Yuji personally made the trip to the Daimyo's mansion. After he left, the Daimyo generously transferred all the funds originally intended for constructing additional pharmaceutical factories directly to the Sand Village.
No one knew what had been discussed between Yuji and the Daimyo during that meeting, but Yuji was smiling when he walked out. The Daimyo's sudden illness had also shown improvement after the visit, though it appeared he was not yet fully recovered.
With the additional financial support secured, the Sand Village immediately began construction work with tremendous enthusiasm. The call to action came not only from the village's leadership but from every single villager.
Everyone in the Sand Village participated in the construction and renovation projects in some capacity. The momentum was even more significant because Yuji had personally contacted several small nations that had established friendly relations with the Sand Village, including countries connected through the pharmaceutical trade network.
By recruiting and hiring craftsmen and technical talents from these places, the village was able to complete projects at a pace that would have been impossible relying solely on its own population.
During this period, the Sand Village was almost constantly wrapped in the sounds and dust of active construction, with villagers working energetically across every corner of the village.
The pace of activity was relentless, almost as though his feet never fully touched the ground.
Because beyond overseeing the construction itself, Yuji had to determine the design specifications for new housing and architecture, plan the village's interior expansion, and decide the function and designated use of every plot of land. Certain areas would be set aside for villagers to relax and enjoy themselves.
Other areas would house new facilities. Every detail had to exist clearly in his mind before decisions could be made and instructions issued.
Beyond the construction work itself, he was also actively managing the population influx initiative.
Under the quiet pressure he had arranged, the Daimyo's Mansion was also encouraging residents throughout the Land of Wind to relocate to the Sand Village. The welfare and benefits the Sand Village was now offering were genuinely attractive to the lower-class population of the Land of Wind, and almost every day new residents arrived.
He had also organized a specialized verification team working in cooperation with the Daimyo's Mansion to ensure that those entering the Sand Village had clean backgrounds and no hidden problems.
The reason he had specifically targeted the Land of Wind's domestic population first for this influx initiative was to lay the groundwork for the broader talent acquisition plan.
The first step was to draw from the existing domestic population, encourage them to come to the Sand Village, increase the village's overall population base, and get the entire mechanism running smoothly.
Once everything was operating naturally and the process was familiar, the plan could eventually be extended to attracting people from outside the Land of Wind's borders.
The domestic population was certainly relatively safer to integrate quickly. People from other countries or villages presented greater difficulty in background verification and carried more potential hidden risks.
It was better to hold off on actively attracting outsiders until after the Great Ninja War concluded.
However, certain key individuals he remembered from his knowledge of the future were a different matter entirely and would need to be addressed separately.
Although the Land of Wind did not have a large population, if it could be centrally managed and provided with stable and genuinely safe living conditions, the Sand Village's birth rate would increase significantly.
This was because throughout all five great nations, not just the Land of Wind, there were situations where the lowest class of people were effectively eliminated through banditry, displacement, or simply the harsh conditions of existence as refugees, all of which caused a portion of the population to die prematurely without leaving descendants.
This amounted to needlessly wasting human potential on a massive scale. The Land of Wind, already having the smallest population among the great nations, needed to address this problem more urgently than anyone.
Of course, among the Five Great Ninja Villages, expanding population was not typically something leadership actively concerned itself with. But if one wanted to do it seriously, it came down to authority and most importantly to the will of the Daimyo.
With the Daimyo currently in a condition where cooperation was not something he could easily refuse, this particular obstacle posed no problem.
Beyond these two priorities, the construction schedules for the new school and hospital had also been accelerated. These two institutions were the most important of everything being built. They were the foundational pillars of the Sand Village's future.
Yuji constantly thought through the regulations and management structures for both, attending to both major decisions and minor details simultaneously. Furthermore, after the village expansion was complete, two additional pharmaceutical factories would also need to be constructed.
In short, there was far more to handle than any single person should reasonably manage. Every day from the moment he woke up he was working, dealing with affairs of every kind, sacrificing mealtimes and sleep without complaint.
Meanwhile, the Sand Village's daily financial expenditures were growing at an extraordinary rate. Under the Kazekage's direction, money was flowing out like water. The senior officials led by Chiyo followed along in a state of combined awe and excitement. The Sand Village was transforming at a pace none of them had imagined possible.
Outside the village, the war raged fiercely. Battle reports arrived in a constant stream every day. Under the combined heavy assault of the Hidden Stone and Hidden Leaf Villages, the Hidden Cloud Village was showing signs of declining.
A portion of the Land of Lightning's border territory had been completely seized by the Hidden Stone Village, and Ai was finding it genuinely difficult to reclaim any of it from Onoki.
This was because the Hidden Stone Village's battlefield capabilities had been substantially enhanced by the Sand Village's medicinal resources, allowing them to display fighting power that far surpassed what the Hidden Cloud Village had anticipated.
Even with the Hidden Cloud Village's innate familiarity with their own territorial environment, they could not resist.
It was worth noting that the Hidden Cloud Village's military strength was almost on par with, or even slightly stronger than, the Hidden Stone Village's in terms of raw numbers.
Ai's forces were even larger than Onoki's, yet they still could not repel or drive the enemy away. This was not simply a difference in Kage-level individual combat power.
Although Ai's overall strength was slightly below his father's, and he had ascended to the Kage position earlier than he would have in the original timeline, he still possessed genuine Kage-level combat capability.
The issue was that he had limited experience in this role, and purely in terms of accumulated battlefield experience and strategic cunning he could not outmaneuver the resourceful and battle-hardened Third Tsuchikage.
But the most fundamental factor was the Sand Village's medicines. Their effects on the battlefield were simply too significant to overcome through manpower or individual ability alone.
The medicines allowed the Hidden Stone Village to maintain powerful fighting capability even deep within the Hidden Cloud Village's own territory, far from their supply lines.
One should not look only at the medicinal resources the Sand Village had researched and developed in isolation. In terms of how those medicines were applied on the battlefield, the Sand Village's excellent treatment system made it difficult for Konoha to cope with sustained casualties.
But in terms of the overall amplification of an army's sustained fighting capacity, the Hidden Stone Village was actually extracting even greater value from the medicines than the Sand Village itself. This was partly because of the Hidden Stone Village's larger military force.
The greater the number of soldiers, the greater the total consumption of pharmaceuticals, and the greater the aggregate effect on the entire army's combat performance. The enormous scale of the Hidden Stone force made the medicines' value on the battlefield even more fully realized than in smaller engagements.
On the other side, on the battlefield in the Land of Rice Fields, the Hidden Cloud Village soldiers led by the Eight-Tails Jinchuriki B were being pushed back to the Land of Lightning's border by Konoha's forces advancing from the Land of Rice Fields.
Forced into an increasingly desperate situation, the Hidden Cloud Village was highly likely to consider releasing a Tailed Beast directly onto the battlefield. Which method Ai would ultimately choose depended entirely on his judgment in that critical moment.
Another development of even greater concern was the Hidden Mist Village's sudden entry into the Land of Fire conflict. Without any warning, the Hidden Mist Village had launched a large-scale attack on Konoha, striking the Land of Fire from the coastal border regions.
The coastal areas of the Land of Fire were being invaded simultaneously by numerous Hidden Mist forces. And not content with attacking Konoha alone, the Hidden Mist Village was also taking advantage of the chaotic situation to launch a surprise attack on the Land of Lightning simultaneously.
This former troublemaker was truly living up to its legendary reputation for unpredictable aggression.
In short, the ninja world had entered a state of complete chaos, with every side fighting fiercely across multiple fronts simultaneously.
Of course, the Sand Village was also fighting.
However, compared to the furious and all-consuming actions of the other great villages, the Sand Village seemed almost as though they were merely splashing water at the edges of the conflict.
Except for the initial stages of the Great Ninja War, when the Sand Village had displayed an extraordinarily powerful presence and seized the attention of the entire ninja world, they had since quietly slipped into the background, letting the other villages exhaust themselves while carefully managing their own position.