Another warning I should give again is this: the whole point of fanfiction, at least for me, is to logically build on the original canon, not to freeze myself inside it.
If that feels like a flaw, then you're honestly better off sticking with the original series and enjoying it again.
For me, this approach is a strength, not a weakness. It's the reason I enjoy reading and writing fanfiction at all, and that won't change.
And let's be real, if I just dropped the MC into the canon plot without expanding or reshaping anything, nothing would feel believable to you.
The story would collapse into 40 or 50 shallow, awkward chapters at best.
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Kimimaro hadn't rowed all this way to wander ruins like a tourist.
He already had a working theory and a specific thing he hoped to find, something that might help him solve the problem of the original Kimimaro's fatal illness.
A thousand-year-old clan like the Uzumaki doesn't vanish without leaving a trace.
That was impossible. Their legacy, in some form, had to be here somewhere.
The only question was how they had managed to hide it in a way that kept it out of the hands of the Five Great Villages, the four attackers who razed them, and Konoha, their so-called "ally" who betrayed them.
But if any clan could do it, it was the Uzumaki.
They were the greatest fuinjutsu users in history.
If they wanted to leave something behind for descendants who might return one day, they could easily weave seals or layered shiki formulas that would keep scavengers away while still allowing blood heirs to inherit.
Also, decades after their destruction, the ruins still repelled intruders.
Not because of patrols or actual ghosts, but because ordinary people were ruled by fear.
Fear of lingering traps, fear of drawing the attention of the Great Villages, fear of stepping into a graveyard where an entire clan had been slaughtered.
Kimimaro, however, wasn't ordinary.
"No risk, no reward."
Deductively, he crushed the fear and came anyway.
And it seemed to pay off, at least, no enemies were waiting for him.
Whether he would find something valuable was another matter entirely.
His Dead Bone Pulse still carried risks, still lacked a faster, safer long-term solution.
The thing he was looking for was related to that.
However, there was not only that.
As for the clan itself?
He pieced together some logic.
When the Four Great Villages descended, the Uzumaki had probably been caught off guard.
Very few, if none, escaped.
That lined up with what little the original series ever showed: Karin, Nagato, perhaps one or two of their parents, besides Kushina and Mito, obviously.
And those likely weren't survivors of the battle at all, but people who had simply been away on errands when the attack struck.
Simply deduced from such low numbers.
The Uzumaki had numbered in the thousands.
They still traded with the outside world at the time.
So, of course, there had to have been a few abroad when the hammer fell.
Could some have sealed themselves away?
Initially, maybe.
But the idea of Uzumaki hiding forever in pocket dimensions also didn't convince him, for example.
The Great Villages weren't fools.
Four of them combined, with all their sealing experts and chakra reserves, could brute force or patiently unravel even Uzumaki seals and barriers.
After all, they had gotten inside somehow, hadn't they?
That was the logical deduction Kimimaro made, piecing scraps of information from what he remembered of the series.
Even if he found nothing today, it was still worth the risk.
Because if he did find something… it might just be what let him reshape his fate initially.
Kimimaro spent the day prowling through ruins, left and right, up and down, like a predator, but with precision, his senses stretched thin, his thoughts moving faster than his body.
He checked collapsed buildings, from beginning to the end, moved the heavy stone pillars, and even poured chakra into cracked tiles etched with faint spiral patterns for some reason.
Nothing. Every time, just cold stone or waterlogged rubble.
His sharpened brain ran through theory after theory: "If I was a thousand-year clan leader, where would I hide something? A sealed chamber? A dimensional fold? A symbolic crest?"
By late afternoon, he was underwater again, checking even the bottom of the river, his lungs straining, shifting boulders that had sunk into the riverbed.
His small fingers bled raw from scraping, his mind whispering that it was all wasted effort.
"Maybe nothing survived here. Maybe the Uzumaki really did vanish completely, even spiritually, like fools."
He surfaced, chest heaving, resting against a jagged ruin.
The sun was low now, painting the water copper.
His eyes drifted lazily across the stonework until only one spiral crest caught him.
It shouldn't have.
Uzumaki spirals were everywhere here.
But this one didn't feel like stone.
His sensory field rippled against it oddly, as if the mark itself pushed back, not passive like dead material but quietly humming.
Kimimaro's eyes widened.
In an instant, he dove, slammed his hand flat against it, and poured chakra in a steady stream.
Both sensory pulses and raw output.
The reaction was immediate.
The spiral drank it, and his consciousness lurched.
His body felt light, as though tugged by invisible strings.
For a brief second, it was like he was looking down at himself from above.
Panic flared.
His first instinct was to withdraw, but before he could, a voice echoed in the hollow of his mind next.
"…So, the one to wake me is… not Uzumaki."
The tone was weary, bitter. Old.
Kimimaro froze.
"For who knows how long… I waited. I left this tether… this seal of my soul. I thought surely, some survivor would return. A son. A daughter. At least one with the blood of Uzumaki running proud."
There was a sigh, heavy like waves grinding stone.
"But no one came. Not one. Either they were all hunted, all massacred, or too cowardly and weak to even step onto their birth soil again."
The voice seemed to falter, thin as if it might vanish with the wind.
"My technique is old, unraveling. I lingered only in fragments. Watched only in silence. If none woke me soon, I would have faded into nothing… Forgotten as the clan itself."
Kimimaro's grip on the spiral tightened.
He could sense it now; this wasn't just stone.
It was a seal, a container. And inside it, a soul.
The voice came again, sharper now, tinged with surprise.
"But you… White-haired boy. You are not Uzumaki, yet… your essence resonates with my seal. Similar… but distant. What are you? Why does your blood answer when it should not?"
Kimimaro stood still, his own heart beating steady as stone.
For the first time all day, a thin smile curved his lips.
'So the Uzumaki had truly left ghosts behind.'
His green eyes narrowed.
"What I am doesn't matter. What matters is that I woke you, and from your words - just 'saved' you. You said you were waiting for Uzumaki survivors. They didn't come. I did. Does that not prove enough?"
The voice inside wavered, almost incredulous.
"…Bold for a child. But you are no ordinary child, are you? I saw you, for a while, combing these ruins with patience, as if dissecting the earth itself. You are disciplined. Calculating. Not like the Kaguya—"
Kimimaro chuckled darkly. "You know them?"
"I watched some of their kind in my time. But you… your chakra reeks of them, and yet it doesn't. It carries the same root, but twisted higher, something elevated, set apart."
Kimimaro didn't flinch.
"Yes, this body is theirs - their 'monster.' But the mind inside? That's mine. Not chained to their idiocy. Not chained to anyone in the world. Maybe that's why I'm different."
Yet, inwardly, he knew the difference wasn't only from the transmigrator soul.
Even the original Kimimaro had always stood apart.
His pale gray hair leaned closer to Otsutsuki, while the rest of his clan carried black.
His features were sharper, his bloodline rarer, the Dead Bone Pulse perhaps surfacing only once in centuries, or never before him, judging how they looked at him like he was an alien.
A throwback, an atavism.
Toneri on the moon was another example of a similar concept, but also the clearest mirror to the Otsutsuki, his clan keeping Hamura's blood more pure because they had no choice.
They lived sealed away above the earth, cut off, unable to mix with anyone.
That isolation preserved their essence, but also doomed them, narrow blood, fragile survival, desperate measures like the artificial Tenseigan to keep going.
This is why Toneri's bloodline was probably even much higher than Kimimaro's.
In fact, he estimated that it was probably only below Hagoromo and Hamura in purity.
The Kaguya on Earth weren't much better in inbreeding, though, although still not on that moon-isolation type level.
It was just because their arrogance and reputation left them no outsiders to mix with over time, so they even partially interbred, which was easily spotted when looking at their faces, honestly.
Madness and degeneration were their inheritance.
And Kimimaro? He was the outlier.
The miscast seed that grew too straight in crooked soil.
This logic also explained perfectly why Kimimaro stood miles above his clan, and why his clan was so pathetically weak compared to the other Kaguya's descendants, at the same time.
Generations of inbreeding had done bot, allowed a throwback monster like him to surface eventually, closer to the original Otsutsuki divine aliens, but left the rest brittle and diminished.
He figured Toneri's people on the moon might have suffered the same problem.
Neither his nor Kimimaro's clan could probably ever compare to clans like the Senju or Uzumaki, who mixed freely, brought in talent from outside bloodlines, and absorbed knowledge for hundreds of years, on a more collective clan basis.
After all, the canon didn't specifically state what their personal strength was like before Toneri gained his Tenseigan.
However, at least that branch had gained Hamura's Giant Tenseigan to mask their decay, which would even allow Toneri to threaten the entire Earth some time in the future, a powerful monument to their heritage.
Meanwhile, Kaguya truly had nothing.
In the world below, they weren't even seen as proper shinobi at all.
The seal, meanwhile, pulsed faintly, like the ghost within was weighing those words.
"…Strange. Stranger still that your blood resonates with mine. A faint echo, like a branch severed from the trunk long ago."
Kimimaro tilted his head, thoughtful.
That would make sense.
Kaguya. Hamura. Hagoromo.
Descendants branching into branches, cousins scattered into different names. Perhaps that explained the faint recognition.
Also, the Uzumaki, Kaguya, Senju, and even Toneri's clan on the moon leaned more toward the Yang inheritance, the Sage Body line.
By contrast, the Uchiha and Hyūga were steeped in Yin, the Sage Eyes, Uchiha especially so.
That Yang dominance among Kaguya's descendants reflected their ancestress as well; Kaguya herself was more Yang-aspected overall.
Kimimaro also sorted his bloodline as the "Sage Body" for that very reason.
If Hagoromo's Yang heirs were canonically known to carry it, then by logic, Hamura's, equal as his twin, both half-Ōtsutsuki, would too.
Kimimaro couldn't help but find it darkly funny.
The six great clans, the ones closest to godhood, were almost all erased.
The Uzumaki, slaughtered in fear of their talents.
The Senju, who burned out through their own self-destruction.
The Uchiha, butchered by their own village.
His Kaguya clan, too brainless to last another year, about to fling themselves into suicide.
Toneri's people on the moon thinned down to one lonely heir.
And the only ones left standing?
The Hyūga. Not because of brilliance, but because they enslaved half their own family to keep order. Survival built on chains.
'Humans really are envious creatures,' he thought. 'A clan shines too brightly, and the world takes it as a challenge. The brighter the fire, the faster everyone rushes to stamp it out. No one wants anyone else to stand above.'
His gaze lingered on the spirals etched into the stone, symbols of a clan that once thrived on knowledge and creation, now reduced to dust.
'It's just human nature. Fear what you don't have, destroy what you can't be.'
The idea didn't weigh him down; it amused him.