Naruto: Starting from Eating the Gold Fruit

Chapter 562 Is giving up more comfortable than working hard?

To be honest, You Ya has been in this world for decades, so naturally he should have been prepared for many things long ago.

It's just that things are now a bit out of his control.

Here we must talk about the price that Yuya has paid over the years to develop Konoha Village into the prosperous and powerful place it is today.

First, the decentralization of power.

The reason for decentralizing power was explained a long time ago. Yua is a person, not a machine. If Konoha Village remains just a village, then Yua can firmly hold onto power.

The key issue is that Konoha Village is not static.

Since Yuya came to power, Konoha Village has been expanded three times.

Note that this only refers to the inner city of Konoha. If the outer city of Konoha is included, the expansion of Konoha has been ongoing since Yua came to power.

After so many years, the population of Konoha Village has finally exceeded ten million. Of course, this number is the sum of the population of Konoha's inner and outer cities.

The majority of the extra population is concentrated in the outer city area.

As mentioned before, relocating only one hundred households from the outer city to the inner city each year is simply not enough.

You Ya has been in power for almost forty years. Even if we round it up to 100 households per year, with 10 people per household, that's only 40,000 people.

The population of Konoha Village's inner city increased by 40,000 in forty years, a growth that would break anyone's heart.

However, this is a perfect way to control the outer city of Konoha, and the number of people can only decrease each year, not increase.

If people from the outer city are allowed to enter the inner city of Konoha, the inner city of Konoha will immediately become overcrowded.

Of course, this is not a very important matter. For Yuya, this is just a means for him to maintain stability in the outer city. He never relies on this method to increase the population of the inner city of Konoha.

The best way to increase the population of Konoha Village's inner city is undoubtedly through natural population growth.

As for how the population grows naturally, it is naturally because the lives of the lower classes become better and better.

To put it bluntly, everyone in both the inner and outer castles of Konoha knows that the inner castle is the place everyone dreams of, but being able to enter doesn't mean you can live there.

Even so, many people still prefer to work in the inner city of Konoha with temporary ID cards.

Why? Are they pinning their hopes on that vague, elusive list of one hundred people each year?

of course not.

The reason is simple: the inner city of Konoha Village is better built than the outer city. Even though life in the inner city of Konoha Village is more difficult, it is still much more comfortable than life in the outer city.

This is the real reason.

These people don't even expect to get permanent residency; they just want to stay in the inner city of Konoha Village as long as possible.

These people, to put it bluntly, are there to serve the residents of Konoha's inner city.

It's just that Youya uses very strict laws to prohibit everyone from engaging in discriminatory behavior.

Why would the Yakuza enact such a law?

I won't go into too much detail about how the locals in the city where Youya lived looked down on outsiders in his previous life. Having seen so much, Youya also understood that you can never expect to use morality to restrain people's thoughts. Countless ancestors have told Youya this for thousands of years. This path is not feasible. It is impossible to restrain people with morality.

So Yuya used the law to at least give the people in the inner and outer walls of Konoha Village a semblance of fairness.

This situation couldn't last forever. Most of the people in the inner city of Konoha were only like this because they benefited from Yua's rise to power, while many people in the outer city thought, "Were we just lucky to be in Konoha when the Hokage took office? If we had been in the village back then, we would definitely be doing better than you now!"

This underlying contradiction has always existed.

Youya also knew that resolving this issue was very simple: just open the borders between the inner and outer cities.

But while this solves the problem, what about the host of new problems that arise? How do we address those?

In any case, Yuya felt that it was best to continue with the current system for the time being, and wait for a population explosion in the future, when the proportion of the population in the outer city was much higher than that in the inner city of Konoha Village, before implementing a long-term residency system.

Giving permanent residency directly is definitely not an option, but granting long-term residency for ten or twenty years would give the residents of the outer city the impression that the Hokage's office has been forced to back down. In that case, the conflict could gradually ease, and even if it resurfaces, it would be absolutely impossible for the inner and outer cities to erupt into a major conflict or even a full-blown war.

This is currently the biggest underlying conflict in Konoha Village.

On top of this, there is a higher-level contradiction.

When we look at history, we must consider the actual situation at the time.

Historically, every place where civilians have appeared has been associated with news of various conflicts [after all, who would remember if there were no conflicts? There are no sensational events...], but the wars that were truly won by civilians in the end, at most, have only happened twice in thousands of years.

More often than not, the fruits of victory still end up in the hands of those at the top.

This brings us to the topic of so-called highly skilled personnel.

Who are the most talented individuals in Konoha Village right now?

That's right, it's people who have graduated from university and... these ninja clan members.

Yuya's plan was simple: as more and more people graduated from university, the power of the ninja clan would naturally decline.

However, plans can't keep up with changes. These ninja clans aren't fools. Besides, they have clan members graduating from university every year. Moreover, due to the exchange of benefits, Yua gave them many powerful positions in Konoha.

This has led to a very serious consequence.

That is, ordinary people who graduated normally and entered various units, or worked in grassroots or middle management positions, would be associated with some ninja clans, whether by choice or by force.

Yuya wasn't unaware of this, but he didn't care because he knew that the most important difference between commoners and ninja clans was that commoners also wanted to rise in social class and become like the ninja clans of Konoha Village. Theoretically, they were not in the same class.

However, Youya overlooked one problem.

That is, there will always be people who choose to take shortcuts.

Some commoners would naturally choose to cut ties with the ninja clan because of their own inner desires.

However, naturally, there are also those who choose to give up, directly cater to their preferences, or simply marry a ninja woman or a male member of the ninja clan.

The reason why Youya had not discovered this phenomenon was because it was a voluntary act by these people.

There was no external force compelling them.

These people, born into humble circumstances, simply weighed the pros and cons and chose the path that would allow them to advance the fastest.

What did the ninja clans do in this? No, they did nothing.

But the final result is...

Whether actively or passively, almost every department in Konoha Village—construction, finance, legal affairs, agriculture, and so on—has connections with various ninja clans.

This could be a marriage where the woman marries into the family or is married to a member of the ninja clan.

Or it could be a direct superior-subordinate relationship.

Or it could be a teacher-student relationship where the teacher mentors the student.

And the most common of them...

They were classmates.

The relationship between classmates is something that many ordinary people may not care about.

However, in reality, this relationship is a very important personal connection within upper-class circles.

If you are classmates, many things will be much easier to handle.

In Konoha Village, the current situation is that every year, some of the university graduates are members of ninja clans.

After losing their clan lands, these ninja clans could only follow in Yua's footsteps, sending their clan members to university and trying to find ways to inherit their positions and power.

This is in accordance with the rules of the game.

However, what You Ya didn't expect was that, at the university, these people, although they didn't deliberately befriend talented people from ordinary backgrounds...

However, their classmate relationship created a real bridge between them...

You Yade admitted that he was wrong this time.

He originally thought that the most outstanding talents among the carefully selected commoners would not choose to cooperate with the ninja clan.

However, Youya forgot one thing.

That is……

Isn't it more comfortable to just give up than to work hard?!

(End of this chapter)