"Despicable! Shameless! Utterly disgraceful!" Rasa furiously slammed his fist onto the table, knocking over the teacup and spilling the freshly brewed tea across the tabletop.
"If you want to lose your temper, then lose your temper. Why are you pounding the table? Now I have to clean it up again." Karura complained as she took out a rag and wiped the table.
"Have you ever seen anything like this? Have you? The factory has been running for less than a year, and that old man with a tube up his throat has raised taxes for the third time already. What the hell is he trying to do?
"I paid good money for fifty years of land-use rights along the river. What right does he have to demand more taxes from me? If he really pushes me too far, I'll relocate the factory. Raise taxes? Go collect them from the River God of the Shule River."
"Relocate the factory? That won't do. Have you forgotten Lord Kazekage's instructions? We need to hold this river." Karura coaxed Rasa as if she were soothing a child, then poured him another cup of tea.
Rasa gradually calmed down as well. After taking a sip, he said, "Isn't it just one million ryo in sanitation fees? Give it to him. Consider it charity for a beggar."
"I think we should pay it, but we can't give it to him so easily. If Hanzo of the Salamander can take whatever he wants from our Hourglass Group, he'll only become more excessive in the future," Karura reminded him.
"Of course it won't be that easy! Send him an invitation. We'll have dinner together tonight. Have him sell the Sumu Iron Mine to us. If he agrees, the one million will count as a small personal token from the Hourglass Group. No need to call it a sanitation fee or garbage fee. It sounds cheap."
"And if he refuses?" Karura asked.
"If he refuses..." A faintly murderous smile appeared at the corner of Rasa's mouth.
"Then I'll submit a report to Lord Kazekage and take down that greedy old bastard! Only now do I think the Second Kazekage Shamon was right. Amegakure really deserves a beating!"
"I think we may be oversimplifying this. How about I write up a report on the situation here and submit it, then hear what Lord Keiko thinks?" Karura said.
"Fine." Rasa nodded.
"Write it tomorrow. Tonight, let's hear what that old bastard has to say first. Oh, and suspend the intake of Amegakure refugees for now. Stir up some trouble for him first. If I'm unhappy, I can't let him rest easy either. He needs to learn that the pot is made of iron."
"When you delivered the notice this morning, what was Rasa's attitude like?" Hanzo of the Salamander swirled the red wine in his glass, carefully observing the legs it left behind. He removed his mask and took a small sip, looking thoroughly pleased as even his brows relaxed. Only after quite some time did he put the mask back on.
"He neither agreed nor refused. He only said they needed to hold a meeting and discuss it. But his expression looked terrible," Oboro reported methodically.
"His expression looked terrible? Hahahaha! With that bitter melon face of his, when has he ever looked good? Hahahaha!" Hanzo of the Salamander seemed amused by his own joke and laughed for a long time without stopping.
"That Rasa is nothing more than Keiko's watchdog here. At best, he's a second-rate nobody. One million ryo in taxes is barely enough for a little wine money, yet he dares haggle with me over every last coin. If not for Keiko's sake, I'd have his damn Hourglass factory shut down tomorrow! Worthless trash that can't be put on display!" Hanzo of the Salamander said viciously.
Since the Hourglass Group had established itself along the Shule River, it had provided Amegakure with an extremely considerable cash flow: twenty million ryo in startup capital, fifty million ryo for fifty years of land-use rights along the river, thirty million ryo for fifty years of mining rights at the Sada Iron Mine, plus two million ryo in commercial taxes every month.
Those huge windfalls had Hanzo of the Salamander seeing stars. A ninja village the size of Sunagakure had once had an annual administrative budget of only thirty million ryo. Amegakure was merely a small ninja village, and the Land of Rain's daimyo allocated it only ten million ryo a year. With nearly one hundred million ryo suddenly landing in his lap, anyone would probably get carried away like a nouveau riche.
Moreover, the war within the Land of Rain had now completely ended, and Sunagakure had helped solve the refugee issue that had troubled him most. Hanzo of the Salamander was entirely free of pressure and completely let himself go. He abandoned his former rough, frugal ways and learned how to enjoy life.
Drinking wine, tasting tea, watching dances, and sleeping with prostitutes. In Hanzo of the Salamander's own words: "I've fought wars my whole life. Can't I enjoy myself for once?"
"Report! Rasa has sent an invitation, inviting you to dinner with him tonight."
"Hm. Looks like Keiko left a sensible person beside that bitter melon face. At least he knows what's proper. Reply that I'll attend at midnight tonight." Hanzo of the Salamander accepted the invitation, opened it for a look, and nodded in satisfaction.
"There is one more matter."
"Speak."
"The Hourglass Group refugee shelter announced that it would stop accepting refugees as of today. Large numbers of refugees are now pouring toward the Hidden Rain Building."
"What?!" Hanzo of the Salamander shot to his feet in shock.
"Why did they stop taking them?"
"They said the labor they needed this year was already at capacity, and they couldn't afford to employ any more..."
"Damn it! How many people are coming this way?"
"Men and women, young and old, approximately twenty thousand..."
Bang! The beautiful wineglass smashed to pieces on the floor.
The famous American psychologist Stuttgart once said that sex was truly the best remedy for relieving stress. When facing work pressure and emotional problems, not only did the human brain become tense, but the body became stiff as well.
Through contact between hands and skin, sex could make people feel warmth and promote the secretion of endorphins in the brain. This chemical produced feelings of happiness and could soothe emotions. Experiments had proven that this was no lie. Looking at Tsunade, who had already fallen into a deep sleep on the sofa bed beside him, Keiko quietly pulled the blanket up over her bare, fragrant shoulder.
It seemed Tsunade truly had been under enormous pressure. By the end, her movements last night had been nearly frantic. If Keiko had not spent more than twenty years building his strength and training his stance and waist, and if he had not kept his vital essence intact all this time, he might not have survived last night.
Keiko quietly got up, rubbed his slightly sore waist, wrapped his bathrobe tightly around himself, and cautiously left the break room. It happened to be the weekend, so there was no one in the laboratory. Before dawn broke, Keiko quickly slipped back to his own villa.
The first thing he did was take another shower under the showerhead. As he scrubbed himself, he considered how to handle his relationship with Tsunade. As the Kazekage, he obviously could not marry into the Konoha, but getting Tsunade to marry into Sunagakure did not seem easy either.
Although the two villages were allies now, who knew when that alliance would end?
A cross-national marriage like Shikamaru and Temari's could only happen under the great peace that came after the Fourth Shinobi World War. Now? The Second Shinobi World War was in full swing, while the Third Shinobi World War had yet to begin. Under such a political climate, Keiko did not dare imagine marrying a noble "princess" like Tsunade. A political marriage?
Forget it. A marriage between people of Keiko and Tsunade's status would be equivalent to binding the Konoha and Sunagakure together for good. Setting aside whether the Konoha's higher-ups would agree, the elders of the Sunagakure Hearing Council probably would not agree either.
"Damn it, what's done is done. I'll take it one step at a time." Keiko could not think of a good solution for the moment, so he simply stopped thinking about it.
After showering and changing clothes, Keiko made two sandwiches, packed them into a lunchbox, and returned to the underground laboratory with a nervous heart.
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