Seimei sank into the earth like a ghost and vanished.
Up on the surface, Orochimaru just stared at the spot for a long, long time, tongue flicking across his lips.
Exactly like Seimei predicted—the snake already had a pretty good guess what the kid was really after.
And that guess? It freaked Orochimaru the hell out.
Natural energy isn't some tame pet. Sage Mode isn't a weekend course. If it were that easy, Orochimaru would've cracked it decades ago, especially with Jiraiya prancing around as a walking billboard for the damn thing.
The guy's been to war twice. He knows power is the only currency that matters. Immortality's cute, but without the muscle to protect it, you're just a fancy corpse waiting to happen.
So yeah, he's spent years trying to leash natural energy the backdoor way—through Jūgo's cursed bloodline and the Curse Seal project.
That's why Seimei dangling this "collaboration" in front of him was like waving raw meat in front of a starving viper.
Free observation of someone stupid—or crazy—enough to touch natural energy directly?
Possible new data for his own experiments?
And if the kid screws up and fries his soul… well, one more perfect test subject to dissect.
Win-win.
Orochimaru finally snapped out of it, glanced at the huddled, terrified lab rats in the cell, sighed dramatically, and formed the seal.
Boom boom boom.
Exploding tags stitched into the walls turned the entire wing into a collapsing grave. No loose ends, no witnesses.
Halfway across the sky, Seimei felt the faint rumble behind him, flicked a lazy look back, and shrugged.
He'd spotted those tags before he left. Knew exactly what was coming.
Save them? Why? Byakugan already told him their lifeforces were flickering candles. Orochimaru had burned them out from the inside. Mercy was the explosion.
He shook it off and let his mind drift back to the snake himself.
Weird part: Orochimaru barely even eyeballed his eyes.
No hunger. No obsession.
At first Seimei figured the guy was just hiding it better than usual.
Then it clicked.
This timeline's fucked.
Orochimaru never got his ass handed to him by Itachi's Mangekyō because Itachi never went rogue. Shisui's still alive. The whole Uchiha clan's still chilling in the village, sipping tea instead of plotting coups.
No massacre → no traumatized Itachi → no "I'll take your eyes" moment where Orochimaru learns just how broken top-tier Sharingan can be.
To him right now, Sharingan are just those decent-but-not-mind-blowing toys he and Danzō used to harvest like Pokémon cards.
Seimei's eyes? Probably filed under "talented kid, cool dojutsu, whatever."
Hell, with Body Revival already in his pocket, Orochimaru's probably drooling way more over Seimei's perfect, young, jacked-up Uchiha meat-suit than the eyes inside it.
Whatever. Let the snake scheme.
Absolute strength turns every plot into tissue paper.
Five minutes of full-speed flight later, Seimei touched down on a jagged peak at the northern edge of the Land of Rice Fields, right up against the Land of Earth border.
Below him: a cluster of tiny mountain villages hugging the foothills.
Same vibe as the last spot his wood clone scouted—the place where Jūgo's "murder spree" legends were born.
No surprise the guy kept coming back. Homesick killer's still homesick.
Seimei closed his eyes and reached out with his senses.
Natural energy? Thick. Stupid thick. Four, five times denser than flatland.
But the real kicker: every drop in the area was flowing downward, funneling straight into the heart of the mountain like it was being sucked through an invisible straw.
Jackpot.
He dropped the flight jutsu, landed on the summit, then melted into the rock with Earth Style: Earth Dragon Dive.
Swam through stone like a shark through water until the density peaked.
One burst of chakra later, he carved out a two-hundred-square-meter cavern, smooth walls, high ceiling—his new secret lair.
Walked to the dead center.
Natural energy here was so thick it almost had weight.
But more importantly… it vanished.
Completely. Like the mountain was a drain and something on the other side was slurping it up 24/7.
Seimei's theory: this was the spatial node linking to one of the three great Sage holy lands—probably the one tied to Jūgo's clan.
He cracked his neck, grinned like a bastard, and opened his eyes.
Rinnegan flared to life, silver rings spinning, space itself rippling under his gaze.
One of the Rinnegan's quieter perks: spatial perception on fucking steroids.
Ōtsutsuki or not, anybody with these eyes can feel the seams between dimensions like braille.
Time to find the exact pinhole where all that energy's disappearing to…
And then?
Then he's gonna rip that shit wide open.