Marked for Death: A Rational Naruto Quest

[OliWhail]

Was there a ruling on the concept of seal ratings vs sealmaster ratings, or is that also still under discussion?

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The seal, since the idea is to incentivize people to make the most valuable seals they are capable of.

 

[Inferno Vulpix]

So, salt. We have a vague idea about stuff but let's crunch some numbers.

The way we intend to get salt is by evaporating salt water that we isolate from the rest of the sea with MEW walls, more or less. How much salt can we get out of this?

Well, evaporation cares less about volume and more about surface area. According to this neat article about swimming pool evaporation, we can expect roughly 0.25 inches of water to evaporate each day. This means for a hypothetical 10ft x 10ft surface area we'd see 2.08 cubic feet (or 58.9L) of water evaporate per day.

Spoiler: Calcs

10 ft x 10 ft = 100 ft2​.
0.25 in = 4 in-1​ = 48 ft-1​.
100 ft2​ / 48 ft-1​ = 2.08 ft3​.

Sea water is 3.5% salt, meaning for every liter of sea water there is 35 grams of salt. At 58.9L of evaporation per day we get 2,061 grams of salt per day (let's round that to 2kg for simplicity). We won't be able to use a given day's salt production until the saltern fully empties, but if it takes 30 days to empty then we just get 30 times this much in one lump sum.

So, for every 10x10 surface area we get 2kg of salt per day. How much is that worth to us? Going by what Cariyaga linked earlier, 1kg of salt is worth roughly $15 (or 150 ryo) in Roman conditions (more on that later), so we can say a 10x10 surface area gives us 300 ryo per day of salt, or (approximately) 9,000 ryo a month.

This is, clearly, not enough. But 10 feet by 10 feet is also pretty small. What if we scale it up to 100 ft by 100 ft? That's a hundred-fold increase in the salt production, and thus a hundredfold increase in the profits, so our 9,000 ryo a month goes up to 900,000 ryo a month. Not 'buy out the entire world' rich, but a pretty dang respectable income.

(Note, production scaled up to this level also pumps 6,000kg of salt into the market every month. Neat, huh?)

There are other questions to ask about the saltern, such as 'how many cells do we use?' or 'how deep do we start the waters out?' and while those questions have an impact on the logistics of our salt production (how often we have to visit, the amount of time it takes to get the lump sum payout, etc.) they don't actually impact the output rate at all. If you double the depth of the water, it takes twice as long to evaporate but you get twice as much salt out of it.

What does matter, that I haven't fully covered, are the following:

• Rain. I don't have exact numbers for how much inflows of rain would slow down and interrupt evaporation, but we probably don't want any of it. To avoid rain, we'll need a roof of some sort, which is another thing to figure out but, I imagine, not an impossible challenge.
• The price of salt is likely to be higher than it was in Roman times, because (as Cariyaga said) the Romans were big on infrastructure and roads and stuff which would've jacked the prices down. I don't have a way of knowing how much more expensive salt is in a place like the Elemental Nations, but my gut feeling is somewhere between 'a good amount pricier' and 'a heck of a lot pricier'. Take from that what you will.
• The last mile. We could just let water evaporate until there's nothing but a coating of salt all over the bottom of the saltern, but we could also wait until only most of the water has evaporated and boil the rest manually. This would involve other mechanisms to gather the saturated water and boil it, but would slightly speed up the salt rate.
• Purifier variants. Basically the same thing as boiling, but instead of heating it after gathering it we run a quick salt-snatcher seal over it. Might be easier to do, if Hazou can make a good enough seal.
• There's also wiggle room on the 0.25 inches per day statistic this is all based off of, and if that turns out to be lower then we're not going to get as much salt.

 

[faflec]

As of Chapter 671 (09/19/1071):

Spoiler

Character	Birthdate	Age	Notes
Akane	02/03/1052	18
Atomu	03/12/1026	45
Reo	03/20/1033	38
Keiko	06/03/1054	17
Hazō	06/27/1054	17
Mai	07/30/????	N/A
Noburi	08/05/1054	17
Naruto	10/10/1054	16
Haru	10/14/1053	17
Mari	10/31/1044	27	Estimated YOB/Age

 

[eaglejarl]

What do the economics of the Land of Fire look like? What are the terms of our mortgage? How much money do we have?

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Rejoice, for the answers are available!

In a fine example of gratitude and preemptively throwing people under the bus, we would like to state that @Evenstar and @Rihaku are responsible for the vast majority of the following, without them it would not have happened, and if there turns out to be anything wrong with it then it's absolutely their fault and not ours we are extremely grateful. +20 XP as a thank-you to both of you. You guys rock.

We aren't going to make the actual spreadsheets public, since it's mostly specifics that Hazō doesn't have, but here's the key details. Recall that 10 ryō (R10) = 1 US dollar ($1):

The Gōketsu warchest
You have R10,000,000 in the bank right now. This includes every source of money that the clan and its component individuals have ever received.

The Gōketsu mortgage
In mint condition, your property would be worth R102,300,000.

Jiraiya got it half off, with a 10-year mortgage of R51,150,000 principal with a R5,000,000 down payment and a 12.5% annual interest rate.

Your monthly mortgage payment is R675,526 according to the mortgage calculator website we plugged the numbers into. +1 XP if someone digs through the timeline and figures out the date on which the mortgage was taken out so we know how much of it has been paid off.

The market price of seals
Price per Jounin-Grade Seal Element R2290
Price per Chunin-Grade Seal Element R760
Price per Genin-Grade Seal Element R250

Explosive tags and storage seals are 1 element, Air/Earth Domes are 2, and Five Seal Barriers are (unsurprisingly) 5. Skywalkers are just Air Domes (2 elements each) and need to be used in pairs, meaning that a skywalker is effectively 4 elements.

(Kagome is rated as a chūnin-grade sealmaster. Hazō is rated genin-grade. Getting upgraded is a process the details of which are firmly HDK for now.)

An average till'n'fill mission is R500-2,000 ($50-200), meaning that using 2 explosives eats all the pay for a low-end TNF.

Note that not all seals can be made by all sealsmiths, because that person either isn't skilled enough to learn the seal or simply hasn't done so. This should really influence prices, but we aren't going to worry about it in most cases since that's a little more fussy than we want to get / have the skills to get. We'll probably add a bit of fuzzing where appropriate so it doesn't look like everything is completely deterministic, but these are the basic numbers that you can plan around.

Taxes: How do they work?!
There are eight general classes of people in the Land of Fire: Rural farmers, urban farmers (i.e., farmers who live inside the walls of Leaf or one of the major cities), non-farm workers, the nobility (the Daimyo and the local lords), the Hokage, clan ninja, clanless jōnin, and clanless ninja (meaning the genin, chūnin, and special jōnin who are not clan ninja). Taxes flow like this, with some money sticking at each level:

Rural farmers > Local lords > Daimyo > Hokage > Clan ninja + clanless jōnin
Urbanites (farmer and not) > Daimyo > Hokage > Clan ninja + clanless jōnin
All ninja > Hokage > Clan ninja + clanless jōnin

Tax rate for all ninja is 80%, with the first R42,400 (i.e. annual subsistence income for a ninja) not taxed. See below about refunds for clans.

The essence of this is that the Hokage rules everything and bribes the clans + clanless jōnin to keep them loyal to Leaf, the Daimyo and nobles are glorified tax collectors, and clanless ninja get screwed.

The money that goes to clans / clanless jōnin is paid 10% as a non-conditional cash transfer to the Clan Head / jōnin and the other 90% is in the form of conditional payments -- equipment allotments, tax refunds, bonuses to mission pay, etc. (See below for more.) The large majority of the non-conditional cash payment is typically used on clan investments, etc with only a small (or zero) allowance to each ninja.

(NB: Clanless ninja receive an equipment issue each month from the Tower's discretionary fund. The recipient can choose how to allocate the funds and will typically spend it on a couple of explosive tags unless they really need new uniforms, kunai, etc. Again, any monies not spent go into the Tower's discretionary fund.)

The benefits money is not divided evenly. By law, the 8 founding clans (Senju, Hyūga, Aburame, Inuzuka, Uchiha, Nara, Akimichi, Yamanaka) receive 70% of the money; the remaining 30% is divided among the non-founding clans (including the Gōketsu) and clanless jōnin.

Hazō has not been shown to know any of this onscreen, nor have we shown him getting registered to receive the Gōketsu stipends. We don't want to waste time with that, so we'll assume it's what he's been doing with his timeskipped hours since getting back from the Exams. This means that he has not had time for seal research.

Legal implications of the above
The money paid from the Tower to the clans is a fixed pool and awarded on a per-ninja basis. That means that the payments are zero-sum. When the Gōketsu were formed it cost all the other non-founding clans money and every time the Gōketsu adopt a clanless ninja the Gōketsu clan receives more money and every other non-founding clan ninja / clanless jōnin receives less money. Similarly, when Keiko stopped being a Gōketsu and became a Nara, some of the stipend that you had been receiving got taken away from you and given to the Nara. Based on this, we have decided that there are laws saying no clan may add more than 2 clanless ninja per year to their ranks. Ninja may transfer freely between clans, since that doesn't affect anyone else. (Note: We had not realized that these laws needed to exist, so an IRL month ago you would have been free to adopt as many clanless ninja as you liked. Hazards of asking us to work out a consistent economic system.) Naruto obviously does not count against your 2-ninja allotment, since he's a clan ninja.

Gōketsu income
There's some income from selling seals. We haven't figured out the numbers yet.

The Gōketsu receive a maximum total value of R382,700 per month (R76,540 per ninja * 5 ninja (Hazō, Noburi, Akane, Mari, Kagome)) from the Tower. This is divided into 10% non-conditional payment and 90% conditional payments, as follows:

• R38,270 : Non-conditional monthly cash stipend from the Tower bureaucracy, paid directly to Hazō as Clan Head.
• R344,430 : Maximum monthly value of conditional payments (CP), divided as follows. NOTE: Any portion of these that is not used will be retained by the Tower as part of its discretionary budget. There's no carryover.
  • Up to R258,322 (75% of CP): 50% bonus to mission pay + tax refund. All ninja face an 80% tax on their mission pay above the untaxed R42,400 annual subsistence rate; the tax is paid at the point of payment, meaning that if the client is paying R100 for a mission then you actually receive R20. If you are a clan ninja then the following month's benefits payment to your clan will include an extra R50 (50% bonus on the mission price) + R80 (refund of the tax). This makes it look as though it's fair to both clan and clanless while hiding the fact that clans are getting paid extra and aren't actually paying the tax.
  • Up to R51,644 (15% of CP): Equipment draw at Tower rates. This generally means seals, since all other ninja equipment is pretty cheap. In all cases, the Tower has discretion over what it can be used on. You still have to pay your monthly tax in seals and then provide first refusal on all other seals, but you can then immediately buy the seals back at the same rate you were paid by the Tower.
  • Up to R34,430 (10% of CP): Various other things that will probably come up but we haven't thought of. Suggestions welcome.

Things the Gōketsu want to do with their money
The Hagoromo have a large but unspecified debt to the Hyūga that is giving the latter a lot of control over the Hagoromo. If the Gōketsu agree to pay the Hagoromo R2,000,000/month for the next 15 years, the Hagoromo agree that in the upcoming election for Hokage they will vote for whomever the Gōketsu tell them to vote for. They have expressed an extremely strong preference that this be anyone other than Hyūga.

---

EDIT: Original language referred to the "conditional payments" as "non-monetary benefits", which is not correct. They are in fact cash, it's simply that you only get the cash if you do missions etc.

 

[eaglejarl]

More stuff that's been sitting in QM QUINOA for months, already signed off:

Things in Jiraiya's Notes​

This is a partial list of what Kagome has discovered in Jiraiya's notes.

• Seals
  • Instant Darkness Dome: Blanks out all light in a certain radius
  • Electrocution Seal: sends a surge of raiton energy (which works exactly like electricity except in cases where that would make the QMs lives difficult, at which point it works differently) into whatever they are attached to for some period of time. Touching the object is harmful but not lethal.
  • Substitution Seals: Two-element seal. Swap the positions and velocities of the objects the seal elements are attached to, so long as those objects are close enough, have LOS to one another, are below mass and volume limits, and are similar enough in mass.
• Jutsu. These went to Naruto and are no longer available to you.
  • Earth Element: Swamp of the Underworld jutsu. Create a massive area of chakra-infused sticky mud / quicksand for enemies to fall into.
  • Needle Jizō jutsu. Use your hair for protection or to throw needles. Requires a lot of natural hair
• Detailed instructions on how to learn each of the Elemental chakra natures
• Recipes
• Personal information on various people that he wants to be on the good side of -- their food preferences, birthdays, etc
• Philosophy and musings about the Will of Fire, the future of the EN, etc
• Self-flagellation
• Notes for Icha Icha -- plot ideas, character sketches, etc
  • Details of Jiraiya's various less-classified adventures with the name changed to Jun, his protagonist
• Political/espionage stuff
  • Blackmail on various Leaf people (ninja and non ninja)
  • Blackmail on various non-Leaf people (ninja and non ninja)
  • Lists of agents across the EN
• His Lightning Lash jutsu from Chapter 223. Creates a weapon, much like Noburi's Water Whip, but more flexible:
  • Will cut through things or wrap around them as you choose (e.g. it cut Hana's sword but wrapped around her neck)
  • Will send non-lethal shocks to a person it's wrapped around.
• Lots and lots of seals
  • Earth Pillar Seal: when activated, extrudes a 50cm thick pillar of chakra construct stone at a respectable speed.
  • City of Pillars. Causes 1d6 dozen stone pillars of various randomly-chosen heights (5m to 30m) and diameters (10cm to 500 cm) to erupt out of the ground in a large area. For some reason, they all have either the kanji for 'Dream' or 'Sunshine' on them.
  • Twin Repulsion Seals: When both are active, they repel each other when they get too close.
  • Naruto's bijū seal. Not complete information but it's a good start.

Everything in the "Political/espionage stuff" section went to Asuma and is no longer available to you. Basically, Mari said "Given our precarious position after you nearly got executed, we are not going to fuck around. Give him these things, don't keep copies, and don't try to recreate them. Do not give him any excuse to be angry with us until we've had time to win back some points."

Other than the Pangolins, what are our other revenue streams, and how much do they make?

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1. Your monthly tax disbursement.
2. Selling tags to the Tower/general population. See the "Partial Sealing License" Informational threadmark for details.
3. The Gōketsu receive a theoretical 50% of all sales of skywalkers to the Tower. (see below) This is rolled into your tax disbursements, meaning that you get 10% in cash as the non-conditional payment and the remainder goes into your conditional-payments fund that you get in the form of mission bonuses, tax refunds, and equipment draw. Because of the strategic importance of the seals, the Tower is bearing the costs of these payments instead of the seller as would be normal. The intent is to maintain the incentive structure for people to sell them without bankrupting the Tower.
4. You are gearing up for salt production but there is no actual revenue from that yet.

+1 XP if someone figures out how many skywalkers are being made per month.

Economics​

The following questions are from the wiki and player-suggested answers Economic Questions

Q: Salt production rates, sale price, and other major factors in the enterprise.

A: Depends on how many salterns you have in place. Relevant facts:

1. Normal price for salt is 650 ryō per kilogram. It varies, but that's a reasonable average under current market conditions.
2. Salt production rate is roughly 2kg/day per 10'x10' saltern as per @Inferno_Vulpix's post.
3. There will be a 15% fee paid to the distributor per sale.
4. There will be a 50% bribe processing fee paid to the Merchant Council per sale, in order to keep them from hassling you your sales permits in good order. This will obviously be on the gross, not the net of fees.
5. Total income for the day is therefore: 2 kg/saltern/day * 650 R/kg = 1300 R/saltern/day - (1300R * 0.15) - (1300R * 0.5) = 455 R/saltern/day
6. These numbers are based off natural evaporation and assume optimal conditions; actual income will depend on evaporation conditions (weather, animal attack on salterns, etc). If Akane gets involved then the cost of her time must be factored in.

 

[eaglejarl]

What actual renovations are taking place on the clan compound? How large is it? How many rooms are there in it? What are they for? How many of those are currently usable?

Basically, I want to know what we're getting for that very large mortgage.

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[A]ny chance that you could just lay bare your general reasoning of Goketsu's current income vs expenses, sans concrete numbers? Or, if that is too spoilery or not ready for general consumption yet, maybe request some help by a couple of players that seem both into this stuff and fair when it comes to not abusing knowledge?

Click to shrink...

This isn't just a house, it's a clan compound. It's at least two dozen acres of land, a square plot more than 300m on a side, that includes:

• A 10' wall around the whole area and an imposing gate
• A very large two-floor mansion at the end of a decorative multi-colored gravel walkway, with extensive basements and sub-basements, some of which were very clearly produced via jutsu.
• Five smaller one-family houses, again one-floor, with mundane basements
• A hedge maze with a meditation grove in the center
• Elaborate gardens, some of which contained rare medicinal herbs
• A hot spring with a communal bath house and segregated bathing areas
• A dozen minor outbuildings (sheds, a dedicated jail with 4 cells, etc)
• A training hall (a roofed building containing a 50' wide, 10' deep pit covered in sawdust to use for a sparring ground) plus an attached sickbay / recovery area

The main 'house' is more of a rambling mansion built approximately in the shape of an X. The central common area includes library (sadly, the books have all moldered away) and a commercial-grade kitchen. The wings are intended for living space and each contain various linen and cleaning closets, bathrooms, and 5 separate bedrooms varying in size from "1-person luxurious" to "master bedroom that's just silly". The basement contains the family vault. The first subbasement contains what was probably an alchemist's lab and storage for test subjects that were undoubtedly not humans, really, we promise, as well as a secret tunnel that comes up outside the walls of Leaf and contains a number of locked and barred gates down its length, as well as concealed pits and multiple sets of support beams with "PLACE EXPLOSIVE TAG HERE TO CAUSE COLLAPSE" painted on them. The exact number of subbasement levels is unknown, and it may be best left that way, since not even the ANBU wanted to go too deep.

The main house still looks impressive, but the roof leaks everywhere and has three head-sized holes where it's rotted out. (Fortunately, all on the side away from the street.) The furniture was all so musty and bug-eaten that it needed to be burned. Most of the outbuildings are badly damaged by weather, termites, chakra-enhanced varmints, etc. The grounds are second-growth forest at this point and swarming with minor varmints.

Jiraiya bought it because he felt it was a steal for what you were getting and he was planning ahead to when this would be a real clan with hundreds of people in it. As to why he thought he could afford it, based on your very limited understanding after perusing the clan account books it's clear at this point that:

He had significant training in accounting, presumably as part of running his spy network. Tracking the economics of foreign polities would have been a major focus of his efforts.

After 40+ years of ninja service and opportunities for looting the people he assassinated, he was stupidly wealthy. Of course, he left all his savings to Naruto, since he figured that the Gōketsu had enough in the bank + Pangolin income to be fine.

He had income streams aside from the Pangolin money. You can tell that they're there but you cannot understand what they are or how to put your hands on them because the paranoid bastard wrote the accounts in something that is at best a cryptic shorthand and may actually be active encoding.

If you manage to figure out what these revenues are and how to get at them, and if he hasn't bequeathed them to Naruto or someone else, then you'll be in better shape than you are.

 

[Rihaku]

So you're saying land will be really cheap to buy from the Daimyo, got it

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It depends whether or not the Daimyo actually owns the land or just administrates it for the Kage. The latter seems more likely. But in either case, wild undeveloped land shouldn't be too expensive as there is a substantial abundance of such in LoF. Leaf's limiting factor is not fertile land but rather the security needed to keep said land free of chakra beasts. I imagine land that is closer to a source of security (major cities) would be somewhat more expensive as it's cheaper to protect.

The market value of land can be calculated by the following:

For land with 0 security costs -

Normal Land: 1 Sengoku Cho is roughly 5 acres and produces 11.7 Koku worth of food, 1 Koku is worth 4,240 Ryo. 4.5 Koku are spent feeding the farmers working the land, profits from 1 Cho equal 7.2 Koku = 30,528 Ryo per annum. Capital value of fertile, secured, land is equal to 10 - 20x the annual profit, so a value of 300,528 - 601,056 Ryo per Cho or 15 - 30 million Ryo per sq. kilometer.

Chakra Soil Land: As above but it produces 22.5 Koku worth of food using 4.5 farmers, profits from chakra land equal 18 Koku per year or 76,320 Ryo. Capital value is thus roughly 2.5 times that of Normal Land.

For land with security costs -

Land with an annual security cost less than the profit per annum will be worth (30,528 - Cost of Security)*(10 to 20)
Chakra land is the same but use 76320 instead of 30,528.
Land with an annual security cost above the profit per annual is effectively worthless and should be very cheap.

One can either raise the productivity of the land (efficient farming methods) or lower the security cost (clearing it and building walls). If lowering the security cost is a known effective tactic, then lands that this tactic can be applied to will be more expensive. The market value of such lands would be (The Capital Value - The Investment Needed to Lower Security Costs to 0 or near 0), shortened to (C - I). If I is high enough, said land will still be near-worthless because it's too difficult to secure.

You can figure out the market value of a given plot of land (assuming it's reasonably close to Leaf) by taking its Capital value and deducting:

1) The cost of however many Chakra Beast Extermination missions is needed to clear the land, plus
2) The cost of however many missions it takes to remove tree stumps and otherwise make the land suitable for habitation, plus
3) The cost of however many missions it takes to wall off the land.

 

[Evenstar]

Value-of-compound calculation:
Land: 43.7 million Ryo
Land in hidden villages ain't cheap, and we have over 20 acres of it, in a busy district, with direct access to running water. Which makes it absurdly prime land. Seriously.

4000 feet of 10-foot-high stone wall: 20 million Ryo
Comparable defensive walls in historical Japan would be very thick, especially if they're ten feet tall. (They don't use mortar, instead relying on well-fitted stone.) I'm going to eyeball these as "about four feet thick." 4 feet thick * 10 feet high * 4000 feet long = 160,000 cubic feet of stone. We've counted the corners twice, but given the added difficulty of bracing them I think that's fair.

There's probably going to be a quarry within 160 miles, even in Fire Country, so we don't need to worry about transporting things absurd distances. However, for a clan compound like this you'd want quality ninja on it so your shipment isn't waylaid or tampered with.

We are Orochimaru, so we have access to as many storage seals as we want. It's been shown that a thick book or sheaf of notes can hold roughly 20 storage seals; I can fit about five books in my hiking backpack after all my other gear is packed. So our ninja can carry about 100 storage seals.

1 cubic foot of stone conveniently weighs about 100 kilograms. Let's say that it takes a full day for each round-trip to the quarry; using a single ninja, it will take 1,600 days to transport all the stone.

Clearly, we need more than one ninja for this. Let's say that a team of four is put on it: one Jounin, and three Genin pack mules. This still takes a full year of continuous quarry runs, which is kind of ridiculous; you would have to pay for 104 2-week B-rank missions to actually transport it all, which comes to 700,000 Ryo * 104 = at least 72 million Ryo, before actual assembly of all that stone.

Assembly won't be cheap either. This is the wall that's the main facade for the compound from the street; it's going to be good-looking, neatly-faced stone, and just building a wall that high is expert work already. Let's call it a team of *mutter* journeymen working twelve hours a day under a master mason, for a total cost of *mutter* Ryo per day. Each stone is about the size of a large modern brick (a foot long by four inches tall by four inches wide), so it's 12 stones deep and 30 courses tall.

In a day each mason can lay about *mutter* stones, so that's *mutter* linear feet one course high per day, which means the whole thing takes about a year to build. Multiply that by the cost of labour we calculated earlier, 10% markup... and we get another three quarters of a million Ryo.

Clearly it's cheaper to just hire the same S-Ranker that Oro got to do the sub-basements. Pay them 20 million Ryo for two days' work, and let them Jutsu the walls out of nowhere for a quarter the cost.

(Alternately:
A: The quarry was closer than 40 miles away.
B: The quarry was under Oro's control to such an extent that it's only a C-rank mission.
C: The walls are made of wood and plaster, not stone.)

5 moderately-sized 1-floor houses: 1.5 million Ryo.
This assumes they aren't impressive, but made of high-quality materials and built to last, and that each one is capable of comfortably lodging ten or so people.
The basements make up about a third of the cost here, even though I'm assuming they're only 2 rooms.

A dozen misc. outbuildings: 1.1 million Ryo
Looking at a half-dozen worked examples of various outbuildings, their average cost looks to be about 90,000 Ryo. These are probably pretty workmanlike and nondescript, so I'm not going to adjust that upwards for higher quality.

Training Hall: 0.3 Million Ryo
This is mostly a matter of telling a whole bunch of civvies with shovels to get at it.

It takes 1 gravedigger about 1 day to dig a hole 6 feet deep by 8 feet tall by 3 feet wide. That's 144 cubic feet of earth per person per day. Our training "hall" is 50 feet wide by 50 feet wide by 10 feet deep, which is 25,000 cubic feet of earth, or 173 person-days of digging. Since it's unskilled labor, it's cheap; the cost for all the earth-moving is under ten thousand ryo.

The shoring that keeps the dirt walls from collapsing in the next rain will cost a lot more. 200 linear feet of wood ten feet tall; one carpenter can shore *mutter* feet in one day at a cost of *mutter*, so that works out to about 200,000 ryo. (We don't need to worry about the transport or material costs for the lumber, because We Are In Leaf; it's peanuts.)

Call the attached medical area a small-but-specialized outbuilding at about another hundred thousand Ryo, and we have a total of 0.3 million Ryo.

Onsen/Bathhouse: 0.3 Million Ryo
Likely as as large as the medium houses, and takes more specialist work. I don't have enough of a floorplan to be super accurate, but this is easily three hundred thousand Ryo.

Hedge Maze & Gardens: 15 Million Ryo
The maze would take a staff of a dozen gardeners working half the year to maintain, and about seven years to grow naturally. It was probably made using Jutsu, but would cost about 15 million Ryo to do the hard way. Keeping it well-maintained demonstrates our continuous control of skilled labour.
The nonmedical gardens fall under this general heading as well, and have been included in this cost.

Medicinal Garden: Impossible to estimate. Possibly literally priceless.
This garden may well contain the experimental results of a competent biosealer. If nothing else, it no doubt contains many samples of exceedingly rare plantlife. Every blossom could be worth its weight in gold.

Colorful Gravel Path: 0.75 Million Ryo or more.
It takes about a ton of gravel to bury 30 square meters 2 centimeters deep. Let's say it's actually 2 tons of gravel, which would give us a path 30 meters long by 2 meters wide. It's only one trip for one ninja; you can store 2 tons of stone in 19 storage scrolls.

If the stone is native to Fire - from somewhere on its coast, most likely - then this path is worth no less than three quarters of a million Ryo. If it's not available in Fire, then this is a show of power and reach; it's a subtle advertisement of our ability to import rare, heavy goods from far abroad. If this is the case, it could easily be worth more than 10 million Ryo.

Aboveground Mansion: 9.65 Million Ryo
Hoooo boy. This took some calculation. We have:
- 4 2-story wings. Each floor of each wing has 5 bedrooms, toilets, and closet space. That's around 50 rooms in total.
Assuming the average size is "Roomy enough for two to sleep, four if you squeeze it", each bedroom has a closet, and that there's two bathrooms per floor per wing, that makes the total value of the materials used to build the wings ~1,797,000 Ryo. The common area pushes us past two million.

... But that's if Oro built this out of dirt-cheap materials and hired apprentice carpenters to do all the work. It'd be spacious, but not any higher-quality than a peasant hovel. The value of the needed expertise and higher-quality materials damn near quadruples the final price.

Subsurface Mansion: 10 million Ryo or more. Possibly literally priceless.
Because of the specialized nature of the mansion's basement rooms - and the degree of OPSEC that would have been involved in their construction - they may also be literally priceless. The sub-sub-basements are definitely literally priceless, containing as they may the last surviving specimens of Orochimaru's biosealing research.
It's also almost impossible for me to estimate the value of rooms that I don't know the size or composition of, especially when their construction clearly involved Jutsu: all I can say for sure is that they're worth more than 10 million Ryo.

TOTAL RYO VALUE:
Land: 43.7 Million
Outer Wall: 20 Million
Hedge Maze & Gardens: 15 Million
Subsurface Mansion: 10 Million
Aboveground Mansion: 9.65 Million
Five 1-floor houses: 1.5 Million
Miscellaneous Outbuildings: 1.1 Million
Gravel Path: 0.75 Million
Training Hall: 0.3 Million
Onsen: 0.3 Million
----------------------------------------------------------
At least 102.3 Million Ryo.

 

[Ipsos Custodes]

Your monthly mortgage payment is R675,526 according to the mortgage calculator website we plugged the numbers into. +1 XP if someone digs through the timeline and figures out the date on which the mortgage was taken out so we know how much of it has been paid off.

Click to shrink...

The end of Chapter 123 has the mention of the three compounds Jaraiya is considering. Chapter 124 seems to start with them already in the compound, and specifies the date to be August 31.

The current date is January 6.

Assuming payments are due the last day of the month, that means we've made 4 payments.

Each payment is R675,526, for a total of R2,702,104 already paid.

The principal was R51,150,000 - which means it's now R48,447,896

+1XP please, @eaglejarl

Incidentally, at R3435 per Skywalker, and the rate of Skywalkers being 6/hour, we can fully pay off the mortgage in 2351 hours. If we use the R10,000,000 we have in the bank, that gives us a principal of R38,447,896 - able to be paid off in about 1865 hours. 932 hours of work if split evenly between Hazou and Kagome.

 

[OliWhail]

Let's try this again. A big thank-you to @Adept_Woodwright, @Halberdier, and @Jello_Raptor for volunteering to make suggestions and vet changes.

Your seal licenses have come through, making both Hazō and Kagome fully recognized Sealmasters of the Village Hidden in the Leaves. To maintain this privilege, the Hokage Tower requires a fee of 100 explosive tags of various tiers per month.

Any seal intended for sale outside of the sealmaster's clan must be approved by the Tower. Applications to sell seals which have been approved previously consist of scheduling an appointment to demonstrate to a currently-approved sealmaster that you can explain and safely produce the seal. For this purpose, Jiraiya has signed off on Hazou producing the seals listed below.

Applications for the right to sell seals never previously approved by the tower must include a one-time fee of (20-100 depending on how draconian the Tower is feeling) copies of the fully functioning seal or set thereof for testing and the village reserve stock, along with written instructions governing the seal's intended uses and a copy of the sealmaster's notes in case the sealmaster dies before anyone else masters the seal.

This acts as a rudimentary form of patent protection/incentive: every sealmaster other than the inventor who makes that seal, or any seal derived from it, gives 50% of gross revenue from said seals to the original inventor for 2 years.

So long as you maintain your license, you may freely sell seals which lack 'substantial military applications', a classification over which the Hokage's administration maintains sole discretion. At present, these include:

• Party Trick
• Air Freshener (probably no market)
• The eight basic Chime seals (probably no market)

The Tower claims right of first refusal on all military seals, for which they will pay a standard rate depending on the seal. At present, these include:

• Explosive tags
• Alarm seals
• Air Dome
• Storage seals
• Usamatsu's Glorious Life-Saving Purifier

If they choose not to buy your stock, the Tower will provide a receipt (printed on their fancy press) for each tag i) saying they have declined to purchase it, and ii) giving you the right to sell a tag of that type within the next seven days (so that prospective buyers know they are not purchasing bootleg tags). You may offer seals accompanied by valid receipts to anyone, at any rate you can successfully negotiate.

The letter informing you of your licenses emphasizes that, though it should go without saying, buying or selling regulated seals without a receipt, or granting access to classified knowledge or equipment to unauthorized persons, is treason.