Materials for making goods and machinery for manufacturing parts-none of these could be dispensed with.
But finding where in the shinobi world the metals needed to build that machinery lay required long-term geological surveys and the collection of other information.
So Orochimaru could only wait for Konoha Shinobi Village and the Land of Fire Daimyo's Residence to develop their existing land bit by bit, building one city after another and gradually discovering and organizing the extraction of resources during construction.
How many years had it even been since Orochimaru left the Dōjutsu World? How many materials could he have found in that time?
Only now did Orochimaru realize that he still had not learned enough. He was not quite so all-capable.
Besides, the shinobi world was different from Yanbai's Dōjutsu World. There were far too many unknowns to explore.
Yanbai said casually, "Sometimes, it isn't that a shinobi village lacks strength or money. It's that it lacks the industrial foundation needed to produce these weapons of war."
"From the standpoint of industrial structure, smelting techniques, for instance, need to be improved continually through industrial manufacturing. You can't rush it. The existing craftsmen also need to keep experimenting and making things."
"Training a skilled craftsman is far harder than training a shinobi. It takes a long time, costs a lot of money, and requires talent, too. Ten or twenty years pass in the blink of an eye, and Konoha Shinobi Village and the Land of Fire still haven't reached the goals I have in mind."
"The same goes for other nations. In fact, if the Four Great Nations outside the Land of Fire and the many smaller countries could pull ahead of the Land of Fire in their industrial foundations, I'd be more than willing to learn from them and adopt