The Land of Rice Fields, soon to be renamed and reshaped into the Land of Sound, lay quiet beneath a dim overcast sky.
Deep below one of its unmarked hills, far from any village road or wandering patrol, Orochimaru's true domain pulsed with life.
Not the kind of life villagers would recognize.
The underground corridors were lined with metal walls, pipes, reinforced chambers, and glass tubes humming with chakra.
This was the heart of the network he branded, and that would one day be recognized as Otogakure, a nest of experiments, forbidden jutsu, and living weapons awaiting their turn to be perfected.
In the innermost sector, behind three sealed doors and a corridor filled with paralytic gas vents, Orochimaru stood alone.
Before him floated a glass tank.
Inside the tank hung the preserved corpse of a man, Jashinist tattoos curling like black vines across pallid skin.
His body was perfectly stitched and preserved, suspended by chakra threads… yet unmistakably dead.
A remnant of one of the Jashinist cultists, Orochimaru's subordinates had been secretly captured years earlier.
Orochimaru's golden eyes narrowed.
"Shūmoku Island…" he murmured.
The word slithered out on his breath.
One pale hand rested lightly on the glass as the fluid inside rippled with a faint glow.
"Such a troublesome location," he whispered to himself. "And such an interesting little cult."
His tongue flicked briefly across his lip.
He wasn't sure yet what was happening there, but the signs were… unusual.
Orochimaru's story did not begin with ambition.
It began with curiosity.
Even as a child in Konoha, he was the kind of prodigy people looked at twice, not because he tried to impress them, but because he never seemed to blink.
Quiet, watching, absorbing.
His mind processed the world too quickly. It always had.
When his parents died, something in him shifted.
Not grief.
Not rage.
Just a deep, ringing emptiness, a blank space where most children place warmth and memory.
Orochimaru stared at their graves and saw a discarded white snake skin nearby.
He kept it.
It was an omen, he decided.
A reminder.
Everything sheds.
Everything dies.
To live fully, one must become something else.
That single, silent moment became his philosophy's seed.
He grew up under Hiruzen Sarutobi, in Team Hiruzen with Jiraiya and Tsunade.
Jiraiya played the clown.
Tsunade played the hammer.
Orochimaru was the knife — sharp, efficient, and always cutting deeper than anyone asked.
He wasn't cruel then, not exactly.
He simply lacked the softness others carried.
He performed missions flawlessly, studied endlessly, and passed every test as if each one were beneath him.
Then Nawaki, his first disciple, died.
And Tsunade shattered for the first time.
Orochimaru watched her break, watched the cycle of loss replay yet again — and he noted it like a researcher taking mental notes.
The world was a system built on rot.
Humans lived like mayflies, breaking, mourning, forgetting, dying.
Orochimaru began to ask the question:
"Why cling to a body that betrays you?"
By the Second and Third Shinobi Wars, he was already something other than human in mindset.
A prodigy whose curiosity had slipped into territory forbidden by any moral framework.
Hiruzen saw it.
Feared it.
And chose not to — or perhaps could not — stop it, burdened by how much he knew of the village's darkness.
By the time he acted, it was already far too late.
Then came Minato.
Young, golden, terrifyingly pure — and chosen as Fourth Hokage over Orochimaru.
That was the moment the old skin tore.
Not because Orochimaru wanted the hat.
He never cared for Konoha's ceremonies.
But a village that picked appearance over substance and knowledge, sentiment and hidden politics over evolution, was a village that would never allow him to grow.
Hiruzen couldn't "punish" him for his rebellion or his experiments.
Not without dragging into the light those very same questionable projects he had quietly allowed to exist within Konoha's own walls and umbrella.
So, he simply left. No, shed.
From there, his life became an unending chain of discarded bodies, stolen techniques, and experiments that blurred the line between horror and genius.
Orochimaru's philosophy crystallized:
To master every jutsu and every scrap of shinobi knowledge in existence.
To become an immortal, godlike being worthy of his own brilliance.
He needed decades.
Centuries
Lifetimes.
To achieve that, he first needed to completely tear the human form apart and rebuild it from the ground up.
Thus, the white snake.
The shedding skin.
The ouroboros swallowing its own tail.
Life devouring life, evolving through recursive rebirth, climbing relentlessly toward the highest summit this world could offer.
He built a network of hidden bases across the otherwise mundane Land of Rice Fields, a nation with no hidden village of its own but positioned perfectly, isolated yet central.
A web of laboratories, prisons, and nurseries for forbidden techniques.
Later, the world would call this web Otogakure, in his vision, but for Orochimaru, it was simply the natural garden where evolution would bloom.
He was a perfectionist, the worst kind.
Every project meant to be flawless.
Every experiment a step toward the "ultimate lifeform."
He valued talent, nurtured brilliance, but had no hesitation sacrificing it if the results demanded it.
Disciples called him master out of awe and terror in equal measure.
He had no sentiment toward them.
But he did have an interest.
To him, they were puzzles, investments, stepping-stones.
He delighted in unsettling people on first meeting - it revealed their true selves.
He had a superiority complex, but it wasn't loud or theatrical. It was a quiet certainty:
"I am closer to the truth than any creature on this earth."
He didn't seek destruction.
He sought evolution.
If the world fell apart in the process…
Well.
That was the world's problem.
Now, standing before a floating corpse marked in Jashinist symbols again, Orochimaru's golden slit eyes narrowed with interest.
A cult that had originated and had been quietly growing in the Land of Hot Water for at least a few years now.
Chakra signatures mutating outside any known bloodline curve.
Unexplained Yin–Yang distortion.
Ritual residue.
Someone was quietly acquiring scientific equipment — rarer pieces each time.
Someone out there was playing a game suspiciously close to his domain.
And more importantly…
Someone was doing it all well.
He smiled, thin and reptilian.
"How curious…" he whispered again.
For Orochimaru, curiosity was the closest thing he ever had to affection.
He still remembered when the first whispers reached him over two years ago.
Not from his elite operatives, but from the scattered intelligence cells he maintained in the neighboring Land of Hot Water.
Rumors, vague at first — a strange cult, erratic behavior, yet unnervingly disciplined beneath the madness.
Intriguing.
How could something so unstable keep itself so tightly hidden?
That curiosity sharpened once he managed to have a few members quietly kidnapped.
He brought them here, opened them up, and researched them immediately.
And what he found was… contradictory.
They weren't shinobi.
Not even close.
Their chakra signatures were weak, their genetics mundane, their training primitive.
Yet they were durable.
Far more durable than anything they had the right to be.
Their bodies resisted trauma as if something unseen kept 'resetting' them, a loop of Yin and Yang yoked around their chakra and souls.
It wasn't bloodline-related, to Orochimaru's irritation, and it wasn't genetic.
Something external was being grafted onto them in a way he couldn't yet articulate.
He attempted to capture whole formations of them next, especially the ones rumored to fight in unison with strange chants that even caught seasoned shinobi off guard.
But that proved impossible.
They traveled only in small cells of five, scattered, evasive, never in predictable locations.
He managed only a handful.
The experiments continued.
And yielded almost nothing.
Durability.
A hint of "immortality" at the lowest, crudest level.
And a belief among the captives that the more and stronger "sacrifices" they provided, the more their bodies would change as a reward from higher-ups in the cult.
But those higher-ups?
Every cultist he dissected knew nothing.
Truly nothing.
It was also as if the cult had no true S-ranks among them, at least none he could confirm, no matter how deeply he dug.
That particular detail dulled his excitement… if only slightly.
And then the entire organization — what little of it he could observe — went quiet.
Silent.
Vanished.
As if the rituals and sightings in the Land of Hot Water had been wiped clean.
Orochimaru eventually shelved the matter, despite how deeply their strange durability and crude "immortality" tempted him.
He had bigger issues to juggle:
His own steadily advancing research and old specimens, which already demanded most of his focus, and which he alone could truly control.
Evading Akatsuki's movements.
Jiraiya's network's constant interference and pursuit.
Konoha's eyes on his former bases.
And his preparations for the Leaf invasion.
Curiosity could only survive so long without data.
Until now.
Recently, the cult resurfaced, not with rituals or kidnappings, but through purchases.
Someone from Shūmoku Island was procuring advanced scientific equipment.
Equipment far too rare for random buyers.
Equipment usually controlled by the great villages…
Or by him.
Orochimaru smirked at the thought.
He didn't brag publicly, but secretly he knew: the majority of the off-record high-grade scientific devices produced each year funneled directly into his hands or his networks.
He practically owned the black market for such tools.
So when someone else began buying them — consistently, quietly, and in increasing quality — he noticed.
Because only a few types of buyers had that kind of money and need:
Daimyō and nobles, who had no interest in such things.
Usually, the major or a few minor Hidden Villages, which hadn't made any unusual orders and had their own proper channels, typically.
Akatsuki, who preferred discretion but wasn't operating in that region.
His own networks.
And now…
A Jashinist cult with a long trail of corpses behind it.
He narrowed the list.
Cross-referenced the shipping routes.
Traced the supply chains.
The puzzle pieces aligned.
Shūmoku Island.
The same cult that vanished from Hot Water had reappeared there, quietly growing, now mixing rituals with scientific research.
Yin–Yang anomalies, cult discipline, strange durability, and now scientific procurement?
It flipped a switch in him — pure intellectual appetite.
This wasn't just some wandering death-worshipping group.
This was a puzzle worthy of him.
A ritual-based system that could alter bodies.
A durability trait not tied to genetics.
Yin–Yang loops of unknown origin.
And now someone apparently conducting their own biological experiments, the likes of his own?
He felt something he hadn't in a long time.
Excitement.
He would investigate Shūmoku Island personally this time.
It didn't matter that the region was isolated.
Nor that it lay between Kiri and Kumo, risking detection.
Nor that the cult might actually be dangerous now.
He was Orochimaru.
And this puzzle…
This puzzle deserved him.
Unraveling it wouldn't just bring him closer to something immediately applicable to his own immortality — like that permanent essence-altering ritual hinted at in those strange cultists — but might also reveal truths about the world itself that even he had not yet touched.
He felt it in his bones.
A hunch.
And Orochimaru's hunches were rarely wrong.