Time slowly went on, and in the blink of an eye, it had been weeks since Ren enlisted Kankuro's help with trying the new seal control method for puppetry.
Since there were no problems with it, Ren proceeded to introduce it directly to the Puppet Corps. Everybody over there had their minds blown, first gaping like children and then getting excited as if they had just gotten a new toy.
They flooded Ren with praise, throwing beaming smiles and wide-eyed looks full of admiration at him. Even those grumpy old veterans realized that he had just completely changed the future of their art and couldn't help but acknowledge the achievement.
Well, at least, until they heard what Ren intended to do with it. Let's just say they were far less impressed after he revealed he did it to turn their Puppet Corps into Sunagakure's new 'Mining Department'.
Then, they were silent for a moment before the curses started flying left and right. Bastard this, bastard that. Foreign cur this, Gold-digging tree-humper that. And so it went.
But that was okay. Ren was resourceful. One great thing about the ninja culture was that their opinions and reluctance did not matter. Ninjas were raised to obey orders, and so, Ren only had to convince the council. Which really only meant he had to convince Ebizo because his faction currently held the majority of the council, so his word was pretty much the closest thing to law in Suna.
As long as the old man gave the order, the Puppet Corps was going to follow it, sour expressions or not. Wrap it up with some nice bullshit like, 'It's for the greater good of the village!' and the majority would even be happy about it, too!
It was no wonder that Danzo's rhetoric was so effective.
Frankly, the ninjas were no strangers to menial labor. Their D-rank missions were exactly that, and every single ninja did them at one point in time.
But for some reason, they hated them with passion.
Ren had no idea why. For him, those tasks seemed like an adequately-paid vacation when compared to the usual crap ninjas had to deal with on higher-ranked missions. But it was what it was. Most ninjas would rather earn their money by doing a boring escort mission where they would need to be on alert all the time for well over a week, rather than picking up some trash on a training ground and having the rest of the day free.
They were weird people like that. Somewhere along the tenth and the hundredth punch to the head they suffered during the academy training spars, a few gears probably got knocked loose.
Then again, Ren probably shouldn't complain about that when their way of thinking worked in his favor. Getting Ebizo to issue the order to the Puppet Corps to follow his plan was easy enough.
The reason?
Money.
The thing that made the world spin with a capital M. And the same thing the ninjas were in this bloody mercenary business for in the first place.
Ren's plan was quite beneficial for Sunagakure. Samira was building her merchant empire out of Sunagakure, but one village was not big enough for that. She naturally expanded as far into the Land of Wind as she could.
And with that came business deals, business partners... in short, connections. Important merchants, officials, nobles, and more.
The crucial part for Ren was her connections with the nobles. Especially those living in the more mountainous regions in the west, where even the desert ended. He had tweaked his detection seal to perceive various rare metals and gained the ability to locate clusters of those in the earth.
It was more bothersome than hard. Developing a way to have the seal somehow register gold, silver, and other rare metals was a pain in the ass.
But thanks to this, he could find new mineable veins with minimal effort. Better yet, it was a seal, so he didn't need to be the operator. Some unfortunate mook could be put to work, scouring the mountains after a bit of tutoring on what to look for. Suna had enough manpower for that, so why should Ren use his time to do the legwork?
In this world, finding new mines was a matter of monumental investment and luck for the nobles. It sounded as if it shouldn't be hard. After all, couldn't the Earth-natured ninjas just submerge in the earth and look for new ore veins?
But no. It wasn't quite that simple. Ninjas who use the Hiding Like a Mole technique or anything similar did not utilize their eyesight underground. Usually, they had a complementary, easy-to-use earth-sensing technique that helped them navigate.
Naturally, it worked via the chakra. They could find their enemy or any person above the ground just fine as long as they had chakra. But locating anything natural, anything that was actually supposed to be in the earth? The techniques simply were not built with that function.
Ren suspected that the Iwagakure had some specialized earth technique that could do it. There were far too many mines in that country. Yet, at the same time, he didn't think their method was all that reliable. Funnily enough, there were not enough mines for that to be the case.
Normal nobles in other countries, however, usually had to use the old-fashioned non-ninja methods of scouring the mountains for ore veins. In this feudal-esque era, it took a whole lot of resources and manpower with a huge risk of finding exactly nothing.
It was not as if they could dig through an entire mountain. Just imagining the bill for organizing such a thing would give even a great noble heart attack.
Sure, a mine was something that could become the financial backbone of a noble family for countless generations to come. Even small iron mines were seen as a massive blessing and looked at with jealousy by the neighboring nobles who didn't possess them on their territory.
But as far as investment prospects went, looking for a mine was a pretty shitty one. The people in this world truly did not have reliable ways to find mineral veins.
Hence, Ren had Samira contact some less important nobles and offered them a simple deal. He offered the use of his seal to locate new veins for them, but it would cost them.
For the next five decades, two percent of their annual profits from the new mine would be given to him. Another two percent would go to Samira's trading company. Another two percent would go to the Sabaku clan. And four percent end up with Sunagakure.
All in all, he asked for ten percent of their profits for the next fifty years.
And while some dumber nobles were unhappy enough with that to protest in outrage, at the end of the discussion, there was not even one who refused, even when Samira insisted on Ren's initial terms, no matter how the nobles tried to negotiate. For them, this was an opportunity of a lifetime for their families.
Between paying ten percent and having a mine, and not paying the ten percent and not having a mine, the choice was obvious.
As for not paying after getting the mine?
Heh. There was a reason why Ren did not go to a great noble or the Daimyo. Or why he dragged Sunagakure into it by offering them four percent of profits for literally zero work.
The less important nobles did not have as much political protection from ninjas as the great nobles did. Better yet, they knew it, too. Stopping the payments meant they could one day, well, 'not wake' with a knife buried in their heart.
Sunagakure wouldn't care if their four percent came from the old family head or a new one. If the old one was causing problems, then ensuring a new one could get the reins after being sufficiently warned was also a way to do business.
As long as nobody had proof they did it... Right?
Even if a lesser noble family complained, the Daimyo would be put in front of a choice to support a lesser noble or support his ninja village. Frankly, even if he absolutely despised Suna, he would still stand behind them in such an issue.
Especially if Suna was shown to have the power to find mineral veins for his nobles. That would make the village even more important for his country.
After all, from his perspective, while it would be regrettable that such an amazing thing was not in his hands or under his control, there was no reason to make a fuss about it. The Daimyo would still get his cut from profits through taxes either way.
Coincidentally, this fear of Suna's retaliation if they stopped paying would also keep the nobles from trying to do fwucky-wucky with the percentage they owed to the other parties.
Ren didn't intend to spend his time hounding the nobles for his cut of the money. Outsourcing the problem to Suna sounded like a better idea.
But there was more.
It was only after all of this that the Puppet Corps' part in the whole thing became relevant.
In this world, mining was a very hard and demanding job. Even such a simple thing as train tracks for carts was not common. Trains were a new thing that existed only in the extremely technologically developed Land of Snow, and so were train tracks.
Getting the mined ore from the mining shaft back to the surface took tremendous effort. It was also the thing that was slowing the mining work down the most. So, Ren decided to take advantage of that. He proposed to use puppets to ease the burden.
With the seal control method for puppets, the puppeteers could sit in Suna, and as long as they had a puppet in the mine, they could earn themselves and Suna some money while practicing their puppetry.
They could even take turns. Maybe devoting one hour a day to it per person? It really wasn't going to be a big burden for the Puppet Corps. Ren was a staunch believer in working smarter, rather than harder.
The best part? Since they could use chakra strings through the control seals, they could also use storage seals through them. Ren left that one as a little easter egg for the Puppet Corps to find. He wondered when they would figure it out.
But until then, they would simply have to put in at least some effort into it.
It had barely been two weeks since the first mine started using that service, and at first, the nobles were sceptical. They only agreed to hire the puppet corps because Samira included it in the agreement about finding new mineral veins. But now, the Sunagakure was already flooded with requests for puppet users to help out with mining work.
The efficiency of work might be nowhere near Ren's previous world, but for this era, it simply went through the roof. The puppets could bring the ore to the surface several times faster with far less effort, so the actual miners could focus on mining and did not need to take so many breaks.
Once the nobles realized that...
It was a simple thing. Between earning tens of thousands of Ryo from their mine a day and earning hundreds of thousands of Ryo a day, the choice was obvious. Even if they had to pay ninjas a lot of money for their continuous services.
Even those who already possessed mines instantly sent requests for puppets and the help of puppet users when they found out just how big an improvement it was. Suna literally did not have enough puppet users to satisfy the demand.
Ebizo was happy, Ren was happy, the nobles were happy, and even the Puppet Corps members started to grumble less once they saw the improvements in their paychecks.
It was a bit insidious by Ren, but with this, Sunagakure's future was secured even more. The nobles who tasted the sweetness of increased profits would never want to go back to the previous inefficient methods. It was simply human nature.
The war was still raging on, but Suna was experiencing yet another economic boom while its ninjas were fiercely defending the Land of Wind. Slowly, its importance was becoming entrenched in the country's economy so deeply that not even the Daimyo would have a hard time dislodging it.
The things Ren did for Temari and her family…