With the Kazekage publicly attributing the deaths of the civilian faction leaders to enemy action, the Hidden Sand Village settled into an outward calm.
The demonstration had done its work. The passive resistance running through various departments gradually subsided, and the surface of the village's operations returned to something resembling normal.
Then one of Rasa's deputies was found dead in his own home.
No signs of a struggle. No evidence of defensive action from the deceased. The body was lying in a pool of blood on the living room floor, discovered only when neighbors noticed something was wrong, having heard nothing through the night.
The killer had not bothered to clean the scene or conceal their involvement. They had simply left.
Inside the village. No disturbance to the patrols. An inside job by any reading.
With the Nohara and Fukushima family heads barely in the ground, the message being sent was not subtle. The target was Rasa's deputy, but the direction the message pointed was clear to everyone who understood the context.
The Kazekage's expression darkened when the report reached him.
"The Guard Corps found nothing unusual last night either," Sasori said, delivering the information with his eyes lowered and his voice even.
The former Nohara clan head, Sakamoto's father, had built the Guard Corps largely from civilian ninja. His death had not dissolved what he had constructed.
The corps he had shaped still operated, still staffed by the same people, still carrying the loyalties he had cultivated.
"Find who ordered it," the Kazekage said. "No matter who it is."
Moving against entire families was a different calculation from removing individual heads. The civilian ninja families were combat reserves the village could not simply purge wholesale without producing consequences that would destabilize operations severely.
A legitimate basis for action was necessary. The killing of a village member from within provided exactly that basis, if the right person could be identified as responsible.
"Yes."
Sasori turned and left.
He was now the Anbu member assigned to investigate the matter in full. The Kazekage would not consider him a suspect. Among Anbu members with both the capability and the established trust to handle sensitive internal operations, Sasori had become one of the most reliable, demonstrated by his clean handling of the family heads.
The veterans like Arai could have managed the physical side, but their familiarity with the targets made exposure more likely. Sasori carried no such problem.
The deputy had been Yuji's choice of target. Sasori had initially favored striking directly at more senior figures, but Yuji had redirected him.
The first move had to be calibrated carefully enough not to raise immediate suspicion about the true source. The deputy was small enough not to constitute an obvious opening escalation, but connected closely enough to Rasa that the provocation would register precisely where it needed to.
The secondary benefit was that handling this investigation gave Sasori direct access to the Kazekage's confidence and closer proximity to the center of the village's decision-making. That access would prove useful.
Outside the village, Yuji was still working.
After several months of sustained operation, the pharmacological research had reached completion, a full year of work from start to finish. The next phase was drug formulation and live animal testing.
Both required continued funding, but the pace of this stage would be considerably faster than what had come before. He estimated roughly half a year to get through it.
He needed more money.
Finished products would follow once the experimental phase was done. The number of viable drug types would depend entirely on what the results supported.
After that, the village's existing trade routes and traveling merchant networks would serve as the initial distribution channels, pushing the medicines outward into the wider ninja world and beginning the process of establishing a market presence.
One stage at a time.
The later stages also required sustained financial support. And the work Yuji was taking on outside had shifted. Noble assassination contracts made up a limited portion of the underground registry and weren't replenishing quickly.
The clients capable of targeting nobility and paying serious bounties were rare, and the broader market had contracted somewhat as the ninja world moved into a more stable period following the war's end.
The main business of the underground network had always been strikes against military forces, primarily ninja from various villages, and with the fighting dying down, those commissions had thinned.
He had spent time working through contracts on ninja from smaller villages and taking from certain factions and organizations he crossed along the way. The rewards there were modest.
Eventually he came back to Amegakure.
The reason was straightforward. Amegakure remained the most active conflict zone in the ninja world at this moment. Wherever active conflict persisted, there was economic activity around it, mercenary work, protection contracts, faction warfare with assets worth taking.
Yuji had no particular attachment to how he earned. He came to participate.
He walked through the rain in a straw raincoat, looked up at the grey sky, and exhaled slowly.
The place always carried the same quality. Heavy. Compressed. Like the air itself was under pressure.
He was also tracking the Hidden Sand Village's internal situation through Sasori's ongoing correspondence and returning to the village at intervals.
The killing of Rasa's deputy would read as retaliation from the civilian faction, a direct strike against Rasa rather than generalized dissatisfaction with the leadership.
When that interpretation hardened into the official understanding, the people it was blamed on would know they hadn't done it. They would feel it keenly, the particular frustration of being accused of something you didn't do, by someone who holds all the power and has no reason to believe your denial.
The Kazekage's personality left no room for that kind of appeal to land.
The series of events had already severed any real channel of communication between the two sides. Going forward, even without Sasori taking further action, the two groups would eventually move against each other through their own accumulated grievances.
The plan was developing on its own momentum now.
"Who's there?"
Several figures jumped out at the village entrance, farmers in patched clothing, holding tools, their wariness apparent in the way they planted themselves.
"The person you sent for."
Yuji smiled slightly.
This particular village was being squeezed by a local armed force. The village head had organized the residents to pool whatever funds they could manage and commission outside help.
The sum they had gathered was small enough that it wouldn't normally attract anyone worth hiring.
Yuji wasn't here for their payment.
The leader of the local force was one of his actual targets, listed in the registry with a worthwhile bounty attached. The village's commission gave him a clean excuse to operate openly and a reason to be here. He would handle the contract, then take whatever assets the organization held on top of the payment.
He followed the men inside.
The village was not what it looked like from the outside. The figures he could see in the shadows of the buildings didn't move or carry themselves like farmers. The wariness in their eyes had a different texture than civilian caution. Some of the houses contained wounded people.
A rebel stronghold, most likely.
He filed it away and kept walking.