At four years old, **Ren Kurosawa** no longer walked through Konoha with the innocence typical of a child.
He observed.
The streets were far too well kept for a simple village, the shops prospered thanks to constant warfare, and shinobi passed by armed even in times of so-called peace. To Ren, all of it functioned like an old mechanism—efficient only because no one dared to take it apart.
Konoha was not a village in the common sense of the word. It was a **military institution** embedded within the heart of a feudal country.
And to Kurosawa, that explained almost everything.
The Hokage was treated as the highest authority, the supreme leader, the one who decided the village's fate. But that image was incomplete. Above him stood someone who rarely appeared in everyday conversations: the **Daimyō of the Land of Fire**.
A common man.
Without remarkable chakra.
Without jutsu.
Without any individual power comparable to that of a shinobi.
And yet, he held the final word. He released funds, approved wars, signed treaties. The Hokage could command thousands of shinobi capable of destroying cities, but he still had to bow to a political system that did not truly understand the weight of chakra.
In Ren's eyes, this was a serious structural flaw.
A system where real power and formal authority did not align was destined for internal conflict. It functioned only as long as everyone agreed to pretend it worked.
His gaze then turned toward the village hospital.
Relatively recent, the building represented an important step forward. Before it existed, injured shinobi relied almost exclusively on medical clans or dangerous improvisation. Now there was a place dedicated to treatment, a minimal level of standardization, an attempt at organization.
Even so, it still seemed primitive.
There was a lack of deep research.
A lack of consistent scientific methods.
A lack of continuity.
Shinobi medicine depended on the occasional emergence of geniuses—such as Tsunade in the future—instead of a system capable of producing constant progress. It was a pattern Kurosawa was beginning to recognize in that world: **advancement did not come from institutions, but from exceptional individuals**.
The same applied to education.
The Ninja Academy, created by Tobirama Senju, had been revolutionary in its time. Standardizing training, educating civilians, creating a shared foundation for all shinobi had been a brilliant decision. Yet decades later, the method remained almost unchanged.
Little advanced theory.
Little experimentation.
Little incentive for innovation.
It was as if the village had decided the initial model was good enough… and simply stopped there.
Ninjutsu reflected this same stagnation. After Tobirama's death, technical advancement slowed drastically. New techniques emerged, but almost always as minor variations of existing ones. True research was viewed with suspicion.
In the future, Orochimaru would try to break this cycle. He would push the shinobi world back toward progress, experimentation, unrestricted knowledge. And he would be suppressed for it. Not only because of his extreme choices, but because the system itself could not tolerate someone who threatened the established balance.
The clans, in turn, had turned inward.
The Hyūga, trapped in self-destructive internal policies, crippled their own potential by dividing the family into branches and using seals as tools of control. The Byakugan—one of the world's greatest inheritances—was kept artificially limited.
The Senju, ironically, were in decline. They had not been defeated in a great war, but were slowly fading away, diluted by the loss of identity, poor political decisions, and the very peace they had helped create.
The Uchiha still existed as a respected force, but they were already being pushed to the margins. Distrust, excessive surveillance, isolation. The massacre was still far away, but its roots were already visible to those who knew where to look.
As for the Uzumaki, they still lived.
And, contrary to what many might believe, there was still time.
Ren knew their destruction would occur **five to six years from now**. Kushina Uzumaki was already about **one year old**, **three years younger than him**, and her arrival in Konoha was still several years away. When that happened, Uzushio's fate would already be nearly sealed.
It would not be immediate.
It would not be sudden.
It would be a tragedy foretold, built slowly through the negligence of the great villages and the fear inspired by the Uzumaki's power.
Time enough, Ren thought, to observe.
Perhaps time enough to prepare.
Konoha was not cruel by nature.
It was complacent.
People had found a fragile balance and decided that any change would cost too much. They preferred to preserve flawed traditions rather than risk the unknown.
He clenched his fists, feeling the weight of that realization.
He did not want to destroy that world.
He wanted to reorganize it.
And he understood, with uncomfortable clarity, that individual strength would not be enough. Becoming Hokage would not suffice. The hat was merely a symbol within a larger system.
To change the shinobi world, one would need to control **political, economic, and military power at the same time**.
That ambition—silent and growing—began to solidify within Kurosawa.
Slowly.
Like everything in that world.
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