Today was a special day. The entrance exams for the Ninja Academy began once again for the new year. Children who had registered long ago got up early with their parents accompanying them, preparing for today's entrance exam.
Konoha's entrance exams had always been known for their strictness, and their elimination rate was also the highest among the five great ninja villages.
According to the Konoha Charter, any child born in Konoha had the right to register for the Ninja Academy upon reaching the proper age, regardless of whether their parents were ninja.
But eligibility was merely eligibility. Only by passing the exam could one truly step through the gates of the ninja world. Every year, countless non-ninja parents wanted to send their children through those gates, hoping that their children would become ninja in the future.
The reason was simple. This was, after all, a world dominated by ninja. The strong devoured the weak everywhere—it was an immutable truth. Naturally, ninja, who wielded the world's most formidable power, belonged to the upper tiers of this world's pyramid.
In other words, they were a special class.
Of course, being a ninja was dangerous. They carried out missions, fought in Ninja World wars, and sometimes had to obey others' orders. But correspondingly, ninja held a high status in this world.
Seeing only the dangers of being a ninja was undoubtedly one-sided. Take Konoha, for example. The resources and wealth of the entire Land of Fire flowed into this village. In such a vast nation, more than half its income supported Konoha's mere tens of thousands of ninja. Even minor nobles had never enjoyed such a concentration of resources.
To say nothing of elsewhere—even in Konoha itself, if two families got into a dispute, one with a ninja in the household and