"That all must have been scary!" Kaiyo blurted out. She then kicked at the dirt as she processed the sheer physical trauma their new lord had put himself through.
Rin kept her gaze fixed on the tree line ahead. "It was when I heard about it."
"You mean you weren't there?" Shigeru pointed out.
"No, I was tasked with finding Lars at the time."
She recalled that moment as if it were yesterday.
Rin's journey had taken her deep into the Rain Village while disguised under the Transformation technique. To her, the place was a miserable place, drowning in a constant downpour. But what she didn't know was that it was the Akatsuki's main hideout.
Obito was there, somewhere in the shadows, but he didn't spot her. Zetsu did.
The creature happened to overhear her say Arthur's name, making it believe she was tied to the man they were still looking for.
"It didn't take long for the entire Akatsuki to come down on me," Rin recounted.
She described the terror of that moment, how all of them had surrounded her: White and Black Zetsu, Hidan, Kakuzu, Itachi, Kisame, Sasori, Deidara, Konan, and even Pain. The most dangerous criminals on the continent gathered in a single courtyard to apprehend one scout.
Rin thought she was going to die again.
But Arthur felt the disturbance. So he teleported directly into the center and immediately teleported her out of the ambush.
The problem was the timing since he was still sick from the genetic rejection, and his chakra had nearly plummeted afterward.
The Akatsuki did not hesitate as a fight erupted.
It was ten against one. Absolutely no one alive in this world would have been able to survive such a clash.
The scene was filled with explosive clay, water sharks, iron sand, and black flames. Arthur, despite sluggish movements, managed to remain standing far longer than most would have.
Even with his great enhancements, he knew that his failing body could not win a war of attrition against immortals and monsters.
That's when Pain trapped him in his infamous Planetary Devastation technique. Arthur was forced to summon the Six-Tails just to break out. More so, he caused the beast to fire a Tailed Beast Bomb point-blank at Deidara, killing him.
The sudden casualty forced a pause in the violence as Arthur descended to the ground where Pain's Rinnegan was locked on him.
Pain knew something was wrong with Arthur, so Arthur used that exact moment to try and negotiate. He reasoned with the Akatsuki leader and offered to let the battle end right there. In exchange for letting him go, he promised to deliver Kaito up to them as their newest member to replace the dead Deidara.
The Akatsuki members were surprised since they believed Kaito was dead. Hearing that he was alive and working under Arthur changed the board.
Pain, therefore, accepted the terms.
Konan, however, by no means trusted Arthur. So she placed a golden paper seal directly onto his chest. It bound his chakra to a contract, and if he committed treason or failed to deliver, the seal would detonate.
Arthur accepted those terms as well, allowing him to escape with his life intact.
The next phase forced Arthur to expedite his plans. Because he had promised the Akatsuki a living weapon, he went straight into his cloning experiments—something he had already been working on prior.
It didn't take long for him to isolate his own DNA, splice it with the genetic material he had gathered, and grow a functional copy.
The first of the clones to be born from those vats was Hoshikaze.
Arthur needed to ensure the clone was fully functional and capable of high-level combat. A basic stress test wasn't enough, so he sent the Hoshikaze on a field mission where Jada and Kakashi were trapped in a localized time loop, an anomaly unknowingly caused by Jasper in the outer territories.
Hoshikaze helped her break through the spatial barrier, shattered the loop, and rescued them. The test was a complete success.
Now Arthur sought to make four more clones to manage his expanding empire. Albeit, it would take time and almost all of his laboratory resources to grow them properly.
While he waited for the vats to finish their work, he decided to expand his political reach by recruiting Danzō Shimura into his ranks. The old war hawk had yet to make his appearance and still operated the Foundation (or Root) in the shadows.
Having Danzō meant having the Leaf's dark underbelly. How could Arthur resist?
The best way to contact Danzō without triggering a war was by cooperating with Alice. So Arthur met her in the woods outside the Leaf Village walls. There, he offered a trade: in exchange for her helping him secure a meeting with Danzō, Arthur was going to give her the exact coordinates of the Cayman Jungles.
Alice agreed. She went back into the village to set the meeting.
Yet she failed her end of the bargain when Margaret used the Time Travel technique after having a fallout with Danzō.
The recruit was dead, causing the narrative to shift again.
Arthur further understood that the otherworldly variables were too unstable to rely on, so he abandoned the Leaf infiltration and decided to just focus entirely on his clones.
"But how did he manage to revive us all again?" Kaiyo interrupted.
"I was getting to that part," Rin tried explaining.
After a few weeks, Arthur had finally finished the cloning project.
Him and Kaito traveled to a remote location to make the drop, where they met Zetsu in a clearing. Unbeknownst to either of them, Margaret had somehow managed to track them by herself.
This prompted Zetsu and Kaito to immediately depart. That in turn left only Arthur, disguised as John, to face Margaret alone.
Their fight was one for the ages.
Two different Sage Modes collided for the first time ever recorded in history. Margaret utilized the slug's natural energy by striking with devastating technique. But Arthur was heavily enhanced with perfect displays of combat.
After dismantling her fighting style and shattering her wood style, he brought her to the ground.
Had Jada, William, and Alice not arrived via a coordinated Flying raijin jump, something terrible would have happened to Margaret.
Surrounded by a team of anomalies, Arthur had no more reason to stay. So he eventually teleported after a quick chase, leaving them to tend to their wounded friend.
Not once has his goal changed despite all the trouble he has been through. He had survived the Akatsuki, convoluted techniques like time traveling, and his own failing body. Now he had a leash on two of the most notorious criminal factions.
Yet Arthur knew that if an all-out war were to breakout, he'd lose.
What separated those organizations from the one Arthur sought to create was scale. They operated out of hidden bases and caves. They also hid themselves very well.
For Arthur to stand against them, he had to build a country.
So he went to work.
First, he contacted Diana in the Land of Money. He fed her precise intel regarding national crop yields, shipping routes, and mining operations for her to place massive bets. Diana followed his lead by buying out failing industries just before they spiked in value.
Doing so amassed so much money that it placed her net worth at the very top of the entire world as the first-ever trillionaire.
Arthur now had just enough liquid funds to begin construction. The only question remained: where was he going to build this land?
Prior to having met Diana, Arthur had traveled north and met Toki. She was the feudal lord of the Bird Country. But her court was a mess, plagued by internal sabotage and assassinations.
So Arthur had systematically dismantled the conspiracy within her land and helped her secure her throne early on. In return for saving her rule, she gave up a massive portion of her territory for Arthur to build whatever he wanted.
He had the money and he had the land. All that was left was the labour.
Arthur, therefore, hired civilian contractors from across the continent to construct the infrastructure. They worked for double the standard wage and asked no questions.
To expedite the process, he also utilized his own assets by using Jirōbō's earth style to flatten mountains, carve rivers, and lay the massive stone foundations.
In record time, the Light Village was fully constructed. Tall walls, paved streets, and housing sectors rose from the dirt. Once the perimeter was secure, Arthur teleported all of Sun Stream Plaza directly into the center of the new village.
"How much did all this cost?" Kaiyo wondered.
Rin thought about the ledgers she had seen on his desk. "I can't remember the exact number. But I think it was somewhere around six trillion or something."
Both Shigeru and Kaiyo stopped walking as they gave Rin a dumbfounded look.
In truth, Arthur had actually spent more. The bribes alone cost a fortune.
"I knew our country was more affluent than our old one," Shigeru said. "But to think the GDP was that much."
"What the heck is a GDP?" Kaiyo urged.
"Don't worry about it…"
"Whatever! What happened next?! What happened next?!"
Rin let out a rare chuckle as she started walking again. The other two hurried to catch up.
Like she remembered, the money invested into the land paid off. It provided a safe haven for Arthur's final project: cloning Ryūzetsu.
Arthur needed more of her since he couldn't just revive one person at a time if it meant finding a new host for every soul. So he had grown hundreds of Ryūzetsu clones in his laboratory without the original knowing.
These clones were the catalyst for reviving the known clans currently roaming the Bird Country today.
But even with the clones acting as the casters, the technique required an immense amount of chakra and sacrifices to balance the scales.
The chakra part would be handled with the Six-Tails and natural energy. But the sacrifices were a whole other story. Nations would raise alarms if they discovered that entire settlements were being massacred.
So Arthur ventured to an unspecified city on the edge of the continent. It was a corrupt place, filled with slavers and mercenaries. No one would miss them.
There, his clones and him sealed them in and slaughtered everyone present. He then harvested their bodies and brought the biological material back to the Cayman Jungles for the Reanimation ritual.
Just like how he had revived Rin, he performed the same process. Just on a massive scale.
All Ryūzetsu clones were activated simultaneously as the light blinded everyone in the vicinity. The earth shook, drawing the souls from the underworld and pushing them back into the dust and bones of the fallen.
The end result killed all of the Ryūzetsu clones, including the original one. But the gains were worth the cost, because when the light cleared, the coffins were crowded with breathing Uchiha.
Everyone worthwhile had successfully been revived.