The Sins of Our Ancestors

Uchiha Kei didn't care that Uchiha Shisui's clan members were getting close to him for their own reasons.

Life was like a tree: looking up from below, all you saw were people's butts. Looking down from above, all you saw were smiling faces.

Compared with Shisui's branch these days, Uchiha Kei's branch had it unbelievably good.

So, as Kei saw it, no matter what they thought, they had to greet him with friendly smiles whenever they faced him.

And Kei's attitude toward them depended entirely on his mood.

Whether he was warm and gentle when he was in a good mood or scolded them when he was in a bad one, they had to take it. They didn't even have the courage to refuse.

Because no one would stand up for them.

Who could blame them? Their branch couldn't fit into the village, and their own clan didn't like them either~

There was nothing to be done. It was all the sins of their ancestors!

As descendants of Kagami Uchiha's branch, they were Uchiha who had cozied up to the Hokage, hoping to make their clan fit into the village through love. It was downright absurd.

The proud, aloof Uchiha Clan had never wanted you to love them. They wanted you to fear and revere them.

Besides, Kagami Uchiha wasn't trying to get the village to love the Uchiha. He wanted the Uchiha to love the village.

We Uchiha abandoned our own clan leader, Uchiha Madara, and chose to stay in the village. If that wasn't love, what was? We were just too proud to say it out loud.

Since we'd gone this far, it was the village's turn to love us.

The Uchiha felt they'd given so much without getting anything in return, and they were growing resentful. Yet naive Kagami Uchiha still wanted them to give even more.

Anyone who'd been in a relationship knew that you might be unable to leave a terrible partner because you'd invested too much. If things didn't work out, you'd find it hard to accept.

The Uchiha were already resentful, and now one of their own wanted them to give even more.

That was straight-up manipulation!

The Uchiha Clan hadn't thought it through as clearly as Kei had, but that was more or less the situation.

Unfortunately, the people and their leaders usually wanted different things. The people wanted what was reasonable, fair, and in their own interests. If they couldn't get that, then an ordinary man's anger would draw blood, and the whole world would mourn.

But the leaders had to consider how the Uchiha would survive if they left the village, how they'd handle the village's retaliation, and how they'd make proper arrangements for their clan members.

If they couldn't manage that, then they had no choice but to stay in the village.

And if they were staying, they could only find a way to fit in.

So the clan leader at the time privately backed Kagami Uchiha's actions. In other words, "I can't openly support you, given what the clan members think, but I won't interfere with what you do."

But the clan members didn't know about this private support, and they wouldn't have accepted it.

So how did it all turn out?

During the Second Shinobi World War, whenever Konoha needed people to risk their lives, Kagami Uchiha's branch always sent men and did its part.

As a result, dying young became the norm for their branch.

It didn't matter how strong you were. Once you were on the battlefield, whether you survived was all down to luck.

Now, that once-thriving branch had only Uchiha Shisui, Uchiha Obito, and a few others left.

Even the ones who looked after them weren't from their own branch. They were elderly Uchiha women, widowed in the war and in need of someone to care for them in their old age. They'd married into the clan.

For the men of this Uchiha branch, twenty-five was a threshold. Not one of them had lived past it.

And as a transmigrator, Uchiha Kei knew they'd lose even more people in another year or two.

After that, the only way this branch could continue was if they learned to reproduce asexually.

"I hope someone like me, a man with a cheat, comes along among them too. Otherwise, when the holidays come, there won't even be anyone to visit their graves. Will they have to get a job in the Pure Land just to make ends meet? That'd be so pitiful."

The thought made Kei happy.

In a world with such overwhelming power, having knowledge of the future from a past life wasn't much of an advantage.

What good was knowing so much if you had no strength? If you lived through a familiar storyline, your life or death depended entirely on the whims of the familiar characters.

You might think you knew everyone's personality and could talk your way out of anything, fooling everyone with a few words. That was just wishful thinking.

Think about it. Were you even able to fool your own parents?

Once you understood that, you'd realize that in a superhuman world, knowing the future wasn't useful.

But if you left that familiar storyline behind, you'd lose your biggest advantage as a transmigrator. What would be the point of transmigrating then?

So having a cheat was still the safest bet.

Kei's cheat was aloof and never spoke to him. It was nothing like those flashy cheats that acted cute.

It wasn't cute at all, but it worked great, and Kei liked it.

Its functions were powerful but simple: it drew cards. The cards it gave him were living, named ninjas from anime worlds.

Those ninjas might not have been as strong in their original worlds as they were in the Naruto world, but a lifetime of experience made them competent ninjas by nature. Add the Sharingan to the mix, and they could instantly become capable ninjas in the Naruto world.

That wasn't all. The cheat also let Kei assign these ninjas to complete system missions.

The missions weren't dangerous either. They just required him to assign at least one Purple Card, several Purple Cards, or one Orange Card, and so on.

But for now, that meant Kei couldn't accept a lot of missions because he didn't have any Orange Cards.

The missions were things like patrols and routine work. They wouldn't even be accepted at the Hidden Village's mission hall. Yet their rewards were incredibly generous.

They gave him lots of points, which he could exchange for all kinds of things: silver, resources, materials, ninjutsu, and more.

So, without support from the clan, Kei's branch had survived by exchanging points for resources.

Feeding and clothing more than two hundred people was no small expense.

But thanks to the missions, none of that was a problem for Kei. He'd already saved up quite a lot of points.

The exchange shop also offered plenty of high-quality items. But those required not only a huge number of points, but also a large number of Orange Card ninjas to complete Orange missions.

Unfortunately, Kei only had Purple Cards on hand, and not a single Orange Card. So he could only take on low-level missions.

It was even more unfortunate that this game didn't have a way to pay for more draws.

Otherwise, Kei could draw cards, assign ninjas to missions, earn money, spend it on more draws, and repeat the whole process—a perfect loop.

That would've been a little too overpowered.

So Kei could only rely on his daily login rewards to get summoning scrolls. Usually, he managed to save up enough for a ten-pull every month.

In other words, he could add ten more clan members.

Kei had been a war orphan, sent off to live in a remote corner of the Uchiha Clan's territory. In less than two years, he'd made that isolated corner thrive and forced Uchiha Fugaku to acknowledge his branch's existence. It was all thanks to the cheat's card draws and point exchanges.

Of course, Uchiha Kei also had to thank the Second Hokage, Tobirama Senju, and the Third Hokage, Hiruzen Sarutobi. If the Second Hokage hadn't established the village's policy of sidelining the Uchiha, and the Third Hokage hadn't carried it on so perfectly for political reasons, Uchiha Fugaku wouldn't have been under so much pressure as the clan's newly appointed leader.

If Fugaku hadn't been under so much pressure, he wouldn't have been so desperate to strengthen the Uchiha. He wouldn't have so readily accepted the dozens of Uchiha clan members who'd appeared out of nowhere.

Kei still remembered his first ten-pull. He'd been extremely nervous, even preparing himself to die—or, if he survived, to flee the village.

Kei had thought that if dozens of ninjas suddenly appeared in any village, it would be a major event, and the whole village would investigate.

But he'd had no choice. Back then, Kei was an ordinary Uchiha who hadn't awakened his Sharingan. His strength was that of a completely ordinary Genin.

That meant he'd mastered the Three Basic Jutsu and one C-rank ninjutsu. In other words, he was cannon fodder.

And he was a war orphan.

For orphans, survival was always a struggle.

Human nature might have its countless shining moments, but people were still people. You could never pin your hopes on the goodness of human nature.

Even in a society governed by laws, it was common for people to seize the property of the dead orphans who had no one to protect them. How much worse would it be in the chaotic Naruto world?

Besides, most of the Uchiha Clan's property belonged to the clan as a whole. Once Kei's parents died, he no longer had the right to live in a large house.

So, like Uzumaki Naruto later on, Kei lost his home. With only a few keepsakes from his parents, he was relegated to a remote corner of the Uchiha Clan's territory, where he lived among other Uchiha orphans.

Kei was at an awkward age. Compared with the other orphans, he was old enough to be their big brother, but not old enough to support himself.

He'd been forced into the role of big brother, but he didn't have the means to provide for everyone.

It was a miserable situation. On top of looking after the few other children who were also war orphans and living in that remote corner of the Uchiha Clan's territory, Kei had to find a way to feed himself as his growing body burned through energy.

In other words, he had to fill his stomach.

Not just his own, either. He had to feed more than a dozen orphans!

They said a growing boy could eat a man out of house and home. That wasn't easy!