For all sorts of reasons the Elder Councillor retreated again and again.
As was only natural.
Senju Tobirama could only accept this hot potato with tears in his eyes. Konoha had no grounds to refuse such a mission, and next year's budget still depended on the bigwigs of the Land of Fire to provide support. Because of the indemnity imposed on Kumogakure, the Akatsuki Shinobi Village's budget would far outstrip Konoha's for years to come.
"I will await good news from Konoha then. Do not disappoint the Daimyō."
The Elder's tone was meaningful, his expression complicated.
Akatsuki was a menace.
Konoha were no saints either.
One could even say Konoha was the chief culprit behind all of this, and this mission was nothing less than a loyalty test for Konoha from the Land of Fire's grandees.
Akatsuki had already messed things up on their side.
They still had to gauge Konoha's stance.
More than failure, they feared the unknown.
The grandees wanted Konoha to press Akatsuki and deliver an explanation. No matter how perfunctory that explanation was, it would count as success.
If Konoha managed it
then without a doubt
for a time the Land of Fire would provide Konoha with a wave of investment and funds, and even the Daimyō might soften his attitude toward Konoha and toward Senju Hashirama.
If they failed
the future of the Land of Fire would become hard to predict.
To be blunt, these nobles of the Land of Fire had little real fighting ability, almost none. They relied on tradition and the economic levers still in their hands to manipulate shinobi villages.
What cannot be won on the battlefield cannot be won at the negotiating table.
You have grain, I have guns.
That makes you my granary.
The Elder could hardly imagine such a situation.
The times were changing too fast.
So fast he was caught unprepared.
How many years had it been
and the power represented by shinobi had swelled until the once lofty nobles had lost any effective means to rein them in.
If the Land of Fire wished to break the stalemate, it had to establish a truly national shinobi village.
Train a state army of ninja.
But carrying that out was a nightmare.
At the founding of each nation's shinobi village, they attracted away almost all shinobi clans. Aside from a few farsighted figures, most nobles never grasped the gravity of this, clinging to the old path dependency and believing they could keep order by stoking hatred and wars between villages.
Yet Uchiha Makoto slapped Kumogakure across the face, then turned and slapped them as well, waking them with a single blow.
Did they think that after beating a shinobi village he would not beat them too
He wanted it all.
The chance was gone. The few shinobi families left in the Land of Fire were small in number, weak in strength, mostly a bunch of genin and chūnin riffraff.
Each was eyed like prey by the villages.
Given the chance to join a village with a bright future like Akatsuki or Konoha, they refused and went to curry favor with the nobles. Later, on missions, they had better watch their backs, or a stray shuriken might fly their way and make them die by suicide.
Even starting over
promoting commoners, selecting gifted children from among them to become shinobi
was extremely difficult.
Should the Land of Fire government open a ninja academy
They could not provide systematic training, nor did they possess strong secret techniques.
Shinobi clans value their secret arts and bloodlines more than life. They will not reveal them, even if they rot in their own hands.
Knowledge is power, and it truly changes fate.
That holds in the shinobi world as well.
Consider Orochimaru and Yakushi Kabuto, classic cases of knowledge changing destiny.
They grasped core technology. To say that one person could stir up a world war was no exaggeration, and their survival skills were first rate.
Applied to shinobi clans, if a clan's bloodline cannot match a kekkei genkai, it can still compete with secret arts.
The classic Ino–Shika–Chō trio shows this. The Yamanaka, Nara, and Akimichi secret-art clans are each masters of their craft. They can stand alone and claim a place in the shinobi world, and once allied, even kekkei genkai clans hesitate to make enemies of them.
Secret arts are forged through the hardship of clan shinobi. They are the foundation on which a clan stands, their precious foothold in the shinobi world.
Thus shinobi clans naturally seek to monopolize both knowledge and bloodline.
For now their ecological niche is occupied by the nobles. If given the chance to seize economic power, a shinobi-world version of rigid caste would appear.
Open-source ideals are too advanced for this world.
The village academies have only opened access to the three basic techniques and a few elementary taijutsu drills and lessons learned.
Akatsuki is the same.
In Akatsuki, Uchiha Makoto's unprecedented recruitment of so many children from commoner backgrounds to be trained as shinobi did not meet fierce resistance from the village clans not only because he had the money to buy them off but also because he did not touch their core interests.
Pressed by war, Uchiha Makoto had neither the time nor the energy to train those children deeply.
Their efforts all went into taijutsu.
A bunch of taijutsu-specialist genin threatened no one's status. On the battlefield they were just fodder.
Who complains of too little cannon fodder
Uchiha Makoto indeed intended to use them as fodder. Cruel and realistic.
The shinobi world has always been thus.
Of course
he would not allow this to continue forever.
It was a question of stance.
If he were only a clan head, he would have to oppose any publicizing of secret arts. Yet his own Uchiha clan is in Konoha, while his highest office is Light Shadow of Akatsuki.
He knows his base is not the clans but the shinobi of commoner birth.
So this will be one of Uchiha Makoto's strategic priorities in the coming years.
He must continue copying Senju Tobirama.
Promote a system where chūnin and jōnin lead squads, changing reality step by step.
Masters take on favored disciples and pass them ninjutsu. This is a method the clans can accept.
Even great clans like to invest in and court commoner-born geniuses. If they can be absorbed into the clan it is pure profit. If not, it is still profit.
Uchiha Makoto will not give the clans that chance.
He will gather all those commoner-born prodigies into the Anbu. This is a power the Light Shadow naturally wields. No one has the standing to object.
By every means, he will collect them into a second pillar of strength.
Commoner-born shinobi have overwhelming numbers. With such a base, geniuses will keep emerging. Perhaps they will hit the jackpot and find a Minato or a Jiraiya. With a vast and stable constituency of their own, they can chip away at the clans' voice in the village.
In short
even with a powerful Akatsuki behind him, elevating commoners into great shinobi is brutally hard.
As for those Land of Fire nobles who are completely out of step with the shinobi world
to use commoner-born shinobi to build a village on the scale of Konoha or Akatsuki would demand oceans of resources and money to scout talent and develop secret arts, followed by at least a dozen years of seasoning.
It sounds like a way to break the game.
But ask the nobles to foot the bill for defending the Land of Fire's foundation and almost none will pay.
A dozen years. Why not, with that money and energy, choose another route and cozy up to the shinobi villages, wallow with the shinobi
If tycoons can pledge themselves to a village, why can't nobles who have even more wealth and status
Their spines can bend as well.
If the ship of the Land of Fire sinks, they can simply board another and go on living in luxury. That is the thought in these vermin's hearts.
They even worry that the force coalesced by commoner-born shinobi might merge with other villages and together turn their guns on these noble lords.
Enlightened, empowered, and numerous commoners in revolt would be more terrifying than a village going to war.
"I understand."
"Rest assured."
Senju Tobirama gazed at the Elder, who looked dazed.
He did not understand why the Elder was so haggard and sighing.
Their minds were not on the same channel.
Uchiha Makoto's behavior was wildly arrogant and beyond Tobirama's expectations, yet still within reason. After all, he is an Uchiha.
Senju Tobirama could swear by the Sage of Six Paths that Konoha harbored absolutely no treasonous intent, not even the ambition of a would-be Cao Cao. Konoha's loyalty to the Land of Fire was absolute.
The Elder said no more. He left the Hokage's office and set off at once for the capital. Affairs in the Land of Fire were many and could not spare him, and he had to report to the Daimyō with full details of this visit to Konoha.
After seeing him off
Senju Tobirama waved in several Anbu, ordering them to protect and shadow the Elder, and immediately issued commands to assemble Konoha's picked shinobi to begin a serious investigation.
Three full days passed.
Konoha's investigation teams combed the crime scene from end to end. As Tobirama had expected
they found nothing.
There was almost no evidence, and the only physical traces pointed to Takigakure.
To dig deeper
Tobirama rudely requested the victims' bodies from the Daimyō of the Land of Fire.
In the shinobi world
you cannot glean intelligence from ash and paper, but you certainly can extract information from the dead.
The Daimyō, straining to suppress pressure from certain nobles, agreed but demanded that the bodies not be further damaged.
Tobirama promised he would not.
Yet the result was bitterly disappointing. The assassins' methods were devious, as if prepared in advance. They had destroyed the entire nervous systems of the victims' brains, rendering memory-extraction secret arts useless.
As for making the dead truly speak through a secret art
he did have an idea.
War is the greatest engine of technology. Spear and shield advance in lockstep.
Tobirama had witnessed the power of Akatsuki's explosive tag offensives and conceived the Mutually Multiplying Explosive Tags technique. Paired with bodies of the truly immortal dead, this could mass-produce human bombs.
But the true might of Impure World Reincarnation lies elsewhere. In the future, another genius, Orochimaru, would take a different path.
Orochimaru would focus on restoring the revived to their living strength, using them to fight rather than following Tobirama's line and building human bombs.
For now, Impure World Reincarnation did not even exist in embryonic form.
It was a rough inspiration in Tobirama's mind, without a concrete research direction. To perfect and deploy it would require vast experiments, resources, and time, and even Tobirama could not say how much.
Half a year, a year, two years
ten years
Who knew.
He could not even be sure the technique could be completed.
And plainly
the Daimyō of the Land of Fire would not grant Tobirama that time.
The Daimyō had it hard as well.
To reduce the impact of the massacre of a top noble family from the Qinghua house, he was straining to smother the news.
Uchiha Makoto likewise had no wish to throw oil on the fire and trumpet the incident.
If he forced the nobles into a united front against Akatsuki, the consequences would be severe.
At this stage
salami tactics and quiet profit would do.
But the longer time dragged on
the harder it would be to keep the news buried.
The nobles' intelligence networks were not idle. Once they learned of it, they pounded the Daimyō with memorials, demanding the culprits be caught at once and the evildoers brought to justice.
They were no fools.
Old foxes all.
They were well versed in seeking profit and avoiding harm.
Even though the real culprits were all but obvious, with Akatsuki shinobi appearing at the key time and place and emerging with the greatest gains
before conclusive proof, no one dared take the lead in accusing Akatsuki of the deed.
If Akatsuki dared slaughter a noble of the Qinghua house, and most nobles' pedigrees were inferior to Qinghua's, then they too feared death.
These vermin lacked the nerve to open fire on Akatsuki, but they had plenty of courage to pressure the Daimyō.
And that courage was great.
Waves of pressure crashed over the Daimyō.
Under such strain
he could only pass the pressure to Senju Tobirama.
In the end it escalated to this
in a single day, Senju Tobirama was hit with twelve gold-sealed edicts.
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