The transition from the bed to the floor was my first lesson in the physics of a world where chakra acts as a secondary nervous system. In my previous life, gravity was a constant, a background force I never gave a second thought to. Here, as the Second Tsuchikage, gravity felt personal. Every ounce of my weight seemed to be in a constant, vibrating dialogue with the stone floor. As my feet—wrapped in the same coarse, medicinal linen as my face—touched the basalt, a surge of information traveled up my spine.
This was the sensing.
Mu's primary gift wasn't just invisibility, it was sensing.
I didn't see the room with my eyes; I felt it through the chakra signatures bleeding through the walls. To my left, through six feet of solid rock, I felt a pulse—hot, rhythmic, and dense. That was a guard. His energy felt like the slow churn of molten slag. Further down the hall, a group of genin moved in a cluster, their signatures flickering like weak candle flames in a draft, unrefined and chaotic.
Mu's sensing wasn't a visual overlay. It was a visceral recognition. I knew the intent behind the energy. I could feel the "bitterness" in a healer's chakra three rooms over, a sharp, acidic tang that told me she was exhausted.
"Master, your equilibrium..." Onoki's voice was a low hum, but through the floor, I could feel the way his vocal cords moved.
Onoki's voice was a low hum, but his chakra was the most distracting thing in the room. It was a bright, concentrated core of potential, vibrating with an anxiety that felt like static electricity against my skin.
"Steady, Onoki," I said. My voice sounded like a shovel hitting dry dirt.
We left the infirmary. The corridor was a massive, vaulted rib of dark granite. Iwagakure was a vertical hive, a fortress carved into the Sanmenkyō mountains. There was no wood here, no paper walls, no softness. The air was pressurized and heavy, circulated by massive Earth-style bellows deep in the mountain's roots. It tasted of wet minerals and flint.
As we walked, the scale of the village opened up. Through a narrow archway, I saw the central abyss of the Hidden Stone. Thousands of homes were stacked like geometric crystals along the cliff faces. In the dim light of the amber glow-stones, I watched a transport team moving a multi-ton boulder across a suspension bridge. They didn't use cranes; they used their shoulders and Earth Release.
The Land of Earth was a brutal landscape of high-altitude deserts and jagged ridges. We lacked the forests of the Leaf or the trade routes of the Cloud. Everything the Stone possessed was torn from the ground with raw effort.
My modern memories were beginning to blur. I tried to recall the face of my old boss, but the image was a smudge. I tried to remember the layout of my apartment, but all I could see were these vaulted stone ceilings. The loss was a hollow ache in my chest, but it was being filled by a new, sharper realization: the danger of this era was absolute.
I was living in the shadow of the First Shinobi World War. To the north, the First Raikage was consolidating power, looking hungrily at our iron mines. To the east, Tobirama Senju was turning the Leaf into a military machine. And Madara... the memory of that blue fire made my chakra spike instinctively, a cold shiver running through my bandages.
"The lower sectors are struggling, Master," Onoki muttered as we crossed the Great Bridge. "The floods in the iron mines haven't been cleared. The workers are starting to talk about the 'Uchiha's Curse.'"
I looked down at the workers. Their chakra signatures were dim, grey, and flickering. They were exhausted. The "Will of Stone" was being tested not by war, but by the grinding reality of poverty and fear.
'Madara tried to crush this village with power,' I thought, my white eyes scanning the hive below. 'But a mountain doesn't break from a single blow. It erodes and if it erodes we cansimply build it back.'
We reached the Earth Spire. The air here was thinner, colder, and smelled of cedar incense. I sensed the Council members through the doors long before I saw them.
It was a low, vibrating hum of calculated caution, like a hive of bees waiting for a signal. They were already arguing. I could feel the friction of their energies clashing against the stone.
I stopped at the granite doors. My heart thundered, but I forced my chakra to go flat, erasing my presence until I was nothing more than a ghost in the hallway. Onoki shivered as I vanished from his senses, even though I was standing right in front of him.
"Open the doors," I commanded.
The stone groaned, rock grinding on rock. I stepped into the Council pit. The amber lamps cast long, flickering shadows against the walls.
A new Era was about to begin and Iwagakure would be at the center of it.
The Council Pit of Iwagakure functioned as a physical manifestation of the village's hierarchy. Six tiers of raised stone benches curved around a central floor, forcing whoever stood in the middle to look upward at the Elders. The air was thick with the scent of burning cedar and the heavy, oppressive pressure of seasoned chakra signatures.
As I stepped into the center, the shouting died. The silence followed with a suffocating weight, broken only by the rhythmic drip of water from a nearby stalactite.
At the highest tier sat Ishikawa, the First Tsuchikage. Beside him sat the true power of the founding era: the Kamizuru Triumvirate. Elder Genji sat with a swarm of honey-colored insects buzzing in a ceramic jar at his hip. To his left was Matriarch Hana, a woman whose chakra felt like a hive—disciplined and stinging. Finally, there was Bakusan, the grizzled captain of the fledgling Explosion Corps.
Ishikawa leaned forward. "Mū. You look as though you've been carved from a different quarry since the Uchiha struck. Tell us why you've summoned the council while your stitches are still fresh."
Bakusan didn't wait for my answer. He slammed a gauntleted fist onto the stone railing. "The reports from the border are a disgrace! The Raikage's scouts are practically dancing on our ridges. We need to strike. Now."
"Strike where, Bakusan?" I asked, my voice finding a cold clarity.
"The northern passes!" Bakusan barked. "We seize the iron routes. We remind the world that the Stone does not crumble. My men are itching to paint the peaks red with Cloud blood. If we retreat now, we aren't Stone—we're silt!"
"And we lose another four hundred shinobi to the Cloud's lightning flickers," I countered. "We have three thousand active combatants. You want to commit our last reserves to a skirmish over a trade route we lack the surplus to utilize."
Matriarch Hana leaned into the light, her eyes narrowing. Her chakra was a low, vibrating hum. "The village is starving, Tsuchikage. My clan's hives are failing because the flowers are choked by dust and the fumes of your foundries. If we do not take the fertile valleys to the south, we will rot from within. Your 'logic' won't feed a hungry child."
"Precisely," I said. "Our problem lies in treating the Land of Earth like a fortress instead of a resource. I am issuing a decree. From this hour, forty percent of the Earth-corps is being withdrawn from the borders."
The room erupted. Genji's bees swarmed in agitation. I waited for the noise to peak before flaring my chakra. I let a flicker of the Jinton leak out—a precise mixture of Earth, Wind, and Fire. The air in the pit suddenly felt thin. The Elders stiffened.
"We are automating the borders," I continued. "Ōnoki."
The young boy stepped forward, holding the scrolls I had drafted.
"Ōnoki has the designs for a defensive perimeter based on Weighted-Stone Seals," I explained. "We will replace a thousand men standing in the snow with twenty masters maintaining a network that triggers landslides and increases an invader's weight tenfold the moment a foreign chakra signature crosses the ridge. It is a more efficient use of our limited manpower."
"Efficiency?" Genji spat, the jar at his hip rattling. "You wish to trust our lives to ink and paper? A seal can be broken. A man with a kunai cannot. You are asking us to abandon the traditions that Ishikawa-sama built with his own hands! The Stone stands because we stand on it, not behind a scroll!"
"The Stone stands because it is heavy," I replied, staring him down. "I am making it heavier. The Earth-users we withdraw will move to the Lower Sectors. We are going to reshape our nation's anatomy. I want vertical shafts designed for geothermal tapping. We live in a volcanic range; we should be using the mountain's internal heat to power our foundries rather than burning through our limited timber."
"The chakra cost..." Genji whispered, his stubbornness finally wavering into doubt.
"Is a fraction of the cost of a war," I interrupted. "And it doesn't stop there. I want the Kamizuru scouts to map the subterranean aquifers. We will coordinate with the Earth-corps to use Path of the Earth techniques to carve aqueducts through the Stone Forest. We will bring the mountain runoff directly into the central plains. We will turn the basalt dust into fertile silt."
"You're talking about changing the landscape of the nation," Ishikawa said, his voice unusually quiet. "That would take decades of grueling labor. Our people are warriors, Mū, not ditch-diggers."
"I am the Second Tsuchikage," I said, stepping back into the center of the pit. My white eyes glowed with a terrifying conviction. "I care about the next century. Madara Uchiha treated us like pebbles because he saw a village that could be broken. I am going to build a nation that cannot be moved. We will stop chasing border skirmishes and start building an industrial base that the other nations cannot compete with. If they want our stone, they will pay for it in gold, not our blood."
I looked at Ishikawa. "Do you concede, or do you wish to remain a beautiful, starving statue?"
The First Tsuchikage looked at his council, seeing the reluctant respect in their eyes. He struck his fist against his chest. "The Stone endures," he muttered.
"And it grows deeper," I replied, turning toward the exit.
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So plz gib me power stonesssss 🫦