Chương 2685: 75
Preparations for Naruto's sixteenth birthday were more elaborate than he'd have liked, but he was in the position of being a Daimyo and a Kage turning old enough for everyone to generally agree that he was no longer in a 'should be listening to advisors' situation. Not that he really had any significant advisors in the way those caring about this kind of thing wanted. Their model was 'child learns through letting the advisors make most of the decisions, in theory asking the child for their opinion and implementing it only if deemed acceptable as a learning tool' instead of 'ask opinions, make the decisions yourself'.
In practice, it felt like it was designed to make leaders that weren't actually leaders, just puppets that allowed the advisors to be the real power across multiple theoretical generations of leaders.
Arranging for all of the 'potential suitors' to make the journey was also slightly annoying, given that permission to travel to or through various countries needed to be acquired, but hadn't been too difficult. More tedious and repetitive than difficult...and made much easier by virtue of Uzushio not having any treaties restricting their movement. The Land of Fire gave them free travel outright, but without a more restrictive agreement the prevailing attitude was 'keep us out if you can'.
The flip side of that was that technically there was nothing stopping others from coming to Uzushio under the same rules. They were just much, much better at the 'keep others out' part due to most of their territory being island. Their small bit of territory on the mainland was the obvious exception, and Naruto had been beefing up the 'border security' there bit by bit as well. While also expanding their island bunker network out so that they didn't have to travel too far to reach the outpost that had indicated an attacker had been there.
...though he did have to ensure that the 'properly registered Uzushiogakure shinobi' access rules were working, preferably with rank-based rules for various points, and get those deployed across the bunker network instead of relying on the old Uzumaki chakra taint system. Too many people with the latter and access to a lot of places really needed to not be inherited that way.
Nagato didn't have to hide his frown as he looked over the information that 'Madara' had provided. "They made it that far out, only to abandon the location and likely come back this way?"
"That's my best guess," 'Madara' agreed. "There might be a range limitation on the teleportation trick, or perhaps I just didn't find the endpoints. All the ones we know about here are in isolated bunkers that we know I can't access easily. Of course, the security of the whole thing felt...lacking, and I also couldn't gain access to the computer system itself."
"A temporary or fully-abandoned outpost they didn't bother to tear out completely, perhaps because they expected it to be buried under lava soon enough to not matter? No real way to use it to track where they went next, and you claim it was obviously abandoned long enough ago to be a dead-end from traditional tracking perspectives. That could also mean that the teleportation trick wasn't available when they abandoned it too."
"The most I found was a small graveyard with basic marker stones. Looked like they had a lot of people die in a short period of time, possibly due to the volcano itself."
Nagato nodded, then looked at the next few sheets in the pile. "While that's interesting, I'm afraid that I can't work with any of these plans you came up with for attacking or infiltrating Uzushio itself."
'Madara' felt unhappy about that, but didn't argue the point. Likely because he expected it to be coming. "Can you at least get me into one of their bunkers?"
"So that you can try to use their teleportation seals to get to the island itself?"
"Yes."
It was tempting to let the man make the attempt without a warning. But probably too out of character, and allowing him to try that could strain relationships with Naruto. "And you don't think the endpoints are protected, with guards or possibly even heavily-trapped for unexpected arrivals?"
Yeah, it was obvious that 'Madara' hadn't fully thought that part through. "Ah. And I won't be able to see anything coming when I first arrive. Hmmm."
"Have you considered slipping in through visiting for an event?"
"What event? It'll probably be several years before they host another chunin exam."
"The Uzukage's birthday is coming up."
"...I was honestly hoping to slip in while I knew he would be off the island."
Well, that was admittedly sensible. "Then I don't currently have any ideas unless they enter another nation's exams and you try to slip in while he's off watching their finals."
"Pity, but I hadn't considered that either. It should make a good fallback plan, at least, though it would take far too long for my tastes."
Hinata nodded as she brought up images from the cameras at the outpost. "Definitely 'Madara', though I don't think this place was built as an outpost."
"...it wasn't an outpost?" Naruto asked as he worked with clones to connect it to the wider Uzushio network and rebuild some of the defenses.
"The dates indicate that it was set up after the fall of the original Uzushiogakure. I think this is the first attempt at rebuilding by the survivors, only to abandon it when the volcano proved to be more active than they were expecting."
"Oh. But it isn't really all that active, someone just tried to mess with it and screwed up their seal arrays."
"...what?"
"I think they wanted to be able to control eruptions and lava flows as a defense mechanism, but forgot to ensure that the seals themselves could handle the heat and pressure involved? I've fixed those issues so that eruptions shouldn't send any lava this way and hopefully there won't be any eruptions."
"They were messing with the volcano?"
"Of course they were. Didn't you notice that the entire place is powered from the heat of the volcano?"
It was obvious that she had not, in fact, noticed that, but she created a couple of clones to go take a look for herself.
A few hours later they had everything linked up, backups downloaded to Uzushio's main systems, the new transit bunkers in place for the island, and he had teams of clones working on building the island out properly. It was a bit too far away for the 'bloodline island' idea, and in fact he had ideas for how to manage that much more impressively, but it did feel like a good remote 'want to experiment' location for those that couldn't be trusted to experiment around others. And hey, maybe the survivors that had built the place would notice the work being done and stop by.
"Why does the map of the area suddenly indicate that there's an island where there isn't an island?" Ino asked, looking over the map on the wall of Naruto's office.
"Because there will be one there soon," Naruto replied, grinning.
"What?"
"Didn't like any of the existing islands nearby, so I decided to build one from scratch."
"You're building an island? For what?"
"Bloodline testing."
"Didn't Hinata find six different islands you could repurpose for that?"
He nodded. "She did, but they're all too far away and I don't feel like destroying their ecosystems to set up the tests. Much better to build a new island that doesn't have that problem."
Ino stared at him. "So you're building an island instead."
"Yep."
"How?"
"Chakra, and lots of it."
"You can't just throw chakra at problems to solve them."
"I can when it works. Besides, none of the islands she identified would let me build up some of the underground areas properly."
"...and you're already working on it, aren't you?"
He nodded. "Yeah."
"And not focusing on preparing for your birthday?"
"I needed a distraction project."
Kisame groaned as he limped into base, only to run into Deidara. Who handed him a plate of cookies?
"What are these?" Kisame asked.
"Booster cookies," Deidara replied. "Er...just don't try to prime them. I'm never quite sure if I got the explosion release chakra out of the mix."
"Huh." Eating one of the cookies showed that it did, in fact, boost his chakra levels a bit. "Might have to get some help for that prison."
"You didn't solve the problem?"
"They tried to feed me and Samehada to some kind of giant box in an attempt to open it, and I got a bad feeling about what might happen if they succeeded. On my way out I killed most of them, including several that thought they were in charge but not the one that seemed to actually be in charge."
"Giant box? Seemingly impossible to damage, with demon faces on the sides?"
"...yes. How did you know that?"
"That thing is bad news. Supposedly let Kusagakure nearly take over the world back in the time of the Sage of Six Paths. Though they weren't called Kusagakure then, of course."
"...fuck. And it wasn't destroyed back then?"
"Apparently not if it exists for them to be trying to open it again."
Naruto hadn't expected a messenger from Amegakure to come through one of the teleportation seals, but apparently Nagato had decided to risk it as part of warning everyone that Kusagakure was trying to open 'the Box of Ultimate Bliss'. Granted, that something like that was happening had been noticed, but the danger level the box presented hadn't actually come up elsewhere.
Well, that and he'd not made the connection to various legends.
Sighing, he'd decided that this should be dealt with more sanely than through the apparent default 'drop everything and go after the box' plan and had gone in person to deal with it before the small armies being assembled by others could properly mobilize. But he'd gone out to the island in the guise of Kyo.
"Are you idiots actually trying to open that thing?" Kyo asked as she floated into the room that held the box. At the same time, she was noticing that, up close, it felt more like the Tome than anything else she'd ever been anywhere near.
"...what?" Mui, the current 'guardian' of the box, questioned, spinning around to look at her. "How did you get in here?"
"Through the door. It wasn't exactly well-hidden and Kisame appears to have recently killed basically all of your guards that could've given me trouble."
"Well, you can't do anything to stop us anyway, because you can't destroy the box."
Rolling her eyes behind her mask, Kyo decided to show how wrong that declaration was. It took a moment, during which she had to dodge an attempt by Mui to brand her with his prisoner control technique, but she was able to cast the teleportation spell that Futo was so proud of on the box to send it to another dimension entirely.
"No more box means no more opening the box," Kyo stated. "Which means your plan is officially foiled, whatever it was you were actually planning."
"...but..." Mui said, eyes wide as he looked where the box had been. "How?"
It was better to play dumb here regarding knowing where the box actually was in the other dimension. "What do you think happens if you teleport something without specifying a destination? No destination means no arrival means no more box." No destination technically tended to also mean no departure with most of their methods, or throwing it into a location where it could reappear on the planet anytime with basically zero ability to control where or when, but she wasn't about to admit to that. "Now we just need to inform the other nations that we sent the box into the void where hopefully nobody will ever see it again. At the same time, I'm reasonably certain that your prison is about to suffer a severe lack of prisoners, given that feeding their chakra to the box appears to have been the whole reason for setting this place up and I suspect that ninety percent of them are here entirely to figure out what you were up to."
She vanished a moment later and turned back into Naruto back in Uzushio. Copies of all of the secret records would be distributed throughout the continent in the next few hours, once the small group of clones finished making the copies...but for now he probably needed to go grab the Tome to see if it could make any sense of the box.
"That thing is actually a magic device of some kind," Matatabi said in a meeting a few days later, being held inside the Tome's world. "Much bigger on the inside like the Tome is, but constructed with very different base design principles."
"At least you can tell that much," Yoko said. "Can you figure anything else out?"
"It's got a set of seals keeping it closed, and pumping chakra in is more feeding the seals than anything else. They're imperfect, possibly due to damage done to them by the box itself, and appear that right now they'll allow those trying to feed chakra in to be taken into the box itself as a result. To open them it looks like you'd need to feed in the chakra of someone who had achieved sage status to temporarily unlock the seals, likely something done by Hagoromo himself to stop the thing back in the day. A system similar to the guardian system exists, but it looks like it might require a host body with access to magic...and there are at least six hundred potential such bodies stored in there right now. I suspect, but can't prove, that their personalities are trapped inside of a world like this one, but have no way to access it."
"Legend has it that if you can open the box you can make a wish," Futo added. "But you know that Gamabunta disagrees. Based on the stories you got from the toads regarding the use of the thing back in the day? It's likely that the bodies in stasis are simply able to be used as an army for the master of the box...though how said master is identified is unclear."
"I don't think the box would acknowledge a 'master'," Ren replied. "Thinking back on things, I think that the box is an anti-Ōtsutsuki weapon because the stories of the fighting made it feel a little too focused and there were mentions that it was 'capable of destroying a God Tree'."
Miho frowned at that, but eventually nodded. "Yeah. More of a 'dumb luck' that the fighting was benefiting one group of humans over everyone else than an actual controlled war on their part. The Uzumaki's tales from that whole ordeal indicated that the humans were sweeping in and taking over territory behind the fighting more than anything else, maybe coupled with the lingering personalities from those first claimed by the box being loyal to where the box first turned up?"
"It has several hundred more slots to store people in," Matatabi added. "Collecting anyone it can to fill up the 'army' before opening to hit any Ōtsutsuki nearby would make sense there."
"So what do we do with it?" Naruto asked. "Because leaving it sitting around seems...unwise, even if it's currently isolated in a dimension very few can access."
"That's another problem entirely. I need more time to examine it."
"You're lucky that Yoko can run the shrines in both villages with clones," Odoroki grumbled. She wasn't happy about being trapped in another dimension for examining a magic box.
Complaints that Uzushio had merely 'claimed the box for themselves' had come in from several nations, but it seemed that 'could take over the continent with the box' was seen as a non-issue to the larger ones. After all, there was a general assumption that they could do so without the box already, and they hadn't made any attempt to. A nation that didn't want to take everyone over was thus apparently the perfect nation to hold a superweapon that nobody knew how to use anyway.
Kusagakure was, of course, the most vocal nation complaining. They were also on everyone's shit lists for even making the attempt to open the box, on top of Mui basically trying to hold the prisoners hostage. That had worked right up until he'd been stabbed in the back of the head, at which point the few prisoners that weren't there on false charges tried to stage their own uprising.
There had been some talk of trying to respect the treaties involving the place and running it as a proper prison, but Nagato had shown up and obliterated the castle instead of allowing any attempt to force Amegakure to agree to send prisoners there.
As for the box itself, Naruto had decided that it could wait until after his birthday. Aside from a quick 'shoring up' of the seals keeping it closed, anyway, which had taken twenty minutes and the box immediately started working to subvert. They'd hold long enough, because he needed to focus on the various ongoing elements for setting up for his birthday and continuing to build the bloodline island. Except that 'Madara' had started poking at the island's defenses, seemingly looking for ways to poke a hole in the blocks on unauthorized people using space-time techniques.
"I can't decide if I'm allowed to just kill him or not," Naruto grumbled as he got reports from his clones about the man's attempts. "On one hand, he's trying to circumvent the island's security as a near-guaranteed lead-up to attacking it. On the other hand, he's incompetent, nowhere near any of the actual anchors he'd need to interact with."
"He's a missing-nin believed to have screwed with a number of countries," Hinata pointed out.
"I'm screwing with a number of countries."
"...point. There's a chance he was directly involved in the attacks on Uzushio?"
"His age is wrong. That was almost certainly the real Madara, not this pretender."
"Taking on the identity of a criminal means you don't get to complain when someone kills you for the criminal's prior actions?"
"Madara himself was never declared a missing-nin and the dude doesn't wear a forehead protector. Granted, some of that was Madara being believed to be dead, but whoever this is would also currently be believed to be dead."
"Hmmm."
Ino sighed. "If he's already supposed to be dead then just kill him and make that reality?"
Naruto rolled his eyes. "Because I want to figure out if he needs to be killed or just given a proverbial spanking and sent on his way. Someone was manipulating Uchiha for far too long and killing the ones who fell for the manipulation feels like a dick move."
"Okay, when you put it that way it does feel at least somewhat wrong."
"I'm half tempted to send a clone to give him lessons in breaking into places."
"He can't be that bad."
Hinata moved over to the computer that Naruto had in the room and brought up some videos for Ino. Most of them of the man's 'breaking in' tactics being 'bash his way through the defenses' with no finesse whatsoever, coupled with his failed attempts to attack the island's defenses underwater nowhere near where any of the anchors actually sat.
"Maybe we should write a book for him?" Ino suggested after seeing that. "...could actually do with sending such a book out to a number of villages, honestly. Basic security and how to get through things that aren't even security? Some villages think a basic pin tumbler lock is actual security instead of just a slight distraction on its own."
"There are merits to that," Naruto admitted. "Could use it as an academy textbook too, possibly? Might have to check with Iruka there, see if he has any suggestions or requests."
They hashed out some ideas for such a book, the items and tricks it should cover on the 'absolute minimum security' standpoint and how to bypass basically everything below that point, before sending a copy of the notes off with a clone for Iruka to review regarding a potential academy textbook.
The arrival of groups for the birthday celebrations had involved a lot of Naruto welcoming delegations and 'potential suitors', but zero attempts to indicate that he was interested in any of them. That came easy because he wasn't interested in any of them, and nine of them were only there in hopes that their 'security' could find some of the village's secrets. There were four major exceptions to the pattern though. The Fire Daimyo came for the celebration without pushing anyone to be a suitor, Hiashi's group didn't include a suitor because Hinata lived in Uzushio, Inoichi's group had no suitor because Ino lived in Uzushio, and Orochimaru's group was essentially one chipmunk-woman and twenty orphans.
"I brought records of the experiments I performed on those that I experimented on," Orochimaru said, handing over a scroll. "But none of them are likely to get a proper education with the state of my people."
"Doubly so when you had to kill off some of the worst offenders?" Naruto questioned as he took the scroll.
"Wouldn't have trusted them to teach any of the kids anyway, to be honest. I also included a small collection of items you might find interesting and probably hadn't run into before. A bit of payment, but also curiosity to see what you might do with some of it."
"I see. You are aware that 'send orphans to another village to eventually get agents in their forces' basically never works, right?"
Orochimaru scoffed. "Of course I am. Exploited it several times too. Most of these kids would already turn on half my forces in a heartbeat as it is, and little Shimaki has already tried to kill me twice for killing her mother."
"...why did you kill her mother?"
Instead of answering herself, the woman looked down at one of the younger kids, who blushed. "Mommy was putting poison in the water."
Naruto nodded. "That's generally frowned upon. Did you attack Orochimaru before or after you found out?"
"...both."
"To be fair to her," Orochimaru said. "Revenge of the sort is somewhat traditional, and I am generally considered to be a bit of a monster. Though I personally suspected that she'd have tried to kill me for experimenting on her."
The girl blinked a couple of times, as though that hadn't occurred to her at all. "But I like being able to spit acid? And what you did to make the acid spit not hurt made the leak in my room stop hurting if I touched it too."
"...and apparently I have to do some checking on the idiots that are supposed to maintain the housing for the orphans. Do watch out for her acid-spit though...and I'm not sure if she's going to have related problems when she's older. Details are in her file."
Naruto nodded. "I'll see if we can come up with a list of problems for you before you leave, just to speed things up a bit."
Orochimaru was very much visibly resigned upon realizing that was a serious offer. She would look even more put-out when they'd not even gotten through four of the orphans at the hospital before being handed a full report on the status of her orphan housing, plus fifteen other buildings, but seemed to appreciate the list of problems fixed at the end.
Karin flipped through the collection of files on the orphans that Orochimaru had brought, shaking her head. They'd undone his work on a few of them, improved it to make things stable longer-term for a few others, and left the rest alone. All of that had even been predicted in the medical files, depending on how 'successful' a given experiment had been. The two kids with acid-spit were going to need a lot of monitoring, as was the boy who had two artificial legs because of a problem with a bloodline ability.
How an entire family had existed for at least four generations with a bloodline that had a primary effect of rendering your legs useless was beyond her, but they apparently had. There were ideas on how to get it to stop propagating to kids in the file as well, including six that hadn't worked on the boy's father.
"It's weird how excited those kids were to get examined," Sakura said as she came in with drinks for both of them.
"Half of them liked what Orochimaru did to them and wanted to be 'more awesome'," Karin replied. "The rest seemed to make a major distinction between 'examination' and 'experimentation'."
"...true, I suppose."
"I'm personally more concerned about the 'Ruri' several of them mentioned."
"She wasn't in the group?"
"Nope. No file on her, just comments from several of the kids that she didn't come with the rest of them for some reason."
"Weird, but not our problem."
"I think I'll ask Naruto to check on the orphans left behind in general anyway, just in case."
"Already did," Naruto said from the doorway. "Boss says there are four orphans that didn't get brought here."
Karin blinked, reclassified this as one of Naruto's clones, and then frowned. "Any reasons why not?"
"Looks like two were being treated well by adults, possibly extended family. One has problems with salt water. The last is the 'Ruri' you were just talking about and probably doesn't need to be worried about."
"That's infuriatingly vague."
"Well, you could also claim that she's not an orphan. As far as the boss could tell, she's the kid of Orochi's last host."
That...well, it certainly put the 'acting maternal' observations into perspective, at least.
"So everyone is here," Naruto said as he stretched after dinner. "With over a day for people to get settled before the festivities start."
"Complete with a large-scale politically-approved prank on all of the visiting suitors," Ino said, bouncing slightly.
"Of course. Jiraiya is going to be devastated when he realizes what's going on though, since he was dreaming about me arranging to have a twenty-girl harem or something like that."
"He would."
"You didn't see the forty-page plan he came up with," Hinata said, shaking her head. "With arguments for why the various nobles and leaders should allow it and even how to manage hierarchy within the 'harem' itself."
"That does not surprise me in the least."
Naruto sighed. "It also doesn't include dealing with the fact that 'Madara' seems to have mind-whammied one of the suitors so that he could play bodyguard. Undoing that is going to be mildly annoying, but I think it provides suitable justification for actually killing him. Assuming, of course, that he survives tomorrow after I informed Jiraiya, Tsunade, and Orochimaru about the stunt. Seems they have standards and are willing to work together when someone is that stupid."
"Doesn't hurt that Tsunade and Jiraiya have basically decided to treat Orochimaru as though she's the original's not-quite-so-crazy daughter," Hinata added. "The personality differences are apparently a little extreme, and not being 'immortal' has ensured that she's more cautious than he'd been in years."
"Yeah, there's that too."
"So what are we doing tomorrow?" Ino asked.
"Checking out bloodline island, if you want? Finished it up yesterday, but wouldn't mind an additional opinion or two before showing it off more widely."
"Did you at least put in proper computers?" Hinata questioned.
"I put in a full outpost security system with plenty of cameras, yes. There are twenty-one total arrival points, and I'll need to build a 'bloodline tower' for people coming and going. Individual alerts for each arrival area and the paths through, your identification card reader system for opening the initial doors, and chakra signature lockouts for known problems. I even got an age restriction into place, though I haven't been able to test the final installation itself."
"Twenty-one arrival points?"
"Fire, wind, lightning, earth, water, yin, yang, and medical as basic points. You can either earn access to a full capability seal or prove your skills to try and branch out into a combined-chakra path from those. Well, or the bite-to-heal node for the medical entry point. Then ten more points cover combining two of the basic five natures, with another for combining yin and yang. The wood release helper is number twenty, and twenty-one is a special path for the sensory node and chakra chains. Haven't decided what to do with the extra beads though."
Ino frowned. "Extra beads?"
Naruto pulled out a tag and unsealed a set of shelves filled with the various element beads. "Figured out how to duplicate them outside of the Tome and made a pile expecting to need a bunch for my plans, before I figured out how to manage it all with a single set. Left me with quite a lot of extras."
"Holy..."
"Yoko's a little annoyed at how little entertainment the displays in Konoha have produced too. Every so often someone tries to get one out, but nowhere near as often or seriously as we'd expected."
"How valuable do you consider these?" Hinata asked, looking over the shelves.
Naruto frowned. "...not very? Why?"
"What do you think about making 'consolation prize' necklaces for the suitors?"
"As in give away what some people would consider to be incredibly valuable beads built into necklaces, without stating what they are, to people essentially incapable of actually using them?"
"Yep."
"Huh. That sounds like a great prank, but I was half-thinking about gifting a couple to villages that I sent copies of the basic security books to. Say, one per copy of the book I send along? Would just have to decide which ones for which village."
"Why not do both? Then when someone compares things they might notice the similarities."
That did have some merit to it.
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