"What is this supposed to be…"
"That innately evil Uchiha brat…"
Senju Tobirama muttered under his breath.
Even so, he obediently followed Uchiha Makoto out of the room.
The Daimyō of the Land of Fire had reached the point of sending twelve gold-sealed edicts in a single day to push him to solve the case.
If the delay continued,
the consequences would be dire.
Worst of all, if he couldn't resolve it and present a result the Land of Fire found satisfactory, next year's budget for Konoha would remain unsettled. Konoha depended on subsidies from the Land of Fire to keep growing, so it wouldn't fall far behind Akatsuki Shinobi Village, whose coffers were overflowing. The grandees were no soft fruit; if they seized on this to slash Konoha's funds, it would be a disaster.
Tobirama had no desire to blacken his own name as Konoha's Shadow Hokage over this.
If the budget was cut,
the clans would definitely have opinions.
And the root of it all was Uchiha Makoto, the hand behind the curtain. Even without conclusive proof, Tobirama had to wring a reckoning from him.
To bear a filthy cauldron again thanks to Makoto—did they take him for the Scapegoat Kage
Cursing in his heart, Tobirama kept pace with Makoto.
They soon arrived at a village.
To be fair,
the village was still in rough shape, but compared to its earlier misery it had improved a great deal. With earth-release shinobi assisting, the villagers had already built large numbers of shelters. They'd get through the winter just fine.
To push the commercial plan forward,
Arasaka Corporation's technicians intended to repair and update the village's backward infrastructure. The place didn't even have a proper road.
Without a proper road,
if they kept doing as before, merely farming, that would be one thing—but Arasaka was about to industrialize. Not all this land would stay in rice; some would go to mulberry. Keep the old state, and everything becomes inconvenient.
The villagers were working hot and fast according to plan on the tasks Arasaka laid out. Having eaten Arasaka's grain, they couldn't just idle. Everyone had to work.
Carrying a belly full of doubts, Tobirama followed Makoto into the village. Even though he'd never been here, he could roughly infer the situation.
Because on the way,
even though Tobirama had devoted almost every moment to traveling fast—resting only long enough to sip water and swallow a soldier pill—
in those snatches of rest
he still saw countless ordinary people in the Land of Fire with no food or clothing security—numb, dazed, clinging to life without hope, repeating the fate of their ancestors generation after generation.
In his youth Tobirama had felt pity for such scenes and even wanted to change them.
But he was a shinobi; it wasn't his affair.
Better to think about how to grow stronger and kill those evil Uchiha.
Years as a shinobi had made all this seem normal to him, as if the world were born this way.
The shinobi world was a cesspit.
Not only shinobi lived in pain; commoners did too.
No,
for commoners it was worse. Shinobi at least possessed power beyond ordinary people, while commoners had no power to resist. The existence of the superhuman made "are lords and nobles a birthright" a complete joke.
Because the strong truly do care about bloodline.
For commoners,
suffering is the default.
Prosperous Konoha was the exception, a good home carved out only because the clans joined hands.
Those who managed to move to Konoha were the lucky ones who caught the tide of the times.
With such thoughts,
Tobirama expected to see another crowd of numb villagers eking by. Instead he found a sight he rarely saw.
The village before him, though shabby, was full of life.
A kind of life he had never felt.
In the eyes of the busy villagers there was a new glimmer.
He knew well that eyes with light felt different from hollow eyes. Looking at the lively village and its people, a hard-to-name feeling rose in Tobirama's chest.
It was similar to the feeling he got when, exhausted in body and mind, he walked Konoha's streets and watched its villagers labor over their own lives. His anxiety eased, and even his mood lightened.
Makoto walked along the roadside.
His bright, fine clothes marked him as no ordinary man.
Even if these villagers didn't know him, the Akatsuki crest on his forehead protector told them at a glance—he was a lord from Akatsuki Shinobi Village.
And one of high rank.
From bone-deep fear of great men, the villagers didn't dare approach too closely.
Yet they still crept a little nearer and expressed themselves in the plainest way—dropping to their knees to greet him, eyes full of hope and gratitude, even reverence.
Before the Akatsuki lords arrived,
what lives had they lived
A meal today and none tomorrow.
In a bad year they went hungry.
In a good harvest
they still went hungry.
Each year they owed a portion of their yield to the nobles. In good years they surrendered more; in bad years they worried about starving to death.
They pinched and saved all year,
and if they could eat a single white bun at year's end, it was a blessing.
But now
disaster struck,
and the shinobi lords were somehow feeding them three times a day.
It was only temporary,
but those who could read said new factories would be built next year and a switchover from rice to mulberry was coming.
They didn't know what that meant, but if the shinobi lords told them to plant mulberry,
they would plant it well.
Their womenfolk had places to work too. The new textile mills needed female hands. The wages could help with household expenses, and most important, the mills fed them two meals a day.
Two meals made them saints already.
And they paid wages.
Meager, yes, but it was income they'd never had.
With strong cash flow and a hard backer, Arasaka promised payment on the nail, never delayed, and paid fair prices.
At contract rates, a family could earn two to three times what farming used to bring.
With money, they could lay in more rice and buy more cloth. Life finally held hope.
If they could fill their bellies, that was already a good life.
Some shinobi even said they would open a school here to teach the children their letters, and those with talent might be taken to Akatsuki to attend the academy and become shinobi.
For a family, that was a chance to change fate.
Even if Makoto called them small-fry genin, that was a shinobi lord forever out of reach to common folk.
The small change from D and C rank missions was money a lifetime in the fields could barely earn.
The villagers didn't know why the shinobi were helping them.
But who cared.
It was good.
Such a great village—would those lofty shinobi lie to them
What did they have worth scheming over.
"Lord shinobi."
"Lord shinobi."
Makoto kept waving them off, telling them not to kneel.
It did little good.
Before he knew it,
dozens were on their knees.
Makoto disliked people kneeling to him. Helpless, he simply vanished from their sight.
"Uchiha Makoto, what did you do."
"You didn't cast genjutsu on innocent villagers, did you."
Tobirama could hardly believe what he'd seen. True to his familiarity and prejudice toward the Uchiha, he was more inclined to believe Makoto had secretly used powerful Sharingan genjutsu on the villagers.
"Senju Tobirama, you innately evil Senju old ghost."
"What a filthy mind."
"Have you become so useless that I could cast large-scale genjutsu under your nose without you sensing it."
Listening to Tobirama's wild talk, Makoto's face darkened.
If he really could use large-scale genjutsu right under Tobirama's nose, his first act would be to take Tobirama apart,
so he'd learn what true Uchiha humiliation felt like.
"Well… that's true. I didn't sense any chakra from you just now."
"But that makes it stranger. Why. What exactly did you do."
Tobirama gave an awkward laugh.
It was true.
He had felt no chakra fluctuation from Makoto.
Which made it all the more bizarre.
Tobirama knew very well how commoners saw shinobi.
Normally,
people treated shinobi like floods and wild beasts—avoiding them on sight, even bolting in panic.
You couldn't blame them.
In the Warring States era,
major clans kept only the areas around their strongholds safe and swept only their own doorsteps.
Elsewhere, chaos reigned.
Fallen small clans and rogue ninja staked out territories and raided them from time to time.
They were poor.
They had to eat.
Nobles would never hire those with no reputation.
Only reputable clans were nobles' first choice.
The nobles knew all about the raiding and often turned a blind eye.
A starved stray dog bites.
Feed it and it doesn't.
They hid in their manors behind heavy guards; rogues wouldn't risk going after them. It was safer to strip commoners.
One family held little loot—rob a few more.
The nobles resented it, but the cost of hiring clans to purge the rogues felt high, not worth it for a few lowborn.
It sounded foolish, but that was reality.
So long as it wasn't too excessive, they winked at it.
After years of this and the whispers of interested parties,
in common eyes,
shinobi and bandits were no different.
Shinobi's reputation had only improved somewhat in recent years.
With the villages founded, missions were centralized, rules standardized. For stability, Daimyō and nobles jointly issued missions to cull disobedient shinobi and bandits.
Even so,
their reputation hadn't improved much.
Shinobi maintained order to complete missions for pay; they didn't publicize it.
Nobles trumpeted those deeds as their own achievements.
Bound by traditional shinobi thinking, Tobirama found it hard to step outside the frame and consider the meaning behind these things.
Shinobi exist as tools.
Tools need only complete tasks swiftly and efficiently. A tool's reputation—did that matter.
And shinobi needn't care what commoners think, since commoners are neither employers nor superiors.
Thus to Tobirama this felt absurd and astonishing.
That innately evil Uchiha brat had, without a sound and in so short a time, flipped shinobi's reputation in this region.
From reviled to raved about.
"Hard to understand."
"I can fill their bellies."
Makoto's mouth quirked into a smile, and he spoke each word clearly.
"That simple."
"In a sense… yes. If shinobi take action, many things become easy."
"Grain merchants don't dare gouge, the distributors don't dare skim. And I nearly forgot—the confiscated estate of that noble house helped. But those vast assets were created by these villagers to begin with."
"Do you know why I call myself Light Shadow. Because I want the light behind me to be the lights of ten thousand homes, gathered into a single glow."
"Tobirama, do you follow."
Tobirama's face shifted and shifted again.
Even bound by traditional thought, he caught something different in Makoto's words.
He didn't dare keep thinking down Makoto's line.
His instinct for politics warned him:
if Uchiha Makoto were allowed to continue unchecked, then sooner or later the shinobi world would ignite in roaring flames and burn everything down.
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