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Because of the lesson learned from the Land of Earth, the new policies in the Land of Rain went into effect much more smoothly. Once the decree was issued, the Leaf and Sand shinobi pulled out quickly. Of course, that was only on paper—there were still stragglers from other nations trying to operate in secret. They thought they were moving in the shadows, but the Rain shinobi sniffed them out every time and wiped them out to the last man. After that, the others wised up fast and cleared out of Rain's territory.
With no interference from outside villages and no more foreign infiltration, the Land of Rain entered a period of peace and rapid growth. The Rain Village's victory over Iwagakure had boosted both its reputation and its confidence. More and more outsiders came to issue missions at Amegakure—guarding caravans, wiping out bandits, escort jobs.
One after another, requests piled in. Bit by bit, people even began speaking of Amegakure in the same breath as Konoha, Sunagakure, Iwagakure, Kumogakure, and Kirigakure. The Land of Rain was small, sure, but its shinobi village was clawing its way into recognition as a sixth great ninja village.
The result filled the people of Rain and the shinobi of Amegakure with joy and pride. In all of history, only their hidden village had ever reached such heights. And all of it—they knew—was thanks to their leader, Hayato. Their admiration for him soared to new levels, bordering on worship.
Under his leadership, Rain surged into another golden age of growth. For a time, the entire shinobi world couldn't ignore them.
Hayato trained bare-chested in the downpour, his lean, sculpted muscles alive with energy. Raindrops barely touched him before scattering away, a thin mist forming around his body as if the storm itself bent to him.
He moved swiftly through strikes and stances, each motion sharp, if still a little raw. Hayato was taking every scrap of taijutsu knowledge he'd gathered, blending it with his own insights, hammering it into something uniquely his. He even reached back to the martial theories he'd once read about in his previous life—whether true or not, he folded them into his practice.
Things like the legendary "internal redirection" in old martial arts, the ideal of "dust not clinging, even a mosquito unable to land." He'd never formally studied those arts, nor fully understood their principles, but through sheer trial and error he pushed from outcome back toward process until he found ways to mimic their effects.
Vibration—that was the key. Hayato forced both his body and his chakra into subtle oscillations, inside and out. At first it was miserable, painful even. Controlling the frequency and intensity was brutal work, and more than once he wrecked himself in the attempt. Only his freakish healing ability kept him alive through it all.
He pushed his "immortal" body to its limits, trying again and again. Sometimes the vibrations burst his capillaries, blood seeping from every pore until he looked like a man painted in red. A normal shinobi would've died a dozen times over. But Hayato lived through it, learning with every failure, until at last he nailed it. He'd found the rhythm.
By tuning his own vibrations, he gained both offense and defense. When striking, he could send that violent oscillation into his opponent's body, tearing them apart from within. When defending, incoming blows were shaken apart, their force dispersed before they could do serious damage.
Of course, that wasn't the most important part. What really mattered was that once Hayato discovered he could keep his body vibrating at a steady frequency, everything—his skin, muscles, bones, even his organs—started strengthening bit by bit. The vibrations pushed out impurities while tightening and refining his cells.
After realizing the benefits, Hayato spent nearly every waking moment maintaining this state of vibration. He even wrote down his method and left it in the Hidden Archives. But when other people tried to exchange points to learn it, they either failed miserably or ended up severely injured… some even died.
In the end, the technique was officially classified as forbidden. Without Hayato's insane recovery ability, training with this "vibration power" was basically suicide.
Still, for Hayato, the payoff was huge. After a period of intense training, his strength skyrocketed. Before long, he had already reached Kage-level power without ever needing to transform into the Hulk. And because Hayato had been walking his own path from the very start, when he finally broke through into that realm, he didn't just scrape by—he stood among the best of the best, even compared to other Kage-level elites.
Meanwhile, Konan didn't slack off either. Even though most of her time was tied up with handling the politics of Amegakure and the Land of Rain, she kept training. With the full resources of the nation backing her, by the age of just nineteen, she too had reached Kage level.
At this point, Amegakure had two Kage-class shinobi, plus the terrifying Four-Tails, Son Gokū, as a deterrent. Thanks to the Archives, their number of top-tier jōnin had also risen dramatically. Even if
Hayato never transformed into the Hulk, Ame had truly earned the right to be recognized as the "Sixth Great Ninja Village."
And strangely enough, the shinobi world seemed to settle into an unprecedented peace. Even small skirmishes and border wars had become rare.
"....."