104

Naruto filed the newly-signed paperwork for taking over the Land of Sound with the paperwork from taking over Ame, though officially things wouldn't take effect until after the finals. Orochimaru had given permission for Uzushio to start work inside of the Land of Sound anyway, and he'd sent a couple teams of clones into the area to start dismantling the worst of the now-empty bases. Another couple of teams were working on setting up the border systems, and one team was working on converting the long-abandoned port to the north into a proper Uzushio port.

At this point the moon construction was going to happen after the finals as well. Just pulling enough clones off of the project for the problematic bases, coupled with Yoko's need to deal with things on the Shrine Island side of things messing with her schedule, put things too close to the finals. Better to do things properly, wait for the finals to conclude and things to settle from that, and then start the removal and replacement process in orbit. Plus that gave extra time for diplomatic prepwork.

He also had a request from Tsunade to help look over some of the Oto shinobi though, and while it wasn't specified he assumed that was going to be some of those with seals on them. Jiraiya should've arrived in Konoha this morning, so would probably join them unless he did something stupid around Tsunade today.

An alarm going off had him flinching. Wame was decently safe when it came to experimenting with spells, but the others following her example were far more likely to overdo things. A quick check with his clones showed that the duo in question had been pulled to the hospital already. Perhaps he needed to set up more dedicated spell practice areas.

Yugao and Hayate had assumed that Tenten's new 'legendary sword' would take at least a decade of work for the girl to be competent, and even then would still be horribly impractical. The charge-up time for it was also predicted to be horribly impractical, though the feeling that it was 'chakra-hungry' had turned out to be partially because it was absorbing chakra others were giving off. Simply by leaving it unsealed it would charge itself up, and intentionally pushing chakra into it had sped that up considerably. Either the girl had more chakra than she'd calculated or the sword required less too.

But now Yugao found herself staring at a field of defeated bandits and shinobi, including a couple of jounin-level missing-nin. It was the first time they'd let the girl use the seemingly-impractical weapon in the field and she'd trivially taken out everyone including the obvious kenjutsu specialist. Some of that was obviously nobody knowing how to react to the various tricks the weapon had, but most of it seemed to be that she had an insane amount of skill with the thing already.

"Okay," Hayate said. "That's actually clever of her."

"What?" Yugao asked, turning to look at him.

"We missed that the thing is designed to be able to be directly used as several different weapons, if oddly-shaped versions, so she was able to switch between weapon forms as she moved along."

"Oh." Now that he mentioned it, thinking back on what she'd just watched made it somewhat obvious. "Huh. So she has literal years of training with existing weapons that directly translate into using that one, coupled with it essentially being a pile of weapons in one. That improves her versatility basically instantly...and makes it one of the most sensible impractical-looking designs I've probably seen."

"Perhaps we owe her an apology for assuming that she'd design something horrendous, compared to finding and learning to use someone else's horrible design."

"She was still stupid with the stunt she used to make the thing."

"...true."

"And she wants to see if she can repeat it to have a spare."

He choked at that. She wants to do what now?"

Yugao sighed. "Under better supervision, see if she can repeat the process to make a second one. I told her that she'd have to prove that she can use it effectively before considering such a request, and she's just proven that part of things, so I fully anticipate her bringing it up again soon."

"She nearly killed herself the first time!"

"And she has more chakra now and a better idea of how much is needed, but I'd still rather check with others for second opinions. Plus, a 'legendary' weapon isn't anywhere near as legendary if there are multiple running around."

That had him snorting. "Tell that to Uzushio."

"Not their fault that half of Kiri's legendary weapons seemed to be people repurposing Uzumaki-created tools."

"Point."

Yoko sighed as she read over a couple of Shion's reports. The priestess was far too willing to attribute things going on around the shrines to actual divine miracles with no attempt to figure out more mundane explanations. Or even expectation that there might be more mundane explanations, for that matter.

Having four dried-up wells suddenly producing water again in the general vicinity of Suijin shrines didn't mean that the gods had anything to do with it when the honden were feeding water into the local water table. The increase in discovering people trying to slip into the shrines for various things was likely a combination of better training on the shrine staff and the rebuilding drawing in more idiots than usual, even if the repeated 'light shone on' wording across multiple priestesses and shrine maidens was a bit weird.

Then there were the knock-off effects from the clearing out of dark chakra from the area, such as the general improvement in the temperament of the local animals. Those had been expected and explained. Shion seemed to think that the range of the effect was unusual, but didn't seem to be considering that animals moved around on their own. Improved health throughout the entire region was also expected when you were clearing out those energies and providing better access to clean water, on top of the number of people visiting the installed hot springs at several of the shrines and the benefits from that.

...the report of a fire burning down three buildings was a bit more coincidence-filled though. A merchant who had just run out on their bill had, in their rush to escape, caught their cart on fire from one of the torches outside. Their panic over that had caused them to not turn in time to avoid a building, the fire from the cart spreading to the building. The flames had weakened walls that would-be slaves were chained to, allowing them to pull free and escape, but those who had been running that operation had been trapped upstairs and died in the fire.

The smaller of the two neighboring buildings had also caught fire, across an alley but without the fire spreading to buildings directly touching the two. Some checking of Uzushio's network indicated that the second building had been used as a place to store drugs being smuggled through the area...by the same people running the slave operation.

It was possible that this was covert action by shinobi, though nothing in Uzushio's network indicated involvement and Konoha didn't have anyone at all in the general area right now. They were simply the most likely to manage something like that though, so it was possible that another village or a missing-nin passing through had been responsible. Unfortunately, the shrines were the only source of intelligence at the time of the incident, so unless reports popped up in other villages they were unlikely to find out more.

"It definitely isn't worth the risk," Naruto said as he put the sheet of paper down.

"Told you that it was a bad idea," Yugao said, glaring at Tenten.

"But there's a chance that something will happen to the first one," Tenten said, half-glaring at him.

"And the chakra requirements for all of your weapon-making clones fluctuate wildly. Observing you creating simpler weapons has revealed a range that had a minimum of a little more than half of the maximum required for the same result. While it's possible that you were on the high end the first time, there's a very good chance you got lucky and next time the chakra needed will be enough to instantly kill you."

She flinched at that, then frowned. "How long have you known I could do this?"

"Since the first time you used it to make some extra money by producing a pile of kunai and selling them because monitoring clones spotted you. I find that making raw materials is more useful overall, personally. The chakra cost of making finished products is higher than the cost of making raw materials and having clones work with them in most cases, at least for me."

"Oh. But...it's likely that I'll never reach a point where I have enough chakra to be safe if I have to assume I could need more than twice what I needed the first time, and I don't know how to make it otherwise!"

Naruto rolled his eyes as a clone appeared in the room and unsealed an entire rack of copies of her weapon, though with different coloring on the grip points. "I experimented after Yugao asked me my opinion on the chakra requirements and haven't gotten around to disposing of the results yet. Do you want to stick to your original 'channels generic chakra' version or have the spare be able to channel a specific element? I found that there were benefits and drawbacks in both directions, and the white grips are my attempts at putting specific elemental flows into individual areas..."

He trailed off as Tenten recovered from her shock and went into 'shiny weapons' mode, then looked over at Yugao. She shook her head. "You should've known she was going to do this."

"I prepared a 'so you want one of each' invoice already."

"Smart."

"She'll then get pouty about that, try to guilt me into letting her take more than just one, and eventually pay for an extra one beyond the free one I'm offering. One exact copy and one of the varying elemental flows ones to see how that works out, specifically, with a demand that I destroy the rest if she can't have them because she didn't give me permission to make them for others."

"That's awfully specific."

"You've already pointed out to her that too many copies of a legendary blade make it a curiosity at best, which has happened with Uzushio-produced items already. Limiting things to three for now, in two variants with her holding onto all of them, should be safe enough. Besides, she hasn't even decided on a name for it."

"Because she's waiting to see what others describe it as, I think in part because she isn't sure what she wants to call it."

Half an hour later his predictions had come to pass. He even destroyed the extras in front of her, to her combined horror and satisfaction.

Gaara sighed as Naruto welcomed everyone to the finals, including pointing out that they were down a couple of genin from the expected number. Two of Suna's genin had wandered into the desert a couple weeks ago and only one of them had returned in time for the finals. The other could very well be dead, but if not they were definitely not getting promoted. In fact, the one that had returned was unlikely to be promoted either as they'd not informed anyone of their plans.

At least Suna wasn't the only village with a missing genin though. Oto had lost one as well, though Orochimaru hadn't shared what had happened to them. Not that the details of Suna's missing genin had been shared either, just reported as a basic item to explain the change in plans from 'one extra match to start with' to 'one genin gets a free pass in the first round of matches'.

"Of course," Naruto explained. "This left us with a need to determine how to decide who got the free pass today. A check with the genin had only five of them indicate that they'd happily accept a free pass instead of being annoyed at losing a chance to show their skills. Those five are standing off to the side here, and we have a spinning numbered target split into five sections. Each of the five will take a number from a bag, though will not reveal it, and then the other twenty-six genin will each throw one kunai into the spinning target. If a single genin has the fewest kunai in their section then they will get the free pass, then we'll go with the single genin with the most, followed by the sole genin in the middle. Should they be split into two groups, we'll eliminate the matched pair and repeat with the other three genin."

As it turned out, they did have to go with the second pass, and then balls holding the names of all the genin were dumped into a rotating drum. That was left to spin for a couple of minutes before being poured into the top of a plinko-style board, the balls bouncing around and filling slots in the bottom before being released into a tray underneath the board. They were then pulled off the tray two at a time to determine the fifteen matches for the day.

"Interesting method of choosing the matches," Orochimaru commented.

"We didn't have enough information from the previous stages to set up things in a less-randomized manner," Naruto replied. "Besides, there's a large audience, so visually interesting methods of choosing are almost mandated when you haven't provided a fight list ahead of time for betting reasons."

Gaara knew he wasn't the best at considering ways to entertain the civilians, but could see how that made sense. He was taking some mental notes about things, but if Suna managed to get a rental on the island in the next exam slot or two then others were still going to be doing the bulk of the planning. It was looking like they weren't likely to get a slot for at least a year though, if not two or three, as Kumo and a couple of smaller villages seemed likely to be ahead of them in the queue.

Odoroki found her inability to understand ninety-plus percent of what Naruto and Yoko were doing with construction projects to be both infuriating and pleasing. The latter in a 'grown beyond them' manner, the former in a 'the laws of physics should not work that way, even with chakra' one...

After getting multiple headaches with that, she'd given up and sought out the various people working on experimenting with spells. Naruto and Yoko didn't seem to care too much about experimenting when someone else wasn't directly prompting them...at least beyond 'take existing spells and supersize their output'. Actually trying to figure out how to make new spells was something else entirely, and being connected to the Tome made that seem easier than it should be to play with.

Possibly entirely due to the simulation interface being designed for it, admittedly. They had trouble with 'creativity', which felt likely to be intentional as well, but so long as an idea came from elsewhere they were actually quite good at figuring it all out over time.

She was under no illusions that this plan was entirely her own idea though, nor did she think that she'd been manipulated into it by Naruto. No, she was reasonably certain that it stemmed from realizing that he spent time wearing the Tome each time there was some new spell to learn, if only to be able to access the simulation interface himself. Something deep in the Tome had very likely picked up on that and was pushing for them to do things that would cause him to carry it around.

Unfortunately, Wame was the only one of the group experimenting with spells that had any sense of self-preservation and doing things safely. She was still having trouble with buffering the raw information output of scanning spells, but didn't push herself to the point of causing injury and had worked with bullets in as safe a manner as possible without being able to make a pile of paperwork clones or use a simulation system. There had been fourteen major injuries in the rest of the group so far, and five people had been told they weren't allowed to experiment with spells at all anymore.

Just following Naruto's basic safety rules of ensuring you had Knight Armor up while experimenting with anything possibly dangerous would remove ninety percent of the injuries...though there was the unfortunate exception of those working out if there were ways to make that particular spell better. It was very hard to have Knight Armor in place while testing an alternate version. Everyone else had basically no excuse though, especially with the spell tablets making learning the spell directly optional.

A small explosion and scream of pain from the next field over had her flinching, though she didn't feel the tell-tale pulse of a clone pulling the idiot out for emergency medical attention. That didn't mean that she didn't immediately start heading that way though, likely to drag them to the hospital the slow way if they weren't in critical condition.

Onoki was happy enough with the first day's matches. His genin hadn't done horribly, the bulk of them making a good showing even if they'd lost, and he had to admit that having the smarter candidates make it through to this point with minimal trouble due to working together with other villages was nice. The larger arena also allowed for more impressive displays in some instances thanks to not having to worry as much about being stuck in too-close quarters.

Still, now that the day of fighting was over he was feeling a bit cheeky. He'd had a couple of insane rumors passed along, so as they were leaving the 'Kage Box' he looked over at Naruto. "So, have you heard the rumor that Uzushio has a replacement moon in the works?"

Naruto just looked back. "Who said it was a rumor?"

That obviously took A and Gaara by surprise...but not Shisui or Orochimaru. Onoki blinked a couple of times. "How can you possibly build a replacement moon?"

"With a lot of prep time. Or a rabbit goddess to seal inside of it, I suppose, but we're fresh out of those. I'll put out construction warning notices before we start the actual construction, though it'll be far enough away from the planet to not likely be an actual hazard unless we drop something big and somehow don't notice for a week or two."

"And I thought that was the more outlandish rumor."

"What else have you heard?" Orochimaru asked.

Onoki flinched as he considered things, but decided to run with it anyway. "That you're the father of Tsunade's child."

The woman gave a half-smile and patted her stomach. "Only from a genetic standpoint." She obviously noticed that she was getting more stares now. "It was a result of drinking a bit more than we should've."

"I was under the impression that you're both female," Gaara noted.

"And we will be having a daughter as a result. Ruri is looking forward to being a big sister."

A shook his head after a moment. "I suppose when you drink too much with one of the world's best medics that normal medical realities don't apply."

Jiraiya knew that this was a waste of time, but once Tsunade had learned of problems that he'd not told her about decades ago she'd decided to turn it into a teaching event for Ruri. Presumably because doing so was intended to make him feel uncomfortable, given her age, even though she could do the examination of his reproductive system without him undressing. Or perhaps it was supposed to be due to her inexperience, or that she'd been learning from Orochi?

Whatever the case, it was at least less annoying than stripping horrible seals off of Oto shinobi and kunoichi. The finals had put a pause on that, and Orochi's personal guards were going to be another matter entirely due to how often they used their seals. A quick, if useless, checkup was at least reasonably relaxing.

"Can you spot the issue?" Tsunade asked Ruri as the girl focused on the mystic palm.

"Yes," Ruri answered, pouting. "But I can't fix it."

"...it isn't a difficult procedure."

The girl turned to look at Tsunade, appearing to be confused. "But it's in his chakra?"

"What do you mean by that?"

"Like my chipmunk features. When I push against the problem his chakra pushes back just like trying to change my ears is pushed back."

Tsunade took over and examined him, which was enough to actually make him uncomfortable given some of her long-standing threats, and her expression gradually darkened. "How in the world did you manage that? Or is this something someone else did to you?"

He shrugged. "Side effect of a mistake very early in my sage training. Specifically, me trying to do things that the toads said I wasn't ready for, and it turned out they were right. They saved my life, but not before some things had settled a bit too deeply. I suspect it's part of why I can't get my sage mode down perfectly, the remnants of that mistake preventing me from achieving full control."

"You started sage training back before the war."

"Yep."

"I'd wondered how in the world you didn't have children across the continent, but hadn't expected that it was because you couldn't have them. Why didn't you ever say anything?"

"Didn't want you to spend a pile of time trying to figure out how to fix something I was reasonably certain couldn't be fixed."

"Naruto and Yoko have a chance of being able to fix it, though you might have to relearn everything to do with your chakra if they try."

"Not worth the effort, especially when the only one I'd want to have a kid with would be unlikely to ever want to."

She gave him a look telling him that she knew exactly what he was referring to. Of course, she'd never been stupid either.

Yoko bit back a sigh as she waited for the soldiers of the other faction contesting this part of the continent to finish looking over the signs posted with information. This group was definitely looking for a fight, which was going to be annoying to deal with. Not that they'd brought anything particularly dangerous with them, at least by shinobi or samurai standards. Well, Land of Iron samurai standards, anyway. Those normally employed directly by daimyo were good for those who didn't use chakra but really weren't up to the standards needed otherwise.

Still, she wanted to put on a proper show, so she reached out to the forest seals with light chakra and the trees with wood release. The former reinforced the entire system trusting her and the latter allowed her to more directly control things. Mostly to hold back the potentially deadly reactions to violence, admittedly, but being able to directly interact with the plants in general would send a message of its own.

When the group ensured that their weapons were ready and stormed through the gate she frowned, but didn't move from where she was watching. The outer forest ring was the least-mobile, making it better to wait until they were deeper anyway. Automated puppets were starting to converge on the area though, seeing this as an assault. They were programmed to handle that differently than those in non-shrine locations though, with a higher threshold required before they went to violent repelling options.

Puppets and the group arrived at the next gate at the same time. The former moved to intercept, but the latter had spotted her higher up the stairs. Evaluating the shrine maiden puppets compared to her, they decided that she was the priority target. Barked orders had three of the soldiers firing arrows at her. All three arrows were snatched out of the air by trees before they could reach her, stunning the group, but an attack on her was enough to put the defending puppets into attack mode. Their programming prioritized disarming over other actions when chakra-based abilities weren't in play though, and the fact that the group was stunned allowed the puppets to strip them of all of their weapons and armor reasonably quickly. Each of the men was then held down in a sitting or kneeling position by a couple of puppets.

"This is a place of worship," she said as she started to walk down the steps, accepting the three arrows from the trees as she did so. "Not one of violence."

"What are you?" the leader of the group, Ehmed, asked.

"I am the highest religious authority tied to this place. The others that found this place were...far more respectful. Those soldiers realized that this was not a place to attack and sent researchers to find out more instead. You have ignored all the signs prepared, the guidance offered, and decided to attack first. I find that to be unacceptable."

Chakra threads lifted the weapons and armor into the air, and she activated her rinnegan. A moment later a small black sphere was thrown into the middle of the collection, only for the entire thing to compress down into a sphere. Significant force was exerted to ensure that everything had bonded together before she released the effect and lowered the ball to the path.

"You can take your trash with you when you leave," she said, gesturing to the ball. A pulse of chakra released a book from a seal, and she used chakra threads to float that over to sit next to the ball of metal. "And this is a guide you can take with you, so that if you return you will hopefully be less disrespectful."

The group of men gulped, and she told the puppets to release them. They took a moment to look at her fearfully, then one of the men collected the book while two others determined that it was going to be difficult to carry the ball of metal. Eventually they figured out that they could carefully roll it down the steps, not that the seal-reinforced steps would even notice if they let it barrel down uncontrolled, and the entire group quickly retreated.

With any luck the other country would push a little harder and cut that one off from access for the time being. They were far too willing to kill everything that moved if they could get away with it due to their particular national image.

A noted that the seats once again didn't have village symbols on them as he sat down for the second day's matches. He only had one genin left in things, which wasn't that big of a surprise after the 'four villages work together' group had dominated the second stage. Though if you told him that suddenly it was a Kumo-only final day he wouldn't be that surprised compared to the revelations of the previous evening.

...and it said something that Uzushio preparing to build a moon was the more believable of the two. Though that was in part due to the chain of revelations the other had led to. First being told that Tsunade was having a kid with her former teammate, who had already been a bit of a head-scratcher due to somehow getting himself trapped in a female body, was just insane. That Tsunade was the mother, but not carrying the child, was another matter entirely. This leading, practically at the legendary's medic's insistence, to Otogakure's disbanding was another one...though it was very hard to disagree with the statement that you went against Tsunade when she had medical justifications and a personal stake in things at your own peril.

Then they'd found out about the idiocy of the land's now-deceased daimyo, essentially reverting control over the entire country to Orochimaru. But she didn't want to deal with the political games and the neighboring countries had agreed that they'd rather have Uzushio take over instead of trying to split it up between each other. Some of that was obviously the Land of Iron and the Land of Hot Water not wanting a direct land border, but the whole thing was a bit weird. Not entirely his concern either, as the four countries involved had come to agreements already, but it was a wacky series of events.

It had been one hell of a meal and discussion going through all of it, and only that the pregnancy was only discovered after the exams started made it feel justified to keep Oto separate from Konoha in the genin ranks. In fact, to hear Orochimaru tell it, she'd only taken advantage of the availability of Uzushio medics because of the exams and probably wouldn't have figured out she was pregnant for a few more months otherwise.

Hinata looked over the updates Naruto had made to the 'construction project' notice plans this morning, now that more countries were aware of the moon construction plans. Changing the language on the Elemental Nations side of things made sense there, but he'd added additional translations that had required digging into translation books due to her not knowing them yet.

Those turned out to be for other continents. Because of course he was learning languages from the places he was putting in bunker networks. She felt kind of stupid for not thinking to send clones of her own to learn some of the languages, but half-expected Ino to have already done so as part of preparing for infiltration work elsewhere.

All of the messages included copies of the findings for why a moon was important, a brief summary of the known history of the currently-destroyed moon, and basic details as to the ability of the new moon to keep itself in orbit instead of moving towards or away from the planet over time. Those intended for areas unfamiliar with the Elemental Nations in general and Uzushio in particular got a brief recent history lesson as well, plus a general description of both chakra and shinobi.

She wasn't sure if anyone outside of the Elemental Nations would believe the notices if he delivered them, at least until they saw things for themselves, but construction was going to take at least a week and then the moon itself would just be there. Even if a given country had horrible weather for the entire construction period they'd still see the end results eventually.

The first thing to actually annoy her were the notes on 'how to connect to local video systems' for each country that had them, or more specifically that they weren't in the general technology division files. He seemed to be considering a live broadcast of the construction process without consulting any of them, or her in particular. Converting between systems wasn't a trivial matter, which is why they'd basically replaced everything in the Elemental Nations with their versions to standardize properly.

Then she hit the equipment numbers to replace things across other continents instead of interfacing with existing systems, which had her twitching. The numbers were...oddly reasonable, all things considered, and standardizing across the entire planet would simplify a broadcast, but at that point he might as well give them all telephones so they could call and ask questions.

...and of course, the information on the 'country to country interchange system' to do just that came next, because he'd obviously pretended to be her and others to preempt all their arguments. Even the ones that would be sarcastic instead of serious.