Ashi cut off Mito's tirade with surprising force and stepped in front of Haru in a single stride.
To him, Haru was now the great benefactor of the entire Uzumaki Clan.
"Mito, you've gone too far. How can you show so little respect to Hokage-sama?"
Ashi planted himself firmly on Haru's side and spoke with righteous conviction.
"Ashi-ni, you..."
Mito was left speechless. Not only was Ashi refusing to stand with her, he was actually speaking up for Haru.
How was that possible?
He was her own family.
"Haru, what exactly did you do?"
Mito ground her teeth and glared at Haru in frustration. She could not understand how, in just a single day, Ashi had ended up completely on Haru's side.
Haru watched the whole thing with amusement. Even he had not expected Ashi's reaction to be this strong.
That was the charm of money.
"What could I possibly have done to the Uzumaki Clan?"
"The Uzumaki Clan is the Leaf's beloved family and sworn brothers."
"I just added a little money. Not much, only fifty billion ryo."
Fifty billion.
That was real money.
Right now, even if the Senju Clan emptied out everything it owned, it still could not come up with that amount unless they sold off all their land and family property.
No wonder.
Mito quieted down.
At this point, no matter how much she argued, Ashi was never going to stand on her side again.
A married daughter was spilled water. Strictly speaking, Mito already counted as part of the Senju Clan now. In a real sense, she and the Uzumaki Clan were no longer one house.
Haru had used real money to aid the Uzumaki Clan and had directly bought over the entire clan with cash. That amount was enough to make the whole Uzumaki Clan throw itself into danger for him without hesitation.
More importantly, Haru was the Hokage. He had the moral high ground and the money. As long as Ashi had a functioning brain, he knew exactly whose side to take.
Haru had given too much.
"Mito, you need to be sensible."
"Hokage-sama truly means well toward the Uzumaki Clan. We Uzumaki are straightforward people. We can't repay kindness with resentment."
"You don't show Haru-sama any respect at all. You don't even treat him like the Hokage. You won't even call him Hokage-sama."
Ashi put on his older-brother expression and lectured Mito in a solemn tone.
Mito was supposed to be the bridge between the Uzumaki Clan and the Leaf. If even she didn't respect the Hokage, then how was the Uzumaki Clan supposed to advance alongside him in the future?
That fifty billion hadn't been wasted at all.
Haru watched Mito droop under Ashi's lecture, and he almost lost control of his expression. He tried to keep a straight face, but the smile still escaped at the corners of his mouth.
After finishing his lecture, Ashi returned to the matter of Yozuki.
Haru himself was not really interested in the little girl. In the end, she was still too young, and some things had not quite... matured yet. Cough. What he meant was that he preferred someone a little older. In age.
It was better for Yozuki to stay with Mito. Having a sealing master like Mito guide her would be a major advantage for her future growth.
With Yozuki's matter settled for the moment, Ashi and Yayoi planned to stay in the Leaf for a while and study how things worked there.
The Leaf had developed so well that Ashi wanted to learn from its experience and bring some of that back to revitalize the Uzumaki Clan. Relying on the Leaf forever was not a long-term solution.
Of course, that hope was probably doomed to fail.
The two biggest reasons the Leaf had developed so quickly were very simple.
First, it had ruthlessly squeezed Tobirama's labor to develop advanced technology and build sweatshops.
Second, it had gone around slaughtering pigs. In Haru's eyes, the nobles of the Land of Fire were just a herd of fat pigs waiting for the knife.
The Uzumaki Clan had neither a first-rate workhorse like Tobirama nor a noble class sitting on top of ninja to exploit.
Their daimyo was Ashi himself.
There was no one left to butcher.
A few nights later, at the Hokage residence
Haru was lying shirtless against the bed, staring at the ceiling.
Human desire really was ridiculous. Sometimes people made mistakes and lost their way, but as long as they sincerely repented and worked to correct themselves, they could regain inner peace and freedom.
Right now, it was post-battle clarity.
"Master... are you still not rested?"
Kaede and Rin leaned back toward him from either side. There was a whole lot of pale skin in view, and very unfortunately, his moment of clarity ended. His lower body defeated his brain once again.
After repeating that cycle a few times, Haru finally recovered his usual calm and composure. It was an old habit of his.
Once desire, lust, and all other wants were temporarily cleared away, the only things left in his head were the great matters concerning the entire Leaf.
The Leaf was flourishing now. All kinds of factories and small workshops had sprung up around it.
Cheap industrial products were flowing endlessly into the Land of Fire.
Under Haru's deliberate policy guidance, merchants throughout the entire country had begun traveling to and from the Leaf on a massive scale.
The Leaf had people, money, and a market. Above all, it had buying power. Everyone knew there was money to be made doing business in the Leaf. A shop in the Leaf's commercial center could bring in a fortune every day, and real estate prices across the village had begun climbing rapidly.
Especially in central areas.
They had already surpassed the housing prices in the capital of the Land of Fire.
At this point, the Leaf practically needed to create a whole new department just to manage population flow. Too many people were pouring in.
The Leaf's propaganda campaign had played a major part in that. A single blockbuster movie had shown the entire ninja world the Leaf's sense of justice.
Then, when people arrived, they discovered the place was a true treasure land.
Buying a house in the Leaf not only gave you a profitable store opportunity, it also came with the most precious feature in the entire world.
Safety.
If you lived in the Leaf, bought a home there, and got a local resident ID, then the old days of sitting at home eating hot pot and singing only to get robbed by wandering ninja were over forever.
What wandering ninja would dare make trouble in the Leaf?
Not just in the Leaf. Haru had sent ninja to wipe out every wandering ninja, ronin, and bandit within a hundred miles of it.
The Leaf was doing major business now. If it couldn't even guarantee the safety of merchants coming to trade there, then what kind of business center was it supposed to be?
Haru had openly declared throughout the ninja world that anyone foolish enough to attack merchants doing business with the Leaf would be treated as an enemy of the Leaf itself.
That couldn't completely prevent attacks on caravans, but it still gave merchants traveling to and from the Leaf a tremendous sense of security. Haru wasn't just making empty threats either. He had already made heads roll across the ninja world.
It wasn't just merchants and commoners. Even the nobles of the Land of Fire were desperate to buy homes in the Leaf. After Haru had put them through the wringer, they had finally learned their lesson. At the end of the day, they were only ordinary people with worldly authority and large fortunes.
But what did power and wealth really amount to in front of armed ninja?
Nothing more than fat pigs waiting to be slaughtered.
The only reason Haru hadn't killed them yet was because he still had use for them. For now, he was letting them stay in place and keep sucking blood from the Land of Fire, fattening themselves further. The moment he needed money, they would be the first ones under the knife.
Those noble parasites were shameless, low, despicable creatures, but they deeply understood how to keep a family line going for centuries.
The answer was simple.
Never keep all your eggs in one basket.
If they couldn't beat the Leaf, then they would just join the Leaf.
The smart ones split their households overnight. One branch stayed in the Land of Fire to keep holding office, while another branch moved straight to the Leaf, buying houses and starting businesses.
After all, business in the Leaf was wildly profitable now.
Hokage-sama, we've already been Leaf people for a long time.
Surely you can't turn on your own people now.
We contribute a lot of GDP to the Leaf.
Houses.
Houses.
The good locations in the Leaf were almost impossible to get now.
Originally, houses in the Leaf had been worthless, especially the plain wooden homes of ordinary civilians. Some of them weren't even worth as much as the air conditioners Haru sold to nobles. But there were simply too many buyers.
The fools who had sold their houses early two months ago regretted it so badly their intestines were practically turning green. The pace of rising prices had long surpassed the speed of their regret.
And when those people who had sold their homes tried to use the money to buy back a new one, they discovered the money from the sale was no longer enough to buy even a single replacement.
All they could do was bitterly rent houses in the Leaf instead, while rents kept rising too.
You don't want to rent?
There are plenty of others who do.
The miserable state of those unlucky people had been seen clearly by everyone else who still owned homes, and they clutched their deeds tightly.
Pay a high price for their house?
Sorry. Not for sale. No amount of money would do.
But the power of money still far exceeded ordinary people's imagination. There were always some who couldn't resist selling, only to watch prices surge again and become the next tragic fools.
Too few houses.
Too many people.
Haru let out a sigh. He was actually worrying about overpopulation now. Tobirama would never have dared imagine a problem like this.
Population represented the deepest potential of a ninja village.
Refugees, merchants, commoners, great nobles. They were all pouring toward the Leaf, waving money around and hoping to buy property, settle down, and live there.
The main urban area of the Leaf simply could not hold any more people. There were too many.
But Haru didn't want to push them away. Apart from the refugees who ended up in sweatshops, the rest were from the richest families in the ninja world.
The Leaf's residency policy was still extremely simple and direct. If an ordinary person bought a house in the Leaf and lived there for more than three years, they got a resident ID.
Once people discovered what Leaf property meant, their eyes turned red. They started buying houses there like crazy. This wasn't speculation. They genuinely intended to move there and live.
Haru had no way to swing a heavy fist and suppress that, because they were actually paying real money and sincerely wanted to become loyal sons of the Leaf.
At this point, expanding the Leaf's area was the only option. That was going to happen sooner or later anyway. The Leaf didn't lack land. All around it were forests and empty fields, and all of that belonged to the village.
That would solve both problems at once, too many people and too few houses.
As he drifted off, Haru began planning the new district in his head. Commercial areas, residential zones, schools, hospitals...
Any new urban area would need complete supporting infrastructure. Building all of that from scratch would cost a ridiculous amount of money.
And Haru didn't want to pay for it.
Such a huge expense would seriously drag down the Leaf's development.
Then Haru thought of pre-sales.
Although the surrounding area was still nothing but empty land, he was confident that as long as the Leaf published a clear urban plan and released the news, that would be enough.
A brand-new district would be built here. Complete supporting facilities. The best hospitals. The best schools. The safest area in the entire ninja world.
At that point, he could probably stick a sign into the dirt and sell the plot as if it were already a finished house.
Haru knew exactly how profitable real estate could be. If this plan succeeded, the Leaf's financial report next year would look very good indeed.
Money. Houses.
Why did every world revolve around those things?
In the future, when a young man from the Leaf wanted to marry, his future mother-in-law would probably ask first whether he owned a house in the Leaf.
Thinking about that, Haru gradually drifted off to sleep.
The next day
Haru went to slack off. In other words, to work.
While working, a few more nobles sent gifts, hoping to use Haru's connections to buy several large houses in central Leaf so that their second sons, youngest sons, illegitimate sons, and the like could move there.
As Hokage, solving something like that would have been effortless for Haru.
But he still refused.
He couldn't open that kind of door.
How could he, as Hokage, take bribes? The Hokage's power was a public tool. He couldn't smash his own reputation for the sake of a measly one million ryo gift.
Of course, there was no chance he was returning the gifts.
As long as he didn't actually do them the favor, then it didn't count as bribery.
Office
"Shikato, property prices in the Leaf have risen too much..."
"They really have, Hokage-sama."
"There are too many floating residents in the Leaf now. Everyone wants to buy a house and settle here. Of course prices are going up."
Shikato thought about the recent real estate situation. It really was rising fast. Originally, those self-built wooden houses hadn't been worth much at all. It was the flood of outside buyers that had pushed everything up.
"Interested in doing a big piece of business?"
A smile appeared on Haru's face.
This time, Shikato actually understood that smile.
"Hokage-sama means... selling houses?"
"But all the houses in the Leaf already belong to someone. Where are we supposed to get houses to sell?"
"We can't exactly sell off all the clan houses, can we?"
Shikato shook his head. He thought Hokage-sama was daydreaming again. Housing stock in the Leaf was finite. If you wanted to sell houses, you needed actual houses to sell.
Haru pulled out a map and circled an area.
"We'll sell the houses here."
"Hokage-sama, that's empty land."
"I know."
"But there will be houses there in the future."
(End of Chapter)
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