After hearing Jie's plan, Madara and Hashirama finally had a direction.
The war between the Uchiha and Senju was called off.
A moment ago, their leaders had still been fighting with enough force to tear the battlefield apart. Now both sides had suddenly been ordered to stop, withdraw, and wait for further orders.
Tobirama was deeply unhappy with the result.
Unfortunately for him, his objection could not change anything.
Hashirama had spent his whole life chasing peace. Now that he had finally seen a possible path, there was no way he would give it up.
So no matter how unwilling Tobirama was, he could only issue the order.
The Uchiha and Senju withdrew from the battlefield, each side full of doubt. Some thought their leader had won. Others wondered if the enemy had surrendered. No one understood why both clans had been ordered to stop at the same time.
As for cooperation between the clans, Jie had only set the general course. The details still had to be decided by Madara and Hashirama themselves.
The name of the village did not need much thought.
Konoha.
The location did not need changing either. The place where Konoha stood in Jie's own timeline was already close to both the Uchiha and Senju clan lands, and the terrain was suitable for building a large settlement.
Once the name and location were settled, the real difficulty would be convincing the clans.
If Madara and Hashirama could not even persuade their own people to put aside their hatred, then there was no point talking about uniting other clans, let alone the rest of the ninja world.
But that was their problem.
Jie had already done his part.
Then Jie remembered something even more important.
In his own timeline, after Konoha was founded, Hashirama and Madara had traveled through the ninja world and captured the tailed beasts.
Then Hashirama made a decision Jie had never understood. In the name of peace, he gathered the first Five Kage Summit and handed most of the tailed beasts to the other villages.
Those tailed beasts later became the strongest weapons those villages used against one another.
He was thinking about the tailed beasts themselves.
Izumi had already received the completed Six Paths chakra seed. Given enough time, she would finish her transformation and become a Six Paths-level existence.
But Hinata still had no such path.
Originally, Jie had planned to deal with Black Zetsu or Kaguya first, then find a way to extract the Ten-Tails and let Hinata become its jinchūriki.
Now, however, this timeline still had all nine tailed beasts.
If he gathered them, sealed them into the Gedo Statue, and recreated the Ten-Tails, he could solve several problems at once.
The tailed beasts would no longer become weapons for this era's villages, Hashirama would have nothing to divide, and Black Zetsu would lose one of the key pieces needed to manipulate Madara.
And for Jie, it meant gaining another Ten-Tails.
No matter how he looked at it, there was no reason not to do it.
Thinking of that, Jie immediately tested his Rinnegan.
Far away, on the moon, he felt a faint response.
The Gedo Statue.
That was enough.
His Rinnegan could still summon the Gedo Statue in this timeline.
That saved him a lot of trouble. Otherwise, he would have needed to go to the moon first and drag the statue out himself. Now, a simple summoning would be enough.
Madara and Hashirama were busy discussing the future village, and Jie had no interest in doing their work for them.
He might as well use the time to catch the tailed beasts.
Capturing them was not the problem. Finding them was.
In his own timeline, Jie knew where each tailed beast had ended up. But this era was different. The hidden villages did not exist yet, and Madara and Hashirama had not gone out to capture the beasts.
All nine were still wild, and no one knew where they had settled.
The tailed beasts were not much of a threat to people like Jie, Madara, or Hashirama, but to ordinary ninja, they were still monsters wandering the ninja world. Even if someone saw one, surviving long enough to report it was another matter.
Jie thought for a moment, then looked at Madara and Hashirama.
The manpower he needed was already right in front of him.
Searching personally would waste time on a job the two clans could handle. The Uchiha and Senju had just stopped fighting anyway. They needed something to do, and searching for the tailed beasts would also give them a reason to work together.
Madara and Hashirama noticed his gaze and immediately felt that nothing good was coming.
Then Jie told them what he wanted.
"Find the tailed beasts."
Madara and Hashirama were both stunned.
Of course they had heard of the tailed beasts. But to them, the beasts were not serious threats. Strong, yes, but not enough to decide the future between the Uchiha and Senju.
Still, searching for the beasts was not difficult for the two clans. Jie was not asking their people to fight the beasts, only to locate them and send back the information.
Madara and Hashirama agreed.
It was also a chance to test cooperation between the clans. If Uchiha and Senju teams could complete a mission together, perhaps it would help ease the hatred between them, even if only a little.
The order was sent down soon after.
The Uchiha and Senju had barely returned from the battlefield when they received a new mission.
Find the tailed beasts.
And worse, they had to do it together.
Both clans went quiet, understanding their leaders less and less.
Stopping the war halfway was strange enough. Now they were being told to travel through the ninja world with the very enemies they had just been trying to kill.
If Madara and Hashirama had been in their clan compounds, their clansmen would already be demanding an explanation.
Unfortunately, both leaders were still at the center of the battlefield, discussing the village with Jie.
In their clans, Madara and Hashirama's authority was unmatched.
So no matter how unwilling the clansmen were, they could only accept the order, swallow their resentment, and begin the search together.
...
Five days passed quickly.
During those five days, Jie stayed in a small wooden cabin he had made with Wood Release, waiting for news from the two clans.
By now, the locations of the One-Tail through Seven-Tails had already been confirmed and sent back.
There was also a lead on the Eight-Tails. It only needed final confirmation.
The strange thing was the Nine-Tails.
Jie had thought the Nine-Tails would be the easiest one to find. It was the strongest, the loudest, and the hardest to hide. But after five days, there was still no useful news.
A target as obvious as the Nine-Tails could not stay hidden forever.
Jie still had twenty days left in this era.
He refused to believe that the two strongest clans in the Land of Fire could not find one fox in twenty days.
Meanwhile, Madara and Hashirama had spent those same five days sitting in the middle of the old battlefield, discussing every detail of the future village.
Up to 40 chapters ahead on patreon :-
patreon.com/Vristikk