Around four months had passed, and Kimimaro now stood with Emi on one of the great northern islands that officially belonged to the Land of Water.
It was no ordinary outpost; this was the second-largest island in the entire country, only after the Water Daimyo's own central island, vast enough to be a realm of its own.
And like all the isles in that scattered federation of an archipelago, it already enjoyed a measure of self-rule.
But this one held even greater autonomy, its noble family ruling almost as if they were an independent state.
The place was called Shūmoku Island, the 'Island of the Hammerhead', after the reefs that tore apart ships foolish enough to approach without guides.
Kimimaro expanded his cult's presence onto the island as well.
Geographically, it sat almost directly west of the Land of Hot Water, making it a logical choice, while also being a state within a state.
On one side, it was buffered from the central Water Daimyō and Kirigakure's main island; on the other side, it faced the looming power of the Land of Lightning.
The noble family that ruled here could almost claim the same independence as the Land of Hot Water itself.
Technically, they were still under Water Country's authority, but in truth, recently, the Daimyō was weak since Kirigakure was weak.
Meanwhile, a recent surge of Kumo's strength pressed nearby.
That pressure gave the nobles the perfect excuse to play both sides, drifting into a neutrality and isolation even greater than other semi-federal islands in the Water domain.
For Kimimaro, it was an ultra-win scenario.
More potential recruits.
More opportunities to quietly skim and extort gold.
A place to hunt stray shinobi from either Kumo or Kiri, leaving the two villages suspicious of one another instead of him.
And most importantly, another backup hideout network if his continental bases in the Land of Hot Water were ever breached.
The expansion was finally coming together.
Kimimaro now split his time, but more and more, he found himself here.
Saya was permanently left to oversee the Hot Water network in his stead when he wasn't there.
Reika, meanwhile, stayed on this island permanently as well, and whenever he wasn't present, anchored operations in his stead.
And Emi, of course, remained his 'personal assistant', always at his side, wherever he was.
After all, he still couldn't dismiss the possibility of the Hyūga Main Branch attempting something unpredictable.
Better to keep her close, where his hand could smother any attempt before it bloomed.
They watched the harbor from a low cliff, salt wind teasing at Kimimaro's hair, the island's black reefs like teeth below.
He folded his hands, calm as a gravestone, and counted aloud like a man reciting inventory.
Between this island and Hot Water, he now commanded five hundred fighters.
About a hundred and twenty-five of them were high-genin level, trained as the Inner Circle.
The other three hundred and seventy-five were low-to-mid-genin strength, arranged into formations that made up the Outer Circle.
Behind them stood another five hundred in logistics: smugglers, craftsmen, cooks, dockworkers, people who would never touch rituals but kept the machine alive.
Secrecy was the iron law.
Outcasts, runaways, and abandoned children filled the ranks, bound together by his doctrine of the forsaken.
Boats now rotated constantly between Hot Water and Shūmoku, a hidden fleet moving under the cover of night.
The island itself had also been laced with static seals just like the Hot Water areas, Uzumaki communication nodes layered among dispersed Jashinist cells and suppression talismans.
Kimimaro's sensing clones also drifted across the terrain like silent wraiths, turning the whole territory into a web only he could read.
He was no longer just surviving.
He was preparing to sit as the final boss eventually.
Already, he had begun sketching plans to bring the noble family under his control as well, a slower, subtler conquest, but one that would cement his grip.
If the lords bent to him, then this island's autonomy became his shield, and its wealth his fuel.
Another layer of security.
Another lever for the future.
They sat where the cliff dropped into the harbor, wind tasting of salt and old storms.
Kimimaro watched all of it with a casual, dangerous calm.
"Yugakure's already in a chokehold, so we need to focus here more for a while...", He said, not bothering to soften it.
"I think that some of their higher-ups there might have even guessed there's a cult, at this point, after all. Maybe they have an inkling about Jashinism. But they have no guts to do anything about it now, I'm sure of that."
Emi hummed, waiting for him to fill the silence.
"Why?" she asked when he paused.
"Because it was simply too late, we reached a certain threshold of power and danger already and showed them our teeth," he answered simply.
"A few guerrilla strikes, the right ghosts at the right time, to scare them off and cut those thoughts at their root. Enough to prove what we can do if pressed. Open war would doom their recent aspirations regarding their rising tourism, wreck trade, and panic the local economy completely. Their Daimyō probably doesn't want smoke on his coasts either."
"So they will have to tolerate us, as long as we don't go too overboard, that is." He spoke the last part like a fact about the weather.
"So they keep quiet," Emi supplied. "And also don't inform the other villages about our rapid rise, which is even more dangerous to us, because who wants to invite a massive war, that could potentially spiral out of control if others get involved too, inside their own borders?"
"Exactly." Kimimaro's eyes were flat, satisfied. "They'll whisper to themselves and pretend ignorance. Politics prefers silence to blood. That gives us space."
The Uzumaki fuinjutsu and the Jashinist/Chinoike Yin–Yang rituals, together formed a superb combination to conquer territories and hold them in a choke. Kimimaro grinned, already seeing the sweeping army he would raise in a few years from these two small territories.