Early the next morning.
Shihōin Naraku stood at the entrance to the Konoha Orphanage, dressed in his Hokage robes.
Kabuto Yakushi stood unobtrusively behind him in a plain robe.
Kabuto adjusted his glasses and looked at the clean, tidy building before him, a gentle smile appearing on his lips.
Compared with the orphanage he remembered, the building before him looked a little too new.
There was no helping that.
All the buildings in Konoha were like this now.
Nagato had completely destroyed Konoha with a single Super Shinra Tensei, collapsing every building and leaving nothing but ruins.
All of Konoha had only recently been rebuilt before the Fourth Shinobi World War broke out.
So it was only natural that Kabuto found the building before him unfamiliar.
"Does it feel like everything has changed? So many things are different from what you remember." Naraku asked without turning around.
Kabuto Yakushi nodded, but immediately realized Naraku could not see him, so he spoke instead:
"That's true."
His voice was calm, but a trace of complicated emotion flickered in his eyes. "I've been away from Konoha for too long. So long that I can barely remember what the orphanage looked like."
"But Lord Naraku, why did you move the orphanage so close to the center of the village?"
As a child who had grown up in the orphanage, Kabuto knew very well where the original orphanage had stood.
Remote, quiet, and old-that had long been Kabuto's impression of the orphanage.
It was hardly surprising, since the old orphanage had been built on the very outskirts of Konoha.
An environment like that would naturally have shaped Kabuto's lasting impression.
But at least the orphanage had still been within Konoha and under its protection. Under normal circumstances, things that could endanger the orphans rarely happened.