Orphanage

The rookie ninja continued, "Pair up for taijutsu training. The last ten will go without food today."

Thirty or so children formed fifteen pairs with expressionless faces. The older children were avoided by everyone, while the younger ones looked terrified, clearly not their first time undergoing this so-called taijutsu training.

Two by two, the fifteen pairs of children faced each other. The rookie chunin nodded and waved his hand.

The children at the orphanage began a clumsy yet vicious brawl. No one wanted to go hungry; they all knew how unbearable starvation was.

Before long, over a dozen children were bruised and battered. The worst off had eyes so swollen and purple they couldn't even open them, yet he still desperately tried to fight back. The supervising chunin had no intention of calling a halt.

"Sister Meizi, I recall the orphanage was established less than a week ago, right? Shouldn't taijutsu and such be taught at the Ninja Academy?"

With Sister Meizi's explanation, Dada understood the operating principles of the Kumogakure Orphanage.

What is an orphanage? An orphanage is naturally a place to take in orphans. But how are these orphans produced?

In the ninja world, only those with the potential to become ninjas have a chance to enter an orphanage. For the vast majority—the tens of thousands of ordinary orphans—no one cares. No ninja village would spend money or effort raising orphans who lack the talent to become ninjas, unless they were the children of their own fallen ninjas.

Currently, the ninja world is in a period of peace. Most of these thirty children were gathered by Kumogakure from the Land of Lightning and surrounding small nations. Some were victims of famine, some had families caught in the crossfire of ninja missions, and others were simply abandoned.

They were actually the lucky few who no longer had to worry about starving to death. Their other companions continued to struggle on the brink of survival, fighting tooth and nail for a bite to eat, only to die in ditches or caves where no one would ever notice.

A small portion were the descendants of Kumogakure ninjas. Their numbers were few in peacetime, but without exception, they were the children of civilian ninjas. When ninjas from ninja clans died in battle, their orphans were raised by their own kin; even in the worst-case scenario, they wouldn't be sent to an orphanage. The ninja orphans who ended up here were those whose parents were civilian ninjas and had no relatives willing to take them in.

The purpose of the village raising these children was to cultivate them into ninjas. Although Kumogakure did not, like Konohagakure, openly cultivate orphans as cannon fodder or use them for human experimentation, Kumogakure still implemented a militarized management style.

The orphanage was also modeled after Konohagakure's. While it earned some reputation for benevolence, the upper echelons of Kumogakure didn't place much importance on it, and this rookie chunin was clearly a rigid, one-track-minded individual.

Perhaps in his eyes, it was perfectly normal to subject a group of children who had only arrived in Kumogakure a week ago to militarized taijutsu training.

But Dada always felt that this wasn't quite right...

Perhaps because he sensed hidden dangers, or perhaps simply out of sympathy for a group of children rolling in the mud with bruised and swollen faces, Dada felt that this method of running an orphanage was doomed to fail.

Having arrived in Kumogakure less than a week ago, these children currently had no sense of belonging. They were at their most anxious and unsettled, yet they were being subjected to militarized management...

This wasn't cultivating reserve forces for Kumogakure; it was likely cultivating rogue ninjas and unstable elements.

I know the Kumogakure orphanage might already be considered decent, but that's no excuse for laziness.

You can't just raise a group of social outcasts and unstable elements, especially since these people will become ninjas in the future...

Dada curled his lip and turned to head back to the village. At this moment, he had neither the standing nor the ability to do anything.

Dada took small steps back to the Yotsuki Clan compound, brought some pastries to greet his mother, spent some time chatting with her, and then excused himself to return to his room, intending to continue reading.

However, he didn't expect someone to be waiting in his room.

"Dada, how has your cultivation been lately?" Third Raikage A said.

"Same as always," Dada said gloomily.

The Third Raikage, or rather the entire Yotsuki Clan, was very concerned about Dada's cultivation progress, but it had been the same for the past few years.

Although his speed of refining chakra was increasing and the quantity was growing as he aged, filling that "football field" remained a distant prospect.

Right, the "football field" was just Dada's own metaphor; others only knew that the chakra he refined was being absorbed.

The Third Raikage asked a few more questions related to his cultivation, which Dada answered honestly. Afterward, A brought up something else.

"Is this notebook yours? Did you invent a type of encrypted symbol yourself?"

Dada looked at the notebook in A's hand, his scalp tingling... his personal notes...

The notebook was filled with questions he was curious about and his thoughts after reading books. He used Chinese characters. The Naruto world also had Chinese characters, but they were used like the Japanese language in his past life—they looked the same but had different meanings. Therefore, Dada used Chinese to record things, treating it as a form of secrecy.

However, he seemed to have underestimated the methods of ninjas. Encryption and decryption were mandatory courses for ninjas, though Dada didn't know how miraculous they could be.

He could only hope that A hadn't understood it.

Still, he felt some resentment toward the Third Raikage. Reading someone else's things without asking was one thing, but asking about it to his face showed he didn't take the child seriously...

Bullying him because he was young...

"Yes, Father. I write things down when I have thoughts while reading. This... code, I researched it myself." Dada could only grit his teeth and admit it.

A was somewhat surprised. He was busy with work every day and, aside from cultivation, hadn't paid much attention to the daily lives of his two children. He happened to come to the room today and saw this notebook. At first glance, the contents were confusing, but after studying them using his familiarity with some Chinese characters and ninja decryption methods, he had deciphered most of it. Although it was only a preliminary understanding, he had seen some interesting things.

As for privacy... where would a six-year-old get privacy? Not in my Kumogakure, anyway.

The Third Raikage looked at Meizi with an inquiring gaze and received an affirmative reply.

Regardless of anything else, this encryption was done quite decently. It felt comprehensive and could hold a vast amount of information, as if it were a real, existing language.

If Dada knew what the Third Raikage was thinking, he might want to bang his head against a wall. This was a complete and great language; he had originally thought that writing things down in Chinese was very safe.

Ninjas really have some tricks up their sleeves. I was careless...

Empiricism really kills, and the Qidian orphanage trope has doomed me.

(In reality, if a certain language (script) has sufficient records, then even without a teacher, it can be deciphered and reconstructed. If there is a historical evolution, it is even easier.)

The Third Raikage had no self-awareness about invading someone's privacy—children have no human rights, right? He found a page right in front of Dada, pointed to it, and said, "Here you wrote, 'Village's current... hmm, economic sources are singular, risk is too high.' What does that mean?"

"Father, I was just writing randomly..." Dada said awkwardly.

"It's fine, Dada. Answer my question. Consider it a test of your abilities. Ninjas also need powerful minds."

Seeing he couldn't bluff his way out, Dada hesitated.

A lot of what was written in there was quite important. Looking at the current situation, even if he didn't say anything, A could decipher it himself...

In that case, it might be better to use this opportunity to achieve some of his own ideas.

So... let's just say, in a world where you can go to the battlefield at six, it's perfectly normal for me to be a bit precocious, right?

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