A hundred million ryō.
It looked like an ocean of money, and honestly, it was a lot. But the economy of the shinobi world… was a complete mess.
There was no clear, systematic breakdown of prices, wages, or what counted as "rich." Half the time you could only guess.
After crossing over, Kenichi Amamiya had slowly pieced a few things together: the economics of the ninja world were downright weird.
A basic S-rank mission easily started at a million ryō.
And yet, plenty of shinobi still lived like they were one bad mission away from bankruptcy.
The main reason? Costs.
Weapons. Tools. Explosive tags. Medicines. Training fees. Secret manuals. The constant need to repair or replace everything after every battle.
On top of that, the village itself took a cut.
Orochimaru had once mentioned it casually: every mission fee was taxed. That money went straight into the village coffers to fund infrastructure, the academy, ANBU, black ops, and all the nice little "secret projects" the higher-ups pretended didn't exist.
Orochimaru had done over a hundred S-rank missions. Years of that kind of work, plus prudent hoarding, had turned into a considerable fortune.
And Kenichi had just dragged in a comparable pile in one go from Gatō.
A shortcut through time, basically.
"…But where did that lightning dragon go?" Kenichi scratched his head, a prickle of unease creeping up his back. "It shouldn't cause too much trouble… right?"
In the natural world, a typical lightning bolt didn't travel that far—three to five kilometers, usually. But there were rare types that could stretch for hundreds of kilometers across the sky.
He'd seen records claiming over seven hundred kilometers in extreme cases. It sounded fake, but…
Now that he'd personally turned the sky into a weapon, Kenichi didn't feel so confident anymore.
"It shouldn't be a problem… I think?" he muttered, not sounding convinced at all.
The Land of Waves sat south of the Land of Fire, a tiny island nation surrounded by sea. But the sea wasn't the end of the world; somewhere beyond the horizon, there were other shorelines, other countries.
At that exact moment, in a remote canyon in the Land of Wind—
"Scorpion of the Sand," Konan said, arms folded, paper flowers rustling faintly. "Have you thought over my proposal?"
This man—still young, but already dangerous—had real value. In their earlier test fight, he had lost to her, but his potential was obvious. He was exactly the kind of talent Nagato wanted in Akatsuki.
"Akatsuki…" Sasori stared back at her, his expression dark.
He was still angry.
The battle just now had ended in his defeat. Even the puppet he was most proud of—the one made from the Third Kazekage—had failed to turn things around.
For someone like him, that humiliation cut deep.
How was he supposed to face his parents' graves… when he couldn't even win a fight like this?
Yes, the Third Kazekage was dead. Yes, the White Fang of Konoha had committed suicide. On paper, his revenge should've been complete.
But Sasori's heart was anything but calm.
His parents hadn't died by his hand. Their deaths hadn't been paid for by his blade. That made the vengeance feel hollow.
"I'll join your organization," Sasori finally said, after a brief silence. "I'm interested in what you described."
The words had barely left his mouth when a deafening roar crashed through the sky.
Sasori's head snapped up.
Something—something massive—came screaming in from the direction of the sea, tearing across the heavens like a falling god.
It wasn't a beast. Not really. To Sasori's trained eyes, it was clearly a technique—an enormous, condensed mass of chakra, shaped into something monstrous.
A heartbeat later, the thing slammed into the desert outside the canyon.
Thunder exploded. Red-black currents whipped through the air in savage arcs. For a terrifying instant, Sasori felt his control over his puppets flicker and snap.
"What is this…?" he whispered.
The hairs on his arms were standing on end.
This wasn't just a big jutsu or a strong attack. This was something that twisted the landscape just by existing.
Konan's face turned serious. With an impact this loud, only a complete idiot back in Sunagakure would fail to notice.
And Akatsuki wasn't ready for a frontal clash yet.
They were still in their quiet, shadow-gathering stage. Only when the time was right would they make the entire shinobi world learn the meaning of pain.
"We're leaving," she said curtly. "The Sand shinobi will be here soon."
She tossed Sasori a ring as she passed—a simple token with deep meaning—then turned and took off without looking back.
She wasn't worried about him.
If a rogue from Sunagakure couldn't even escape his own homeland after this, then his strength simply wasn't worth recruiting.
Sasori didn't move immediately.
Instead, he walked toward the place where the "dragon" had struck.
That direction…
His eyes narrowed.
It was the way of the ocean. The same direction the thing had flown in from.
When he reached the impact site, he stopped dead.
A massive crater had been carved into the desert. The sand inside wasn't sand anymore.
It was glass.
A huge, shimmering bowl of fused silica, still studded with impurities, but unmistakably glass. The surrounding dunes hadn't escaped either—streaks of melted, vitrified sand spread out in branching patterns, like lightning veins frozen in time.
Some of the glass lines stretched over a hundred meters from the center.
Under the desert sun, the crater glittered.
"Beautiful," Sasori murmured.
There was awe in his voice.
What kind of ninjutsu could create something like this?
Such destruction.
Such transformation.
Such… art.
Artists had always been strange like that.
Back in the Land of Fire, Kenichi returned to his underground base with a fortune in sealed scrolls and a head full of half-formed plans—only to find something off.
"Orochimaru-sensei… isn't here?"
The laboratory was quiet.
Too quiet.
No clinking tools. No hissing burners. No muffled screams from the holding cells.
Even the "materials" that were usually locked up were gone. Every cage was empty.
"Did sensei go off to do something on his own?" Kenichi scratched his head.
Then shrugged.
His teacher was always like this—mysterious, unpredictable, full of secrets. And Kenichi understood the rules by now. Orochimaru had many labs. Many bases. Many layers of snakes and shadows.
Kenichi only stepped into the ones he'd been personally led to. The rest?
He pretended they didn't exist.
If you wanted to live a long, stable life under someone like Orochimaru, you learned early:
There are questions you never ask.
"…But I am curious," he admitted to himself.
On the way to his own lab, something hanging by the door caught his attention.
A box.
Inside was a sealed vial of blood, kept beautifully preserved with a cold storage seal. On the label was a single word:
[辉夜]
"Kaguya, huh…" Kenichi turned the tube in his hand, eyes lighting up.
Not the Ōtsutsuki matriarch, of course. This was from the Kaguya clan—the Shikotsumyaku bloodline.
"So sensei really remembered."
Back in Konoha, Kenichi had mentioned wanting to study the Kaguya clan's bone manipulation. Orochimaru had agreed in passing.
Then war, betrayal, Nine-Tails, defection, Akatsuki—so much had happened that Kenichi assumed the promise had been forgotten.
Apparently not.
"Still… this is going to have to wait," he decided after a moment.
As tempting as it was, he had other priorities. The vial went into a specialized preservation cabinet, time-limited but stable enough for now.
He had something more urgent to do.
"While sensei's out," Kenichi stretched lazily, grinning to himself, "I should finish tuning the thermobaric mix."
Back in his own lab, he unfurled his blueprint again.
Rows of formulas, annotations, ratios.
He'd finally gathered everything he needed to make the thermobaric explosive. The only problem now was the exact mixture.
The design scroll he'd gotten was complete in every other respect. Triggering, casing, detonation behavior, fuel cloud dispersion—all there.
Except for the key part: the fuel-oxidizer ratio.
"Figures," Kenichi muttered. "No cheat codes for the fun parts."
He flipped pages, then paused.
"…Unless the missing step is supposed to factor in chakra?"
This world's biggest difference from his previous one was obvious: chakra.
A universal, absurdly versatile energy system. Elemental conversion, shape transformation, illusions, space-time distortion, planetary devastation—
Chakra could do it all.
The eyes were even worse. Mangekyō Sharingan and Rinnegan, with their "pupil powers," casually bending physics like a suggestion.
So.
What if you didn't just build a normal thermobaric bomb?
What if you infused it with chakra?
If that worked, then one day, maybe…
"What about mixing in pupil power?" Kenichi whispered, eyes gleaming. "A thermobaric bomb keyed to a specific Mangekyō… That'd be one hell of a 'gift' to send to a certain someone."
He shook his head, forcing himself back on track.
First step: learn from existing tech.
He reached for a familiar, slightly worn book.
"Explosive Tags: From Beginner to Master."
Explosive tags were basically low-grade fire release ninjutsu sealed into scraps of paper. Convenient, mass-producible, and simple enough that even genin could use them effectively.
Then there were more advanced things: sealing tags, barrier tags, even sage arts sealed into talismans.
This world had a mature system for embedding chakra effects into physical media.
If he could understand the principles behind explosive tags, he could apply the same logic to a chakra-reactive thermobaric charge.
Kenichi settled in at his desk, the thick manual open in front of him.
Behind him, if he'd turned to look, he might have noticed small traces of residual chakra near the walls. Evidence of new seals, new experiments, something Orochimaru had recently done.
He didn't.
He was too focused on the fun part.
Ratios. Volumes. Reaction curves. Ignition thresholds. Chakra conduction paths.
And just like that—
Amamiya Kenichi sat down in his lab to "do a bit of safe, controlled testing."
And then he blew his house up.
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