The corridor outside the interrogation room had become an impromptu waiting area for the Uzumaki clan's leadership. Wooden floors creaked under nervous footsteps.
Renji couldn't stop pacing. Back and forth, back and forth—each step a metronome marking the passage of agonizing uncertainty.
"Renji, just sit down," Elric's grandfather said, his deep voice carrying the weight of decades and the calm authority of someone who had weathered countless storms. The old man sat with his back perfectly straight, hands resting peacefully on his knees, seemingly unbothered by the momentous events unfolding mere feet away. "It should be fine. Have some faith in the boy."
But Renji couldn't sit. Too much rode on what was happening behind that closed door. The balance of power in the shinobi world, the future of everyone they loved—all of it hinged on whether a twelve-year-old could successfully negotiate with a legendary Kage.
The absurdity of that thought would have made him laugh under different circumstances.
The door handle turned with a soft click.
Every conversation stopped. Every eye turned toward the slowly opening door. The hinges creaked—a sound that seemed unnaturally loud in the sudden silence. Elric emerged, his young face an unreadable mask that gave nothing away.
"What's the result?" Renji's question burst out urgently, unable to contain himself any longer. His voice cracked slightly on the last word, betraying just how much this moment meant.
For a heartbeat, Elric said nothing. Then a smile spread across his face—small at first, before widening into something genuinely pleased.
"Take care of him," Elric said simply, his tone carrying quiet satisfaction. "He's our friend now."
He extended his hand toward his father. Renji stared at it for a fraction of a second, Than his own hand shot forward to meet his son's.
SLAP!
The sound of their palms meeting echoed through the corridor.
"I expected nothing less from my son," Renji said, his voice thick with pride that he made no attempt to hide. He pulled Elric into a brief embrace before stepping back, his mind already racing ahead to the next challenge. "Now we need to make the other villages our friends as well."
"Haha!" Elric's grandfather's booming laugh filled the corridor, rich with amusement and something darker—the satisfaction of enemies brought low. "Not three villages, boy. Four."
He stood up with the easy grace of someone who had kept himself in fighting condition despite his years. "Among those seven thousand shinobi out there, roughly a thousand are from Iwagakure. It seems all four major villages were involved in this coalition, though the Rock ninja were held in reserve—likely intended to attack Konoha if they had tried to support us."
"Will the Rock ninja accept these conditions?" Renji wondered aloud.
Iwagakure had always been among the most stubborn of the great villages.
Elric shrugged with a pragmatism beyond his years. "I doubt it. But there's no harm in trying.
"Either way," his grandfather added with grim satisfaction.
Later that evening, Elric sat alone in his room, staring out at the ocean that stretched endlessly toward the horizon.
His mind wandered backward across time and space, to a life that felt simultaneously recent and impossibly distant.
Before coming to this world, he had been nobody special. Just another ordinary person born in a peaceful country, surrounded by a loving family. Life had been simple, predictable, safe. He'd gone to school, complained about homework, played video games, worried about normal teenage things like exams and social awkwardness.
The biggest violence he'd ever witnessed was in movies and anime.
Even after being reborn into this world—this violent, chaotic reality where children trained to kill before they learned to read—his life hadn't changed as dramatically as it might have. The Uzumaki clan had sheltered him, protected him, loved him. He'd grown up in a bubble of relative peace, knowing intellectually that the world beyond their island was dangerous but never truly experiencing that danger firsthand.
He'd known this world was messed up. He'd known that somewhere out there, children his age were fighting and dying in wars started by adults.
But knowledge and experience were different things entirely.
The coalition's attack had shattered his comfortable distance from reality. Suddenly, the violence wasn't happening somewhere else to someone else—it was here, threatening everyone he loved, forcing him to act.
That moment had crystallized something in him. A purpose that had been forming unconsciously for years suddenly snapped into sharp focus.
He would change this world. He would make it better—as close to the peaceful world he remembered as possible, if not better still.
Every child should have the chance to grow up the way he had in his first life. Every parent should be able to watch their children play without fearing a kunai might find them. Every person deserved the opportunity to live a full life, to pursue dreams that didn't involve killing or being killed.
His mind drifted to Nagato, a boy whose entire family had been slaughtered by shinobi who didn't even know their names. How many children had been orphaned because some noble decided he didn't have enough land, enough money, enough power? How many lives had been destroyed to feed the endless appetite of human greed?
The cycle had to end. And he had the power to end it.
The most efficient path would be simple conquest. Take over the world as a dictator, impose peace through overwhelming force. It would be fast, clean, effective.
And it would require killing millions of people who refused to bow.
Elric leaned back in his chair, turning the problem over in his mind like a puzzle box. Democracy wouldn't work in a world where individual people possessed the power to level mountains. When a single shinobi could massacre a town, voting meant nothing. The traditional systems of government simply weren't designed for this reality.
But force alone wouldn't work either. He could crush armies, defeat Kage, conquer nations—but he couldn't kill everyone who resisted without depopulating the world to the point where there was nothing left worth ruling. People would die faster than they could reproduce.
No. He needed a different approach. Subtler. Longer-term.
He needed to make people not want to fight.
The plan formed in his mind.
First, improve their quality of life so dramatically that warfare became less appealing than simply living. Introduce technology from his old world—not weapons, but comforts. Internet infrastructure. Cell phones. Television. Air conditioning. Refrigeration. All the little conveniences that made modern life worth living.
Make them dependent on Uzushiogakure for these luxuries. Let the innovations spread slowly but inevitably, like roots growing through soil. Control the infrastructure, control the supply, and gradually, peacefully, make every nation economically tied to his village.
Then spread the word. Let people see how citizens of Uzushiogakure lived. Let them compare their own lives—full of violence and hardship and fear—to what life could be. Plant the seed of a simple question: "Why wasn't I born in the Uzumaki village?"
When the majority of the world's population started asking that question, when they started believing that a better life was possible and that Uzushiogakure represented that better future—that would be his victory. Not ninety percent complete, but close enough that the rest would follow naturally.
The remaining obstacles would be the nobles and rulers who saw their power slipping away. Those who benefited from the current system of violence and exploitation. They wouldn't surrender peacefully.
But by then, they'd be standing against the collective will of their own populations. And no matter how powerful individual shinobi might be, they couldn't fight an entire world that had decided it wanted something different.
It would take time. Years, maybe decades. But he had time now.
"What are you doing all alone, Elric?"
The voice shattered his contemplation like a stone through glass. Elric's head whipped around to find Kushina standing in his doorway, her red hair catching the evening light like living flame. Her expression carried that unique mixture of innocence and mischief that seemed to be her default state.
"Hey, Kushina," he said with patience, though he couldn't quite keep the exasperation from his tone. "I've told you before—when you enter someone's room, you have to knock first and ask permission."
"No fair!" Her lower lip jutted out in an exaggerated pout that would have been adorable if it wasn't so clearly calculated. "Elric, don't you like me anymore? Before, you used to let me play in your room all day long!"
"It's not like that," he explained, his voice softening despite himself. It was hard to stay annoyed at Kushina when she looked at him with those wide, innocent eyes. "You know there are dangerous items in my room now. Things that could seriously hurt you if you touched them by accident."
"So why are you working with dangerous things?" She stepped further into the room, her curiosity clearly piqued. "Does Auntie know about this?"
A mischievous smile spread across her face—one that Elric recognized. "Elric, you don't want Auntie to find out about this, do you?"
His hand came up and gently bonked her on the head—not hard enough to hurt, just enough to express his exasperation.
"Stop talking nonsense," he said, fighting to keep a straight face. "She obviously already knows everything I'm doing. Who do you think approved my workshop in the first place?"
Kushina rubbed her head with both hands, pouting properly now, but her eyes still sparkled with barely suppressed laughter. Despite the scolding, she seemed delighted to have gotten a reaction out of him.
Elric shook his head, but he couldn't suppress the small smile that tugged at his lips.
You guys can check out my patreon with 20 advance chapter, and want to support this story.
patreon.com/LMStar666