(Purely handmade, non-AI text.)
(Power-building route, no system, ensemble cast, multiple heroines and harem, do not enter if you dislike this.)
(Slow burn in the early stage, trying to keep it logical.)
(Because it starts from the Warring States Era, there will be some original characters.)
(I am going to eat your brains, reading without brains is not allowed. Also, this book has been to the small black room.)
That was before the founding of the small village called Konoha.
In the Warring States Era, an age of great contention, nations frequently engaged in diplomacy of conquest; the strong grew strong, and the weak perished.
Every social stratum in various countries fluctuated and convulsed; from nobles down to commoners, everyone was panic-stricken day and night without a shred of security, constantly at risk of becoming fish on the chopping block.
In such a chaotic world with extremely high warfare intensity, morality and shame were meaningless, and violence and slaughter were the only correct answers to staying alive.
Natural disasters and famines spread across various countries.
The starving, wandering refugees—claypot rice, wife cakes, husband and wife lung slice, and so on—used real ingredients and never faked them.
Just as this age of great contention seemed about to enter a new white-hot stage, the Senju Clan and the Uchiha Clan in the Land of Fire abruptly announced an alliance.
This caused the entire chaotic world to bizarrely slam on the brakes and plunge into a dead silence.
Senju and Uchiha allied?
The remaining ninja clans were torn between laughter and tears.
Could this not be some new style of Warring States dark comedy?
Last year, these two strongest ninja clans in the Ninja World were still beating each other to death, and this year they suddenly allied?
However, as the alliance pact of the two clans was sent to various countries in the name of the Daimyo of the Land of Fire, everyone paying attention to this matter instantly fell silent.
Who were the two most powerful ninja clans of the Warring States Era?
They were the Senju Clan, who possessed the power of the Sage Physique, and the Uchiha Clan, who possessed the power of the Sage's Eye.
Thus, the Daimyos of various countries, along with countless large and small ninja clans, had their brains blown in various senses on this day.
They tacitly stopped fighting and killing; anxiety, fear, silence, and suspicion filled the hearts of these daimyos and ninja clans.
◎
Nightview City.
That was a magnificent giant city that abruptly rose more than a decade ago at the border of the former Land of Waterfalls and the Land of Iron, using wood and stone as its base and steel as its skeleton.
Every street, every residential area, and every public facility inside the city seemed as if it had been meticulously measured, arranged in an orderly and regular distribution like fish scales, which was pleasing to the eye.
Even the road surfaces were tamped down inch by inch, and carriages driving over them would not feel the slightest bump.
Coming and going, merchants and travelers formed an endless stream, talking and laughing about business with the plump residents here. Various novel, strange, and trendy commodities appeared on the shelves of many shops, injecting an unusual vitality into this city.
Such a prosperous and peaceful scene looked completely out of tune with the overall pattern of the entire Ninja World.
Everything was as beautiful as a utopia.
Located in the center of the city was a magnificent architectural complex surrounded by a tall wall built with a large number of earth and wood materials, reaching a height of tens of meters.
Because of the cover of the high wall, only the heads of the tall buildings protruding from the inside could be seen, and even so, the majesty and grandeur of those buildings were visible.
Especially the giant towers guarded by numerous sturdy buildings, giving people the feeling of aerial pavilions floating in the clouds, not like things of the mortal world.
Among the architectural complexes within the high wall, there were samurai carrying katana at their waists, wearing stacked armor, and almost fully armed.
There were also ninjas dressed in standard black clothes, wearing outer windbreakers, coming and going like the wind.
Two completely different violent professions, yet both were special groups capable of using chakra in the Warring States Era, were integrated and merged in a seamless manner.
The number of samurai was the largest, numbering around a thousand.
The number of ninjas was not as great as the samurai, but there were still two hundred of them.
These integrated ninjas and samurai carried out heavily guarded patrols along planned routes among the architectural complexes.
At the center of the architectural complex was a tower-like loft.
At this moment, on the top floor of this loft, Oda Yayoi stood with his hands behind his back, staring unblinkingly at the huge map hanging on the wall.
This was a precise map encompassing the entire territory of the Ninja World, with mountains, rivers, and streams dotted across it. The borders of various major and minor countries were also painted in a strict manner, including the family crests of many ninja clans located within the borders of these major and minor countries, all drawn upon it.
These family crests of the ninja clans were scattered unevenly across the countries of the Ninja World, except that nearly half of the ninja clan crests had a red '×' mark on them, meaning these ninja clans were completely erased from the Ninja World in this chaotic Warring States Era.
The Land of Fire had the most; in this major country alone over the past few decades, there were as many as thirty large and small ninja clans that had been erased.
Similarly, the number of ninja clans located in the Land of Fire could be called the largest among all countries.
This meant that the warfare intensity inside the Land of Fire was much higher than in other countries.
However, all of this had ended.
The reason was that the Senju Clan and the Uchiha Clan, two powerful ninja clans that once opposed each other, had reached a reconciliation.
Yayoi's gaze swept to the two most prominent ninja clan crests within the Land of Fire on the map.
Senju... Uchiha...
Yayoi's face revealed a rare look of gravity and deep thought.
Memories both familiar and strange from his past life began to surge like a tide.
The rumors that had been creating a huge uproar lately about an alliance being forged between the Senju Clan and the Uchiha Clan meant that the day when the ninja village he knew so well from his memories, called Konoha, would be established was not far off.
The endlessly chaotic Warring States Era was also about to usher in a new turning point.
For many countries and ninja clans, this would be an unprecedented test.
The same held true for the country he currently controlled—the Land of Night.
According to the timeline, it probably won't be long before Konoha is established in the Land of Fire, and then the other four great powers will begin following suit one after another...
The system of One Country, One Village had already become unstoppable.
Anyone standing in the path of this system would be crushed by the torrent of the era.
Naturally, Yayoi would not overestimate his capabilities by trying to stop it; he was simply thinking about what kind of benefits he could reap when such a trend of the era arrived.
The reason Yayoi was certain that the torrent of the era of One Country, One Village was unstoppable was naturally not because he possessed foresight, but rather because he possessed a "discerning eye" that transcended this era.
This "discerning eye" had nothing to do with human perception and wisdom; it was purely a matter of his knowing the trajectory of this future era.
That was right, Yayoi was a transmigrator.
He still remembered that in his past life, he was a social corporate drone who had graduated from college and worked for three or four years.
He had no particularly special experiences, and had simply descended into the world of Naruto in the form of a prenatal transmigration after going home from work one day and falling asleep.
The terrible part was that the place he arrived at was not the familiar plot era he knew, but rather the troubled Warring States period he did not understand very well.
It was a dark era where even a four- or five-year-old child could wield a blade to kill and needed to go to the battlefield.
Adding to that, he did not come from any ninja clan background, but instead started out as the most miserable kind of orphan, handed a broken bowl at the start to beg everywhere.
If he hadn't later met a wandering ninja who took him in, even surviving would have been a problem for him.
Fortunately, although he didn't have a good ninja clan background, he possessed a special talent that was no less inferior to a Kekkei Genkai.
He didn't know if it counted as special treatment resulting from living two lives, but the chakra he refined possessed a life activity that ordinary ninjas didn't possess.
To put it more intuitively, his chakra possessed an extremely strong seal-less self-healing ability even without forming a "jutsu," and he could also use the transfer of his own chakra to heal others, similar to the Uzumaki Clan.
This activated special chakra would also subtly modify his constitution over time, comprehensively amplifying his taijutsu, ninjutsu, and genjutsu.
It was precisely because of this point that he was able to rely on the chakra knowledge imparted by the wandering ninja, combined with the original manga and a transmigrator's little brain-in-a-jar brainstorming, to fight his way up step by step and gradually gain a foothold in the troubled times.
The pity was that when he was ten years old, the wandering ninja who had taken him in was heavily injured and died during a black market bounty mission before he could wait for Yayoi's healing.
Afterward, he resumed his solitary days and continued to mingle in the black market.
Gradually, his strength grew stronger and stronger, and his reputation in the black market also grew larger and larger. When he looked back, a large number of talents had already gathered around him at some point, and thus a mercenary organization destined to cause a storm of blood in the black market was born just like that.
After six years of development, starting from just one person at the very beginning, then a dozen people, and then slowly growing into a super-large-scale mercenary force of hundreds of people, coupled with a logistics team composed of tens of thousands of ordinary people, he established a city capable of accommodating tens of thousands of people—Nightview City—at the border of the Land of Waterfalls and the Land of Iron.
With a core stronghold, taking this town as the center, his sphere of influence continuously radiated outward, naturally and smoothly acquiring a massive momentum within the territories of the Land of Waterfalls and the Land of Iron, virtually monopolizing the warfare market of these two countries.
Unsurprisingly, such actions drew the deep dread of the daimyo and aristocratic classes of both countries.
Yet by this time, Yayoi's wings were fully grown; facing the suppression of the daimyo of the two countries, would he duck this edge?
Following two years of war, he successfully captured the daimyo estates of the two countries, suppressed multiple internal rebellious forces within both countries, and pulled out a name list to carry out a systematic purge of the names on it.
During these two years of war, his force also transformed from mercenaries, growing like a snowball and attracting more talents to defect to his side.
Therefore, upon successfully suppressing the rebellious forces within the two countries, he mastered the military and politics of the two countries with almost no effort, and the men under his command could rapidly integrate into the bureaucratic system and run the country.
Subsequently, he established a shogunate, replacing the title of "daimyo" with the post of "general," and formally ruled the territories of the Land of Waterfalls and the Land of Iron.
The Land of Waterfalls and the Land of Iron also perished from the ninja world, and upon the corpses of these two countries, the "Land of Night" was born as the times required.
Nine years had already passed since the establishment of this newborn country, the Land of Night.
Yayoi was currently twenty-seven years old, right in the prime of his life.
Through nine years of integration, the forces of the "remnants of the former dynasty" within the Land of Night had basically been wiped out.
The various departments operated in an orderly manner within the country, and the people lived and worked in peace and contentment, loathing endless battles and slaughter. Even if there were still old forces that wanted a restoration, they could not stir up any trouble.
With internal unification, the enemies would then turn from internal to external.
Although the land of the Land of Night could not be considered fertile in the ninja world, there were still hungry wolves eyeing this piece of land.
For instance, the Hagoromo Clan, who suffered defeat in the Land of Fire four years ago and subsequently fled to the Land of Night, had once plotted against the Land of Night.
In order to hunt down this external hungry wolf, Yayoi expended a great deal of effort before finally wiping out the Hagoromo Clan that had migrated to the Land of Night, obtaining quite a few good things from them.
It was also by virtue of this battle record that Yayoi truly secured his position as the general of the Land of Night, causing the numerous hungry wolves coveting this patch of land to not dare to bare their claws and fangs carelessly.
Just as Yayoi was pondering these matters, a knock on the door rang out.
"Come in."
Yayoi's gaze still lingered on the map, calculating his next plan.
Following the sound of the door being pushed open, a young man in his twenties, of an age similar to Yayoi's, walked in from outside the door.
He wore a mask on his face, concealing the area below his eyes and revealing only a pair of dim-green, faintly glowing pupils.
"Lord Yayoi."
"It's Kakuzu. Is something the matter?"
Yayoi swept his gaze across the young man who had just entered, a trace of satisfaction flashing in his eyes.
This young man was Kakuzu, one of his greatest acquisitions over the years.
He was one half of the immortal duo from the Akatsuki organization in the original work.
Because of his failed assassination of the First, Hashirama Senju, he suffered unfair treatment from the upper echelons of Takigakure. In the end, he fled with the village's forbidden technique and became a rogue ninja.
Yet the current Kakuzu had not yet experienced betrayal, having been recruited by him early on to become a high-ranking figure in the Land of Night on par with his right-hand man.
According to later ninja rank classifications, Kakuzu's current strength was equivalent to an elite jonin, proficient in both Earth Release and Water Release, with quite formidable taijutsu abilities as well.
In this unfamiliar Warring States chaotic era, Kakuzu could be said to be one of the few "acquaintances" he had.
The current era was far too distant from the start of the plot, and many once-famous ninjas never appeared in the later story.
Most importantly, the manga Naruto was something he followed back when he was in school. The point he had read up to was the Five Kage Summit, where the one-eyed man claiming to be "Madara Uchiha" had just revealed the Eye of the Moon plan and declared the start of the Fourth Shinobi World War.
As for the subsequent parts, due to graduating and starting work, he lacked the leisure to keep up with the serialization, so it petered out.
Coupled with the fact that it was still the Warring States Era, much of the "foresight" in Yayoi's mind could not be applied, and some figures were people he had never even heard of.
For example, a ninja from the Land of Wind named "Retto" was rumored to be able to use Wind Release to create giant storms with a range spanning dozens of miles.
A ninja named "Ishikawa" from the Land of Earth could be called a human earthquake generator, with Earth Release techniques that shook the heaven and earth. His most famous battle involved single-handedly burying a powerful clan possessing a Kekkei Genkai and collapsing several mountains.
Aside from them, A of the Land of Lightning and Byakuren of the Land of Water were equally illustrious, deserving to be called human natural disasters.
Yayoi had reason to suspect that these individuals were the other first-generation Kage who were later said to be on par with the First, Hashirama Senju.
Otherwise, how could it be such a coincidence that they appeared separately in the remaining four great nations?
"Lord Yayoi, the search party sent out to find the Seven-Tails you were looking for has found it."
Kakuzu gathered his thoughts and reported to Yayoi concisely.
"Where is it?"
Yayoi's mind stirred.
In this era, although ninjas were the mainstream, the existence of the Tailed Beasts also left a heavy mark.
As one of the Tailed Beasts, the Seven-Tails had historical records of its whereabouts, and it had always lived within the territory of the Land of Waterfalls, even though the Land of Waterfalls had already been wiped from the map.
"The Black Steel Forest. The Seven-Tails seems to have been staying there all along without leaving."
Kakuzu stated a location name.
Before you continue