A week later I came across a small town, but what remained was charred and destroyed buildings and houses. I couldn't sense any life signs anywhere.
By the size of this town, I could tell that its population was around fifty people. Dead bodies were lying everywhere nobody was spared.
'Even if there weren't many shinobi here to protect this small town, whoever did it was certainly strong,'.
Then I looked at some of the bodies and realized that their hearts were missing. 'The rouge shinobi Kakuzu' I instantly knew who it was.
I heard stories that there was one immortal missing-nin, that left death and destruction where ever he went. He was known because he stole his enemy's hearts, and there was only one person that did this.
Walking through the town I didn't feel any anger or sadness. Death was a part of life and it was something unavoidable, some people just had more luck than others.
I wasn't an irrational, quick-tempered idiot that thought he could change the world and make everyone happy, but that didn't mean that I was heartless and enjoyed killing. I respect the dead and buried them, to put them at peace, this was the only thing I could do for them.
I looked back at the burial stone I left for them and sighed. In this world, death was a common thing especially now as there was the third shinobi war currently taking place.
As for Kakuzu, the cause of this massacre, I wasn't going to go out of my way to capture him. I saw no point in doing so as there would always be people that would replace him.
If anything, I wanted to have a good spar against him. He did somewhat piqued my interest as I heard that he had survived a fight from the First Hokage.
I wanted to see what tricks he had up his sleeve that allowed him to escape with his life.
Currently, I was in the frost country still 4 weeks away from reaching Konoha so I didn't spend much time in the land of frost.
As the name suggests, the entire land is pretty much covered in snow. It would snow about once a week, but once it did, there would be lots of snow.
You might then be wondering why it's called the frost country, it's because this country is positioned right next to the hot water country.
The heat from the hot water country melts the snow in the frost country, but since it snows heavily once a week. All the melted snow gets frozen over. There is constantly a frozen frosty layer everywhere.
It was truly bizarre as you wouldn't expect two opposing climates to be right next to each other. The reason it was like this is because of the difference in chakra concentration.
The natural chakra in the air was naturally drawn to the hot water country from the frost country. Nobody knew why the natural energy was drawn towards the land of hot water.
Natural energy/chakra is found everywhere, and it absorbs the nutrients and heat from the sun. This is why sage mode strengthens the body and gives you more energy.
Since the frost county has less nature energy, meaning that it can't absorb as much sun, it is constantly cold. Whereas the hot water country has lots of natural energy to soak up the sun's heat and warm the surrounding area.
This cold environment wasn't any trouble for me, as I had learned a technique that circulated chakra through my body to constantly heat it.
Another week quickly passed, and over this time not much happened. I didn't go to any nearby towns, as I had completely run out of money so there was no point. Besides, I could sleep out in the wild with the help of my survival techniques.
It was times like these where I was slightly thankful for Jigen's training. One trick that he taught me was infusing my element nature into my chakra. He kept saying that it was a common technique for people of his clan.
I was able now to infuse elemental chakra into objects and after a year of practice, I was able to circulate it around my body. For some reason, I picked it up surprisingly fast, even shocking Jigen. It almost felt familiar, like I had done it before but it wasn't complete.
It was a huge boost to my battle strength as I was able to infuse elemental chakra into my body, allowing me to have different abilities.
If I infused lightning chakra into my body, it dramatically improved my speed, it was almost like I was lightning. I would always leave a dark red lighting trail behind me when I used this technique. Although I made me extremely fast, it was hard to control where I was going.
When I used water chakra, I could turn my body into water and have the properties of water, which allowed me to have objects pass through me, but I wasn't able to phase through things. It was like if you threw water at a wall, it wouldn't come out the other side but if you threw a stone at a waterfall it would go through. When I used this, it would make me extremely vulnerable to lighting-style attacks.
Using earth chakra I can turn body parts rock solid, I am also able to travel through the earth, as I was one with the earth (like Zetsu).
With fire chakra, I can heat my body to inhuman temperatures which provided extremely good defense and could help me stay warm during the night. While using it I would be vulnerable to water attacks. This was extremely useful in colder countries, and also an amazing survival skill.
Lastly using wind nature chakra I can become like the wind and dance around opponents with ease. This make my sword skills skyrocket as it allowed my body to be fluent and flexible beyond human measures.
These techniques were amazing but I knew that they had room to improve. I could try and fix some of the weaknesses involved such as water being weak to lightning, or having bad control over using the rapid speed.
As I was walking along the roads in the land of hot water taking in the beauty of nature around me, I felt a strong chakra presence.
It was by itself and seemed to be carrying a half-dead body. I was quite curious as to who it could be, so I followed them.
As I got nearer I saw it was, Kakuzu the S-rank missing-nin from Takigakure. As I saw who he was, he felt my presence and sent a kunai straight to my head which I simply dodged.
"Who are you," he said.