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"Master, I discovered that when you boil water, the steam can actually push things!"
Gamamaru could barely contain himself.
Manji stopped walking.
For one second, he just stared.
Then his pupils contracted sharply.
Holy...
He'd spent centuries assuming Gamamaru was doing what any crown prince with unlimited free time would do: eating, sleeping, having prophetic dreams, and generally killing time until his impossibly long-lived predecessor finally stepped aside.
He had not expected the toad to independently stumble onto the principles of steam power.
Manji's mind raced through the original timeline. By now, Gamamaru should have already inherited Mount Myōboku's leadership. He should have been the Great Toad Sage, sitting on the throne, dispensing cryptic prophecies to future generations of summoners.
But Manji's presence had derailed that trajectory entirely. With no responsibilities and centuries of downtime, Gamamaru had wandered off the canonical path and started... inventing things.
The surprise lasted about two seconds.
Then Manji's eyes went cold.
Something wasn't right...
His gaze sharpened, sweeping over the oblivious Gamamaru with the clinical precision of a surgeon examining a patient who'd just presented symptoms that shouldn't exist.
Gamamaru was reaching for the wooden wheel beside his apparatus, still chattering excitedly, completely unaware of what was about to happen.
Manji moved.
One finger extended, a thread of invisible force touched Gamamaru's forehead.
The toad's eyes went blank. He pitched forward, unconscious before he hit the ground.
Manji's hand settled on top of Gamamaru's head. The Rinnegan blazed to life—concentric violet rings spinning with cold, surgical intensity. Sage chakra flooded outward in tandem with the ocular power.
A translucent replica of Gamamaru's form rose from his body, pulled free by the Rinnegan's soul-extraction technique. The spirit-form floated in Manji's palm, still wearing the toad's confused expression.
Manji stared down at it. Eyes like chips of ice.
Layer by layer, ring by ring, he scanned every thread of the soul's composition. Searching for contamination. Foreign consciousness. Parasitic implantation. The telltale fingerprints of a transmigrator hijacking a native body.
Mount Myōboku is completely isolated. Gamamaru has never been exposed to outside knowledge sources. Steam-powered mechanics don't belong in this era. This kind of conceptual leap doesn't happen by accident.
Unless someone put the idea there.
Three full minutes of examination.
The Rinnegan's glow dimmed. Manji's shoulders loosened by a fraction.
Clean. The soul was pure. Nothing but natural Myōboku energy, undisturbed and authentic. No foreign entities. No hijacked consciousness. No transmigrator signatures.
Just a very old, very bored, very clever toad who'd asked himself the right question at the right time.
He wasn't being paranoid. He was being experienced. Kaguya had smiled while planting a bone through his chest. The Yatagarasu had bowed before trying to cut his throat. After a millennium of betrayals dressed up as gifts, trust required verification.
Manji guided the soul back into Gamamaru's body with a gentle pulse of chakra.
A few seconds later, the toad's eyelids fluttered. He wobbled upright, rubbed his forehead with one stubby leg, and blinked several times.
"Uhhh... Master? What happened? I blacked out for a second."
Manji's expression had already cycled back to warmth. He patted Gamamaru's head gently. "Nothing serious. I sensed something unusual in your aura, thought maybe a stray spirit had latched onto you. Just ran a quick check. You're fine."
"Oh! Okay then."
Gamamaru accepted this without a trace of suspicion. Manji was the Grand Sage of Mount Myōboku. If he said there was a reason, there was a reason. Simple as that.
"Anyway, Master, LOOK!"
The confusion evaporated, replaced instantly by that same boundless enthusiasm. Gamamaru scrambled over to his contraption and started gesturing wildly.
A clay pot sat on a crude fire pit, water boiling furiously inside. A bamboo tube had been fitted over the spout, channeling the steam into a concentrated jet. The jet struck a palm-sized wooden wheel mounted on a stick frame, and the wheel spun. Fast. Below it, a small wooden block was being dragged along by a string attached to the axle.
"See?? When you boil the water, the steam comes out with real force! It's not just hot air—it can MOVE things! I've tested it with wooden blocks, stone chips, even a small crate. The hotter the steam, the more power it has!"
"And I figured out that if you seal the bamboo tube properly, so the steam has nowhere else to go, ALL the force pushes in one direction! Way stronger than letting it leak!"
Gamamaru crouched beside his invention, poking at the wheel with one leg, words tumbling over each other.
"I keep thinking—what if we built a BIGGER version? A huge pot, tons of water, a massive wheel. We could move boulders! Drag timber! Transport ore across mountains! And the best part—no chakra needed! Just water and fire!"
Manji looked at the device.
A crude arrangement of clay, bamboo, and wood. Held together by string and optimism. The kind of thing that would make an engineer cry.
And also, unmistakably, indisputably, the prototype of a steam engine.
He nodded slowly. Patted Gamamaru's head again. "Well done. How did you come up with this?"
Gamamaru scratched behind his ear with a sheepish grin. "I was sitting around one day thinking... what if we didn't have Sage Arts? What if we couldn't use chakra at all? How would we solve problems then? And I just started... experimenting."
Manji smiled. "Keep this between us. Don't mention it to anyone else on Mount Myōboku. Not even the other sages. Continue your research in private, and come to me first with anything new."
His voice was gentle, but his words left no room for argument.
This kind of knowledge couldn't leak into the shinobi world. Not yet. Not for a very long time. The ninja world's technological development was already bizarre enough—a civilization that could summon meteors from orbit but hadn't figured out basic plumbing. Introducing industrial mechanics a thousand years early would cause a butterfly effect so catastrophic that the entire Naruto timeline might simply cease to exist.
If steam power reached the clans now, Hashirama and Madara's legendary riverside meeting wouldn't involve skipping stones. It would involve texting each other.
Manji left Gamamaru's peak, turning the idea over in his mind.
"A dedicated secret research division. Let Myōboku's technology advance independently, behind closed doors."
The more he thought about it, the more sense it made. Mount Myōboku had nothing but time. Nearly a thousand years before the main storyline kicked off. That was enough runway to make enormous leaps—quietly, without disturbing the timeline.
By the time Hashirama and Madara were laying Konoha's foundations, Mount Myōboku might already have satellites in orbit.
..............
Senju territory. Drums beating. Bonfires blazing. Dancing in the streets.
The whole clan was celebrating Shūichi's decisive victory over Uchiha Senichi. Songs were being composed on the spot. Children reenacted the final punch using wooden swords and wildly inaccurate sound effects.
One person wasn't celebrating.
In a locked room deep inside the clan compound, Senju Shūichi knelt alone before a makeshift altar. A single candle. A cup of sake. A strip of cloth bearing the Uchiha crest, laid out with care.
"Senichi... I'm sorry. I didn't mean for it to end like that."
Tears streamed down his face. There was no one watching, no reputation to protect—just a man mourning the only person who ever truly understood him.
He hadn't known about the Mangekyō deterioration. Hadn't realized Senichi was fighting half-blind, running on fumes, burning through the last of his reserves in a desperate all-or-nothing gamble. If he'd known, he would have held back. Would have found another way.
But he hadn't known. And now Senichi was gone.
Years passed. Shūichi never leveraged his victory. Never expanded Senju territory. Never pressed the advantage against the weakened Uchiha. He just... stopped.
He spent most of his days sitting by the river where he and Senichi had first met as boys. Watching the water. Thinking about a world where things had gone differently.
One day at a time. Alone.
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