A Few Months

When Yue returned to Rōran's royal palace from deep underground, Sara was fretting over a pile of dilapidated city reconstruction reports on the table.

Although Anrokuzan was dead, Rōran's puppet-based industrial system had collapsed completely along with him.

Without those tireless machines, the people of Rōran, accustomed to being "kept" and enslaved, now faced even the most basic problems of drinking water and food in the barren, arid desert.

If they could not solve the problem of survival, the tragic ending from the original story—Rōran becoming a dead city while Sara wandered from place to place with the survivors—would still repeat itself under the powerful World Correction Force.

"Are you worrying about how to feed those tens of thousands of mouths, Your Majesty?"

Yue walked up to the table and casually flipped through a few sheets of parchment.

"Lord Yue..." Sara hurriedly stood up, her expression dark. "Anrokuzan destroyed the oasis aboveground, and the groundwater was contaminated in the battle. If we don't use the Dragon Vein to power the water-pumping puppets, we won't last more than a month."

"I told you that the Dragon Vein's power belongs to me from now on. No one is allowed to touch it again."

Yue's voice brooked no argument. But immediately afterward, he pulled a thick stack of blueprints from his black robe and slapped them down in front of Sara.

"However, in return for you offering me the Dragon Vein, I promised to give your people a good life. I, Yue Uchiha, always keep my word."

Sara picked up the blueprints in confusion and froze.

The drawings showed nothing like any puppet she had ever seen. Instead, they depicted intricate mechanical designs and architectural plans she could not begin to understand.

"What are these...?"

"A Wind-Powered Water Pumping Station, a Deep Soil-less Drip Irrigation Agricultural System, a Solar Power Station, and basic plans for some tools."

Yue pointed at the blueprints, a confident smile tugging at his lips.

As a transmigrator from modern Earth, he had mostly forgotten the physics, chemistry, and basic engineering he had studied in school and university. But the Sharingan's ability to dredge up memories was profound.

In this shinobi world, where the technology tree was so lopsided that people had radios and display screens yet still relied on cold weapons and primitive agriculture, the basic modern technologies from another world were a complete dimensionality attack.

"We don't need to exploit that dangerous Dragon Vein, and we certainly don't need to fill the production line with human lives. The desert has no shortage of fierce winds and scorching sun. I'll teach you how to harness the pure 'laws of nature' to obtain energy, instead of 'chakra.'"

Yue looked at the dumbfounded Sara, ambition gleaming in his eyes.

"I'll spend ten years turning your people from slaves into engineers and scholars. I'll transform this city of Rōran into a Steel Oasis that doesn't depend on shinobi and isn't controlled by the Five Great Nations."

"It will be my future weapon against... never mind."

Sara had no idea what this man had been through, nor why his mind was filled with such godlike wisdom.

She only knew that Rōran needed this now.

"I understand, Lord Yue." Sara stepped back, placed her right hand over her chest, and performed the highest royal bow.

"For Rōran."

Time passed, and a few months slipped by in the blink of an eye.

In the main timeline, the wheels of history continued to grind relentlessly forward, and the Third Shinobi World War came to an end amid blood and fire.

Minato Namikaze stepped over countless enemy corpses and on the strength of his illustrious achievements, finally donning the Hokage Cloak that symbolized Konoha's highest authority and becoming the Fourth Hokage.

After he took office, the Anbu order to hunt down the S-rank rogue ninja Yue Uchiha was never rescinded.

Minato even personally sent Anbu elites to search the deserts of the Land of Wind several times, but they were blocked by the vast sands, which seemed to possess a will of their own, and by the ingenious concealment Barrier around Outer Rōran. They returned empty-handed each time.

Meanwhile, Rōran's technology was also advancing rapidly.

Rōran's engineers had never been lacking in skill. They had built magnificent Tower wonders and complex puppet production lines in the shinobi world, so their craftsmanship and mechanical aptitude were undoubtedly exceptional.

All they lacked was an inexhaustible energy source like the Dragon Vein and the right guidance.

Although their current energy system could not compare to the Dragon Vein's boundless, furious power, it could sustain the city's basic operations for a year or two without any problem.

And beyond energy, some applied technologies were also progressing rapidly.

Rudimentary internal combustion engines, greenhouse farming using soil-less cultivation, and more efficient underground water circulation systems...

Thus Yue Uchiha had fulfilled his promise to the people of Rōran to "improve their quality of life."

Aside from periodically delivering blueprints for these epoch-making applied technologies to Sara, Yue Uchiha spent almost all his time like a ghost, buried in a secret underground laboratory, conducting in-depth research on the Dragon Vein.

He began with an initial concept, proposed a hypothesis, and then embarked on endless experiments and research.

And along this long, unknown road of scientific exploration, Yue Uchiha possessed an ultimate cheat beyond the reach of anyone else in the Ninja World—even Orochimaru.

The Yagokoro Omoikane in his left eye could alter probability through ocular power.

Even without using that power, it could tell him the probability of success for any undertaking.

Only researchers knew how incredible this ability was.

It let him avoid paths that were impossible from the outset and focus on those with a higher probability of success.

The dim underground laboratory glimmered with a faint, bluish light.

"Hiss—"

Wearing a white lab coat, Yue Uchiha stood before a transparent vessel covered in complex Sealing Jutsu formulas. Inside, a wisp of purple Dragon Vein energy, carefully extracted, slammed against the vessel's walls like a frenzied venomous snake.

"The Natural Energy is more volatile than expected. The probability of 'petrification' if it's channeled directly into the body's pathways is 99.99%."

Yue studied the experiment log in his hand, brows furrowed.

Science was fundamentally a process of trial and error. But when researching a volatile energy capable of distorting space and time, any "error" could reduce the laboratory to dust.

Following normal experimental procedures, even Orochimaru would need decades to figure out the Dragon Vein's chakra wave pattern.

But Yue didn't need that long.

He poured endless ocular power into his Dragon Vein research. His vision grew increasingly blurry, but the experiments advanced ever more quickly.

"Since conventional chakra ratios can't neutralize it... then I'll try resonating with it using extreme, high-frequency gravitational waves."

Yue set down his pen and slowly raised his head.

The black eyes in his sockets instantly turned into the scarlet Mangekyō Sharingan.

The Star Array in his left eye, shaped like a pair of dice, began to rotate slowly.

"What's the probability of causing a miniature space-time collapse if I compress this wisp of Dragon Vein energy at my current chakra output frequency?"

As his ocular power dwindled slightly, a cold number surfaced in Yue's intuition: 0.7%.

It was a success rate so low as to be nearly negligible. If he acted now, he would most likely cause an explosion and shatter the vessel in front of him.

But beneath the mask, the corner of Yue Uchiha's mouth curled into a mad grin.

As long as it isn't zero, that's enough.

"Snap!"

A crisp snap of the fingers echoed through the quiet laboratory.

"Yagokoro Omoikane!"

"Keep the gravitational force I'm controlling within the range needed for the Dragon Vein to distort space and time."

The Mangekyō in his left eye spun wildly, forcibly shifting the wheel of causality and crudely raising that tiny 0.7% probability to an absolute 100%!

"Vmm—!"

Inside the vessel, the previously frenzied purple energy was compressed by the faint gravitational field released from the "Amenominakanushi" in Yue's right eye. It didn't explode. Instead, it reached a strange, perfect frequency resonance!

The purple light quickly drew inward, finally collapsing at the center of the vessel into a speck the size of a pinhead that emanated profoundly deep spatial fluctuations.

"Success... This is the Dragon Vein's critical frequency for triggering space-time distortion!"