波風ミナト
A damaged soul can be the source of great pain, and in another universe, another set of possible outcomes, Orochimaru would have suffered that pain for seventy two days before he finally found a way to circumvent the spiritual damage he had suffered. It would be two years after that, during what would have been the Fourth Great Shinobi World War, before he would finally regain the spiritual portion of his arms that had been cut away from him by his old mentor
It is said that a person's personality, ideals, actions, and thought processes can undergo drastic changes under the stimulus of great pain. Such a saying would have held true for Orochimaru. In another world, he would suffer seventy-two days of non-stop agony, and in those seventy-two days, the snake Sannin would have cycled through several phases of despair, hatred, regret, self-pity, and destructiveness. The lives of a number of his subordinates would fall to his wrath in that period of time before he finally fixated and stopped on resignation. By then, the cold fury he'd harbored for years would have been melted away by the fiery, unforgiving pain. The flames of his hatred would burn out, its kindling used up in one massive bonfire.
At the end of that period, Orochimaru would have come out a different man, a more mellow human being whose ambition rarely went further than his general thirst for knowledge that he would retain until the end of his days, if it ever came to one such as he. No longer would he covet power as he once had, envisioning himself to be a great windmill of change.
But such a universe is mere conjecture, a fantasy. Orochimaru would undergo no such change in character. Far from the Hidden Leaf in the land of Grass and twelve years after the birth of the Fourth's son, Uzumaki Naruto, the snake Sannin cut open the Dead Demon's belly. The portion of his soul that had been his arms returned to his body instead of drifting away into the afterlife. His would not be the only one.
In another part of the continent, deep inside the storage room of a certain temple, a storage scroll fell to the floor and rolled itself wide open. Its conditions for the release of its content fulfilled, the seal that had been scrawled onto the scroll's white parchment surface flickered and then radiated a sickly blue light.
And so it was that, twelve years after his supposed death, a man finds himself sitting inside a dark, musty room which he would later discover to be one of the underground storage spaces underneath a place known as the Temple of Fire, a sacred temple where Shinobi from all across the Land of Fire who sought the spiritual path, to redeem the sins of their professions, were gathered.
The man sat unmoving, his eyes riveted on the scroll from which he had been released. On the corner of the scroll, separate from the now defunct patterns of the storage seal which had held his body, were a set of glowing blue letters, a command. It told him all he needed to know as to what had happened.
He stared, he breathed, and he stared some more, unable to move his eyes off the message and the achingly familiar handwriting in which it had been written.
生
き
て
(Live)
And he did, unwillingly, his heart beating a stubborn rhythm and his breath coming out slow and measured. He sat on the cold, earthen floor and stared at the message. He didn't move, nor did he take his eyes away from the scroll. He remained still, even when his stomach began to tell him that he was hungry, even when his body told him that it needed sleep and his eyes began to feel a heavy strain in that underground darkness.
It was some hours before sunset when Orochimaru had split the Dead Demon's belly, but it was near sunrise of the next day before Namikaze Minato finally stirred from where he was sitting. Maybe she was alive. She'd had the strength to set up a storage seal after all. He felt a desperate euphoria of hope as he staggered around the blackness looking for an exit.