The moment the Anbu Ninja finished speaking.
There was no knock at the door. The handle was pushed straight down.
"Creak."
The heavy solid-wood door swung open.
Mito Uzumaki walked in.
A loose, dark-green kimono. Long red hair neatly coiled at the back of her head.
She leaned on a dark-brown wooden cane.
Its tip was sheathed in iron. It landed on the wool carpet with a "thunk."
She had brought no attendants. She was alone.
The second she crossed the threshold.
The air in the office grew heavy.
As though hundreds of pounds of invisible lead had descended upon it.
It was the tangible pressure of the Nine-Tails' violent Chakra leaking out.
The heat and pressure warped the air, visibly distorting it.
In the coarse porcelain tea mug beside Shu Shiraishi, fine ripples spread across the cooled boiled water. They struck the sides with an almost inaudible sizzle.
At the corner of the desk, the edges of the freshly collected stack of land deeds began to curl slightly upward from the dryness.
Shu Shiraishi leaned back in his high-backed chair.
He had just lowered his military boots from the edge of the desk to the floor. But he didn't stand.
Even though the woman who had entered was the First Hokage's wife, the most senior person in Konoha.
He didn't even shift his backside.
He interlaced his fingers beneath his chin.
And watched Mito coldly as she walked step by step to the desk.
Mito stopped.
The two stared at each other across the three-meter-wide mahogany desk.
Mito's weathered eyes surveyed Shu from head to toe.
Taking in the bloodstains that hadn't washed clean from the collar of his black short-sleeved shirt.
The white cotton cloth he had casually tossed onto the corner of the desk, stained with blood from Sarutobi Sasuke's neck.
Then his cold eyes, utterly devoid of respect for his elders or the worthy.
She said nothing.
Her cane pressed hard against the boundary between the wooden floor and the carpet.
The stifling heat of the Chakra continued to intensify. The Anbu Ninja outside the door retreated to the stairwell, struggling even to breathe.
Half a minute later.
Mito's shriveled lips moved.
She smiled.
It was no kindly smile from an elder to a youngster. It was a short, cold chuckle that rolled up from deep in her throat.
"Sarutobi Sasuke's head," Mito said, her voice hoarse. "A very clean cut."
Shu lowered his interlaced hands.
He reached for the cigarette pack on the desk, shook one out, and put it between his lips.
"Just a sharp blade." Shu didn't light it. "His bones were more brittle than I thought."
Mito pulled out the chair across the desk.
It was where Mitokado Homura had sat that morning. There was still a scuff on one leg where it had been kicked.
She sat down steadily and rested her cane against the edge of the desk.
"When Hashirama built the village, he was always talking about 'love.'"
Mito looked at Shu.
"He thought that if he divided the Tailed Beasts between Kumogakure and Iwagakure, everyone would have a deterrent. Then they could understand one another and stop fighting."
Her thin fingers rapped on the desk.
"Naive."
Shu lifted his eyelids slightly.
He had thought the old woman had come to use the First's name to put pressure on him. He hadn't expected her to start by cursing.
"He was like a god when he caught the Nine-Tails, and like a fool when he handed out the Tailed Beasts."
Mito cursed her dead husband without the slightest reservation.
"And what happened?"
"The First Shinobi World War. The villages that got Tailed Beasts turned around and bit Konoha the hardest."
"So many of the Senju Clan's young men died that there were almost none left. Tobirama's lying in a sickbed now, his intestines hanging out."
Mito leaned forward slightly.
"In this Shinobi World, talking about mutual understanding with those hungry wolves is just cutting off your own flesh to feed them."
"An age of chaos doesn't need a saint who reasons with people."
A sharp light flashed in her cloudy eyes.
"It needs a tyrant who can smash every troublemaker to pieces."
"What you did in the square this morning. You cut down Sarutobi with one stroke and forced Ino-Shika-Cho to kneel and work like oxen and horses."
Mito leaned back in her chair.
"Ruthless enough."
"I like it."
Shu took the cigarette from his mouth.
He crushed it in his hand, scattering tobacco across the desk.
The old woman had ten thousand times more sense than the trash outside who spent all day shouting about the "Will of Fire."
"So?" Shu flicked the crumpled cigarette paper into the wastebasket. "You came here just to call Hashirama naive and praise me?"
Mito didn't answer.
She slipped her left hand into the wide sleeve of her green kimono.
And drew out a red scroll.
"Smack."
She slapped the scroll onto the mahogany desk. A black spiral pattern was drawn on its surface.
The red wax seal was still intact.
"The complete collection of the Uzumaki Clan's core Sealing Jutsu."
Mito pointed at the scroll.
"The Eight Trigrams Seal, the Four Symbols Seal, the Adamantine Sealing Chains, and a fragment of the Reaper Death Seal. They're all in there."
"Tobirama asked me for them three times before, and I never gave him the full set."
Mito stared at Shu.
"Now it's yours."
Shu glanced at the scroll on the desk. He didn't move.
"The price?" he asked bluntly.
"There's no price. This is an investment."
Mito leaned on her cane.
"Konoha can't keep running by those rotten old rules. Since you're going to push heavy industrialization and completely overthrow those great clans."
"I'm betting on you to win."
Mito took a deep breath.
Wisps of red Chakra seeped out from beneath her dark-green kimono.
It wasn't an invisible pressure, but tangible energy visible to the naked eye.
The red Chakra wound around her arm like mist, carrying an aura of violent destruction.
The temperature in the room shot up.
A wisp of smoke rose from several sheets of parchment on Shu's desk.
"And not just the scroll."
Mito's voice carried through the scorching air.
"This fox inside me has a terrible temper. But he has an astonishing amount of Chakra."
"Since you're going to wage war and expand, you're bound to have a use for an ultimate weapon like this."
Mito looked at Shu.
"As long as you can guarantee Konoha wins, I'll draw out as much of the Nine-Tails' Chakra as you want."
Her words landed with tremendous weight.
Any ordinary ninja-even Hiruzen or Danzo-would have leaped up in excitement at hearing them.
This was the Nine-Tails, the strongest natural disaster in the Shinobi World.
Deployed on a battlefield as an ultimate weapon, he could easily sweep away an army of thousands.
Shu didn't cheer.
Nor did he show the wild delight of someone who had obtained a divine weapon.
He leaned forward and reached for the red scroll.
His thumb pried open the red wax seal.
"Rustle."
The scroll unrolled across the desk, all the way to Mito.
Dense rows of ink-black formulae emerged, like swimming black snakes.
Shu's eyes swept rapidly over the scroll.
Reading line by line.
The Eight Trigrams Seal's Chakra guidance circuit. The Four Symbols Seal's energy storage barrier. The Adamantine Sealing Chains' chains of materialized Chakra.
For the first time, his breathing faltered slightly.
Not because of the Nine-Tails' destructive power.
But because of the underlying logic of these Sealing Jutsu.
In his eyes, these weren't mysterious Ninjutsu at all.
They were the perfect industrial blueprint.
The Eight Trigrams Seal was like the heat-resistant casing of a heavy-duty nuclear reactor.
The Four Symbols Seal was an energy conversion valve and pressure regulator.
The Adamantine Sealing Chains were high-strength superconducting cables.
With this set of theories, Chakra could be perfectly stored, converted, and transmitted, instead of being sprayed straight from the mouth to burn trees like an idiot.
Shu's eyes grew brighter and brighter.
That light was like a man who had gone hungry for three days seeing an entire table laden with a Manchu-Han Imperial Feast.
As he read, he quickly muttered a few terms Mito couldn't understand at all.
"Closed-loop circuit... energy attenuation rate... use the Four Symbols Seal as an inverter..."
Mito frowned.
What's wrong with this kid? He sees the strongest Sealing Jutsu in the Shinobi World and shows no awe at all. Instead, he's chanting over there.
Shu finished reading the last line.
He jerked his head up.
An uninhibited grin spread across his face, exposing his gleaming white teeth.
He slapped the scroll onto the desk and braced both hands against it, staring fixedly at Mito.
"The Nine-Tails' Chakra?"
Shu clapped his hands and burst out laughing, his voice echoing through the spacious office.
"Wonderful. Absolutely wonderful."
"The village's heavy industrial base is just about to start construction. The blueprints for the number one blast furnace and the Chakra machine tools are already finished."
Shu rapped his knuckles hard against the mahogany desk.
The rapid "thunk-thunk" hammered against Mito's eardrums.
"I was just worrying that burning coal was too slow and wood couldn't get hot enough."
Shu's eyes shone.
"I was just short of a large, inexhaustible generator."
Mito froze.
The red mist of Chakra coiling around her arm stiffened in midair.
A g... generator?