The first thing Marcus Chen became aware of was pain.
Not the dull, throbbing ache of sleeping in an awkward position, or the sharp sting of a papercut. This was something far more primal—a bone-deep wrongness that radiated from the top of his skull, as if someone had taken a surgical saw to his head and stitched it back together with fishing line and pure malice.
His eyes snapped open.
Above him stretched an unfamiliar ceiling—wooden beams darkened by age and smoke, the kind of traditional Japanese architecture he'd only ever seen in museums or, more relevantly, in the countless anime series he'd binged throughout his twenty-six years of existence. The smell hit him next: wood smoke, earth, something herbal he couldn't identify, and beneath it all, the copper-sweet undertone of old blood.
Marcus tried to sit up and immediately regretted every decision that had led him to this moment.
His body moved, but it didn't feel like his body. The proportions were wrong. His center of gravity had shifted. His hands, when he raised them before his face, were larger than they should have been, the fingers longer, more elegant. A man's hands. A stranger's hands.
And yet, somehow, they responded to his will as if they had always been his.
"What the hell," Marcus croaked, and even his voice was wrong—deeper, smoother, carrying an undertone of cultured refinement that his actual voice, with its slight Midwestern twang, had never possessed.
He forced himself upright despite the screaming protest of muscles he didn't recognize, and the world tilted dangerously before stabilizing. He was in a small room, sparsely furnished in a style that screamed feudal Japan. A futon beneath him. A low table nearby. Scrolls stacked in one corner. A bronze mirror—
Marcus lunged for the mirror with a desperation that surprised him, nearly face-planting in his haste. His fingers closed around the polished metal surface, and he brought it up to examine his reflection with the same morbid fascination one might reserve for a particularly gruesome car accident.
The face that stared back at him was devastatingly handsome in that androgynous way that had always made him irrationally jealous of anime characters. High cheekbones. A strong jaw softened by almost feminine lips. Eyes that were dark and knowing, framed by long black hair that fell past his shoulders like a silk curtain.
But it wasn't the beauty that made Marcus's borrowed heart stutter in his borrowed chest.
It was the stitches.
A neat line of surgical sutures ran across his forehead, just below the hairline, circling his entire skull like a macabre crown. The skin around them was pink and healing, but unmistakably recent. As if someone had removed the top of his head, done something unspeakable to the contents, and then carefully, almost lovingly, put everything back together.
"No," Marcus whispered. "No, no, no, no—"
He knew those stitches. He'd seen them a hundred times, in manga panels and anime frames, always accompanied by that distinctive smile that never quite reached the eyes. He'd theorized about their meaning on Reddit, debated their implications in Discord servers, written half a fanfiction about them before abandoning it when chapter 4 proved too ambitious.
Those were Kenjaku's stitches.
Which meant this body—this beautiful, wrong, stolen body—belonged to Suguru Geto.
Except it couldn't be Geto's body, because Geto's body came after. A thousand years after, in a modern world of jujutsu sorcerers and cursed spirits, of Jujutsu High and the Star Plasma Vessel. Kenjaku had worn other bodies before Geto. Many others. He'd been Noritoshi Kamo during the Meiji era, had created the Death Paintings using a woman with the ability to birth cursed spirit children. He'd been someone during the Heian era, had known Sukuna, had—
Marcus's racing thoughts ground to a halt as something else registered. Something that had been present since he'd woken up but that his panicking mind had failed to properly process.
Energy.
It flowed through him like a second bloodstream, coiling in his gut, pulsing in his veins, tingling at his fingertips. It was warm and cold simultaneously, comforting and threatening, as natural as breathing and yet fundamentally other. It responded to his emotional state, surging with his panic, settling as he forced himself to calm down.
Cursed energy.
He had cursed energy.
The realization should have terrified him. Instead, Marcus felt something he hadn't experienced since childhood, since he'd still believed that maybe, just maybe, he might one day receive a Hogwarts letter or stumble through a wardrobe into Narnia.
Wonder.
He extended his hand, focusing on that inner reservoir of power the way he'd imagined doing a thousand times while reading manga on his phone during boring work meetings. The energy responded eagerly, almost playfully, rising to the surface of his palm. For a moment, nothing visible happened.
Then, with a thought that felt like flexing a muscle he'd never known he possessed, Marcus released it.
The cursed energy burst forth in a visible shockwave that rattled the scrolls in their corner and sent the bronze mirror skittering across the floor. It wasn't much—a parlor trick compared to what he knew Kenjaku could really do—but it was real. Tangible proof that this wasn't a dream, wasn't a hallucination, wasn't his brain's dying fantasy as he suffered some fatal accident he couldn't remember.
He was really here.
He was really Kenjaku.
And if the wooden architecture and paper screens were any indication, he was really in the past.
But which past?
Marcus forced himself to stand, his new body's center of gravity finally starting to feel natural, and began to explore the small room. The scrolls proved to be written in classical Japanese, which he couldn't read despite his weeb credentials—but the diagrams were universal enough. Hand seals. Energy pathways. What looked like crude blueprints for barrier techniques.
Jujutsu sorcery, then. Definitely the Jujutsu Kaisen universe.
Except...
One of the scrolls bore a symbol he recognized, though not from JJK. It was a spiral, stylized and elongated, curling in on itself with an elegant simplicity that made his newly acquired heart skip several beats.
The Uzumaki clan symbol.
Marcus stared at it for a long, frozen moment, his mind refusing to process what his eyes were telling him. That symbol belonged to a completely different franchise. A completely different fictional universe. It had no business being in a JJK story, no business existing alongside cursed energy and stitched skulls and stolen bodies.
Unless...
Unless this wasn't the Jujutsu Kaisen universe at all.
Or rather, not just the Jujutsu Kaisen universe.
With trembling hands, Marcus rifled through more scrolls, searching for any identifying information. Maps. Names. Dates. Anything that could tell him where—and when—he'd landed. The documents were maddeningly unhelpful at first, full of jargon and references he couldn't parse, but eventually he found what he was looking for.
A map.
A map of a land divided into dozens of small territories, each marked with a clan symbol. Some were unfamiliar. Others made his stomach drop through the floor.
The Uchiha fan.
The Senju spiral.
The Hyuga flame.
The Uzumaki swirl.
The Sarutobi leaf.
And in the margins, written in careful calligraphy he still couldn't read but somehow understood, as if the knowledge was bleeding through from the brain he now inhabited: "The Warring States Period. Year 47."
Marcus sat down heavily, the map falling from his nerveless fingers.
He wasn't just in the past. He wasn't just in a fictional universe.
He was in a merged fictional universe—a world where cursed energy and chakra coexisted, where jujutsu sorcerers and shinobi shared the same blood-soaked lands, where the Heian era monsters of JJK had apparently evolved alongside the legendary founders of the hidden villages.
And he was here at the very beginning. Before Konoha. Before the First Hokage. Before Madara's descent into madness and Hashirama's naive dream of peace.
The Warring States Period.
The most brutal, chaotic, opportunity-rich era in the entire Naruto timeline.
Marcus began to laugh.
It started as a chuckle, quiet and disbelieving, but it grew and grew until he was cackling like the supervillain he'd apparently become. The sound echoed off the wooden walls, wild and unhinged, and he couldn't stop even when his borrowed chest began to ache and his borrowed eyes began to water.
Because this was insane. This was absolutely, categorically, magnificently insane.
He'd died—he must have died, though he couldn't remember how—and instead of heaven or hell or simple oblivion, he'd been reborn as one of his favorite manga villains in a mashup universe that combined his two favorite series. He had cursed energy. He presumably had Kenjaku's techniques. He was in an era of legendary shinobi and world-shaking battles, decades before canon events would make the timeline inflexible.
The possibilities were endless.
And Marcus, who had spent twenty-six years as a middling accountant in a middling city, living a middling life that had offered precisely zero opportunities for greatness, found himself faced with a choice that wasn't really a choice at all.
He could try to be a hero. He could attempt to use his knowledge of future events and his considerable new powers to save lives, prevent tragedies, maybe even create a better world than either canon timeline had managed.
Or...
Or...
Marcus thought about his life. His boring, beige, fluorescent-lit life, where the most excitement he'd experienced was getting a new high score in a mobile game and the greatest drama was office politics. He'd been nobody. He'd done nothing. He'd been forgotten by the world before he'd even left it.
But now he was Kenjaku.
A thousand-year-old monster who viewed humanity as an experiment, who wore people's bodies like seasonal fashions, who had manipulated events from the shadows for centuries in pursuit of goals that made ordinary ambitions look like a child's wish for ice cream.
He was also, now, a being with access to shinobi powers and cursed powers, in an era where the very concept of hidden villages was just a gleam in Hashirama's eye.
What kind of mark could he leave on a world like this?
What kind of story could he write?
Marcus—no, Kenjaku, he needed to start thinking of himself as Kenjaku—rose to his feet with a new sense of purpose. The existential panic that had gripped him moments ago began to recede, replaced by something colder and more calculating. He recognized the shift in his psychology and understood it for what it was: the influence of the brain he now inhabited, the thousand years of memories and perspectives that came with Kenjaku's consciousness.
The original Kenjaku hadn't truly died when Marcus arrived. That wasn't how this worked. Instead, their minds had merged, Marcus's modern sensibilities and meta-knowledge combining with Kenjaku's experience and instincts to create something new. Something potentially more dangerous than either individual alone.
And wasn't that just delicious?
Kenjaku—for he was fully Kenjaku now, Marcus's memories simply another life to add to his collection—began to take stock of his situation with newly efficient calm.
His memories were... fragmented. Incomplete. He could access flashes of the life that had led to this moment, but they came in disjointed pieces rather than a coherent narrative. He knew he'd been active for several centuries already, wearing different bodies, experimenting with cursed energy in ways that had earned him the enmity of every established jujutsu clan. He knew he'd developed techniques that were considered heretical, abominations against the natural order of cursed energy manipulation.
He knew, in particular, that he'd perfected one ability above all others: Cursed Spirit Manipulation.
The technique that allowed him to absorb and control cursed spirits, turning the monsters born from humanity's negative emotions into his personal army. It was the ability he'd eventually pass on to his "child," Suguru Geto—or rather, the ability that had made Geto's body worth stealing in the first place.
But that was a thousand years from now, in a timeline that might not even exist anymore.
Here and now, Kenjaku had access to the technique himself. And more than that, he had access to knowledge that the original Kenjaku could never have possessed: the meta-knowledge of someone who had read the stories, who knew the characters, who understood the future because he'd experienced it as entertainment.
He knew about Madara Uchiha and his eventual descent into villainy. He knew about Hashirama Senju and his power to rival gods. He knew about Black Zetsu and the thousand-year manipulation that had been set in motion long before this era. He knew about Kaguya Otsutsuki and the truth behind the chakra that flowed through every shinobi's veins.
He knew about Jujutsu Kaisen's own horrors too—about Sukuna and the golden age of jujutsu, about the Six Eyes and Limitless, about the merger with Tengen that his original self had been working toward.
Two thousand years of future events, laid out before him like a roadmap.
And all of it was now irrelevant, because he was going to rewrite history entirely.
A smile spread across Kenjaku's borrowed face—that distinctive smile that never quite reached the eyes, the one that had made him such a compelling villain in the manga. Except now there was genuine warmth behind it, the satisfaction of a man who had finally found his purpose.
He was going to become the greatest villain this merged world had ever seen.
Not out of malice. Not out of cruelty, though he suspected both would be necessary tools. No, Kenjaku's motivation was simultaneously more selfish and more profound than simple evil.
He was going to do it because it would be fun.
Because after a lifetime of mediocrity, he finally had the power to be extraordinary. Because the universe—or whatever cosmic force had arranged this impossible situation—had given him the tools and the setting and the opportunity to create something truly spectacular. Because every reader, every viewer, every fan who had ever experienced a great story knew in their heart that the villains were what made the heroes shine.
Without Madara, Hashirama was just a tree-using hippy with good intentions. Without Orochimaru, the Sannin were just three talented ninja with complicated friendship dynamics. Without Pain, Naruto's talk-no-jutsu was just preaching without meaning. Without Kaguya, the shinobi system was just a different flavor of violence.
And without a truly magnificent villain to oppose them, the upcoming generation of heroes—Hashirama and Madara and Tobirama and all the legendary founders—would never reach their full potential.
Kenjaku intended to be that villain.
He intended to be better than any villain either canon had produced.
Not better as in more powerful, though power was certainly part of his plan. Better as in more interesting. More complex. More fun. A villain who could match wits with the greatest minds of the era, whose schemes spanned centuries and continents, whose influence touched every major event without ever being definitively caught.
A villain worthy of the universe he now inhabited.
But first, he needed to understand his current situation more thoroughly.
Kenjaku spent the next several hours exploring his surroundings, piecing together the context of his existence from scattered memories and environmental clues. The building he'd woken in was a small temple on the outskirts of Shimoda territory—a minor clan that had been absorbed into Uzushiogakure's sphere of influence in the main timeline, but which currently existed as an independent entity under constant threat from its neighbors.
The body he wore had belonged to a Shimoda clan member, a young man of considerable talent who had shown an unusual aptitude for something the locals called "cursed techniques." The Shimoda, it seemed, were one of the few clans in this merged world who had developed jujutsu-style abilities rather than shinobi-style chakra manipulation—a fascinating quirk of genetics and spiritual development that made them both valuable and feared.
Kenjaku had taken this body three months ago, infiltrating the temple under the guise of a wandering scholar seeking knowledge of ancient meditation techniques. The real owner had been eager to demonstrate his abilities, had let his guard down in his excitement at finding someone who appreciated his "curse," and had never seen the brain transfer technique coming.
The stitches had healed quickly, aided by cursed energy reinforcement, and Kenjaku had spent the intervening months integrating himself into local society while exploring the limits of his new host's potential.
It was only last night that the merger had happened—the moment when Marcus Chen's soul had somehow been fused with Kenjaku's ancient consciousness, creating the being who now stood contemplating his reflection in the bronze mirror.
The being who now possessed not just Kenjaku's techniques and the body's natural abilities, but also a comprehensive knowledge of two separate fictional canons spanning decades of future events.
"First things first," Kenjaku murmured, his voice thoughtful. "I need to determine exactly what abilities I have access to. Then I need to gather intelligence about the current political situation. After that..."
He trailed off, considering his options. There were so many directions he could take this. He could involve himself with the Uchiha-Senju conflict, inserting himself into the dynamic that would eventually give birth to Konoha. He could seek out Hagoromo's legacy, the Sage of Six Paths' enduring influence on the ninja world. He could hunt down other jujutsu sorcerers, building an army of cursed spirits and human allies. He could—
A sound interrupted his planning. Footsteps, approaching the temple from outside. Multiple sets, moving with the quiet competence of trained killers.
Kenjaku's stolen lips curved into that distinctive smile.
It seemed the world was already coming to test him.
He extended his senses, letting his cursed energy spread outward like invisible tendrils, and immediately got a read on the approaching threats. Five signatures, each burning with the hybrid energy that seemed to characterize this merged world—not pure chakra, not pure cursed energy, but something in between. Shinobi, then, with enough exposure to negative emotional energy to register on his jujutsu-trained senses.
Their intent was unmistakable. They'd come to kill him.
Kenjaku's smile widened.
He had been hoping for an opportunity to test his abilities.
Moving with a grace that surprised even himself, Kenjaku retrieved a scroll from the pile in the corner—one that his memories told him contained a summoning contract, not for animals as shinobi typically used, but for cursed spirits he'd collected over his centuries of existence. The original Kenjaku had built quite a collection, and while the merger with Marcus had scrambled some of the technical knowledge, the core ability remained intact.
Cursed Spirit Manipulation: the power to absorb and control the monsters born from human fear and hatred.
He bit his thumb, smeared blood across the scroll, and pulsed his cursed energy in the specific pattern his instincts demanded.
The effect was immediate and deeply satisfying.
Dark energy burst from the scroll, coalescing into a form that made Kenjaku's modern sensibilities recoil even as his ancient instincts purred with pleasure. The spirit was vaguely humanoid, if you squinted and ignored the extra limbs, the inverted joints, the face that was more wound than feature. It was a Grade 2 cursed spirit at best, nothing impressive by the standards of the Heian era horrors, but more than sufficient for five human assassins.
"Kill everyone approaching this temple," Kenjaku commanded, testing the limits of his control. "Leave one alive for questioning."
The spirit didn't speak—couldn't speak, lacked the cognitive development for language—but its compliance was immediate and absolute. It flowed through the paper screen like liquid shadow, moving toward the approaching threats with a predator's eager hunger.
Kenjaku followed at a leisurely pace, curious to see how shinobi of this era would react to a cursed spirit. In the main Naruto timeline, such creatures didn't exist; the closest equivalent would be the tailed beasts or various summons. Here, in this merged world, the interaction between chakra-based combat and jujutsu-based entities was an unknown variable.
One of many he intended to explore thoroughly.
The screaming started before he reached the temple's entrance.
It was a particular quality of scream, Kenjaku noted with clinical interest—not just pain or fear, but the fundamental wrongness of a human mind confronting something that shouldn't exist. Shinobi were trained to face death, to deal with violence and gore and the horror of war. But they weren't trained for this. They weren't prepared for the existential violation that cursed spirits represented.
By the time Kenjaku stepped out onto the temple's porch, the battle—if you could call something so one-sided a battle—was already over.
Four bodies lay scattered across the clearing in front of the temple, arranged in the particular configurations of people who had died while running away. Their wounds were strange—not cuts or punctures, but areas where flesh had simply ceased, erased by cursed energy in ways that left the surrounding tissue paradoxically intact. One man was missing his heart without any visible damage to his chest. Another had died when his spine simply... stopped, the nerves disconnected by an entity that didn't understand human anatomy as anything other than a puzzle to be disassembled.
The fifth shinobi—a woman, Kenjaku noted, with the scarred hands of a taijutsu specialist—was pinned against a tree by the cursed spirit's extra limbs, her eyes wide with the kind of terror that would haunt her surviving years.
If she survived the next few minutes, of course.
Kenjaku dismissed the spirit with a thought, absorbing it back into his reserve, and approached the woman with unhurried steps. She tried to speak, to scream, to do something, but her voice seemed to have abandoned her along with her courage.
"Good evening," Kenjaku said, perfectly polite. "I believe you were looking for me?"
The woman's mouth moved. No sound came out.
Kenjaku waited patiently. He had all the time in the world—literally, given that he was effectively immortal—and there was something deeply satisfying about watching someone's worldview shatter in real-time. It was an aesthetic he intended to cultivate extensively in the coming decades.
"D-demon," the woman finally managed. "You're—what are you?"
"An excellent question," Kenjaku acknowledged. "The truthful answer is quite complicated, but let me simplify: I am something old, wearing something young, carrying knowledge of something yet to come. I am a scholar of the profane and a collector of the cursed. I am, in the parlance of your profession, a threat far beyond your current pay grade."
He smiled, and even in the darkness, the woman flinched.
"Now, let's discuss why you're here. Your clan symbol suggests Yamanaka affiliation, which means you're operating under contract rather than independent initiative. Who hired you? And more importantly, how did they know where to find me?"
The interrogation that followed was informative, if somewhat disappointing in its revelations. The woman—a chunin-equivalent named Hana—had been contracted by a consortium of minor clans who viewed the Shimoda temple as a threat. Not because of anything Kenjaku had done, but because of what the original body's owner had represented: a jujutsu sorcerer, a wielder of "curse techniques" that the shinobi world didn't understand and therefore feared.
The mission had been simple: eliminate the threat before it could grow into something unmanageable.
They had no idea what they'd actually been sent to kill.
"How unfortunate for your employers," Kenjaku mused, when Hana had exhausted her usefulness. "They've drawn attention to me while I was still... establishing myself. Now I'll have to accelerate my timeline significantly."
"Please," Hana whispered. "I've told you everything. Just—"
"Just let you go?" Kenjaku interrupted, genuinely curious. "Why would I do that? You've seen what I can do. You know my face. You're a Yamanaka, which means you have techniques for transmitting information mentally. Releasing you would be strategically catastrophic."
The woman's face crumbled. "I have a daughter. She's only—"
"Six years old, I know. You mentioned her during the interrogation, hoping to humanize yourself and trigger emotional leverage." Kenjaku tilted his head, considering. "It's a reasonable strategy against most opponents. However, I've been alive for several centuries. I've watched countless children grow up and grow old and die. Your daughter is, statistically speaking, less significant to me than a particularly interesting rock."
He watched the hope die in her eyes and felt... nothing, really. Not pleasure at her suffering, nor guilt at causing it. Just the mild intellectual satisfaction of a hypothesis confirmed.
He really had become Kenjaku, hadn't he? The merger hadn't just given him the ancient sorcerer's powers and memories; it had fundamentally altered his psychology, smoothing away the rough edges of human empathy that might have made him hesitate.
It was a troubling realization, in an abstract way. Marcus Chen, accountant and anime fan, would have been horrified by this moment. He would have searched for any alternative, any option that didn't involve murdering a mother in cold blood.
But Marcus Chen was dead—had been dead since the moment he'd woken up in this body—and Kenjaku saw no value in pretending otherwise.
"That said," he continued, "I'm not going to kill you."
Hana's eyes widened with desperate hope.
"I'm going to offer you a choice instead. Option one: you die here, and your daughter grows up an orphan, eventually dying in one of the countless conflicts that will consume this era. A statistically likely outcome even if I spare your life, but at least there would be a chance of something better."
He paused, letting the first option sink in.
"Option two: you serve me. Not as a slave, not as a mind-controlled puppet, but as a willing subordinate. I'll teach you techniques that will make you one of the most dangerous killers of your generation. I'll provide resources and protection that will ensure your daughter survives the Warring States Period. And in exchange, you'll do what I tell you, when I tell you, without question or hesitation."
Hana stared at him, trying to read his intentions and finding only that serene, unsettling smile.
"Why?" she finally asked. "Why would you help me after—after everything?"
"Because I'm building something," Kenjaku said simply. "Something that will require agents and allies and operatives scattered throughout the shinobi world. You're not special, Hana. You're not chosen or fated or any of that romantic nonsense. You're simply convenient—the first person to arrive at my door with skills I can use and leverage I can exploit."
He extended his hand in an offer that was more threat than kindness.
"So. What do you choose?"
Hana looked at his hand, at the bodies of her fallen comrades, at the place where the cursed spirit had vanished. She thought about her daughter, waiting in some distant village, trusting that her mother would come home.
She took his hand.
"Excellent," Kenjaku said, and his smile finally reached his eyes. "Welcome to the first day of your new life. We have so much work to do."
The night stretched on as Kenjaku began his subordinate's education, explaining just enough about cursed energy to make her useful without revealing the true scope of his knowledge. He told her about the basics of jujutsu sorcery—how cursed energy was generated by negative emotions, how it could be shaped into techniques, how cursed spirits were born and how they could be defeated.
He did not tell her about his brain transfer ability, or his true age, or the cosmic scope of his ambitions.
Some secrets were meant to be kept.
As dawn broke over the Shimoda temple, painting the sky in shades of blood and gold, Kenjaku stood on the porch and surveyed his new domain. It wasn't much—a small temple, a single subordinate, a handful of mediocre cursed spirits—but it was a beginning.
In the Naruto world, the greatest villains had all started from humble origins. Madara had been just another Uchiha prodigy until loss and pain had forged him into something legendary. Orochimaru had been a talented child, nothing more, until his obsession with immortality had transformed him into a monster. Pain had been an orphan in a war-torn country, utterly unremarkable until Jiraiya's teachings and Yahiko's death had reshaped him into a god.
Kenjaku intended to learn from their examples. He would be patient. He would be methodical. He would build his power base slowly, carefully, ensuring that every step forward was unshakeable before taking the next.
And in the meantime, he would watch.
The Warring States Period was just beginning, which meant the founders of Konoha were still children. Hashirama and Madara were probably around eight years old right now, just starting to develop the skills that would eventually make them legends. Tobirama was even younger—perhaps five or six, already showing the genius that would make him the most dangerous administrator in shinobi history. The other founding clans were scattered across the land, killing each other in endless cycles of revenge and counter-revenge.
It was a perfect moment to insert himself into history.
But where to begin?
Kenjaku considered his options as the sun rose higher. He could target the Uchiha, whose emotional volatility and powerful dojutsu made them ideal subjects for cursed energy experimentation. He could approach the Senju, whose life-force-based techniques shared fascinating parallels with reverse cursed technique. He could seek out the remnants of his own jujutsu sorcerer communities, scattered survivors of the Heian era who might still remember the old ways.
Or he could do something entirely unexpected.
Something that would set the tone for his entire villainous career.
"Hana," he said, not turning from his contemplation of the sunrise. "Tell me what you know about the Uzumaki clan."
His new subordinate, exhausted from a sleepless night but too afraid to show weakness, straightened to attention. "The Uzumaki? They're an old clan, headquartered on Uzushio Island. Known for their fuinjutsu—sealing techniques—and their vitality. They're allied with several powerful clans on the mainland, including the Senju."
"And their current strength?"
"Significant. They're not the largest clan, but their sealing techniques make them valuable allies and dangerous enemies. Most clans avoid antagonizing them directly."
Kenjaku nodded, a plan beginning to form in his ancient mind.
The Uzumaki clan was fascinating from a meta-knowledge perspective. In the original Naruto timeline, they would eventually be destroyed by a coalition of villages who feared their power—but that destruction wouldn't happen for another several decades, and even then, survivors would escape to propagate the bloodline. Naruto himself carried Uzumaki blood, as did Karin and presumably many others who never made it into canon.
Their sealing techniques, meanwhile, were arguably the most versatile abilities in the entire Naruto universe. The Reaper Death Seal that killed the Fourth Hokage. The Eight Trigrams Seal that contained the Nine-Tails. The various fuinjutsu that could bind tailed beasts, store objects, create barriers, and accomplish countless other impossible feats.
If Kenjaku could access that knowledge—could combine Uzumaki sealing techniques with his own jujutsu expertise—the possibilities would be genuinely limitless.
But more than that, the Uzumaki represented something symbolically important.
They were Naruto's clan. The ancestors of the series' ultimate protagonist. To corrupt them, to twist their legacy before it even began, would be an act of villainy so profound that it would reshape the very nature of the story.
Kenjaku didn't just want to be a villain. He wanted to be the villain—the shadow that loomed over every hero's journey, the architect of every tragedy, the reason that every triumph mattered.
And what better way to establish that role than by targeting the foundations of heroism itself?
"We're going to pay the Uzumaki a visit," he announced, turning to face Hana with that unsettling smile. "Not as enemies—not yet. As scholars. Seekers of knowledge. Fellow practitioners of the esoteric arts."
Hana's expression suggested she had several objections to this plan but was too smart to voice them. "And what knowledge are we seeking, exactly?"
"Everything," Kenjaku said simply. "I want to understand their sealing techniques. I want to learn their history. I want to map their bloodline and assess their potential."
He paused, considering how much to reveal.
"I want to plant seeds that will bear fruit in a hundred years. Or perhaps a thousand. Time is on our side, Hana. The longer we plan, the more devastating our eventual success."
It wasn't a complete lie. He did want all of those things.
But more than that, he wanted to meet them.
The people who would become Naruto's ancestors. The clan that would be destroyed so that one sunny orphan could carry their legacy into a brighter future. The sealmasters whose knowledge would save the world—and damn it—a dozen times over.
He wanted to look them in the eyes and know that he was going to be the reason for their suffering.
Because that was what a true villain did.
They didn't just oppose the hero. They didn't just create obstacles for the protagonist to overcome.
They made the story matter.
They gave the hero something to fight for by threatening everything they loved. They forced growth and change and sacrifice by being too powerful to defeat easily. They embodied the darkness so thoroughly that the light had no choice but to burn brighter in response.
Kenjaku intended to be that darkness.
Not because he hated the light—quite the opposite, actually. He admired Naruto as a character, respected the themes of perseverance and connection and hope that defined the series. He had no desire to simply crush those ideals.
He wanted to test them.
He wanted to push the heroes to their absolute limits, to force them to become everything they were meant to be, to give their eventual victories the weight and meaning they deserved.
And if some of those heroes fell along the way... well.
That was the nature of the game.
"Pack your things," Kenjaku told Hana. "We leave at noon. I want to reach Uzushio Island within the week."
"That's... a significant journey," Hana said carefully. "We'll be passing through several hostile territories."
"Then we'll have opportunities to practice." Kenjaku's smile widened. "I have several new techniques I've been meaning to test."
He turned back to the sunrise, already planning his approach to the Uzumaki clan. He would need a cover story, a reason for his visit that wouldn't raise immediate suspicion. The body he wore was from a jujutsu sorcerer lineage, which provided some legitimacy—the Shimoda were known as practitioners of "curse techniques," and academic exchange between esoteric clans wasn't unheard of.
But the Uzumaki were cautious. They would check his background, verify his claims, probe for any hint of deception.
They would find exactly what he wanted them to find.
A traveling scholar, young but knowledgeable, seeking to expand his understanding of sealing arts. A potential ally against the encroaching violence of the Warring States. A valuable connection for the future, when the clan structure of the shinobi world inevitably consolidated into something more organized.
They would welcome him into their village, share their knowledge, perhaps even take him as a student.
And they would never suspect that they were nurturing the architect of their eventual destruction.
The thought brought Kenjaku a satisfaction so deep it was almost physical.
This was what he had been missing his entire previous life. Not power, exactly—though the power was certainly nice. Not immortality, or knowledge, or even the thrill of villainy.
Purpose.
A reason to wake up each morning. A project worthy of his intellect and ambition. A story to write, not just consume.
He was going to make this merged world interesting.
And God help anyone who got in his way.
As the sun continued to rise over the Shimoda temple, casting long shadows across the bodies that still littered the clearing, Kenjaku began to make preparations for his journey. He gathered scrolls and supplies, catalogued his available cursed spirits, briefed Hana on the basics of what they would encounter.
He was thorough, methodical, patient—everything a good villain should be.
And somewhere, in that vast merged world of chakra and cursed energy, shinobi and sorcerers, heroes and monsters, the wheels of fate began to turn.
The greatest villain of the Warring States Period had awakened.
And he was just getting started.