Chapter 567: Even Makoto Can’t Solve This One

Kakashi was suffering.

Obito had turned evil after finally becoming smart enough to recognize Konoha's Will of Bullying, and that realization had shattered him.

Now Kakashi was suffering because he had realized that Obito had realized the truth about the Will of Bullying and gone mad because of it.

As the Uchiha clan's resident idiot, Obito had already been hopelessly naïve to begin with.

Then Uchiha Madara spent who knew how long filling his head with nonsense.

With Obito's intelligence at the time, he had completely lost the ability to distinguish truth from lies, or good from evil.

And now that Kakashi understood that Konoha's bullying culture had been one of the forces that pushed Obito down this path…

Originally, Kakashi had been thinking about finding an excuse to dump Tobirama's assignment on somebody else.

But now he felt a strange sense of responsibility.

He could no longer save the Obito of the past.

But perhaps he could save countless other Obitos from appearing in the future.

Kakashi put down his novel.

The burden on his shoulders suddenly felt unbearably heavy, and whatever mood he had possessed for relaxing and enjoying his vacation was completely gone.

After thinking for a while, Kakashi decided to write Makoto a letter asking for help.

After Jiraiya, Makoto had effectively become Kakashi's second great mentor in life, teaching him all kinds of strange yet strangely useful lessons.

And now, when Kakashi desperately needed someone who might actually have an answer to an impossible problem, Makoto was the first person who came to mind.

Once the letter was finished and sent through the Flying Raijin network, Kakashi finally breathed a little easier.

Faced with Konoha's bullying problem, Kakashi felt no smarter than Idiot-Level-Two Obito.

He had no solution.

No inspiration.

Not even the faintest clue where to begin.

If even Kakashi felt this helpless, then Obito—with the intelligence he had possessed back then—falling into total despair and deciding that Infinite Tsukuyomi was the answer suddenly seemed almost reasonable.

Infinite Tsukuyomi was essentially running away from the problem and rebuilding reality as a fake world instead.

Running away might be shameful.

But it worked.

Unfortunately, even if Infinite Tsukuyomi really were as beautiful and perfect as Obito and Madara claimed, most people still would not willingly enter it.

First of all, given the classic choice between a beautiful illusion and a cruel reality, people would probably split roughly fifty-fifty.

Second, the supposedly perfect Infinite Tsukuyomi was designed to give everyone the world they desired most.

That might appeal to people burdened by regret.

But for Konoha's villagers?

Completely useless.

Their perfect world was already the shinobi world they lived in now—

A place where they could bully other people as much as they liked.

Their dream had already come true.

Why would they need to enter a fake world just to keep bullying people?

Rather than helping Konoha's villagers fulfill their dreams, Infinite Tsukuyomi would mostly help everyone else escape from them.

After all, there was no normal way to deal with a population that feared neither suffering nor death and would apparently rather die than stop bullying somebody.

So the question was—

Could Makoto find a perfect solution even with all of that information?

Obviously not.

When Makoto received Kakashi's desperate letter, he was equally speechless.

Why was Kakashi asking him?

Was this some elaborate form of torture?

Makoto had already told Kakashi that the Theory of Bullying could explain countless mysteries of the shinobi world, much like the Theory of Heaven's Will could explain the newer Romance of the Three Kingdoms adaptations.

What did that imply?

The Will of Bullying was the shinobi world's Heaven's Will.

It was practically one of the universe's supernatural rules.

Why were villagers willing to keep bullying people even when doing so might get them killed?

Because the true Heaven's Will—Kishimoto Masashi—needed villagers to bully characters in order to construct backstories and shape personalities.

Even more terrifyingly, Heaven's Will Kishimoto had eventually been corrupted by the very narrative law he created.

He discovered that using bullying to establish a character's tragic past was simply too convenient.

Then path dependence took over.

From that point onward, practically everyone's flashbacks needed some form of bullying.

Naruto's background, especially after being "corrected" by Heaven's Will, became an even bigger problem.

Because if Naruto had been bullied specifically for being the Fourth Hokage's son, that would at least make a strange kind of sense.

After all, in the country where Heaven's Will Kishimoto lived, even members of the imperial family were hardly strangers to bullying.

But Naruto being bullied because he was the Nine-Tails' jinchūriki?

That was where it became obvious Heaven's Will had been consumed by its own logic.

After all, in Kishimoto's world, nobody went around bullying bears or other dangerous creatures just because they were threatening.

If anything, people sometimes became absurdly cautious about provoking them at all.

The logic was basically:

If you injure a bear without killing it, you might only make it angrier, so perhaps it is safer not to hurt it in the first place.

That kind of reasoning was almost comparable to certain arguments that abolishing the death penalty would somehow make criminals less likely to murder their victims.

Following that logic, Naruto should have been treated completely differently.

He had never even killed anyone after becoming the Nine-Tails' jinchūriki.

Even if he had behaved like the neighboring Gaara and occasionally killed somebody every few days, the villagers should theoretically have treated him the way people treated a dangerous bear—

Carefully.

Politely.

And from a safe distance.

Instead?

Naruto received exactly the same childhood treatment as every other emotionally damaged Konoha ninja.

No exceptions whatsoever.

So what solution was Makoto supposed to give?

Harsh laws would accomplish nothing.

Konoha's villagers were the sort of people who could not be moved by poverty, tempted by wealth, or intimidated by force.

They would never stop bullying people just because they themselves were weak.

Even if they could barely afford food, they would apparently still spend money on eggs and fresh vegetables just so they could throw them at somebody.

Nor would strength, status, or wealth protect the target.

As Makoto had already said, if Naruto had been bullied because he was the Fourth Hokage's son, that would actually fit Konoha perfectly.

The Boruto era made this even clearer.

Himawari, the Hokage's daughter, got bullied.

Sakura and Sarada, despite belonging to one of Konoha's most politically important families, got bullied.

Kaminarimon Denki, son of the richest man in Konoha, got cornered and shaken down for protection money.

Some people claimed that after Kawaki and Boruto's identities were swapped, the villagers' reluctance to bully Kawaki proved they had subconsciously seen through Omnipotence and realized he wasn't really the Hokage's son.

That interpretation was wrong.

Konoha villagers had never allowed a person's identity to interfere with their Will of Bullying.

They did not bully people merely because they were weak.

Nor did they bully people simply to challenge authority.

Their bullying was founded on universal equality.

Everyone deserved a turn.

In the original Boruto story, Kawaki had been beaten and bullied since childhood.

His father abused him.

After joining Kara, he endured constant physical and psychological torment.

Then he arrived in Konoha, where villagers whispered about his background as someone connected to a villainous organization, kept their distance, and subjected him to cold social exclusion.

That was bullying too.

The only difference was that compared with everything Kawaki had already endured, Konoha's equal-opportunity bullying was almost gentle.

Combined with the warmth and care he received from his adoptive father Naruto, Kawaki actually found life there comfortable.

It wasn't that nobody bullied him.

It was simply that, to someone accustomed to being beaten half to death, Konoha's level of bullying practically felt relaxing.

Faced with a society like that, what possible solution could Makoto offer Kakashi?

Actually…

There was one.

Konoha's Will of Bullying had already spread like cancer cells.

Normal treatment was no longer enough.

Makoto picked up a pen and wrote a short reply explaining the only method he could think of.

The method was simple.

It still involved killing.

But this kind of killing was completely different from executions carried out under Konoha's new laws.

Legal punishment killed in order to deter others.

This?

This was just killing.

Purely and simply reducing the number of people capable of inheriting the Will of Bullying.

Because Konoha's villagers could not be intimidated by force.

Even if they watched people die for bullying others, they would never stop merely because they feared becoming the next corpse.

Killing them would not frighten the Will of Bullying out of existence.

It would only reduce how many people were left to pass it on.