ken has been out in the forest region for a few days now since finishing his job after killing the sand gang and casually reporting his mission completion to his squad captain inu .
as for why he hasn't gone back to the village till now ? simple ,, because he has got another job to complete now . after a few minutes when ken reported the success to inu , there came his next job which was carried by gabriel to him . the job was simply to find the real team or individual who was assigned to fulfill the trade or deal . he may kill him if possible or just report his description in as much detail as he can to inu. the next was announcement that ken's hard work and accomplishments have be recognized so he is promoted to an official chunin . well honestly ken wasn't particularly happy about his promotion this time as not even veteran jonin can complete his jobs smoothly like ken maybe even in a group . so this promotion could be said that wasn't based on his accomplishments at all .
ken could not find any information that could lead to the trade or the person in charge or even the other party from the 13 ninja that he had played with before . so he had no choice but to find other alternatives. thinking about alternatives he tried his luck with system map and it actually answered back that ken could definitely locate the person or group after telling the purpose or pretty much any information about them which system found satisfactory . of course ken knew about this as he had searched for his targets many times before but this time the information was a bit too vague so ken was left surprised with system's response .
ken then immediately decided to search for the person or group and actually found out that the person for the job appointed by sand village was not even a ninja . ken was a bit surprised but relatively easy accepted this fact as after seeing this world with his own eyes ken had found that this world is much bigger than he had considered it to be at first and there are many strong individuals except ninja albeit relatively few in numbers .
so the person wasn't even inside the fire country's territory yet , that's why ken has been touring this beautiful forest at a leisurely pace since completing the first part of his mission outside this time . anbu had the authority to travel outside the boundary of fire country for a mission by gaining permission but ken couldn't possibly tell inu that he had already discoverd the target and he was still outside the fire country. so ken was admiring the nature and passing time in peace while at it.
it's not like the journey was extremely boring though . ken had encountered an A rank beast which was a armor centipede and killed it earning himself 500 points . he even found an abandoned underground laboratory which was huge and from the remaining small amount of documents and research scrolls, he deduced that this facility belonged to orochimaru. of course there were many factors which eventually led him to this decision . ken found many corpses of beasts and even humans that were mutated after some experiments but didnt find anything useful that he could trade with system .
if system could trade corpses with him then Ken could have gained many points so it was a bit unfortunate. ken wasn't a maniac who had many screws loose inside their brains so he didnt look at those researches a second time. being practical and insane are two different things after all .
the best discovery was the difference among the tress in this forest . not the whole forest though but ken found many trees that were relatively bigger so he was a little interested. actually those tress had too much vitality due to good amount of chakra running in them .
this fact reminded ken of hashirama's deep forest emergence jutsu so he immediately connected the dots and reached the conclusion. from the vast forest ken could estimate the power of hashirama and it was really great . so old fox hokage's evaluation inside ken dropped once again as he was too weak when compared to the first hokage .
ken only ate fruits on this journey as there were many types in the forest and were absolutely delicious . one particularly suited his taste which was big as a pumpkin with dark red colour while taste like sweet mango.
now the time has passed and finally the two parties who are supposed to have a deal or trade have arrived inside a cave that is completely hidden by a small waterfall near the location of the valley of reconciliation.
oh yea ken also visited the valley of reconciliation but wasn't awed by the scene or anything . just the size of two statues belonging to hashirama and madara was great in fact too big and the space that the valley took was huge .
the waterfall which was the trade location was located in the plateau that was connected to the valley of reconciliation with its left edge ..