Chapter 108 (Patreon)

After listening to Kushina explain the effects of the sealing jutsu, Fugaku immediately thought of Minato’s student—the famed young genius of Konoha, Kakashi Hatake.

On the surface, Kakashi was the only person outside the Uchiha clan who possessed a Sharingan.

When Obito sacrificed himself, he entrusted one of his Sharingan to Kakashi. Under normal circumstances, the Uchiha clan would have reclaimed the eye afterward.

However, because Kakashi was Minato’s student, Fugaku had withstood the pressure from within the clan and allowed him to keep it. He had hoped the decision would strengthen the Uchiha clan’s relationship with Minato, allowing Minato to ease the tension between the clan and the village once he became Hokage.

As events later proved, Fugaku’s decision had not been wrong. After the Third Shinobi World War ended, Minato successfully became the Fourth Hokage.

The only thing Fugaku had failed to anticipate was that Minato would hold the position for barely a year before sacrificing himself during the Nine-Tails incident, allowing the Third Hokage to return to power.

Fortunately, Kushina had inherited Minato’s will. After becoming the Fifth Hokage, she maintained a close relationship with the Uchiha clan and appointed Fugaku to the Council of Elders.

Otherwise, everything he had risked back then would have been for nothing.

Fugaku activated his three-tomoe Sharingan and placed the sealing tag over one eye.

He had considered the possibility that Kushina’s seal might permanently damage his eye. If it somehow sealed away the power of one Sharingan forever, his strength would inevitably suffer.

Even so, he was willing to trust her.

If Kushina had harbored any ill intentions toward the Uchiha, she would never have appointed him as one of Konoha’s elders in the first place.

The moment the tag covered his eye, Fugaku distinctly felt the flow of chakra toward it being severed.

“How is it?” Kushina asked.

Fugaku moved the tag aside, and his eye immediately returned to normal.

He nodded. “It works. The seal can indeed cut off the chakra flowing into the eye. However…”

“However?”

“Kakashi isn’t an Uchiha. His Sharingan relies entirely on his chakra to remain active. If the eye goes without chakra for too long, it may lose its power and eventually become no different from an ordinary eye.”

Fugaku explained what he had sensed. This was also the fundamental reason those outside the Uchiha clan were unable to deactivate the Sharingan at will.

It was a detail that Kushina and Roy had both overlooked.

Fortunately, the problem was easy enough to solve.

Kakashi would only need to raise his forehead protector at fixed intervals each day and supply the Sharingan with enough chakra to maintain its vitality. Keeping it sealed and resting for the remainder of the day would drastically reduce the burden on him.

It would also prevent him from ending up as he had in the original story—so constantly drained that his chakra reserves practically became a unit of measurement.

With that matter settled, Kushina moved on to another proposal: strengthening Konoha’s civic values and improving the conduct of its villagers.

At first, neither Fugaku nor Shikaku understood what she meant.

They were naturally aware that bullying occurred within the village. However, they had never considered it bullying. In their eyes, such treatment was a way of tempering a child’s mind and will.

If someone could not endure a minor hardship like that, how could they hope to survive for long in the merciless shinobi world?

Fugaku and Shikaku were far from alone in holding that belief. Nearly everyone in Konoha—and the other hidden villages as well—regarded it as perfectly normal.

Bullying was not unique to Konoha. The same thing happened in every shinobi village.

Why else would ordinary villagers dare to mistreat children from powerful shinobi clans? Did they truly have no fear of death?

Of course not.

They acted that way because they had received tacit approval—and, in some cases, subtle encouragement. Their role was to serve as whetstones, tempering the children through adversity.

It was this same belief that had driven Itachi, in the original story, to repeatedly force Sasuke to relive the night of the Uchiha massacre, using unimaginable mental anguish to push his younger brother to grow stronger.

Roy had not been born in this world, so he could not understand or accept such a deeply ingrained method of raising children.

Yet if one examined the shinobi world carefully, there was a clear pattern. With the exception of Sunagakure, had those responsible for bullying ever faced retaliation?

They had not.

Neither the victims nor the clans standing behind them had ever seriously considered seeking revenge against the bullies.

That was because everything was kept within what they considered an acceptable range.

Shinobi children were resilient. Even if they were beaten, their bodies would recover quickly. If their lives were ever genuinely threatened, someone watching from the shadows would step in and stop it.

After hearing Fugaku and Shikaku’s reasoning, even Kushina nearly found herself persuaded.

It was true that the dangers encountered during shinobi missions were far greater than anything children would face inside the village. Compared to a battlefield, those incidents seemed almost insignificant.

However, when Kushina recalled what Roy had told her, she realized that this nearly barbaric tradition was still fundamentally wrong.

They had completely ignored the psychological wounds inflicted when so-called tempering went beyond what a child could endure.

Children arguing or getting into the occasional fight was one thing. Prolonged and deliberate bullying was something else entirely.

If they wished to strengthen a child’s will, there were other, more humane ways to accomplish it. There was no reason to tolerate indiscriminate cruelty without limits.

Ultimately, the problem came from the belief that shinobi were merely tools.

That idea had originally been encouraged by the nobility as a way to control shinobi, whose power far surpassed that of ordinary people. A tool had to be repeatedly hammered, sharpened, and polished before it could be considered useful.

Whether the process caused pain was irrelevant.

After generations of living beneath that ideology, even shinobi themselves had come to accept it. Since they were tools, they believed they should endure whatever was required to refine them. As a result, they silently tolerated the same suffering when it was inflicted upon their descendants.

As a jinchūriki, Kushina had been treated as the ultimate weapon—a tool among tools.

That was precisely why she understood better than most how twisted this belief truly was.

If Minato had not become the light that reached her during those lonely years, she might have lost herself long ago and taken both the Nine-Tails and Konoha down with her.

Her rebuttal left Fugaku and Shikaku silent.

“Shinobi may be tools, but they’re still people,” Kushina said firmly. “This idea that we must silently endure everything was imposed on us by nobles who wanted to keep us obedient and easy to control.”

By the traditional standards of the shinobi world, her words were nothing short of rebellious.

Shikaku was deeply concerned about the trouble Konoha might face if such words ever reached the daimyō.

However, as he considered her argument, he gradually realized that she was right.

Everyone was born to a mother and father. Why, then, should the nobles enjoy every comfort while shinobi—those who possessed the strength to protect entire nations—were expected to serve, suffer, and sacrifice without question?

Still, Shikaku had been born and raised within this system. Questioning the very right of the daimyō and nobles to stand above everyone else was beyond anything he had ever seriously considered.

He agreed with Kushina’s desire to put an end to bullying within Konoha, but the thought of overthrowing the rule of the daimyō and the nobility had never crossed his mind.

Kushina also understood that this was not the time to openly oppose the noble class.

Change had to come one step at a time. For now, they would begin with Konoha.

Once that discussion came to an end, Kushina introduced another subject.

Money.

More specifically, how Konoha could earn far more of it.

Financial independence was the foundation Konoha needed if it ever hoped to free itself from the daimyō’s control.

Although Kushina had cut Roy off the previous night in her haste to relieve some of the pressure weighing on her, she had later listened as he gave her a detailed explanation of his plans for generating revenue.

“You want us to develop flexible prosthetic limbs controlled through chakra threads and sell them?” Fugaku asked.

“That’s right,” Kushina replied. “Wars and missions have left countless shinobi without arms or legs. With flexible prosthetic limbs, even if they can’t return to active duty, they’ll at least be able to live normally again.”

Naturally, shinobi from Konoha would receive a significant discount.

The difference in cost, however, would have to be recovered from the shinobi of other villages.