A few days later, Ryusei finally had some free time to chase another idea.
He sent out a clone, this one bound for the ruins of Uzushiogakure that were actually not that far from his current operation area.
Now, surrounded by the silence of the open sea, he guided a small boat toward the island once known as the Land of Whirlpools.
After the four great villages destroyed it, they likely stripped everything valuable, if it was not destroyed by the Uzumaki themselves.
But knowing the Uzumaki, Ryuse doubted they left without sealing away a few final secrets for their scattered survivors at least.
"If anyone could outsmart death, in some way," he thought, "perhaps it would be them."
The Uzumaki had once ruled their, eventually formed, hidden village, but also the land directly; no daimyō, no separation between politics and shinobi.
Their island thrived on sealing, medicine, and trade, not conquest.
A peaceful power, but one that had made the five great nations uneasy.
Their mistake was trust.
They sided with Konoha indirectly during the First Shinobi War, bound by blood and old alliances, giving them preferential treatment regaridng their seals.
It looked like safety, but it was a leash.
The other nations saw it too, and before the Second Shinobi War, they struck hard first, erasing the Uzumaki from history.
Ryusei's thoughts were calm but sharp.
"Konoha used them, then discarded them the moment it became inconvenient, despite being the reason, once the other nations closed in. Cold, predictable, and completely calculated. However, the Uzumaki should have known better. Brilliant in fuinjutsu, hopeless in politics."
He reached the shore. The island was a scar, overgrown, quiet, its people long gone or reduced to scattered fishing villages.
Moving inland, Ryusei ignored what little life remained.
His senses swept ahead, leading him straight to the heart of the ruins.
Stone spirals jutted from the earth, half-swallowed by moss and time.
Collapsed towers leaned into each other like broken ribs.
No great hidden villages' guards. No chakra. Just silence.
Ryusei knelt beside a cracked pillar, tracing the worn spiral carved into it.
"So this is what's left of them," he thought. "Centuries of mastery, gone with the tide."
He reasoned it out step by step.
Even if the Uzumaki had left something behind for their scattered survivors, it made sense that nothing ever appeared in the original timeline.
That didn't mean the trail was cold.
It meant there was still a chance for him to find what others had missed.
When the Four Great Villages descended on Uzushiogakure, the clan had likely been caught off guard.
Almost no one escaped.
That matched what the series showed, Karin, Nagato, maybe a few of their parents, besides Kushina and Mito.
And even those weren't survivors of the massacre itself, just people who happened to be away when the attack came.
There were likely no other survivors.
The Uzumaki had once numbered in the thousands.
They traded widely, sent scholars and merchants abroad.
Naturally, a few would have survived by distance alone.
Could some have sealed themselves away?
Possibly at first.
But the idea of them hiding forever in pocket dimensions didn't convince him.
The Great Villages also weren't fools.
Four of them working together, with all their sealing experts and chakra reserves, could break through any barrier given enough time.
They had gotten in once, after all.
That was Ryusei's conclusion, drawn from fragments of memory and logic.
Even if the ruins held nothing, it was still worth the effort to check, not to mention it was just a clone being sent.
Ryusei expanded his sensory field to its limit, sweeping across every broken wall and buried stone.
For hours, he searched in silence, scanning for anything that wasn't just an ordinary dead rock.
Nothing.
Just as he was about to leave, his gaze drifted lazily over another ruined wall.
One spiral crest stood out.
It shouldn't have.
Uzumaki spirals were everywhere here, carved into nearly every surface.
But this one felt different.
His chakra sense finally rippled oddly against it, like the mark itself pushed back.
It wasn't stone, not entirely.
Something beneath it was humming faintly, alive.
In an instant, Ryusei dropped to his knees and pressed his hand flat against it, flooding chakra in steady pulses.
Sensory bursts followed, sharp and precise.
The reaction was immediate.
The spiral drank it in, and his mind snapped somewhere else.
For a heartbeat, it felt like he was floating above his body, strings pulling him upward.
Then a voice echoed in his head, hollow and old.
"…So, the one who wakes me is… not Uzumaki."
It sounded tired, bitter.
"For years, I lingered here. I left this tether, this fragment of my soul. I thought one of my kin would return."
"A descendant, anyone with our blood still proud." A long pause followed, heavy as surf grinding stone.
"But none came. Not one. Either they were all slaughtered, or too afraid to step foot on their own soil again."
The voice grew faint, like it might fade with the next breath.
"My jutsu weakens. Only pieces of me remain. I've watched for so long in silence. If no one had come soon, I would have faded completely… forgotten, just like the clan."
Ryusei's eyes narrowed. This wasn't a carving.
It was a seal, a container, and inside it, a soul.
The presence stirred again, this time sharper, tinged with surprise.
"You are not Uzumaki, yet your chakra resonates with mine. Familiar… Senju."
Ryusei froze, then grinned slowly.
"So that's what I found…" he murmured. "The last patriarch himself."
Ashina Uzumaki.
A legend of sealing arts, a man whose knowledge was worth entire nations.
The greed in Ryusei's chest flared immediately.
Advanced fuinjutsu, ancient formulas, hidden techniques, all buried here, waiting for someone capable enough to claim them.
Ashina's spirit stayed quiet for a few moments, his thoughts heavy.
Seeing a Senju instead of an Uzumaki filled him with mixed feelings.
The Senju were both kin and cause; kin, as proven by how effortlessly this one's blood had stirred the tether, and cause, because it was through their bond that Uzushiogakure had chained itself to Konoha.
His own younger cousin Mito had married Hashirama, a man he respected deeply, but after Konoha's founding, the Senju soon dissolved into the village, erasing their own name.
And when the four great nations attacked, Hiruzen didn't send help, didn't even warn them.
He let the Uzumaki burn.
Ashina's hatred for Konoha had fermented into something deep and venomous.
Yet he couldn't separate that from the Senju who had once bound their fates together.
It was the Senju who set everything in motion.
Their brotherhood made the Uzumaki trust Konoha too deeply, only for that trust to be betrayed when Hiruzen, appointed by Tobirama, rose as the Third Hokage and turned his back on them at their darkest hour.
Tobirama's decree to dissolve the Senju name had seemed like an internal reform at the time, but its true cost was far greater; it had fundamentally cut the bond between the two villages at its very root by removing one brother.
By the time the Uzumaki realized what had been lost, the damage was beyond repair.
Now, staring through the remnants of his consciousness at this young Senju who radiated talent second only to Hashirama, Ashina felt both resentment and reluctant curiosity.
This was not the heir he had expected, yet perhaps, after all this time, it was the one fate had sent.
The spirit's voice grew steadier, curiosity replacing its earlier bitterness.
"Tell me, boy… how does a Senju find his way here, to what remains of my people? Your chakra carries its strength. Speak. Who are you, and what has become of the Senju name?"
Ryusei stayed silent for a moment, his hand still pressed against the spiraled seal. He could feel the faint pulse of the tether beneath his palm, like a slow heartbeat echoing through stone.
"The Senju you remember don't exist anymore," he said quietly. "After Tobirama's death, Hiruzen and Danzo took over everything. Tobirama's order to dissolve the clan was never reversed."
"The proud lines were scattered into the wider village, and our name was erased piece by piece. Only a few families held onto their bloodline quietly. Most didn't even know what they were anymore."
Ashina said nothing, but Ryusei could feel the soul listening closely.
"My own lineage belonged to what was truly left and could be called the 'revivalist faction', alongside a few others," he continued. "They all tried to rebuild what remained of the clan's pride, quietly, within the cracks of the system. They gathered knowledge, kept our records alive, and tried to stage a political comeback of some sort. But ROOT and the Hokage faction never stopped observing and looking for the right time to exterminate all of us directly with sinister plots; so we were hunted too, during the WW2. My parents also died for it. I was barely left alive. Konoha calls me their own, but in truth, they've always been my enemy."
The silence that followed was long. Then the old voice spoke again, quieter, weighted with something harder to define.
"So even the Senju bled under the same hand," Ashina murmured. "They became another victim of its own creation."
He paused, as if thinking aloud. "I should hate you. Your blood carries the name that doomed us. But I see now, your clan was actually buried, just as mine was. The same blades that carved us apart cut into you as well. Tobirama and Hiruzen were your own executioners as much as they were ours."
Ryusei gave a faint, humorless smile. "That's exactly why I came here. If I'm to survive or get revenge, I'll need more than bloodlines and ideals. I'll need the kind of knowledge you locked away here. Fortunately, I was not wrong."