NRaO Chapter 37 (Patreon)

It was the hidden sand village and I was another clone looking to learn about puppets, gather information, sabotage the village, and look for kekkei genkai to consume or take to my bedroom. At least my main body will. I was young and often looked down on, especially as Sasori was just born. The two main teachers for puppet mastery were no longer teaching and instead raising their children together.

I had done my best to stall the war but hidden sand was insatiable. I knew they were about to go to war even with me constantly undermining their attempts. I worked my way through the future schematics for the new puppets before I realized these were all things the original had thought up years ago and improved on. Clones can’t think up new ideas but they can absorb knowledge like normal, maybe slightly less good. That’s what makes them such good spies and training assistants.

I had eaten through all the knowledge they had on puppets and was probably the best puppet maker in the world at this point. That left me figuring out how the fuck did the Kazekage get the magnet release. He didn’t have it before he was Kazakage… Got the 1 tail jinchuriki in his village… Somehow they learned a release specifically tied to that jinchuriki and somewhere in there, I needed to figure out the method he used.

I needed some of his blood but that was too difficult to do. The previous two Kazekage were bums. They made several terrible decisions in a row that got them assassinated but this one looked like a smart cookie… At least he was until it came to how they treated their jinchuriki. The man was a nobody deemed to be the best choice and given the power of a god. Then he misused it to the point that the docile jinchuriki had started to become more feral.

This village and hidden mist had the two clones for the longest period of time. I had been able to take in three orphans the village had abandoned and turn them against themselves as they were ready to leave and come to Konoha when I finished my mission. All of the leadership was spitting in the orphan's faces and expecting them to have loyalty to a village that mistreated them for most of their life.

Even now that I had begun training them they were still looked down on as orphans. Some of the strongest genin in the village get made fun of by people fresh out of the academy because of their special abilities. All three coincidentally happened to be females but I was sure I was going to make them my wives yet. It felt wrong to take a child and make them rely on you then maybe lead them into a relationship. The only reason is I had been acting differently from the original Orochi from the beginning so any feelings toward him would be fresh after this clone was dismissed.

The first I had taken in was a girl on the verge of death. She was so starved I couldn’t feed her normal food. I had to feed her bowls of thin soup before she recovered enough for regular food. She was still skinny and short because of her stunted growth. Brown hair was tied into a ponytail, and the ponytail was puffing out. She had hawk eyes that let her see farther than normal and let her see in sandstorms.

It was a very useful dojutsu but still, it was an extra thing for free that no one else has. She was weak to begin with but I had taken her on to learn the very basics of puppet mastery and now she was fairly competent compared to other puppet users. It was a very difficult method of fighting and not many people were good at it, some would have been better off fighting alone. It took someone with full awareness of the battlefield, enemy, and ally positioning, and someone who can predict what is going to happen to be a functional puppet master… So like 10% of puppet masters are any good at it.

The next I picked up was a one-armed girl. She blew her own hand up with her kekkei genkai called scorch release. The village was going to throw her away but I made a suitable puppet hand that would allow her to continue being a ninja. She was pretty enough even without an arm I think she’d still be able to find a husband. Black hair with red tips, and her breasts were above average hitting a high C-cup or maybe very low D-cup. Still impressive for a shinobi who burns tons of calories on missions.

The final one was another I just couldn’t wrap my head around them pretty much abandoning. It was a pseudo jinchuriki. You know, what I am and the thing that just went for ten times more than a Uchiha in the slave auctions. She was just an average genin in power when I started helping her but that’s because she was an orphan and not given the same resources other ninjas received. With almost nothing she was competing with ninjas who had at least kunai and shurikens.

She was a scorpion girl. Purple, almost black hair and fingernails that could produce some poison. Hair tied up like a scorpion tail she could fully control and sting people with. Purple face paint around her eyes streaking down her face like mascara and a supple and strong body she was made for sex and fighting. I made her a special grappling hook and poison storage container on her wrist that would coat the shurikens in her poison or spray out in a ranged venom attack. With that, she went from the middle of the pack to above. 

She was also very resistant to poison and any poisons she had endured would also make her venom more potent. She had above-average thickness in her skin, she could almost ignore shurikens. Finally, she needed far less food compared to others. She was able to go weeks without food before she fainted which is why she was still alive. 

That really only left sabotaging the village before fleeing with my possible future concubines. A few years ago when they wanted to start the war I sabotaged their food sources and weapons supplies. Because of that, I had a mountain of kunai and shurikens buried in the desert. One of my main sources of income in the hidden sand was selling those supplies.

It also delayed the war by a few years but there was no stopping it now with the new Kazekage. The previous one was assassinated for his inaction. Still, I was getting shadow clones from the hidden stone that was him bringing dozens of slaves back… Perhaps I should do something risky and big as well. This village was a shithole though. At least the stone had its population, the sand had nothing except hardship.

The only thing that really seemed like a good solution was to kill Granny Chiyo and her family before the war started. That was asking to get my followers killed though, an even better source of money and sabotage would be the greenhouse and aviary.

The main method of communication in the hidden sand was through carrier birds and the main fighting power was Granny Chiyo with her poisons. Stealing the resources from both would effectively be the biggest crippling move for their war potential.