Seeing People Clearly

After Lin Chuan arrived at the back of the classroom and took a seat, he began picking targets. He skipped Naruto right away. He hadn't expected to actually end up in the same class as Naruto, but Naruto was protected by ANBU, so there was no way he could succeed. He could only look for some other minor Konoha scumbags.

He remembered that the most famous thing about Konoha Ninja Academy was bullying: bullying Hinata Hyuga as a Byakugan freak, bullying Naruto as the dead last, bullying Rock Lee for not knowing ninjutsu, and so on...

Then he would just kill a couple of scumbags and collect interest on the two times he had been killed before. During those first two transmigrations, he had been taken out before he understood anything, losing two lives just like that. It was fucking ridiculous. Everyone in the Naruto world was the same—despicable outsiders deserved to go hungry.

But after searching for a long time, he couldn't remember who had been doing the bullying. He would wait and see who bullied the protagonists first, then decide who deserved to go hungry.

After school, he saw that everyone had parents picking them up. He had a parent picking him up too. There was no chance to make a move, so he could only temporarily suppress his urge to make someone go hungry and follow his cheap father home. He practiced extracting chakra, as well as the Three Body Technique, tree climbing, and water walking to train his chakra control.

Extracting chakra was necessary to gain the ability to perform "ninjutsu." It was the prerequisite for becoming a ninja, participating in combat, and carrying out missions. More importantly, it was the foundation of being a ninja.

Ebisu had explained it to Naruto in the anime: if one's ability to gather and control chakra was too poor, then even with the same amount of chakra, a person with bad control couldn't use ninjutsu. He had meant people like Naruto and Rock Lee. Even if they forced themselves to use the Clone Technique, they would consume more chakra than others.

Once chakra was extracted, any excess would naturally dissipate and could not be stored in the body. Ordinary ninja extracted however much chakra they needed to use. To store chakra, they needed special ninjutsu or certain sealing techniques.

Put simply, a ninja's chakra control determined the pace of battle. One slow step led to slow steps all the way through. If his chakra gathering and control speed weren't maxed out, others would have already finished casting their ninjutsu while he was still extracting chakra and forming hand seals. That would be a joke.

With the Grind Panel, his training would be much easier. He only needed to see whether a ninjutsu's proficiency had increased to know whether he was training correctly. Next came the time to grind.

Tap, tap, tap. Tap, tap, tap—

In the backyard of his wooden house, he took out kunai and threw them at the red dot on a wooden post. At first, only one out of every ten kunai hit the red dot. Then it became two out of ten, then three. That visible improvement was incredibly exciting.

After only half an hour of grinding, he had raised his kunai throwing to one hundred percent. The Grind Panel changed into an introductory prompt.

[Kunai Fixed-Target Throwing (Not Learned: 99%)]

[Kunai Fixed-Target Throwing (Not Learned: 100%)]

[Kunai Fixed-Target Throwing (Beginner: 1/1000)]

When he saw the prompt saying it would take one thousand attempts to advance past Beginner, he went numb. Didn't that mean he had to hit the bullseye another thousand times before entering the next stage?

What else could he do?

Just suck it up. Other than continuing to grind, he had no other choice.

After grinding kunai throwing for another half hour, he hit the red dot more than a hundred times. He watched the numbers on the Grind Panel climb bit by bit.

He realized that the damn game designers really understood gamers!

This was the feeling!

It felt fucking amazing!

[Kunai Fixed-Target Throwing (Beginner: 156/1000)]

[Kunai Throwing +1+1+1+1+1+1+1+1...]

[(157)(158)(159)(...)]

Watching the numbers constantly jump on the Grind Panel, he suffered and rejoiced at the same time. After dinner, he continued grinding, as though he had returned to his gaming days. If games didn't have all kinds of limits on gaining experience, he could have grinded for days and nights without sleep.

Unfortunately, there were no limits on gaining experience here—only the limits of his stamina. Every kunai that hit the bullseye counted as experience. He kept grinding until midnight, then collapsed onto the grass in exhaustion and laughed as he stared at the moon overhead.

So what if his talent was poor? With the Grind Panel, he could still become a hardworking genius. But that genius would run out of steam once he reached Chunin. In the end, his chakra reserves would still limit his growth!

He closed the ninjutsu panel and opened the mission prompt, where he saw the mission description.

[Save characters who appeared in the original story. Saving one person grants ten Life Points. (Mission Six: 0/3)]

The make-them-go-hungry mission required him to save three people to complete it. It had clearly required only two before, yet now it had become three. Did missions increase along with the number of transmigrations?

Still, that mission paid far too well...

Saving one person gave ten Life Points. He had no idea how many talent points that would buy. Unfortunately, he had no Life Points to test it with. He needed to get some as quickly as possible.

Life Points were tied to resurrection. How could he not be anxious? Life Points were his hope of reviving. He wanted to know how to obtain them, so he opened his personal panel again and checked the description for Life Points. Then he saw...

[Save characters who appeared in the original story. Saving one person grants one Life Point.]

[Kill characters who appeared in the original story. Killing one person grants one Life Point. (Ineffective against targets one level weaker.)]

"Well then, may those damn game designers die horribly. They're so fucking stingy. Killing ten people is only worth one-third of a mission reward, but this mission is hard to handle," Lin Chuan thought. Then again, he didn't have to handle it. There was no chance to save anyone right now, so he could put making people go hungry aside for now.

If he wanted Life Points, he either had to do missions or kill characters who had appeared in the anime—and they had to be opponents around his own level. Targets weaker than him didn't count. Or he could save characters who had appeared in the anime, but that came with no mission reward.

That meant the stronger he became, the fewer Life Points he could obtain. After all, strong people were rare, and they weren't easy to kill. But once he had strength, saving people would be truly convenient, making Life Points easy to farm—as long as he could encounter them.

Those damn game designers really weren't human. They gave him two missions he couldn't choose, then gave him a mission he couldn't complete. As expected, it was all a trap. He and those damn game designers were irreconcilable. He cursed them to have sons with no dicks.

For now, the only way to obtain Life Points was to save people or kill people. Unfortunately, his surname was Make-Them-Go-Hungry—unless those damn game designers offered enough.

Other than resurrection and adding talent points, he didn't know what else Life Points could be used for. They had to be extremely valuable. After all, he had to risk his life to obtain them, which showed just how precious they were.

Fortunately, he still had time to plan things out slowly. The most important thing was to improve his strength first. With his current pathetic strength, whether he wanted to make people go hungry or not wasn't up to him.

Lie low first. Get Life Points first. As long as he still had chances to revive, every mission could move aside. At worst, he would die and start over. Failing missions meant death anyway. He would secure some guaranteed Life Points first.

Over the next month, then two months, then three months...

Sometimes, in order to grind, he skipped afternoon classes and went out to train. After all, the afternoon physical education classes at Ninja Academy were just a bunch of children playing ninja games. He only needed to return on time for roll call.

The days of grinding through training were painful yet joyful. While desperately grinding, he also searched for targets to make go hungry, considering who he could go after.

His current strength was no different from that of an ordinary person. It would be easy to target ordinary people, but if someone died in Konoha, the Police Force would investigate. They might even trace it back to him. Making a move in Konoha had become the worst possible option...

If he didn't act in Konoha, then he could only wait until he graduated from Ninja Academy. By then, Konoha would hold the Chunin Ninja Exams, and Orochimaru's Konoha Crush Plan would overlap with them. Only then could he fish in troubled waters amid the chaos. Just the ninja from other villages could earn him quite a few Life Points.

There would also be the Sasuke Retrieval Mission afterward. The five Sound Ninja, beaten half to death by Konoha Genin after entering their Cursed Seal forms, would also be opportunities for him to pick up easy kills. The premise was that he needed at least Chunin-level strength.

He should develop for a while longer and see whether there were any scumbags around him he could target. Otherwise, even if an opportunity appeared right before him, he wouldn't have the strength to interfere.

After three months of school life, students were going home by themselves after school. Lin Chuan had just stepped out of the academy when he suddenly heard someone shouting. Turning his head, he saw three bullies surrounding Hinata.

"We're going to have a snowball fight here..."

"You Byakugan freak, get lost..."

Lin Chuan knew those three bullies. They were in the same class as him. Those three were the ones who often bullied Hinata, and he had long listed them as targets. Since they had ties to Hinata, they had definitely appeared in the anime.

Of course, he didn't rush over to play the hero and save the beauty. Instead, Naruto, who had been sitting on a swing, rushed over and shielded Hinata behind him. With how possessive he was, it would be hard for Hinata not to like him.

Lin Chuan had no idea how those three Konoha scumbags dared to bully both the Hyuga clan's eldest daughter and Naruto, the Fourth Hokage's son. Neither Naruto nor Hinata had ordinary identities. Konoha really did have a rampant bullying culture, full of people with low intelligence and poor character.

Then Naruto was beaten up by the three of them. The red scarf Kushina Uzumaki had knitted was also hung from a tree and ruined when the three scumbags used it as a swing. Only then did they leave laughing arrogantly, while Naruto prepared to escort Hinata home.

"Winter gets dark so quickly. It's getting late, there aren't many stars in the sky, and the clouds are heavy and black. What wonderful weather," Lin Chuan said. He merely glanced from afar in the direction the three bullies had left, then hurried toward the training ground. He knew they would pass through a small alley!