The day after Aoba was promoted to Jonin, Sarutobi gave him an urgent mission to track down the whereabouts of Orochimaru, a Konoha S-Rank rebel.
Of course, the specific content of the task was only information found a suspected Orochimaru part of the trail, so he was sent to investigate some.
Although Sarutobi could not bear to kill Orochimaru, but all these years, Jiraiya had not given up tracking Orochimaru's whereabouts.
The most suitable candidate for the Fifth Hokage in Sarutobi's mind was Jiraiya and Tsunade.
The state of his energy was getting worse every day, Sarutobi had already moved more than once to the idea of retirement, so now he very much hope to get Jiraiya and Tsunade back.
As for the Fifth Hokage 'self-proclaimed' a certain kid, in Sarutobi's mind was not only he was too young to convince the public, his qualifications were also insufficient, so he did not even consider Aoba.
Aoba received the task to go out of the village to track down the whereabouts of Orochimaru and naturally did not know that to find Orochimaru was to allow Jiraiya back to Konoha.
But even if he knew, he was not afraid!
Don't forget, now he was not once a rootless weed.
There were backers, and even if Sarutobi wanted to go his own way, he had to consider the consequences, as well as whether Jiraiya and Tsunade were willing to be the Hokage.
Fair play is out of the question, couldn't he play a little dirty?....
After leaving Konoha, Aoba did not follow the information on the location to find the whereabouts of Orochimaru.
The reason was that he understood Orochimaru, this guy had a lot of secret bases in the Ninja World, even if he found one of them, it would not help, he could just give up.
And because of his relationship, Itachi was unlikely to join Akatsuki again in this life, so he would not happen to kill Orochimaru with a single look, forcing him to rebel against the organization.
In order to get the most out of the world, he must be thinking about how to kill Pain and grab Rinnegan, and would not easily leave the organization, unless he thought there was no hope of success.
So who knew if Orochimaru was on a mission with Sasori, or hiding in a base where he was doing research that could not be seen.
This task Sarutobi handed was very difficult to complete beautifuly by anyone, so he handed to Aoba.
Where was Orochimaru?
Just ask this guy!
Aoba immediately found a place where no one was, changed into the skin of the [Crimson Swordsman], and then took out the 'small spirit pass' put on his hand, and began to make a ' call'.
Since the completion of the mission to assassinate the Fourth Mizukage, it did not take long for both Sasori and Orochimaru to show him their interest in Yagura's body through Pain.
Only he had not thought about what to exchange, and he could not let Nagato know that what he was interested in was actually a favor from Sasori, or Nagato would have suspected his motives.
After the 'call' with Pain, Aoba directly explained the purpose of coming.
Pain also gave face, and immediately sent an invitation to Sasori and Orochimaru to join the "call".
Soon, Sasori and Orochimaru's body appeared.
After seeing the often unseen Yasuo actually there, Sasori and Orochimaru were a little surprised, but did not think otherwise, and looked at Pain.
"Another mission?"
Orochimaru seemed a little less than happy to say, "My experiments have been placed for a long time, I thought it was agreed that after this mission I would temporarily stop the mission for a while?"
Pain was not satisfied with the attitude of Orochimaru's speech, but wouldn't flip out because of this small matter.
"This time Yasuo had something to ask you guys, nothing about the mission. Talk among yourselves."
After Paine finished, he acted as a tool man and stopped looking at both sides.
Orochimaru, on the other hand, stuck out his tongue and licked his lips with some surprise, and stared grimly at Yasuo with the same gaze he had used to look at his prey.
Yasuo immediately had a feeling of being targeted by a poisonous snake, but put aside this fear. It was just some discomfort in the heart.
"The leader said before that you are interested in the corpse of Mizukage, make a price, what can you come up with to make me interested in exchange."
So this was the matter.
Orochimaru's gaze flickered for a moment, but he always felt that things might not be so simple.
On the contrary, Sasori, who was inside Hiruko, did not care about this at all and said with unusual interest, "What do you want to exchange for something? I think you should not be interested in my puppet work. Then how about a trade in money? Ten million? Fifty million? Or a hundred million?"
As soon as Sasori opened his mouth, he showed his tycoon air, which made Aoba almost shout, "First charge 100 million!"
Come to think of it, Sasori was a Puppet Master !
People who could afford to play with puppets, couldn't be poor!
Only the production of puppets with those precious materials wasn't something that poor people could afford.
Aoba bets that this guy Sasori was definitely making a lot of extra money, or else Nagato promised to give him a kickback, or else from where a mouthful of tens hundreds of millions of ryo came from?
But Aoba still resisted the urge to say yes, after all, his main goal this time or Orochimaru.
Seeing Yasuo look over, Orochimaru now seriously suspect that this guy was sitting on the ground in order to raise prices, so that he and Sasori compete with each other to raise prices. In order to find them both at once, he threw out the bait of the body of Mizukage in front of the leader.
This also made Orochimaru upset and feel he was being used.
Especially since all his money was used to build bases and conduct research.
If the puppet game was no longer costly, could it be that the research costs money?
That wass a bottomless fucking pit, how much money was not enough to spend!
n addition, he was secretly building a village, and was simply spending money like water.
So he had no chance of winning against Sasori's financial strength.
Would he give up?
Orochimaru could not help but think this thought, after all, as experimental material, the body of Mizukage was not so important to him.
If there was, of course, it would be best, and if not, it would not affect the research he was doing.
The other thing was that Sasori could make a puppet out of the corpse of the Fourth Mizukage and increase his strength again.
Thinking about this, Orochimaru smiled.
Even if he had to give up, he would still have to pit Sasori!
The two of them have been disagreeing with each other from the beginning, and have come close to fighting on several occasions.
And Orochimaru, who had been studying immortality, despised Sasori's idea of 'immortality' and regarded it as a heresy!
So then, Orochimaru laughed grimly twice, and directly added, "Money... such a dispensable thing, what can be done with it? I have a lot of scientific research results, maybe you will be very interested, do you want to see it before making a decision?"
The first time he heard this, Aoba did not say anything, but Sasori's tone immediately became more gloomy, "Orochimaru, do you have to compete with me?"