Hyuga Hinata's guard, Hyuga Tokukun, entered at that moment.
Hyuga Tokukun looked at Hyuga Hinata nervously and said, "Young Lady, you weren't hurt, were you? The clan head was very worried when he heard you'd gone missing."
Hinata hurriedly waved her hands. "No, I'm not hurt."
"Then let's head back. The master and the others are waiting for you. It's almost dinner time."
Hyuga Tokukun said, "Thank you, head of the Akimichi Clan. The Hyuga Clan will surely repay you later."
After the two left, Choza stroked Denji's head and asked:
"Do you know who that little girl was?"
"You just said she seemed to be from the Hyuga Clan."
"She said her name was Hyuga Hinata."
Choza looked at Denji with smiling eyes. "It's fine. You can be friends with her."
With that connection, there would be less resistance when he arranged for Denji to return to the heart of the clan.
Denji rolled his eyes inwardly. This bargain-bin dad isn't thinking of Hinata as his future daughter-in-law, is he? Why was he smiling so lecherously?
"Tonight, I'll have dinner with you. I heard you're a pretty good cook. Your old man will cook with you."
Having made up his mind to mend their father-son relationship, Choza said this.
Denji nodded in agreement.
That evening, beneath a bright moon and sparse stars, it was a peaceful night. No clan massacre was about to happen.
Hyuga Clan.
Hiashi of the Hyuga Clan looked in surprise at Hinata, who had stopped after eating half a bowl of rice. "You're not eating anymore?"
Hinata nodded shyly.
Usually, Hinata ate two bowls while Hanabi ate one. He had always taught Hinata to have the manners of a young lady and eat a little less.
Had she finally come to her senses today?
But then he began to worry about his daughter's health.
"You're still growing, so you should eat a little more. Although I said before that you had a big appetite, one bowl of rice is still fine."
Thinking of the ten bowls of rice she had eaten at Denji's house, Hinata lowered her head. She had clearly eaten a lot already.
But she didn't dare tell her father about eating at someone else's house.
Besides, Denji's cooking was better than the food at home.
Hinata merely shook her head. "I'm really full, Father."
"Bring me another ten big bowls."
The Akimichi Clan was an entirely different scene.
Akimichi Choza sat at the dining table, wolfing down food like a whirlwind.
Denji brought food out from the kitchen and looked speechlessly at his bottomless-pit father.
As the head of the Akimichi Clan, a powerful figure in one of Konoha's foremost shinobi clans and a well-known name throughout the Shinobi World, he somehow gave Denji the feeling of a bottomless-pit Ryoko today.
His principle was simple: eat and drink when you could, run up a tab when you couldn't. Don't take anything to heart; live however made you happy and do whatever pleased you. Life came down to just two words: happiness and clothes.
But Choza's loss of composure wasn't entirely without reason.
He had come intending to repair his relationship with his son and make up for years of neglect. Choza had never planned to put on airs. He only wanted to taste the food his son had cooked himself, just as a small gesture.
Most food in the Shinobi World was centered around staple dishes, such as Ichiraku Ramen and Three-Color Dango.
Denji came from an ancient Eastern country renowned for its cuisine. He simply braised pork knuckles, spare ribs, chicken legs, and more in a savory sauce...
The protein-heavy meal immediately captured Akimichi Choza's stomach.
He couldn't stop eating.
"I never expected you to have this talent. Come to think of it, your mother was a good cook too."
Akimichi Choza's eyes revealed a nostalgic look as he made some casual conversation.
Denji did not harbor much resentment toward this bargain-bin father.
The previous owner of this body had not lived well in the Land of Rain. His birth mother had died early during the reforms in the Land of Rain.
Before she died, she left behind a letter describing her circumstances and background, telling him to take it and seek the help of his biological father—Akimichi Choza.
Even so, the distance between the Land of Rain and the Land of Fire was not something a six-year-old child could easily cross.
The hardships along the way need not be mentioned. After finally arriving through untold suffering, the previous owner caught a severe fever and died.
That was how he came to inhabit Akimichi Denji's body.
No wonder there had been no such character in the original story.
But that was the fate of insignificant people in this cruel era.
It could be said that the citizens of small countries in Naruto truly had no human rights.
To control their losses, the great nations kept wars confined to the smaller countries, using them as strategic buffer zones between themselves.
During the two Ninja World Wars, the Five Great Nations appeared to suffer considerable losses, but the small countries suffered the greatest harm.
The Land of Rain was one such small country. During the Second Ninja World War, it had been led by the demigod of the Shinobi World, who intended to elevate the Land of Rain to the status of a sixth great nation.
The war was lost, and the Land of Rain's circumstances were easy to imagine.
Parents and children were exchanged for food, and living beings were devastated. It was no exaggeration. Human lives were truly as cheap as grass.
Now that the Akatsuki had taken over, life was slowly improving, but not by much.
That was precisely why he needed to obtain the power to protect himself in this world, rather than become a weed of this era, harvested at will.
"What do you think?"
Akimichi Denji raised his head, his eyes gleaming. "I want to become a ninja."
Since coming to this world, the thing he had anticipated most was the path of the ninja.
But without a method for extracting chakra, he had yet to even get started.
Choza pondered for a while, then nodded.
"In that case, I will teach you and make you a ninja of the Akimichi Clan."
A ninja of the Akimichi Clan?
Thinking of the Akimichi Clan's uniform image as bottomless-pit tanks, Denji's mouth twitched.
It did not quite suit his aesthetic tastes, but he knew it was caused by the Akimichi Clan's inherited secret technique, the Multi-Size Technique.
"The source of a ninja's power is chakra. Only by possessing chakra can we use the ninjutsu you saw."
Choza gathered a ball of chakra in his hand. It was not the hand-signless Rasengan Denji remembered, merely a ball of chakra for demonstration.
But Denji was captivated. This was "supernatural power."
Every young man had once dreamed of wielding mysterious power.
On some ordinary afternoon, a crisis erupted at school. What kind of crisis it was did not matter. What mattered was that he, sitting by the window in the back row of the classroom, would stand before everyone as armor fused onto his body. Then, once it was over, he would brush off his clothes and leave, hiding his achievements and fame.
Or he would be walking down the street when a helicopter flew over and landed, and a pair of men in black told him, "Please lend us the Dragon King's aid." He would merely wave goodbye to his classmates, yet know that he would never return to his peaceful campus life.
Unfortunately, none of that ever came. Neither did the red-haired senior in high heels driving a red Ferrari.
Those fantasies had been ground into dust by life and work.
Choza continued:
"A ninja is someone who can use chakra to complete tasks that ordinary soldiers cannot.
Chakra, simply put, is something extracted by mixing physical energy drawn from roughly 130 trillion cells throughout the body with spiritual energy gained through training and accumulated experience.
Do you know why we of the Akimichi Clan can eat so much? Why we're all so fat?
Because we need to convert food into fat and store it in our bodies as energy. Then, when we fight, that fat is converted into chakra and becomes tangible power."
"This is the foundation of the Akimichi Clan, our most unique clan secret technique: the Multi-Size Technique.
Anyone with Akimichi blood can use this secret technique, and you are no exception."
Before you continue