The next day…
Yorin woke up to Hikari—face flushed, clearly embarrassed, and somehow even cuter than usual.
She was too cute, so he ended up getting out of bed two hours later than normal.
After finally getting up, Yorin checked his stats.
After completing a whole chain of objectives—outclassing an Uchiha prodigy, the desert restoration plan, strengthening Akatsuki / the Ninshū / Konoha / Sunagakure / Kirigakure / Iwagakure / Kumogakure, and so on—Uchiha Yorin's overall numbers had climbed to a pretty ridiculous level.
Transcendent Kage-tier.
No question about it.
He figured that if Senju Hashirama came back right now and the two of them dueled, he could at least fight him to a draw.
Yorin: "Still… not quite there."
His target wasn't "very strong Kage-tier." It was Six Paths-tier. So he couldn't get cocky just because his power had spiked again.
Next came tailed beasts—and then war.
Black Zetsu was still nagging nonstop, but Yorin sank him with one line:
"Three-Tails needs time to revive, right? Even if I get the other beasts, without the Three-Tails you still can't revive Kaguya. So what's the rush?"
…And yeah. That was true.
So there was no need to hurry.
Tailed-beast revival times varied—some came back relatively quickly, some took years.
Yorin decided to plan around a five-year timeline.
Step 1: Gather the remaining tailed beasts.
Step 2: Sweep the nobles and daimyo into history's trash heap.
Step 3: Launch a mass literacy campaign.
Step 4: Formalize Orochimaru's labs into a united "Ninja World Research Institute."
Step 5: Reach Six Paths-tier personally.
Step 6: Scale up Mangekyō production (Uchiha-wide).
Step 7: Spread Chimera-style integration so bloodlines become accessible, not hoarded.
Step 8: Build trunk roads—link the continent with rails and airships.
Step 9: Construct more, newer, modern cities.
Each of those had a pile of concrete targets underneath: steel/cement output per person, power generation, vehicles, grain yields, industrial machinery, housing, healthcare… the whole thing.
One thing that wasn't on the list—and never would be—was finance and exotic financial derivatives.
To Yorin, that stuff was capitalism at its worst: garbage that created nothing.
Yorin: "I can't wait to see what the future looks like."
It might turn out amazing. It might turn out ugly. Either way, as long as the world kept moving forward, he believed it would eventually become right.
Holding Hikari close, he quietly thought that to himself.
…
With that, Hikari's "happy ending" was basically locked in.
For a while after, Yorin went into a lower-drive, steadier routine: spending time with his partners, handling paperwork, and building up the empire's fundamentals.
Time moved fast—Konoha Year 53 was already more than halfway gone. Early spring to midsummer, then deep into autumn.
While the daimyo and nobles drowned themselves in delusions, the empire's strength steadily grew.
But the kind of breakthrough leap Yorin was hoping for still hadn't arrived.
It annoyed him enough that he briefly wondered if Orochimaru was just farming research funding.
But intel from Kabuto suggested everything was legitimate—and besides, Yorin had multiple Edo-Tensei scientists working too. If anyone was going to lie, they'd get caught.
So… he waited.
…
Orochimaru's side hadn't delivered the big "holy grail" breakthrough yet, but Konoha's main technical departments surprised Yorin.
Under the banner of Scientific Ninja Tools, they'd made real progress.
Amplification gear, chakra storage devices—lots of upgrades.
On the military side, Konoha had fully digested chakra-armor tech and iterated it through multiple generations. It had evolved so far you wouldn't recognize the original design.
On the civilian side—construction machines, medical devices, electronics—there were also real wins. Plenty of products were already viable for market and value creation.
At this rate, the "everyone has a handheld game device" era didn't feel that far away.
All of it pushed Ninshū capital forward at an absurd pace.
That "Ninshū capital" was basically Yorin's massive syndicate-style monopoly structure.
It wasn't just the Uchiha Group anymore. The other four great villages had their own companies, and major civilian industrialists were joining too.
Cross-shareholding, unified trade blocs, coordinated expansion—the efficiency was leagues above a normal merchants' guild.
Yorin still wasn't fully satisfied, though.
He wanted to evolve it from a syndicate into a full-blown trust, and that required a further political step: becoming an actual world sovereign.
Was it time yet?
The empire's schools were growing. Land of Snow kept training administrators. Young recruits from every village were steadily joining the Ninshū.
Even non-ninja civilians—people with real vision—were traveling from far away to throw their lot in with Yorin, sensing the tide of history changing.
Like the "Warring States era patrons," Yorin's own network of retainers and talent was swelling.
Some geniuses thought they were born to be grand ministers and refused to start small. Yorin didn't care—this wasn't a romance-of-the-three-kingdoms story, and he wasn't obliged to indulge delusions.
And besides: this world ran on personal power. If you couldn't mold chakra, your "genius strategy" only got you so far.
That was also why more and more people believed Yorin could truly sit at the top.
By now, many had also noticed the "hazy overlap" between Yorin, the Ninshū, and Akatsuki.
So maybe everyone was just waiting for the shoe to finally drop.
The question was: when would Yorin make his move?
Probably soon—five years wasn't long.
Yorin: "So… we hunt tailed beasts."
Everything else in the five-year plan was grinding forward. The one big lever he still hadn't pulled was tailed beasts.
He'd once said he needed to control Tsuchigumo's doomsday technique, but it had been pushed back by other crises.
Now that things were quieter, he figured: start there.
"Tsuchigumo are hiding a dangerous WMD that could threaten the world! The righteous coalition can't ignore it!"
With that as the justification, Yorin once again mobilized a coalition and launched an operation against the Tsuchigumo clan.
This time it wasn't "Five-Village Allied Forces." It was closer to a Ninja World Coalition, because so many smaller villages had joined the Ninshū umbrella.
Some wanted progress. Some just wanted protection.
Either way, they were sending envoys, tribute, gifts—begging to "ally" with Konoha.
"Alliance" was just a nicer word. Most of them were effectively asking to become junior partners.
Yorin's attitude toward smaller villages was relatively gentle.
Not every village was as twisted as Grass or Waterfall had been. Some—like Hot Springs or niche matriarchal settlements—just wanted quiet lives.
You couldn't treat them all with the same hammer.
So Yorin used a softer approach: integrate them into Konoha's system without terrorizing them.
He even remembered something vaguely embarrassing: Jiraiya had history with the leader of one such village.
The man was getting old. Living like a perpetual playboy was eventually going to end badly.
Yorin decided he'd have the Third Hokage pressure Jiraiya into settling down—marriage diplomacy, personal stability, and village alliance all in one.
Efficient.
…
Meanwhile, marching with the coalition, Jiraiya suddenly got chills.
He looked around suspiciously, half-convinced Orochimaru was messing with him again.
Ever since Orochimaru's body-swap into a female vessel, her personality had gotten… sharper, and she'd been relentless about tormenting him. Jiraiya had become paranoid enough that he avoided nightlife entirely, scared the "top hostess" might just be Orochimaru in disguise.
At that moment, he thought: Maybe marrying that village leader wouldn't be so bad after all… anything's better than this.
He even felt a little grateful to Yorin.
…
That's how the coalition moved—loud, massive, and growing—toward Tsuchigumo territory.
And somewhere in the army, Jiraiya kept sneezing, utterly unaware he'd just been "volunteered" into a diplomatic marriage plan.
~~~
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