Chapter 9

In about three months, I'll be able to switch to part-time work and finally focus not only on clan-affiliated cripples who haven't yet gone through the gigantic hospital queue but also on medical research, with plenty of material available—both living and dead. Although a hundred bodies had to be sacrificed for the hospital's patients, I still have accumulated enough scrolls with fresh bodies.

Fortunately, making them is only a bit more complicated than food storage scrolls, unlike those containing living captives, which are sold in the shop but aren't as popular as food storage scrolls. If only every tenth shinobi on the front line had one of these, the hospital wouldn't be short on organs for transplants, eliminating the need to beg from the Torture and Interrogation Department for unnecessary prisoners. But does anyone care about this except the staff?

Of course not! The Hokage and the elders don't care about the crippled and wounded since new ones can always be trained! It's no wonder they've been promoting sending children to the shinobi academy among ordinary citizens. Mito told me that right after the war, the Senju clan began to subtly and unobtrusively remove control over shinobi training from their hands in favor of village leadership.

Over the past five years, the founding clan has gradually been regaining lost positions in both influence and manpower, having arranged several advantageous marriages with strong fighters from hereditary shinobi families that maintained political neutrality. And the new generation has grown up.

However, no one wants overly strong Senju, so both the Hokage and his allies, as well as other clan heads, are making significant efforts to restore the pre-war political balance, where the clan of the first Hokage did not wield too much influence.

The Nara and their allies haven't remained on the sidelines either. Although I tried to discuss with Shensu the suspicions of deliberate sabotage in the medical field and the assignment of undesirable clan fighters to the worst frontlines, nothing came of it. My uncle acknowledged some likelihood of such a theory, but substantial contributions from Sunagakure and Iwagakure effectively silenced the discontented clans.

Alas, even shinobi are people with all their inherent flaws, such as greed, avarice, and stupidity. These flaws are not absent even in the smartest, like the Nara. Along with the reluctance to go against the still powerful Hiruzen, the very generous bribe, and the reasonable expectation of losses during the war anyway, my suspicions were brushed aside. I didn't dare to approach other clans, even allied ones, as the response was already known in advance.

In general, before the war, Konoha's forces numbered over twenty thousand shinobi, and seventy percent of them were clan fighters. After the peace treaties with Iwa and Suna, half of our remaining shinobi are now clan members. If this trend continues after the Third Shinobi World War, clans will play far from a leading role in the village's politics, unlike when the village was founded.

Given Danzo's obsessive desire to control the clans and Hiruzen's suspicious moves, deliberately increasing losses among elite forces and then replacing them with more numerous but easier-to-manage cannon fodder, this doesn't seem unrealistic. Iwagakure, with its thirty-five thousand shinobi, uses just such a strategy (a few founding clans holding important positions, and the rest as expendable forces).

Even though their fighters are of much lower quality, using three hundred jounin on a suicide mission for the Tsuchikage is quite acceptable compared to the results achieved. Even if Oonoki lost, Iwagakure still has more troops than us—nineteen thousand compared to twelve—so they won't face post-war problems with fulfilling orders, unlike Konoha, which is stretching its forces between earning money and trying to fully secure the borders in the most dangerous directions. Considering that all the other major countries are around us, this is quite a headache.

Unfortunately, after returning from the war, both the Nara elders and the senior Uzumaki have slowly been training me to understand politics both between clans and various village factions (such as the merchant alliance, the bureaucratic apparatus, and the Daimyo's representatives), as well as with neighboring countries. Given my affiliation with the ruling Nara family, if something happens to Shikaku, I will inherit the position of clan head, so understanding all this is absolutely necessary for me.

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