"Nohara Murashi and Fukushima Oka?"
Sasori arrived at Yuji's home in the evening, still in Anbu attire, and placed a file on the table. It contained information on Hidden Sand Village shinobi with significant military records who were close in age to Rasa.
Two names caught Yuji's attention.
Nohara Murashi, nineteen. Fukushima Oka, twenty, the same age as Rasa.
The reason they stood out was that these two were the older brothers of his students, Sakamoto and Fukushima Taki. They came from families with roots in the village's power structure, but their position within that structure was a specific one.
Unlike Pakura's family, which represented bloodline and secret technique lineages, the Nohara and Fukushima families represented civilian ninja. Both family heads had followed the Second Kazekage in their time.
People like Yuji and Sasori occupied one layer of the village's power faction. Families like these occupied another. The distinction was clear to anyone paying attention. A class divide existed, even if no one stated it openly.
Sasori's family connection was through Chiyo. Yuji himself carried the Blood Release. Rasa was the same. Kekkei Genkai and bloodline distinction ran underneath everything.
To reshuffle the power at the top, the water needed to be muddied first. In the current ninja world, the easiest pressure point for generating conflict was the latent tension between classes that everyone acknowledged and nobody discussed.
"The Nohara and Fukushima families show no signs of dissatisfaction with Rasa's rise," Sasori said, watching Yuji study the two names.
"That's expected. The village's senior officials are unified right now, and Rasa's contributions are recognized across the board. With the Kazekage overseeing the overall direction, disagreements among those below don't have room to surface.
The village's energy isn't oriented toward internal competition at this stage." Yuji nodded, then looked up. "But you brought this data to me specifically, which means these two can be used."
"Their relationship with Rasa is not good."
"That's not surprising."
Rasa's personality ran along the same lines as the Third's. He operated from a value system built around usefulness to the village, and anyone he deemed to fall short of that standard received nothing from him in terms of recognition or engagement.
Sasori had the same fundamental disposition before Yuji's presence had introduced small modifications to it, though those modifications had not gone especially deep.
"I'll find ways to mention their names in the right places," Yuji said. "Help them get some quiet recognition within the village. The family heads may have no issue with Rasa, but they can't fully contain the next generation's feelings.
If the atmosphere is shaped carefully enough, their own flesh and blood will pull them into it regardless of their preferences."
A single spark, placed correctly, could turn what looked like ordinary peer friction between young shinobi into something that mapped onto the village's existing class fault lines.
Once that happened, the power factions would divide around it naturally. The conflict's root would have nothing to do with Yuji.
Sasori stood and left without further comment.
In the weeks that followed, Yuji used his two students to make introductions, gradually establishing a loose social connection with Fukushima Oka and Nohara Murashi. He tested their feelings about Rasa carefully through conversation, reading their reactions without pushing.
Once he had a clear enough picture, he began the slower work.
In the hospital, in the course of ordinary daily interaction with shinobi and villagers who came and went, he found moments to mention Fukushima Oka and Murashi. Their battlefield records, their contributions, their capability. He framed it as natural admiration, the kind of thing anyone might say about talented young shinobi. He tied their names loosely to Rasa's without drawing explicit comparisons, just placing them in the same conversational space, letting the proximity do the work over time.
None of it could be rushed. The incubation period was the whole point. And the hospital was one of the highest-traffic locations in the village. Things said there moved.
His meetings with Fukushima Oka and Murashi remained infrequent and casual. Rasa came up in conversation each time, naturally and without apparent intent. Yuji's only contribution was the fuel.
The root of the conflict wasn't anything Yuji had manufactured. Fukushima Oka and Murashi were already carrying a genuine internal dissatisfaction with Rasa, a refusal to submit to him that predated any outside influence.
That was the real pressure underneath the surface. Rasa's own disposition made it worse. He didn't know how to manage people, and he didn't particularly try.
The aloofness and the arrogance were simply how he operated, and they produced predictable results in people who already felt overlooked.
That the tension could be intensified at all demonstrated something Yuji had observed long before he started paying deliberate attention to it.
The Hidden Sand Village's factional divisions weren't as layered or as openly contested as Konoha's, but they existed. They had always existed. They just sat beneath the surface, quiet and unacknowledged.
He had noticed the shape of it early, back when he and Pakura were still students. Every time they crossed paths, the elders accompanying her would cut the interaction short before it developed into much of anything. The discomfort wasn't accidental.
Certain elements within the village's established classes had a deeply ingrained habit of looking down on civilian ninja, a posture that had been built into the atmosphere over the course of the village's entire history. It wasn't an isolated attitude. It was a pattern.
That pattern was useful.
Separately, Yuji began the other project.
The monopoly industry he had settled on was medicine.
The ninja world had drugs and potions of various kinds, but their penetration, particularly among civilians and lower-income populations, was thin.
Most Medical Ninjutsu in practical use was oriented toward injury recovery rather than disease treatment. The medicines that did exist were predominantly for external wounds. This was a direct product of the era.
Warfare was constant, and external injury was the primary cause of death across all the major villages' fighting forces. Illnesses that didn't kill immediately received little systematic attention.
The original story bore this out. Characters in it died of sickness with a regularity that reflected how underserved that area was.
Yuji had obtained Kuroo's entire legacy with this in mind, not only because it would push his development as a Medical Ninja further, but because of exactly this gap.
And he was now a Medical Ninja with genuine pharmacological understanding. Collecting medicinal herbs from this world, conducting research, synthesizing that work with his previous life's knowledge and his own developed capabilities, and then finding paths to mass production, all of it was within reach.
Medical resources were indispensable in every world and under every set of conditions. A monopoly position in that space generated returns that no other industry could match for sustained reliability.
And during the Third Ninja World War specifically, the demand would spike sharply. Military medical supply during large-scale conflict was as close to guaranteed revenue as anything in a wartime economy could be.
There was also the longer-term structural benefit. If Sunagakure developed genuine dominance in pharmaceutical production, it would change what the village represented in the wider ninja world.
The Hidden Sand already had a foundation to build on. Puppeteers and Medical Ninja in the village had accumulated real expertise in poison research and pharmacological work over generations.
That was not a typical base of knowledge. Cultivating it systematically, with a knowledge advantage no one else in the world possessed, had significant potential.
Most of what he knew from his previous life couldn't be transplanted directly into this world's context. But even a fraction of it, filtered through his current understanding of this world's biology and chemistry, was enough to produce things no one here had thought to produce yet.
The critical distinction was this: he was not planning to send people out to sell. He was planning to make something that people from outside would come to buy on their own.
Medicine that circulated widely enough to become a standard resource rather than a specialty product. Once that threshold was crossed, the Hidden Sand Village's pharmaceutical output would extract wealth from the entire ninja world passively, through the simple fact of being necessary.