POV: Seijuro's Clone –
Location: Uzushio Ruins, Former Kage Tower Site
Weather: Overcast, wind brisk, ocean crashing faintly in the background
Seijuro's clone knew he didn't have long left. He had used a lot of his chakra, and only 50% remained. Also yes, he was being hunted by bounty hunters—he, in fact, did kill them and collected the bounty on their heads.
The latest bounty hunter that was after him? A man by the name of Kakuzu. He defeated the man, destroyed his heart, and left.
Yet, he felt like something was off. Sure, the battle was a one-sided massacre, yet as he left the man's broken body on the floor, he felt like he was missing something.
Oh well. No biggie.
Currently, he was in Uzu no Kuni—Uzushiogakure, the village hidden in the whirlpool. He was here for one reason and one reason only:
For them jutsu. And seals.
He wished to learn them.
He needed to learn more.
There were some people settling near the village. Oh well. He just ignored them and followed his map.
He scanned the surroundings—eyes narrowing behind his mask.
All around him were the remains of lives violently disrupted. Burnt homes. Collapsed schools. Half-disintegrated bridges. Paper charms dancing like ghosts along shattered alleyways.
But that wasn't why he came here.
He reached into his coat and pulled out an old parchment—a pre-destruction map of Uzushio, stolen from the bounty compound he had liberated with extreme prejudice.
He opened it. Ink slightly faded. Uzushio's old infrastructure was a spiral maze, as expected.
"Kage Tower... center quadrant... beneath the Sealing Hall," he muttered.
He glanced up.
A toppled stone pillar stood like a grave marker nearby, and past it—half-sunk into the earth and weather-worn by salt—lay the collapsed remains of the Tower's foundation.
This had to be it.
He walked toward the base, careful not to trigger any residual barrier traps.
Nothing lit up.
No reactive Fūinjutsu.
"Strange. Either they were deactivated in the raid... or hidden even from chakra scanners."
That alone meant Uzumaki High-Class Seals. Hidden in plain sight. Invisible to the naked eye. It was one of their trademark defenses—layered concealment arrays that only responded to very specific triggers.
He knelt near one of the fallen keystones and slowly brushed dust off with a gloved hand.
And then—
There it was.
A seal.
Not glowing.
Not active.
Just engraved into the stone, faintly... like etching on titanium.
"Huh... not the style I know," he muttered.
The clone began brushing off more surface debris, and as he did—more and more seals began to emerge.
One.
Five.
Fifteen.
Dozens.
Some spiraled into the next like recursive algorithms. Others were compact cubes of glyph clusters, nested inside one another like data encryption. And some weren't even linear—they looped in geometric patterns that made the eye twitch.
Seijuro's clone's brow furrowed deeply.
"Okay... what the hell is this?"
He reached into his pouch and pulled out a sealing journal, flipping open to a page covered in comparison charts.
He scanned the glyphs again... and paused.
These weren't the seals he'd learned. They were... but they were being used differently.
A good way to explain it: his sealing language was Java, while the one he was looking at now was Python. They were both coding languages—quite similar to each other.
This was proving to be a burden. He hadn't fully learned the Uzumaki clan sealing style—like sure, he got one thing or two from Kushina, but it wasn't much.
It was like knowing the ABCs and now being forced to learn the language from just knowing the alphabet and basic words.
Worse still—he found no chakra output requirement notation anywhere. Most seals had clear intake/output lines. These didn't.
"They operate on a different logic set entirely... almost like... compiled commands instead of run-time formations," he whispered.
That meant the seals weren't just dormant—they were pre-executed. Waiting for input they were told to expect decades ago.
And that input?
Probably no longer existed.
Still...
He squatted and began decoding, piece by piece. The strokes weren't just characters—they were instructions. Some pointed to memory calls. Others resembled recursive loops. A few even had "interface" markings—seals that connected to other seals.
"A whole seal network... beneath the city...?" he muttered.
In coding terms, the seal he saw probably looked something like this:
IF intruder ≠ Uzumaki → NULL return / backlash
There was also some other stuff being used—loop, return, and so on—alongside a self-destruct sequence. If the wrong code got entered too many times, all the knowledge in there would be burned away.
Looking at the challenging words, a smile made itself known to his lips.
This was fun.
The clone sat cross-legged, unrolled a scroll, and began sketching what he saw—slowly drawing connections, mapping dependencies.
"This will take a while..."
He knew it would. Yet something so difficult had him excited. It was time for him to learn a brand new language—and use that shit to open this door.
Once that was done, he could get his treasure.
How fun.
The thrill of this made this even more fun.