Chapter 28.2- Gamer of the Desert

Apart from planning a war, most of my time was spent in this very place. The Kazekage’s private library. It seemed that all the past kage had left some things of use here for their successors. The most useful by far, were the Third’s writings on magnet release. While I wasn’t going to go through the effort of learning to weild iron sand when my regular sand was already magnitudes more dangerous, he did include a lot of tips and tricks for defeating enemies from a distance with said iron sand. Not all of them were usable by me, but enough were that I could add a few things to my arsenal.

Rasa had written on gold dust and mining for gold in the mountains that made up parts of Kaze no Kuni’s territory. Mining with ninja involvement had been limited in Rasa’s reign. As a result of my newfound affinity with the Daimyo, he’d approved of me sending a clone out to the mountains every few weeks to help out with the mining. With me there, efficiency had nearly quadrupled, and now all i had to do was pop in twice a month to get the gold and other precious metals out in their crude form, and leave it to the miners and refiners to prepare it to be transported deeper into the country for further refinement and preparation for exportation. Jewellers from abroad were being subtly induced to either move manufacturing here or open outfits here.

The Daimyo had already passed strict border control laws so not more than a fixed amount in unrefined precious metals could be exported every month. The real money was in refinement and it was time to get our own share of the pie. Closer ties meant ninja could assist at every step, even beyond me, and civilians from Suna could be employed at the facilities. Already, the efforts were having effects across the board. Both Kaze no Kuni and Sunagakure were seeing the benefits of the new policies. And that was only from Rasa’s notes.

The Second Kazekage’s notes were likely to have even greater effects. He was Suna’s last true fuinjutsu master, and while his work had never been on the level of the Uzumaki, whose teachings I was already working to devour, they were still useful in their own way. His grasp of barrier techniques was well beyond mine, and even if he hadn’t managed to finish his magnum opus, he’d left enough notes and ideas behind that I could work to perfect it in time. As war was coming across the horizon, this seal was more likely to change the landscape of the world itself and Suna’s place on the global stage.

No, i am not exaggerating. In fact, I’m probably understating things a fair bit. The barrier he’d been working on was a miracle in writing. Not even halfway through before he died, but still done with the most important bit, he’d been working on creating a barrier that would allow the creator to change the climate and weather within a fixed area. No, that probably misstates things a bit. It lets the creator create a false climate within its range.

His original goal had been to turn Suna from a desert into something else. Bold, but too ambitious, had been my conclusion after my first look at it. Sure, maybe if I was Mito Uzumaki or someone else, such a seal might have been within my abilities, but I wasn’t going to have skill like that for a long while. Even months of focusing a single clone on fuinjutsu and fuinjutsu alone hadn’t taken me to the level where it was feasible. Instead, what I could create were perfect glasshouses, without the requirement for glass domed ceilings.

With the seal, I could set aside warehouses in the center of the desert that had mediterranean-like climate and weather effects. Everything from rain to sunlight was going to be approximated by fuinjutsu bullshit. It was going to take a shit ton of chakra to set up, but the good thing about a lot of barrier techniques was that maintaining them took much less chakra.

The sealing corps had gotten a lot of my attention for this very reason. I was having them scale up recruitment from the ninja populace so it would be possible to run an actual rotation of ninja that would power the seals. The logistics were coming together nicely, but I still had to do my duty of completing the seal itself. A clone had called me here because of the breakthrough and I stared at him as he formed hand seals in front of a sealing circle.

“If this goes wrong, we’ll be very dead people” I warned him.

“Not you.” He said, and I shrugged in response. Of course, my life wasn’t in any real danger.

I watched in rapt attention as he slammed his  hands down on the ground and flooded the seal with power. When it began to snow within the miniature house, he smiled at me and I smiled back. At least until he was blown to bits as the seal exploded right in his face. I’d transformed into sand and retreated to a safe distance away. I stared at the area where the clone had been before sand from the inventory transformed into a new one. One thing I’d noticed since the update had separated my chakra pool from Shukaku was that my chakra was growing. Some combination of age and constant stress from the clones I was always creating and my training was probably to thank for the consistent steady rise.

A/N; Next part of the new chapter. Part 3 should come up tomorrow.