Hiroki and Kushina walked along the road back.
The sun had already dipped halfway below the horizon.
Several figures followed in the shadows, neither too close nor too far behind Hiroki and Kushina.
[Anbu - Owl - Kinoshita Kaze]: Wanting Earth Style ninja to blast mountains and reclaim land, and Water Style ninja to build irrigation works—how absurd! Leaving aside the fact that ninja earn far more than those people, if ninja took over those jobs, what would happen to the original workers?
[Root - Child Three]: Is Lord Minato Namikaze planning to eliminate a group of people who are useless to the village?
Especially those farmers...? Or does Lord Minato Namikaze simply have no idea what consequences this would bring?
Hiroki did not look back, but the thought-barrage of the guards behind him appeared clearly on his system interface.
They were very typical ways of thinking.
Kinoshita Kaze had approached the matter from the perspectives of economics and employment, seeing the direct social conflicts the reforms might trigger.
The cost of ninja and the jobs of civilians—this was a real contradiction.
Root's Child Three, meanwhile, was far colder. He simply divided people into "useful" and "useless," and tended to interpret policies in the most extreme way possible.
He suspected Hiroki was about to carry out a social purge.
That was normal. Even Hiroki himself had not initially considered how changes in productivity could render people obsolete.
But that did not mean the reforms had to stop, nor did it mean he intended to eliminate those farming households and farmers.
His reforms had been meant to ensure that people could eat their fill. If he could not even accomplish that, and instead caused even more people to be unable to afford food because of the reforms, then his reforms would