Time - the great pacifier.. the killer of all hopes, ambitions, and dreams.
Any who looked upon his face would say that he could be no more than thirty. He couldn't blame them for thinking so. His youthful countenance was a feature he'd taken years upon years of study and experimentation to achieve. As he stood atop the hills of the snowy landscape, he thought on his previous life. Once he had been a precocious child, coveted for his skills and his ability to simply learn faster than all his peers. It was the people and society around him that had encouraged his abilities, praising him at youth for taking up information and understanding concepts with near-unparalleled genius. Genius was what they had called him. Over the years, the carelessness with which they threw about the word had severely diminished its value. Everyone was a 'Genius'. Every clan had a 'Genius'.
The thought brought a smile to the man's thin lips despite the horrid cold. Genius was relative. If the capabilities and qualifications for what made a genius became commonplace among all, then only those who performed beyond the capacity of the commonplace genius can truly be considered genius. Even a human of low intellectual capabilities could be considered 'Genius' when measured against the smartest of non-human apes. In a society of genius apes, the average human was a genius among geniuses.
With this fact in consideration, it was easy to dismiss any claims that he, Orochimaru, was a genius. He was not. He was merely able to absorb data faster than those around him, applying and mastering almost everything he was taught sooner than the rest. Given sufficient time, even the worst of his peers could achieve the same. He was nothing special.
Measured against the concept of omniscience, his knowledge was infinitely tame; he was a blatant idiot.. relatively speaking.
Idiot or not, he, Orochimaru, former child 'genius', teen 'prodigy', young adult scientist, and connoisseur of knowledge had achieved immortality.
It wasn't that he feared death. Death was a partner, one with whom his experiments employed intimately. He himself had been brought into death's embrace many times. No, his immortality had come not as an aversion to death, but as a byproduct of his quest for knowledge. It was his insatiable desire to know, to learn and to catalogue everything that'd driven him. It was his furious denial of the limitations of human knowledge which had pushed him to seek to extend his life beyond mortal confines, to give himself the time needed to build on his well of knowledge.
The world was rich with information and secrets, waiting to be mined and stored like vast vats of valuable gold. Some might consider it megalomaniacal, but he, Orochimaru, thought his quest for knowledge no different from a quest to Godhood. He would never be satisfied until he'd tasted some semblance of omniscience.
The howling blizzard wind picked up, blowing sharp gales of frost against his pale skin. Orochimaru carelessly brushed some flecks of snow off his cheeks. Then, with a jutsu which was part transformation and part summoning, he created a set of clothes and a cloak and wrapped it over himself. Slowly, he infused the Chakra-conducting material of the thin white layers with fire-natured Chakra before resuming his thoughts.
It'd been years since he'd put himself to sleep. Last he saw of the landscape, the place had been shrouded in massive forests of trees. Those trees were long gone. In their place grew a different set of smaller, younger trees. Against the rapidly receding ice, life was slowly reclaiming its territory.
Several hundred years after Uchiha Madara's Infinite Tsukuyomi, the climate had begun to change. There was a chill in the air that would not go away, and Orochimaru had put together all the evidence. An age of ice and snow loomed upon them all. Very few, if any, would survive. He'd predicted it, and he had been correct. The cold had refused to let up, and even the enduring trees of the Leaf fell to the might of the unending storm. It was an Ice Age, and humanity would be lucky indeed to survive the plight. Society as he'd known it was dealt a crippling blow, and even as the last of the people he knew of either died or migrated, Orochimaru had stayed. Long having predicted the perpetual storms that was coming, he'd spent years developing and then perfecting one project: a technique which allowed his immortal body to sleep through the tortuous storms for eons or until the world was once more receptive to life and living things.
The lair he'd prepared for himself was set in just the right location. He'd made sure that the area wasn't prone to seismic activities and predicted the level of erosion that might occur while he'd been asleep. He was safe, and if worse came to worse, he would be woken prematurely.
As he refreshed his mind of his past, Orochimaru felt the presence of a cluster of.. ostensibly humans.. trailing through an area just several kilometers to his side, unknowingly entering his massive sensory field. The group plowed through the snow, no doubt they were looking for shelter. None of them had Chakra actively circulating through their system.
He would attend to them later. Orochimaru turned a quick look back to the hole he'd dug from his silicate lair several hundred kilometers deep in the Earth's mantle. In that lair, a near-indestructible room sat innocently, trapped between thousands and thousands of tons of rock. In that room was where his knowledge was stored.
Based on the isotopes he'd left behind prior to the Ice Age, he could, with almost certain accuracy, say that about ninety-eight thousand years had passed, give or take a couple centuries. Sitting next to the small storage of isotopes was a massive entity which contained all the information he'd gathered in his centuries of conscious life. The amount of data that could be stored there far surpassed the approximately three hundred year memory capacity limit of the average human brain. The entity also served as a Chakra-generating well, created from his experiments on the Shinju and from which he could draw whenever and wherever he wished.
He'd amassed enough knowledge, experiences and data to outmatch many lifetimes, data which received contribution from the souls and Chakra of the deceased humans and their offspring, humans who he had marked hoping to detail their survival of the Ice Age.
They'd all died. Every single one of them. They didn't die at the hands of the massive storms of cold. No. The Chakra-wielding superhumans were more than a match for the storms. It was petty internal conflict and war which had ended them. All it took was one crazy psychopath - a descendant of Uchiha Sasuke - to finally polarize and then destroy all that was left of Chakra-using society.
"What irony." Orochimaru said to himself, testing his voice. He laughed. The policy of forgiveness and peace that was extended to the Uchiha had ultimately caused the end of all Shinobi.. all but one.
In the blink of an eye, the once-famous Sannin of the Hidden leaf covered the distance between himself and the group which encroached upon his senses. He landed lightly and soundlessly on the tip of one of the snow-ridden trees, staring down at the slow-moving bunch. They numbered at least a thousand, moving in tight-knit clusters. It was a purposeful migration, and the people were clearly human.
Even with that knowledge, Orochimaru narrowed his eyes. The fact that not a single one of them had Chakra circulating within them was disappointing, but it did not completely void him of hope. What did do that was the genetic uniformity of these nomads. The ability to use Chakra was completely genetic. Clearly, these people were not descended from Shinobi. Having artificially lived through the death of countless Chakra-using humans to the hands of Uchiha Furuto, he knew that the hope of finding any descendants were useless. Orochimaru glared at the group below him patiently. Only those who operated on Chakra were capable of contributing their lives to his knowledge database. Although he'd rarely expressed interest in those whose bodies did not circulate Chakra, it seemed they were all he had left to work with.
With a silent jutsu, Orochimaru's face reconfigured itself, taking the common features of the people below him and pasting it onto his own face. He shifted his jaws, reshaped his cheekbones and readjusted his height. Apparently, the average height of humanity had shrunken in the hundred thousand years he'd been asleep. The largest from among the group could not have stood more than a hundred and eighty centimeters tall.
Letting his cloak vanish into dust, Orochimaru outfitted himself with the same quality and design of animal skins and weaved cloths as those that the people below him wore.
None saw him. They were all looking down, averting their gaze from the freezing winds to watch their feet progress through the snow step by agonizing step.
The wind shrieked loudly, drowning out Orochimaru's voice as he tested and adjusted his new vocal chords.
One moment, the figure of a woman could be seen standing atop of one of the trees overseeing the group. The next moment, the woman was gone. None could be faulted for keeping their eyes from the stinging wind, but if any had cared to look, more than likely they'd believe themselves to have seen nothing more than a mere illusion. The idea that a human being could balance on the tip of a ten-meter tall tree in such a storm was beyond ridiculous..