Sengoku sank onto a weathered stone step, the weight of his recent failures pressing heavily upon him. Before him lay the bustling thoroughfare of Sunagakure's market district. Shinobi moved with hurried purpose—exchanging mission scrolls, inspecting weapons, operating in a high-stakes, efficient world that remained completely closed off to him.
His gaze drifted aimlessly away from the ninja stalls, eventually settling on the civilian side of the street.
A few paces away, a white-haired stonemason sat on a low wooden stool, the steady clink-clink of a chisel and hammer cutting through the ambient noise. The old man was carving small amulets. The raw material was completely worthless—ordinary sandstone found everywhere in the village. Yet, under the mason's practiced hands, the rough stone was smoothed and transformed, bearing simple but elegant engravings of swirling sand dunes and camels.
A woman walking with her young child stopped at the stall. "How much?"
"Ten Ryo," the old man replied without looking up from his work.
The woman paid immediately, taking an amulet etched with a protective ward and tying it around her child's neck.
Sengoku watched thoughtfully. Ten Ryo was a meager sum, but the profit margin was pure labor, and the volume was high. In the short time Sengoku had been sitting there, the old man had already sold several pieces. Looking closer, Sengoku realized that while the themes were similar, no two amulets were identical. The mason worked with the natural grain and shape of each stone, giving every piece a unique, artisanal charm.
Sengoku shifted his attention to a nearby furniture stall. A small crowd had gathered around the vendor, who was proudly displaying a low wooden cabinet. The frame was built from common desert poplar, but the cabinet doors and drawer panels were a different story. They were carved with an intricate, sweeping desert sunset, the edges meticulously inlaid with polished, multicolored stone fragments.
"This piece will cost you ten Ryo more than the standard ones," the vendor announced.
A villager ran his fingers over the smooth, intricate carvings. "Fair enough. The craftsmanship is worth it," he agreed, pulling out his coin pouch without hesitation.
Sengoku absorbed the scene in silence. Rare medicinal herbs, exotic ores, graded bounties—those belonged to the shinobi world, and he lacked the strength, status, and age to touch them.
But these stone amulets and carved cabinets belonged to the daily life of ordinary villagers, and this market operated on an entirely different set of rules.
This economy didn't care about his chakra reserves. It didn't demand a Jonin's recommendation or ask his age. It only cared about utility, craftsmanship, and whether the creator could add enough value to make someone willingly open their purse.
A revelation slowly crystallized in his mind.
'Perhaps I shouldn't be trying to make money like a shinobi.'
He still needed funds. He desperately needed explosive tags. But the path to acquiring them didn't have to start at the shinobi mission board. If the ninja economy was closed to him, he would just have to exploit the civilian one.
Sengoku stood up. He cast one last glance at the old stonemason's calloused, dexterous hands and the rapidly emptying display of amulets, then turned and headed straight home.
The moment he returned to his stone house, his previous despair vanished, replaced by a hyper-focused intensity. He immediately began scrounging through his room, gathering all the scrap materials left over from his *Hover Drone* prototypes: irregularly shaped wood offcuts, thin metal strips, and a half-empty jar of industrial binding adhesive.
He had a clear direction. If people were willing to pay for purely decorative, impractical amulets, then creating something highly functional should command an even better market.
His mind sank entirely into the engineering process.
His first target was a universal nuisance: mice. The aging, sandstone architecture of Sunagakure was infested with them, and the standard wooden snap-traps used by the villagers were bulky, temperamental, and highly inefficient.
He picked up a piece of scrap wood and a wire strip, attempting to build a vastly superior version.
Drawing upon the mechanical principles he had memorized from his puppetry scrolls, Sengoku designed a highly complex, hyper-sensitive lever system. He wanted it to trigger at the absolute lightest touch. Not stopping there, he engineered a secondary locking mechanism that would snap shut the moment the trap sprang, ensuring the rodent could never wriggle free.
Half a day later, his creation sat on the floor before him.
It was ingeniously crafted, yet utterly bizarre. Comprised of seven or eight interlocking parts, precisely bent wire, and perfectly slotted wooden grooves, it looked absolutely nothing like a conventional mousetrap. It looked more like the internal firing mechanism of a lethal, high-grade puppet.