A few days later…
Uchiha Makoto packed his belongings and left the Uchiha clan alone.
That morning, a few clansmen even came to see him off.
"This treatment is a lot better than what Madara Uchiha will get in the future," he told himself.
He had the travel funds Madara had given him tucked in his robe, a full ten million ryō.
To be fair, Madara had not treated him badly. It was generous by any measure.
By the mission ranks Konoha would later define, only S-rank missions that required jōnin squads paid in the millions.
Ten million ryō equaled ten S-rank missions. For Makoto it was a fortune, practically overnight wealth.
But it was still far from enough.
To found a shinobi village, funding would have to be measured in the hundreds of millions.
If he tried to raise that by the usual grind of missions, he would die of exhaustion before earning it.
So Makoto thought it over again and again. He needed a backer. He needed a philanthropic, public-spirited angel investor.
On that front he could copy someone's homework.
In the future shinobi world, every village had an angel investor wiring them money.
Konoha's angel investor was the Land of Fire. Sunagakure's was the Land of Wind. Iwagakure's was the Land of Earth. Fate never gives for free. The daimyō of each land remitted funds on schedule, and the villages pledged loyalty in return, protecting the daimyō in person and buttressing their rule.
The daimyō needed shinobi power.
Where there is oppression, there is resistance. Nobles in the shinobi world had never been known for benevolence. The common folk on the brink of starvation would not quietly wait to die. Uprisings against the lords were hardly rare, only to be put down by shinobi each time.
"I need an angel investor."
Makoto decided to copy Konoha's approach and opened his map.
To find a patron, he had to find a big patron.
Small countries were out.
The Land of Wind was endless sand, sparse population, a weak country and a poor people. Pass. It was barely fit for human life, a mouthful of grit every time the wind blew. He had no desire to build in a desert.
The Land of Water was too distant, separated by a vast sea and far from the continent. Build there and you would be nothing but a spoiler in the shinobi world. Put it on the bench for now.
The Land of Earth looked good.
The Land of Lightning could work.
The Land of Fire was the best of the best.
After weighing it, Makoto decided to make a play for the Land of Fire before Konoha existed.
The Land of Fire's position was superb, at the heart of the shinobi world, with the richest soil and, ahem, abundant human resources.
With the Land of Fire's daimyō behind him, nothing could be better.
As for the future Konoha, was the Land of Fire not vast enough to host two shinobi villages?
Would it not be an insult to the daimyō to suggest otherwise?
Hashirama Senju was a famous good man, and good men always ended up with guns pointed at them.
He would have to be wary of Tobirama Senju, though.
Makoto shook his head. He was thinking too far ahead. First he had to convince the Land of Fire's daimyō to be his angel investor. That was the hurdle right before him.
He already had an idea of how to persuade him. The entire plan would revolve around one point.
The Hashirama Senju Threat Theory.
Question. What worries a daimyō most?
Answer. Shinobi power so strong it threatens their rule.
The shinobi world that Kishimoto crafted was skewed. Those who held force did not hold the highest power, and instead remained in a political low ground.
It was a paradoxical worldview.
Shinobi were used as tools. Clans fought for commissions. The daimyō stayed behind the curtain. The rules of the shinobi world had held for a thousand years, sometimes ruffled but never overturned.
Now was different.
That rule faced a huge challenge.
Hashirama Senju and Madara Uchiha were too strong. Either one alone could sweep the entire shinobi world.
Across the past millennium, the Senju and the Uchiha had produced extraordinary shinobi, but none approached the level of Hashirama and Madara. They were likely the strongest pair among all reincarnations of Asura and Indra, their power nearly equal to Asura and Indra themselves.
Even so, if that were all, it would still be manageable.
By tradition across a thousand years, Asura and Indra's reincarnations would tangle for life, fighting each other to the end with no time to spare for the rest of the world.
The daimyō only needed to keep issuing jobs to the Uchiha and the Senju. But now it was different.
This generation of Asura and Indra, Hashirama Senju and Madara Uchiha, had temporarily broken fate. They had set aside the endless feud and were ready to walk into a shared future, founding a village for the Senju and the Uchiha.
Once that happened, how were the daimyō supposed to sleep at night?
The two strongest shinobi in the world would join hands, build a village, and seek peace.
The daimyō would ask what on earth they intended.
Just thinking about it would chill them to the bone and leave them restless.
Even if Hashirama Senju, the simple and kind good man, had never once thought of toppling the daimyō's rule, that was not the point.
The point was whether he could.
Han Xin had been honest and had no rebellion in mind, and still he was strangled on Lü Hou's orders, dying at a woman's hand.
In this shinobi world the daimyō were in greater danger still. They had no power to resist.
If Hashirama Senju decided to remake the shinobi world, no one could stop him.
"It may unfairly persecute an honest man, but forgive me, Hashirama Senju."
"I want to advance too badly."
So said Uchiha Makoto, and on paper he wrote out the contents of the Hashirama Senju Threat Theory.