Chapter 77 Reforming Hoshigakure! A New Research Direction!

Two months passed in the blink of an eye.

Time, as always, helped to heal the wounds of the past. The chaos that had shaken the village had finally settled down, and under new leadership, Hoshigakure was moving steadily toward stability and prosperity.

That new leader was none other than Renjiro, who had officially become the Fourth Hoshikage.

But his rise to the position hadn’t been without obstacles. After Ranzo’s defeat, many villagers had initially wanted Natsume to take the mantle of Hoshikage.

Compared to Renjiro, who seemed to have suddenly appeared from nowhere, Natsume was someone they knew, trusted, and had relied on for years.

But Natsume refused without hesitation.

Her refusal, however, wasn’t because she lacked ambition or had no desire for power. After all, very few people are completely uninterested in power, those who are usually either have unusually pure hearts or rather eccentric personalities.

The real reason Natsume turned down the position was fear. She knew exactly what Renjiro was after: the seat of the Hoshikage.

From the very moment they met, he had never hidden his ambition. She worried about what Renjiro might do if he were denied that position.

Publicly, Renjiro had claimed that he killed Ranzo to avenge the Third Hoshikage and to revive the Star Training program. But Natsume knew better, Renjiro had no personal connection to the Third Hoshikage, nor did he have any deep bond with the village.

Why, then, would he go so far for people he barely knew, if not for his own greater purpose?

This was the shinobi world, not an ordinary one. Acts of kindness born purely out of sympathy or pity were extremely rare.

Those with the strength to intervene were usually powerful shinobi, and from childhood they were taught discipline, loyalty, and obedience. No shinobi would act without the approval of their village or their leader.

Even missions that appeared charitable were rarely so. Take, for example, Kakashi’s team escorting Tazuna to the Land of Waves, they only accepted that mission because Tazuna had paid Konoha for protection. In the shinobi world, everything came with a price.

That was why Renjiro’s actions were so transparent. He hadn’t killed Ranzo purely to avenge the Third Hoshikage, nor out of pity for the children suffering under Ranzo’s rule.

Those were convenient justifications. In truth, he had eliminated Ranzo for one reason alone: to claim power and take the Hoshikage’s seat for himself.

Natsume had seen firsthand how terrifying Renjiro’s power was. He had killed Ranzo and his two subordinates almost instantly.

She feared that anyone who dared to stand in the way of his ambition would meet the same fate as Ranzo. That was why she refused the position of Hoshikage without a moment’s hesitation.

Renjiro’s origins remained a mystery. In truth, the villagers knew almost nothing about him, apart from two facts: he carried official appointment papers from the Daimyo, and he was an extraordinarily powerful shinobi.

Even so, his achievements spoke louder than any doubts. He had exposed Ranzo’s conspiracy, developed a medicine to suppress the dangerous side effects of the Star Training, and, with the added support of Natsume’s good reputation, his path to leadership became clear.

In the end, Renjiro was officially acknowledged as the Fourth Hoshikage.

Of course, even if the villagers had resisted, he still had the means to secure the position—it simply would have been more troublesome.

That was precisely why he had gone to the effort of bringing Natsume back and obtaining the Daimyo’s formal appointment papers: to eliminate unnecessary obstacles.

Once in power, Renjiro’s first act was to abolish the dangerous Star Training. More than that, he distributed the formula for his suppression medicine, allowing the village to produce it in large quantities.

For the first time, those who had long suffered under the Star’s harmful side effects could finally receive proper treatment.

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After addressing the dangers of the Star Training, Renjiro turned his attention to a sweeping reform of Hoshigakure’s military system.

Without the Star Training, the village’s foundation was alarmingly fragile.

Aside from the basic Three Ninja Arts, they possessed little more than a handful of low-grade D-rank and C-rank techniques—barely enough to sustain them, and certainly not enough to secure a future.

This weakness had been the very reason Ranzo tried to revive the Star Training in the first place; without it, Hoshigakure seemed to have no path forward.

But now, fortune was on their side. They had a Hoshikage unlike any before.

Renjiro unveiled a vast collection of techniques to the village—not just D- and C-rank, but even B-rank Jutsu.

As for A-rank and S-rank techniques, he deliberately kept them out of their reach. He had no intention of being overly generous.

Even so, this sudden enrichment of the village’s arsenal transformed Hoshigakure overnight.

The Hoshigakure shinobi admired him, the villagers respected him, and together they began to revere Renjiro as a true leader worthy of the title “Hoshikage.”

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Next, Renjiro turned his attention to Hoshigakure’s dire economic problems.

Because of the village’s weakness, they rarely received missions from other nations. Even within the Land of Bears, the assignments they were offered were too few and too poorly paid to sustain the village.

To find a solution, Renjiro dug into the history of both the Land of Bears and Hoshigakure. With the aid of Arkain’s simulations, he uncovered a promising path forward: the herbal medicine trade.

The Land of Bears was surrounded by mountains, and within its borders lay its most famous landmark—the Valley of Hell.

In the anime, the Land became notable because the Ryūmyaku, the Dragon Vein, a massive source of natural chakra, was sealed within this valley.

However, it was important to distinguish this Valley of Hell from Jigokudani, the “Hell Valley” that produced Hidan, which was located in the Land of Hot Water.

For generations, the people of the Land of Bears and Hoshigakure had gathered and sold raw medicinal herbs from their mountains.

But because their technology was underdeveloped, they could only provide crude, unprocessed materials. As a result, profits remained meager, and the potential of this trade was never fully realized.

Renjiro was determined to change all of that.

With Arkain’s analytical power at his disposal, he identified five toxic plants within the Land of Bears that could be refined into valuable medicines.

Using these discoveries, he even created a cheap but effective hemostatic and recovery drug.

This breakthrough meant that Hoshigakure no longer had to rely on selling raw herbs for meager profits. Instead, they could refine and market genuine medicinal products, elevating the village’s economy to an entirely new level.

After transforming both the military and the economy, Renjiro’s prestige soared. The villagers began to revere him as the Saviour of Hoshigakure.

But Renjiro’s true motives were far more pragmatic. He hadn’t become Hoshikage out of pure devotion to the village, nor out of some lofty dream of turning Hoshigakure into a great power.

What he truly wanted was a faction of his own, a stable base of operations that would allow him to gather the resources he needed to grow stronger.

So, once the military system was restructured and the economic foundation secured, Renjiro began to delegate the village’s long-term development to others.

And with the essentials in place, he turned inward, switching fully into research mode.

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Underground Laboratory

Renjiro left a shadow clone behind to oversee village affairs, while his true body slipped away into a secluded underground laboratory.

“After more than two exhausting months, I finally have a place where I can study in peace.” Renjiro muttered with a weary sigh. Yet beneath the fatigue, his voice carried a faint tremor of excitement: “It’s time to begin what I’ve been waiting for.”

His eyes gleamed with anticipation as he reached for a sealed scroll resting on the shelf. Forming a rapid sequence of hand seals, he released the seal.

Puff!

A small cloud of white smoke rose from the scroll. As it faded, something grotesque was revealed—a severed arm, pale and ghastly, studded with multiple Sharingan eyes that seemed to blink open and shut on their own.

It was Danzo’s arm.

This was the object of Renjiro’s long-awaited research.

A monstrosity, yet a treasure. Within this single limb lay powers beyond imagination: the Sharingan of the Uchiha, the Wood Release of the Senju, two of the greatest bloodline legacies fused together in one grotesque vessel.

Renjiro’s true interest wasn’t merely in the Uchiha’s Sharingan. His real target lay deeper, Hashirama’s cells.

It was precisely because of these cells that Orochimaru had been able to stabilize the countless Sharingan implanted into this grotesque arm.

The process was as ingenious as it was horrifying. Orochimaru had grafted fragments of Hashirama’s DNA into an artificial limb, much like the method used to engineer Yamato’s survival.

Into this living vessel, he surgically embedded multiple Sharingan, fusing them into the flesh.

Each eye remained viable only because Hashirama’s cells possessed unparalleled regenerative power. They could repair tissue endlessly and, more importantly, regulate the unstable chakra flow that would otherwise tear the arm apart.

And because the arm constantly threatened to spiral out of control, it had to be bound in heavy bandages and restrained with layers of Sealing Jutsu.

Danzo’s arm was no ordinary graft. It had been constructed with Hashirama’s cells and studded with the Sharingan of the Uchiha clan.

Which meant, if Renjiro could study those cells in detail, he might unravel the hidden mysteries of both bloodlines. Perhaps, he might even catch a glimpse of the Sage of Six Paths’ legendary lineage encoded within their DNA.

The possibilities before him were limitless.

Hashirama’s cells!

The Uchiha’s Sharingan!

All of it lay here, in front of him, waiting to be claimed.

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Of course, such ambitions could not be realized overnight. They would require meticulous experimentation and unwavering patience. But Renjiro had no doubts.

The Central Neural Chip, Arkain, his biological supercomputer, was a peerless authority in the study of cells and genetics.

Even after transmigrating into this world, it had only grown stronger, nourished constantly by Renjiro’s chakra.

With its analytical power guiding him, Renjiro was certain: success was no longer a question of if, but when.

And so, with a gleam of anticipation in his eyes, he began his research.