An Open Scheme

Heh. The thought made Uchiha Kei want to laugh.

That was because Shisui was Shisui. If Kei were in Shisui's shoes, he'd have pushed Itachi out as a scapegoat in a heartbeat.

"The clan heir told me to return to the village and handle clan affairs while I was on the front lines, causing unrest and damaging morale. Considering I've shed blood for the village and earned credit for the Hokage, the Hokage should lend me a hand."

After all, he'd dragged the Uchiha Clan's heir into this mess.

It went without saying how the Hokage would play things from there.

Sometimes, it was hard to understand whether the times made the hero or the hero made the times.

But no matter what choices anyone made, nothing could stop Uchiha Kei from bringing more clan members into the fold. Anyone who got in the way of Kei's plan to expand the clan would become his next target.

He had no choice. Kei had his own predicament to deal with.

The strength he currently had was enough to protect himself, but to gain an advantage in high-end combat power, Kei had decided to draw a card once a year from now on.

That way, he could use a hundred consecutive draws to confirm whether an S-rank card really required a hundred draws to obtain.

An S-rank card was crucial for Kei, who had hit a bottleneck.

Getting an S-rank card wouldn't just give Kei access to even greater combat power. It would also let him take on those lucrative missions that could only be completed with an S-rank card.

Watching all those rich rewards remain out of reach made Kei feel awful.

Compared with the rewards for ordinary missions, which had no requirements, S-rank missions offered Kekkei Genkai, legendary weapons, Devil Fruits, and Zanpakuto.

With the power of the Big Three manga series behind me, I should be able to wipe the floor with anyone in Naruto.

So no matter how hard it was, Kei had to get at least one S-rank card first—even if it was only one.

That meant Kei couldn't draw any more people through the card system for the next year.

Since he couldn't obtain more ninja, bringing together the groups scattered beyond Konoha that could be recruited had become his best option.

After all, with the system, he had no shortage of the resources needed to live. If he brought the Red Eye Clan into the fold, then in less than half a year, he could use ample resources and the Uchiha Clan's, Koga's, and Iga's ninja-training methods to train the Red Eye Clan. That would give him another three to five hundred ninja with at least Chunin-level strength, all naturally suited to countering the Hyuga.

That was equivalent to drawing three to five hundred cards one at a time!

Another reason was that Hokage Sarutobi Hiruzen's plan had forced Kei to speed up the process of bringing the Red Eye Clan into the fold.

Sarutobi Hiruzen's plan showed some thought, but to Kei, who had seen five thousand years of Chinese schemes and stratagems, it was nothing special.

It was a classic plot to set two peaches against three warriors. Nothing new.

The Hokage planned to create a position called Hokage Advisor and have the noble clans choose a representative to fill it.

The role's main responsibility would be to serve as a channel of communication between the ninja clans and the Hokage, with candidates to be put forward by the Uchiha, Hyuga, and Kurama Clans.

The Kurama Clan was short on members and barely holding on thanks to adopted sons. If they chose someone from their family, a direct descendant would surely be sickly, possibly reducing their numbers even further. If they chose a healthy candidate, he'd be either a son-in-law or an adopted son, neither of whom would be qualified to stand on equal terms with the Hyuga or the Uchiha.

Their status simply wouldn't match.

The Kurama Clan had been disqualified from the competition from the very beginning. Its only role was to serve as a balance.

Although the Hyuga, who had recently taken the title of Konoha's greatest clan, had thriving numbers and abundant assets, they had a natural disadvantage against the Uchiha: the Hyuga specialized in Taijutsu, while the Uchiha were capable all-rounders.

But the Hokage Advisor position only required communication skills. The Hyuga Clan had a good reputation, the Aburame and Inuzuka Clans followed them, and they enjoyed the friendship of other clans. That made them the obvious choice.

Next, it would come down to whether they could withstand the pressure from the Uchiha Clan.

That was where the Kurama Clan, another great clan, became especially important.

The proud Uchiha had never been a clan that made friends easily. Sarutobi Hiruzen had already foreseen that the Kurama would side with the Hyuga. Even so, the combined pressure of two great clans wouldn't be enough to make the Uchiha give up.

At that point, Sarutobi Hiruzen would only need to hint to the Uchiha that if they were willing to abandon Uchiha Kei, he would fully support them in securing the Hokage Advisor position.

He could even imply that he was getting old, and that the Hokage Advisor position existed to train the next Hokage.

Whether the Uchiha believed him didn't matter.

If they did, and managed to kill Kei, all the better.

If they refused to abandon Kei, the Uchiha would be pushed completely to the opposite side of the other ninja clans, once again becoming a clan with no allies.

Sarutobi also thought he could use the Uchiha Clan to restrain the other ninja clans. Of course, it would be best if they all restrained one another.

No matter who won, the Hokage had nothing to lose.

Uchiha Kei thought, as expected, those in high positions loved this kind of open scheme.

A covert scheme relied on constantly throwing up smokescreens to hide its real purpose. As long as you saw through the goal, you could find a way to counter it.

An open scheme was more troublesome. It made no effort to conceal its true purpose. It simply used benefits to push human nature in the direction it wanted.

Even if you saw through it, you still had no way to counter it, because the benefits on offer were impossible to refuse.

The Uchiha couldn't refuse the position of Hokage Advisor.

Fortunately, the long history left by their ancestors gave Kei plenty of precedents to draw upon. Things that had happened in the past would keep happening in the future.

As long as he studied history, he could find another way to solve a problem by looking at similar events.

This seemingly unsolvable open scheme wasn't as flawless as Sarutobi thought.

First, Sarutobi had made one mistake: the decision to force the Uchiha to turn on Uchiha Kei wasn't actually in the Uchiha's hands.

Sarutobi assumed that today's Uchiha were no different from the other ninja clans, apart from having a few more people. He thought they still had the same habit of sacrificing anything for the sake of their clan.

But Kei understood that some of the Uchiha, those born and raised in the clan, might indeed abandon him for the sake of the so-called future Hokage—the Hokage Advisor position. But the prerequisite was that they had to be strong enough to kill him.

What, they planned to use the clan's greater good to force Uchiha Kei to kill himself?

Moral blackmail only worked on people with a conscience.

Trying to use the greater good to blackmail Uchiha Kei into taking his own life was underestimating his selfishness as a modern-day transmigrant.

To stay alive, he'd rather force the Uchiha Clan to die.

By then, it wouldn't be clear who was forcing whom.

Kei had also thought of a way to deal with the Hokage: fight an open scheme with an open scheme.

If the Hokage dared to hint that the Hokage Advisor would become the next Hokage, Kei would spread that information everywhere and drag Minato Namikaze into the mess.

The many ninja from civilian backgrounds who had already accepted the fact that Minato Namikaze would be the next Fourth Hokage wouldn't want any further twists. There were too many of them for that.

They couldn't accept another ninja from a clan becoming a rival to Lord Minato.

Sarutobi wanted to set the ninja clans against one another over a single position. Kei would muddy the waters even further, forcing all the ninja to choose sides. Everyone would have their own opponents.

Then it would become a struggle for the right to choose the next Hokage, and the chance to earn credit for supporting him would be right in front of them.

No one could refuse that.

Then Sarutobi Hiruzen would have to explain himself.

Even if everything went wrong, there was no need to worry. Even if Sarutobi managed to placate the villagers, take care of the ninja clans, and hoodwink the Uchiha, it wouldn't matter.

Uchiha Kei's position had never been bestowed on him by the Uchiha. At worst, he could make a blood sacrifice in a righteous crusade against a traitor to the nation, and let everyone see his fangs.

It was Konoha itself that had plenty of skeletons in its closet.

After all, Konoha had committed evil for years. Three years after the village was founded, someone whose village had been destroyed buried a hundred thousand Explosive Tags beneath Kage Rock.

Uchiha Kei had known this for a long time and had already made plans. If things came to the worst, he'd detonate the Explosive Tags, then demonize Konoha's actions and publicize the darkness of the Third's rule, dealing a devastating blow to the Hokage's reputation.

By then, the Hokage would be too busy looking after himself for the Hokage Advisor position to be worth anything.

Twisting the truth was Uchiha Kei's specialty.

Besides, what he said was true. It really was revenge for a village that had been destroyed.

And the avenger was naturally in the right.

Especially when the weak took revenge on the powerful!

As for the pressure from the Hyuga Clan, it wasn't a problem. Once he had the Red Eye Clan, which naturally countered the Byakugan, it would be even less of a problem!