The fishing household consisted of just one family: Tanimura Tsuyoshi, his wife, and their son, a very clever little boy.
As for the craftsman, he was a solitary man named Nakano Teruo. He had become separated from his family while fleeing the war and, aside from necessary exchanges, didn't want much to do with other people. So Bai Sui didn't know much about him.
The farmers made up most of the village, with nine households in all, plus two children.
Of those nine households, three were among the earliest settlers. The others had joined the village one after another later on.
From Bai Sui's observations, the reason the village had remained unable to grow over the years was its shortage of women. There were quite a few unmarried young men in the village, all of them old enough to marry, but they had no one to wed.
There was little they could do about it. The village was in a truly remote location, making it hard for ordinary refugees to reach. At the same time, they couldn't publicize the village's location, since that would invite disaster.
So Bai Sui put all their spare energy into studying. Starting with the basic kana chart, she then used word origins and associative memorization, teaching them common words by focusing on the "sounds" and "shapes" of the kana. Grammar wasn't much of a concern. They might not be able to read or write, but they could speak, so she only needed to correct them in certain places.
After all, Bai Sui's expectations weren't high. They only needed to learn to read and write and understand basic written material. She wasn't trying to raise a bunch of literary scholars.
More importantly, while teaching them words, she also taught them to recognize some simple plants and explained the basics of gathering them. She had them collect some whenever they came across them, making the lessons fun as well.
On top of that, Bai Sui took them to dig a pit in a remote part of the village. There wasn't much choice: everyone was dumping their waste straight into the stream downstream. It probably wouldn't affect the water they collected upstream, but it still made Bai Sui uncomfortable.
Under Bai Sui's guidance, they spent five days digging a two-chamber sanitation pit with a group of children. It would keep mosquitoes from breeding and produce fertilizer through fermentation.
The villagers weren't used to using it at first, but the doctor had insisted. And once they learned it could also enrich the soil and increase their crop yields, the village chief made it the rule.
It wasn't that the villagers had never thought of fertilizing their fields. The problem was that they hadn't used human waste. Without fermenting it first and getting the proportions wrong, it could easily do more harm than good.
The method passed down in the village was to mix duck manure with some rotting leaves to enrich the soil.
But the village had been founded by refugees, and they were short on all kinds of supplies. They didn't even have any ducks. For years, they'd had almost no suitable fertilizer and had to dig up silt from the river instead—a time-consuming, labor-intensive task that yielded little.
Now that they had a steady source of fertilizer, the villagers naturally thought even more highly of Bai Sui. Under her subtle influence, the whole village began to change.
Time flew by. Bai Sui had not only put down roots there but also earned the people's respect.
After all, she had combed through her memories of her previous life for useful facilities like fertilizer and waterwheels, testing them one by one.
Some didn't suit the local customs or level of development, but quite a few had brought tangible benefits to everyone.
And those benefits gradually spread from the village to the outpost.
Even Kubota Noriyuki, who had never cared much about the village, came to realize that Bai Sui was no ordinary doctor. The villagers had long suspected she was a noblewoman fallen on hard times because of the war.
Kubota Noriyuki had always kept his distance from the village, so Bai Sui hadn't had many chances to speak with him. And from what she could sense, she had already surpassed him in many respects. She figured he probably wasn't highly regarded among the samurai either, which was why he had ended up here.
Unexpectedly, after Bai Sui returned from gathering herbs one day, the samurai Kubota Noriyuki, reeking of alcohol, struck up a conversation with her.
He didn't talk about his own circumstances. Instead, he brought up bloodline and poured out his grievances to Bai Sui.
Thinking about how the entire Naruto story revolved around infighting within the Ōtsutsuki Clan, Bai Sui disagreed with him, but didn't know what to say.
But it seemed he'd found a kindred spirit. He grew more and more animated as he spoke. "Everything about us is decided the moment we're born. Our talents and our capacity are already set in stone. Our future is..."
In the end, Bai Sui felt he had wandered so far off track that she couldn't take it anymore. "Not necessarily. Take the village, for example. If what you say is true, then the children here will never have the chance to learn to read. They'll never be able to, because their futures were already decided at birth."
Hearing Bai Sui contradict him, Kubota Noriyuki suddenly froze, then reflexively argued, "That's because you..."
"No." Bai Sui cut him off. "I don't believe that everything in a person's life is decided at birth.
"I think the difference lies in opportunity. Your background determines some of the opportunities available to you. The more privileged your background, the more opportunities you can encounter and the more choices you can make."
Seeing that Kubota Noriyuki hadn't come up with a rebuttal, Bai Sui continued. "Take medicine, for instance. While teaching those children to read, I've also taught them some basic medical knowledge. That's an opportunity I've given them.
"According to you, they should simply inherit their ancestors' work. Those who farmed before them can only be farmers.
"I don't think they can only farm. I think they have very few opportunities to choose from, and inheriting their ancestors' work is simply the easiest opportunity for them to seize. That's all."
Realizing he was being persuaded, Kubota Noriyuki quickly cut in. "No, no. If you hadn't come here, they'd definitely have inherited their family trades. They changed because of you, not because of themselves."
Bai Sui smiled and quietly shifted the point. "Look, earlier you thought everything was predetermined. Now you still think any other opportunities can only come from someone else, and that people can't actively obtain them for themselves, right?"
"Ah, right, exactly. They changed because of you, not because of themselves. So the opportunity came from you, not from anything they gained for themselves." Kubota Noriyuki didn't seem to realize that Bai Sui had steered the conversation toward whether people could obtain opportunities for themselves.