“When can we expect you back sir?” Buta asked. He was a rotund man with a mustache shaped like tusks. He wore a fez hat and clothes that allowed the breeze to flow in. Currently, he was doing all he could to keep up with my already mild pace.
“Don’t hold your breath. If the damage is as bad as I think it is, every somewhat competent medic, doctor, medicine man, shaman, and anyone who has ever used a bandaid on someone else is going to go to the village. If not from the goodness of their heart, then to show off their skill.”
“Do you think I should take my business elsewhere then?”
‘Ahh yes, as subtle as one would expect from a man of his size.’ I thought to myself. One of the biggest tragedies in the ninja world's history and he’s still counting coins. As the two of us approached the main village gate, I could see Jiraiya and Chiyo talking. As far as I could tell she was giving her condolences to the man.
“Business elsewhere? You looking to dodge the competition, maybe find a small settlement to monopolize?”
“Competition?” The man perked his head up. I swear I saw his nose wiggle like a pig's snout that just caught the scent of food. What do you mean?
“Well, you ship and sell food and medical goods, in that order, between the land of wind and fire.” Buta nodded his head, paying attention. “But you also sell luxury and miscellaneous goods. Not as much, you have had a problem securing consistent buyers in the past.”
I stopped walking, already at my destination. A giant 14 by 10 carpet with a handful of wooden crates placed evenly on it. I turned to the man who was doing calculations in his head, but to make sure he didn’t come up with the wrong conclusion and the fact I was on a short timetable, I just gave him the answer I wanted him to have.
“The Leaf villages back up food storages have either been destroyed or tapped empty, the war wasn’t that long ago. The same can be said for our medicine.”
“Yes I see that, but there are plenty of food and medicine merchants in the leaf village. Food, medicine, and lumber are the land of fire's biggest exports. There are plenty of merchants that will get to the Leaf faster than me.”
“But not luxury or miscellaneous.”
“Your village is a war zone. What is a survivor going to do with a gold necklace?”
“It will take you roughly a week to get to the Leaf if you leave here tomorrow. The first thing my village is going to do is make sure everybody is healthy and fed. The second thing is to deal with the damages. Houses were destroyed. My whole village just saw their life flash before their eyes, some of them are now homeless. But funerals will be held and houses will be reconstructed, and people are going to want to buy things to fill up those houses, not need, want. They won’t want to use the hand-me-downs from their dead neighbor. All that money that they have been saving for a rainy day, well there was just a downpour. Responsible spending is about to be flung out a window.”
“But what about the established companies, Won’t your people just go to them?”
“They will, but they won’t have the merchandise to support the rise of new customers that they are going to be flooded with. This means they’re going to raise prices on the stock they have which is going to be fine with their prior and loyal customers, but not new ones. The luxury goods companies are about to raise their prices on a village that just went through a disaster.”
Buta looked like he just saw behind the veil of the universe. He would get to the conclusion I want in a few minutes but I might as well lead him to port. “Who has luxury and miscellaneous merchandise lying around collecting dust and cobwebs that could make it to the Leaf faster than anyone else.”
“I could sell to not just your people but the established companies as well. All my back stock could be gone by the end of the month.”
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“I would move on this before the Hot-Spring merchants do,” I said turning away. Buta had a bad deal with a few Hot-Spring merchants in the past and would love to get one over on them. I could hear Buta’s feet stomp on the ground as he jogged back inside the village.
Jiraiya, seeing the Christmas ornament-shaped man jog off stepped on the carpet and took a seat on one of the wood crates. “You ready?”
“Yeah, just some last-minute dealings I had to deal with. Office and apartment are packed, staff is paid with a three-month severance, and my merchant friend is about to pay out the nose for Sand shinobi to guard his cargo as he practically brings everything he owns to our village.”
Jiraiya nodded but kept looking down. Neither of us would make good conversational partners for this trip so I just activated the seals on the carpet. Without a sound and barely any disturbance on the surrounding sand the carpet lifted from the ground and took off towards the Leaf village.
***
I would love to say I had a flying carpet but it was more along the lines of a carpet that falls upwards, slowly. Thanks to Fujitsu I could use a water-down version of gravity release. I needed a large carpet if I wanted to fly, especially with other people, but soaring through the sky made all the sleepless nights worth it.
Thanks to my carpet, a journey that would have taken two or three days only took us eight hours. We managed to get back during sunset. From above we could see fires being lit. The wall surrounding the village had a massive hole in it with construction crews lighting torches around it, preparing to work through the night. Jiraiya asked to be left off at the Hokage’s Tower. We passed the hill of debris and saw the boulders and shattered buildings littering the village.
Jiraiya leaped off once I was near the tower and I made my way to the hospital. Landing on the roof and placing a ward around my stuff, I quickly made my way inside. It didn’t take me long before recognized somebody I knew.
“Kuriki, it’s me, I’m back, Who needs help?” Kuriki had long Lime green hair and a small button nose. Last I remember she used her hair to hide the fact she lost an ear during the war. By now she must have grown it back but kept the hair cut.
“Shouldn’t you be in the Sand Village?” Kuriki said pushing a bed with a sleeping patient from intensive care to the acute care ward.
“No, I should be here, helping. Who needs my help, whose been active the longest and needs a break.”
“Captain Kurochiku, he had just finished a back-to-back 12-hour shift before the attack. Now he is doing surgery in the theater.”
“Okay, I’ll wash up and send him to bed,” I said as I quickened my pace to the theater. Throwing on medical scrubs and washing my hands I entered.
“Kurochiku, get ready to switch with me,” I said making my way to the table. On it was a small girl with a rebar pole sticking out of her stomach.
“Wow, we must be in trouble if they called you back Amon. Is Tsunade behind too?” Kurochiku said as he moved over to let me see what he was doing. It looked worse than it really was. The rebar hadn’t hit anything major but the small girls' size made the damage more serious from the blood loss alone.
“No, she’s at home, asleep. Speaking of, go home. There will be plenty of sick people tomorrow.”
“Can’t, the fox destroyed it. I’m lucky to be alive.”
“Family?”
“Parents live on the other side of the village. My brother is out on a mission.”
“Wife, kids?”
“Now you sound like my mother.”
“Welp, Kuriki snitched you out so go find a bed somewhere.”
Captain Kurochiku clicked his tongue mentally marking down the name of the nurse. “Fine but first make more of your preservation tags. We used them up.”
With a hand sign, I made two shadow clones to guide Kurochiku out as I took his place. The girl was stable, Just had to cut the poll, pull it out, and stitch her up. One of my clones went to the ICU and started to use the medical preservation ninjutsu I created during the war.
The idea was to make a simple medical ninjutsu almost any medic ninja could use to keep people alive long enough to get proper help later. The medical ninjutsu version of a band-aid and an ice pack. With proper use, it could extend the life of a patient by 3x.
The tags were not as good but if you could use a paper bomb you could use the preservation tag. One of my proudest achievements that took me arguing with the village elders till my face turned blue to get it implemented. The side effect of the tag was that it put the subject to sleep and out of the fight. They argued that if a ninja was hurt and put to sleep by a teammate then were attacked. The incapacitated ninja could be easily killed or “worse”, captured by an enemy ninja.
It took me longer than I liked to admit to discovering the real reason they didn’t like it. It was because of money. The tags could become popular and I could hold a monopoly on the market. Only after I gave other medical ninjas the design of the seal and they started to make some of their own did they relent.
My other clone started making the tags and handed them out to the nurse. Slowly the nurse took over and started sending doctors home to rest. Any doctor who had been in the hospital for over 24 hours was to be sent home while the rest was to use the tags to buy time for the doctors to rest.
Thanks to the tags we managed to save some lives and livelihoods. One of the patients was a young Leaf Kunoichi who had a mangled arm. Because her life was not in immediate danger, she was marked as a low priority. Her teammates, one missing an eye while the other had an ugly-looking scar across his face were trying to get her help but were rebuffed every time. Finally seeing that the girl could lose the arm if not treated I quickly put the arm in place so that it could heal in a way naturally that she could still use it, then put her to sleep to have someone else come and fix the rest later.
The night passed and the doctors who had gotten some sleep started coming back. By the following afternoon, the hospital was back to normal. I had a clone walk the halls manning the low-priority cases and another work on making more tags for the hospital to store up.
I managed to leave the hospital by late afternoon, just 4 hours shy of a full day. I called my flying carpet to me and flew to my small apartment I kept at the edge of the village just to find out it-to was destroyed in the fox attack. I sighed to myself, in the future, I was going to have to be one of Butas customers.