A/N: This chapter is purely internal monologue. I'm thinking of more ways to have him pass his time other than just training to be strong. I mean...there are 24 hours in a day and he can't be spending a major part of it training when there's a vast world building to be done.
…
Murakami's POV.
It was strange how quickly time could pass when you had nothing to do.
Not the lazy kind of nothing, where you simply sat around wasting the day, but the kind where your body was free while your mind refused to stay idle.
Ever since finding out I was already a multimillionaire, and well on my way to becoming a billionaire, I couldn't say much had changed. I already knew the money would be waiting for someone else if I died tomorrow.
Still, I found myself becoming more productive.
One month had passed since Hina left for the capital leaving me in charge of the business here in Konoha, however, I can't say there's anything to be in charge of.
Everything proceeded as usual, with or without my input, although I did have a clone keep an eye on things of interest while experimenting on various other potential lifestyle seals.
(A/N: Household Seal and Lifestyle Seal are basically the same thing.)
You see, the thing with Fūinjutsu was that it was versatile.
Creating a seal wasn't simply a matter of drawing a few symbols(kanji), pouring chakra into them, and hoping for the best.
At least, not once you understood what you were actually doing.
The closest comparison I could make was programming or circuitry.
A proper formula could be built around parameters, inputs, and outputs. You could define what the seal was supposed to act on, what energy it would use, what conditions had to be met before activation, and what result it was meant to produce.
You could even account for exceptions.
Change the parameters, and the same basic formula could produce an entirely different result.
That was what made Fūinjutsu so terrifyingly versatile.
Once you understood the principles behind a formula, you weren't limited to simply copying what someone else had created.
You could modify it.
Improve it.
Or create something entirely new.
These Lifestyle Seals are the lowkey types, not the kind that explode, trap enemies, or summon giant animals from another dimension.
These were seals that purified the air in a room, filtered toxins from food, or automatically brewed tea at the perfect temperature.
There were also seals that regulated room temperature, kept clothing warm during winter or cold during summer, repelled insects, cleaned dust from surfaces, and maintained a steady supply of fresh water.
There was something deeply satisfying about making civilian-grade convenience items. I like to think it's my own contribution to the great balance of the world.
While others were busy mastering forbidden jutsu and searching for ways to destroy mountains, I was figuring out how to turn a storage scroll into a portable pantry with temperature and humidity control.
Honestly, I considered that a perfectly respectable contribution to the world.
And from a business perspective, it made far more sense.
Shinobi were useful customers, but civilians made up the overwhelming majority of the population. They didn't need forbidden techniques or battlefield equipment. They needed food that stayed fresh, homes that stayed comfortable, and everyday problems made a little easier.
There was far more money to be made solving problems that millions of people had every day than selling something only a few thousand shinobi could use.
One of the more ambitious projects I took on during this little period of pseudo-retirement was a communication seal.
The idea was simple: inscribe a seal onto a small tag, pair it with another matching tag miles away, and boom, instant messaging, shinobi edition.
The downside was that the tag could only hold the connection for so long. Once the message was transmitted, the formula burned itself out and the tag disintegrated.
A shinobi's version of pen pals, minus the postal delays and the risk of a messenger getting intercepted halfway there.
The reality? Not so simple.
Turns out, like all communication systems, there needed to be a transmitter, a receiver, a shared chakra frequency, and ideally, a relay point to handle the handoff.
Fuinjutsu wasn't magic, it was chakra physics.
Ninjutsu was magic.
For a direct seal-to-seal message, both tags needed to be synchronized to the same chakra frequency.
Establishing that connection required the two users to be relatively close, or for the tags to have been synchronized beforehand.
So, naturally, I tried to cheat the system.
I built a prototype communication hub, a fist-sized block of treated metal engraved with a network of interconnected sealing formulas.
I called the central array an Anchor Seal.
It was designed to remain permanently active at a fixed location, receiving messages from registered tags and redirecting them to their intended recipients.
Think of it as a post office crossed with a chakra router.
Instead of sending a message directly from one tag to another, the transmitter would send it to the hub. The hub would identify the intended recipient using a unique identifier I assigned to each registered tag, then redirect the message to the appropriate receiver.
Simple in theory.
In practice, it was a nightmare.
The hub had to remain active and continuously draw chakra to receive, process, and transmit messages. That meant I needed a power source that was both large and stable. Worse, anyone who managed to tamper with the hub could potentially intercept the messages passing through it.
There was no concept of end-to-end encryption in traditional Fūinjutsu.
And, as if that wasn't enough, my first prototype caught fire.
That was fun.
Still, I wasn't stumbling around completely blind.
I'd seen something similar before.
The Akatsuki.
Their rings weren't merely symbols of membership. Each contained a unique inscription that allowed its wearer to participate in their long-distance communication network.
The technique clearly relied on synchronized chakra markers and some form of central medium capable of handling an absurd amount of chakra.
The Gedo Statue.
If my understanding was correct, the statue acted as the central anchor that allowed their chakra projections to manifest across enormous distances.
I couldn't replicate something on that scale, but I could replicate the principle.
First, I created a unique chakra identifier for each registered tag. It bound the tag to its user's chakra signature while assigning it a numerical address.
Essentially, your chakra signature plus a passcode.
That solved identification, but not transmission.
So I built a smaller version of my communication hub, a simplified anchor seal designed to receive a message, identify its destination, and redirect it to the appropriate registered tag.
A simple chakra router.
Except mine involved ink, paper, and exploding formulas whenever I got the syntax wrong.
But surprisingly, it worked.
Not perfectly, but well enough that a message written on one tag would appear on its linked counterpart through the hub, as though the ink itself had somehow crossed the distance.
Written messages were simple enough but capturing sound and reproducing it at the receiving end was a completely different problem.
I'd need a way for the seal to detect, encode, transmit, and reconstruct vibrations accurately without turning every conversation into distorted chakra noise.
For now, text would have to do.
The short-range system worked, but distance was still a problem, so I went back to the formula itself.
The limitation wasn't the communication method; it was the range I'd assigned to the chakra transmission.
So I started working on the parameters.
I increased the transmission range, adjusted the chakra requirements, and added a relay function that allowed the hub to strengthen and redirect weaker signals instead of expecting a tag to maintain a direct connection across the entire distance.
It worked, but farther I pushed it, the more chakra the system consumed, and eventually the signal became unstable.
But that was enough, I'd proven that the distance wasn't a fundamental limitation of the technique.
It was simply a problem of efficiency, and efficiency was something I could improve.
The short-range system was already functional. A pair of communication tags could exchange written messages through the hub, provided they were properly registered and within the system's effective range.
But I didn't want another pair of tags that could only talk to each other.
I wanted a network.
Communication tags that could register with fixed nodes, send messages through them, and eventually reach other nodes without requiring users to manually synchronize every connection.
A decentralized communication network spread across the Land of Fire.
That was the goal.
I smirked at the thought, I wasn't trying to make something capable of destroying a mountain but it'll inevitably change the world.
Unfortunately, the moment I started expanding the system, I ran into the real problem.
Energy.
The formulas themselves weren't the issue, the problem was keeping the damn thing powered.
A centralized hub needed a constant and stable supply of chakra to receive, process, and redirect signals between multiple nodes. The more tags I connected, the greater the demand became.
Basically, I was trying to build a chakra router with insane battery life and zero lag.
Cute concept, horrific execution.
I sighed and leaned back in my chair.
The system worked, I just needed to figure out how to keep it alive.
The frustrating part was that this world had no real technological infrastructure for me to build on. There was no electrical grid, no established power network, nothing remotely comparable to what I was used to back on Earth.
Chakra had simply made most of those problems unnecessary.
Why invent light bulbs when you could cast Fire Release: Lantern Palm?
Ahem, that wasn't actually a technique, but still…
Why develop medical scanners when you had the Byakugan or a sensor-nin with enough training?
Why build refrigeration systems when a simple Fūinjutsu could preserve food?
Why develop engines when chakra could power tools, transport, and machinery directly?
Why create radios when shinobi could communicate over distance through messenger animals or specialized techniques?
Even construction had little incentive to evolve. Why invent heavy machinery when Doton could move earth in minutes?
Chakra had made the world incredibly convenient.
It had also made it incredibly lazy.
But I couldn't exactly blame them. This world had spent generations learning how to use chakra for one thing above all else.
War.
When the most valuable applications of your world's greatest resource were weapons, defense, and survival, nobody was going to look at a chakra network and think, "Maybe we should use this to power people's homes."
They had never needed to think that way.
But this… this was different.
This was data, and data needed infrastructure.
I considered the options.
There were powerful chakra sources in the world that could theoretically anchor the entire network without breaking a sweat.
The Bijuu, walking nuclear batteries of chakra with more than enough juice to power massive hubs each. But trying to negotiate with a tailed beast was… suicide.
I didn't even know where most of them were. Let alone who had them sealed. And I sure as hell wasn't strong enough to snatch one without starting a war.
The only one in close proximity was the Kyubi and that one was a massive No-no.
(A/N: He knows where they are, but not where they are…I don't know if you grab? Like, he knows Kumogakure, Sunagakure, Kirigakure and others have them, but not where in the villages or whom they're sealed into.)
There was also Star meteorite of Hoshigakure?
It amplified chakra, yes, but at the cost of terminal radiation sickness.
Not exactly sustainable energy. Plus, last I checked, the place guarded it like it was a divine relic.
The anime mentioned it's been there for over two hundred years, which makes them older than the Shinobi villages.
They'd rather blow up their own village than let an outsider touch it.
The Dragon Vein beneath Rōran in the Land of Wind was another possibility.
A source of immense chakra, powerful enough to distort space-time under the right circumstances. If I could understand the mechanism behind it, it might provide the kind of high-output energy source I needed.
The problem was that Rōran at this point in time is probably still a functioning city, and the Dragon Vein was hardly something I could casually dig up and experiment with.
Besides, anything capable of interfering with time itself was probably not something I wanted to mingle with.
Not yet, anyway.
All the best options were either impossible, inaccessible, or suicidal.
Which left me with one fallback.
If this world didn't have an energy source suitable for what I wanted to build, then I'd just make one.
Simple as that.
The lack of electricity in this world had always been one of those things I'd accepted without questions.
Chakra had made conventional power systems unnecessary afterall, so nobody had bothered developing them.
But that didn't mean electricity was impossible. It simply meant nobody had bothered to make it.
And if I could generate electricity, I wouldn't need to force chakra into doing everything.
I could separate the two.
Chakra could handle the things only chakra was good at while electricity handled the boring but essential job of keeping the infrastructure powered.
The idea was almost laughably simple.
Which meant the execution would probably be hell.
Still, before committing myself to building a power system from scratch, I had to consider whether there was an easier way.
There were a few people who might know enough about large-scale chakra circulation to save me years of experimentation.
First, Mito Uzumaki.
Living legend. Walking library of Fūinjutsu. First jinchūriki of the Kyūbi and wife of the First Hokage.
If anyone could help me understand how to maintain enormous amounts of chakra within a stable sealing system, it would be her.
The problem?
She was Mito-freaking-Uzumaki.
I'd spent years keeping my abilities and ambitions relatively quiet for a reason. Walking into her estate and asking, Hello, can you help me build a nationwide communication network? wasn't exactly subtle.
And considering what she knew about chakra and sealing, there was a very real possibility she'd notice things about me that I wasn't ready to explain.
So, no.
Second option.
Uchiha Madara.
Yes.
That Madara.
The man was practically synonymous with absurd chakra reserves, monstrous techniques, and questionable opinions about world peace.
He certainly possessed the knowledge and power necessary to help with large-scale chakra manipulation.
Unfortunately, contacting Madara wasn't exactly something I could put on my agenda.
As far as the world was concerned, he was dead.
And if he wasn't which I know he isn't… Finding him would be difficult enough and surviving the conversation would be another matter entirely.
And even if I survived, there was the obvious problem of asking Madara for help with anything.
The man didn't exactly strike me as the type to give away knowledge without attaching his own agenda to it.
I liked being alive, I also liked having control over my own body so Madara was out.
And then there was Zetsu.
Absolutely not.
I didn't even need to think about that one.
Whatever knowledge that thing possessed, I wasn't willing to risk drawing his attention just to get it.
Which left me exactly where I started.
Alone.
Fine. I'd build the damn thing myself.
If this world had no electrical infrastructure, I'd create one. There was no reason Fūinjutsu and electricity couldn't complement each other.
The thought was simple which meant that the execution probably wouldn't be.
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Like it? Read up to chapter 60 on [email protected]/This_Young_Lord