When Kagami Uchiha arrived at the Hokage Office, he saw Yuya standing leisurely by the window, watching the figures below holding up banners.
"Um... Shouldn't we send someone to drive those people away?"
Yuya spotted Kagami Uchiha and asked, puzzled, what had brought him here.
There was no need to ask whether he was real or an impostor. The Uchiha Clan wasn't made up of dead weight. With them guarding Konoha, the man here had to be the real Kagami Uchiha.
Kagami Uchiha explained the situation, and Yuya's eyes immediately lit up.
Though Senju Tobirama hadn't explicitly said there was a mine there, Yuya knew as soon as he heard about it.
There was definitely a gold mine, and it had to be a sizable one.
There had to be dozens of tons, maybe even hundreds...
Forget it. He'd go take a look first.
Oh, right. He had to deal with the situation here first.
Seeing that Kagami Uchiha was still confused, Yuya explained everything to him.
It turned out that ever since Yuya had announced some time ago that every factory district had to strictly treat its wastewater, the merchants had all resisted.
They used to think Yuya was Senju Tobirama's spokesman, and since their interests didn't conflict, they'd just gone along with him.
But things were different now.
Treating wastewater would cut their profits in half. Once they had the equipment, they could expand production, and the bigger they expanded, the more their profits would gradually increase. After all, the wastewater treatment system was already in place; they'd only have to connect any additional factories to it, so the extra profits would keep growing.
Yuya had explained the matter clearly, appealing to both reason and emotion, but the merchants still refused. They insisted he'd acted on his own authority.
Yuya was so angry he laughed.
Oh, when there's something in it for you, we're the best of friends. Now that there's nothing in it for you, suddenly I'm a tyrant? And, afraid Senju Tobirama would hold you accountable, you even made a point of saying I was acting on my own?
If that were all, Yuya would've been willing to move forward gradually.
But to oppose his policy, they'd gone so far as to shut down their shops, textile mills, grain stores, ninja tool shops, and more...
The textile mills didn't make much profit but required lots of workers and were difficult to manage, so Yuya hadn't meddled in them. The same went for the others.
Yuya sneered to himself. The merchants thought they could take him on by banding together. They probably figured they'd give this little brat a taste of economic shock.
Fine. You want to play it that way?
You shut your doors, then don't you dare open them again!
You really think I can't manage without you?
He turned around and opened Konoha's granary.
The grain merchants got their grain from other countries or bought it directly from Konoha.
Yuya immediately cut off that supply route, banning the sale of grain from Konoha's granary.
Then he sent a message to Iwagakure, placing an initial order for ten tons of grain. Potatoes, rice, wheat—it didn't matter. As long as it was edible, Yuya wanted it.
Put the hospital, school, and Hokage Office Building renovation plans on hold. If I don't make you bastards feel the pain this time, I'm not Yuya.
You shut down your factories and shops, huh?
Then don't even think about opening them again!
The day after the grain stores closed, Yuya announced in the name of the Hokage Office that a former beverage shop on Commercial Street would begin selling grain. The announcement was printed in the newspaper. Even those who didn't want to buy a newspaper would notice that their usual grain store was closed when they went there. Once they realized they had no grain to eat, they'd panic and ask around about where they could buy some.
Then someone would surely tell them that there was a grain shop on the central Commercial Street, and its prices were a little lower than those at the old stores.
It might only be five or ten Ryo cheaper, but as long as the grain was available and a little cheaper, Konoha wouldn't fall into chaos.
Yuya's top priority was always resolving the food problem. Just a few years ago, there had still been many people in Konoha, and things had only improved over the past two years.
But Yuya had always kept this in mind. Even his deals with Kirigakure had prioritized fish and other seafood.
In fact, the three thousand kilograms of fish had already been eaten. Three thousand kilograms sounded like a lot, but with hundreds of thousands of people in Konoha, it wasn't even enough to give everyone a single fish.
So Yuya placed a second order with Kirigakure.
This time, he doubled it.
But now Kirigakure had a problem: they didn't have a ship big enough, so they'd have to send a whole fleet.
Still, it was twice the money. They couldn't pass up the profit.
As for Sunagakure...
Well...
Let's skip them. They had to import their own food...
In short, the grain in Konoha's granary was only enough to feed the entire village for three months. Yuya had only been appointed at Senju Tobirama's request for two years.
If he'd been given another year, Yuya could've filled the granary enough to feed everyone in Konoha for a year. By then, the granary would need expanding, too.
As long as the food problem was solved, Konoha wouldn't fall into chaos.
After that, Yuya sent people to Kirigakure and Sunagakure to make purchases.
What did he buy?
You shut down your textile mills, huh?
Then I'll go buy finished clothes directly from those two places!
I'd rather let them make the money than you!
Unfortunately, the countries around Konoha didn't have the same industrial setup. More precisely, they didn't have factories Yuya had helped establish.
The factories Yuya had invested in at Kirigakure and Sunagakure weren't limited to steel mills. They also included textile mills.
Of course, the workers there were locals, and they used locally sourced materials.
Yuya had only invested money in the first phase. For the first two years, Konoha would receive ten percent of the finished products. The investment would be repaid over ten years, and control would remain in the hands of Kirigakure and Sunagakure.
The terms were already very generous.
The leaders of those two villages weren't idiots, though the Third Mizukage hadn't been chosen yet...
Well... It was said that the clans in Kirigakure were discussing whether they should simply leave the Mizukage position vacant and let the major clans run things. That seemed like a pretty good arrangement to them.
Yuya couldn't be bothered with whatever tricks Kirigakure was playing.
Who didn't have problems within their village?
If there was a problem, solve it.
If it couldn't be solved, then deal with whoever was causing it.
To be honest, Yuya was ready to kill this time.
Once those factories closed, Yuya immediately set up operations doing the same things the merchants had done.
How to put it? Yuya was even losing money on a lot of it.
Take buying clothes from Kirigakure and Sunagakure, for example. There were bound to be losses during transport.
In theory, the clothes should've cost more by the time they reached Konoha.
But Yuya didn't raise the price.
He'd rather lose millions of Ryo on every shipment than give in to those profiteering bastards!
I'll put off building the hospital and school, and renovating the Hokage Office Building. I'll use the tens of billions of Ryo I've made over the past two years to fight you. Come on, let's see who caves first.
Of course, Yuya couldn't just replace the shops and leave the factory workers out of work.
Yuya sent people to talk to them and lay out the facts.
Sure, you can still put food on the table every day for now, but how will you support your families in the long run if you don't have a paycheck?
The workers stared at them blankly. "Huh? What are you talking about? The day my factory closed, people from the steel mill and beverage factory next door asked me to work for them... That new cement factory asked if I wanted a job, too."
Yuya: ...
Damn it. His own infrastructure projects in Konoha had been so successful that every place was short of workers. These workers were experienced and needed little training, so everyone was fighting to hire them.
How had this come back to bite him?
Yuya thought it over for a while, then decided to send people to persuade the workers by appealing to their interests.
Look, the factory closed, and the boss didn't pay you for this past week, did he?
What? It's only a few thousand Ryo, and you don't care? No, how can you think like that?! If you let it go, what's to stop the owners of those factories from hiring you for a few days, then firing you without paying you?
You can't just think about the present. You have to think about the future, too.
The workers thought it over. That seemed to make sense.
Then, the next day, they went out into the street and saw that so-and-so from next door had come to demand his wages, too.
"Well, fancy that! What a coincidence. Come on, let's go together!"
And that was how things had ended up like this.
Yuya grabbed Kagami Uchiha and said, "Some of the merchants are already thinking of backing down, but I don't want to let them off that easily.
Who do they think they are, giving me that kind of attitude?
Come on, I'm heading to the front lines with you. We'll leave those merchants who don't know what's good for them hanging for ten days or half a month."
Kagami Uchiha was dumbfounded. Then he began to wonder...
Had the Uchiha Clan done anything to offend this young Yuya?
What Yuya didn't expect was that this trip to the front lines would last more than a month, and he'd nearly lose his life there...
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