The former Daimyo of the Land of Waterfalls and the Land of Frost had settled permanently inside the core region of the Nation of a Hundred Clans.
They had no shortage of money.
Financial freedom had already been achieved.
More importantly, living directly inside the country’s central city meant they could buy every cutting-edge product before almost anyone else.
That alone gave them endless material for showing off.
Mu had even introduced a special premium service specifically for the rich and aristocratic.
Even ninja assigned to these customers were expected to serve them properly.
In terms of emotional satisfaction and prestige, the experience was complete.
The ninja and ordinary workers providing those services were equally delighted.
Their wages were several times higher than other jobs.
So what if earning that money meant acting like someone’s obedient grandson for a few hours?
Money was money.
Even so, draining the former Daimyos’ fortunes through luxury spending alone would take far too long.
That wouldn’t do.
Money sitting uselessly in a Daimyo’s vault was nothing but dead paper.
Only when money circulated through the economy could development accelerate.
Directly seizing their wealth was obviously impossible.
If Mu did that, merchants and other nobles would become terrified and stop coming here.
So instead, he developed an entire collection of success-theory lectures and began teaching them how to make money.
Today’s lesson was about identifying pain points and turning them into profit.
The former Daimyo of the Land of Waterfalls looked at the mountain of money he’d accumulated.
It produced no income and slowly decreased every year.
So he made a decision.
Invest it into the city.
Use money to make money.
Watching his wealth slowly disappear while doing nothing frightened him.
Destroying the mountain and rebuilding it into something larger, however, gave him no psychological pressure whatsoever.
The biggest reason was simple.
The classes Mu’s people gave them made earning money sound ridiculously easy—as though piles of cash were lying everywhere on the street waiting to be picked up.
The former Waterfall Daimyo paid ninja to survey the city’s restaurant industry.
The answer?
Almost nonexistent.
There was a noodle shop.
That was about it.
He and the other former Daimyo had eaten stir-fried dishes Mu developed earlier.
They were delicious, especially once combined with various unfamiliar vegetables and seasonings.
Naturally, Mu had used Transformation Technique while giving his business lectures.
He hadn’t bothered hiding himself when introducing stir-fried food, though.
After all, entrepreneurship involved the possibility of losing money.
If these people followed his lectures and then failed, there was always a chance they would resent the person who had taught them.
Uchiha Mu had no intention of carrying that blame personally.
The survey results were obvious.
The city currently had no real restaurant industry despite substantial demand.
Factories provided meals, but only twice a day.
Workers had eaten the same things for so long that many were naturally growing tired of them.
Ninja performing other jobs either brought food from home or bought military rations pills.
Even improved military rations pills were still military rations pills.
The commercial district had plenty of snacks, but the former Daimyo wasn’t certain what would succeed there.
So he decided to satisfy the most obvious demand first.
He spent heavily to acquire five storefronts.
One near the factories.
One near the village gate.
One near the ninja academy.
And others along routes most workers used every day.
The moment his restaurants opened, business exploded.
The former Daimyo had sold his territory to Uchiha Mu and now possessed little besides money.
Naturally, he’d spent much of that money on enjoyment.
His standards for food and drink were exceptionally high.
Mu had also taught him a simple advertising method.
Market the food as something so good that even a Daimyo praised it.
The moment that slogan appeared, enormous numbers of customers came pouring in.
When the former Daimyo of Frost saw the former Daimyo of Waterfalls making money, he naturally refused to fall behind.
He leased a large number of houses and transformed them into lodging specifically for outsiders and visiting merchants.
The government already provided accommodations, but comfort was limited.
The former Frost Daimyo spent heavily renovating his properties.
Wealthy merchants immediately became customers.
He also made money, though not as quickly as the former Waterfall Daimyo.
So he began researching other industries.
Again: food, clothing, housing, and transportation.
Through paid surveys, he discovered that nobody had properly entered the clothing business yet.
Most families bought cloth and made clothes themselves.
But because Mu had encouraged women to work and earn money normally, more and more households now had both adults employed.
Nobody had time to sit home sewing clothes.
Some people had considered opening clothing stores, but many were still uncertain about the country’s long-term stability and didn’t dare invest.
The former Frost Daimyo couldn’t care less about those worries.
He immediately spent money to establish a clothing workshop, purchased more than a dozen sewing machines, and hired people of different body types to serve as fitting models while standardized clothing sizes were developed.
This method had also come from Uchiha Mu.
Standardization and templates could cut production costs enormously.
Before long, several complete clothing lines appeared.
And they looked good.
You could question a Daimyo’s morality all you wanted.
Questioning a Daimyo’s aesthetic sense was much harder.
Over the course of the year, the former Daimyos’ investments gradually encouraged other people to enter the market as well.
Merchants with money.
People carrying stolen wealth they wanted to legitimize.
Anyone with enough capital began investing in the city.
This dramatically reduced Mu’s own construction expenses while creating substantial tax revenue.
The country’s development had finally entered a new stage.
Konoha could barely keep pace thanks to businesses belonging to its ninja clans.
The other great hidden villages couldn’t.
They still relied almost entirely on village spending.
At this point, Uchiha Mu was leading the entire shinobi world.
He simply didn’t publish detailed statistics, so outsiders had no clear understanding of what life inside the Nation of a Hundred Clans actually looked like.
Because Mu constantly introduced new products and sold them throughout both great and small nations, most outsiders only understood one thing.
The Nation of a Hundred Clans was extremely rich.
How rich?
Nobody had any real concept.
But everyone remembered one plan.
The moment Uchiha Mu died, they would move in and divide the country.
For now, all that wealth could simply be considered temporarily stored there on their behalf.
Why did the great nations tolerate the Land of Iron existing as a neutral country?
Simple.
It was too poor.
Invading the place might cost more than they could ever recover from conquest.
So everyone allowed it to remain neutral.
The Nation of a Hundred Clans had also been temporarily recognized as neutral—but only because Uchiha Mu existed.
…
Konoha.
“Tobirama-sama, intelligence from the Nation of a Hundred Clans.
Uchiha Mu has left the country.”
A masked ANBU ninja reported to Senju Tobirama.
The ANBU system had technically appeared first in the Nation of a Hundred Clans.
Of course, Mu had copied the idea from Tobirama’s future creation—Tobirama simply had no way of knowing that.
From Tobirama’s perspective, he had merely seen a useful organization in another country and created Konoha’s own version.
As for plagiarism?
That concept barely existed in the shinobi world.
Otherwise, everyone whose ninjutsu had ever been copied by the Sharingan would have gone insane long ago.
“Have you confirmed his destination?” Tobirama asked.
“Not exactly.
But he appears to be traveling toward the Land of Lightning.”
“The Land of Lightning at this particular time…
What intelligence do we have from there?”
Tobirama frowned.
As the man who respected the Uchiha Clan more than anyone else in the world, Tobirama always tried to think several moves ahead whenever Uchiha Mu acted.
He wanted to understand Mu’s ultimate goal before it happened.
“There is one relevant report.
Kumogakure lost a considerable number of people fighting an enormous two-tailed cat.”
One of the ANBU answered.
Every great nation had spies and information gatherers inside the others.
Kumogakure couldn’t conceal a battle of that scale.
Unless, of course, they possessed enough strength to instantly suppress a tailed beast the way Uchiha Mu did.
If Chomei hadn’t physically appeared inside Mu’s country afterward, nobody would even have known he’d obtained the Seven-Tails.
“Uchiha Mu’s target is the Two-Tails,” Tobirama concluded immediately.
“Collect information on the other tailed beasts as well.
At the same time, notify Kumogakure.
Make sure they know Uchiha Mu is coming.”
If something could obstruct Uchiha Mu, Tobirama was willing to do it.
In his eyes, Mu was more dangerous than Madara.
No—more dangerous than the Uchiha Clan as a whole.
Not merely because of his strength.
His ideas were the truly dangerous part.
Whether Kumogakure could actually stop him was irrelevant.
Tobirama simply refused to let Uchiha Mu accomplish everything too easily.
“Understood.”
The ANBU vanished.
A summoned animal would carry the warning to Kumogakure at the fastest possible speed.