System Activation

System initialization complete.

After those words rang out in his mind, Shinichi could no longer sleep.

He lay in bed, staring at a crack in the ceiling, waiting for that cold synthetic voice to say something else. He waited about three minutes, but nothing came. It was so quiet he could hear grinding teeth from the next room—that was Little Fatty, who slept beside him. He ground his teeth every night, sounding like two squirrels fighting.

That's it? Shinichi could not help asking in his mind.

There was no response.

The system was clearly not conversational. It was more like a tool with preset programming: it activated when it was supposed to and stayed quiet when it was supposed to. As a former product manager, Shinichi inexplicably found the design reasonable. Who wanted a system that chatted with them about daily life? If the first thing it said every morning was, "Good morning, Master! Another energetic day awaits!" then within three days, anyone would want to uninstall it.

Wait.

This one probably could not be uninstalled.

He began trying to interact with the system more rationally. Closing his eyes, he focused and silently recited, Open system interface, display status bar, and view attributes panel—trying every game-related term he could think of.

Nothing happened.

He tried another approach. Instead of verbal commands, he simply released the intention of I want to know. Like a user deciding what they wanted to search for before typing into a search engine.

This time, there was a response.

No interface window popped up, nor did translucent text appear across his vision. Instead, information poured directly into his mind, as if he had recalled something he had always known. He did not need to read it or comprehend it. He simply knew.

He knew that his chakra affinities were Earth and Water.

He knew that his physical condition was average among six-year-old children.

He knew that an extremely faint yet undeniably real special bloodline existed within him—

The Senju Clan.

"Bloodline confirmation complete. Senju Clan bloodline concentration: faint. Current state: dormant. Awakening conditions: absorb First Hokage cells or the bloodline of a close Senju relative."

Shinichi opened his eyes and slowly sat up.

The moonlight outside was bright, spilling across the floor like a thin layer of frost. He spread out his palm beneath it and studied it carefully. Senju Clan bloodline. He had guessed it before, from the faint resemblance in his features, from his unexpectedly smooth chakra control when climbing trees, and from his surname itself—Senju Shinichi. Of those four characters, the important part was not "Shinichi," but "Senju."

But guessing and confirming were two different things.

The word "faint" bothered him a little. Just how faint was it? The moment that thought surfaced, the system responded—not with an exact number, but with a vague sense: less than one-thousandth of Hashirama Senju's bloodline concentration.

One-thousandth.

Shinichi's mouth twitched.

It was like a major corporation with only a three-digit balance in its accounts, yet a yellowed certificate reading "Direct Heir of the Senju Conglomerate" tucked away in the legal department's drawer. It was not worthless, just temporarily—no, basically forever—unredeemable. Like pulling out a business card that said "My ancestors used to be rich" at a convenience store. The cashier would probably be torn between concern and calling the police.

Still, it was fine. The system had said he could absorb and fuse bloodlines. That was the important part.

He began exploring the system's rules in greater depth. This investigation took nearly an hour, and the process was like a product manager testing a new feature with no documentation—pure trial and error.

First came the activation conditions.

The system could not begin devouring at any time. It required two prerequisites: first, the target had to be on the verge of death or had just died, with the chakra in their body not yet fully dispersed; second, Shinichi had to be in direct physical contact with the target.

"Isn't this just kill-stealing?" Shinichi muttered.

Then he thought about it.

"Well, that works too. Kill-stealing is a skill in itself."

In his previous life, his favorite role in MOBA games had been jungle. Not the top-lane type that fought head-on, not the mid-lane type with flashy damage, and certainly not the ADC type that needed the entire team to serve them like a parent. What was the essence of jungling? Timing. When to go in, when to retreat, when to steal the dragon, when to abandon your teammates—no, when to support your teammates.

This system had practically been made for a jungler.

No.

For picking up corpses.

That phrase sounded a little unpleasant, so he decided to call it something else—"battlefield recovery and reuse." Environmentally friendly. Circular economy. Sustainable development.

The second rule was the storage mechanism.

Bloodlines absorbed through devouring would not fuse immediately. Instead, the system stored them in a space similar to a "bloodline vault." He could choose to fuse stored bloodlines with himself at any time, or leave them in the vault indefinitely.

"So I can stockpile them first and eat them after I've thought it through." Shinichi rubbed his chin, making the exact same gesture he had at thirty-three. On a six-year-old's face, it looked strangely out of place. "This design is very user-friendly. After all, some things don't exactly look like something you'd want to stuff into your body."

Like what?

He did not know.

But his instincts told him there were plenty of unsettling things in this world.

The third rule was the fusion mechanism.

When fusing a bloodline from the vault with his own, the system would automatically handle compatibility. Highly similar bloodlines would fuse smoothly, like adding water to water. Bloodlines with low similarity would be uncomfortable to fuse, like adding oil to water. If two bloodlines were completely incompatible, forcibly fusing them would result in—according to the system's exact wording—"possible genetic chain collapse."

Shinichi fell silent for two seconds when he saw those words.

The term "genetic chain" appearing in a system description in the world of Naruto was already absurd enough, but even more absurd was how casually it said it. Genetic chain collapse, translated into plain language, probably meant every cell in his body revolting at once and rotting into a puddle from the inside out.

In his mind, he put a cross next to the option of "forcibly devour incompatible bloodlines."

Whoever wanted to try it could try it.

He would not.

The fourth rule, and the most important one—purification and evolution.

If he absorbed a bloodline highly similar to one he already possessed, the system would automatically purify the original bloodline. Once the purity reached a certain level, the bloodline would naturally evolve, like quantitative change giving rise to qualitative change. For example, the Senju Clan bloodline in his body was faint right now, but if he could absorb First Hokage cells, Tsunade's blood, or the bloodline of the Uzumaki Clan, those homologous "Yang-attribute life-type bloodlines" would stack with one another and eventually be purified to a level close to Hashirama's.

Even more enticingly, the system stated that after enough bloodlines of the same type and sufficient strength were stacked together, he could not only return to the level of his ancestors but might even achieve "atavistic evolution"—recovering an even stronger form that even his ancestors had never attained.

What would atavistic evolution of the Senju Clan look like?

Shinichi did not know.

But merely imagining it made his heart race.

He went over the system's rules from beginning to end in his mind, then lay back on his pillow and stared at the ceiling.

Honestly, this system was not very much like a power fantasy. There was no intelligent assistant jumping out to say, "Master, I'll help you level up with one click." No daily check-ins handing out gift packs. No first top-up reward of six-star ninja fragments. What it gave him was a tool, a set of rules, and a casually delivered warning that "genetic chain collapse may occur."

Yet because of that, he found it reassuring.

Experience from his previous life told him that anything advertised as "simple, fast, and zero-threshold" would eventually tax you somewhere you could not see. Free on the surface, paid underneath; they said registration cost nothing, then halfway through using it, a members-only feature popped up and blocked the exact point where you needed it most.

But this system was different. It laid out all the conditions, restrictions, and risks, making them perfectly clear. Want to become stronger? Fine. But he had to find the materials himself, take the risks himself, and bear the consequences himself.

That was what a real world should be like.

Even if it was a world with chakra and the Nine-Tails demon fox.

The next morning, Shinichi woke especially early.

He was not awakened by the matron's loud voice, nor by Little Fatty's teeth grinding. He woke naturally. The instant he opened his eyes, he felt like a completely different person from yesterday. Not because his body had become stronger—the Senju Clan bloodline was still dormant, and his chakra reserves had not increased. His mindset had changed.

Yesterday, he had been a confused soul who had just transmigrated here, his head full of question marks.

Today, he was a strategy-guide player armed with the full plot walkthrough and a cheat, ready to start pushing progress.

At breakfast, he drank an extra bowl of porridge.

Little Flower sat beside him and was surprised to find that Brother Shinichi was eating faster than anyone else today. He used to be the last one to come to the table, but today he was the first to sit down and the first to finish. Afterward, he even took the initiative to help the matron clear the dishes.

"Did you take the wrong medicine?" the matron asked, looking at him as if he were some rare beast.

"No." Shinichi smiled brightly. "I just felt like moving around."

The matron narrowed her eyes. She had worked at the orphanage for nearly twenty years and had seen every kind of child, but she had never seen a six-year-old smile so sincerely while voluntarily helping with chores. So sincerely that she began to suspect he had broken something and was hiding it from her.

That morning, Shinichi asked the matron for leave, saying he wanted to visit the village library to read introductory ninjutsu textbooks.

The matron was sorting vegetables at the time, and the kitchen knife in her hand nearly sliced her finger when she heard that. She looked up and examined him from head to toe with an expression that said, "Have you been possessed by something?" This woman, who had battled in the kitchen year after year, was probably thinking that Shinichi usually asked for leave to catch bugs, yet today he wanted to go to the library. What had gone wrong in his head?

"Can you read?" she asked.

"A little," Shinichi said. That was an extremely conservative answer—he could probably recognize more characters than the matron. In his previous life, he had watched Naruto for fifteen years. He could not claim to be fluent in Japanese, but he had long memorized the kana charts and common kanji. The writing used in this world was highly similar to Japanese from his previous life. Last night, he had flipped through an old children's picture book by his bed and discovered that he could understand eighty to ninety percent of it.

The matron granted his leave with some skepticism.

Leaf Village's library stood next to the Ninja Academy. It was a two-story wooden building with gray tiles and red pillars, with a plaque reading "Leaf Library" hanging above the entrance. The interior had excellent lighting, its floor-to-ceiling windows spotless, its bookshelves neatly arranged, and the air carrying the mingled scent of paper and ink.

The librarian was a middle-aged woman wearing round-framed glasses. When she saw him enter, surprise flashed across her face. A six-year-old walking into the library alone was not a common sight even in Leaf Village.

"Little one, what book are you looking for?"

"Basics of ninja tool throwing." Shinichi answered quickly. He had decided on it last night—he had no combat ability right now, and the devouring system had not even opened for business. The most practical first step was to master basic skills. And among all the basic skills, shuriken throwing required the least chakra and was the easiest to practice alone.

The librarian adjusted her glasses and pointed to a low bookshelf in the corner. "There are illustrated ninja tool guides in the children's section."

"Thank you, but I want to read those." Shinichi pointed toward the shelves in the adult section.

The librarian followed his finger. On those shelves sat Shuriken Throwing Trajectory Studies, Introduction to Close-Combat Kunai Fighting, and Selecting and Maintaining Ninja Tools. Each one was as thick as a brick, densely packed with text and without a single illustration.

"You... can understand those?"

"I'll try."

Shinichi stood on tiptoe, pulled Shuriken Throwing Trajectory Studies from the shelf, and opened to the first page. Dense rounded characters filled the page, explaining the relationship between a shuriken's rotational speed and throwing angle, accompanied by a large number of physics formulas.

He understood it.

The librarian stood where she was and watched him for a full two minutes. Once she confirmed the child was genuinely reading rather than merely flipping through it for fun, she shook her head and returned to her desk.

Shinichi found a seat by the window and began reading seriously. Sunlight streamed through the glass and fell across the pages, making the paper gleam faintly. He turned the pages one by one, neither fast nor slow, occasionally pausing to simulate the movements described in the book.

Honestly, the book was pretty dull. The author was probably some old scholar obsessed with academia, turning ninja tool throwing into advanced mathematics. Every angle was precise to decimal places, and every movement was broken down into fourteen or fifteen steps. A normal person would fall asleep after three pages.

But Shinichi would not.

The product requirement documents he had read in his previous life were much thicker than this, and every single one had been sent before clocking out on Friday, demanding feedback by Monday morning. Compared to that kind of thing, this textbook at least had clear logic, no typos, and would not message him in the middle of the night asking, "Are you there? Can we add this requirement?"

He spent the day quietly reading. At noon, he bought two rice balls with the two copper coins he had brought and made do with those. He continued reading in the afternoon. The librarian came to urge him twice before he reluctantly got to his feet.

When he left the library, the setting sun had already painted Hokage Rock gold. The stone faces of the First, Second, and Third Hokage looked especially solemn in the twilight, their enormous outlines reflected against the orange sky like silent guardian gods.

Shinichi stood at the library entrance, looking at those three faces, and remembered how he had felt when he first saw that scene on a screen in his previous life. Back then, he had been a college student who had just gotten into Naruto after a friend recommended it. When he started, he had thought, Isn't this just a shonen manga? Something to watch for fun. Then he watched for three days and three nights straight. When he reached Naruto's battle with Neji, a grown man had cried his eyes out in front of the screen.

He had never imagined that one day he would stand on this land.

He had imagined even less that one day, his fate would become tightly intertwined with this village, with those people, and with everything that was about to happen.

After returning to the orphanage, the children were exhausted after dinner and soon climbed into their beds. Shinichi lay down as well. He had spent the entire day reading and needed to digest what he had learned.

But the system clearly had no intention of letting him rest.

The moment his consciousness sank into shallow sleep, that cold voice came again.

"Detected that the host has completed basic knowledge acquisition. It is recommended that the first-stage training plan be initiated."

Shinichi opened his eyes in the darkness.

"Training plan?"

"Based on current physical condition and chakra reserves, the system recommends prioritizing the following training: chakra control, taijutsu fundamentals, and ninja tool throwing. Estimated time needed to attain basic combat capability: three months."

Three months.

It was now September of Leaf Year 59. Three months later would be December. There were still four months before enrollment.

Enough.

Shinichi closed his eyes, and this time he truly fell asleep. In his dreams, the corners of his lips curved slightly upward, as though he were having a long, wonderful dream that had only just begun.