That was exactly why Aoki Yuuichi could not understand it. If the Ninja Academy's purpose was to mass-produce cannon fodder and then sift out true talent from the crowd, why would Chiba Shun spend so much effort and money on children who seemed to have no obvious genius at all? On the surface, it looked like a contradiction. To Aoki, it looked like wasted resources.
But when he saw that Aoki's expression had finally softened, Chiba Shun immediately pressed his advantage. "Besides Ayana," he said, "you probably already know some of the children I deliberately keep in contact with. If any of them catch your eye, senpai, I can step aside."
Aoki Yuuichi let out a long breath and waved a hand, as if brushing away the thought altogether.
He had no interest in them. Chiba Shun's targets were always strange—children who looked useless in the eyes of most people, kids who were mediocre even by the standards of the Ninja Academy, the sort who might struggle even to become decent cannon fodder. Aoki had neither the resources nor the patience to spend on students like that. He barely had enough to invest in the real geniuses he hoped to cultivate for himself.
Only then did the wariness in his eyes begin to fade.
After a brief silence, Aoki Yuuichi asked the question that truly mattered to him. "The Eight-Tails rampage... I heard the village took serious losses?"
Chiba Shun nodded. "It did."
Aoki's gaze sharpened. "Then there should be quite a few empty positions in the village now. Since you advanced so suddenly, didn't the Raikage make any special arrangements for you? I don't believe the village would keep two jounin at the Ninja Academy for no reason."
Chiba Shun hesitated for a heartbeat, then answered honestly, "I just came from the Raikage."
Aoki Yuuichi's eyes narrowed slightly.
"In the next few years," Chiba continued, "the Raikage intends to place some special children into the Academy. My main task is to preach the Will of Lightning to them."
Aoki Yuuichi frowned and thought for a long time, but he could not figure out what sort of child would warrant personal arrangements from the Third Raikage. He did not ask further. Chiba Shun had not said much, and that alone told him this was probably village business best left untouched.
After a while, he said, "Aside from normal expenditures, the Academy still has some spare funds. You can use thirty percent of it."
Aoki Yuuichi was not a fool. Now that Chiba Shun had strength, status, and direct contact with the Third Raikage, their relationship could no longer remain what it had once been. The old pattern—where Aoki stood above and simply tossed Chiba a small share of the students' mission earnings—could not continue. If they were going to keep working together, then the relationship had to shift from command to cooperation.
Chiba Shun nodded and accepted the goodwill. There was no point pretending otherwise. He needed Aoki's support, and Aoki needed his ideas.
At that point, the two of them had finally reached an unspoken consensus.
Once Chiba saw that Aoki Yuuichi's resistance had eased for the moment, he decided to steer the conversation toward safer ground. "Aoki-senpai," he said, "I recently invited a disabled chuunin who's skilled at making sealing scrolls to join the Academy. I also opened a sealing-scroll class at the school. It isn't a required subject—only students who are interested can take it on their own time."
He paused, then continued, "After this period of study, some children have already shown real talent in it. So I was thinking... once things settle down a little more, could we work together with the village's logistics department? Maybe have the Academy handle a few of the simpler steps in producing sealing scrolls. It would also give some of the children another way to earn money."
Aoki Yuu nodded almost at once. "That can be done. I know the person in charge of logistics. I'll talk to him."
Chiba Shun exhaled quietly in relief. That kind of answer meant Aoki Yuuichi was serious about cooperating.
Encouraged, he continued, "And besides sealing scrolls, we could also try cultivating other practical specialties. Healing. Sealing arts. Explosive tag production. Even ninja tool manufacturing."
"I suggest we bring in a few retired medical-nin, sealing specialists, explosive-tag makers, and ninja tool craftsmen to teach at the Academy."
Aoki Yuu fell silent, calculating the likely cost. A few moments later, he said, "The Academy's funding is limited. Do you think the children learning medicine or sealing arts would also have ways to earn money in the short term?"
Chiba Shun considered it seriously before regretfully shaking his head. "That would be difficult. At least for now."
Aoki Yuuichi gave a small nod. "Then let's set those two aside for the time being. I'll try to invite ninjas with the other specialties first."
"Understood," Chiba said. "I'll adjust the curriculum."
With that, the two of them quietly tested each other again through practical matters rather than words. Chiba openly revealed his weakness—his lack of connections in the village. Aoki, in turn, acknowledged something equally real: Chiba Shun's strange, troublesome imagination was valuable in a way his own wasn't.
Once the tension between them had finally loosened, Chiba Shun decided to bring up something closer to his heart. "Aoki-senpai," he said, "I've been running into a lot of problems in my training lately. Could you help me sort some of them out?"
Aoki Yuuichi raised a brow. "Talk."
Chiba found a place to sit and began explaining the issue in detail. "I want to simplify hand seals. But no matter which of the dozen or so seals I try removing, it never works. Why?"
Aoki Yuu leaned back slightly and answered without hesitation. "Simplifying seals? Every ninjutsu specialist runs into that problem eventually. The most common solution is simple: practice until your chakra gets used to the flow pattern of the jutsu."
"But there's another method, too—chakra control. Not the kind you teach the kids when you make them climb trees or walk on water. I'm talking about much finer control. Hand seals guide chakra through the body in a certain path. To shorten the sequence, you need to actively control that flow yourself and replace one of those seals with direct manipulation."
"In other words," he finished, "you substitute a seal with your own control over the chakra."
Chiba Shun froze for a second, then felt his thoughts open all at once.
He had made a ridiculous mistake. All this time, he had never even thought to ask Aoki Yuuichi about something as fundamental as simplifying hand seals.
The truth was simple enough. His circle had always been too small. Sakai Hajime, Yotsuki Ai, Killer Bee—they were all taijutsu monsters. They knew ninjutsu, yes, but only as support. Their understanding had limits. Chiba could learn from their battles, their instincts, and their tactics, but not much from their understanding of ninjutsu itself.
Aoki Yuu was different. He was a real ninjutsu jounin, one who had lived through the brutal Second Shinobi World War and survived. And now Chiba Shun finally understood why the Third Raikage had entrusted someone like him with the Ninja Academy in the first place.
At the very least, Aoki Yuuichi was not like Naruto—someone who could only brute-force his way through chakra and hope that repetition would solve everything. Aoki could articulate his understanding clearly. He could explain the structure behind the art.
Chiba Shun suddenly realized he had underestimated a war-seasoned jounin by an absurd degree.
At first, he had only intended to ask a few questions to ease the awkwardness between them. But now that his mind had truly shifted, he no longer held back. One question led to another. Then another. Soon, he was laying out every problem he had run into while training, from seal simplification to chakra transitions to why certain jutsu felt unstable no matter how many times he used them.
Aoki Yuuichi did not hide anything. In fact, somewhere deep down, he felt a trace of regret.
If he had taken the initiative to guide Chiba Shun when Shun was still only a chuunin... if he had truly invested in him then... perhaps Chiba Shun would now genuinely think of him as a teacher. If he had also offered support back when Shun was training the A-rank Earth Release: Mountain Earth Technique, maybe their relationship would have become something much stronger than this uneasy partnership.
But regrets had no use now.
By the end of the discussion, Chiba Shun felt that theory alone was no longer enough. So he shamelessly pressed further and asked Aoki Yuuichi to come to the training grounds and personally help him with his ninjutsu practice.
Aoki Yuuichi could only stare at him in disbelief for a moment.
Chiba Shun really was the sort who could seize an opening and cling to it without shame.
In the end, though, Aoki cooperated. Over the following days, he personally gave Chiba pointers during training. After that, he even introduced him to several jounin in the village who specialized in ninjutsu, telling Chiba that he could ask them for advice when he had time.
Chiba Shun had plenty of time. And even if he didn't, he was the kind of person who would carve time out by force.
The very next day, he bought gifts and began paying visits.
Since the people he was visiting were all jounin, ordinary presents were meaningless. Something like a longsword would be pointless, and most of them would not care for little favors. But explosive tags were different. Among shinobi, explosive tags were the closest thing to hard currency.
So Chiba Shun went from one jounin to another with bundles of explosive tags in hand, asking for advice. Once he finished with one person, he pestered them for recommendations and used that to move on to the next.
Very soon, all the jounin in Kumogakure came to know a strange new rumor in the village: a lunatic had appeared who roamed around carrying explosive tags and hounding people with ninjutsu questions.
Chiba Shun did not care about their personalities, their positions, or their tempers. As soon as he arrived, he would hand over a dozen explosive tags and then, without the slightest pleasantry, begin bombarding them with questions about the problems he had encountered while performing ninjutsu.
And after the questions came the sparring.
He would badger them into fighting him with ninjutsu. After the spar, he would ask them to point out his weaknesses. After that, he would continue pestering them for another day or two—sometimes longer—until they finally lost patience, took some mission outside the village just to escape him, and vanished from sight. Only then would Chiba Shun move on to the next victim.
In just three months, he consulted fifteen jounin like that. Every single time, he paid a dozen explosive tags. One tag was worth three thousand ryo. Twelve came to thirty-six thousand. Fifteen jounin meant a total of five hundred and forty thousand ryo spent as though it were water.
It was obscene. Even by shinobi standards, it was absurd.
Chiba Shun burned through his entire fortune doing it. In the end, he even shamelessly borrowed another two hundred thousand ryo from Aoki Yuu.
Aoki Yuuichi was speechless when he heard. For the first time, he even felt a trace of regret over deciding to cooperate so readily with Chiba Shun. But now that Shun was borrowing money from him, Aoki could hardly refuse. Refusal at that point would have looked petty, and worse, would have undermined the very cooperation he had just accepted.
Yet despite the money vanishing like sand through fingers, the results left Chiba Shun completely satisfied.
Within three months, he managed to simplify the hand seals of every single ninjutsu he had learned. Even his hand-seal speed improved, rising from four and a half seals per second to roughly five seals per second.
That half-seal difference sounded small, but in actual combat, it was enormous. Originally, Chiba Shun had thought that unless he advanced all the way to elite jounin, his speed would be very difficult to increase any further. But under the guidance of Kumogakure's jounin, his understanding of ninjutsu deepened sharply, and that deeper understanding alone pushed his speed upward.
Three months later, Chiba Shun was completely broke and two hundred thousand ryo in debt. At last, he stopped asking other people for help and shut himself back inside the Ninja Academy to digest everything he had learned. He intended to summarize it, test it, refine it, and push his own foundation even further.
In the past, when he trained at the Academy, he had done so almost in complete isolation, like someone groping forward with his eyes covered. But now things were different. After drawing from the strengths of so many jounin, his thoughts had finally opened up. During those months of consultation, he had written down countless strange ideas, little fragments of understanding, wild possibilities that now needed to be tested one by one.
Far away in the Land of Earth, inside the Tsuchikage Building, Onoki sat buried behind a mountain of documents taller than he was. An intelligence adviser entered the office, handed him a report, and said, "Third Tsuchikage, we've found it."
"The reason for the Third Raikage's recent changes. Kumogakure has gained a new strategist—Chiba Shun, a newly promoted jounin teacher at the Ninja Academy."
"The Cloud Ninja Academy recovered quickly from Konoha's sabotage and grew to a respectable scale under his guidance. It started later than our own academy here in Iwagakure, but in another year or two it should begin showing real results."
Onoki grunted and took the report for himself.
Ever since being toyed with by the Third Raikage in that last near-war, he had been unable to let it go. He simply could not understand how that straightforward brute of a man—someone who used to solve everything with a single punch and even fewer thoughts—had suddenly begun playing tricks and setting traps.
That was why, after returning, he had immediately ordered an investigation. He wanted to know who or what had changed the Third Raikage. It had taken an entire year of chasing hints and scraps, but now at last he had found the thread.