Chapter 332: Undercurrents Rising
Mist Village. Mizukage's Building.
As the administrative center, this building itself was quite inconspicuous, only five stories high. Inside were the Mizukage's office and some important meeting rooms.
"You are the envoy from Konoha?" Mei Terumī sat in the middle of the solemn and spacious meeting room, looking at Haruno Sakura, whose age could not even be described as young, but rather juvenile. Her willow-leaf-like eyebrows suddenly rose, and she spoke faintly.
She was a young woman, about twenty years old, with a mature woman's temperament in her features. Her long, wine-red hair and bright red lips were the most eye-catching, seemingly hinting at her personality.
"Yes, I am," Haruno Sakura said calmly, handing the Konoha documents to Hagura. "This is my identification, and a personal letter from the Fifth Hokage to you."
Hagura carefully opened it and checked it once before handing it to Mei Terumī.
The moment their eyes met, Mei Terumī seemed to understand something from Hagura's gaze. She thoughtfully opened the envelope, read it for a while, and a smile appeared on her bright face, which was very charming.
"Tsunade's disciple, Haruno Sakura?" she asked with a smile, looking at the girl in front of her with interest. "Please sit."
Sakura nodded with a smile and sat in the guest seat arranged by Hagura, with her three students sitting behind her.
The others in the meeting room also looked over. There were elders and high-level officials sitting at the head, and powerful ninja sitting on both sides. The meanings in their gazes were also different. There was suspicion, wariness, welcome, indifference, detachment, eagerness, and also old and cloudy eyes whose meanings were unclear.
Haruno Sakura ignored them all, just nodding slightly to both sides in greeting.
Mei Terumī quickly finished reading the letter and passed it to an elder sitting on her right. Taking advantage of the time they were reading it, she exchanged a few pleasantries with Haruno Sakura.
"Lord Mizukage, speaking of which, the surname Terumi also exists in Konoha. My neighbor happens to be named Terumi, and the whole family are ninja! I wonder what their relationship is with you?" After chatting for a few sentences, Sakura thought of her new neighbor and asked casually. She often saw Terumi Inin and Yūzuki, and had partnered with Yūzuki a few times in the Anbu, so she was a little curious.
"The Terumi clan is not a big clan," Mei Terumī laughed. "In the early years of chaos, some of my clan members drifted overseas. It's not uncommon for them to take root in foreign countries. However, as the Mist Village takes off the hat of the Village of the Bloody Mist and opens up to the outside world, I believe that the ninja who drifted away back then will also return to the village one after another. After all, this is still their hometown."
"The Mist Village's tomorrow will be better," Mei Terumī said firmly.
"It wasn't just simple chaos," the elderly elder sitting first on the Mizukage's right interjected. "Back when our village was still the Village of the Bloody Mist, we ostracized Kekkei Genkai clans and exterminated several large clans in the village. Many people from the Terumi clan fled the village at that time."
Mei Terumī pursed her lips and chuckled dryly.
"Is the Terumi clan also a Kekkei Genkai clan?" Haruno Sakura recalled the information on the Terumi family in her mind. Uncle Terumi worked in the Konoha Hospital, and his physical examination data was very detailed, but she hadn't seen any Kekkei Genkai inheritance in their clan.
"Our clan is quite special," the Mizukage smiled faintly and said. "This is no secret. It's mainly because the Terumi clan members sometimes have a special spiritual trait that makes it easier for them to develop a Kekkei Genkai than ordinary people, so our clan is also known as the Kekkei Genkai clan that is not a Kekkei Genkai clan."
With members of the Terumi clan in Konoha, their secret would be known sooner or later, so the Mist side didn't hide anything.
Is it a natural dual spiritual core...?
Haruno Sakura immediately understood Mei Terumī's meaning. The Sakura in the original story also had this trait, and after she transmigrated, she had even formed a three-core soul. This spiritual trait could indeed reduce the difficulty of cultivating a Kekkei Genkai by a lot.
Conversely, there are gains and losses. The Terumi clan was also prone to producing mentally ill patients with schizophrenia. This was their Kekkei Genkai disease.
Moreover, to merge into a Kekkei Genkai, one still needed to cultivate two nature transformations to the extreme.
Does Mei Terumī possess a Kekkei Genkai? Haruno Sakura speculated secretly. However, in this situation, she couldn't carefully probe other people's chakra.
"Ever since our village overthrew Yagura's bloody rule and set things right, the order to persecute Kekkei Genkai clans was immediately revoked. In this, Lord Mizukage's contribution is the greatest," the elder said slowly again.
The smile on Mei Terumī's face stiffened a little, and she looked at him.
Haruno Sakura faintly heard the smell of gunpowder; the elder's slightly sarcastic tone seemed to imply, openly and secretly, that Mei Terumī had overthrown Yagura's rule only so that she and her family would not be oppressed by the higher-ups, not for the sake of the Mist Village's future.
"Some policies are maladies that need to be eliminated, while others are not necessarily so," the elder's voice was old and slow. He turned to Haruno Sakura and asked, "When your village was founded, it was based on the alliance between the Senju and the Uchiha. I wonder how many people in your village are still named Senju or Uchiha?"
Haruno Sakura couldn't answer this question.
She lowered her eyes, not knowing what to say for a moment.
The elder didn't mind her silence, taking it as acquiescence, and continued, "A village within a village built on family blood ties will inevitably harm the interests of the village. This is the consensus of the ninja world, and even the strongest Konoha agrees with this view."
Speaking of this, Haruno Sakura had to admit that what he said made some sense. If the ninja world were to develop forward, the ideal state should be families without clans, just as the industrial society in her previous life had abandoned the concept of family in the feudal era; however, was it going to another extreme to be anti-bloodline to the point of slaughtering others?
At least in Konoha, the main combat power of ninja still came from various clans, large and small. Connecting the ninja of various clans through the Ninja Academy, breaking away from the shackles of a clan, and becoming a ninja of a village, this should still be a system that had not decayed.
From this perspective, this elder's view was too advanced, so much so that it was divorced from reality.
Mei Terumī's eyes turned a few degrees colder. The elder bringing up Konoha's example made it a bit difficult for her to respond for a moment.
"Lord Mizukage once said that we should learn from Konoha's opening-up policy. Why don't we learn from the policy of cracking down on Kekkei Genkai clans? Even the Konoha envoy admitted that there are no longer any people named Senju or Uchiha in Konoha. Why does Lord Fifth still want to bring the Yuki, Kaguya, and other clans back to the village?" The elder sighed, and without waiting for Mei Terumī to say anything, he continued on his own, "Is it because of the special situation of the village at present?"
The atmosphere was a bit strange. The Mizukage was actually arguing with the First Elder about these contents in front of the Konoha envoy. It showed how serious the differences within the Mist were.
The people in the meeting room were silent, no one daring to interject.
Mei Terumī took a slow breath and said faintly, "My Mist Village and the Land of Water have their own national conditions, so we don't have to copy every policy of Konoha. What's more, not every Kekkei Genkai clan in Konoha has been crackdowns on. The Hyuga and other clans are living well now, aren't they, Haruno Sakura?"
"Indeed," Sakura nodded and said.
It was Mei Terumī who insisted on the opening-up policy, so she naturally leaned towards Mei Terumī's side.
"Whether the Yuki and Kaguya are the Uchiha or the Hyuga of our village, please don't confuse them, my lord," the elder said unhurriedly. "Lord Mizukage said that we should establish policies based on our national conditions and the actual situation of the village. We all think this makes a lot of sense."
First, he gave a compliment, and then the conversation took a sharp turn: "Our Land of Water and Mist Village are isolated overseas, easy to defend and hard to attack, and naturally not easily interfered with by the mainland countries and ninja villages. At this time, why not close the country, bide our time, and silently accumulate strength, waiting for the future to participate in the hegemony of the mainland, instead of opening the village at its weakest moment, inviting the unwarranted coveting of other countries?"
As he spoke, he even glanced at Haruno Sakura.
Many people in the meeting room were nodding secretly. It seemed that this rhetoric had many supporters. In fact, looking at his words alone, it was not without reason.
The history of the Mist was a series of closed-door histories. Closing themselves off had indeed brought them many benefits. Maintaining their mystery had allowed them to tide over many difficulties of internal and external emptiness.
The cruel Village of the Bloody Mist policy, the mutual slaughter of graduates, and the persistence in cracking down on Kekkei Genkai clans had actually left the Mist Village in a state of constant self-bleeding and a lack of successors. It was already the peak of the Mist's combat power when they managed to gather the Seven Ninja Swordsmen of the Mist once. Later, the seven either died or defected, and only one ninja sword remained in the village. What was even more surprising was that the Mist actually had no spare energy to search for and retrieve the ninja swords!
It was only after Haruno Sakura had personally come to the Land of Water this time that she realized that the Mist's combat power was so low. While the mainland countries had been fighting wars with foreign countries all these years, the Mist bad been fighting with itself, wasting a great opportunity for development.
If Konoha were as weak as they were, it would have long been torn to pieces by the surrounding wolves eyeing it covetously!
Unlike the kind of closed-door policy of "the Celestial Empire has abundant resources and has everything, and does not need foreign goods to communicate," the Mist elder's proposal to blockade the country was based on a lack of confidence in his own country's strength.
Mei Terumī's face was very gloomy.
Her gaze moved away from the elder and swept over the people in the meeting room; some looked straight ahead calmly, some looked confused and didn't know where to look, some lowered their eyelids and didn't know what they were thinking, and some's eyes drifted, avoiding meeting the Mizukage's gaze.
The Fifth Mizukage took a deep breath, relieved the irritability in her heart, and said, "No matter how many differences we have, in front of the Konoha envoy, we should also present ourselves as a whole, not a plate of loose sand, making people laugh at us."
Her voice was cold and awe-inspiring.
This was criticizing the elder from the perspective of the Mist as a whole for not knowing the big picture and exposing the Mist's ugly side in front of envoys from other villages. Regardless of whether the audience agreed with the elder's point of view, at this moment, most of them felt that the elder's making a fuss was a bit too much.
Mei Terumī glanced at the audience faintly and said, "Since there are still many people who hold different opinions, it just so happens that everyone is gathered together today, so let's take this opportunity to speak out! Without unifying our thoughts, no policy can be implemented!"
"Hagura, please trouble you to take the Konoha envoys on a tour of our village," she turned her head and winked at Hagura, then smiled at Haruno Sakura. "Sorry to let you see such a joke."
Haruno Sakura smiled gently, then led her three students to follow Hagura's steps and left the meeting room.
She had a smile on her face, but her nerves were tense in her heart.
The meaning of the Mizukage's wink just now seemed very rich...
What does she want to do?