Do shinobi harbor ambition?
Do shinobi want to rebel?
Can our rule pass on for ten thousand generations?
…
These were the things the daimyō of the Land of Fire feared most. To safeguard their rule, they racked their brains and forged an ideological cage for shinobi—the doctrine of "shinobi as tools."
Soaked in that poison, shinobi would exhaust themselves completing whatever missions their employers gave them, without ever asking what lay behind the task.
Yet even if reality had been twisted into the shape the daimyō wanted, their essence did not change. They were paper tigers—aloft in appearance, but in truth possessing authority without power.
One powerful shinobi willing to defy the world would be enough to drag them off their altar.
Even if Hashirama Senju never did such a thing, time would push the era from clans to villages.
Power would centralize in the hands of village leaders. A Kage could reduce a daimyō to a puppet. A single rogue from a great village could topple a small country with ease.
When that time came, shinobi would naturally discover… interesting truths.
Uchiha Makoto understood both the course of the future and the daimyō's present mind.
"Your Highness, the fighting between the Uchiha and the Senju has ended completely."
The daimyō's face froze, then showed naked surprise. "Ended?"
"Ended completely," Makoto stressed.
"How?"
As a daimyō, he knew the Uchiha–Senju entanglement well. Their blood feud had lasted a thousand years, right up to the present.
And now it had ended completely?
What a joke.
Impossible.
Utterly impossible.
"Could it be… the Uchiha won in the end and wiped out the Senju… or the Senju…"
That was where his mind went.
If the fighting between Senju and Uchiha had truly ended, there could be only one explanation: one of the clans had vanished from the shinobi world.
From a certain angle, he was not wrong.
After Konoha was founded, the struggle between the Senju and the Uchiha did not actually stop; it burrowed deeper and grew subtler around the Hokage's seat. Until the Senju died out first—that was when their side of the contest ended. And the Uchiha kept fighting the standard-bearers of the Senju lineage's will until the Uchiha themselves were annihilated.
As for the notion that the Senju and Uchiha would set aside a thousand-year feud and shake hands… that possibility never even crossed the daimyō's mind.
Shake hands?
How could such a thing happen?
But it did.
Dark humor, indeed.
Makoto recounted the recent events, skipping past the negativity that the Uchiha were suppressed on every front.
After all, without Uchiha Izuna, and with Tobirama Senju—that sly old bastard—having a special edge against Uchiha… for balance's sake he ought to be hard-banned.
What mattered most, the point to hammer home, was that the Senju enchanter—Hashirama Senju—had stabbed himself with a kunai and staked his life to prove his sincerity, finally convincing Madara Uchiha and bringing about the grand reconciliation between Senju and Uchiha.
"To win peace between the Senju and the Uchiha, Hashirama stabbed himself with a kunai—tried to kill himself?"
"That's right."
"You're sure a kunai could actually hurt Hashirama Senju?"
The daimyō had heard of Hashirama's inhuman regeneration.
He was sick to death of hackneyed tales of self-sacrifice on thin ice for carp. So he doubted the 'suicide' on the spot. "Speak—Hashirama Senju, you straight-laced, bright-eyed fellow, were you just putting on a show?"
"Uh… at least Lord Madara believed it."
Makoto paused. He didn't truly know, either.
But the question didn't matter. It was like this: a few days before the wedding, your girlfriend goes to a hotel with a stranger and spends the whole night there.
Did anything happen?
Does it matter?
What matters is your attitude.
If you believe she kept herself pure, then even if something did happen and you wore a green hat, you wouldn't care; you'd still marry her.
If you don't believe it…
Even if she kept herself pure, you wouldn't.
Believe in the power of belief.
Whether a kunai could kill Hashirama wasn't the point. The point was that Madara thought it could.
After Makoto's explanation, the daimyō was persuaded and stopped fixating on the kunai.
"This… this… this is cause for celebration, I suppose."
He stared, digesting the news. Only after confirming it again and again did he squeeze out the words.
But inside he tasted only bitterness.
Hashirama Senju and Madara Uchiha had power enough to overturn the entire order of the shinobi world.
Even that was not insoluble.
War had racked the shinobi world for ages. Shinobi clans fought for resources and missions. The daimyō sought to exploit that, to make the clans hate and consume each other while they stayed cool behind the curtain—the Senju and Uchiha were the prime example.
The best way to deal with Hashirama and Madara was to set heroes against heroes, a good man against a good man—let Madara Uchiha deal with Hashirama Senju.
If events had followed the forefathers' fine tradition—Madara and Hashirama fighting on to life's last moment—that would have been perfect.
But the worst happened.
The Senju and Uchiha reconciled.
You actually reconciled.
How could that be allowed?
To realize your childhood dream, so children never take the field again… oh, and for peace in the shinobi world?
What bloodline nobility?
"Peace in the shinobi world"—for peace's sake?
A slogan we daimyō have worn out, and you two cradle it like treasure.
You've shamed the faces of your ancestors for eighteen generations—Senju and Uchiha alike.