101

Naruto looked over at the screen scrolling through running tallies of participants from each region. This time they didn't have any shrine maidens or helpers coming through, Yoko having impressed upon them that they didn't need to show off more than anything else, but there were a lot of students and civilians. The Land of Fire also had a bunch of satellite village shinobi showing up to prove that they could handle the testing, having intentionally made the trip to either Konoha or the capital to get to a transport pad.

All of the counts were broken out into registered shinobi, student, and civilian categories and was keeping track of those who were in each stage, had passed a stage, or had failed at a stage. The chakra meter test was currently the highest failure rate for civilians and the 'written' test was tripping up students with the international travel questions, but they'd just gotten started. Nobody had even reached the fifth test yet, and he'd put in ten total this time. Eleven if you counted the initial 'reach the island' component.

Still, all the village leaders and a good portion of the higher-ranked sensei were also running through things. This left him with no meetings for the day, so he was going to shortly return to working on preparing construction items. Building things ahead of time for something as large as a moon was far more time-consuming than he'd like.

Shisui had decided to give the genin testing a shot this time, mostly because he'd been teased about skipping it previously but also because he was eligible for whatever 'gifts' were going to be handed out. He obviously had no problems with his chakra levels, wondered if the pain-generating seal was set lower than before, and was a little embarrassed to admit that he'd needed to think about one of the questions on the written exam. To his credit it was a reasonably new change to things implemented due to the transport pads and he'd not done much traveling with them that would normally apply.

He was a little weirded out by the island's digital maps though. He had to loop around the island to a specific point on the far side of the central forest, which was back to being the dangerous forest instead of the arena today, and every map he got close to popped up with an indicator telling him that he was going the right direction. Stopping a distance away from one showed that it did the same for a civilian obviously participating in things, making him wonder how Naruto and/or Uzushio's technology division had pulled that off.

It also had him feeling jealous, because if the island was able to track everyone within it that easily then it was likely that all of Uzushio's other facilities could too. Automatic tracking of everyone, even if only applied to secure areas, would be an incredible security boon. Knowing where everyone was supposed to be going was the best part of it though, and he hoped that it could be applied to things like automatic unlocking of doors you should be going through and only those doors...when not using access cards, anyway.

As for the actual trip, he suspected that most civilians could make it if they pushed themselves a little. He'd barely needed a quarter of the time even with his quick stop to observe others.

Kushi had reviewed the information gathered through the combined intelligence networks of the Land of Shrines, Konohagakure, and Uzushiogakure on the five people wanting healing blessings today. Even without that she could feel that one of them was far too 'evil' for her tastes...and wondered why it was that was so obvious to her. She was reasonably certain that she'd shivered when he'd set foot on the shrine's grounds, despite not being there to watch him do so. Yoko claimed that this kind of reaction was probably due to people like him being subconsciously 'in tune' with dark chakra, but Shion's explanation was that a proper priest or priestess could sense evil.

Being in his presence was worse, but she had to put on a good show. He was a minor daimyo, after all, no matter what atrocities he was paying people to perform in the name of his greed.

"You have come asking for a blessing of healing," Kushi said to the five. "Be warned that if the gods do not find you worthy then the healing may not take, or they may enact their own punishment on you."

None of the five seemed worried about that, and the Fire Daimyo nodded as this was part of the script. She then moved down the line of them, forming a medical chakra Rasengan with light chakra mixed in for a purple sphere and pressing it into their chests. First the woman who had been injured and told that she'd never be able to have children, then a man who had lost all feeling in his left arm. Two of the shrine maidens that were better at medical diagnosis, nurses or so in level, had come over to bring the woman to an examination room at that point.

Kushi continued though, with a man who had gone blind in one eye being next. The next Rasengan she made was made with a medical scalpel base, looking identical despite being far deadlier, and was pressed into the minor daimyo's chest. He'd claimed joint pain from an old injury, but wouldn't have that problem anymore. She was back to a normal medical chakra base for the last man, who had been attacked by a wild animal and had deep infections the doctors didn't think they could help him with.

The minor daimyo had taken a few seconds to fall over, obviously dead, even as the other three men had started to comment about feeling much better. At least until they realized that there was a dead man among them now and quieted down.

"It appears that he wasn't worthy," Kushi said with a properly mournful tone, despite the man's death making the shrine feel cleaner to her. A couple of the other shrine maidens were obviously scrambling to gather items for moving the apparently-unexpected corpse, even though they'd all been informed of this during their morning meeting.

Having it obvious that they hadn't expected a death today was important, but spending too long trying to find the things they needed would create an entirely different problem for how they were perceived.

The Fire Daimyo took some time to recover himself, carefully moving over. "He...what would have made him unworthy?"

Kushi sighed. "I cannot say, though perhaps his family or advisors will be able to find out if he had particularly dark secrets? They would be able to determine things better than I can."

Fat chance of that, given how detailed the information brief was, but admitting that the Land of Shrines had access to that kind of thing would be insane.

Mei wasn't positive, but thought that Uzushio might've dropped their overall genin standards slightly. Either that or she'd improved more than she thought she had, which was possible. Though she'd been surprised when after running around the island she'd been tasked with proving she could consciously use her chakra. Any technique that was obviously performed with chakra, including bodily reinforcement or boosting of your physical abilities. The latter had to obviously be beyond what happened just because you had chakra though.

She'd easily handled that, of course.

Now she was considering two different things. One was that there were samurai in the mix this time, despite the Land of Iron not officially taking part in the full exams, and at least three she could see had made it past the using chakra stage. The other was that there was nowhere on the island to do the bulk of the chunin testing that Konoha and Uzushio had pioneered...which either meant doing something entirely new despite the treaty changes or that there was something else about the island that hadn't been revealed yet.

Personally, she was betting on the latter. Genin had supposedly wandered down into the innards of the island for their skill challenge yesterday, so who knew how much more was hiding down there.

She was pulled out of her musing when her turn came up, those registered for the exams having a priority queue that had delayed them slightly. Walking into the next room, which was larger than she'd expected and seemingly too large for the building they were in, she frowned slightly as she considered the forehead protector on the test's proctor. Six circles, a large one surrounded by five smaller ones. It wasn't the symbol of any village she knew of, yet all of the individual test proctors had one so far and the genin had commented on that being the case for their 'gifts' yesterday as well.

"This is a hand-to-hand combat test," the man said. "To pass you need to defeat all your opponents up to the yellow line before the timer hits zero. You can choose to continue to the orange and red lines if you wish to, but are forbidden from using weapons or visible attack techniques. Alternatively, you use weapons and techniques, but need to defeat all enemies in half the time and will be penalized for damage done to the surroundings."

Examining the area behind him, she noted that there was a white line that seemed like it was the edge of the 'testing area'. Halfway between that and the yellow line was a green line. "Crossing each line is a new difficulty level, I assume?"

"That's correct."

"Then let's get started."

He nodded and stepped off to the side. She wondered if there was a hidden control panel, only for zombies to suddenly pull themselves up out of the floor. Five in the first area, twenty in the second, and then it looked like thirty or so in each of the third and fourth areas. Screens in the walls lit up and displayed a countdown timer...that wasn't running yet. A gesture from him had her realizing that the timer would likely start when she crossed the line.

Mentally shrugging, she darted forward and took a slightly zig-zagging path to take off the heads of all five zombies in the first area. She then discovered that the second area wasn't just more zombies, but more skilled zombies. One of them had even managed to dodge her first, admittedly sloppy, punch. Cleaning up her form and pushing a little more chakra into her legs let her push though all of them, and when the last one fell a time appeared on the screens. She continued into the third area and found that these were probably mid-genin to low-chunin level, still trivial to deal with, and the last area were all solidly chunin level in their hand-to-hand skills.

When she was done she looked up at the screens and grinned. Well under half the allotted time, but under the constraints for only taking out the first two groups to pass.

Orochimaru sighed as she walked to the next testing station, annoyed with her performance so far due to odd fluctuations in her chakra control. She'd given herself a quick check-up a couple of days ago and found nothing obviously wrong, but had long known that having a different medic check on you was far more reliable. Especially for issues affecting your chakra control, which your lack of control might prevent you from spotting. Maybe she'd get lucky and find that Tsunade was working in the on-island hospital for the bulk of the exams? As annoying as her former teammate could be at times, she was very thorough with examinations.

Whatever the cause, it had caused a fizzle on a low-powered technique during the 'can you use chakra' test, but luckily you only needed to prove that you could use chakra in a specific time window. Switching to a less-fiddly but more powerful technique had been enough, if annoying to keep from damaging the room with. She was still unsure how the room fit into the building it was in though, as she'd ended up on the third floor and the room seemed to be larger than the building itself. Perhaps there had been seals involved that she'd not noticed?

Spotting Guren in the distance, she nodded to herself as that definitely confirmed that Ruri was somewhere on the island. There were far too many people with chakra to feel out individual signatures at any significant distance, on top of the entire island itself having its own overpowering feel masking weaker signatures. Ruri was now able to be left mostly on her own anyway, provided that she'd not had too many nuts from the chipmunks recently, and today had been anticipated and planned for on that front. Guren was mostly tasked with keeping the girl from going a bit too far with experiments at this point, and that experimenting wouldn't be happening here anyway. Perhaps they'd meet up and have dinner together after they were all done with their testing?

She paused and turned to look at the map screen she'd been passing. It was telling her where her next testing station was, which was honestly incredible monitoring capability that implied nobody was going to be going anywhere they weren't supposed to on this iteration of the island, but also where the hospital was. Had something spotted her using medical chakra to check herself?

Yoko frowned as she looked over an alert. It seemed that their guesses for when they'd get another visiting group at the shrine on the other continent had been wrong as a group had tripped the outer perimeter array and was on approach. Much faster than expected, so someone must've decided that this was a priority. Or perhaps they just wanted to get those sent to investigate more deeply out of their hair. Whatever the case, she'd need to take a nap this afternoon so that she was fully awake in the middle of the night for when the group arrived there early in the morning.

It was annoying enough working across a single continent with the differences in sunrise and sunset times. Adding in other continents was proving to be annoying. Sadly, the automated 'shrine keeper' system wasn't good enough for the deeper interactions expected of curious and clueless visitors. Without a full local computer system it couldn't even fill in for shrine maidens in the most basic of interactions with visitors and the entire current generation of things wasn't that great at dealing with completely unexpected questions.

Naruto had to have the exam island's systems monitored by a small team that could provide answers to such questions if they came up. They had no such system set up for Shrine Island or the other continent's outpost, and only five people that even properly understood the language spoken in that part of the continent. Other parts of the continent had enough interaction with the Elemental Nations via merchants right now to make the language barrier less of an issue, but Yoko was the only one directly affiliated with the shrines that could likely communicate with these visitors.

Training shrine maidens or a potential permanent priestess, or priest, for the outpost was going to be problematic from that point of view alone.

Still, there were things that they'd been working on that had been put into place. Specifically, signage in the local language explaining some details about how to properly interact with a shrine, which gods were enshrined there and why they were important, and warnings about violence on the shrine grounds. She instructed the shrine keeper system to double-check all that signage, just in case, so that she'd know if she needed to start with replacing any of it after her nap.

A was much happier with his performance with kunai and shuriken today, compared to his first evaluation of genin testing, though hadn't expected the follow-up test to see if you knew how to take care of your weapons. It was a critical, if frequently overlooked, skill and he was honestly happy that it had been included. At the same time, he wasn't surprised that it had obviously tripped up some civilians that had likely never needed to properly maintain an actual weapon. They'd...done decently enough, based on tool maintenance, but not well enough.

That a couple of samurai had sat down with a small group of said civilians to teach them properly after seeing them fail was mostly notable in that they'd beaten several shinobi to the punch. Seeing anyone disrespect weapons that badly was annoying, and it was very likely that anyone who specialized in weapon use would've wanted to correct the group.

Still, that left him able to continue on, and based on the flag he'd been given he suspected that there was a tower to climb. That hadn't been outright stated, but seemed reasonably obvious based on the previous time he'd done this. Following the prompts of the map screens was simple enough though, and it wasn't long before he came to...a small park? Looking up, there was a platform floating in the air above the park, with not-quite-taut ropes leading down to several of the trees.

Apparently 'walk or climb up a tower' was too pedestrian for Uzushio these days.

Shrugging, he moved into the trees to see how the ropes were anchored. They seemed to be solidly attached to a ring that was solidly anchored in the tree, too solidly really. There had to be a bar or something embedded in the tree itself for this. However it was done, he started walking up the rope anyway, a combination of balance and surface-sticking making it trivial for him. Halfway up he paused as a young...chipmunk girl? She scurried up one of the other ropes at high speed, swapping her flag, and then diving down another rope. Despite her age, she'd moved almost like she was on flat ground, which was honestly impressive. He also thought she looked familiar, but wasn't sure where from.

Shaking his head, he continued his more leisurely walk up to the platform. It was surprisingly stable in the air, as though fixed in place and not floating, and swapping his flag was easy enough. Instead of going down one of the ropes he instead flipped over to the underside of the platform, partially out of curiosity if there was something hard to see holding it there, but found nothing before he dropped down to the ground with a gentle flip to land on his feet.

As he walked away he noticed that one of his own genin was moving up the rope by essentially climbing it instead of balancing and using surface-sticking...but then again, the rope wasn't taut enough to overcome balance issues. If you weren't confident you could stay on top then it made more sense to do things that way, and the previous towers had handholds for those unsure of their ability to use surface-sticking to get up the towers as well.

Mifune was finding the genin testing both easier than expected and much harder than expected. It was very obviously not designed around being in full armor in particular, but very few shinobi wore full armor and instead relied on the improved mobility not wearing such protections granted them. This affected the comfort of the written test and the combined stamina and endurance test quite a bit and served as a major hindrance to getting up to the impossibly-floating platform.

That his people still weren't used to using chakra as freely as shinobi did was another matter, of course. The overall attitude was changing, with a larger number of utility techniques now in use, but anything 'deceptive' was still looked at as dishonorable. They were starting to use surface-sticking and water-walking quite a bit more than they used to though, and elemental techniques that didn't rely on a weapon were starting to pick up in popularity as well. Illusions of any kind were currently being ignored, but non-illusionary clones were a topic of interest.

Arriving at the point to turn in his flag, he glanced at the monitors there showing progress. He already knew that probably half of his people had failed at the fifth test where obvious use of chakra had to be demonstrated, but was a little annoyed at how many had failed at the following zombie elimination as well. Then again, samurai rarely practiced fighting without any weapons at all and the last group of zombies had been surprisingly skilled at dodging. Most of those who had reached the flag-swapping had succeeded though.

He was given a new destination by the woman behind the counter for the last test though, so thanked her for her time and moved on.

Ruri was happy that she'd made it through all of the tests so far and knew that this was the last one before she was done. But there was a line, and she wasn't participating in the chunin exams, so anyone who was got priority. Which would be a lot less annoying if a bunch hadn't been sent to this particular testing station. She was distracting herself from the annoyance by trying to figure out how every building she'd entered today seemed to be larger on the inside than the outside would imply.

She wasn't figuring much out there. Seals could store things inside of them, and could make openings smaller, but she'd never seen anything that said they could make the inside of something bigger. Unless the building had been built bigger and then seals had been used to make it smaller? But that seemed far too dangerous because of what would happen if the seals failed and the building was suddenly full-size again. Plus the only seals she'd seen able to make things smaller only worked on openings.

...but she and Orochimaru-mama weren't very good with seals. Maybe they just didn't know enough?

"Ruri," the man at the desk called, snapping her out of her thoughts. A moment later she'd moved down the hall to her assigned room. The door was open, though closed behind her when she entered.

"Your final test is to make it through the next room in under ten minutes," the woman in the room said, gesturing at another door. "If you retreat back through this room then you fail."

Ruri nodded, then opened the door and stepped through. She found herself faced with three large cats. Her first instinct was to jump back out of the room, but stopped when part of her screamed that would be failing.

She was not going to fail again!

It was obvious that the cats were guarding the door at the other end of the room, and they were focused on her. Going up and over was probably not going to work, but she darted to the side and went up the wall anyway. They were less...

Her train of thought was obliterated by one of the cats chasing her up the wall. She sped up, continuing across the ceiling and darting around the lights with the cat following her, before finally recalling that she had kunai and a sword. One of the former was pulled out just in time to throw it into the face of one of the other two cats that had tried going up one of the other walls to get ahead of her.

Swinging around one of the lights, she pulled the small sword out and used it to block an attempt at getting her with claws, then pushed back towards the cat and cut its head mostly off. She then swung down under the lights, diving at the last of the three cats. Twisting in mid-air let her dodge a lunge and she put the sword through the cat's side, tumbling as she did so and landing on her tail. The cat didn't get back up though, and she collected the one kunai she'd thrown before leaving out the back door...to come out in the room she'd left? Or maybe the woman had just gone around some other way.

"Good job," the woman said. "You can claim your forehead protector from any of the registration desks."

"Thank you," Ruri replied, wondering how long it was going to take her heart to stop feeling like it was trying to escape her chest.

Naruto looked over the sizable crowd that had gathered on the edge of the island, in what was ostensibly a park with a great view off the edge of the island. This one held the village leaders, including Mifune, as well as the chunin exam hopefuls and their sensei. The other four 'parks' had clones and held the rest of those that had made it through things.

"Congratulations to those of you who passed today's testing," he said. "As promised, those of you who are not participating in the rest of the exams will be receiving a prize. Those in the other four gathering points will be able to visit the shops on the island for two free meal scrolls and a weapon pouch, as can those other than the village leaders here. For those concerned about how useful a weapon pouch will be to them, it should also trivially hold various tools and the storage seals in them are food-grade so you can even use them as a snack pouch instead."

"Now I kind of want one," Mei half-mumbled.

Ignoring that, he continued. "But that brings up the question of what I'm giving your leaders, and the answer to that is in the boxes behind us." He gestured at a table with boxes, each a little over thirty centimeters tall. "One for each leader, they're all the same so no need to worry about who gets which one."

He waited as all of the boxes were claimed, and then on unspoken agreement they all opened them together. Inside each found a scale model of the island set on a stand with a small set of controls. All of the leaders looked a little confused, though the controls were still 'locked'.

"I'm not sure what we'd want with a decorative copy of the island," Onoki commented.

"Ah," Naruto said. "Right now they're all synchronized to the island's current state."

"Okay?"

Horns suddenly going off startled everyone. The dome in the middle of the island, and the domes on all the models, lit up with warning lights. Then the doors on the sides of the models opened up, startling those holding them, and the platforms started to emerge. It took a few minutes for the entire deployment process to happen, causing shock in all five areas outside of those from Uzushio, and then the domes on the five platforms deployed so that they could flip to individual elemental areas.

"First thing in the morning the chunin exams themselves begin," Naruto said. "And we need plenty of room for everyone to get their testing in." He then turned to the leaders. "In an hour your models will finish powering up and you'll be able to turn off the synchronization so that you can play with configurations."

The looks on their faces, especially the few that had obviously realized that the models could not possibly have held the platforms with normal physics just as the island couldn't have, were quite amusing.

Onoki looked over the model of the exam island, which as promised had unlocked and was now able to be customized instead of staying in sync with the real one. There was a button to retract the five outer platforms, dials to pick the environment for each platform and central dome, and a toggle switch to change back to mirroring the real island. An instruction booklet, that doubled as a description of the island's actual capabilities for 'if you want to rent it' purposes, that the models were as much for planning purposes as anything else, allowing them to play with layouts they might want to use.

Just the model was plainly impossible, let alone the island itself, and the combined implications for what Uzushio could do were worrying. At the same time, it was obvious that a less-significant version of the tricks needed had been used on most of the island's buildings as you'd need things to be much bigger on the inside than the outside to make any of this possible.

He was pulled out of his musing by Kurotsuchi coming in. "I've got an initial report from the science-types."

"Oh?" he asked.

"They think that Uzushio figured out how to build things in four physical dimensions instead of three. Maybe five."

"...I have no idea what that means."

She dropped a very thick stack of paper on his desk. "This is supposedly the short explanation, pulled from archives, though they've promised a summary in the next three days."

"Doubt I'll understand the summary either."

"I'd say that was a sign that it was time to retire if I thought I had any hope of understanding it."

"Might retire to leave all this insanity to you anyway."

"And I'm not sure I want the job right now."

"Which is, ironically enough, a sign that you're more ready for it than you were before."

"At least we have a better clue about all the proctors with the weird forehead protectors. They're indicating affiliation with the island instead of Uzushio."

He snorted and grabbed the book on the island, flipping to the right chapter. It took a moment to find the page he wanted. "Take a look at this."

She took the book and glanced over the page, then obviously stopped and started reading it more carefully. "They're all puppets of some kind?"

"Apparently. With a small team of observers that also act as question-checkers for when the automated control system has no answer for a question that someone asked them. Their use comes standard with renting the island, drastically reducing the number of shinobi needed to run an examination cycle."

"Uzushio automated examinations?"

"Not entirely. You still need observer teams, medics, and a few proctors for specific things."

"But...even a minor village could probably run...oh. That's the point, isn't it?"

He nodded. "They've negated the 'only major villages can run exams' problem by removing ninety percent of the things the minor villages don't have available. There's a claim in there that this also helps ensure that anyone using the island can meet minimum standards for testing, which is hard to disagree with. When we rented the previous iteration we couldn't run things nearly as well due to not dedicating as many shinobi to running testing stations."

She flipped through the small book, checking other areas, before closing it and sighing. "They're determined to scream that they're moving along faster than anyone has any hope of catching up with."

"Honestly? I think Naruto just doesn't know when to take a vacation."