If he could, Uchiha Yorin would have loved to spend a soft, cozy winter in Konoha—curled up by a warm fireplace, surrounded by cute girls, petting cats with one hand while sketching out his business empire and reform plans with the other. Just quietly watching the coldest season of the year pass by, then thinking about whatever came next.
Unfortunately, that wasn't happening.
The reason—like he'd already told Mei—was the summons from the Daimyō.
Because of that bastard Daimyō of the Land of Fire, Uchiha Yorin had no choice but to leave the warmth of the hearth and the arms of his loving wives in the bitter winter of Konoha Year 52, and head to the capital to await the lord's pleasure.
Officially, the Daimyō's envoys had said it was "to host a banquet in honor of the hero who defeated the evil "Rinyo" and saved the world."
Everyone knew that was bullshit.
In reality, the Daimyō was spooked by Uchiha, and wanted to "sound him out." If possible, he'd love to rope Yorin into serving him. If not, he'd like to find some way to crush him quickly to maintain his own rule… The odds of the latter were almost zero, of course, but a man's gotta have dreams, right? Otherwise, what's the difference between him and a salted fish?
…
Uchiha Yorin: "This sucks. I really want to just wipe those bastards out in one go."
"But it's not time yet. I have to endure…"
This year's enrollment at the Academy was five times larger than before, and they'd need to recruit even more kids next year.
On top of children's education, adult re-education had also been put on the agenda.
And the funny part was: there were still tons of fully grown adults in this world who were completely illiterate.
Neither the villages nor the countries had anything remotely like a public school system.
Under Yorin's direction, Konoha might become the first "country" to implement universal nine-year compulsory education, plus a literacy drive and widespread technical training.
Problem was: Konoha wasn't big enough yet. And the speed at which they could train cadres wasn't nearly fast enough. That's why Yorin needed branch bases.
All four other villages, plus the new Uzushio, were effectively branch bases of Uchiha Yorin.
He'd spread the unified "Ninshū" ideology there to counteract parochial "village-first" thinking.
That way it wasn't just one village, but all five major villages plus a fully controlled Uzushio feeding into his system. The time needed to make cadres wouldn't get shorter—it'd still take ten years or more—but the number they produced would be ten times, even dozens of times what Konoha alone could manage.
Still, it would take ten years—maybe longer—to raise a real generation of talent. That saying, "ten years to grow trees, a hundred to grow people," wasn't just for show. So no matter how impatient he was, Yorin had no choice but to spend the next decade as the shinobi world's Sage.
Uchiha Yorin: "Of course, there is another option."
That "other option," naturally, was the universal problem-solver: Orochimaru.
If Orochimaru could invent some kind of "super learning machine" that just dumped knowledge and ideology straight into people's heads, they wouldn't need ten years. Yorin could pull together enough trained cadres to rule the world in a tiny fraction of the time.
But at what cost?
Using tech that rewrote souls and hijacked minds… Yes, that crossed some moral and ethical lines…
Then again, for someone like Uchiha Yorin—who had no shame and treated "ethics" as clay to be molded at will—"morals" didn't weigh that much.
What he really worried about was the side effects. He had played Warhammer 40K, after all.
In 30k, the Astartes had their own version of brain-uploaded knowledge: the Expeditionary "rapid-levy" Legions.
It worked—both loyalists and traitors fielded hundreds of thousands of Marines overnight. But the price was atrocious: mental instability, psychosis, constant headaches, glitches on top of glitches.
The "true" Astartes pretty much saw these rapid levies as defective units, not brothers. Nobody cared about their pain or confusion.
End of an age, in its own way.
So Yorin's real dilemma was: if he created something similar—mass-produced cadres by mind-jamming knowledge into them—and ended up with a batch of barely functional freaks, what then?
He figured he could still conquer the world with them.
But once the world was conquered, what would he do with these imperfect creations?
Follow some yellow-robed emperor's playbook and hold a giant purge, "roasting them on the training grounds, no armor allowed"?
That would be extremely weak behavior.
Yorin openly admitted he wasn't a good person. But he wasn't that kind of coward. So he hesitated.
What really made him hesitate, though, was what came next.
When he brought this grand plan to Orochimaru, he got smacked with a bucket of cold water: "Huh? Directly inputting knowledge into someone's brain? If only it were that easy."
Pure, merciless reality check.
"Stop fantasizing," Orochimaru told him. "Science isn't that omnipotent."
Yorin: "Yeah, but…"
"If we're talking artificial humans, though," Orochimaru continued, "I can tweak their intellect and learning capabilities. Make them geniuses, essentially."
Yorin was, after all, his primary investor. Even if the guy's brain ran on fanfic logic half the time, Orochimaru still had to explain and throw him a bone:
"They could learn in a day what takes others ten days, a hundred days, or longer. How does that sound?"
Yorin: "And they'd all carry Senju and Uchiha genes—our bloodline—right?"
Orochimaru: "Exactly."
Yorin: "So, how long until you can mass-produce these perfect little monsters?"
Orochimaru: "Oh, several years at least. I'm thinking… at least ten years."
Uchiha Yorin: "…Ten years?!"
Orochimaru: "With good luck, maybe less than a few years."
Yorin: "…Right."
…
So the "cheat with cloning and crank out a million elites" plan died before it ever got started.
Orochimaru did leave the door open—said he could probably recreate it eventually.
But when was "eventually"?
In ten years, the soup would've gone cold.
…
With that mild frustration sitting in his chest, Yorin set off for the capital of Land of Fire.
Shinobi travel fast, but this time he didn't bolt or spam Flying Thunder God. With Geneva Daimyō calling, what was the rush? Better to ride in a Konoha truck convoy, take it slow, enjoy the scenery, and do some hands-on inspection of his own logistics company's performance.
The results pleased him.
In the ninja world, actual roads between cities were almost nonexistent. Over-charged natural energy and monsters filled the wilderness. But none of that mattered to a shinobi-run transport company.
Those terrifying beasts that scared civilians to death were, to ninja, just another category of "summon-able monster neighbors."
With Konoha Transport's contracts, these would-be road-wreckers and caravan-killers became road maintenance crews and security escorts.
Whole packs of "monster fauna" helped haul cargo, repair roads, and enjoyed the fruits of civilization—delivered food and modern conveniences—courtesy of Uchiha Industries. They were quite content with the deal.
So as Yorin rode toward the capital, he spent his time joyfully burying both hands in fur, petting every ninja beast in range, while batch-processing intel streams from all five villages and Uzushio. He rode in comfort, quietly honing his chakra and eye power.
If you saw his eyes right then, you'd have been surprised.
Wasn't he already at full three-tomoe? Why did he suddenly have only two?
Answer: those weren't his original eyeballs—they were prize Sharingan he'd pulled out of the system inventory.
The path from three tomoe to six tomoe was a long one, and with no big quest prompts popping up lately, the only way to power up was grinding.
So as he trained, Yorin remembered something—he still had two spare sets of perfectly compatible Sharingan sitting in storage.
He rotated those pairs through his sockets, infused them with chakra daily, and mentally roleplayed tragic star-crossed lovers to stimulate their evolution.
Little by little, both pairs evolved from one-tomoe to two-tomoe, and like his originals, shifted into that gold-and-silver yin-yang "sage eye (prototype)" form.
That made him very happy.
From now on, he was a man with three pairs of Sharingan.
With that upgrade in hand, he happily slowed his journey even more. Every day, he invested extra time into polishing techniques and tempering his eyes, savoring the simple, honest happiness of feeling himself grow stronger.
Meanwhile, in the capital—
Daimyō of Fire: "..."
"…He still hasn't arrived?!"