Gains from around the World

Traveling to his desert fortress would be extremely easy if he was alone as he could just use his Flying Raijin but unfortunately, his mastery over the jutsu didn't yet allow him to bring others along so they had to use conventional methods.

Meanwhile, his clone and Tazuna reached the old man's house after which Shiki shamelessly proceeded to flirt with Tsunami, Tazuna's daughter.

She had long blue-coloured hair and was wearing a short-sleeved pink shirt with the end of the sleeves and the collar being red in colour and a long blue skirt. She found Shiki quite cute but largely ignored his flirting left him cursing his age again.

Shiki sped up the construction of the bridge with shadow clones to earn some good will with the citizens, mainly Tsunami since who cares about random sweaty men, as he waited for Gato to show himself.

He had two goals here, one was to impress Tsunami while making sure she saw him take care of all those thugs she had convinced her to come to the site by saying it would be easier to protect the family of three if they were all in the same place, even though he could have used shadow clones.

Shiki's other goal was to Kotoamatsukami Gato and make him into a willing slave following all his orders. This was because he was a billionaire with powerful connections to both other large legal companies as well as the underworld.

He would make a nice minion for the Reaper. After Shiki beat all of his thugs and scared him away.

Needless to say, against such small fry, all of Shiki's plot went without a hitch. He earned the gratitude of all the citizens of the Land of the Waves, got a bridge named after him, enslaved one of the most rich and well connected men in the world and most importantly, impressed a hot single mom and her annoying son to.

A couple of days later, Shiki, Zabuza and Haku had finally reached their destination. To say they were impressed would be a massive understatement.

When Guren and Chino saw Shiki bring in another beauty they immediately gazed intensely at her while standing close to Shiki as if to state and guard their positions. This behaviour left Haku a bit at a loss but she soon got used to it and ignored the two women's glares.

Time passed and as the Chunin exams approached, Shiki had a few things to take care of of. First he set out to solve the issue of the Tailed Beast Scroll, its slow speed at gathering chakra.

Due to the Ryumyaku, he was able to charge it quite easily but once it ran out of chakra he would have to return to base immediately. Some might say that this is not that great of a flaw considering the massive amounts of chakra a tailed beast has but Shiki was already considering the massive battles against celestial beings so this was a critical problem.

The solution Shiki found was simply put, batteries. He created a rod made with chakra metal and covered in seals, then he sealed massive amounts of chakra from the Ryumyaku in it and adapted his Tailed Beast Scroll to be hollow so as to have a slot that takes this batterie. Then, all he had to do was carry a couple of batteries around. Once a tailed beast image ran out of chakra, it simply could return to the scroll and draw on the battery to recharge. Once the battery was completely drained, Shiki would replace it.

Another point of focus for the boy lately, was the jutsu he was developing based on his current knowledge of the soul, the soul manipulation jutsu of the Uzumaki legacy and Orochimaru's immortality jutsu. Although he was largely unsuccessful, the experimentation greatly deepened Shiki, understanding of the soul and its mysteries, revealing a great problem that passed underneath his radar.

His repeated use of the Soul Melding Seal was creating problems in his own soul! While at first, when he observed his own soul, he found to issues, after he inspected it more closely with his newfound knowledge, Shiki discovered that his the individual parts of his own soul were bound by something akin to rough patchwork. If he continued to meld souls without solving this problem, His soul might suddenly rip itself apart from the poorly made seams!

The worst part was that he had no way of fixing it! Not only that but there was even the chance that this problem would emerge even if he stopped melding souls entirely. Shiki's only hope would be to complete the jutsu he was working on but it was so far from completion that Shiki wondered if he would even make it in time to save himself.

Although this was a serious problem, Shiki couldn't simply give up on the rest of his plans to try and fix it. He assigned several soul clones to the necessary research and decided to occupy himself with other matters like the processing and uses of Gelel ore.

The results were greatly satisfying. He had refined a single stone of gelel for each of his subordinates and bound a Yang Soul to each stone to enhance the stone's effects on their physique. The end result was gelel enhanced chakra, strengthened bodies and accelerated healing.

He also sealed the entire ore vein in his heart which became like a gleaming gemstone in his chest providing massive amounts of gelel energy and massively boosting his already powerful self-healing. Built the seal in a way that let him draw on exactly how much power he needed.

Moving on to other things, having full use of Danzo's resources allowed Shiki to greatly advance his infiltration plans on the world's various hidden villages including the five greats. This resulted not only in an enhanced information network but also in a great harvest of souls.

Unfortunately, it would be far too risky to meld them until the problem in his soul was completely solved. Still, there was much knowledge to be gained from these souls.

Shiki acquired various elemental jutsu that would prove to be a great help for his development of original jutsu. He also obtained various puppet creation techniques from Suna that he planed to incorporate into an assembly line in his fortress.

The Uzumaki had seals that allowed one to control simple puppets to execute monotonous tasks but with Suna's knowledge of puppetry, it would be possible to make highly capable and autonomous puppets using stones of gelel as power cores.

There were still two things Shiki required to make the puppets he envisioned but those would be acquired some other time.

Shiki also managed to obtain something quite precious from Takigakure. To be honest, he didn't even remember that such a thing existed and the story of how he obtained it was quite interesting.

Naruto and Sasuke were an investment, as such, since it is good practise to keep an eye on one's investments, Shiki naturally placed some seals on them without their knowledge that would not only tell him their positions but also transmit sound and images.

Team 7 was protecting a kid from Takigakure and after observing them through the seals for a while, Shiki remembered a random OVA tha he only saw long after he finished Shippuden.

The mission involved Takigakure and something called the Hero Water that increased one's chakra at the cost of their lifespan. This gave Shiki some ideas.

First he used his superior speed to have a soul clone quickly reach their location. Then, after waiting for a window of opportunity during which Shibuki, the kid they were protecting was alone he enacted his plans.

"If I remember correctly , this kid is the next leader of Takigakure. If so, there's no way I won't take advantage of this! Hehehehe . . ."

Quickly putting him under genjutsu to verify what he remembered and to see if he could get some more info, Shiki quickly got what he wanted. Namely, the location of the Hero Water.

He then used Kotoamatsukami to place him under a suggestion that would make him respond in a certain way to commands from him, making Shibuki a sort of sleeper agent.

After the unexpected surprise from Takigakure, there was not much else for Shiki to do before the chunin exams and soon, the participants would start arriving.

Shiki had grown quite attached to the village so he would be reducing the amount of destruction it would suffer. First, unlike in canon, he would have the fake Danzo participate in the village's defence by ordering the Root shinobi to help.

He would also drop subtle hints to the Hokage, warning him of the threat without outright stating it. He needed the attack to happen to accomplish one of his schemes and it would also provide a nice excuse for the seat of Hokage to pass to Tsunade since she would take no shit from the elders.