Naruto blinked a couple of times. "Of course Hanabi and Himeki can't manage to pretend to be someone else. You need more than a byakugan and shapeshifting."
Hinata sighed. "We've figured out that you likely need to have a lot of clones around the person for a while, and neither of them have enough chakra to manage that."
"I obviously keep enough clones active to make it work," Ino added. "For some people, anyway."
He shook his head. "We're the only three on the planet with any hope of pulling it off right now. Chakra levels are a side effect, not a requirement." Both girls stared at him. "Out of the ten people on the planet with collection nodes, we're the only ones with the byakugan that allows the subconscious collection of enough information on others to emulate them."
Hinata tilted her head as she considered that. "We're using the collection nodes as extra storage?"
"It's closer to us just using what the collection nodes were already gathering. Yoko stumbled upon a couple of tricks for doing a 'deeper dive' into them, but we think they got 'reset' when being bound to us as they didn't seem to retain anything from before then. Our best guess is that the trees had a lot of ability to 'sense' things that would've fed into the nodes, but we really don't have any good way of checking that."
"So we haven't been infected by Uzumaki insanity?" Ino questioned.
"I'm assured you have been, but that isn't what lets you imitate people that well. If anything, that's because all three of us were 'infected' by the bits of the God Tree bound to us."
"How long have you known this?" Hinata asked.
"Since before I told you how I'd figured things out? A week or so before I revealed the exam island to everyone? I put notes in all of our files about it and you two should be cleared to see them. Have neither of you set up alerts for updates to your own files?"
He got the feeling that neither of them had ever seen a need for it, but both went and checked a computer to confirm that the information was in their files and had been for quite a while now. Why they'd waited so long to come to him about it was a bit of a mystery though.
Whatever their thoughts, the integration of the new group of Uzumaki was hopefully at a point where he could stop paying a lot of attention to that and focus on finishing up the replacement exam island. They were getting questions as to when it would be available, and he'd already managed to complete the portions he'd been concerned about. With the structure done he just needed to finish up the details and give everything a proper test.
A sighed as he put down the letter from Naruto. It was very hard to argue that the first run in the rebuilt exam island should be done by Uzushio, if only to 'iron out the kinks'. In fact, now that it had been brought up he didn't want to run the first exam on a rebuilt island. Hopefully the new island would be done soonish though, because every other setup for running examinations felt insufficient now.
He had people looking into changing that, admittedly, but that was probably a 'next decade' thing and who knew what Uzushio would manage in the meantime.
Moving onto his reports, he made it through several standard items of no real importance before sighing as he ran into one about more 'Land of Shrines' locations, this time in the Land of Demons and surrounding area. Apparently the local priestess had decided that her skills alone weren't enough and there was now a known plan to enshrine gods there. It was unlikely that this would allow them to see more of how the shrines worked, and there were already far too many in the ranks that felt that the shrines might be legitimate instead of trickery for any number of reasons. Which just made the things that much more impressive, honestly.
Sadly, this didn't really provide any evidence either way for whether the shrines were being used as information-gathering points for Konoha and/or Uzushio. All observations pointed at them being run as actual shrines, but there were oddities. Such as every last one of the shrine keepers currently having fox features that, when compared to shinobi, were slightly 'wrong' for the Konoha 'beast man' formula. The sole seeming exceptions were two kunoichi that had been shrine maidens in Konoha at the time they manifested their fox features. Having them all trained to at least Uzushio's genin level was also a mixed signal situation, because being able to defend a shrine made sense while also making it feel more likely that they were all just off-the-books members of Konoha and/or Uzushio.
That they all seemingly shared the ability to generate the special 'divine chakra' that the line of religious leaders from the Land of Demons was known to be able to generate was another thing entirely, especially as it wasn't actually known to be chakra. Just particularly, or perhaps singularly, effective against demons in that area and generally calming to most in ways that genjutsu-based effects generally weren't.
He was pulled out of his musing on that by his office door opening and a slightly-panicked looking C entering. Sighing, he put the report down. "What now?"
"The team doing the bonus calculations for our spies has revealed a problem," C replied.
"Someone obviously working for another village?"
"No, but also yes?"
"Then get to the point."
C handed over a sheet of paper, which upon examination contained fifteen names. Presumably the number next to them was the qualifying reports that had been confirmed through alternate sources, but eight of the fifteen also had a date and a second number next to them. For several of them it was the same number, but for others it was a smaller one. At least half the first number in all cases though.
The various pieces of information weren't labeled though, so he looked up. C didn't need a verbal question and started to explain. "Those are the top fifteen spies and their bonus-eligible report counts, along with dates of confirmed deaths and the total number of reports filed after that date."
Blinking, A looked back down at the sheet. Over half of their best-performing spies were confirmed dead and had likely seen their performance increase since they died. He sighed. "I see Uzushio is being cheeky. Again. Probably laughing their asses off at us not noticing that they've been slipping reports into our spy network with the identities of dead spies for years, though I suppose we can't assume they're responsible for all of these. Just the ones that every report since they died has been confirmed through other sources and useful."
"Er, why just those?"
"Because any other village using the identities of our own spies like this would try to cover their tracks with the occasional useless report to keep up appearances due to how difficult faking a spy would be, on top of trying to distract us from things they obviously don't want us to know with legitimate-looking false reports. Uzushio's infiltration is good enough to not need to play those games and is far more likely to be blatant about it to see how long it took us to notice while having us handle things they couldn't be bothered to take care of themselves. Though I suppose if they've been training Konoha's spies then they might have started doing the same. Hmmm."
"So you think that Uzushio has been doing this to show off and use us to accomplish goals, with the possibility of Konoha doing the same with their lessons?"
"Yes, and I'm almost certain that within the next week we'll stop getting reports from anyone on the 'we finally noticed their deceased status' list."
C nodded, now looking very much confused. "I suppose I'll let the team know."
"You do that." Shaking his head, he set the paper off to the side and returned to his reports.
It was a little over a dozen reports later when his eye started twitching, finding a fully-typed unsigned report in his stack listing just over twenty deceased spies and who was now pretending to be each. A quick check with the paper that C had brought up revealed that all eight from it were generically listed as 'Uzushio', plus one more that was more recently-deceased, compared to the more detailed information available for the rest.
Having one village obviously operating on an entirely different level from the rest of them was annoying, but at least they could take comfort in the fact that Uzushio didn't seem to have any desire to take over the rest of the continent. Or the planet, perhaps...
Ino shook her head as she reviewed the results of dropping evidence that dead spies were being impersonated into the major hidden villages. Naruto wasn't personally doing passes through the other villages for a number of reasons, but she'd decided that more direct monitoring of them was a good 'side project'. Figuring out how many dead spies existed without being noticed had led her to start using some of their identities for the requests to drop things into other intelligence networks, but then she'd started realizing how much damage the various villages were doing to each other through the same tricks.
Konoha and Oto were the only two villages with heavy use of spy networks that had properly culled their spy lists with deaths, and Kumo was the only village she'd dropped blatant hints into so far that had actually paid attention and spotted the problem. Admittedly, she'd managed to get a recording of the Raikage's reaction to the reveal and discovery of the report she'd dropped into his pile once it was obvious that his people had noticed the problem and were merely figuring out the scope. With any luck she'd also get to capture his reaction to someone noticing that the submitted 'bonus payment' suggestion had come from a different deceased shinobi...
There were other plans she could use for drawing more attention to the dead spies problem though, and Uzushio would never have that issue with the way they ran things. Though they weren't likely to let other villages know that any future dead spies were known to be dead, just to see what was attempted to be passed along. Well, assuming they ever had spies that operated in that fashion, anyway, because right now they didn't do the normal 'get spies into position' dance and instead just slipped in and out as needed.
Akira shook his head as he reviewed some of the new 'experimental seals' being worked on now that they weren't spending significant time on the drudgework of mass production of seals. He'd forgotten how much the 'constantly replenishing stock' work kept down the crazy plans, especially in those still learning. On the flipside, it was this kind of experimentation that generally led to significant innovation...provided it was done in safe areas for the inevitable failures and you didn't lose too many people to the mistakes.
So far they'd been doing okay on that, but some of that was due to convenient interruptions from the Uzukage pointing out where things were going to go very wrong for people.
The past few weeks of integrating the surviving Uzumaki from the distant settlement had only mildly impacted the seals division, and most of that was seeing how many of the survivors had enough of an aptitude for seals to possibly help in examining the combinations of seals and technology that the Uzukage had figured out. Well, that and a lot of additional examination of Hinata's seal printers, before and after they'd been improved by the Uzukage.
At least none of the recovered survivors were in any mood to argue that someone else should be in charge of running the village.
A beep from the blasted computer grabbed his attention, and he moved over to check it. He was getting better at using the thing, though admittedly incredibly focused on using a few pieces of software and not understanding it, but it still took a minute to figure out what had fired. That turned out to be a general message to one of the large distribution lists...announcing the reveal date for the new exam island.
...everyone had a feeling that there was going to be more to things than just a better-built island, the question was how much more and how many of their brains were going to want to turn to mush trying to comprehend it.
Yoko had spent most of the trip very annoyed with the noble along for the journey, but they'd finally made it through to the primary shrine in the Land of Demons. Her clones had replaced basically everything overnight with seemingly-identical but much-improved versions and placed a new bunker underneath the entire area. Shion had already found one of the entrances to the bunker, though only because she'd been consulted for where she thought hidden entrances should be, and the elements for the visual show were in place.
It was cloudy with a small amount of light rain, and a glare from Shion was all that was needed to keep the noble outside of the gate despite the weather as they moved to do the enshrinement rituals. The show started as they crossed the new torii gates, clones turning seals on in the background ensuring that they sparkled now despite not having done so when Shion came out to meet them. This started to extend around the border of the shrine grounds as they made their way in.
They started with the Amaterasu honden. Entering it, the two of them went through the motions of setting the mirror to represent Amaterasu in place and activating the various seals. This triggered the pulse of light chakra across the shrine grounds and the full activation of the 'forest' seals underneath them, but also seals on the old Mōryō spirit containment area. Those started to dissolve that structure, though slowly.
Sealing the first honden and moving to the Suijin hoden after that was in some ways anticlimactic, though the show wasn't quite over yet. As they sealed the honden and water started flowing there was now an obvious oversight of no channels for the water to flow through. Except that wasn't a problem, as a catch basin around the honden formed and channels throughout the shrine formed with the water flow, as though carved and formed by Suijin personally.
Possibly-unnoticed, one of the flows headed straight for where the containment area was just finishing dissolving away, reaching it just as the next phase of things began. New stone 'grew' from the ground as the water split into two heated streams, basins forming and starting to fill. Tastefully-prepared areas around the basins assembled themselves next, and then walls and a bathing area formed before a path assembled itself.
Not exactly planned was the rain stopping and the clouds parting to bathe the entire shrine in sunlight, though the sudden blooming of some flowers was expected from the seals finishing things up. Of course, they couldn't have a priestess without fox features at this point, so Shion discreetly triggered a seal that had been placed on her to release some of the Shrine Island summon fox beast man formula into her. To add to the effect, she channeled light chakra to create an aura around her as the formula took effect.
It was honestly impressive that she managed to keep the channeling going, given that there had been no way to practice ahead of time, though there were obvious problems afterwards. Her outfit wasn't really ready for her to suddenly have a fox tail in particular, but a couple of the shrine maidens came over to help with that. Both had practiced using chakra to speed up tailoring and quickly had things adjusted.
For the next week they'd stay here, ensuring that everything was going smoothly and dealing with the influx of expected visitors, before going through the motions of preparing the gods for their trip to the next shrine.
Hinata shook her head at Naruto's theatrics as they once again gathered into airships likely circling the new exam island. They'd already done this once, so the shock of an island taking to the air was already lost. At least this time he wasn't broadcasting all the precheck comments, but going through the whole process meant that he'd done something else he thought might be impressive enough to warrant the show.
"Think he went bigger?" Ino asked as they waited. "Despite the old one possibly being too big for some purposes, anyway."
"Naruto knew it was bordering on too large after a few issues in the exams that did get held on the old one," Hinata noted. "So I doubt he was stupid enough to go bigger without taking that into account."
"Good point."
"I'm guessing he came up with a way to shrink it in some fashion to reduce travel times without creating space problems, but I'm not sure how because it was already fairly compact for what it was."
"And of course, everyone has been focused on what he's been leaking about the moon project, leaving us entirely in the dark about this one."
"As if we hadn't been left in the dark the first time around."
"He is a fan of keeping a lid on things to preserve the surprise."
"I suspect it's more to keep us from yelling at him about doing the impossible before he's done."
"...also a possibility."
It took another twenty minutes before the show began properly. The coverings on the windows opened up, and they got their first look at the new island. It appeared to be a pentagon now, with a clear dome over the forest in the middle and what looked like a small village around the dome...but with no real extra space. The border wall was also smaller than the previous one. Similar to the previous reveal, it wasn't long before the island started to lift out of the water, revealing that this one was thicker than the old one had been.
Once the island was properly airborne the first surprise announcement came across the speakers.
Preparing primary dome flip test sequence.
A moment later the entire inside of the central dome started to rotate sideways out of view, the forest vanishing and revealing a desert environment. That sat there for two minutes before it rotated in the same way to reveal a body of water with a few scattered islands. After that sat for two minutes the entire thing rotated again to reveal a rocky, mountain-like area. Two minutes after that another rotation revealed what appeared to be a volcano, which seemingly started erupting before calming down again. Then that rotated away to reveal a larger than standard arena surrounded by trees.
"I don't have any idea how he managed that," Hinata finally said, staring as the rotation happened again to bring back the original forest.
"Where in the world did he even get the idea?" Ino asked. "Because I don't think I've seen anything capable of that kind of trick before."
"I don't know."
Primary dome flip tests passed. Deploying secondary testing areas.
All of a sudden the sides of the island under the walls split into thirds, first the center and then the outsides lifting up into a space that couldn't possibly hold them. This provided enough clearance for round platforms to push out through the holes, each holding what looked like a large park area. Once clear of the holes their angle of movement shifted upwards until they were level with the island's surface, then the outer two sections of each wall from before came back down to fill in the gaps. At the surface, walkways extended from the core island and newly-deployed sections, meeting in the middle before the walls on the core island opened up to create a passageway. Walkways then extended from the five new sections to connect to each other.
Notably, none of that should've fit inside of the island at all after seeing the dome rotate. Not that the various things the dome rotated to reveal should've all fit either, for that matter, especially not with how they'd rotated.
Secondary testing areas deployed. Preparing secondary dome flip test sequence.
There was a pause before a half-ring on the new platforms lifted up to sit over the center of each new platform, then spun to form a dome over each of them. All five then went through a process similar to the central dome, rotating out to reveal what looked like versions of the five elemental areas from the previous version of the island, but with the dome closing and ring dropping down between each. In unison they went through fire, wind, lightning, earth, and water before they hit what looked like generic testing areas and then additional arenas. After that they did another rotation, each one to a different elemental area, before going back to the original 'parks'.
Watching the 'secondary testing areas' stow themselves away was a reversal of the original deployment, returning the island to its more compact state, though the implications of them going to different elemental areas at the same time was a little more subtle. The rotations for all the areas likely didn't follow a sequence at all and any could probably be brought out at any time.
"So," Ino said as the side doors were closing up. "Do you think Naruto forgot that the laws of physics exist?"
"No," Hinata replied, shaking her head. "He's obviously just not bothered to tell the rest of us that we're using outdated reference materials for them, though I suspect that he learned a lot of this from figuring out how the inside of the Tome works. It can take the form of a necklace, so why shouldn't it have even more in there that he's not told us about?"
"Ah, there have been comments that imply that it's much bigger on the inside. Applying that to a larger scale makes sense, though I hope he wrote down how he managed it."
Naruto was a little surprised that he hadn't been yelled at for the apparent blatant disregard for the laws of physics with the new island, though going through and showing that all the 'rotated away' or otherwise undeployed areas were still accessible even while out of sight had been needed. This allowed access for any number of reasons, though while packed away you had to rely on artificial lighting. Which wasn't necessarily a problem and any of the domes could be flipped into opaque mode.
Admittedly, the fact that each area maintained its own relative gravity field was seen as the bigger curiosity to most of those doing deeper examinations. That was kind of needed to keep dirt, sand, water, and people from 'falling off' as the areas rotated out of sight. He'd not even mentioned that said gravity fields could be tweaked in strength to be more powerful if you wanted to provide a bigger challenge.
Still, for now he was going over his documentation on everything to ensure that it was all prepped for release with the correct access levels for various components. It wasn't going to be long before people were demanding to see said documentation, or asking him questions that he could just point them at the documentation for.
Teni shook her head as she looked over the bulk of the technology division, old and new members alike, as they tried to process even some of what the new island was doing. The seals division was taking things better because they regularly violated the laws of physics in similar manners, though doing so without obvious seals and instead using seemingly-permanent spatial warping to accomplish the same end result was a new one for them too.
The claimed 'seemingly-solid blade folds into the tang' trick made a bit more sense now too, because that felt like it was directly related to pulling this insanity off. Though how you figured out the base construction methods for the materials needed was another question entirely. It felt like there were leaps of logic that would require examining existing samples, but where would you find any?
Her best guess was in one of the alternate dimensions they knew were accessible with the rinnegan and other methods. Who knew what had been sitting in them just waiting to be examined.
Wame had managed to create a healing bullet...and a Rasengan bullet as that seemed to be the best way to spread the healing chakra throughout the body. The Uzukage had been thrilled with both, had suggested a few other tweaks, and then provided scanning spells. A smaller one that was less likely to overload her and an area one that would require some practice to handle the input from.
He'd also provided a box, and told her that her task was to figure out how to open it. As there was no indication of an opening method on the outside it seemed obvious that she was going to have to scan the inside, which was a great incentive to learn the scanning spells properly.
The problem was that the scanning spells provided way too much information, especially when cast correctly, and building a 'buffer' was proving to be difficult...
Hanabi shook his head while Himeki served the people in the restaurant. They didn't seem to suspect that she was a kunoichi at all, despite her having slipped up a couple of times, though there were more people trying to follow Uzushio's genin standards books these days. It made sense to be able to defend yourself from bandits, especially when they were also starting to follow the same information.
She'd already gotten both of the binary poison components into their meals, but they hadn't managed to slip the bottles into the chef's locker yet. It was part of the mission parameters, even if there was no guarantee that an investigation would reach that point if the men died on the road and nobody found them in time to realize it was poison. Hanabi had ensured that the original waitress got the antidote for the lesser poison that had made her sick for the past week though, so she should recover in the next couple of days.
Himeki would continue to cover the shifts until then, so as to not draw as much attention to the assumed identity. Running off just after local corrupt assholes died to poison would draw attention away from the chef, but having to leave because the original waitress was back again wouldn't be as likely to be noted in any meaningful manner.
The sudden addition of bandits entering the town at the far end of his range had him mentally swearing. They weren't supposed to be trying their raid for the better part of a week. Worse, it looked like they'd decided to torch the town instead for whatever reason. Juggling ideas in his head, he grimaced and dug out the seal tag with his phone in it. Dialing back to Konoha only took a minute.
"Emergency?" Ibiki's voice came over the line.
"Bandits are unexpectedly jumping the gun and going for torching instead," Hanabi replied.
There was some quick but muffled shouting from the other end of the call before the man came back. "We've just gotten word that the bandits have high-level shinobi leadership due to a recent takeover, which probably prompted the change in plans. If nobody is sounding the alarm yet then do so to provide an excuse to run. Get back here within the hour if possible, drop any mission parameters you've not completed."
"Will do."
Making a clone and sending it to transform into a panicked civilian was easy enough. A quick message to Himeki followed. Five minutes later the clone had alerted those in the restaurant to the bandits torching the other end of town. Himeki took that as a reason to grab her things and run, but the men she'd poisoned and the chef grabbed makeshift weapons to go after the bandits instead.
A few minutes later he and Himeki had grabbed their gear from the small campsite they'd been using and erased their presence enough before summoning back to Konoha.
Two hours later his clone would dispel and he'd get memories showing a pair of jounin-level missing-nin finishing off everyone they could find before searching the rubble. Presumably for the lock boxes that he'd gotten back to Konoha three days ago.
Shisui frowned as he read about another group of missing-nin taking over a bandit group. Someone was hiring them to do this kind of thing, but their network hadn't figured out who. Sighing, he secured his office and picked up the phone to call Naruto.
"Afternoon," Naruto answered.
"Hopefully your day is going better than mine," Shisui replied. "We keep running into missing-nin taking over bandit groups."
"Couple of smaller but wealthy daimyo are hoping to upset things enough to take advantage."
"I see. Feels like the kind of thing you'd be stepping in to stop, especially if you already knew."
"We can't solve all the world's problems, or if we can I'm told we shouldn't. Don't want to make anyone too reliant on us lest we end up accidentally taking over more countries without really wanting to."
That was an unfortunately sensible outlook. "I see."
"They're currently mostly consolidating criminal enterprises mode anyway, so they aren't a high priority for anyone. In more pressing news, I recently finished the new exam island. Didn't invite anyone from Konoha for the reveal, but tomorrow the notices that we want to run an exam are going out."
"Thanks for the heads up."
"No problem."
He was going to have to have someone check on what rumors were flowing out of Uzushio about the new island, because doing a reveal at all implied something more impressive than a mere replacement.
)
