More than a week passed.
Enough time for bruises to fade, enough time for the world to pretend nothing had happened, and enough time for Kimimaro to rebuild everything from the ground up again.
By then, they had already carved out a new main hideout in the Land of Hot Water.
Quiet valleys, soft mist, harmless springs, all the perfect camouflage for something far uglier beneath.
Old forgotten cells scattered across the country stirred awake again, their messages spreading like whispered veins under the soil.
Every surviving Jashinist was rerouted here, told to lie low, breathe quietly, and keep their knives sheathed unless he said otherwise.
Kimimaro wasn't going to let stupidity undo a week of progress.
Shumoku Island was still technically territory of the Land of Water, and Kirigakure now danced on Obito's strings.
The idea of dealing with Orochimaru one week only to accidentally provoke a masked lunatic with a god complex the next…
Kimimaro wasn't in the mood for that kind of comedy.
"One monster at a time," he muttered more than once.
By this point, the trade with Orochimaru had already gone through.
Smooth, quiet, no surprises.
The new instruments arrived two days ago, smuggled directly into the freshly carved underground laboratory.
Sealed, insulated, buried beneath layers of fūinjutsu that could shrug off a small war.
Emi practically lived down there now.
She claimed she was "guarding the equipment."
Everyone knew she was drowning herself in Orochimaru's lifetime of scientific memories, absorbing them with the kind of enthusiasm only someone about to be freed from a cursed seal could muster.
She read, tested, practiced, and replicated.
Sometimes she dragged Kimimaro down so she could rant about theories until her voice cracked.
He read through the data too whenever he had a spare hour.
Orochimaru's writing style was as deranged as the man himself, but the content was priceless.
In a way, they even hit it off.
Orochimaru laughed too much, and Kimimaro spoke too little, but their goals lined up cleanly where it mattered.
Through one of Orochimaru's own cells stationed quietly somewhere in Hot Water, they had already set up a direct communication link.
A quiet thread between 'similar' minds.
They could reach each other at any time now.
Perfect for coordinating the Konoha Crush when the moment came.
Although Orochimaru probably had no idea that Kimimaro could see the future well enough to set the board in advance, before he even mentioned it to him.
Kimimaro found that mildly amusing.
Additionally, more than anything, this latest ordeal shoved a hand down Kimimaro's spine and reminded him he needed an even faster growth.
Not just for himself but for the girls, too.
One brush with Orochimaru at full power was enough to show him exactly where the cracks still were.
So he had already begun teaching Saya how to open the First Gate right away.
She took to it disturbingly well.
Her body was already something close to quasi-immortal, a blend of absurd durability and pseudo-regenerative Yin-Yang stubbornness that made her almost tailor-made for the brutality of the Eight Gates path.
And honestly, where was it written that only men could learn it?
After all, Tsunade probably had the single best qualifications in the entire shinobi world.
Pure Senju lineage at its strongest, regeneration so fierce it worked like real-time auto-repair, and internal chakra control honed by anatomical mastery to a point that bordered on inhuman, even without a Byakugan to guide it.
With that combination, she reached the absolute peak of physical chakra enhancement, mastering the strong fist style in ways most taijutsu users could only dream about.
But she spent half her life trying to be a medical saint and the other half drowning in grief and sake.
Not exactly the mindset needed for a technique that demanded thousands of hours of self-inflicted torture like Inner Gates.
Thinking of Tsunade kept happening more often lately.
And no, not because of those two very obvious reasons swinging on her chest.
What he wanted was Shikkotsu Forest.
That strange realm of endlessly splitting slug-flesh, a creature older than the recorded shinobi history.
He felt instinctively that the place hid more than some healing "auxiliary" lore.
And more importantly, Slug Sage Mode.
He was convinced it existed.
It would be absurd for snakes and toads to have Sage Modes but the slugs not to.
If anything, Kimimaro suspected the slug path was the hardest of the three.
That alone probably explained why no one in canon ever touched it.
And he knew that hard things, and those that others overlooked, tend to be the ones most worth bleeding for.
But not yet.
He was only thirteen.
His body and chakra were still refining, stabilizing, expanding.
Starting Sage training too early was a shortcut to exploding like a badly carved water balloon.
After all, his sensory network had already brushed past Tsunade several times throughout the Land of Hot Water, but he'd never approached her.
Not because he was scared.
Simply because approaching her now would be pointless.
He wasn't yet qualified to learn Sage Mode, nor even pressure her into opening the path to it.
"Two more years," he later murmured privately more than once.
At fifteen, he would be even more different.
All five of them would be.
At fifteen, many pieces would align at the same time.
And let's be honest, he preferred the slugs for a reason.
After all, volunteering your throat to one of the planet's strongest and least understood creepy predators, right in the center of a nest of nightmates that literally survives by devouring anything weaker, wasn't exactly a stroke of genius.
Perfect plan, truly. Only someone totally brain-dead would pick Snake Sage Mode over a soft-spoken, polite, slightly squishy Katsuyu whose entire purpose in life was to be helpful.
As for the toads, he was obviously a "villain".
Not their chosen "child of destiny" and "protagonist".
And he had no interest in dancing in their prophecies or whatever other suspicious crap they liked to whisper into their Jiraiya-wannabes.
And besides, Katsuyu seemed far more 'neutral' than either of the other two.
Not greedy and predatory like the snakes, not rigid and obsessed with some prepackaged cosmic order like the toads.
With the right 'conviction', or even without it, perhaps, that path felt like one that could actually work the most likely.
So, two more years it was.
Short in normal life.
In his life, with his pace, it would be an era of growth.
Enough to reshape everything again.
Enough to make sure no one he met next time would have the luxury of understating him.