First Prey

The next morning, Shinichi sat at the dining table with dark circles under both eyes.

Not because he couldn't sleep. Because he was excited.

He had stayed up all night reading the scroll he had stolen back. Its contents were far more useful than he had imagined—not a ninjutsu manual, nor the secrets of some forbidden technique, but an escort manifest. It listed all the cargo carried by three carts:

Two test subjects, designated A and B. Six bloodline limit samples. Three cursed seal samples. One bottle of Orochimaru cell culture fluid.

Each term was followed by a string of codes, obscure as hospital lab reports. But Shinichi understood them. In his previous life, he had read countless online analyses about Root and Orochimaru collaborating on illegal human experiments. The code formats had long been researched on those forums. A was Yamato—the sole survivor of the First Hokage cell transplantation experiments, a Wood Release user, and a future elite Anbu.

And B—

The scroll contained no specific information about B. There was only a red X in the remarks column.

Dead.

Or dying.

Shinichi rolled the scroll back up, stuffed it beneath his pillow, then lay down and stared at the ceiling for a long time. He had to save A, but not now. He could barely throw a shuriken properly. Charging in to save someone would be a buy-one-get-one deal. Root wouldn't give him a discount just because of that. But B was different. B was already dead, or close to it. A dying person didn't need rescuing. They only needed to be—properly utilized.

The thought caught even him off guard.

Utilizing a dying person.

If his pre-transmigration self had heard that, he would have felt deeply uncomfortable. But now, lying on this hard wooden bed, he turned the words over in his mind again and again and realized there was no fundamental difference between it and buying discounted rice balls before a convenience store closed. It was just resource utilization.

He made his decision shortly before dawn.

He would act tonight.

During the day, he borrowed The Study of Shuriken Throwing Trajectories and sat in the orphanage's backyard pretending to read. When the matron passed by and saw him like that, the dustpan in her hands nearly dropped to the ground. No, this child had taken leave the day before yesterday to go to the library, taken leave again yesterday to go to the library, and today he was actually reading a book borrowed from the library—before this, the image of him voluntarily studying had only ever appeared in her dreams.

She walked over, tucked the dustpan beneath her arm, and examined Shinichi with the wary gaze of someone inspecting enemy movements. "Do you have a fever?"

"No."

"Really?"

"Really."

The matron fell silent for three seconds, then pressed a hand smeared with vegetable leaves against his forehead to check his temperature. After confirming that he truly didn't have a fever, she gave him an even more suspicious look and left. Shinichi lowered his head and turned a page, his movements calm. Experience from his previous life told him that when you did something out of character, the best response wasn't to explain—it was to stay silent and let the other person process it themselves.

He spent the entire afternoon in the backyard. Whenever he got tired of reading, he stood up and stretched his limbs. He flicked his wrists, rotated his ankles, and practiced a few hand strikes against the trees—the most basic taijutsu movements from the book, so simple that even newly enrolled Ninja Academy students would disdain them. But he practiced seriously. He trained until sweat soaked through his clothes, until his arms were too sore to lift, then shook them out and continued.

Not because he loved training that much.

It was because what he planned to do tonight required thorough preparation.

The sun gradually dipped westward. At dusk, he closed the book, stood up, dusted the dirt from his backside, and went to help the matron wash vegetables in the kitchen. This time, she didn't ask whether he had a fever. Instead, she gave him a look that said, "I've given up trying to understand this child," then silently pushed a basket of potatoes in front of him to peel.

He ate two big bowls for dinner. Little Flower stared at him in astonishment. The matron watched him eat as though she were watching a construction worker. "Has this child been growing lately?" he heard her mutter to the cook. "Or maybe he's got roundworms in his stomach." As usual, the cook's answer displayed little medical knowledge.

He didn't explain. He was eating so much because he needed the energy tonight. Besides, if tonight went well, then starting tomorrow, he might no longer be an ordinary child. He might as well eat a couple more bowls while he still could be ordinary.

Late at night.

The moon was mostly hidden behind heavy clouds, leaking only a few strands of grayish-white light. This kind of weather was perfect for nighttime activities. A dark and windy night, perfect for murder and arson—no, a dark and windy night, perfect for battlefield recovery.

Just as he had the previous night, Shinichi waited until the matron was sound asleep, skipped over the third creaky stair, and climbed out through the kitchen's back window. He didn't bring that old towel tonight—covering his face was too hot, and it interfered with his breathing. He still wore that old dark-gray coat, its overly long sleeves conveniently covering his hands. After leaving the orphanage, he didn't head straight out of the village. Instead, he took a long detour through several extra alleys. He had stolen something last night. Taking the same route again tonight would be suicidal.

After circling around for roughly twenty minutes, he finally climbed over the village outskirts from another side and entered the woods to the southeast. He wouldn't approach that forest clearing tonight. Root's people had definitely tightened security, perhaps even set traps. They wouldn't just let the theft of the scroll slide.

He was looking for B.

A red X. There was no further information in the remarks column. But Shinichi had inferred a few things from between the lines of the scroll. First, B had been removed from the transport convoy because something had gone wrong with their physical condition. Second, Root wouldn't carry a corpse through the forest; the most reasonable approach would be to abandon it on the spot. Like transporting fresh fish over a long distance—the dead ones would be picked out and thrown away midway. Third, if B had been abandoned sometime between last night and tonight, then they would have only recently died, and their chakra would not yet have fully dissipated.

The conditions were: the system required contact with a dying or recently dead body whose chakra had not completely dissipated.

An abandoned test subject, freshly dead, unguarded. Wasn't that a "beginner mission" straight out of the system's tutorial?

Shinichi moved stealthily through the woods. Visibility was poor tonight. Most of the moonlight was covered by clouds, and he could only navigate the forest paths through experience and touch. He moved slowly, stopping every few steps to sense for unusual chakra fluctuations nearby. The system's bloodline sensing function was especially sharp in this environment, like a person who had stayed up late for years being sensitive to caffeine—just a little was enough to trigger an immediate reaction.

After walking for around forty minutes, he still hadn't found anything.

He had searched nearly half the southeastern forest and still found no trace of any test subjects. His legs had begun to ache. A six-year-old body had limited stamina, after all. Even if it was driven by the willpower of a thirty-three-year-old, the glycogen missing from his muscles wouldn't appear out of thin air. He leaned against a tree trunk and panted softly, staring into the pitch-black depths of the forest as he began to wonder whether his deduction had been wrong.

Maybe Root hadn't dumped the body. Maybe they had carried it on with them. Maybe they hadn't even left him a chance to catch his breath along the way. If that was the case, he could turn the entire forest upside down and still come up empty-handed.

Just as he was considering whether to retreat for the night, he suddenly caught a scent.

Not blood.

It was fainter, more distinct—a smell like hospital disinfectant alcohol mixed with some unknown medicinal herb. It drifted over on the wind in intermittent traces. If his nose hadn't already adapted to all sorts of natural smells after forty minutes in the forest, he would never have been able to distinguish it.

Shinichi crawled toward the scent.

There was a small depression in the terrain ahead, concealed by several large trees and difficult to spot from above. In the depression was a shallow pit that had clearly been dug recently—the color of its soil differed from the surrounding ground, and the excavated earth was still wet. Beside the pit lay a thin human figure wrapped in filthy gray cloth, face-down on the ground, completely motionless.

Someone had dug a pit to bury them, but left before doing it?

No.

The person digging the pit hadn't gone far—there was suddenly movement in the bushes. Shinichi immediately lowered himself and hid in the grass at the edge of the depression. A person in a black cloak and mask emerged from the bushes, carrying a shovel. They returned to the shallow pit, looked at the body beside it, then began shoveling dirt into the pit one scoop at a time.

Shinichi rolled his eyes inwardly. Digging a pit in the middle of the night to bury a test subject sounded like the kind of job assigned to the least respected member of the team. He didn't even need to wait—the Root member was clearly here to clean up, left behind by his teammates to bury the body while the others moved on.

Which meant that within several hundred meters, there was only this one person.

A chunin. Alone, carrying out a boring cleanup task. His attention was on digging.

A six-year-old against an adult chunin in a direct fight was the same as suicide. But what about an ambush? In the forest, in the dead of night, while the other party was focused on digging—there might not be no chance at all.

Shinichi still hadn't thrown the stone in his hand. It was the one he had picked up while stealing the scroll last night. The feel was familiar, the weight suitable. He crouched in the grass, held his breath, and observed. The other party was burying the second test subject—there really was only dirt beside the pit. His tool was an ordinary shovel, not a kunai, and there were no explosive tags. This meant he hadn't entered a combat state at all. He just wanted to fill the pit quickly and go back to report completion.

Throw the stone, and then what?

A stone obviously couldn't kill a chunin. It could lure him over—if that person followed the sound to investigate and circled behind him—then he could hit him again with another stone—

No, this wasn't a game. He had no attack skills.

A dozen thoughts raced through Shinichi's mind in an instant. Every single one ended with, "And then what?" He had no kunai, no shuriken, only basic taijutsu movements, chakra control barely good enough for tree climbing, and not a single offensive ninjutsu. He had never even been in a fight—his only combat experience in his previous life had been fighting his deskmate over an eraser in third grade, and he had lost.

And then what?

Then he looked at the aura from the shallow pit. It had completely cut off. The blood was starting to cool, and the chakra was dissipating, but there was still the final thread left—like the last mouthful of plain water at the bottom of a cup.

If he didn't act now, there would be nothing left.

Shinichi stood up.

Not because he was so nervous that he had lost his mind. His instincts told him that if he waited any longer, tonight's trip would have been for nothing.

He clenched the stone and threw it toward the man. He didn't aim for the man himself, but for the shovel at his feet. The stone struck the shovel's metal blade with a crisp clang.

The Root chunin reacted faster than Shinichi had expected. The instant the stone hit the shovel, he threw the shovel aside and rolled in the opposite direction, his movements clean and efficient. This was someone with real combat experience—the first reaction wasn't to look for the source of the sound, but to create distance. Shinichi silently gave this opponent another point.

But he had no time to slowly rate him.

The other party was already on his feet. Beneath the mask, his eyes flashed sharply in the darkness as his gaze swept toward the direction the stone had come from. His hand was already on the kunai at his waist, but he had not drawn it yet—because he hadn't identified the enemy. When an adult ninja saw a stone fly out of the grass, their first thought wouldn't be that it had been thrown by a six-year-old. They would assume someone was lying in ambush.

Someone was behind the grass. Still impossible to see clearly.

Shinichi crouched where he was without moving. He noticed that the dirt beneath the other party's feet had just been filled in—it was loose. Compared to the surrounding ground, it sat slightly lower. If the other party moved quickly, the soft ground might make him slip.

Shinichi glanced down at the loose dirt beneath his own feet, then looked up again. The Root chunin had already drawn his kunai and was creeping toward the grass in a low stance. His movements were light, but the loose soil betrayed him—small clumps of dirt slid down with every step, and the more he stepped, the more they slipped.

Shinichi slowly shifted aside and moved toward a crooked tree. This tree had not grown crooked overnight. Its trunk extended at an angle, hollow at the base, with raised roots forming a small platform. On the other side of the roots lay a moss-covered stone slab—very slippery. Mossy stone slab, loose dirt, crooked tree—this combination suddenly formed a clear picture in his mind.

Not a battle plan.

Page seventeen of Chapter Two in Trap Design and Removal.

The book had two hundred pages. He had flipped through the first twenty, and just happened to reach that page. This kind of luck might have been luck he had spent all his gacha pulls from his previous life on, transferred to tonight.

He would make the simplest thing possible: a tripwire. He would tie vines between the crooked tree and the stone slab, at just the right height for an ankle, with the tension directed toward the mossy slab. Once tripped, the other party would lose balance, slide down the prepared slope, and crash into the roots of that crooked tree—not fatal, but enough to knock him unconscious. If he wasn't knocked out, the slippery moss and clumps of dirt would still entangle his hands and feet for several seconds.

Several seconds. Enough for someone hiding nearby to finish him off.

Materials: two vines. They were everywhere around him.

It took Shinichi about two minutes to complete the trap. Though his hands had never undergone ninjutsu training, he had spent six years doing handicrafts in the orphanage—mending clothes, weaving bamboo baskets, tying brooms. He could tie knots no slower than an adult ninja. Not to mention his previous life, where he had always kept a roll of clear tape and a pair of scissors in his desk drawer, and he was the one who fixed the printer whenever it jammed.

The vines had just been tied when the other party came within seven or eight steps.

Shinichi poked half his body out from behind the crooked tree, raised one finger at the other man, and crooked it.

The Root chunin stopped. Beneath his mask, his eyes stared at the child who had suddenly appeared. There was clearly a brief delay in processing the information—deep in the forest at midnight, a six-year-old child beckoning at him with one finger was not a normal sight in any adult's understanding.

"You..."

He had barely opened his mouth.

Shinichi stepped back and disappeared behind the tree.

The other party chased after him for two steps, then stepped on the vine. His left ankle caught, his center of gravity slipped out of control, and he slid down the prepared slope. The mossy stone slab beneath his feet accelerated his fall. He crashed down with a splat, rolled three or four times down the incline, and struck his head against a protruding root of the crooked tree with a dull thud that shook several leaves loose from above.

He wasn't unconscious.

But stars danced before his eyes. His kunai flew from his grip. A crack formed in his mask.

Shinichi didn't hesitate. He leaped out from behind the tree with a stone clenched in his hand. It was the first time in this life that he had jumped down from above to strike someone—his posture definitely wasn't pretty, and his strength wasn't particularly precise, but the blow landed right on the back of the man's neck. The man let out a muffled grunt and collapsed completely.

He picked up the kunai the other man had dropped. The handle still held the man's body heat. He stood there panting for several seconds, his legs weak and his arms trembling. But he still crouched down, gripping the kunai in one hand while pressing the other against the man's chest. There was still a heartbeat. He was unconscious, with a head injury and a blunt blow to the back of his neck. He had not died immediately, but in an environment where no one would treat him, perhaps a few more minutes would change that.

Shinichi didn't wait.

He pressed his hand against the man's forehead. The system's perception activated automatically. A stream of chakra was drawn from the man's body, flowing through the meridians in Shinichi's arm and into his body. It wasn't hot, not the burning sensation of being on fire. It was more like a cup of warm water flowing from his throat into his stomach, completely natural, as though his body had always been empty and was only now being filled a little.

Then he heard the system's voice.

"Devouring complete. Attribute: Wind. Bloodline limit: None. Skills acquired: Basic Kunai Throwing. Basic Shuriken Throwing."

That simple?

Shinichi froze for a moment and looked down at his hands. They were still so small, his fingertips still stained with dirt, but he knew they were different now. Just moments ago, when he held the kunai, he hadn't known how to grip it comfortably. Now, his fingers automatically adjusted into the most efficient hold. It was as though he had learned it before and simply gotten rusty from not practicing for too long. That was the ability integration mechanism gained through devouring—it didn't create a skill panel out of nowhere, but directly turned the other party's muscle memory and experience into his own. It didn't make you stronger. It let you avoid ten years of detours.

He crouched beside the unconscious Root chunin, staring blankly for about half a minute. Then he glanced at Test Subject B lying still beside the dirt pit. He reached out and touched the back of their hand. Cold. No chakra fluctuations. Too late.

Forget it. Tonight had already been enough.

He tucked the kunai into the cloth belt at his waist, stood up, and brushed the dirt from his knees. Then he ran.

He ran out of the forest, climbed over the wall, circled around the patrols, and returned to the orphanage's back window. He climbed inside, shut the window, skipped over the third stair, took off his coat, hid the kunai, and lay down flat. The entire sequence went more smoothly than it had the night before. His legs were still shaking, and his heartbeat was much faster than last night, but he could control his breathing without gasping.

He turned over and looked at his pillow. Two things were now pressed beneath it: a scroll and a kunai. The scroll was stolen. The kunai was seized. And there was one newly acquired skill—basic ninja tool throwing.

He closed his eyes.

The chakra attributes displayed by the system had changed: Earth + Water + Wind. Three attributes. Though having more attributes didn't necessarily mean greater strength in the Naruto world, the people at the top of the list were all pretty intimidating when you looked at them separately.

Six years old, three attributes, Senju Clan bloodline, foreknowledge of the entire plot.

He laughed softly in the darkness.

Not bad.