There was a sort of unofficial mail service that existed within Fire. You could, of course, pay for someone to take your things—and plenty of people, especially nobles and the like, did just that.

For most, however, that wasn't an option, mostly because one obstacle prevented them from taking advantage:

Cost.

The cost was worse to send a message through the telegram system, but that was no surprise: Konoha had a monopoly on that. Even physical letters, though, and especially packages, those merchants would charge you for.

If you thought the contents were valuable, or you wanted to keep those contents private, you might even splurge for a ninja team—though mostly even the nobles just relied on merchants and a promise not to look.

Who could afford a ninja team, after all?

It had started with asking a neighbor who was going into town to sell a goat to pick up some fabric for you on the way.

And then someone had asked a shinobi team if they could say hello to a sibling in the Academy, maybe, or a family member who had relocated to Konoha, and the ninja had, and then when that family member wanted to send a message back—and a bit of home cooking—they (who were living in Konoha, who had learned that ninja were almost human) had gone to the ninja who had delivered the message.

And the ninja, maybe they weren't going to the village, but they knew someone who was vaguely going in that direction, so they passed the package along, and then the village received it, and—

It wasn't official.

No one was charged for it, and ninja didn't advertise it—they still wanted those who could afford it to pay.

But when you got on a genin team, when you began doing various C-ranks across the country, you learned.

So it wasn't that Ibiki had a problem doing it.

It was just—

He shouldn't have unsealed something from his storage seal in public.

That was the problem.

It was too late now, though, and they were on village number five, and still Ibiki was getting letters and packages and even just spoken things to remember, to parrot back at someone hours away.

And he had to keep track of it all!

Sensei said it was good practice, and anyway the other two were busy cramming in everything they needed to know to become chuunin, so it was up to him.

There. Was. Just. So. Much. Mail.

And none of it had addresses, like people did in Konoha!

Instead, it was "Oh, could you please give this to my dear aunt Hana? She lives about two hours south, and has a blue blanket on her bed."

What was he supposed to do with that?

But Sensei made him take it, said it was "good practice, and we're only spending a week in each village now anyway, so we'll get to a lot of the destinations in no time."

Which didn't help in figuring out how he was supposed to find some random woman named Hana who lived in a vaguely southerly direction and owned a blue blanket.

Ibiki knew perfectly well that the unofficial mail service was about as old as Konoha itself, but he had no idea how it had managed to last even this long.

He was spending over an hour every day dealing with requests, writing down the things people wanted him to relay, and trying to figure out if anything he currently had stuffed in his seal was supposed to go to anyone in the current village!

"Chin up," Sadao said. He was smirking. "You like diplomacy, after all."

This wasn't diplomacy. This was just work.

.

Most nobles did not send their daughters to learn at Konoha's Academy. They would sometimes send their spare sons, and often send their bastard sons, but the general consensus of everyone but ninja was that women should not be involved in martial pursuits.

On occasion, however, daughters of the nobility did end up in the Academy. It was very rare—usually only if, for whatever reason, they were considered to be unmarriageable by the time they were eight, and the noble wanted a particularly martial reputation, would the daughter of a noble show up in Konoha.

There were two, in the Academy.

Neither had died in the byoki attack.

Several of the boys had, however; two bastard sons whom Konoha had to bury itself, and one legitimate seventh son.

It wasn't that bad a loss for nobles to stop sending their children to Konoha, not really.

Admittedly, it had somewhat improved Konoha's relations with several important families when their sons (and, very occasionally, daughters) developed good reputations and became 'diplomats'. (Only some of them actually ended up as diplomats, though Konoha's public stance was that all children of nobility sent their way would be encouraged down that path. Most, actually, went to assassination, which some nobles also appreciated—especially when they got discounts when contracting to get rid of some external social or commercial threat.)

Minato knew this. The Academy Head knew this. Most people involved in the Academy in any capacity knew which noble children might have otherwise been sent to Konoha if not for the byoki attack, how nobles were likely to react to it, to the idea of sending their children to die inside Konoha's walls.

And yet.

Minato smiled as Academy Head Shimura reread the documents, apparently struggling to accept what was written. He looked up at Minato, then back down, then up again.

"I don't know a better way to ask this: why?"

That was a good question.

It was the Diplomacy Department's idea, really. Mitokado Supaku had noticed that as the nobility divided themselves along conservative and liberal lines, the liberal minority had noticed increased immigration, increased human resources, and increased productivity. He'd communicated that to his student, Nara Shin, who had agreed. He'd then suggested a plan, a plan Konoha was only just beginning to see the fruits of: incite an arms race.

Not literally, of course.

That would be bad.

But now the liberal nobles were trying to outdo themselves in liberal-ness, and the conservative nobles were cracking down on their labor force, which only increased the population differential between the liberal and conservative provinces.

And then Shin had suggested enrolling their children in the Academy.

It wasn't as good as being a samurai, that was true, but it accepted girls, it accepted boys with only one arm, it accepted children who were difficult to control, it accepted children who cried when they saw anyone or anything hurt.

Sending their daughters and other female relatives was a harder sell, of course, but sending the male children under their domain who they knew wouldn't perform well as samurai had been far more appealing, especially given that shinobi were now associated with things like research and medicine.

What nobility Konoha had received in the past were all sent to the Academy to become diplomats, something which the samurai only practiced within Fire borders.

Now the stack of papers describing the new students had different notes about the nobles' wishes: teach them, the note said, then give them back as researchers, as doctors, as adults who know how to fight but also know how to keep the economy running when there isn't a war.

"How do you think we should meet expectations?" Minato asked instead of answering the Academy Head's question.

The Head glanced over the papers again. "Push the kids towards the recommended courses and assassination in the Academy, slot them into apprenticeships immediately out of the Academy, make sure the researchers invent at least one workable thing, and medics stay at least three years. Then send them back to their province, and have them do whatever relevant work that needs to be done there whenever we need it done."

Minato hummed. "That works for me. Need anything to get it done?"

The answer was obviously yes. Every change always needed additional resources. But Head Shimura was perfectly aware that every single resource in Konoha was double-booked, likely would be for some time in the future. "I can work with what we have."

"Thank you."

Head Shimura bowed, left.

Minato smiled. What Shimura hadn't mentioned—hadn't mentioned because it was so obvious it didn't need to be said—was that the entire time they were here the children would be taught the benefits of Konoha, the necessity of the shinobi system. They'd be taught to support Konoha, and then they'd go home and teach others.

Shinobi, samurai, Fire, Earth, Daimyo, Hokage—everybody used indoctrination, good or bad.

Minato just had to make sure that Konohagakure kept its unspoken promise, its guarantee of a future, of greatness.

No pressure.

.

In the Nara compound, the porch furthest to the walls of the city was very far away from any other porch. The Nara contained several cabins in the woods that weren't technically anybody's in particular; instead they were used when somebody needed a little seclusion, a little time away.

Sometimes the cabins were even used by non-Nara.

This one wasn't in use at all.

The windows were boarded up, the door shut. Some Nara had cleaned the roof of the spring pollen sometime recently, but had figured they were far enough from the rest of the compound that they'd just left the pollen where it lay.

A table sat on the porch, with two chairs fully pushed in.

The house was completely silent, completely still, completely empty.

And then a cat came screaming in out of nowhere, leaping with all the strength of its nine lives onto the porch.

A weevil—clearly its target—attempted to get away, get free, but while it wedged itself far down enough between the wooden boards of the porch that the cat couldn't reach, it could hear well enough that at least two dozen more were on the way.

With a noise almost too quiet for even the cat to hear, the weevil vanished.

"Anyone have any idea who has the weevil contract?" Minato asked. The report had come in during a Heads Meeting, so there were plenty of people who could respond.

After a moment, the Aburame Head cleared his throat.

"I believe the weevil contract is an earth one, but that is only due to some of my kin noticing an unusually high amount near the camp when we last fought them."

"Testing us, huh?" The Inuzuka Head sniggered. "Thought the Uchiha cats abandoned us alongside their signers. Um, no offense, Uchiha."

The Uchiha substitute representative, Hotaru, merely blinked. At least he didn't have to perform double-duty—the other co-Head of the Research Department, who was sitting beside him, cleared her throat.

"I'm sorry to say that the summons detecting seal proposals haven't had much progress made since they were proposed; always something more important. I'll bump it up if you want me to, though?"

"No, no," the Hokage said. "The cats are more than capable of keeping watch."

Hyuuga Hiashi had to acknowledge that; the Uchiha had basically been impossible to spy on through summons since they'd gotten the cats contract, and that had been several hundred years ago.

That had always been an incredible advantage for the Uchiha, keeping them safe and allowing them the advantage of not having to constantly be on alert for every bug, every bird, every rodent.

Hiashi's elders had emphasized the good that did to the Uchiha Clan's power, the difficulty enemies (like themselves) had in overcoming it.

And then there were the occasional Uchiha wunderkinds. The rare but inevitable Uchiha who were just—

Better.

Who could do different things with their eyes, who could dominate battlefields with little to no effort.

The Hyuuga records hypothesized that they were why the Uchiha tended to put their children on the field the earliest; they want to test if any of their own were the sort that would allow the Uchiha to dominate for the next thirty years, guarantee just about any contract they wanted, make enemies run at the first sight of the Uchiha.

Madara was one of those.

The Uchiha hadn't had a wunderkind since.

Hiashi supposed that was why they'd tried, and failed, to fast-track Uchiha Shisui to the field. The little boy was definitely a genius, no doubt about that, but a genius wasn't enough to be one of the godlike Uchihas who defined a generation.

And, actually, the boy might have been one, might even be one. As far as Hiashi was aware, the boy had not seen combat during his short stint as a genin, and he'd been placed in the first hot air balloon when the byoki had attacked.

Hiashi hoped the boy was simply a genius. They had no need for another generation of Uchiha dominance, until the godlike Uchiha finally died from overwork.

Still, the Hokage's ruling that none younger than ten could be genin, that none younger than thirteen could be chuunin, had likely galled the Uchiha. Had galled the Uchiha, actually, visibly so. The question was only if the Uchiha were right, if the rare but mighty Uchiha warriors did have to fight at a young age to have their powers kick in.

And, of course, that was assuming that the Hyuuga's understanding of the situation was correct.

It was always hard to tell, with doujutsu clans.

They tended to play their cards close to the chest.

The conversation had moved on, now, had turned into a debate on tariffs.

The Hyuuga did not care about tariffs—no main family member ever did any work but shinobi work.

Of course, Hiashi thought, the branch family members were no different, had been too highly specialized by the Hyuuga's pre-Konoha training to do anything else.

Hiashi tried to think if that had changed.

Soon, very soon, the caged bird seal would be gone. The Hyuuga main line would have nothing to keep the branch in power but charisma, which Hiashi lacked; tradition, which many in the branch line hated; and how it benefited them, which it didn't.

He needed to find a way for it to benefit them.

He was, currently, the only working member of the main line family.

If the branch line split off then, regardless of if they left Konoha or stayed, the main line—Hiashi's family—would be ruined.

He tried to think of what any of them did besides shinobi work.

He tried to think of who they were when they weren't in front of him.

But that was not something he'd been trained to care about, and—prior to the death of the majority of the elders—something he would actually be punished for attempting to learn.

The meeting had moved from tariffs already, had turned to various ideas about introducing an 'acid layer' into the city's soil.

Most—just about anyone who had training on nature, Hiashi noticed—were against the idea.

After the meeting, he decided, he'd go and visit branch line families. Ask them what they wanted.

He couldn't think of any better way to convince them to stay, and he needed them to stay.