The first practical step was collection and analysis.
Yuji established a separate department within the hospital, then began purchasing medicinal herbs with his own savings.
The village's financial situation made institutional funding essentially impossible to request with any expectation of success, so he went directly to the traveling merchants operating in and out of Sunagakure, asking them to acquire specific herbs during their trading routes.
His mission earnings over the years had accumulated into a reasonable personal sum. He put it to work.
Through Shiori, Yashamaru, and others with existing pharmacological knowledge, he built a working map of what the village and the wider ninja world currently understood about medicinal substances.
He catalogued efficacy, documented effects, identified gaps. He also brought in several shinobi from within the village who had done serious work in pharmacology.
What he found when he looked closely was that the Hidden Sand Village's pharmacological knowledge was almost entirely oriented toward poison and assassination. Treatment formulas were nearly absent.
Every research tradition in the village had developed in the direction of harming enemies rather than healing people. Yuji didn't set that aside, understanding the toxic applications of a substance was also a way of understanding its properties, but it confirmed how much ground the therapeutic side had to cover.
The project started visibly enough that senior officials including the Kazekage took notice. Their interpretation was that Yuji was running experiments to improve the village's medical standards, which was accurate as far as it went.
When he formally requested funding to expand the hospital and commission medical equipment and tools built to his specifications, the application went nowhere. The answer was always the same answer: no money.
The implicit expectation was that he would use his personal ability to advance the medical system as far as possible within existing constraints, and not raise the subject of resources again.
He had also just entered the village's power structure. His words did not yet carry the weight needed to move decisions of that scale. And even if he had explained the full scope of what he was attempting, the senior officials would likely not have believed it was achievable.
Pharmacological research had been worked on across multiple generations in Sunagakure and across other villages as well. If producing and distributing medicines at scale had been straightforward, someone would have done it already.
Yuji didn't argue the point. Results would make the case better than any explanation.
He settled into the work.
Pharmacological research. Hospital system reform. Core personnel development through Shiori and Yashamaru. Written materials to document and distribute medical knowledge.
Occasional lectures at the Ninja Academy, where he covered medicine, touched on battlefield experience, and quietly pointed the most promising students toward careers as Medical Ninja.
The inspiration he offered the younger students was genuine, though the effect it was designed to produce was also deliberate. Every village ran some version of this process on its youth. Yuji saw no reason to be sentimental about participating in it.
Three months into all of this, he went to find Sasori.
They met privately with regularity, but those meetings were normally about faction intelligence and character assessments within the village. This one was different.
Yuji sat across from him, watched Sasori lift a teacup, and coughed.
"Lend me some money."
Sasori's hand stopped.
"How much?"
"How much do you have?"
Silence.
"I'm out," Yuji said, with the expression of someone delivering genuinely unfortunate news. "From this month I'm living on the village's basic subsidy. Shiori and Yashamaru have both been contributing to the research out of their own pockets."
He had known the project would be expensive. He had not anticipated how quickly it would consume everything he had put into it.
His personal savings had simply not been sufficient.
He had only worked through roughly a third of the basic pharmacology and material identification for this world.
The ratio testing and drug trials still lay ahead. The process was not going to shorten itself.
"I have some. Not much."
Sasori said it without particular emotion. Puppet research consumed money at a comparable rate, materials, mechanisms, modifications, the ongoing cost of maintaining and developing his constructs.
Even ordinary ninja, whose earnings looked substantial from the outside, burned through funds on routine tool consumption. During peacetime the drain was manageable. During wartime it became something else entirely.
"Hand it all over. What I'm doing right now is at a critical stage."
Yuji saw no point in softening the request.
Sasori nodded.
"Also, ask Grandma Chiyo if she can contribute something. Frame it as a loan from me. I'm not in a position to ask her directly."
Yuji's tone adjusted slightly. Borrowing money was an unpleasant experience regardless of who it was from, and asking Chiyo directly would have carried its own complications. Sasori was the better channel.
Sasori was quiet for a moment.
Then he changed the subject entirely. "Yesterday the Kazekage called a meeting with the senior officials. There was a dispute. Reconstruction is the issue. Konoha and Kumogakure have both shown real progress on their rebuilding efforts. Sunagakure is slower.
The Daimyo released a sum of money to the village, but the amount is limited. The Kazekage and Rasa want to put it toward military training and force readiness. The war ended, but no one can say when the next one starts. They don't want a repeat of what happened last time."
He paused. "Others in the meeting pushed for investing in the village's physical infrastructure. Many buildings and public facilities are aging. Some are past the point of repair. Addressing that would also do something for public morale."
Yuji followed the thread without needing it spelled out. "The infrastructure faction is mostly family representatives of the civilian ninja, I assume."
"Yes."
"The Nohara and Fukushima families among them?"
Sasori nodded.
Yuji considered this for a moment. "Then it's working. The number of times Nohara Murashi and Fukushima Oka come up in village conversation has been climbing. People are starting to notice them." He thought through the mechanism.
"For the civilian family representatives, some quiet attention suddenly being drawn to the next generation of their families creates an opening. As civilian ninja, they have a natural connection to the population's everyday concerns.
If they want to consolidate that positioning, demonstrating that they speak for the villagers' interests is the obvious move. Infrastructure investment does that."
He leaned back slightly. "The Kazekage's position isn't wrong from where he's standing, and neither is theirs. Both sides are genuinely thinking about the village.
They're just working from different premises about what the village needs most. The problem for the Third is that the Nohara and Fukushima families must have pulled other civilian representatives behind them to make this a real dispute.
Their two families alone couldn't push back against his style and character without more weight behind them."
The quiet groundwork of the past months had given those families a reason to move more assertively. The heads had noticed their heirs gaining recognition among the villagers and wanted to build on it.
"It's developing. We wait a little longer."
Sasori got up and left shortly after.
The following morning an Anbu operative arrived at the hospital and delivered a sum of money on Sasori's instruction.
When Yuji looked at the amount, he understood immediately that Sasori had spoken to Chiyo. The figure was larger than Sasori's personal contribution alone could have produced.
It would last a while. That was enough.