Rasa returned to his place, and Kakuzu deliberately stood close to him.
"Kazekage, your gold dust Magnet Release must be the best money-making ninjutsu there is. The deserts of the Land of Wind hold unimaginable reserves of gold dust, too. So why is Sunagakure the poorest ninja village in the Five Great Nations?"
Rasa sighed. "Don't get me started. My gold dust Magnet Release does let me extract gold dust easily, but the desert belongs to the Land of Wind, not Sunagakure. We have to hand over at least ninety-five percent of everything we extract in taxes!"
"More importantly, we ninja lack the metallurgical expertise to refine gold dust into pure gold, so we can only sell the dust itself at rock-bottom prices. We don't have any sales channels, either. The Land of Wind handles everything, and all those intermediate steps drive up our costs even further. In the end, we barely make any money. It can hardly even qualify as a sideline..."
Kakuzu's dark green eyes grew somber. "In other words, the Daimyo of the Land of Wind doesn't want ninja earning money through anything other than commissioned missions, lest we slip beyond his control..."
Rasa agreed. "Across the Five Great Nations, there are only a few hundred thousand ninja, even counting genin. But their combined population numbers in the billions. We're overwhelmingly outnumbered."
"Everything we ninja need to live comes from outside our villages. To put it bluntly, we're merely tools serving the daimyo. If they cut off our funding, even our survival would become a problem."
"And the so-called 'Shinobi World' is just a comforting name our little minority gives itself. Ordinary people certainly don't call the world the Shinobi World..."
Rasa's words laid bare all the bitterness of life as a ninja, a member of that