92

Yoko looked over the island, grinning a little. The apparent primary shrine building sat at the high point of the forest-covered island and could be approached from two directions. One end was an arrival platform for more public transport pads, somewhat close to but not at sea level. The other end was a cove with a dock. Natural-looking 'walls' of stone surrounded the island otherwise. Along the main path up were stairs between landings, each landing having a torii at the start of the next set of stairs, and water channels to either side of them. Those were covered at the landings, due to the spiral paths that came from both arrival areas for those that couldn't or didn't wish to use the stairs. Each path hit every other landing, not meeting until you reached the top.

The spiraling paths were home to a number of smaller shrines and had their own torii along them. All those in training would be expected to check on those shrines frequently, the trip along the spiral being a decent stamina exercise for early training, but the automated shrine maiden puppets wandering the island could keep them decently maintained and alerts would be generated if something they couldn't handle was wrong.

Despite being styled like one, the central building was less shrine and more tower. The 'public' portion of the tower went up, a spiral staircase passing through rings of torii stopping at five points along the way. Each of those points allowed rope bridge access to a floating lightly-forested island holding a shrine, though the islands rotated around the tower at different rates with the rope bridges connected to a spinning ring at the tower itself. At the top was a shrine to Amaterasu, with a glowing ball that would keep the bulk of the island lit up at all times. Below that was a shrine to Suijin, water flowing from the honden and spilling off of the island in a couple of spots. When those flows came close to falling on the Susano shrine below it they would turn into rain clouds in a ring around the tower, watering the crops on the Susano island and the Inari one below it. Otherwise, the water would fall down to the base of the tower to be spread through the water channels. The lowest and physically smallest island held a shrine to Omoikane.

She'd decided against coverings at ground level or for the bridges for when they passed through the water falling from the Suijin island. Traditional umbrellas were going to be kept on hand if people were concerned about it, and the various seals built into the paths and bridges would prevent them from ever becoming 'slick' when wet. The spinning rings also had subtle seals to make them less unstable than they looked like they should be, and were largely enclosed for safety except for where they connected to the bridges.

The tower also went down, allowing access to the sprawling underground complex that sat under the main island. That was split into multiple 'levels'. The least secure contained sleeping areas for those not staying in the quarters available in the shrine complexes themselves, training areas and supply rooms, the private transport pads, the summoning stones for arriving on the island, and the ever-present underground hot springs. Below that were the seals for granting specific abilities, the beast man formula system for those who wanted animal features, storage and maintenance for the automated puppets, and the summoning contract registration pads. At the bottom were the various computer systems themselves, the actual summoning contract, and the primary control seals.

Naruto's contribution of a 'ring of fog' around the island made it far more 'unearthly' in overall appearance, with that doubling as a security measure. Only someone with a light chakra node actively powering a specially-designed key seal could open the path through the fog to reach the dock or depart from it. Otherwise the artificial currents around the island would drive ships around the edge of the fog instead of letting them through. An illusion bubble was tied into things, hiding the island from view and making it look like the whole thing was just a solid fog bank from outside.

Things weren't entirely ready though. The seal empowering everything had the light chakra beads tied in for the spiritual experience, but the plant life and few animals on the island hadn't gotten the full effect yet. Equipping an area for bulk-printing the various seals to be sold also had to happen, as she'd decided against growing those on bushes, though each shrine would also have a small setup for that as well. Then there were the stationary puppet 'statues', beyond the ones representing the god at each shrine, that needed to be finished up and installed. Two for each arrival point, pairs at points flanking the main paths, a scattered set throughout the spiral paths...

Yameki looked over her notes from evaluation of the old Uzumaki masks. Ten out of twenty-seven stored in the shrine outside of Konoha had been destroyed due to things they were connected to being removed from play, even if how that happened for the Shinigami mask hadn't been explained, but that had left seventeen to determine if they were safe enough to keep around or should be intentionally destroyed. Without, ideally, wearing most of them.

So of course, they'd had paperwork clones of volunteers put several of them on. That invariably went absolutely horribly for the clones and occasionally caused problems when the clones dispelled.

First they'd gone through the five base element masks, all now destroyed because they couldn't even be worn by a clone supposedly made of the element and immediate medical intervention was needed nine times out of ten when the clone dispelled and the flood of now-elemental chakra returned to the volunteer. The yin and yang masks had been similarly problematic, though with very different effects on the volunteers, and had been studied longer before being destroyed. One of Hinata's clones had worn the 'nature' mask, and it had exploded off of the clone.

After a sizable amount of testing, a couple of captured bandits were used for a single test of each of the 'sun' and 'stars' masks. The former had led to the bandit exploding into a massive burst of fire and the latter had drained the bandit to a husk almost immediately due to the chakra drain. Both masks were destroyed afterwards, and the promised payments were sent off to the next-of-kin of the bandits.

The two masks tied to humanity worked wonderfully if you convinced Naruto to let you drag someone to another dimension with nobody else in it, left them there alone, and they wore the mask...provided they didn't mind not having chakra afterwards. Naruto and Yoko could restore chakra afterwards though, which made correcting a couple of things from Konoha's experimentation with the beast man formula improvements possible. They also made stripping the 'beast' part possible, though you rarely came out of the process looking like yourself.

Then there was the 'dreams' mask. Paperwork clones that put those on vanished, but didn't dispel immediately. Instead, they 'dispelled' when the nearest person in REM sleep woke up, with very vague and hard to parse memories making it back to the volunteers and the just-woken person generally complaining about 'weird dreams'. There were requests for further study there, but it felt like things weren't going to work out in any useful way.

One of the spacetime masks instantly dispelled any clone that put it on. If the clone was an elemental paperwork clone then the element they decomposed to was horribly twisted and distorted, and currently they were using earth paperwork clones to see if there were patterns. Another caused any clone putting it on to vanish, and one out of twenty seemed to dispel and return distorted memories to the volunteer. The last 'tagged' clones somehow, but that tagging didn't return to the volunteer and they'd not yet observed anything else. So far they'd not seen the 'vanishes without a trace' random effect described in the older notes, and hadn't progressed to testing with bandits yet.

Last, and most infuriating, was the 'healing' mask. When worn by clones they ended up becoming surprisingly-stable medical chakra clones that after twenty to thirty minutes excelled at healing. Unfortunately, when worn by captured bandits things went quite differently. Six out of the nine tested so far had turned into a living blob of multispecies cancer, two more just had their bodies stop working entirely, and the one remaining ended up with a chakra-free perfectly healthy body with no memories.

Needing to pay out the promised payments to next-of-kin had been annoying for the last one as they had a perfectly healthy body that just didn't have a mind in it anymore. Which meant that they'd both made the payment and had to take care of a seeming adult newborn to see how much it was able to recover. While trying to figure out if they could duplicate that effect without obliterating chakra or memories through making the mask less potent, but without yet knowing why that one bandit lived.

"Hey," Okachu called from the door. "Have you seen the pictures of Yoko's new 'shrine island'?"

Yameki blinked. "I don't think I was aware that she was building one."

He nodded and came in, dropping some pictures on her desk. "Doesn't surprise me, as the pictures are the first I knew of it too."

She took the pictures and flipped through them, before pausing and going back to look more closely. "What in the world..."

"There's an invitation for seals and technology division members to swing through to take a look for sanity checking before she starts bringing trainees in."

"There's nothing holding those islands up unless the seals on those bridges are incredible."

"I'm betting that they hold themselves up and the bridges are really just reinforced rope bridges. My bigger concern is the lack of obvious safety fences, though there's something weird with the trees so that might have something to do with it."

"...those two are ruining our reputation."

He blinked in response to that. "The 'all Uzumaki are crazy' one?"

"Yes."

"By doing things that are insane by our standards?"

"They're making the rest of us look normal!"

Naruto looked over the suggestions Odoroki had for Yoko's village, nodding as he did so. In theory she should've gone to Yoko directly, but he was far more accessible to her right now and she knew that going to one of them was largely going to both of them. "Some of these do make sense, but I think we're still against keeping it exclusively female. There are a dozen potential priests already identified."

"It's a village of shrine maidens though?" Odoroki questioned.

"While the Uzumaki shrine in Konoha only had shrine maidens, it was partially because until I was born there weren't any male Uzumaki living in Konoha. While keeping that 'tradition' was fine for Konoha and Uzushio by extension, Yoko and I agree that it would be highly unusual and somewhat discriminatory to only have shrine maidens in the new 'village'. She's actually planning on transitioning to a 'priestess' role more than a 'shrine maiden' one, there are male shrine keepers other than priests, and setting up shrines with a minimal staff of three to five will be better in many areas than keeping things to a single isolated shrine maiden."

She frowned, but nodded after a moment. "Okay, I suppose I can see that."

"We have been considering what to do about forehead protectors though, as there are international agreements about those that could be a potential annoyance. Using a medallion that can be worn in various ways and glows faintly with light chakra when held by a properly trained individual would solve several issues, and I can easily bind the 'key seal' to it. A torii symbol on the medallion that's what actually glows would probably be ideal, and then a torii tattoo on the individual to serve as an additional authenticator for the key seal? I'll need to think about it, but it would probably be a good way to handle the bite-to-heal beads."

"...beads?"

"They don't create an inheritable condition, requiring that those wanting to be able to do the 'healing blessing' trick be trained properly instead of merely having the correct ancestry. If sealed properly they can't be removed without destroying them."

"Ah."

"Yoko definitely likes the idea of the torii lighting up in some way as those with sufficiently strong light chakra pass through them though, only wishing that she'd thought of it before putting in hundreds of the things on the island. Probably don't want that to be tied to the key seals though, so that visiting priests and priestesses from elsewhere can trigger it. You think that a shrine on the flying island would be a good idea?"

"You left three places for one."

"I left three potential expansion areas in the starting area. That doesn't mean any of them were intended to hold a shrine, and getting the proper seals in place would be mildly annoying with everything else spread across the island. I'll think about it. We've got a bit before the existing shrine maidens will actually be ready due to the extra training on producing a few things to sell at the shrines anyway. Er, you do realize that right now you're effectively not going to register as a proper 'shrine maiden' under the entire new system, right?"

Odoroki nodded. "A necessary sacrifice to properly sell the whole to the masses."

Tsunade sighed as she finished updating the records for a couple of samurai children from the 'joint education' program between the Land of Fire and the Land of Iron. These two had been injured during training in the Land of Iron, but the medics there hadn't been able to fully treat the two. Fixing that issue was a longer-term goal as well, but for now they were at least able to get the kids healthy enough to train without causing longer-term problems.

Having an academy class alternating between spending a week here in Konoha and a week in the Land of Iron was annoying in several respects. A couple of samurai traveled back and forth, and the academy instructors assigned to the class did as well. Adding a medic-nin or two might not be a horrible idea. Especially if the kids were going to get harmed because they learned 'awesome shinobi tricks' that had let them injure their samurai teachers. That the attempt to block the strikes had led to the kids being injured was inconsequential to them.

'Dishonorable tactics' that worked was one of the many lessons that the samurai wanted to disseminate in their own ranks, because in an actual fight honor was probably going to be held by the losers. In exchange, Konoha was picking up a lot of armor and weapon techniques and getting better access to raw materials from the Land of Iron. Though it might not be a bad idea to have some weapons with special tricks for the class when they graduated, as all of them were going to have at least some weapon specialization and possibly bits of armor to wear.

...actually, if nobody else had thought of that, it seemed like it might be something Naruto could surprise them with. As an added bonus, he'd include enough insane extras so as to make the older samurai jealous of the things that shinobi could do with smithing...even if the bulk of shinobi couldn't do anything remotely like that. It would need to be brought up on her next trip to Uzushio.

Kakuzu watched as the mountain he'd just spent a week rigging explosives in started to collapse. He'd not expected to find the actual Jashin using a combination of bloodline traits and seals to play 'god', but hadn't shied away from attacking the man. Unfortunately, he was incredibly difficult to even incapacitate and had taken two weeks of fighting to at least pin down. Even that wouldn't have worked if not for accidentally disrupting the seals feeding the man chakra.

Killing him for good was still a problem. Kakuzu had rigged up seals to drain the man's chakra constantly, originally researched in case Hidan needed to be put down, and had followed that by building an air-tight 'tomb' covered in reinforcement seals. Molten rock had then been wrapped around that, said rock had been surrounded by water, and the water had been sealed in as well. More reinforcement seals coated the rock around the water, pulling from the chakra being drained from deeper within, and masking seals covered the next layer to make the man difficult to find.

Dropping the rest of the mountain into the tunnels that had once led to the man's sanctum was the current step. Smoothing the surface out and using a couple of tricks to encourage plant growth would follow so as to make it look less like a recently-collapsed mountain. When that was done he'd need to decide what to do next. Maybe build a shrine and tend to it as a cover for keeping an eye on the place, because he wasn't really all that confident in his own seals. It should only take fifty, maybe eighty years for Jashin to perish for good...

"I'm not sure why you need us to check on things," Jiraiya said as they prepared to take a trip through a transport pad he'd not previously known was in the Uzumaki compound. Then again, it might not have been there before today.

"Because I'm pulling from Konoha and Uzushio for people," Yoko replied. "And thus want to be sure that some of the extra bits in the shrine designs will work for Konoha."

"She has a point," Shisui admitted just before Yoko activated the transport pad.

A moment later they'd traveled to their destination, which appeared to be a lone pad in the middle of a ring of shrines...in the middle of nowhere. Jiraiya frowned. "This doesn't look anything like your island."

"This is the test set for the shrines to be set up," Yoko explained. "Initially for the honden effects, but I built them out with different bunker layouts."

Looking at the different shrines made it obvious what a couple of them were. "So obviously Suijin with water flowing, and I assume that the fox statues represent Inari, but those are the only obvious ones of the lot."

"The Susano honden has a calming effect on winds in the area and a mild boost to crops within a distance of it. Compared to that, the Inari honden has a wider and more powerful boost to crops. Then there's the Omoikane honden using a clever seal array the Uzushio seal division figured out to promote thinking things through instead of being rash, though the range is limited so I stuck a 'meeting hall' in its area of effect in addition to the offerings hall. There really isn't anything special about the Amaterasu honden as all the effects I've got for that are less than suitable for a normal shrine."

She led them into the Amaterasu shrine, based on where she'd gestured while explaining things, and the torii at the entrance sparkled as she passed under it. But only when she did, which was interesting. Once through the gate everything felt more 'pure', right down to the trickle of natural energy he picked up as a sage, to the point where he actually stopped following Yoko in shock.

"I can't do more than three 'levels' as you pass deeper into the shrines," Yoko said, obviously having noticed his shock. "So of course I've got the strongest effect at the hondens, though only when they're properly 'active'. The outermost layer is the only one that keeps working even if the hondens are off as it's a side effect of the powering seals, but only so long as someone with a light chakra node is visiting the grounds regularly."

"It's honestly barely noticeable compared to the island," Shisui commented. "But distinctly different from basically any genjutsu-induced effect. Calming on a very low level that's impossible to properly describe. Uzushio's hot springs all produce a similar feeling these days too."

"That's pulling the 'dark chakra' out of the environment. Anyone who draws on it will be severely weakened just being near an active shrine due to the overall concentrations of 'loose' dark chakra being reduced. Actually being on the shrine grounds is an effective disabling of their ability to draw upon dark chakra as there won't be any available, and hitting the second level of concentration is going to start forcibly purging any they'd accumulated off of the grounds."

Seeing the underground bunkers, which included sufficient quarters for a couple of teams to stay in and multiple secret ways in and out, was somewhat anticlimactic. But they were able to make a couple of suggestions, such as setting up a room specifically to hold maps of the general area for review. The thought of putting in a more 'civilian-friendly' secret access had come up, but had been rejected on the basis that doing so would be letting the secondary nature of the shrines be too widely known. A change in the way the provided phones were set up was also suggested, to make it a little easier for a team's sensei to have a more private conversation away from their team if needed.

Tokishi frowned as she looked at her most recent failure to produce a 'protection from bandits' tag. Placing it next to the working sample was followed by comparing them, and it didn't take long to see that there were a couple of places where the ink hadn't gone through the screen properly. This meant checking the screen, and she flinched upon seeing that it had a couple of hairs stuck to it.

It took a few minutes to clean the screen properly, and then she set back up for another test run. New paper into the holder, screen down, ink across the screen, screen up, a pulse of chakra to dry the ink...and this time the pulse of chakra also noticeably activated the seal like it was supposed to. Grinning, she still checked it against the known-working sample before placing the new slip into the 'good' box and starting to make more.

The seal masters really didn't like this method of producing seals, though probably because it took little to no knowledge of seals to produce working seals. Apparently it worked great for explosive seals too, but storage tags and scrolls were quite a bit more finicky.

Once she had fifty good tags she moved over to the next station. Each paper tag was dipped in a protective white coating and hung to drip dry. Then she cleaned up the first station so that it would be ready for Kiyori when it was her turn later. This gave enough time for the protective coating to settle properly on the tags, and chakra hastened the drying process. With that complete, Tokishi had to decorate each of the tags to turn them into proper omamori.

She needed to make five different kinds for now. They should all protect from bandits, at least for a time, but the goal was to have them be good luck items for other things. This process wasn't automated, and Yoko had claimed to not know entirely how it worked, but channeling light chakra into the chakra-reactive paints seemed to make them actually work...for others, anyway, but not the one who made them.

Ten general good luck items were followed by ten for health, then ten for fertility. She marked those on the chart, then looked at what others had made for their last two sets. It seemed that they hadn't had many for relationships or traveling yet, so she made ten of each of those as well and marked down that she'd done so. Wrapping all fifty in the appropriate prepared silk wrappings followed, and she placed them in the cubby with her name on it so that they could be evaluated later.

Sighing, she went to get a quick snack before starting up on Rasengan practice. Only a few of them currently had enough chakra to attempt it, and Yoko had decided that you couldn't be a 'priestess' without being able to do the 'healing blessing' to people.

Yoko looked over things. The past few months had been surprisingly calm in a general sense, though a couple of missing-nin had made attempts at creating larger-scale problems. They'd failed miserably, subtle sabotage of one of them being enough and the other's plans being negated by the destruction of the God Tree. Birthdays had passed without too much fanfare, experimentation had shown that using summons only as the feed genetics for the beast man formula seemed to be universally compatible for some reason, and all the shrine maidens had jumped at the chance to have summon-fox features.

...they'd even voted on making it a requirement at the end of successful training. The foxes themselves loved the whole thing, of course.

Konoha and Uzushio had their shrines upgraded to the 'new standard', the girls had their new medallions and the seals that went with them, a sizable stock of saleable items had been prepared, and nineteen candidate locations had been identified for initial remote shrines. They could only staff three right now though, so she was doing her best to not choose based on 'secondary benefits'. All nineteen had already been purchased, and would all likely end up with shrines, but which to start with had to be decided.

Eventually she picked one in the Land of Earth, where a newly-rejuvenated area had a settlement that had outgrown their water supply. There was enough room for a compound shrine there, so setting up a Suijin shrine to handle water and an Inari shrine to help with crops felt suitable. After that it seemed prudent to handle a similar situation with a settlement in the Land of Wind, but that one was on the coast. They still needed fresh water, so Suijin would be good there, but storms came through regularly so a Susano shrine to help with the winds in the immediate area seemed like a better choice than Inari.

...grudgingly, she decided that they'd 'revitalize' the shrine in the Land of Fire's capital as one of the first three as well. It would keep the Fire Daimyo happy, and possibly lead to other countries extending invitations.

Now, the next question was how much of a show to put on. 'Run-down shrine revitalizing after the honden is sealed' was a good show, but primarily because nobody capable of detecting genjutsu was present. Seal-based tricks could probably be used to replace normal genjutsu though, so coming up with a way of doing that kind of 'reveal the replacement' trick such that it could fool most shinobi present would be a good way to prove that the shrines were 'accepted' by those enshrined...

Shisui sighed as he looked over his calendar. The Daimyo had managed to get on the top of the 'new shrine' list, likely as a reasonably-close 'test case', but was turning it into a whole political ordeal. Dragging other daimyo in, and expecting Shisui to show up in person. It was possible that Yoko was doing too much to 'sell' things too, which was just going to complicate interactions down the road. Well, from her point of view it would simplify things, but eventually the civilians would insist on the shrines being taken into account for any number of reasons.

Yoko was also now officially playing 'head priestess' though, with a corresponding change in her daily attire, and the three best shrine maidens between Konoha and Uzushio were also going the priestess route to run the first three shrines. Others with less chakra available were going to remain 'shrine maidens' instead, and they'd started training up some boys to be helpers and possible eventual priests as well.

"I don't seem to have any existing obligations that I can use to dodge the shrine opening," Shisui finally said with a sigh.

"Because the Daimyo checked all of our schedules ahead of time," Hiashi replied. "Because he knows that it would be rude to expect us to change plans for him unless there was no other way to handle it."

"Which is generally only used for meetings, not scheduling major events that we shouldn't need to attend."

"He wishes to show off, and there will be a procession from here to the capital anyway. This just simplifies the arrangements for it."

"It's a religious ceremony more than anything else though. Asking for security to prevent issues would be one thing, but not our personal presence."

"Then make that argument," Kakashi pointed out. "You are allowed to question things within reason, and this sounds like it fits the 'within reason' side of things. The only possible sticking point there would be if Naruto was invited and plans on going."

Shisui blinked, then checked the provided list of invited guests. Naruto wasn't on it. "Not a horrible point. Differentiating 'you are expected to come' from 'you are welcome to come' is an art I haven't perfected."

"They make it intentionally impossible to perfect," Tsunade retorted. "If we don't have any issues there, volunteering a team or two to help with security would probably smooth things over. Having you attend is likely in part an attempt to get extra security anyway."

That did sound like the kind of political game that would be played in a situation like this, as annoying as it was. A combination of 'avoid snubbing someone who might take offense' and 'get free boosts to the event security'. Some of the 'get you to willingly put yourself into position for an ambush' games played between the hidden villages were easier to maneuver. And frequently easier to spot, for that matter.