The next morning.
Uchiha Makoto officially began his journey home.
Konoha's leadership was once again gathered to hold a grand farewell ceremony for Uchiha Makoto and his entourage.
Uchiha Makoto spotted Senju Tobirama in the crowd at a glance. Last night, when he had gone to Senju Hashirama's house for a final farewell dinner, Senju Tobirama had not appeared before him all evening. The dinner had been sent to Senju Tobirama's laboratory by Uzumaki Mito's servants.
Of course, Uchiha Makoto knew that Senju Tobirama was deliberately avoiding him... So petty, just because he had caused him a lot more trouble.
"Tobirama, I thought you weren't coming."
"Hmph, you're leaving Konoha, of course I have to send you off with gongs and drums... Don't ever come back!"
"Ha... how could that be possible? My son and daughter-in-law are still in Konoha, and their child will be born this year!"
"Don't force me to fight you in front of so many people!"
Uchiha Makoto greeted Senju Tobirama proactively with a smile on his face.
Senju Tobirama did the same.
Then the two of them huddled together, whispering.
An outsider who didn't know the situation might really think they were the best of friends, but in reality—if either one of them were to suddenly drop dead, the other would absolutely roar with laughter while carefully examining the corpse to prevent any risk of resurrection.
As usual.
Uchiha Makoto managed to provoke Senju Tobirama with just a few words.
Senju Tobirama was filled with hatred...
That night, it was clearly his own home. Why did he back down in front of Uchiha Madara? No matter how strange the atmosphere was, it should have been Uchiha Madara who left!
A momentary mistake on his part had allowed this naturally evil Uchiha brat, Makoto, to exploit an opening. His elder brother's granddaughter must not marry Uchiha Makoto's son... Dammit, absolutely not!
The brief confrontation between the two quickly ended. Uchiha Makoto discreetly gave Senju Tobirama a middle finger as a farewell.
Afterward, he formally bid farewell to Senju Hashirama, Uchiha Madara, and the other high-ranking officials of Konoha one by one.
Regarding Uchiha Makoto's departure.
There was joy, there was regret, there was numbness...
With that, Uchiha Makoto led his subordinates back to his loyal Akatsuki Village!
...........
The New Year festivities ended, and a new year began.
As soon as the holiday was over, Uchiha Makoto immediately returned to his Lord Light Shadow office.
Due to the limitations of the ninja profession.
The ninjas within Akatsuki Village always found it difficult to shift their focus from the ninja world to see the broader trends of the world... They were a bunch of simpletons who only knew how to kill.
Akatsuki Village was involved in many industries, so Uchiha Makoto had to handle many things personally.
But Uchiha Makoto wasn't a professional either; he just knew how to copy others' work. When faced with highly specialized problems, he could only turn to true professionals—an amateur can lead experts, but he must never interfere with the specific micromanagement. He had no desire to become that kind of leader.
In short, Akatsuki Village was full of vitality, and while the state of all things brought Uchiha Makoto joy, it also plunged him into an incredibly busy work schedule.
Uchiha Makoto sighed with exhaustion, then walked into the Akatsuki Village meeting room.
The Akatsuki Village meeting room.
The room was crowded, with both ninjas and ordinary people. The ninjas were in the minority; most of the ordinary people were experts Uchiha Makoto had carefully scouted from various industries.
Uchiha Makoto's ambition was definitely not just to build a ninja village composed of ninjas. What he wanted was the ultimate form of an organization—to build a nation!
The assembled experts submitted a strategic plan that had been in preparation for many days. It contained a wide range of content, including agriculture, industry, education, technology, transportation, justice, and public security... Of course, this was just a summary; the real content was not fully displayed.
Uchiha Makoto only needed to know the general outline anyway; he couldn't possibly have enough time to read the full version.
The representatives of the traditional ninja clans were even more overwhelmed. The past days had been difficult, but if they had to deal with these things every day, they would rather go out and kill people. They all complained that even the summary was too long.
They instinctively felt that something written with so many words must be very reasonable... You have more words, so we'll listen to you!
"I think the village's strategy still needs to be focused on some key points... For example, in education... we still need to increase investment."
"Let's continue to expand enrollment..."
Uchiha Makoto paused, looking at the ninja clan representatives in the meeting. Seeing that they had no objections, he breathed a sigh of relief.
The reason the ninja clans had few objections was simple—the expansion of enrollment here did not refer to traditional ninja education.
Although the students Uchiha Makoto was recruiting this time would also receive ninja training, Akatsuki Village was hiring professional teachers to teach the students more industrial knowledge. While there was some ninja knowledge, it was very basic.
In the eyes of the ninja clans, these students couldn't even be considered ninjas. They were just given the identity of ninjas by Uchiha Makoto—this was called identity recognition.
Although in the eyes of some old-fashioned ninja clan members, such an act was an insult to ninjas, the clan leaders felt it was unnecessary to argue with Uchiha Makoto over such a trivial matter of naming and make everyone unhappy.
Uchiha Makoto's reason for doing this was also very simple.
Vast amounts of funds were being spent on investing in and building factories. As the number of factories increased, so did the number of workers needed. Now, there weren't enough people... The number of skilled workers could not keep up with the rapid development of industry.
Akatsuki Village needed to quickly develop a batch of workers who had mastered industrial knowledge and simple ninja knowledge to fill this gap. They would go directly to work as interns in the factories of Akatsuki Village and its partners upon graduation, which also provided a path for the poor children of this era to survive.
It also expanded the influence of ninjas, as they were also granted the title of Genin by Akatsuki Village.
After discussing the major issue of education.
Uchiha Makoto turned his attention to the even more important four items: clothing, food, housing, and transportation.
Even the ninja clan representatives craned their necks to get closer.
Clothing, food, housing, and transportation not only concerned their lives but were also... very profitable!
The salt tax, the pillar of Akatsuki Village's finances, fell under the category of food. In the ninja world, even a ninja couldn't live without eating salt!
As for clothing, Akatsuki Village had previously fought to the death with the great nobles of the Land of Fire to switch from rice paddies to mulberry groves, precisely to compete for the profits in this industry.
During the Industrial Revolution on Earth, many countries started with the textile industry, which gave rise to the infamous Enclosure Movement, where sheep devoured men!
This was hard to avoid in the bloody accumulation of capital... Of course, Uchiha Makoto didn't want to do that.
Before he transmigrated, there was no supernatural power, and they were constrained by the limits of agricultural productivity. They couldn't grow more food from the land, so they had to resort to such methods. Now that he had transmigrated to the ninja world, if he still used those methods, his transmigration would have been for nothing!
As for housing... Although houses weren't worth much in the ninja world, since ninjas could easily build decent houses with Earth Release, real estate still had to be developed. Value could be artificially assigned to it, just like with diamonds... Laborers without a mortgage will have no desire to dedicate their youth to Akatsuki Village, and they would need to have four or five children... People always need motivation!
As for transportation, it was currently all expenditure for Akatsuki Village. Even though building roads could indeed promote development, in terms of investment alone, the return was a long way off.
Therefore, no amount of emphasis on these four items was too much.
Among them, Uchiha Makoto was naturally most concerned with food. He wanted to establish a grain company and build up Akatsuki Village's food reserves.
To control food is to control everything; this principle needs no further explanation.
As long as the problem of hunger was solved, any potential problems in the businesses of the other three items would not be problems. However... establishing a grain company and building up food reserves involved grain and land. Once these two items were involved, things would become extremely tricky.
Currently, most of the land in the Land of Fire was in the hands of the vermin, which meant that the power over grain was also in their hands. And to touch their land and grain was to touch their lifeline.
The last time Uchiha Makoto killed a great noble's entire family was for land, and this had already struck a nerve with the vermin.
Such a method was fine once.
But if he kept using this method, the vermin would really fight Akatsuki Village to the death.
At this stage, Akatsuki Village couldn't afford to have a complete falling out with them.
As for expanding outward...
The Land of Rice Fields had large tracts of fertile land. It was indeed feasible to seize fertile land with ninja strength. The Daimyo of the Land of Fire probably wouldn't even mind cooperating with Uchiha Makoto again and entering a honeymoon period.
But the Daimyo and nobles of the Land of Rice Fields were not pushovers; they would surely rise up and resist... which meant another war, and on the Konoha side... Senju Hashirama would be difficult to handle.
After thinking it over.
Uchiha Makoto still intended to solve the problem in a more peaceful way—to find a way to increase grain production.
The key reason for the large-scale increase in crop yields on Earth was the mastery of fertilizer production technology, but this technology did not yet exist in the ninja world.
It was definitely too late to start investing in developing the technology from scratch now.
It seemed the science route was temporarily unfeasible.
Uchiha Makoto could only turn his attention to ninjutsu.
If it were Wood Release, Senju Hashirama might be able to make crops grow rapidly.
But he was ultimately just one person. The Wood Release mastered by one person was ultimately insufficient for the situation of the entire Land of Fire, let alone the entire ninja world.
"Everyone, do you have any good ideas?"
Uchiha Makoto threw the question to the elites present. After a discussion, an expert in the field of agriculture stood up.
"Lord Light Shadow, I can probably understand what you mean by fertilizer. However, such a technology has not yet appeared in the ninja world. The Land of Fire currently mainly relies on composting to improve soil fertility, which can effectively increase grain production. I think the fertilizer you mentioned serves a similar purpose."
Soon.
Another person in the room stood up to add.
"Hmm... composting... if you mean manure... I just thought of something."
"The Land of Water has a series of affiliated islands. Some of these islands are not composed of rocky soil at all, but of bird droppings... For hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands of years, countless seabirds have gathered around these islands to breed and live. The feces these birds consistently excrete in the surrounding area have, over the long years, formed islands of bird droppings."
"The locals don't go near these bird dropping islands much."
"When I went to the Land of Water for an investigation, out of curiosity, I saw those bird dropping islands with my own eyes... They were truly magnificent!"
"???"
Uchiha Makoto's eyes widened. He found that the problem before him seemed to have a solution.
He remembered a magical country on Earth.
The name of this country was Nauru, a once extremely wealthy nation. In the mid-1970s, around 1975, Nauru's per capita GDP had already reached $35,700.
How wealthy was that?
It was four and a half times the per capita GDP of the United States at the time, the country with the highest per capita income in the world.
And the reason this small country was so rich was bird droppings!
A terrifying amount of bird droppings!
In the eyes of a layman, these bird droppings were truly useless, but in the eyes of an expert, they were gold, enormous phosphate mines!
Uchiha Makoto was a semi-expert.
He knew that these bird dropping mines could be used as fertilizer after simple processing.
"This is really... I think these bird dropping islands should belong to Akatsuki Village... anyway, the Land of Water doesn't like these islands."
"And it just so happens that Akatsuki Village and the Land of Water have a fishing ground dispute. We can take this opportunity to work with Konoha to resolve this matter with the Land of Water and Kirigakure."
Uchiha Makoto quickly calculated in his mind.
..................
On the other side.
Iwagakure.
The First Tsuchikage's face was terrifyingly grim, his eyes bloodshot. He looked anxiously at the room in front of him.
That was Iwagakure's emergency medical room.
Every ninja who entered the emergency medical room was in critical condition, with one foot in the grave.
The First Tsuchikage had been sitting at the door of the emergency medical room for a day and a night. Now, he felt like the center of a low-pressure system; everyone who passed by subconsciously showed a respectful expression.
Finally, a medical-nin walked out of the emergency medical room.
"How is the situation, Mū's injuries..."
"Lord Tsuchikage, Lord Mū's injuries are very serious... We have barely managed to save his life for now, and he will need further observation... But even if he pulls through, the skin all over Lord Mū's body has been completely burned away by high temperatures. He will likely have to rely on special potions and be wrapped in bandages for the rest of his life."
"What about the other ninjas... how are they?"
"The ninjas who escaped back with Lord Mū were lucky. Their burns are not as severe, and their high fevers have subsided... They should wake up this afternoon."
"I understand."
The First Tsuchikage breathed a sigh of relief, but his expression still couldn't hide his anger.
Mū was a junior he valued and promoted immensely, with outstanding talent and a calm personality. He was the best successor for the Second Tsuchikage.
To end up like this on a single mission, with all the other survivors also ending up in the emergency medical room... The First Tsuchikage didn't even know what had happened yet!
This must be paid for with blood. This matter was not over
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