The weeks Yuji spent back in Sunagakure were not idle ones.
He visited Karura's home early on, bringing gifts, and met Yashamaru for the first time. The resemblance to his sister was immediate, the same quietness, the same genuine warmth in the way he spoke and listened.
He was two years older than Yuji, technically a senior, but when they were together he behaved more like someone grateful for the company than someone conscious of rank. He was a Medical Ninja as well, which explained something Karura had mentioned before: that Yashamaru had followed Yuji's progress with considerable admiration.
Beyond that, Yuji took on a string of low-level missions, reconstruction work, mostly, helping rebuild sections of the Land of Wind that the war had left damaged.
For a shinobi, a mission record mattered regardless of actual ability, and his needed filling out. By the time the tally was compiled, he had accumulated eight D-rank missions, seven C-rank, twelve B-rank, and four A-rank.
The B and A-rank entries were figures Arai had submitted based on their operations in the Land of Grass. It wasn't a deep record for someone of his strength, but he had been out of the Academy for less than two years, and the work behind those numbers had been done on actual battlefields rather than in field hospitals or support roles.
The path he had taken to build it looked nothing like the path a traditional Medical Ninja was supposed to walk.
That, he had decided, was fine.
What he had not expected was what he found when he looked at the village itself.
After a war, reconstruction funds flowed from the Daimyo. That was the established order, the village fought, the Daimyo financed the recovery. But in the two months since the fighting wound down, almost nothing had moved in Sunagakure.
Buildings that needed rebuilding stayed as they were. Projects that should have begun hadn't been approved. The money simply was not there, because the Daimyo of the Land of Wind was not satisfied with how the war had gone, and his dissatisfaction expressed itself in closed hands.
Yuji turned the problem over at length.
The logic, once you followed it far enough, produced something close to a closed loop.
The village needed funds to develop. Funds came from the Daimyo.
The Daimyo gave based on battlefield results. So the village's leadership pushed hard on the battlefield to generate results worth rewarding, committing resources they could not always afford and absorbing losses that weakened them further, and when the deployment decisions behind those commitments fell short, as they often did, the losses produced less return than the investment required.
The cycle fed itself. This was why Sunagakure in later years would carry a permanent resource deficit that its rivals did not share, and why the gap between it and Konoha would only grow across generations.
Konoha had moved immediately after the war. While they still had skirmishes running with Kumogakure, their reconstruction apparatus had been running in parallel, organized and efficient, wasting none of the time that Sunagakure was losing now.
'Hanzo had it right,' Yuji thought, 'in one respect at least'.
Holding military and political power in the same hand meant never negotiating with someone who could simply refuse to pay.
That was not a model Sunagakure could replicate, but the principle underneath it was sound enough: dependency on an external financier with different interests was a structural weakness, and Sunagakure had built its recovery plan on top of it.
He was still working through the implications when Arai spoke beside him.
"He's here."
Yuji had been standing at the main gate, watching the street traffic in the distance. He turned and saw Sasori approaching from down the road.
The two months had not been kind to his complexion. He had spent most of them indoors, working on his puppets, specifically on the modifications to the Human Puppet design, which Yuji had occasionally helped him think through during visits back to the village.
They had not spent much time together outside of that. Sasori rarely sought company and did not go out unless he had reason to, which left his skin pale in the way that came from weeks without sunlight.
His expression when he arrived was the same as it always was: composed, contained, carrying whatever he was thinking somewhere well below the surface.
"Let's go," Arai said.
The three of them left together without ceremony.
Yuji looked back once as they cleared the village gate, at the main road, at the sand lifting off it in slow drifts as the wind moved through, and then turned forward.
The route Arai had charted this time was considerably longer than anything they had covered before.
The fighting between Konoha and Kumogakure was winding down, both sides contracting their front lines, and the squad's objective was to gather current intelligence on the state of the battlefield firsthand rather than waiting for reports filtered through external channels.
To reach the front, they would have to pass through the Land of Grass, the Land of Waterfalls, and the Land of Frost before arriving at the Land of Rice Fields, where most of the Konoha-Kumogakure engagement had taken place.
The war's physical evidence was everywhere, even now. Scorched terrain, collapsed structures, stretches of forest that had simply ceased to exist.
The scale of what had passed through these places didn't diminish with distance from the front, it just changed character, becoming less a scene of active destruction and more a record of one.
On the road, Yuji asked Arai about the Land of Rice Fields.
"No Hidden Village," Arai said. "There are active ninja clans, but none of them ever built anything permanent enough to formalize. No structure, no shared governance. During the war they worked as hired hands, selling intelligence, running small engagements for whoever was paying. They fight in family units, not as a village force."
Yuji processed this. Mercenaries, then. Skilled in some cases, perhaps, but without the institutional foundation that turned individual ability into lasting power.
What he remembered of the Land of Rice Fields from what he knew of the future was limited: that Orochimaru would eventually establish the Hidden Sound Village there, and that the Fuma clan operated within its borders.
"The Fuma clan is still there, isn't it?" he said. "They should still have some standing; their tools alone would make them worth knowing."
Arai considered it. "They did, once. The Fuma were the strongest clan in the Land of Rice Fields for a long time, and they had a genuine reputation, their ninjutsu, their tool-crafting, the fuma shuriken most prominently.
But a clan without a village's support structure eventually runs out of room to grow. The systems that Hidden Villages use to develop their shinobi across generations simply aren't available to them, and no amount of inherited technique fully compensates for that over time.
The gap between where they were and where the major villages are now has been widening for years." He paused. "There aren't many of them left in the Land of Rice Fields at this point. Most of the clan scattered. You find them working as wandering shinobi in various countries, capable, but without a home to return to."