The Warring States era.
An age of endless conflict, when nations schemed and fought without pause. The strong grew stronger, and the weak were swallowed whole.
Every layer of society was in turmoil. From nobles down to commoners, no one lived with the slightest sense of safety. At any moment, anyone could become meat on the butcher's block.
In a chaotic age where war burned this fiercely, morals and shame had no meaning.
Violence and slaughter were the only correct answers to staying alive.
Natural disasters and famine spread through every country.
Starving refugees wandered the roads, and when they spoke of meat pies, ladyfingers, shepherd's pie, or blood pudding, the ingredients were often horrifyingly literal. There was no false advertising there.
And just as this age of great conflict seemed ready to enter an even more brutal stage, two clans in the Land of Fire suddenly announced an alliance.
The Senju clan and the Uchiha clan.
That single announcement made the entire chaotic world slam on the brakes, falling into a deathly silence.
The Senju and Uchiha had formed an alliance?
The other ninja clans nearly laughed themselves sick.
Was this some new kind of Warring States joke?
Just last year, the two strongest ninja clans in the world had been locked in a bloody struggle to the death. This year, they were suddenly allies?
But when the treaty between the two clans was sent to every nation under the name of the daimyo of the Land of Fire, everyone watching the matter fell silent at once.
Who were the two strongest ninja clans of the Warring States era?
The Senju clan, who possessed the power of the Sage's body.
And the Uchiha clan, who possessed the power of the Sage's eyes.
So on that day, the minds of every daimyo, along with countless great and small ninja clans, exploded in every possible sense of the word.
As if by silent agreement, they all stopped fighting.
Unease, fear, silence, and doubt filled the hearts of those daimyo and ninja clans.
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Yomi Castle.
It stood on the border between the former Land of Waterfall and the Land of Iron.
Built on a foundation of wood and stone, with steel as its frame, it was a vast and magnificent city that had suddenly risen there more than ten years ago.
Every street, every residential district, every public facility within the city looked as if it had been carefully measured in advance. Everything was arranged in neat, orderly rows, pleasing to the eye.
Even the roads had been tamped down inch by inch. Carriages could roll across them without the slightest bump.
Traveling merchants came and went in endless streams, laughing and discussing business with the well-fed residents. All sorts of fresh, strange, and fashionable goods appeared on the shelves of countless stores, injecting unusual vitality into the city.
Such a peaceful and prosperous scene felt completely out of place against the overall state of the ninja world.
It was as beautiful as a hidden paradise beyond the reach of war.
At the center of the city stood a grand complex surrounded by towering walls dozens of meters high, built from great quantities of earth and timber.
Because of the high walls, only the upper portions of the buildings inside could be seen, yet even that was enough to reveal their grandeur.
Most striking of all was the huge tower protected by countless sturdy buildings around it. It gave the impression of a floating palace in the clouds, something that did not quite belong to the mortal world.
Among the buildings inside the walls walked samurai with swords at their waists, dressed in layered armor and almost fully armed.
There were also ninja dressed in standard black uniforms, cloaked in long coats, moving as swiftly as the wind.
Two completely different professions of violence, yet both were special groups in the Warring States era capable of using chakra. Here, they had been merged and integrated with remarkable closeness.
The samurai were more numerous, roughly a thousand in total.
The ninja were fewer, but still numbered around two hundred.
These organized ninja and samurai patrolled the complex along carefully planned routes, guarding it so tightly that not even a drop of water could slip through.
At the center of the complex stood a tall tower-like pavilion.
At that moment, on the highest floor of the pavilion, Oda Yayoi stood with his hands clasped behind his back, staring without blinking at the enormous map hanging on the wall.
It was a detailed map covering the entire ninja world. Mountains, rivers, and terrain were marked across it like scattered stars. The borders of every great nation and small country were carefully painted, and the clan crests of the many ninja clans within those lands were drawn on it as well.
Those ninja clan crests were scattered unevenly throughout the countries of the ninja world.
Nearly half of them, however, had been marked with a red "X."
That meant those clans had been completely erased from the ninja world during the chaos of the Warring States era.
The Land of Fire had the most such marks. In the past few decades alone, more than thirty large and small ninja clans had been wiped out within that great nation.
At the same time, the Land of Fire also had the greatest number of surviving ninja clans.
That meant the intensity of war inside the Land of Fire far exceeded that of other nations.
But all of that was now over.
Because the Senju clan and Uchiha clan, two powerful ninja clans that had once opposed each other, had reached a reconciliation.
Yayoi's gaze swept over the two most eye-catching clan crests inside the Land of Fire.
"Senju... Uchiha..."
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A rare look of gravity and contemplation appeared on Yayoi's face.
Memories from his previous life, both familiar and unfamiliar, began to surge through his mind like a tide.
The recent rumors that the Senju clan and Uchiha clan had formed a pact had caused an uproar. That meant the ninja village he remembered, the one called Konoha, was not far from being established.
The chaotic Warring States era was also about to reach a new turning point.
For many nations and ninja clans, this would be a trial unlike any before it.
The same was true for the country he now controlled.
The Land of Night.
"According to the timeline, it probably will not be long before Konohagakure is founded in the Land of Fire. After that, the other four great nations will begin following suit one after another..."
The system of one nation, one village was already unstoppable.
Anyone who stood in front of that system would be crushed beneath the tide of history.
Naturally, Yayoi would not overestimate himself and try to stop it.
He was only thinking about what benefits he could gain when this turning point in history arrived.
The reason Yayoi was so certain that the tide of one nation, one village could not be resisted was not because he had extraordinary foresight.
It was because he possessed "eyes" that looked beyond this era.
Those "eyes" had nothing to do with wisdom or perception. It was simply that he knew the direction the future would take.
That was right.
Yayoi was a transmigrator.
He still remembered his previous life. After graduating from university, he had worked as an ordinary office employee for three or four years.
There had been nothing special about his life. One day, after coming home from work and going to sleep, he had awakened in the world of Naruto, reborn from the womb.
The problem was that he had not arrived in the plot era he knew so well.
Instead, he had arrived in the chaotic Warring States era, an age he barely understood.
A dark age where children of four or five could pick up blades, kill people, and be sent to the battlefield.
Worse still, he had not been born into a ninja clan.
He had begun in the worst possible way, as an orphan.
At the start, all he had been given was a broken bowl as he wandered around begging.
If he had not later met a wandering ninja who took him in, even surviving would have been a problem.
Fortunately, although he had no noble ninja clan background, he possessed a special talent that was no weaker than a kekkei genkai.
Perhaps it was a special privilege gained from living two lives. The chakra he refined possessed a life force ordinary ninja did not have.
To put it simply, his chakra did not need to form a technique to possess powerful self-healing ability without hand signs. He could also transmit his own chakra to heal others, similar to the Uzumaki clan.
This special, life-activated chakra would also subtly transform his body over time, comprehensively enhancing his taijutsu, ninjutsu, and genjutsu.
Because of that, he had relied on the chakra knowledge taught by the wandering ninja, combined it with what he remembered from the original manga and the small ideas of a transmigrator, and clawed his way upward step by step until he finally gained a foothold in this chaotic age.
Unfortunately, when he was ten years old, the wandering ninja who had taken him in died of severe injuries during a bounty mission in the underground black market before Yayoi could heal him.
After that, Yayoi returned to living alone and continued drifting through the underground black market.
Slowly, his strength grew greater and greater.
His reputation in the underground black market also grew larger and larger.
By the time he looked back, a large number of talented people had gathered around him without him realizing it.
And so, a mercenary organization destined to stir up storms of blood in the underground black market was born.
After six years of development, it grew from him alone, to a dozen people, and then gradually into a massive mercenary force of several hundred fighters, supported by a logistics team made up of tens of thousands of ordinary people.
On the border between Waterfall and Iron, he established a city capable of housing tens of thousands.
Yomi Castle.
With a core base in place, his influence continued spreading outward from that city. Within the territories of Waterfall and Iron, he naturally gained enormous momentum, almost monopolizing the war market of both countries.
Unsurprisingly, this drew deep fear and suspicion from the daimyo and noble classes of both nations.
But by then, Yayoi's wings had already fully grown.
Faced with suppression from the daimyo of both countries, was he supposed to avoid their sharp edge?
After two years of war, he successfully broke through the daimyo estates of both nations, suppressed multiple resistance forces within them, then took out a list and carried out a systematic purge of every name on it.
During those two years of war, his forces also transformed from mercenaries into something larger, swelling like a rolling snowball and attracting even more talented people to his side.
Therefore, after successfully suppressing the resistance forces inside both countries, he took control of their military and political systems with almost no difficulty.
His subordinates were able to quickly merge into the bureaucracy and keep the country running.
After that, he established a bakufu.
Using the title of "shogun," he replaced the title of "daimyo" and officially ruled the territories of Waterfall and Iron.
The Land of Waterfall and the Land of Iron vanished from the ninja world.
From the corpses of those two countries, the Land of Night was born.
Nine years had passed since the founding of this new nation.
Yayoi was now twenty-seven years old, right in the prime of his life.
After nine years of integration, the remnants of the former regimes inside the Land of Night had basically been eliminated.
Every department within the country now operated in an orderly manner. The people lived in peace and contentment, sick of endless fighting and slaughter. Even if old factions still wanted to restore the past, they could no longer stir up any real waves.
Once internal unity was achieved, the enemy would shift from within to without.
Although the Land of Night was not exactly fertile by the standards of the ninja world, there were still hungry wolves eyeing this land.
For example, four years ago, the Hagoromo clan, defeated in the Land of Fire and forced to flee to the Land of Night, had once set its sights on Yayoi's territory.
In order to slaughter that foreign wolf, Yayoi spent a great deal of effort before finally wiping out the Hagoromo clan that had migrated into the Land of Night.
From them, he obtained quite a few valuable things.
It was also because of that achievement that Yayoi truly stabilized his position as shogun of the Land of Night. Many wolves coveting this territory no longer dared to casually bare their claws.
Just as Yayoi was thinking about these matters, a knock sounded at the door.
"Come in."
Yayoi's gaze remained on the map as he calculated his next plan.
After the door opened, a young man in his twenties, close in age to Yayoi, walked in from outside.
He wore a mask over his face, covering everything below his eyes and revealing only a pair of eerie, faintly glowing green eyes.
"Yayoi-sama."
"Kakuzu, is it? What is it?"
Yayoi's gaze swept over the young man who had entered, and a trace of satisfaction flashed through his eyes.
This young man was Kakuzu.
He was one of Yayoi's greatest gains over the years.
In the original story, Kakuzu was one half of the Akatsuki's immortal duo.
After failing to assassinate the First Hokage, Senju Hashirama, he was treated unjustly by the upper ranks of Takigakure. In the end, he stole the village's forbidden techniques and fled, becoming a rogue ninja.
But the current Kakuzu had not yet experienced that betrayal.
Yayoi had recruited him early, making him one of the high-ranking officials of the Land of Night and a trusted right-hand man.
According to the ninja ranking system of later generations, Kakuzu's current strength was equivalent to an elite among jōnin. He was proficient in Earth Style and Water Style, and his taijutsu was also quite impressive.
In this unfamiliar Warring States era, Kakuzu could be considered one of the few "familiar faces" Yayoi had.
This era was far too distant from the beginning of the main plot. Many famous ninja of the time never appeared in the story of later generations.
Most importantly, Naruto was a manga Yayoi had followed while still in school.
The part he had read up to was the Five Kage Summit, where the one-eyed man calling himself "Uchiha Madara" had just revealed the Eye of the Moon Plan and declared the beginning of the Fourth Great Ninja War.
As for the rest, after graduating and starting work, he had no time or energy left to follow the updates, so he had let it go.
On top of that, this was the Warring States era. That made much of the "future knowledge" in Yayoi's head useless.
There were even people he had never heard of.
For example, there was a ninja in the Land of Wind named Reto. It was said he could use Wind Style to create enormous storms with a range of dozens of miles.
In the Land of Earth, there was a ninja named Ishikawa, practically a human earthquake machine. His Earth Style was said to shake space and earth. In his most famous battle, he single-handedly buried a powerful clan that possessed a kekkei genkai, collapsing several mountains in the process.
Aside from them, A of the Land of Lightning and Byakuren of the Land of Water were equally famous, each one like a natural disaster in human form.
Yayoi had reason to suspect that these people were the other First Kage later said to stand alongside the First Hokage, Senju Hashirama.
Otherwise, how could it be such a coincidence that they had appeared in the other four great nations?
"Yayoi-sama, the search unit we sent out has found the Seven-Tails you were looking for."
Kakuzu organized his words briefly, then reported to Yayoi in a concise manner.
"Where?"
Yayoi's mind stirred.
Although ninja were the mainstream power in this era, the existence of the tailed beasts had also left a vivid mark on the age.
As one of the tailed beasts, the Seven-Tails had, according to all traceable historical records, always lived within the territory of the Land of Waterfall.
Even though the Land of Waterfall no longer existed.
"The Blacksteel Forest. The Seven-Tails seems to have been there all along and has not left."
Kakuzu gave the name of a place.