Shūmoku Island, two to three years later.
Kimimaro was 13 now, though his poise belonged to someone many times that.
Around him sat the four women who had grown beside his ambition: Reika, Saya, Emi, and Akane, each now 15 or 16, each with a presence strong enough to silence a room if they wished.
They were seated at a long, elegant stone table shaped like a Jashinist altar, polished black and carved with faint silver veins that caught the light of the torches.
Behind them stretched the hall of their main base, vast and domed, built deep into the island's cliffs.
The air carried the scent of salt and distant sulfur from the vents below.
The entire hidden base could hold hundreds.
Now, in the main hall, the five of them sat in quiet authority, discussing recent matters.
By this point, out of the entire shinobi world, perhaps only Yugakure's leadership had any real idea of what Kimimaro's cult truly was, since it was born there, and even they were only guessing at the edges.
Their reports were a patchwork of fear, half-truths, and silence. What they did know, they didn't dare say aloud.
Their last "test" had already gone spectacularly wrong. Yugakure had sent that S-rank rogue from Kusagakure to "evaluate and warn" the cult leadership, a polite euphemism for assassination.
The man's head returned first, sealed in a jar.
Kimimaro had included a simple message: Message received. Do not send replacements.
After that, the lesson stuck. Yugakure finally realized the cult's leadership wasn't just a cluster of blood-drunk fanatics; it was a nest of quiet monsters at the top, perhaps too.
Ones that couldn't be removed without tearing open the whole country even more.
And right then, Kimimaro visited the Hot Water Daimyo in person for the first time as well.
No guards killed, no palace burned, no speeches.
Just one quiet meeting, one frightened ruler, and by dawn, the man's trembling hand signed an order urging Yugakure that "no external interference" would be permitted in the region from now on.
Rumor said he didn't sleep for three nights afterward, muttering something about "eyes behind walls."
However, Yugakure probably already understood perfectly.
They didn't just fear the cult; they feared exposure.
What would the rest of the world think if it learned that the so-called peaceful paradise of hot baths and soft diplomacy had let a death cult of bloodline supremacists or shinobi outcasts grow under its nose?
It would be like finding a serpent coiled inside a teapot.
So, they smiled, waved, and said nothing.
The tourists kept bathing, the merchants kept sailing, and the cult kept thriving, quietly, efficiently, and very much aware that silence was the best protection fear could buy.
Of course, there was also the current Land of Rice Fields, still lesser known to the wider world, but far too well-known to Kimimaro.
He knew exactly what it currently was in secret: Orochimaru's personal nest of laboratories, hideouts, and test sites, all politely branded later under the name Otogakure.
And since that particular serpent's territory bordered the Land of Hot Water, the region already felt a little too crowded for comfort.
No matter how disciplined or quiet his followers became, Kimimaro didn't have the guts, or perhaps the idiocy, to keep his cult's main base there once it began to grow.
The mere thought of Orochimaru's curiosity drifting even slightly east was enough to make relocation the only logical choice.
So, he simply stopped targeting Yugakure shinobi altogether, giving them fewer and fewer excuses to probe or clash with the cult.
Gradually, the entire operation shifted across the sea to Shūmoku Island, isolated, ringed with killer reefs, and far safer from wandering serpents.
In his mind, it was ideal: a fortress built not on trust, but on distance.
After all, while Orochimaru's main facilities were based in the Land of Rice Fields, there was never any certainty that he didn't have smaller nests tucked away nearby.
Perhaps one was hidden under the steaming springs of the Land of Hot Water, or another buried beneath the snow of the Land of Iron, which bordered Rice Fields to the west and east, respectively.
Kimimaro simply refused to gamble on it.
The last thing he intended was to end up once again under the thumb of that repulsive snake, because he currently lacked the power to crush him outright if he tried.
Not to mention, after a certain point, mass-stealing ordinary shinobi from such a small village, for sacrifices simply stopped being worth the effort, especially after that S-rank Kusagakure rebel, Tenzo, had been ritualized and broken down into the cult's greatest single source of power ever at that time.
Compared to him, the rest were insects thrown into a bonfire, flaring bright for a second and leaving only ash.
They couldn't even serve as decent cannon fodder anymore, let alone fuel for progress.
After all, Kimimaro had reached the stage where more numbers simply meant more noise, and noise meant exposure.
The cult didn't need more bodies; it needed quality.
What he required now were more sharpened blades rather than a pile of dull knives.
So it wasn't much of a loss to stop hunting Yugakure shinobi altogether.
They had been useful early sacrifices, but like all tools, they'd grown obsolete.
Kimimaro, by then, had also come to understand the limits of his creation.
The cult was powerful, yes, large enough to frighten some minor villages into silence, but it could just as easily become a liability.
The larger it grew, potentially, the more eyes turned toward it, and the more dangerous exposure became.
So, for the past two to three years, his focus shifted.
Less expansion, more refinement.
He poured time and discipline into himself and his four Blessed, sharpening them into something far beyond followers.
He understood that in this world, elite power decided everything.
Armies, politics, villages, all of it bent in the end to the few who stood at the summit.
After all, despite Konoha's prestige and history, a single man, Nagato, Pain, would one day, at least temporarily, erase it from the map.
In the meantime, on the Shūmoku Island, they still caught the occasional wandering stronger shinobi from Kirigakure or Kumogakure for ritual use, but even that was temporary.
Kimimaro soon halted it.
Those two villages were far more troublesome than Yugakure, or even Orochimaru, and crossing them wasn't worth the risk yet.
But, after Tenzo, the most valuable sacrifices came from a far more interesting source, Root.
A few months after Kimimaro's encounter with Akane, a team of Root operatives infiltrated the region again, apparently searching for traces of the Uchiha and their two 'missing' vice commanders.
Shūmoku Island, being technically under Kirigakure and contested by Kumogakure, was foreign ground for Konoha, which meant Danzo couldn't move there openly and swiftly.
The old vulture had already lost his two vice commanders, the same ones Kimimaro's group killed while rescuing Akane, so assembling another capable team must've been a logistical headache.
Unfortunately for him, Kimimaro's sensory network was already watching.
By the time the Root team realized how well they'd been tracked, a mass formation of ordinary Jashinists, Reika, Saya, Emi, Akane, and him, were already on them.
The battle was short, efficient, and bloody.
They became the next sacrifices.
And the results were almost as rewarding as Tenzo's.
What surprised Kimimaro most was how easily Danzo gave up afterward.
No retaliation, no follow-up probes. Just silence.
Though when he thought about it, there wasn't much else the man could do.
Danzo was far too much of a coward to go there himself, and Root's strength had been gutted; no more elites left to send, potent enough in small numbers as his two deputies.
Which meant that if he dispatched too many ordinary operatives at once, Kirigakure or even Kumogakure would take notice, and the last thing he needed was to explain to anyone what Root was doing lurking around foreign islands.
After all, Konoha was not in its heyday anymore.
So, he likely did what all politicians do best: he rationalized.
Kimimaro was sure that Danzo had convinced himself the disappearances were the work of Kumo or Kiri, or maybe even the awakening of some rogue Uchiha with a Mangekyō among that group they were hunting for.
Anything but the truth.
After all, not even in his most paranoid dreams would Danzo suspect some ten-year-old Kimimaro Kaguya as the architect of it all.
After all, by that point, the cult had become massive in number but almost invisible in operation.
After all, Kimimaro himself had grown extremely careful about who ever saw his face.
In fact, only about fifty cultists still alive had ever seen him, or even a few of the Blessed, in person back when he first seized control.
All of them came from the original hundred who had followed him during the early days of the takeover.
Half were long dead, buried under blood and glory in various campaigns.
The rest had been promoted into his permanent inner guard, stationed within the main hideout on Shūmoku Island.
They never left its walls, existing as silent shadows around him, loyal, efficient, and utterly unshakable.
Sometimes, Kimimaro thought revealing his face back then had been a mistake, a rare lapse in his usual restraint.
But in the end, it hardly mattered.
Those few who still remembered him were the kind who would sooner die than speak.
After all, their very bodies now belonged to him, their physiology permanently evolved through his rituals, bound to that ritual chalice fused with Ashina's secret formulae.
They never strayed from his orbit, never slipped beyond his gaze.
In a way, they weren't followers anymore.
They were living seals, loyal by design and by fear alike.
Actually, the majority of that ritual essence, from the beginning, had gone into Saya.
Kimimaro made sure of it.
He wasn't about to repeat the same mistake as a certain so-called "goddess" of this world, who once, in the past, for whatever reason, thought that she could challenge Ōtsutsuki-level beings, cosmic predators capable of erasing worlds, with an army of mindless, half-baked humanoid tree husks, or at least that was what the original narrative said.
That level of delusion almost deserved respect, if it were true. Almost.
Kimimaro had no intention of fighting for the future with mobs of blood-drunk fanatics who barely knew which end of a kunai to hold.
So, instead of wasting the ritual's power on cannon fodder, he funneled most of it into Saya.
The result was a genuine elite, not just loyal, but reforged from the inside out.
By now, Kimimaro's cult had swelled to roughly two thousand members and affiliates in total.
A small army in theory, though he preferred to think of it as an ecosystem, a hierarchy of predators and parasites orbiting his will.
Out of those two thousand, about half could be considered mid-tier genin, with another two hundred and fifty on the higher end of genin.
Fifty had clawed their way into low to mid chūnin range, and only around a dozen could be classified as high chūnin-level combatants.
Beyond that, the line simply stopped.
There was still a heavy bottleneck when it came to advancement.
The amount of ritual essence required to forge a true jōnin was immense, far beyond what the cult's current infrastructure could safely supply.
Even if they could, Kimimaro considered it a waste.
It was far more efficient to concentrate that essence into a single, proven vessel like Saya, whose Yin–Yang affinity already made her uniquely compatible with physical restructuring in the first place.
The rest of the membership weren't even much different from ordinary civilians.
They handled logistics, communication, and technical maintenance.
Some were craftsmen, others smugglers, and a few even spies in local markets.
The cult still extorted various settlements in the Land of Hot Water, including even the biggest of fishes, though always quietly, never loudly enough to draw attention.
Kimimaro saw this as their natural ceiling, the perfect balance between numbers, control, and safety that Shūmoku Island and the Land of Hot Water could realistically sustain.
Any further expansion would only attract attention, and attention was poison.
He kept the majority of those beyond ordinary genin level, several hundred of the strongest, stationed within the main hideout.
They served as permanent security for him and shock troops, the first and last line between him and the outside world.
The rest were scattered across the island and the mainland, commanding small Jashinist cells as regional captains.
Each group functioned like a nerve cluster, an extension of the same living organism, veins and eyes of the cult, all pulsing back toward a single heart.
...
Meanwhile, the five of them sat around the altar table, voices low as they discussed supply routes, discipline reports, continued ritual and fuinjutsu improvements Ashina helped orchestrate, and the next round of training schedules.
It was an ordinary meeting on the surface, steady, focused, controlled, but beneath the calm, something subtle shifted the entire time.
About halfway through, Akane began to look… off.
Her replies grew shorter, her posture looser.
A faint frown crossed her face as she reached again for her tea, eyelids heavier each time she blinked.
Kimimaro noticed, of course, he noticed everything, but said nothing.
His eyes drifted briefly to her cup, then back to the discussion, the corner of his mouth unreadable.
By the time the meeting ended, Akane looked ready to fall asleep on the spot.
They rose from their seats and began walking down the stone corridor, torchlight dancing on the polished walls.
Then Kimimaro gave Emi the smallest glance, a signal as sharp as a blade.
Emi didn't miss it.
Her fingers twitched once, and a thin pulse of Yin chakra rippled invisibly through the air.
Akane barely had time to exhale before her body went limp, the hit cutting her consciousness like a clean string.
Kimimaro caught her easily, lowering her against his chest as if it were all part of the plan, which, of course, it was.
Saya stepped closer, a grin tugging at her lips. "You really had to drug her and knock her out? Bit excessive, don't you think?"
Emi smirked, resting her hands behind her head. "You try convincing an Uchiha to volunteer for brain surgery."
Reika stood at the side, expression calm, though her gaze flicked briefly toward Akane. "Just make sure the ritual room is sealed. If she wakes up too early, even Kimimaro might lose a limb."
Kimimaro said nothing, only adjusted Akane's weight in his arms and started walking.
The truth was simple: they had made a plan behind her back.
An ordeal, one designed to push her mind and spirit past their natural limits.
If it worked, her brain would be tricked into awakening the Mangekyō Sharingan.
If not… well, they had already prepared the containment seals just in case.
As they descended deeper into the base, the torches dimmed one by one.
Whatever happened next, Akane would hopefully either rise above herself or be reborn from what they'd break inside her.