A month after the New Year, work on Wetland Bridge was completed. But it wasn't summer yet over in the Wetlands, and the flowers and fruit hadn't bloomed, so the bridge wouldn't be of much use for the time being.
In the second month of Konoha's sixteenth year, the southern part of Konoha was leveled and rebuilt. After three months of work, the South District became the cleanest, tidiest street in Konoha.
Senju Hashirama walked along a road in the southern part of the village. His wooden sandals clacked against the stones. The uneven surface actually hurt his feet a little, but he didn't mind.
He looked around in amazement at the streetlamps lining the road, the signs, and the shops on the ground floors of the buildings...
Many of the houses were still unoccupied, but it was easy to imagine that, with the housing problem solved, the number of ordinary people could double over the next twenty years.
And with more ordinary people, the village could naturally support more shinobi.
Hashirama felt rather proud. His disciple really was the genuine article. He might not have been talented at fighting as a shinobi, but Hashirama himself already stood at the pinnacle of the Shinobi World when it came to combat ability. Even so, the changes Konoha had undergone in its first sixteen years couldn't compare to what had happened in just the past six months.
Take this part of the South District, for example. Could you believe Yuya had simply told the workers to build such a beautiful road while they were at it?
All the materials had been brought over from the cliffs north of Konoha.
It might not be very respectful to Kage Rock to say so, but its stone really was quite useful.
And the roads in Konoha used to be muddy everywhere. They were nothing like the roads now, with drainage channels running alongside them and lids covering the top. Hashirama had never seen anything like them before, but he'd understood their purpose the moment he laid eyes on them.
The main reason was that when Konoha was first built, nobody had thought about sewers at all. Otherwise, Yuya could have skipped the drainage channels. They could have just put manhole covers over the sewers, leaving the whole road wide, even, and smooth. Instead, there were these drainage channels, and they had plenty of problems. For one thing, in his previous life, leaves and cigarette butts often fell into them.
There were cigarettes in the world of Naruto, so there were bound to be cigarette butts, and leaves, too. Who knew? Maybe a Shuriken or Kunai could fall in there as well.
Too bad there weren't any sewers. Otherwise, he could have made you a manhole cover weighing several dozen pounds.
With drainage channels like these, who knew if someone might try to use one to drift around a turn in the future?
Ahem, he was getting off track. Hashirama had seen the changes in the South District with his own eyes. It was a good thing he hadn't driven Yuya out of Konoha just because he was suspicious of him, and had instead given him a chance to prove himself.
Now, wasn't this impressive?
What impressed Hashirama even more was that the changes in the South District had made people in other parts of the village unhappy.
"Those people in the South District are all ordinary people! If ordinary people can enjoy such nice homes and roads, while we distinguished shinobi are still walking on muddy roads, how can we put up with that?!"
Senju Tobirama had waved his hand grandly. "I've already mastered this so-called economics! Just watch. I'll sort this out in the blink of an eye!"
Then work began in three places at once. A week later, the renovations were complete. Senju Tobirama checked the books and saw that twenty-five million Ryo had vanished. He was so furious that he fainted on the spot.
Yuya could only shake his head. "Even when you're copying someone's homework, you have to make sure the conditions are the same, don't you?"
Now that these shinobi clans had been roused to action, they were practically a bunch of tools at his disposal.
If Yuya had done the work himself, the clans might have ended up with a lot of money, but Konoha's warehouses would definitely have been packed to the brim. The clans probably wouldn't have understood the difference between money and supplies, and would even have thought they'd made a fortune.
Unfortunately, that wasn't an option now.
But it was fine. Yuya thought that the benefits he'd given them would still serve a purpose.
They would lull the clans into a false sense of security. The next time something similar came up, they wouldn't be suspicious.
At present, Konoha's various shinobi clans controlled all of the village's institutions of power.
But this was a common problem in every country. Only shinobi were considered qualified to wield power. It wasn't some unspoken rule; it was right there in the open.
Yuya didn't think there was anything wrong with this arrangement. Shinobi risked their lives to protect the village and fight for it, so it was only right that they should have the authority to go with it.
It was just that perhaps, because of this, most of the people in leadership focused all their attention on the shinobi.
They didn't pay much attention to ordinary people.
In fact, ordinary people could create value, too.
And compared to shinobi, there were far more ordinary people. If they were all put to work serving shinobi, most of them would never even get that opportunity.
The only thing the neglected masses might see all year was the rice growing in their own fields.
That was devastating to their motivation to make a better life for themselves.
At first, because of war and other troubles, they might have been satisfied simply to live in relative peace. But once things stabilized, they would be faced with a future they could see all too clearly. They probably wouldn't give up entirely, but they certainly wouldn't be very motivated.
So Yuya had a second path for development in mind.
Building factories.
They didn't need to use cutting-edge technology. They could be textile mills, food-processing plants, or even factories producing all kinds of high-tech goods.
Decades from now, Naruto would turn Konoha into a high-tech metropolis, using technology developed across the Shinobi World. There was no reason such technology couldn't exist at this point in time.
But research projects burned through money like water. At the moment, even if Yuya wanted to start one, Senju Tobirama certainly wouldn't agree.
Yuya had casually mentioned a proposal that would require at least one billion Ryo in initial investment, and Senju Tobirama's head had started throbbing.
Senju Tobirama had come to understand that the boy Yuya didn't seem to have any concept of money.
He'd just tossed out a figure as enormous as one billion Ryo without a second thought.
That was several years' worth of Konoha's total tax revenue.
Well, a village couldn't have a strong economy if it wasn't developed.
Senju Hashirama's health had been getting better and better lately, but Uzumaki Mito's smile had grown rarer and rarer.
Yuya had once asked Hashirama in private if there was any way to delay his death.
Hashirama had told Yuya quite casually that there was a way, but he didn't want to try it.
The method was simple: he could find someone to fight, just like when he'd fought Madara Uchiha before, and let himself get injured—preferably seriously.
That would give the ever-growing cells in his body a new target. His body's instinct to survive would make them turn to the wound, where they would consume rotten old cells and cells from the outside.
That should buy him a few more years.
But Hashirama had no intention of doing it.
The Shinobi World had finally found peace. If he went looking for trouble now, that peace would shatter and disappear in an instant.
Hashirama had spent his whole life wanting to end a world filled with chaos, disorder, and war. He had succeeded. So even if he was going to die, he would never bring himself to destroy the very thing he had longed for.
Yuya had no response to that.
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