I came quietly, just as I had come;
I waved my sleeves and left not a single cloud behind.
Well... except for the thirty million in "local specialties" I took from Kirigakure.
That's right.
After a round of "intense" negotiations,
Kirigakure had ultimately caved completely.
They had no choice but to agree to Natsume's two conditions.
They had formally decided to enter into an alliance with the Flame Hidden Village.
And they had dutifully paid the "ransom" to buy back the lives of those sixty-five Kirigakure Ninja.
Of course, Kirigakure really couldn't afford to pay much more.
So Natsume had allowed them to pay only thirty million ryo upfront. The remaining seventy-odd million would be paid off in installments over four years.
Why four years?
Simply because Natsume feared that Kirigakure wouldn't survive until the final year of his Five-Year Plan...
And so,
with thirty million in Kirigakure's "local specialties," along with plenty of beautiful pearls and gems from the sea,
Natsume and the others returned home laden with spoils once more.
People always thought that the Five Great Shinobi Villages were terribly poor.
That wasn't actually the case.
The Five Great Shinobi Villages were, in essence, five small towns with populations of tens of thousands.
And they were old-fashioned towns whose development hadn't even fully reached the industrial age.
Suppose a village brought in a total of one billion in taxes each year.
If you calculated that based on the average C-rank mission, which paid thirty thousand,
they'd need to complete at least 34,000 missions to bring in one billion in tax revenue! (And most ninja could only scrape by with D-rank missions.)
And a tax rate of one-fifth of the mission fee would already be considered very high.
That meant that, based on mission fees alone,
the