Soon after finalizing their "deal," they parted ways for now.
Kimimaro wasn't naïve enough to let the old ghost crawl directly into his mindscape, for example, like some foolish protagonists of some webnovels he read in his past life.
He had no interest in perhaps becoming some old man's fresh vessel if Ashina decided to make that unceremonious move.
That was why the terms were clear: Ashina would provide insights and knowledge at intervals, while Kimimaro would keep him reinvigorated with steady offerings of chakra.
A trade. Nothing more.
He set up a small camp nearby, in a cave tucked into the forest around the ruins.
Ashina explained that the more chakra he fed the seal, the more vividly he could manifest an environment, though never far from the ruins themselves.
That was fine. Kimimaro didn't need a hovering specter following him around, only the knowledge.
And the cave had everything: a river for water, enough animals to hunt, and complete isolation.
The ruins themselves terrified the scattered villagers still living on the island; they avoided the place like a cursed shrine.
To Kimimaro, that made it the safest spot possible.
He weighed the alternatives.
Fire Country?
Too close to Konoha, and though the odds were slim, they had the resources to sense him eventually if he lingered there long enough, as they were the strongest shinobi village still.
Water Country? Worse. Bloodline hunts were spreading like wildfire under Obito's lunacy.
Kimimaro smirked to himself. "All this because his little Rin got skewered. Proof that simps can start genocides."
And Kirigakure, now a puppet theater under Obito's hand, was basically Akatsuki's second base. The most isolated of the Great Villages, perfect for them to siphon resources and claim legitimacy. No wonder he chose it.
Both were somewhat more dangerous all in all.
Compared to all that, this ruin, twenty years cold, in between those two great countries, and hidden villages, was like a 'paradise'.
No Great Village would waste resources here anymore.
They had already stripped, burned, and scavenged everything they could, and Ashina himself admitted that most of the clan's knowledge was destroyed directly by the Uzumaki right during their fall.
The master scroll, the core of their secrets, remained only with him.
Which meant Kimimaro now sat in the one place where the dead still had something worth teaching, and the living no longer dared to look.
He thought it was poetic. The ruins of a clan betrayed by its allies would now become the nursery of his own rise.
Kimimaro sat in the quiet of the cave, letting the fire crackle low.
His thoughts drifted back to Ashina.
Could the old ghost still hunger for flesh?
A body to wear, to fight in, to stand on soil again?
He didn't mention it, but who would not want something like that, especially someone with those kinds of ambitions and lingering regrets?
That was the obvious danger.
After all, Ashina was currently nothing but a soul propped up by the last spark of a logic-defying great seal he carved at the moment of death with his last bits of chakra, and struck luck in a sense that it really worked perfectly, as it was probably only just a concept before.
Kimimaro's chakra could now keep that seal alive, refuel it like charging an empty battery, but it could never make Ashina into a player on the board again.
That was the only reason Kimimaro allowed this "partnership."
If Ashina could really snatch bodies at will, why waste time arguing with a disrespectful brat like him?
Why not simply seize the fresh, perfect vessel in front of him, during that first connection?
Why not wait one or more decades more until this body then matured into something even greater?
Kimimaro had his answer.
His transmigrated soul wasn't weak.
It was heavier, denser, sharper than the boy's original ever was.
That gave him spiritual power far beyond his years.
Combine that with the fact that Ashina was shackled to his seal, tethered like a beast in a cage, in one place, and the fuinjutsu concept, and the only real way he could threaten Kimimaro's body was if Kimimaro himself opened the gate.
If he invited him into his mindscape. If he was foolish enough to let the seal be swapped.
Then the old soul could probably eventually escape his seal without consequences by finding himself in a brand new body instead of being pulled to the Pure Land right away.
But Ashina never suggested it. He wasn't stupid either.
He probably understood his concerns. They both knew trust was a joke.
The only rope between them was utility. And that suited Kimimaro fine.
They were similar men, separated by many decades. Neither lived for "morals" anymore.
Both abandoned sentiment for ambition. Only interest could bind them.
In Kimimaro's opinion, since Ashina had probably calculated that the odds of failing to seize his soul were high, especially in his weakened state, and that such a failure might even force him into the afterlife 'prematurely', he deemed cooperation the safer and smarter option.
However, if Ashina were to one day demand that Kimimaro secure him another suitable vessel, Kimimaro wouldn't refuse outright.
Not because of loyalty, but simply because such terms fit the transactional nature of their cooperation.
They hadn't even started formal 'lessons 'yet, but Kimimaro could already picture it.
The kind of insights a man like Ashina could provide… they weren't the scraps of clan scrolls, but the distilled instincts of a patriarch who had steered one of the oldest shinobi lineages on earth.
They had agreed to remain here for a few years, so Kimimaro already imagined how far he could advance in that time.
By the end of it, he wouldn't just be another shinobi child. He would be something else entirely.
After all, Ashina had once been patriarch of the great Uzumaki clan, for a very long time, a force spoken of alongside the Senju.
Some sources of his past life even whispered his name in the same breath as Hashirama's or Madara's.
Not as equals, no, but not leagues below either.
If Kimimaro judged honestly, the old man had probably stood at 'Peak Kage' level and at the lone pinnacle of fuinjutsu.
But in the end, raw power was only half the value.
The other half lay in what he carried in his memory.
Seals and techniques refined over a thousand years.
Knowledge passed down and safeguarded through blood.
Of course, Kimimaro knew the old man wouldn't hand them over immediately.
First would come basics, things Kimimaro had never been taught properly.
Structure. Foundation.
The more esoteric treasures, the true arsenal of Uzumaki, would likely come later, once Kimimaro understood basic fuinjutsu well enough and had proven himself, or fulfilled some future part of their bargain.
However, it was not that Kimimaro was expecting to learn advanced fuinjutsu any time soon.
He needed to focus on more 'basic' things now.
'So that's why no one ever revived him in the original timeline,' Kimimaro thought. 'His soul never even made it to the Pure Land. It was tethered here, just like Sakumo stuck in that Purgatory, or the souls rotting away in the Shinigami's belly.'
In his past life, he remembered some fans arguing about Ashina Uzumaki.
Some swore he was overhyped by die-hard Uzumaki fanboys—"If he was really that strong, why wasn't he ever summoned with Edo Tensei?" But now Kimimaro had his answer.
But think logically.
A patriarch of the great Uzumaki clan couldn't have been weak.
Their bloodline itself was among the peaks of the world.
The strongest among them should've been terrifying.
You look down on the Uzumaki? Just look at what a half-blooded, 'ordinary' descendant like Nagato managed.
Yet, he might have been an anomaly argument still applied, but the source of that anomaly was the Uzumaki clan.
His Sage Body was so durable that he could run both Rinnegan, to a decent extent, for decades without instantly collapsing, unlike Obito, who could only juggle one eye at a time.
Kimimaro really thought such feats could only be rivaled by Hashirama, whose Sage Body was even more monstrous.
If Nagato had been a little smarter or less manipulated, he could've taken that natural gift and actually sought Sage Mode from one of the Holy Lands, or dug deeper into his own clan's inheritance.
Instead, he wasted everything dancing to another man's tune. His application of the Rinnegan was powerful, yes, but because it wasn't his own power, it crippled his vision and ultimately cost him.
He should've at least used it a bit better and gained strength in other areas too, then he might've realised his plans.
And it wasn't just Nagato.
Take Kushina, stripped and weakened after childbirth, her chakra nearly empty, and she still managed to suppress the Nine-Tails.
That wasn't talent, that was bloodline.
Kimimaro compared them in his mind.
The Sage Eye clans, the Uchiha, and Hyūga had their edge and similarity in spiritual power that led to better yin release, chakra potency, control, and shaping.
Yet they had a different dojutsu.
The Sage Body clans were similar.
They didn't have flashy dōjutsu; instead, each branch of them leaned hardest into one exaggerated trait, while still sharing that baseline of more physical energy, which also led to more chakra reserves, better yang release talent, awesome body physiques, fast regeneration, life force, and chakra coil performance.
The Uzumaki's unique, heightened gift was life force itself, the ability to endure across time, both in flesh and in chakra.
That same overflowing vitality was what made them unrivaled in fūinjutsu, a field that seemed yin-based but actually demanded chakra that could "live" inside formulas and barriers well across time.
It was also why they could physically live past a hundred if accidents didn't cut them short.
The Senju leaned more toward coil flexibility, adaptability, and density.
That was why they were called the "clan of a thousand skills."
Their chakra systems were naturally suited for adaptation, ninjutsu, taijutsu, and nature releases.
One body could often juggle multiple or even all five elements when the rest of the shinobi world was lucky to master one to a great extent.
Toneri's lunar clan clearly excelled at pure Yang Release.
It was obvious in their constructs how they could animate entire armies of puppets or raise titanic golems from dead stone.
And his own people, the Kaguya?
Kimimaro couldn't help but sneer.
They only had raw physical stats going for them more than the rest: stamina, speed, and more prominently, the brute resilience, quite fitting for them, and then once in a blue moon, one anomaly with Shikotsumyaku like himself.
The weakest branch of the Sage Body inheritance by far.