On a certain day, Arthur sat on the throne. The daily governance was finally finished as he threw the last stack of trade reports to the dais. The entire room was practically littered with them.
Running a country required a dull rhythm, one that needed him to manage supply lines, approve grain distributions, and oversee border rotations. It was tedious work, but it was building the foundation he needed.
When he closed his eyes to think, he considered how he had to outline the latest goals ahead of him.
First, he had to re-secure his country. The world had woken up to his presence. Almost every major nation was looking for his territory by sending scouts into the blind spots of the map. Thankfully, the defenses he'd set up were just enough to both anticipate and repel intruders.
The second goal was the Ten-Tails. Acquiring the beast was not a single action. It required multiple steps to complete. He had to gather the scattered chakra, secure the right vessels, and manipulate the current powers into destroying each other while he operated in the shadows.
But there was a shortcut: his main body.
While the body of Ryugetsu's clone was strong, it had hard limits. If Arthur could locate his original body during this long process, he'd most certainly put everything aside for the capturing of the Ten-Tails.
But he was not in too much of a rush; both the Ten-Tails could wait and the geopolitical maneuvering could wait.
Reclaiming his true form would have to be near the top of his goals. That way, he could expedite things by years. He just needed to figure out the how-to portion of locating it.
The solution lay in the variables.
As he kept his eyes closed, a scenario played in his head: one that recounted both the original timeline of the world and the highest course of action the otherworldly people would make when knowing what would transpire.
Jada, William, Alice, Margaret, Jasper, Alex—Arthur understood their patterns well because they were the only ones who knew the future of this world. This inevitably caused them to act with a specific kind of arrogance.
Jada tried to win the system through politics. William relied on forcefully fixing the narrative. Alice tried to save characters destined to die. Margaret built alliances with doomed factions. Jasper tracked the main sources of power like a hound. And Alex? Alex caused randomness to disrupt the story.
Arthur took their habits and laid them over the timeline. He treated them like moving parts in a machine. From Jada to William to Alice to Margaret to Jasper to Alex, Arthur pieced them together into one congruent puzzle.
When he saw what he needed, the exact route he had to take became clear.
So he stood up from his throne and teleported.
'Flying raijin…'
Arthur soon reappeared on the outskirts of his country.
The wind was steady here, blowing across the dirt and grass as he stood on a high ridge overlooking the boundary line.
Like he knew, he needed to constantly keep his security in check. The whole reason the war had started was because of the Zetsu incident. That disgusting creature had slipped through his empire and told everything to Pain.
The last thing Arthur wanted was another incident like that happening.
Walls and guards were not enough; he needed a net. So he stood there and focused as he broke down the mechanics of his ninshū.
The process of changing ninjutsu was fairly easy from practice: where ninjutsu relied on aggressive tactics to overwhelm and destroy, ninshū revolved around harmonizing chakra to its fullest.
If executed properly, the energy blended into the environment so one couldn't tell it was a peaceful weapon. Agitate that peace, however, and it could seriously burn.
Arthur's first focus was on the sun. It hung high in the sky, and its rays beat down on him. He let it, allowing him to draw out those chemical energies from the light.
As it was doing so, he remembered his time with B. Not the current B in this timeline, but the one Arthur had met almost a thousand years ago. B understood the fundamental core of ninshū because B felt a deep connection to the life around him.
The difference between Arthur and B was that Arthur held no compassion for this world. He did not care for the trees, the dirt, or the people breathing the air. But he did, however, hold enough compassion to see it burn.
That singular focus was pure enough to serve as a bridge for him to re-learn ninshū.
Right then and there, he could see the tangible lines ninshū carried within the sunbeams. So Arthur harmonized with nature, using his spiritual energy instead of chakra alone.
He pulled the sunlight into himself, and once that energy became rooted in his spirit, he transferred it to his mind. From his mind, it then trickled down to his heart. The process was quite easier than the first time he learned it.
But when he gathered the energy in his chest and tried to spread the energy to his body, he felt a crack.
Crack!
His sternum flared with pain as he staggered a half-step. What had gone wrong? The residual energy spread out through his muscles in a jagged wave rather than a flowing one, causing him to fail at gathering.
Arthur remained calm, knowing this was going to happen. Ryugetsu's body was not as natural as he had hoped. The veins and chakra coils were rigid, designed for specific functions rather than fluid connection. Such an artificial nature was thus preventing a full harmonization. If he forced it, the flesh would break apart and kill him on the spot.
Yet there was a means to this end.
The clone body was flawed, but the body still had barriers the energy could pass through, albeit in subtle ways.
Arthur could not use his heart as the central pump. Rather than the heart spreading the energy fully to the body in one massive pulse, it had to spread the energy in bits so that the body would not implode under the strain of the natural power.
So he got into his meditative stance again and tried to re-harness that energy.
As he reached back out to the sun like before, the energy came to his spirit, then to his mind, and then to his heart. This time, when he was ready to spread it to his body, he recoiled that energy and pulled it away from his chest by making it instead spread from his brain down to his spinal cord.
The spine acted as a transient as the central nervous system filtered the power while bleeding it into his muscles drop by drop.
Before he knew it, he could feel the pressure in his chest vanish. He could also feel the chakra lighten so much that it seemed transparent.
The heavy, dense sensation of his normal reserves was gone. When he opened his eyes again, he felt the chakra flow in him go lighter and faster.
Yet, as he observed the faint aura around his fingers, he noticed it was not the same as before, where it was close to completely white. This one still held a small hint of blue to it. Likely because this body was a modified clone version.
Such a visual reminder of his current state was an imperfection he would have to manage.
As such, he slowly raised his hand, pointing his palm above the clouds to cast a technique.
"Sun maker jutsu…" he whispered.
Immediately, his perception shattered as the size of his sensing range expanded all across his borders where the sunlight radiated. The sheer volume of information flooding his brain should have overwhelmed him, but the ninshū kept his mind organized.
Everywhere he turned his attention, he could see the minute details of the land. He looked down at the dirt hundreds of miles out, watching the segmented legs of tiny insects climb over pebbles. He shifted his focus to a dirt road near the perimeter. He also saw a merchant walking toward one of his open villages. Even the metal coins in the merchant's pouch could be sensed with every step the man took.
The clarity was nothing short of absolute.
But the real test came by checking the vital locations. So he swept his vision there, and when he tried to sense the Hidden Eddy Village, he could not.
The sunlight hit the ground, but his perception slid right off the area. It was a blank spot in his mind.
This was good; the Uzumaki's barrier team was clearly hard at work at keeping the village hidden from sensory nets. Even against those as potent as this one.
When Arthur looked at the Hidden Light Village, it too was hidden.
There didn't seem to be any particular flaw the leaders of both respective clans considered. They had locked their homes down tight.
But that didn't mean there wasn't room for improvement. Arthur would undoubtedly inspect their barrier seals in person later to ensure no one could bypass them.
He soon dropped his arm while still keeping the technique active. As he looked at his hands, he understood this technique to be passive, meaning it could stay active in the background of his mind even while he was focused on other things.
This was the moment Arthur ceased moving completely. He stood on the ridge and focused his mind on the data as he recorded every single chakra signature currently present within his borders.
Civilians in the open towns and guards walking their patrols—he sorted them by density and location. The process took only ten minutes. And when he was done, the baseline of his country was set in stone.
Now he could verify if a foreign chakra signature entered his border.
If Pain knew that he had this technique under his belt, the Akatsuki leader would probably change sides. After all, it was the polar opposite to his Rain Maker technique.