The Sand Village's plan was now exposed. The pharmaceutical resource market had been disrupted in one decisive stroke.
Pharmaceutical factories were being constructed throughout the various nations. The Hidden Stone Village and the Hidden Mist Village both now held pharmaceutical research materials and could independently produce medicines.
And none of this could be stopped by Konoha.
Hiruzen even specifically sought out Danzo and asked him to be honest for once. Do not attempt sabotage from the inside. Because if any hint of it leaked, the outside world would immediately conclude that Konoha had acted out of jealousy and self-interest to protect its own market position.
That would generate hostility toward Konoha across the board. The Hidden Stone Village and the Hidden Mist Village in particular would significantly increase their wariness toward Konoha as a result.
So Konoha had no choice but to watch the situation quietly and try to generate as much revenue as possible before pharmaceutical values collapsed entirely.
But every nation that had reached cooperation agreements with the Sand Village would stop purchasing medicines almost immediately, because they could now produce their own. This caused Konoha's pharmaceutical stockpiles to accumulate rapidly with no buyers. The village's financial situation, which had been gradually improving, was effectively put on pause.
By contrast, Sand Village medicines continued flowing into the market without interruption. The contracts the Sand Village had signed with the cooperating nations included clear provisions stating that until the newly constructed factories were operational, the Sand Village would sell to them at extremely thin margins. This kept their flow of goods moving throughout the transition period.
The other dimension was that the pharmaceutical research knowledge the Sand Village had shared publicly did not include certain specialized civilian and daily-use medicines. Konoha's counterfeit medicines had also not been specifically developed for these categories.
What Konoha had produced and distributed was almost entirely battlefield trauma treatment medications. This meant the Sand Village still retained a defined customer base for its specialty civilian pharmaceutical products.
The next phase of competition would play out in the civilian economy.
At the same time, the Sand Village's agreements with neighboring nations, which included permission to send large numbers of Sand Village ninja into those countries' territories to break through and demolish certain mountain formations, became known to the major hidden villages one after another.
The entire ninja world suddenly found itself witnessing what appeared to be an enormous and vigorous labor campaign. Sand Village forces were not only cutting through mountain ranges and digging channels. The Fourth Kazekage had also used the cooperation framework to recruit and hire substantial numbers of workers from other nations. Multiple countries were simultaneously in the middle of large-scale construction activity.
Of course, the Sand Village's presence in other countries was not for resource extraction purposes. It appeared to be solely aimed at altering certain terrain and environmental conditions.
A commitment and project of this scale simply could not be concealed.
Every major hidden village, including Konoha, quickly analyzed what the Sand Village was doing and reached the same conclusion. The Sand Village appeared to be trying to change the Land of Wind's environmental conditions. There was no detectable military threat component to any of it.
So everyone could only marvel at the Fourth Kazekage's ambition and vision while universally believing the Land of Wind's transformation would never actually succeed.
Even if the Sand Village managed to break through the mountain barriers separating it from neighboring countries and brought some moisture through, or even diverted rivers from neighboring territories into the Land of Wind's interior, completely reversing the Land of Wind's desertification was simply too difficult a challenge to overcome.
First, the Land of Wind's territory was enormous.
Second, desert and arable land were fundamentally different at the soil level. Climate and water quality changes alone could not transform one into the other.
And finally, the sheer scale of this project was so overwhelming that attempting it was widely considered a fool's dream.
From ancient times the Land of Wind had always been this barren and poor. Multiple generations of Kazekage and Daimyo had never thought to attempt changing the Land of Wind's fundamental conditions. This was not without reason.
So the outside world's consensus was that the Sand Village was wasting enormous human and financial resources on a futile endeavor.
But this situation also fully exposed the Land of Wind's, or perhaps more precisely the Land of Wind as a nation's, fundamental weaknesses.
Never mind that the Sand Village's reputation had been rising in recent years and its standing among the Five Great Hidden Villages had improved significantly, with the Fourth Kazekage quietly trending toward becoming the most dominant Kage in the ninja world. Behind all of that prestige, the Sand Village's innate disadvantages and structural vulnerabilities could not be concealed.
Even Danzo felt that Yuji, who was ordinarily so shrewd and deep in his calculations, had for once lost clarity of judgment.
Because if the Sand Village had taken its enormous accumulated wealth and poured it entirely into military capability and expansion, then when the next Great Ninja War broke out, the Sand Village's internal strength would have surged to a genuinely terrifying level and would have posed overwhelming pressure against every opponent.
Instead, all that hard-earned money was being poured like water into something with no realistic hope of success.
The only explanation was that the Fourth Kazekage's rise had been too smooth. He had become overconfident. Genuinely transforming the Land of Wind required completely overhauling the entire country's ecology from the ground up, not just making minor improvements here and there. This would require multiple generations of sustained effort over an extremely long period of time, with no guarantee of success even then.
The Fourth Kazekage was being foolish.
This actually made Danzo quietly pleased. He naturally had no intention of interfering from the inside. On the contrary, he was hoping the Sand Village would exhaust every last resource it had on this pointless endeavor.
Furthermore, the Sand Village's large-scale cooperative construction activities involving multiple nations were paradoxically accelerating the arrival of a genuine peacetime atmosphere.
When the people of various countries were working alongside each other, it eroded the lingering atmosphere of war to some meaningful degree. In wartime conditions, this kind of thing would have been absolutely impossible to facilitate.
The Sand Village. Yuji's office.
Yuji sat at his desk holding a letter.
It had arrived from Konoha, written personally by the Fourth Hokage Namikaze Minato.
The content was straightforward. Konoha was inviting the Sand Village to participate in an inter-generational exchange gathering, covering every area of ninja technique from Genin through Jonin levels. Minato hoped Yuji would attend personally as Kazekage, to jointly build a foundation of friendly relations between Konoha and the Sand Village.
This was clearly a signal of the policy shift Konoha had undertaken after Minato took office.
Yuji narrowed his eyes, turning the question over in his mind. Should he accept?
He had been traveling outside the village for over two months and had only recently returned.
He had actually been considering whether to take action and push forward the Nine-Tails incident.
The Nine-Tails rampage would undeniably deal a severe blow to Konoha. With his current eye technique capabilities and overall strength, Yuji was confident he could control the Nine-Tails.
Namikaze Minato was called the perfect ninja role model for good reason. Yuji understood clearly just how formidable Minato was. If Minato continued developing without interruption, where his strength would eventually reach was impossible to predict. In the Fourth Great Ninja War, he would certainly be a participant of extraordinary power and an inevitable opponent.
Eliminating a peak-level threat early while simultaneously striking at Konoha was naturally advantageous for the Sand Village.
"But the problem is that the situation has changed. All three of the Legendary Sannin are currently present in Konoha. Even if I triggered the Nine-Tails incident, the risk would be substantial. The most difficult element to manage is Jiraiya. Orochimaru cannot compete with Minato and is conducting secret forbidden technique research in the shadows. He might not necessarily intervene. Tsunade's blood phobia has still not been resolved."
"As for Jiraiya, my wariness toward him is primarily because of that toad from Mount Myoboku. That large toad has precognitive abilities, and I cannot currently determine whether it has shared anything relevant with Jiraiya."
"Without the Nine-Tails incident, Naruto as the protagonist would still be born. But he would not necessarily carry the same narrative significance he had in the original story. Kushina would remain the Jinchuriki."
"Trading away a protagonist-level Naruto in exchange for a familiar Namikaze Minato removed from the picture is not necessarily a losing proposition."
"But there is also the question of Indra and Ashura's destined reincarnation cycle. Could those roles still manifest in both of them? Even accounting for the butterfly effect I have introduced, looking at the current situation, the only thing that appears to have been concretely affected so far is the Nine-Tails incident. The Uchiha clan massacre may still happen regardless."
Yuji turned many considerations over in his mind, working through his analysis.
...
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