Although Hidan had reluctantly given in, Simu had still overestimated him.
"I haven't read a single book in over a decade, and I don't recognize a single character. How could I possibly know where the archives are?" Hidan complained, his face bruised and swollen.
"If you ask me, instead of staring at those tadpole-like squiggles, we should kill a few more people to honor Lord Jashin!"
"Shut up."
Simu had nothing left to say to this uneducated man.
Fortunately, although the Jashin Cult members didn't like reading, they at least knew about the archives.
Soon, a cultist led Simu and Hidan to the archives.
"Um, Lord Simu, Lord Hidan, this is the archives," the cultist said with the utmost respect.
It wasn't that he wanted to curry favor with these two God Children. He was simply afraid his head might get chopped off for no reason.
Though only a day had passed, Simu and Hidan's reputations had already spread throughout the Jashin Cult.
Simu was known as the Head-Chopping Maniac, while Hidan was called the Immortal Demon.
People would actually rather have called Hidan the Immortal Idiot, but they didn't dare. Even though Simu cut off Hidan's head every now and then, Hidan was still far too strong for them to provoke.
"Thanks."
Simu gave the cultist a slight nod, then carried Hidan's head into the archives.
The cultist let out a deep sigh of relief, grateful to have survived another day.
When Simu entered the archives, he realized that he hadn't just overestimated Hidan—he'd overestimated the entire Jashin Cult.
Good grief, the Jashin Cult's archives looked like a ruin.
The bookshelves lay scattered across the floor, covered in cobwebs. The books were piled together, and no one knew how long it had been since they'd last been tidied.
Simu rubbed the space between his brows and said listlessly, "No wonder a place like this could produce someone as talented as you, Hidan. Truly a land of outstanding people."
Hearing Simu praise him as an outstanding person, Hidan immediately raised his chin proudly. "You bet."
Clearly, with that IQ of Hidan's, he couldn't grasp the second meaning behind Simu's words.
Simu looked at Hidan's proud face and sighed.
For someone like this to receive such a ridiculously overpowered ability from Jashin, all he could say was that fools had luck on their side.
He used the power of [Koukaku: Spider], shooting out strands of webbing to suspend Hidan's head from the ceiling.
Hidan naturally refused to accept such a humiliating arrangement. But just as he was about to speak, Simu plugged his mouth with a wad of sticky webbing, leaving him able to make only muffled "mmph" sounds.
With Hidan out of the way, Simu could finally study the books in peace.
It had to be said: although the Jashin Cult members were uneducated, the cult's long history meant its collection included many valuable old books.
"Looks like there were some normal people among the Jashin Cult's ancestors after all," Simu muttered.
Otherwise, the Jashin Cult wouldn't have lasted until now.
Before long, a book caught Simu's attention. It was titled Ancient Deities.
It was less a book than a collection of stories.
It recorded many of the deities that had once existed in the Shinobi World.
The first, and according to the author the mightiest, was naturally Lord Jashin, worshipped by the Jashin Cult.
The book praised this deity, who wielded immortality and curses, in the most extravagant terms.
There was also a deity called the God of Death, who held dominion over death and the Pure Land.
Then there were the God of Nature, Animal Sages, and other legendary figures from myth.
Simu slowly closed the book, a question forming in his mind.
"So many deities—why are they all gone?"
The book described so many deities, and he had personally seen Jashin and experienced that deity's power.
Even if the Jashin he knew seemed nowhere near as powerful as the one described in the book, that still proved Jashin had truly existed.
Since Jashin existed, Simu could reasonably guess that the God of Death, the Animal Sages, and the other deities mentioned in the book had existed too.
So why had all those sages and deities disappeared?
And in the descriptions of these deities, there seemed to be no mention at all of Chakra as a power system.
Puzzled, Simu began leafing through the books again.
He spent the whole day reading. Only when the sun had set and the world was plunged into darkness did he finally gain a general understanding of this world.
First of all, people called this world the Shinobi World.
It was home to many countries.
Like the world Simu had lived in during his previous life, this one was also dominated by five great powers.
They were the Land of Fire, Land of Lightning, Land of Water, Land of Earth, and Land of Wind.
Together, these were known as the Five Great Nations.
Each great nation had a powerful armed organization called a hidden village.
The hidden villages were the strongest military forces in their respective countries. Every year, they produced a steady stream of powerful weapons of war: shinobi!
The person nominally considered the strongest in each village was given the title of Kage.
For example, the Kage of the Land of Fire was the Hokage, while the Kage of the Land of Water was the Mizukage, and so on.
In name, these Kage could even stand as equals with a country's leader, the Daimyo.
The Kage controlled the country's armed forces—in other words, its military power.
The Daimyo, meanwhile, controlled its political authority and tax revenues.
To Simu, this system was completely incomprehensible. After all, power came from the barrel of a gun. He couldn't understand how a Daimyo without control of the armed forces could hold on to the position of head of state.
Of course, considering that only a few decades had passed since this world had moved from chaotic tribal societies to the formal establishment of national governments, the flaws in its systems weren't entirely surprising.
Everyone was feeling their way forward without any established system to learn from, so a few loopholes were only natural.
Unfortunately, Simu hadn't found any records in the archives about the period between the Age of Gods and the Warring States Period.
There was little information about the Warring States Period itself, let alone the time between the two eras.
It was only natural for records to be lost to time, damaged, or never written down in the first place.
Many books merely mentioned in passing that "the Sage of Six Paths created Chakra," and left it at that.
They devoted far more attention to "the God of Shinobi, Senju Hashirama, who ended the Warring States Period and established the first hidden village."
Only fifty or sixty years had passed since Senju Hashirama's time, and people still spoke of the God of Shinobi's legend, of how he had subdued an entire era.
Setting down the book in his hands, Simu lightly tapped his thigh with a finger.
"Jashin, the God of Death, the Otsutsuki, the Sage of Six Paths, the God of Shinobi, the Senju Clan, the Uchiha Clan..."
"The secrets hidden among all this are enough to make anyone itch with curiosity."
At that moment, Simu was like a player obsessed with puzzle games, fascinated by the mysteries concealed beneath the surface of the Shinobi World.
Before you continue