80

After the incident with Ruri, Naruto had ended up rebuilding the secure areas of a number of buildings. Isolating the secure areas was apparently a good start, but they needed more options for keeping different portions of the secure areas isolated from each other. For the hospital, he also ensured that the primary tanks for the beast man formula were behind reinforced walls with triple valves between the primary tanks and the exposure area tanks. You'd now have to fill the exposure area tanks, seal off the primary tanks, and then start the exposure process from the smaller tanks.

The new tanks were also behind a reinforced wall, but were easily accessed for those running the process as you now swapped them out depending on the size of the group being exposed.

Rebuilding things without tearing the hospital down and putting it back up again had been annoying, but the lessons learned from it made other areas easier. Adding in some 'less secure' departure zones also happened at the same time. Those would let individuals and teams go to other Uzushio territories in particular, such as the mainland dock facility, and he was working on ideas for more public arrival and departure points deeper into the continent. Assuming that wasn't at least partially negated by Nagato getting off his proverbial ass and convincing his people to accept joining Uzushio officially, at which point Amegakure would be partially rebuilt into an outpost location of its own.

Yoko shook her head at Hoshi's antics around Suzu. The two had been dancing around each other for quite a while now, at least when Naruto wasn't pulling Hoshi away to help with larger-scale illusion type stuff, like when he'd set up a couple of things for jounin trials. Worse, they thought that they were being discreet while the civilians were taking bets on how long it would be before Suzu was having kits.

It was cute, but pathetic at the same time.

"Are you two going to be able to behave if I go on this mission to help a priestess?" Yoko asked.

"...what?" Hoshi asked as Suzu covered her snout with her paws.

"If I go, do I need to take one of you with me? Or am I going to return to a scandalous discussion about what you did on the shrine grounds while I was away?"

"Where are you going?" Suzu asked. Probably as a distraction.

"Reportedly there's a demon of some kind that needs to be sealed and there's a hope that having a proper shrine maiden along will help."

Hoshi frowned. "...you can act the act but we know that you aren't really all that mystical."

"Probably not, but I've still been asked to go and I've been assured that my chakra is 'purifying' in some fashion. So will you two behave?"

"We'll behave," the two said, nearly perfectly in unison.

Naruto entered the conference room and pulled a few stacks of books out of storage seals, placing them around the table.

"I thought you were designing a jounin examination," Iruka said as he looked over the stack of books next to him.

Naruto shrugged. "The entire system has bothered me on a couple of levels for years, and in the middle of construction a comment from one of the Uzumaki made me realize what the problem was. I'm planning on retaining the genin, chunin, special jounin, jounin, and elite jounin rankings for skills but not for responsibilities."

"...what?"

Five of the books were tapped. "These cover my thoughts on official requirements for those ranks as pure skills ranks, both to get them and to keep them. Fall too far down in your skills due to injuries or slacking off and you get demoted, but there's some intentional overlap." Then the next two were tapped. "But these two cover trust checks. A genin can be more trusted than a jounin in practice, but before now not really on paper. The rest cover specific roles. Medics, infiltrators, teachers, merchant guards via ship and via land, various more utilitarian items..."

"Oh. Instead of a single system you want to have parallel systems that interact, with the one clients would be familiar with being primarily a combat rating?"

"That's basically where I'm going with it."

"Not a bad idea. I think everyone has run into problems with promoting someone being problematic because they'd get access to things they shouldn't have access to, or needing to promote someone who didn't have combat skills but needed access to something sensitive."

"Yeah, a split there has been needed for a while, but nobody has ever bothered to do it. We don't have enough entrenched policies to make it problematic, and I'm the primary gatekeeper for ninety percent of the village as it is, so I want to take care of it before delegating more sensitive items."

"Very good idea in context."

The rest of those attending the meeting showed up over the next ten minutes, and then Naruto pitched things a bit more formally. He wanted to plug any obvious holes he'd missed before a full implementation, and encouraged them all to read through everything they'd been given. Not everyone had every book though, at least in the specialities areas, because he was already compartmentalizing some of that.

"So," Yoko said, shaking her head, wondering why teams never showed up in time to prevent a crisis. "It took twenty attempts at attacking this shrine, some of that due to you having managed to get defenders but mostly because you lucked out with a couple of wandering shinobi being on hand, before they got the spirit of the demon from it."

The priestess Shion nodded. "They'll seek to reunite the spirit and body in the Land of Swamps."

"And you believe that you can perform a seal to prevent said reuniting?"

"Yes."

"How does it work?"

"...my mother didn't live long enough to teach me the full details, so I only know what was left in her writings."

"Would you permit me to review them?"

Shion nodded her assent. It was...quite annoying that the girl was acting like a spoiled brat and only willing to interact reasonably with Yoko, especially as she felt a lot kinder. Probably overcompensating through trying to be professional about things without enough time to act out growing up, though the warning that she saw the deaths of others around her was probably also a factor. But it was also convenient that the girl had 'proper respect' for a semi-famous shrine maiden.

It wasn't long before Yoko was flipping through the full set of notes on the 'shrine seal' technique...and frowning as she did so. "This appears to be somewhere between four and six different techniques."

"Mōryō's spirit was sealed with the first set while his body was sealed with the second set," Shion clarified. "There are subtle, but important, differences in the seals at each shrine that require some adjustment. As his spirit has already been broken free, I will need to reinforce the body seal."

Yoko...wasn't convinced that was accurate, or that the girl had ever performed the techniques in the main area of one of the shrines. The provided information looked also like it had come from two different collections, possibly one stored at each shrine, but unfortunately the descriptions were missing with only the minimal instructions for performing the techniques left. She'd need to covertly scour the entire shrine, send clones ahead to the other shrine, and probably keep clones following the ones that wanted to free the demon to see what they did and if they knew anything more.

Obito shook his head as he took out the last stone warrior in this group. "This is very obviously a distraction."

"Yep," Kakashi replied. "Keep those who could interfere away from the enemy's actual plans."

"So why did you insist I come help you specifically?"

"Honestly, I was hoping they'd do a proper job of showing where your combat skills are. Sadly, they're probably half as strong as the last time this 'demon' woke up."

"You're probably more skilled than the last time."

"No, they're very obviously not running at full strength, and they aren't pulling themselves back together if you break off arms."

"Oh. Which just makes the 'this is a distraction' vibes worse."

"Yep. But we've already pulled our own fast one and need to distract the enemy from it. And you do seem to need dodging practice."

Yes, Obito knew he'd slacked off on dodging practice thanks to years of 'can just go intangible'. But the other part of that baffled him. "...how have we pulled a fast one?"

Kakashi obviously smirked under his mask. "We convinced a shrine maiden to go along."

That...was not a proper answer.

Multiple attacks by those seemingly wanting to kill Shion had provided Yoko with plenty of information. Such as the attacks being intended to instill a sense of urgency for the priestess to head to the other shrine, but not to actually kill her, because their enemy had already made it to the other shrine. They'd then found they didn't have the ability to unseal the demon's body, needing to trick Shion into releasing the seal on the body so that the demon's spirit could inhabit it.

Of course, the four primary attackers weren't actually aware that they were supposed to fail, even expected to die by their leader. They'd been told to kill or delay Shion while their leader worked to force open the seal holding the demon's body with their leader knowing that the priestess's bell would prevent her from coming to actual harm.

Luckily for derailing the plan, out of some crazy concern about the girl being too powerful if properly trained a decision had been made to not train Shion in anything physical. This left her as essentially a pampered civilian with a pile of chakra and a chakra net node that did weird things to said chakra, plus the bell that was primarily a chakra battery and crude chakra gem for that kind of chakra.

Yoko had made a point of fetching the Tome so that it could examine the priestess, and thanks to intentionally delaying to 'recover from attacks' Yoko now had the same node. As did Naruto due to his net mirroring her own, of course. Clones had tested that the first stage of things with the 'shrine seal' technique worked for them, in and out of the two shrines, but hadn't dared go further, and Naruto was taking on learning more about the chakra as he had less to do with everyone telling him to delegate to others.

Shion had not been informed of the plan to prevent her from using the full 'shrine seal' technique as the enemy wanted her to. The team 'escorting' them, technically under Yoko's command but acting otherwise, had been informed though and would participate in stopping the priestess from entering the other shrine if needed. On top of the measures clones were taking to rig the place to be more difficult to enter if you weren't on a very small 'approved' list. And Shion wouldn't be on it when things were in place. Their enemies, so as to not draw attention to the changes? Yes. Shion? No, because she'd almost certainly fall right into the plans of said enemies.

As for how long it was taking them, the leader of their enemy was currently in the middle of trying to figure out if they'd pushed the 'trying to kill the priestess' angle too hard. They'd hoped that the mission to get her to the shrine would've been completed today, but 'stopping to recover after attacks' had been forced on Shion on the basis that not healing up after each encounter would be detrimental to their potential success in their future encounters. Meanwhile, the four subordinates were gleeful at how long it was taking the group to progress, unaware that there was a time limit before their leader died.

One instance of 'subtly knock Shion unconscious in the middle of a fight and then fake panic about what could have injured her' had already been used to let the Tome examine the girl, after Yoko already knew that they'd be just as well off turning around and aborting the mission entirely. Might have to use that again during the next attack too, for that matter, both to give Naruto time to figure things out and to see how panicked their enemy's leader got at another significant delay while the clock was ticking on his ability to hold the demon's spirit.

"Weird," Naruto said as he examined the purple energy of the rasengan he'd formed with the new chakra net node. "Not sure what this would be useful for normally, but it looks neat."

"...what did you do now?" Hinata asked.

"Yoko had the Tome copy a chakra net node from a priestess."

"Oh. And you got it too and decided to play with it?"

"More like I'm playing with it for her, because she's more focused on information gathering in the middle of a mission."

"Ah, that makes more sense. Do you know what it does?"

"It seems like it would've been great against things like the zero tails. Kind of a light chakra that works great against dark chakra? Very effective against the chakra in the stone warriors sent to distract everyone around the Land of Swamps, anyway, though Yoko hasn't tried it directly as she doesn't want it to be obvious that she can use it too now. Responds well to 'positive emotions' too."

"Really?"

"Yeah, but it also seems much less effective against normal chakra. Possibly something someone came up with specifically to combat dark chakra from various sources, and the priestess doesn't actually have any other well-developed nodes at all so all of her chakra is basically saturated with this stuff. Oh, but it does make plants grow healthier and animals frolic around you if you mix it with natural energy."

"...what?"

He dismissed the rasengan and pulled on the 'light chakra' and natural energy at the same time. The area immediately around them had flowers grow and bloom before several birds and other small animals came over to move around Naruto. "See?"

"But...how?"

"No clue. Need to figure out more about the stuff if I want to create a properly-themed area for bloodline island."

"You're going to add this to the island?"

"Yeah. I've already got beads for it, though adding those in doesn't seem to improve things like the arena seals. Possibly due to not including any of the chakra's capabilities in one of the illusions though, so I'll need to see if Hoshi can help me with that later. Besides, we've now run into two threats that use dark chakra and I'm sure there will be more eventually."

Hinata took a moment to nod her head in acceptance of that.

"At any rate," Naruto said, dropping the effect. "I've got clones playing with chakra mixtures, even if they need to find some volunteers for medical chakra testing, but I suspect that the stuff is going to be great for certain kinds of seals too."

"Of course you'd want to experiment with using it in seals."

Their arrival at the shrine had been met with a final resistance from their enemies...who were being intentionally hindered by their leader manipulating the dark chakra boosting their abilities. Intentional options for Shion to be brought into or run into the shrine herself kept being left, but it was obvious that the man was frustrated when the Konoha shinobi didn't let her dart in. Doubly so when even the priestess had to blushingly admit that she wouldn't be able to handle a trap if one had been set.

Instead, Yoko slipped past the enemy's fighters and entered the shrine. The leader inside did his best to hide himself as she moved into the center, but was obviously very surprised when she did the first stage of the 'shrine seal' to activate the barrier.

...and unfortunately, was far too gleeful. The energies inside of him pushed hard, and he went through a series of hand seals himself. "I couldn't have done this with the brat, because of her mother's bell, but you aren't protected!"

It was as he finished that she realized that he'd run through the other two portions of the 'shrine seal', taking advantage of her powering the 'key' with the first piece. Very, very annoying as the gateway to the demon's body lifted and opened. The leader's chest then exploded as the demon's spirit forced itself out, entering the revealed body. A moment later it sent out energy to engulf her, pulling her into it and towards where a point of light chakra sat.

And then suddenly she was in the mindscape, a dark multi-headed monster blinking back at her with a tied-up woman that looked a lot like Shion next to it.

"What?" the monster said, looking around. "I was supposed to consume you, not end up in your mindscape."

"I'm a bit more than I appear to be," Yoko replied as a few hundred other personalities manifested from the mindscape around them. "You could say that I contain multitudes, and you're but a speck in the dark compared to them."

The resulting beatdown didn't even involve Yoko herself, who had attempted to tend to the tied-up woman. Instead the woman dissolved into knowledge about how to use the light chakra and what was going on. Apparently either Yoko or Mōryō would come out of this in charge, but either way they were supposed to end up sealed together inside of the shrine. Except that the latter only really worked once and wouldn't happen this time.

After what felt like a couple of hours in the mindscape, but had only been a couple of minutes outside of it, Mōryō had been torn apart and turned into just more personality and knowledge fragments. Yoko then woke up, having landed outside of the base barrier seal but still inside of the shrine. She could feel Mōryō's dark chakra available inside of her now as well, apparently having absorbed everything of him...except that she was also positive that she couldn't do the 'stone army' trick and a few other things.

Why he and his followers wanted to do something as stupid as take over the world through conquest was a bit of a mystery, but she moved to check on Yomi, the leader that Mōryō had burst out of the chest of. Amazingly, the man was actually alive, working to pull himself back together.

"You know," Yoko said, kneeling down next to him. "Mōryō really wasn't all that tough."

"What?" Yomi replied, eyes snapping to her.

"Tried to eat me. I ate him instead."

"...but..." the man said, before his eyes went wide. "What are you?"

She smiled sadly. "Me? I'm a shrine maiden...and could probably call myself a priestess." Miroku's knowledge gave her enough credibility there, in her opinion. "But I'm also a kunoichi, and you're a general threat to everyone."

Using light chakra to burn away his dark chakra and prevent him from healing himself didn't take long, and then she manipulated the earth that made up the floor of this section of shrine to give him an unmarked grave. With that completed, she headed outside, where Shion was trying to get past the barrier seals she wasn't tied into.

"Mōryō is gone," Yoko stated once Shion noticed her. "As is the worshiper that tried to restore him to power. Also, your mother would be ashamed of you burying your emotions."

"...what?" Shion asked.

"You heard me."

Ino looked over the destruction in one of the training grounds, even as Naruto's clones started cleaning up. "Well, that's more than he usually does."

"He's adjusting to Yoko having eaten a demon," Hinata replied.

"...I missed something."

"You were helping with the academy when it happened. It would've come up at dinner."

"Huh. A demon?"

"It tried to eat her, she ate it instead, they've now got a bit more demon personality running around in the mindscape that needs adjusting to."

"I'm supposed to be the expert in that kind of thing between us and I don't think that's how it's supposed to work."

"You're a demon expert?"

"Mindscape expert, and you knew what I meant."

Hinata shrugged. "Your entire clan is baffled at how he and Yoko work, and I don't know if they were just stronger than the demon or if their unique situation is more to blame."

"I'm going to have to go in and help them figure out how the hell their mindscape works one of these days."

"We don't think we want you risking your own sanity to attempt it."

"I'm not sure that you should assume we have any sanity left between us."

"Professionals have informed us that you still have hope, even if it's only a matter of time before you've spent too much time around Naruto and I."

Ino blinked a couple of times. "You aren't joking, are you?"

Hinata shrugged. "Being able to change personalities on a whim for infiltration isn't considered to be a sign of proper sanity. You still tend to 'bleed through' on most of your infiltrations not involving pretending to be a specific individual."

"Huh. Hadn't thought of it that way. Wait, that means that I'm the easiest of us to pick out."

"There is that, yes."

"Fuck. I'm going to have to add more clones for training myself out of that habit."

Shisui looked over the reports from the mission to the Land of Demons and Land of Swamps. Having Yoko along was intended to be a trump card, but not in the way things apparently ended up happening. "She absorbed the demon instead of it absorbing her."

"So the report says," Hiashi agreed. "Trying to absorb someone with a rinnegan might as well be trying to absorb a deity."

"...not sure I'd put it that way, but that Naruto wasn't present likely made the attempt doomed to fail thanks to their connection. She also claims that her personality has remained largely unchanged, but that he is dealing with more 'violent urges' as they try to adapt to the absorption."

"Which isn't a major problem," Tsunade pointed out. "I saw mention of 'priestess training' though, but not a lot of details. Anything useful there?"

Shisui nodded. "In addition to the demon, remaining knowledge from the deceased priestess of the Land of Demons was absorbed. Yoko is considering adding that to the local training, in addition to the shrine maiden elements, but possibly without having considered that it would make people more likely to see her as more of a priestess of the shrine than a shrine maiden."

"Which they already treat her as," Hiashi said with a shake of his head. "It won't change much beyond possibly expecting her to change out her uniform."

"I suppose."

"Besides, even her minor 'blessings' as a shrine maiden seem to be actually doing things now."

Shisui blinked. "Wait, they are?"

"To the point where the civilians have noticed it. Rumors that she defeated a demon had already been spreading, but her blessings being noticeably effective is being taken as a sign that she herself has the approval of the gods."

"How does that even work?"

"Priestess chakra of some kind," Tsunade answered. "Though I think that she called it 'light chakra' in the report. Seems to work best as a protective or fertility blessing. I suspect that her curses could use the 'dark chakra' mentioned to be quite effective as well, honestly, but she doesn't tend to go for those. Naruto might though. Either way, I got to examine a couple that she gave fertility and protection blessings to and the chakra seemed to have helped with allowing them to conceive. I suspect that it's...more in-tune with those without much chakra, perhaps? Her 'healing blessing' rasengan is also more effective on those without much chakra now too. And purple-tinted, for that matter."

"Purple?"

"Yep. A bright purple, but purple."

"Weird. I'd have expected it to be white. But whatever."

Hiashi picked up a sheet from his stack of papers. "I see that the interrogation of the shinobi Amegakure sent us is proceeding."

Shisui nodded. "That was unexpected, as was returning the Sword of the Thunder God along with Rokushō. I don't know what their plans are though, because that kind of move is...highly unusual and they don't seem to be doing so for their high-level missing-nin."

"My initial assumption would be that it's tied to why they defected to Ame in the first place, or if they were simply collected by Ame after defecting instead of intentionally defecting to there. Reversing manipulations, perhaps?"

"Maybe."

Kakashi blinked a couple of times as he looked over the paperwork he'd been handed a few weeks after the whole Land of Demons thing. "This doesn't make a lot of sense."

"Obito seems to be offended that you gave up the eye he gave you," Tsunade replied. "As well as that your skills dropped so far upon doing so. When he found out that it's completely safe to transplant sharingan eyes into you he apparently decided that he'd rather you have his pair instead of him."

"...but this says that he wants to trade eyes when we've both got perfectly functional pairs and his own eyes have already been regrown once."

"I honestly suspect that he doesn't fully trust himself with the sharingan after everything that happened to him."

"Huh. That would explain a few things he's said. But having two sharingan eyes would put more of a strain on me than one did, even if we know that I should be able to leave them off most of the time."

"I don't think it would be that big of a problem for you, and he's not the only one to notice that your skill level has noticeably dropped since giving up the one."

"Because I gave up a handicap I was relying too much on. I'm working on correcting that."

"We're sure you are. Thing is, we've kind of been using Obito as part of a wider experiment as well and I suspect this is an excuse to get us to stop as well. Compared to, well, just asking us to."

"...how many sets of eyes have you pulled from him?"

"Twenty. Itachi is actually pushing for me to take at least one, out of curiosity if it'll advance to the rinnegan or not, but I'm not really interested."

"I'm under the impression that Naruto and Yoko would've preferred to not end up with that themselves."

"Doesn't stop them from using them regularly when they don't have other options, and they obviously don't want to rely on the boost in battle, but they have 'natural' ones instead of chakra-sucking implanted ones."

Kakashi nodded, because that was a known problem with implanted bloodlines in general. Dojutsu were just the most well-known of them. Not being the original wielder of a bloodline tied to something physical like the eyes was a constant drain. "So, has Itachi signed off on this?"

Tsunade nodded, and produced a copy of a signed form. "Yes, though I suspect mostly because he was already used to you being able to be called on for sharingan-involved tasks."

"Ah, yes. That would be a notable downside to the procedure."

"I thought they paid you well in those cases."

"I'm an elite jounin. Everything I'm called on to do pays me well."

"Fair point. Are you rejecting this outright or willing to at least think about it?"

"I'll think about it, and probably get him to tell me why he wants to attempt this insanity to begin with."

"Looks like we've been invited to Suna's exams," Naruto said as he looked over the letters he'd gotten. "Makes me wonder if they're going to innovate or if they've thrown in the towel and are planning on sticking to the old systems."

"Do we have anyone we could reasonably send?" Ino asked. "Our academy hasn't been active all that long."

"We have at least four teams I can think of," Hinata replied. "Maybe as many as six?"

"Seven," Naruto corrected. "Barely, but only five I'd consider sending into a desert at all and two of those I'd expect to not make it through to the finals if sent."

"The two teams that prefer ship-side merchant guarding because of all the water?"

"Yeah. I don't think they'd handle a desert environment well at all."

"Definitely not, though sending them as a lesson that they're not always going to be able to rely on the ocean might not be a bad lesson."

"Maybe one of them. The other was formed as it is because two of the three have major problems when away from water."

Both girls flinched at that reminder. Isaribi had managed to make a team, and they had a water-transformation bloodline holder that had fled Kiri with an Uzumaki on the team with her. Sending either of them into a desert was asking for problems, let alone both of them. Of course, both of them were currently very much content with protecting ships at sea and seemed to have little to no ambition to do anything more. Their teammate, on the other hand, was getting annoyed with their lack of drive and probably needed to be swapped out...

Moving on, he continued down the stack, sighing when he reached another letter. "Iwa has invited us to their exams as well, though if I'm reading the timing correctly the finals for each will be a few days apart."

"Well," Hinata said. "We aren't directly allied with either."

"I should probably just send a note to all the eligible teams and let them decide if they want to participate in one or the other. I'm not actually certain that either exam is going to line up with our new chunin requirements anyway."

"Maybe send copies of our new standards books out to the other villages," Ino suggested. "Ask if they think their exams will properly test for the skills required?"

Naruto considered that. "I suppose it could work. Putting copies in our local stores could provide useful information to our own people too, if we're not going to keep things secret. Might serve as a better 'this is what it takes to be a genin' reference than what came out of our chunin exams too, at least for the smaller villages."