Hey guys, here is the new chapter hope you will liked and read thru everything.
Sorry for not posting any chapters, I've been busy these past few days and my mind wasn't working right. I'm getting back into it little by little now, so please be patient. I know I owe you extra chapter so you will have them soon
Don't forget to leave your power stones along with your comment if you have any ideas or opinions that could help me, as well as a review to continue showing your support.
Enjoy the chapter!
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The transition from the scorching, dry, and implacable heat of the Land of Wind to the absolute, biting, and suffocating cold of the northern seas was not a journey apt for just anyone.
Following the meeting in Daigo's office, the selected team composed of Pakura, Sasori, and Karinna had stripped themselves completely of any visible symbols that could link them to Sunagakure. They wore no forehead protectors, nor the traditional robes of the sand. For the rest of the world, they were simply a prosperous group of independent merchants traveling north in search of rare alloys, high-purity iron, and untapped mineral deposits.
Thanks to the impeccable, meticulous, and advanced mastery that Karinna possessed over Fūinjutsu, the group had managed to bypass the heavily monitored borders of the Land of Earth without drawing attention. Their complex concealment seals had completely masked their chakra signatures, allowing them to move like true civilians through secondary trade routes and mountainous paths, until their boots finally stepped onto the eternal ice and perpetual snow of the Land of Snow.
As the trio ventured deeper into the industrial sectors of the northern country, the distant echo of heavy hydraulic hammers striking iron and the thick columns of white steam rising from rustic ventilation shafts announced that Sasori's information was completely accurate.
"The air in this place is dense, almost as much as that of the desert, but it is completely saturated with the smell of burning coal, rust, and industrial grease," Sasori commented, his voice subtly muffled by the heavy thermal furs he wore to blend in with the local population. His analytical eyes scanned the mechanical structures and the overhead pipes.
Karinna shivered slightly, huddling a bit inside her thick fur coat and pulling the hood down to cover her ears as she walked close to the redhead's shoulder. Despite the piercing cold that threatened to freeze her eyelashes, a small and constant smile remained on her lips from being able to explore beyond the desert and the grass.
Pakura, who was beside Karinna and Sasori, only nodded at the words before looking at Karinna.
"Any chakra higher than normal?"
"Not for now. The locals passing through here are mostly civilian laborers, miners, blacksmiths, and metal smelters. If there is a ninja, I will notify you."
Pakura nodded firmly, keeping her eyes on constant alert as she scanned the frozen streets of the mining settlement. "Keep your eyes open and your attention at maximum. We are not looking for an ordinary blacksmith who forges swords. We are looking for an advanced mind, someone who understands what we are seeking. Let's head toward the workshops of the central foundry. That is where the designers and creators of this country gather."
The trio of infiltrators blended naturally into the crowd of workers with tired faces and calloused hands, passing by sibilant pipes spitting boiling water and heavy metal tracks crossing the snow, carrying wagons loaded with ore. It did not take them long to find exactly what they had come looking for, though the circumstances were nowhere near what they would have imagined in a traditional diplomatic protocol.
As they approached a prominent design workshop, whose outer stone walls were completely stained with soot and black smoke near the main foundry, a loud commotion broke out inside. The building's heavy iron doors burst open, and a middle-aged man with chaotic, wild, and grease-stained brown hair, wearing a thick leather apron packed with mechanical tools, came flying out, falling heavily onto the accumulated snow on the pavement. Right behind him, a veritable barrage of rolled-up blueprints, technical scrolls, and spreadsheets came flying through the air, scattering haphazardly across the frozen ground.
"And don't you dare set foot here again, Yler! We are absolutely sick of your damn delusions and impracticable inventions!" roared an obese supervisor in luxurious clothing from the warmth of the doorway, his face completely distorted in mockery and contempt. "Massive thermal generators to alter the climate of a region? You are completely insane! This municipal council funds practical machinery for daily mining, not the fairy tales and fantasies of a damn lunatic! Your mathematical calculations are impossible, dangerous for the structure, and complete madness. Go sell your delusions elsewhere before I order the guard to lock you in a cell for making us waste time and wasting our time."
The heavy iron doors slammed shut with a metallic clang that echoed down the entire street, leaving the man named Yler sitting on his knees in the snow, breathing heavily, his fists tightly clenched in a mixture of absolute fury, helplessness, and public humiliation.
Pakura stopped in her tracks, halting the group with a slight wave of her hand while exchanging a quick, deep, and meaningful look with Sasori and Karinna. Slowly, with calm but imposing steps, the three shinobis of the sand approached the engineer.
Karinna, displaying her natural kindness and empathy, knelt without caring about the cold of the pavement and began to help the man gather his scattered blueprints, gently brushing away the snow that threatened to erase his ideas.
Yler looked up, revealing red-injected eyes due to frustration and countless sleepless nights, looking with deep distrust and a defensive attitude at the three strangers who had stopped before him.
"What do you people want? Have you come to mock the town idiot too?" the engineer spat, begrudgingly snatching one of the scrolls from Karinna, though his voice trembled with suppressed rage. "Go ahead, laugh if you want. No one on this cursed, frozen rock has enough vision to see past their own noses. They only want to please the Daimyo or make money."
Pakura stepped forward, allowing her imposing, mature, and respectable presence to cast a protective shadow over the kneeling engineer. She looked sideways at one of the blueprints Karinna was holding carefully: a highly complex sketch depicting a heat generator system that could be expanded to much more.
Hearing the man's furious and passionate speech, and seeing the monumental scale of the designs for which the local mediocrity was treating him like a madman, a vivid image of Daigo crossed Pakura's mind. She could see with perfect clarity her partner sitting behind his desk in the Suna office, his pink eyes shining with that desire to make Sunagakure better.
A knowing, subtly amused, and affectionate smile played on Pakura's lips.
"Well, truly," she thought to herself, feeling a pleasant wave of warmth in her chest despite being surrounded by ice. "A man who thinks of the impossible, whose ideas are rejected immediately and labeled as madness by small minds, and who wishes to bend the laws of nature to fulfill his vision... He is practically a carbon copy of Daigo. Dai is going to absolutely love this lunatic. He is exactly his type of person."
Pakura crouched down, level with Yler, fixing her dark eyes on the engineer's pupils with an absolute seriousness that immediately cut through the man's defensive posture.
"They call you crazy because their minds are too small, narrow, and mediocre to understand the magnitude of your vision, Yler," Pakura declared with a firm, magnetic voice that denoted authority. "Bt where we come from, we do not fear the impossible. On the contrary, we seek it, we fund it, and we build it."
Yler blinked repeatedly, completely thrown off by the woman's words. He wiped a smudge of black grease from his forehead with the back of his hand, looking at the three travelers with a renewed mixture of suspicion, astonishment, and deep scientific curiosity.
"Who exactly are you people? You definitely don't belong to this country or the mining colonies. No one in the Land of Snow talks like you do."
Karinna intervened at that exact moment, shifting her voice to sound calm, highly professional, and diplomatic, assuming with perfect naturalness her role as the team's negotiator.
"Mr. Yler, I don't know if you have a safer place where we can speak in private," Karinna said.
Yler, who was now much more interested, nodded, taking the three to a house further away from the town, but which had many metal parts and things thrown around it. Upon arriving, Yler made it clear to them that they could speak about whatever they wanted here, since it was his house.
With everyone now seated in Yler's living room, Karinna took charge, clearing her throat.
"Well, Mr. Yler, you are entirely right. We are not from here; we come from the Land of Wind, specifically from the Village of the Sand. You know it, right?" Karinna asked.
Yler nodded at Karinna's words.
"Obviously. So one of the Five Great Villages came here for technology... you aren't the first," Yler said.
Yler drew a bitter smile on his face as he stretched his legs toward the warmth of the fireplace. "The great military villages always send their spies with the same look of superiority. They come looking for weapons, mechanical armor that amplifies chakra, or some way to make their soldiers kill more efficiently. So save yourselves the diplomatic speech. What kind of cannon or destructive device do you want me to manufacture for your Kazekage?"
Pakura exchanged a quick look with Sasori before leaning forward, resting her forearms on her knees. The seriousness on her face caused Yler's cynical smile to slowly fade.
"You are completely wrong, Yler," Pakura intervened, her deep voice filling the small room. "We haven't traveled incognito to the far north of the map to ask you for weapons, nor are we interested in you designing tools of war. Our Kazekage, Daigo, does not want to destroy anything. What he seeks is to build the future of our village, and for that, he needs a mind that is not afraid to break the rules of what everyone considers impossible."
Yler arched an eyebrow, visibly confused. In his entire career, a shinobi had never approached him to talk about construction instead of destruction. "Build? In the Sand? As far as I know, your country is just a massive ocean of dust and rocks where nothing grows. What on earth could a Kage want to design in a place like that that requires my services?"
Karinna took the floor, settling into her seat and letting the excitement of Daigo's vision shine in her eyes.
"Exactly one week ago, the Kazekage descended in absolute secrecy into the darkest depths of our village's subsoil. What he discovered down there is something that will change the destiny of the Land of Wind forever: a colossal and unimaginable frozen ocean. Kilometers and kilometers of pure ice, an amount of water so large that it could supply our population for generations and completely transform the desert into a place full of life."
The engineer froze completely in his chair. His eyes, previously filled with distrust, opened wide as he processed the young woman's words. As a man of science, his mind began to race immediately, not with complex formulas that were beside the point, but with the pure physical magnitude of what they were describing to him. An entire ocean trapped beneath the rock of the most arid desert in the world.
"A... an ocean of ice beneath the sand?" Yler stammered, bringing a hand to his chin, completely flabbergasted. "That is geometrically ridiculous... thermally contradictory..."
"It is real," Sasori interrupted, breaking his silence with that sepulchral calm that characterized him. "The Kazekage would not lie about this. The water is there, waiting. But the problem, and the reason why you are hearing this in your own home, is that none of us know how to extract it. The Kazekage possesses the absolute military power to break the earth if he wishes, but if we try to force our way through with ninjutsu or common excavations, the pressure of the sand from above will cause all of Sunagakure to collapse and sink into the void. We need to extract that amount of water in a controlled, safe, and constant manner whenever we need it."
Karinna nodded, reinforcing her companion's point.
"The Kazekage wants to use that ice and move all that water to the surface using systems that do not depend on the chakra of shinobis, but rather autonomous mechanisms. When Pakura-sama heard you shouting in the street about your blueprints for heat generators capable of expanding and altering the environment, she knew instantly that you were the piece we were missing. While the idiots on your council view your projects as impracticable locuras or fantasies to please the Daimyo, our Kazekage is willing to put all the wealth, money, and resources of Sunagakure at your entire disposal to make your ideas a reality, as long as they help Sunagakure."
Yler felt his heart spinning inside his chest. For years, his colleagues in the Land of Snow had humiliated him, throwing his blueprints to the ground and calling him insane for thinking on such a large scale. They had relegated him to designing simple pulleys and wagons to extract coal, limiting his intellect to the immediate greed of bureaucrats. And now, three strangers from the furthest village appeared at his door to offer him the largest, most ambitious, and impossible project in human history.
It was not a proposal to manufacture weapons; it was a blank canvas to change the geography of an entire country. For a creator who had been rejected all his life, this was not just a job offer; it was the salvation of his own pride and the opportunity to prove to everyone who had mocked him just how wrong they were.
"An entire ocean..." Yler repeated in a whisper, jumping to his feet, visibly altered by adrenaline. He began to pace in circles around the room, dodging the mechanical parts scattered on the floor while tugging at his wild hair. "Moving all that water to the surface without bringing down the village... The thermal control, the distribution of pressure... It's a damn madness! Anyone with half a brain would say it's an architectural suicide!"
He stopped dead in his tracks, turning around to look at Pakura with a spark of absolute genius and obsession shining in his red-injected eyes.
"And that is exactly why it seems like an absolutely perfect project to me!" Yler exclaimed, letting out a loud, liberating laugh that banished the cold from the room. "It's the first time in my damn life that someone has offered me a true challenge worthy of my brain. Those pigs on the council want me to spend the rest of my days improving iron shovels, while your Kazekage wants me to bend the laws of nature in the middle of the desert. I don't give a damn about the politics of the great villages, but that man, Daigo... that guy is just as crazy as I am. And I like him without even knowing him."
Pakura stood up, extending her hand toward the engineer with a smile full of victory and confidence. "Then we are in agreement. Leave this place behind, Yler. In the sand, no one will ever throw your blueprints into the snow again. You will have a workshop the size of a palace, all the materials you ask for, and the respect you deserve."
Yler looked at the kunoichi's hand and, without hesitating for a single second, shook it firmly, sealing a pact that would change the map of the shinobi world. "Give me ten minutes to throw my most important notes into a sack. I don't plan to let those idiots at the foundry keep a single gram of my ideas. We are going to the sand."
Karinna smiled with relief, watching the man run toward his room, tripping over his own inventions, while Sasori observed the scene with a subtle approval in his steady gaze.
End of Chapter