After Arai left, Sasori appeared in Yuji's office.
"Stop taking action," Yuji said. "Arai has grown suspicious, but looking at his attitude, there's no immediate danger."
"There are still some who haven't been eliminated."
"No need. The Ninja World War that follows will consume those people. We have to give the Village time to recover its vitality. If we remove too many more now, there will be no one useful left when the war breaks out."
Sasori leaned against the wall and said nothing for a moment.
"As for the internal tensions in the Village," Yuji continued, "once Sunagakure's medicines are released, the scale of that change will be enough to settle most of it on its own." He smiled slightly.
"The economy has always been the first pain point. Once money starts flowing and people's lives improve, hostility naturally decreases. And without us adding fuel, whatever friction remains between the two factions will dissolve after the Third's death.
The class conflict wasn't built overnight, it came from unequal distribution of limited resources. That condition is about to change."
"What about him?" Sasori asked.
Yuji nodded. "Begin."
Sasori was asking about the Third Kazekage.
"You already have his full trust. The medicine news will keep him and the other higher-ups occupied and optimistic for some time, they'll be dreaming about the future. He won't be watching for a move from us."
The medicine situation would shift the village's entire policy focus toward this new industry, drawing the senior officials' attention away from anything else. That breathing room was exactly what the plan required.
Sasori turned and left.
"Be careful," Yuji said.
He had already reviewed Sasori's poison. There were no problems with it.
The Third Kazekage had to die. It was necessary for Sasori's sake, and it was necessary for the village's future. But most critically, without the Third Kazekage driving Sunagakure toward conflict, the next Ninja World War might not arrive on schedule.
And without the war, the medicines couldn't be sold in volume, and other villages would have time to study and replicate them before Sunagakure could establish market dominance.
Generic versions would appear quickly once the compounds were understood. The Third's death and the war that followed were both essential conditions.
There was also the matter of the missing bodies. The reason some of the eliminated officials had never been found was that Sasori had kept them.
His puppet core research had progressed to a functional simple version applied to human puppets, though the results still didn't satisfy him.
Recently, Arai's mental state had been visibly unsettled enough that even the Kazekage had taken notice. But with Yuji and Sasori having stopped their operations, Arai's suspicions had slowly begun to lose their grip on him.
He had started telling himself he had been overthinking. The logic worked in both directions, if only Sasori were involved, Arai could have managed the suspicion. But if Yuji were also involved, and Arai had just witnessed what Yuji was about to deliver to the village, pursuing the truth became something he was increasingly unwilling to do.
Yuji remained in Sunagakure for a period. He contacted merchants inside the village and traveling merchants from outside, negotiating the early groundwork for a simple trade channel for Sunagakure's medicines and establishing basic distribution agreements.
Staying in the village also served the secondary purpose of ensuring he was visibly present and uninvolved during the period when Sasori would act against the Kazekage.
Sasori succeeded. The Kazekage noticed nothing.
The village's internal situation remained complex, and the Third had been occupied managing it. That had worked in their favor.
After completing these preparations, Yuji left the village again and returned to Amegakure.
There was still money to be made. Stocking medicinal herbs in sufficient quantity before the other villages grew alert would require capital and time.
Once war broke out and demand spiked, supply would need to be ready. If the medicines couldn't reach the battlefield in volume when the moment came, everything else would be meaningless.
The timing concern went beyond just market saturation. Once other villages obtained the finished medicines and began analyzing the compounds, they would also start purchasing the same medicinal herbs.
The window before that happened was limited, and once it closed, the resources would be carved up across multiple buyers and prices would climb sharply. Yuji needed to move first and move fast.
In the early stage, volume wasn't the priority. What mattered was visibility, every village and every country needed to learn that Sunagakure produced this.
Under the pressure of that timeline, Yuji pushed hard across the following months.
When the first batch of finished medicines left the village through Sunagakure's merchant networks and the traveling traders he had negotiated with, he returned from outside and walked into a room full of the village's senior officials.
Everyone present was holding a small paper packet.
Simple packaging. The character for Sand printed on the front.
Made in Sunagakure.
"The vendors have already taken the first shipment out," Yuji said. "We'll need to wait for actual sales results and market response data. In the short term, I don't expect dramatic numbers, the primary buyers will be lower-class people across the ninja world, which means modest per-unit revenue.
But the total volume will be considerable."
He finished laying out the full picture of what he and Shiori and the others had been building over the past two years.
The room was first silent, then the silence broke into something that looked like barely contained excitement. The Third Kazekage and the senior officials processed it the same way Arai had, shock first, then the full implications arriving and producing something close to joy.
Chiyo's expression was the calmest in the room. She had visited the research department herself half a month earlier and tested the medicines directly. She already knew what they were.
The Third Kazekage was gripping his paper packet with both hands, his usual composure showing visible cracks around the edges.
"The formulas," he said suddenly, looking at Yuji with a sharp directness.
"The complete formula for each medicine is currently known only to me and Shiori. Even if someone leaked partial information, the impact in the short term would be limited." Yuji met his gaze steadily.
"That said, once another village gets their hands on the finished product, ratio analysis is straightforward. What I spent two years building, they can begin reverse-engineering immediately.
But before they can replicate it, they need to identify not just the compounds but the specific herbs those compounds come from. Other villages' pharmacological research doesn't run deep enough to do that quickly.
Generic versions will take at least a year to reach market. By then, we will have already purchased most of the relevant herb supply across the ninja world. Even after generics appear, Sunagakure maintains an absolute monopoly for several years minimum."
The Kazekage had reached the same conclusion on his own before Yuji finished speaking.
"What Yuji is describing," Chiyo said, looking around the room, "is that the true value of his research is not the medicines themselves or the formulas. It's the comprehensive map he has built of which materials in the ninja world have medicinal properties and what effects they produce.
That knowledge base is what no other village possesses. It's the foundation that makes everything else possible. The medicines can be iterated, improved, replaced with more effective versions over time. The underlying data is what sustains the advantage."
A senior official swallowed quietly. "We're going to be rich."
Another stepped forward and embraced Yuji with undisguised emotion. "You're not a genius. You're a god. A god of medicine."
"That's a bit much," Yuji said, laughing genuinely.
Chiyo watched him with a gaze that carried something difficult to read, pride, complexity, and something that sat at the edge of both.
"It's not ninjutsu," she said. "Just medicine. But for the entire ninja world, what he has done may earn that title in time."
The medicines would make Sunagakure wealthy. But for the people outside the village, for the lower classes of every country who died of infections and illnesses that had never had a remedy, these were things that saved lives.
The whole world would benefit alongside Sunagakure.
That had moved well beyond what any single Medical Ninja was supposed to be capable of achieving.
...
Bonus @200 PS