Sugar Is a Good Thing

Perhaps the Uchiha Clan's pride would not allow retaliation. There were no consequences after the brawl with the Uchiha children, and a year quickly passed. Aburame Tetsumaru was now five years old.

The Aburame Clan's financial situation had worsened. Over the past year, twenty-two clan ninja had been killed, disabled, or forced into retirement, nearly twenty percent of the clan's total ninja force. It was a devastating blow.

The Aburame Clan was not skilled at business. Its primary income came from commissions on missions completed by clan ninja. Income had fallen, while the number of orphans had risen. Expenses exceeded revenue.

More than ten children had been added to the Nest House. Clan ninja were frequently away on missions, and over thirty more children came to eat during the day. Besides Sachiko, two retired ninja had come to help care for the children. They could barely manage, but the quality of the Nest House's food supply kept declining.

Aburame Tetsumaru was the oldest among the children. He wolfed down his bland vegetable rice balls and watched his younger brothers and sisters eat.

There were no large bowls anymore. Each person received two vegetable-mixed rice balls and a small bowl of vegetable soup. It was nowhere near enough to fill them up.

The children's sallow faces and the deeply furrowed brows of the three clan ninja made him feel miserable.

In his previous life, Aburame Tetsumaru had lived in a nation that had completely escaped the threat of war and was on the rise. He had only heard of the horrors of war and famine through the news and had never experienced them firsthand.

After dinner, he took the older children his age to help clean up the dishes. Then, in low spirits, Aburame Tetsumaru went out alone.

As a transmigrator with a mental age over forty, he was an old man. The children could all sense that he was different. Though they acknowledged his position as their leader, they could not really play with him.

Aburame Tetsumaru himself had no interest in playing with little brats. As his body developed, he gradually escaped the awkward state of being controlled by it. He deliberately kept his distance from the younger children, which effectively kept him from being dragged into childish nonsense.

After last year's fight with the Uchiha Family, the name "Boss Tetsumaru" had spread throughout Konoha. He was good at fighting and extremely reliable in handling matters. By then, it was not just Aburame Family children who obeyed him. All the children near the clan listened to his commands, far more readily than they obeyed Aburame Sachiko.

As he wandered through the village, Aburame Tetsumaru could clearly feel the pressure of soaring prices in Konoha. Sugar, alcohol, and grain cost more than triple what they had the year before. Fresh meat, milk, and fruit were even worse—there was demand but no supply. None could be found in the market.

Even Konoha, located in the heart of the fertile Land of Fire, had fallen into such a state. The situation in the other ninja villages was easy to imagine.

In an ordinary postwar year without disasters, sustained inflation was a textbook sign of war on the horizon. A new war was brewing.

The problem was that the previous war had begun for muddled reasons and been fought in a confused mess. No one had been accustomed to large-scale ninja army confrontations, and the death rate had been terrifying.

Ordinary ninja had died in heaps, while even the Kage standing at the peak of the ninja world had not escaped disaster. Aside from Sunagakure, which had withdrawn from the war early, all the Nidaime of the Four Great Ninja Villages had died.

The mortality rate among the Kage of the Five Great Ninja Villages had reached eighty percent. Small ninja villages like Kusagakure had simply been wiped out. One could only imagine how high the casualty rate among ordinary ninja had been, and how much psychological trauma it had caused them.

What was more, the so-called end of the war had been anything but clean. Years had passed, yet conflicts between villages remained fierce. Every country had been dragged into exhaustion, making it difficult for another war to break out.

The Shinobi World's society was still in a feudal age. Its social system was backward and simple, but such a simple structure was more resilient.

A mere economic crisis could not ignite a war. It was not that the Daimyo and village higher-ups did not care about the common people. Rather, the suffering of the lower class did not affect the power structure of the upper class at all.

Even if everyone in a village died, it would be a considerable loss for the Lord directly governing it, but it would have no impact on a higher-ranking Daimyo.

Moreover, the defining feature of Shinobi World wars was their closed nature. The battlefield spanned the entire world, yet only ninja fought each other. Civilians were not mobilized. So long as it did not affect the Daimyo's tax collection, war would not even be considered.

Perhaps after another three to five years, when the ninja were so poor that they faced starvation, the fear of hunger would overcome the fear of death, and war would finally erupt.

But the Aburame Clan could not hold on even now. Aburame Tetsumaru did not know how the Aburame Family in his memories had survived this period, but since he had money, he could not just watch his brothers and sisters go hungry.

The house had been renovated, and the courtyard was full of life. Lush grass covered the entire yard, leaving only a narrow path paved with stone slabs to keep the plants from encroaching.

Following the path to a small stone house by the western wall, he entered Aburame Tetsumaru's laboratory.

After the fighting incident, Aburame Kazekazu had searched Aburame Tetsumaru's bedroom. More than a hundred containers had been found under the bed and in the cabinets, housing over two hundred species of insects with a total population close to ten thousand.

After that came an ever-increasing number of bamboo shoots and pork beatings, multiplied and multiplied again. But Aburame Tetsumaru had also gained something from it. Aburame Kazekazu had built a separate little house in the yard specifically to store all those insects.

Aburame Tetsumaru had achieved many results here, including a complete set of techniques for raising Sugar Ants.

Last year, through cooling stimulation experiments, Sugar Ants had differentiated Sugar Jar Ants in the Land of Fire for the first time and begun storing sugar. But cooling stimulation alone was insufficient. Technically, it was equivalent to natural collection and could not be scaled up.

Later, Aburame Tetsumaru discovered that what directly affected an ant colony was not temperature, but the queen's pheromones. He used vacuum test tubes to collect the queen's pheromones.

As the means by which the queen commanded the colony, the pheromones were extremely complex, forcing him to begin a long and difficult analysis.

The work lasted six months. With no progress at all, Aburame Tetsumaru had wanted to give up more than once.

Testing whether a sample contained a specific component and determining its concentration was simple. With a fully equipped laboratory and complete reagents, such qualitative analysis could yield results within minutes.

But untargeted analysis was a bottomless pit. Since he did not know what components were present, he first had to use spectroscopy, X-ray methods, and fluorescence methods to determine the proportions of the elements.

Then he had to guess what kinds of molecules those elements could form, as well as the proportions between different molecules, and conduct a qualitative analysis for every possible result.

In his previous life, several senior students in his laboratory had studied a biological Poison. They spent two full years on compositional analysis and used up 1.2 tons of sample material. Yes, 1.2 tons.

Without knowing the exact composition, artificial synthesis was impossible, and large-scale Sugar Ant farming was impossible as well.

Coming from the industrial age, Aburame Tetsumaru knew exactly how vast the gap in output was between natural collection and industrial synthesis. It directly determined whether ant farming could make money, so he gritted his teeth and persisted.

Six months earlier, Aburame Tetsumaru's golden finger had improved. With Insight, he had vaguely observed the macromolecular structures within the pheromones, leaving only seventeen or eighteen possible component combinations.

The analysis was completed that very afternoon. As for the subsequent artificial synthesis, that was no difficult task for someone in biochemistry.

The next day, the four pheromones that controlled Sugar Jar Ant production were successfully synthesized. A week later, every Sugar Ant pheromone had been synthesized.

From then on, Aburame Tetsumaru had completely mastered the Sugar Ants. He could freely manipulate their activities, collect sugar, and harvest it.

Using pheromones, he also differentiated a population of Tree Ants. In truth, the ants were no different; the only change was that the insects they farmed were scale insects.

Scale insects parasitized trees. They could secrete honeydew and Insect Wax. They produced not only sugar, but wax as well, making the profits even greater.

With the two large trees and grass in his yard, Aburame Tetsumaru had raised two nests of Tree Ants and three nests of Grass Ants.

It was enough to support the family. Just how great was the gap in output between industrial farming and natural collection?

The Sugar Ants in the Land of Grass required a territory of two square kilometers and could be harvested once a year, while Tetsumaru could raise five Sugar Ant colonies in a three-hundred-and-fifty-square-meter yard and harvest them six times a month.

The difference in output exceeded two thousand times.

The sugar and wax produced by the five ant nests in the courtyard brought in enormous income, equivalent to two B-rank missions every day—stable and risk-free.

When money could be earned peacefully and reliably, what kind of fool would go earn money by risking his life?

His father decisively stopped accepting ninja missions and focused on tending the insects at home.

With the family's financial situation improving and her husband no longer carrying out dangerous missions, his mother's sense of security practically exploded. Their little life naturally flourished.

"Father, I have an idea."

Aburame Tetsumaru now called Aburame Kazekazu Father without the slightest awkwardness.

Wearing a straw hat, Aburame Kazekazu was squatting in the grass, checking on the ants, aphids, and vegetation. Hearing his son, he stood up.

He removed his hat and fanned himself with it, smiling at his son. "Go ahead. I'm listening."

"The younger brothers and sisters at the Nest House are eating worse and worse. I want to hand the ants over to the clan to manage."

"Good."

Huh?

Aburame Tetsumaru was a little surprised, but when he saw Aburame Kazekazu's gratified smile, he understood. His family had long wanted to turn it over, but they had been waiting out of consideration for his feelings.

Were they waiting for me to bring it up myself?

He was actually a little moved.

"As a boy, responsibility is the most important quality. Go speak with Elder Shihui yourself."

"Okay."

Aburame Tetsumaru ran into the small house, grabbed a large glass bottle and his tool kit, then entered the grass on the left side of the path. Familiar with the route, he found a large wooden box.

When he lifted the wooden lid, densely packed ants were revealed. Exposed to the light, they began to stir.

Aburame Tetsumaru took a spray bottle from his tool kit and sprayed calming pheromones to soothe the colony. Then he opened the core compartment in the center of the box and carefully used tweezers to pull out the Sugar Jar Ants inside, securing them beside a specially made large funnel.

Sugar Jar Ants were oddities among Sugar Ants. During the transition from autumn to winter, they would actively gorge themselves until their abdomens swelled to two hundred times their original size, turning into grape-sized balls of sugar that could no longer move at all.

After gorging themselves, the Sugar Jar Ants entered a state similar to hibernation. Worker ants dragged them into the core of the nest for protection, using them as reserve granaries to get the colony through winter. The sugar in their bellies was neither digested nor spoiled.

Now, Aburame Tetsumaru used pheromones and lowered temperatures to deceive them, throwing the colony's perception into confusion so that it experienced a full cycle of spring, summer, autumn, and winter every five days.

Thus, the Sugar Jar Ants repeatedly went through the process of gorging and dormancy. In Aburame Tetsumaru's hands, they became a means of harvesting Ant Sugar.

After securing twenty-four Sugar Jar Ants, Aburame Tetsumaru placed the funnel over the mouth of the glass bottle and took out another spray bottle to release a new pheromone. This was the pheromone emitted by a queen in early spring. It would prompt the Sugar Jar Ants to expel all their sugar liquid and help the colony survive the spring famine.

The Sugar Jar Ants quickly expelled all their sugar liquid and returned to normal size. Aburame Tetsumaru placed them back into the wooden box with his tweezers, then moved on to the next batch.

More than three hundred Sugar Jar Ants were densely packed in the core area of the nest. Soon, the collected sugar liquid filled the glass bottle. He sealed the full bottle and closed the ant nest's box.

Tomorrow, he would spray Prosperity pheromones. Three days later, he would spray storage pheromones while cooling the nest with ice packs. On the sixth day, he could harvest Ant Sugar again.

However, Ant Sugar was not as high-quality as honey.

Honey not only had a rich fragrance, but also contained antibacterial enzymes. It had a long shelf life and could even be used as a disinfectant if fresh enough.

Ant Sugar was a monosaccharide formed after aphids hydrolyzed plant cellulose. The ants collected it without fermenting it, so it was sweet but lacked fragrance.

Depending on the plant it had been collected from, freshly harvested Ant Sugar had an alluring pale green or pale gold color.

Without treatment, its sugars would break down within two days, turning it sour and astringent, much like badly failed vinegar. Nauseating black flocculent matter would also appear, and no one would have any appetite for it.

None of these problems posed any challenge to Aburame Tetsumaru. If it lacked fragrance, he could simply add some. Whether distilling essential oils from fresh flowers or cold-extracting fruit flavorings with alcohol, neither was difficult, so he used both methods.

Ant Sugar's short shelf life was no problem either. He added ash water to neutralize the acidic compounds, then purified, dehydrated, and dried it. Once it solidified into anhydrous sugar blocks, it could be stored for a long time.

Aburame Tetsumaru divided the collected raw Ant Sugar liquid into two portions and directly processed one of them into sugar blocks. He packed the sugar blocks, the other half of the raw liquid, various tools, and powdered reagents into his backpack.

Throughout the whole process, Aburame Kazekazu had watched from the side. After Aburame Aiko came home from work, she did not cook either and stayed with the child the entire time.

After packing everything up, Aburame Tetsumaru said goodbye to his parents. Paying no attention to the dim sky, he strode toward the clan's forbidden grounds.

His young parents smiled happily, then began tidying up the house and preparing a late-night meal while waiting for their child to return.

At midnight, Elder Aburame Shihui and several other elders sat around a table, watching intently as Aburame Tetsumaru performed a ninjutsu.

Rat, Monkey, Boar. After forming the three hand seals, Aburame Tetsumaru pressed his hands together.

Water Release: Water Gathering.

His hands slowly separated, gathering a fist-sized ball of water between them.

At the same time, the clear sugar liquid in the Container was dehydrated and dried. Next, Tetsumaru cut it apart with a knife, producing a finished sugar block weighing half a catty.

The old men divided the sugar block into finger-sized pieces. Each picked up a small piece and put it into his mouth.

"Sweet! Fragrant!"

"No strange taste. Delicious."

"One ant nest can yield this much in five days. This Ant Sugar is better than honey."

"Such fine sugar can sell for more than four hundred ryo now. Count them—how many pieces are there?"

"One hundred and twenty pieces. Hiss... Th-this many?"

Aburame Shihui was the leading elder. He silently tasted his sugar block, and his expression gradually changed from wild delight to hesitation.

"Almost fifty thousand ryo. Th-this is too much..."

The room suddenly fell silent. The sound of sucking on sugar could be heard, until a series of gurgling noises made everyone freeze.

Aburame Tetsumaru rubbed his stomach. He had planned to eat dinner after finishing his business, but he had not expected Elder Shihui to value the sugar so highly. The elder had insisted on summoning every elder guarding the clan and making him demonstrate it on the spot, dragging things out until the middle of the night.

Aburame Tetsumaru's appetite had been growing larger and larger. Missing a meal made him hungry, and now he had missed both dinner and his late-night meal. He was starving.

"Hahahahaha!"

The old men burst into laughter, and the atmosphere immediately relaxed.

"Alright. Tetsumaru, go back and rest first. We old fellows will discuss this a little longer."

"There's no need to worry so much. In the end, this is a good thing. We only need to see how much benefit our family can get from it."

"That's right."

"Exactly. At the very least, the children at home can finally eat their fill."

"Tetsumaru, hurry back and rest."

Aburame Tetsumaru saluted. "I'll take my leave first. Elders, please take care of your health."

The old men continued discussing how to explain things to the Hokage, how to communicate with the Senju Family, which family to ally with, who to bring in as partners, and so on...

When Aburame Tetsumaru returned home, two clan ninja came with him. They took away seventeen pairs of queen ants and king ants in their winged state, which had long been sealed away in his home, along with tens of thousands of aphid eggs and scale insect eggs stuck to stiff cardboard.

After seeing off the two ninja, Aburame Tetsumaru enjoyed a large bowl of noodles made by his mother, then went to sleep.

Two days later, Aburame Tetsumaru noticed that the food supplied to the clan's orphans had returned to three meals a day, with enough for everyone to eat their fill.

The Ant Sugar business had officially begun. Though the farms were still being planned and had yet to produce anything, they had already received money from their partners. It was a sign that the clan's financial situation was improving.

It felt quite fulfilling.