Omni-Anime: I Stand at the Forefront of Popularity

Chapter 161: Chapter 162: Eat My Hot Take, Yah!

”The Uzumaki clan was a clan that had mastered Fūinjutsu, on good terms with the Leaf for generations. The swirl crest on Naruto’s clothes and on Kakashi-sensei’s clothes is the mark of the Uzumaki clan—proof of the friendship between the Uzumaki and the Leaf.”

Since Sasuke was there too, Hanabi explained a bit about the Uzumaki clan to the pair of them along the way.

The Uzumaki Clan’s Mask Storage Temple wasn’t some forbidden ground—it was a building that had already crumbled into ruins.

Sasuke genuinely couldn’t stop thinking about Naruto’s past. Naruto didn’t object either, so Kakashi had pushed the training back to start tomorrow.

”So what exactly is Uzushiogakure? Why have I never heard of it?” Sasuke found it strange that after so many years in the Leaf, he didn’t know about something like this.

”Because Uzushiogakure—or rather, the Land of Whirlpools—has already fallen,” Hanabi said. ”Because they’d mastered Fūinjutsu, the other nations grew wary of them and finally wiped them out. Put it this way: over ninety percent of the Fūinjutsu we have today comes from the Uzumaki clan.”

[Holy crap]

[Just compare him to Gaara. Gaara’s got some monster inside him too, but Gaara’s wildly unstable—Naruto over here is totally fine]

[Sasuke just lost his whole family—Naruto here lost a whole COUNTRY]

[@above, Sasuke lost his whole CLAN, get it right]

[Grass (a type of exclamation), can you guys not be so messed up, I can’t stop laughing]

The chaos-gremlin audience were cracking heartless dark jokes.

So Hanabi decided to spice things up.

”On top of that, there’s another reason.” Hanabi was about to lob out a conspiracy theory. ”Unlike the other nations, the ruler of the Land of Whirlpools was the head of the shinobi village himself.”

”Is there a problem with that?” Naruto scratched his head, totally lost.

”In a nation, the feudal lord holds the economy and most of the political power, while the shinobi represent the nation’s military force—but at the end of the day, the shinobi’s strength is all but controlled by the feudal lord.”

[Damn]

[Yeah, true—the Sand only started scheming because the Land of Wind’s feudal lord handed the missions to the Leaf]

[Shinobi are just the feudal lord’s dogs—no different from real history]

[With strength like that, why not just revolt?]

”With strength like that, you might wonder why shinobi would obey the feudal lord at all.” Hanabi just kept riffing straight off the danmaku.

And the danmaku kept scrolling.

Proof, if any were needed, that the audience loved a good conspiracy theory.

Hanabi didn’t care about the facts—her only job was lobbing out hot takes.

”There are only tens of thousands of shinobi in the whole world, but the world itself is vast—which means the shinobi’s power is actually quite thin. A village-structured shinobi system struggles to cultivate managerial personnel on a large scale. In other words, a shinobi village can hardly possess the strength to govern a nation, and the shinobi themselves were long since domesticated by the feudal lords. The Uzumaki clan, though, was an exception.”

Naruto didn’t get much out of this speech of Hanabi’s.

Because... he couldn’t really follow it.

It was Kushina and Sasuke who understood a fair bit.

Sasuke especially: ”The one in the wrong... is this world!”

[What a galaxy-brain take!]

[It’s not me who’s wrong, it’s the world!]

[honestly Sasuke’s not even wrong here]

[Somebody get this man a certain magical little red book]

The audience had gone off the rails again.

And Hanabi kept tossing out hot takes. ”Actually, no. Decades ago, in the Warring States era, there were no shinobi villages yet—shinobi slaughtered one another in clan units. The appearance of the First Hokage ended that clan-scale slaughter, consolidating the shinobi’s power and forming villages, one by one.”

”And the formation of the shinobi villages made shinobi power far stronger. The village system was vastly better than the clan-based situation of decades earlier.”

”...” Sasuke was silent, thinking.

This time he really was thinking.

”Could this... be the truth behind the Uchiha clan’s destruction...?” Sasuke was thinking, thinking with everything he had.

”When you paint in broad strokes, an organization is an organization—but when it comes down to execution, it’s always individual people,” Hanabi said. ”The transition from the clan era to the village era spanned decades, and individual people simply hadn’t yet adapted to the change. In the Warring States era, shinobi organized by clan naturally lacked sufficient funding and strength, so obeying the feudal lords came naturally too.”

”However, the moment shinobi power was consolidated into villages, everything changed. It’s only that the shinobi’s mindset hadn’t caught up with the village revolution.”

”And now, the village system itself has, in turn, become a fetter on the shinobi’s further development. Individual shinobi obstruct the village’s growth, and the growing village obstructs the shinobi’s future.”

By this point, Naruto’s brain was complete mush.

But seeing the serious look on Sasuke’s face, Naruto decided to pretend he’d understood.

[I’m pretending I got it too]

[can some big brain tell me what my waifu just said?]

[Productive forces act upon the relations of production, and the relations of production react back upon the productive forces. Backward relations of production constrain the development of productive forces, and backward individuals in turn constrain the relations of production.]

[I... actually understood that...]

[I damn well got it too]

[but the foreigners aren’t gonna get it]

[thank you, political theory class]

[I’m terrible at this stuff, can someone dumb it down a little more?]

[The village system liberated the shinobi’s productive forces, but it developed too fast, and a lot of the shinobi’s old ideas became a drag on the village. On the other hand, while the village spurred shinobi development, its own backwardness made it a fetter on that development too.]

[Simply put: the village developed productive forces but obstructed the shinobi’s further growth, and the old guard’s outdated mindset never developed along with it]

[thanks for the breakdown, legend]

[typing all that out in a few minutes—respect, that’s a pro]

[worth pausing to wait for the danmaku]

[so what is my waifu even trying to do?]

The audience launched into armchair politics.

Hanabi, meanwhile, had already brought the two of them to the entrance.

Karin was over here as well.

”Naruto!”

”Hey there, Karin.”

Naruto breathed a sigh of relief.

Finally, someone he could actually talk to.

Just now he’d had no choice but to stand off to the side and listen—so awkward.

”So what are we here to do?”

Sasuke was very curious.

The place was quite dilapidated, nearly collapsed, but on the walls of the Mask Storage Temple hung a great many masks.

”The Uzumaki Clan’s Mask Storage Temple. These... are the Shinigami Masks.”

Hanabi said.

”Shinigami...?”

Sasuke immediately thought of a certain someone.

Kushina Yuki.

Naruto thought of that person too.

”Hey, hey, hey—hey hey hey!” Naruto’s eyes went wide.

But the next moment, Naruto suddenly transformed into someone else.

”—Please, stop here.”

Kushina had finally stepped in, unable to hold back.

The Shinigami Mask in the Mask Storage Temple was precisely the key to undoing the Dead Demon Consuming Seal.

And the Dead Demon Consuming Seal itself had sealed away the other half of the Nine-Tails.

Hanabi could not be allowed to go on.

And yet Hanabi’s face wore the same smile as ever.

Just as planned~