Chương 538: CH_14.8 (538)

The administrative wing of the Aburame's central estate wasn't guarded by the flesh-eating beetles that protected the deep archives with clan secrets. Aburame Genji didn't have a death wish, and more importantly, he still had loyalty in his heart. He silently entered the record room of the accounting department and closed the door behind him before nervously walking through the rows and columns of metal shelves with binders and scrolls in every direction one could look.

The security was thin—only the innermost region where more sensitive financial information was kept was protected by anything serious—but he still could feel his heart pumping. Beneath his high-collared coat, his own colonies were restless. They could sense his elevated heart rate, reacting to the chemical spike of his adrenaline. He closed his eyes and focused his breathing to a slow, pushing a wave of calming, rhythmic chakra through his pathways until the microscopic scratching beneath his skin subsided.

He continued his search until he found the shelf that carried records from a few years ago. His hand hovered over the financial ledger. I'm not a traitor, he told himself, though the thought tasted like ash when he recalled what that ANBU had said to him about betraying the clan. The badger mask—Genji didn't know who he was; he didn't want to risk attention and questions if he went around asking about ANBU—wanted undeniable proof that would leave no doubt about the clan's wrongdoing.

He refused to do that; he couldn't be the one to hand over incriminating evidence that would harm his clan. But he had to give them something, or they would expose his embezzlement. So, a compromise. He opened the ledger, his penlight illuminating the neat rows of ink. The numbers were astonishing; they made what he had siphoned off look like a child's pocket money. A sudden, sharp spike of guilt pierced Genji's chest. He pursed his lips and decided that he wasn't doing anything wrong. He was a proud Aburame.

He had been taught that clan and village were symbiotic. The numbers in the ledgers presented were greatly different from his own. He wasn't betraying his clan; this was simply an act of preserving the hive by cutting out the cancer. While it was too late to reverse the mistakes, they could still stop making more mistakes. Genji let out a slow, controlled breath, feeling better as he pushed down his true thoughts about what he was doing deep down so he could ignore them.

He tucked the ledger into his jacket; it was from a few years ago, and no one was going to miss it. Now, all he had to do was get it into the hands of that demon. ———. The midday sun beat down on the crop terraces, casting long shadows over the rows of vibrant purple herbs peeking out from the lush green bushes. From the edge of the dirt road, Nenro leaned against a wooden fence post.

Discarding his mask and gear, he wore a sun-faded straw hat and a simple linen tunic, looking like nothing more than a civilian youngster. A few yards away, in the cool shade of a massive banyan tree, a group of farmhands sat resting on burlap sacks, drinking from their water skins. Nenro wiped sweat from his brow and ambled over.

"Good, it's hot," he sighed, dropping a large cooler.

"Mind if I share the shade? Have to say, these fields look untouched. I hear from my uncle that this whole sector was dead dirt a few years back."

"What's it to you?" asked an old farmer with deeply tanned, leathery skin.

"My uncle's a travelling merchant. It's my first trip with him. He told me about it, and I guess I was just curious about what happened." Nenro opened the blue cooler to reveal glass bottles lodged in the box full of ice. He pulled one out and pushed down the marble in its neck to release the refreshing fizz inside. He offered it to the youngest of the farmhands, who immediately accepted it, and once one accepted, everyone did. In the midday heat, the chilled sparkling lemonade might as well be ambrosia.

"So, what happened?" he asked.

"Dead ain't the half of it, kid," the old farmer said with a heavy sigh.

"It was a nightmare. One week, we had the most vibrant of herbs, thick in purple, but the next week, half of them had lost their lustre and the other half had gone the dead's grey." Another middle-aged farmer sighed.

"Those pests…"

"They didn't eat the leaves or anything like normal pests; they were draining chakra from the plants and the soil itself," said the old farmhand. Nenro glanced at the purple crop in the distance. It was a special crop used in medicine that needed chakra to grow. For this particular crop, shinobi proficient in Earth Release ninjutsu infused the soil with earth-natured chakra.

There existed other crops that needed other natures of chakra to grow; they had special qualities that were useful in creating medicine or fūinjutsu ink.

"Regular pesticide did nothing. We thought the fields were cursed. Lost most of the crop, and what survived was weak; three months of the work down the drain." The weather in the region was only suitable for growing the crop in a six-month period; the farmers had lost their main earnings that year. Taken from Royal Road, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

"Then what happened?" Nenro asked, picking a piece of dry grass to chew on.

"The next crop was the same. We were days away from burning the fields to stop the spread," the young farmhand chimed in, an empty bottle in his hand.

"Then the bug tamers came in." Nenro's eyes sparkled with interest.

"Bug tamers?"

"Shinobi. Aburame. They fixed it."

"A miracle, is what it was," the old man said, his voice more tired than warm.

"They brought out these tiny, pale beetles. Released them into the soil, and by the end of the week, the crops were gaining colour. By the end of the month, they were as healthy as they could be. Saved the harvest. Saved our livelihoods."

"Must be nice to have a fix," Nenro noted casually, watching a normal ladybug crawl along a blade of grass. The old man scoffed, lying down on the ground.

"I wish. Those pale beetles they use? They don't breed in the wild. They die off after a while. The bug tamers march out here on the first of every month to release young beetles to the fields." Nenro hid a sharp breath. This was it; this was why he was here.

"How much do they charge?" he asked.

"Enough, they charge enough," said the old man, and the others nodded in agreement.

"Can't negotiate with them as we do with the shinobi who weave chakra into the soil. They're the only ones who can breed those pale beetles of theirs. What choice do we have? This one time, the handlers were a week late, and the colour bled right away. We knew then that we couldn't grow any crop with chakra without them." Nenro nodded sympathetically, thanking them for the shade before making his way back to the road. Beneath the brim of his hat, his eyes were tinged with a chill.

This wasn't proof, but he was convinced. The Aburame weren't just the cure. They were the disease as well. ———. Two days ago, Nenro sat in Takuma's main office. Unlike his sub-offices used by his clones, the main office actually looked lived-in. A mix of straight and honey-combed shelves filled with scrolls and files lined the walls. A heavy wood table with a gigantic top, like he was worried he would run out of space, sat closer to the innermost wall.

To the right of the room, he placed a separate table specifically made to display maps, which he stored in a special cabinet that allowed him to store them flat. To the left, there was a sitting area used for meetings with visitors. Only the middle of the office was somewhat empty because he liked to get short workouts throughout the day. There were no framed paintings or ornamental plants. Yet, the sheer density of the functional items gave the space a heavy feel.

It was packed wall-to-wall with things required for the job, but it was completely devoid of clutter.

"Here, look at this," Takuma said, sliding a thick ledger across the table. Nenro opened the binder over the knee of his crossed legs and flipped through the pages, his brows raising at the numbers the binder was claiming they were earning.

"What is this?" he asked, vaguely recognising the city and town names in the footnotes.

"Aburame Genji's offerings," Takuma said, leaning into his chair.

"I looked into it. A few years back, something crippled a lot of chakra-dependent crops in the south-east part of the country. The farmers suffered, prices shot up all around, and it was a bad time except for the hoarders… If I'm right, the Aburame managed to fix the problem the next cycle, so it didn't make a splash outside of that half a year or so."

"You realise you have subordinates for this type of stuff?" Nenro sighed.

"These numbers are a big deal." He glanced at the binder's spine that had the Aburame insignia printed on it.

"They earned a lot from solving the problem… What is this, though? I thought Aburame Genji was supposed to give us undeniable proof of wrongdoing."

"He's willing to embezzle money they won't notice, but that's about it. He won't fuck over the clan directly."

"And you're fine with that?" Takuma shrugged.

"We push; he refuses. We lose a mole. For now, we work on it on our own, and if we hit a dead end, we pull on him again." He passed on the second piece of information Genji had provided and passed it on. Nenro looked at the photograph of a gaunt man in his fifties.

"Aburame Shigeki, a tokubetsu jōnin. He's a researcher and breeder, a master of the clan's hiden jutsu. He developed the solution to the problem," Takuma said. Nenro's brows furrowed. All of this seemed fine. There was a problem, the Aburame came up with a solution, and earned money from it. He looked up at Takuma to ask what the problem was with this when a thought entered his mind.

"Are you saying…" Nenro gulped.

"Seems like it."

"… They created the problem?" ———. Nenro returned to the village from the south-eastern sector after his excursion and reported his findings to Takuma.

"We were right. They definitely created the problem in the form of pests and introduced them to the fields. Then they waited before introducing a cure in the form of a special beetle that eats the pest and nothing else."

Takuma held up a document that said: 「Hashirama Emergency Relief Fund — Disbursement 4A 」 「Service: Extermination of unidentified chakra-pest in the south-eastern sector 」 「Recipient: Aburame Shigeki 」 As a reward for developing a breed of beetles that solved the problem, Shigeki had been given a very handsome reward by the village. The Hidden Leaf Village was by far the largest consumer of herbs with special properties due to their chakra-assisted growth.

By finding a quick solution, the Aburame clan had saved the day before it got problematic for the entire supply chain that would've affected everything from medical supplies to everything that required fūinjutsu, like explosive tags, among other things. But that reward amount was paltry compared to what the Aburame had gained.

"It's not a one-time thing either. They've been paying them two times each harvest to keep the pest away," Nenro said. But that wasn't even the main problem. Because the Aburame clan had developed the solution, no one else had tried to come up with another solution, and the efforts had been cancelled after Aburame's beetles.

"The farmers can't negotiate. It's a monopoly. The clan decides how much they want to charge." Takuma nodded.

"If it takes the farmer longer to grow the crop, they have to pass that increase along. Everything gets just pricier. The village pays more, the individual shinobi pays more." He had checked, and the goods tied to the herbs grown in the south-eastern sector had gone up in price.

"That ledger only recorded one harvest. They've been doing it for the past five years. The scope of their operation has grown as well. This is big. He really gave us something serious. Maybe he didn't know what he was giving us," Nenro said.

"Or maybe he wanted to settle it in one shot. Clearing his debt by over delivering by a mile."

"Are you going to let him go?"

"Not at all."

"… What now? We suspect them of creating a problem to profit from the solution, but we don't have proof."

"Genji has given us a direction; it's our job to figure out what he's pointing out. Gotta earn that paycheck… Aburame Shigeki, his name is all over the place. We can't sneak into Aburame clan's deep archives, but I think this old man's home definitely seems like the next best place to find some proof."