Several days later.
Early morning.
Naruto headed alone toward the training grounds where he trained every day.
On his way, Naruto saw quite a few haggard-looking people walking along the road, as though they hadn't rested for days.
Naruto knew they were all players who had spent the past few days grinding in the Infinite Continent.
Without Kushina Uzumaki keeping an eye on him, Naruto probably would have ended up the same way.
Still... things were much better than they had been at the start. After all... the excitement over a game only lasted so long.
When a fun, novel game first came out, you might pull several all-nighters playing it, but... once that initial excitement faded, you gradually stopped staying up so late to play.
It had been quite some time since the Virtual Headsets appeared. The reason so many people still looked utterly drained was actually that there weren't enough headsets for everyone in Konoha.
At the very least... anyone who wanted to buy a Virtual Headset now would find them out of stock.
Anyone who wanted to play could only go to an experience store, and even those stores had a limited number of headsets.
Once one batch of people wore themselves out, another took their place and kept playing until they were drained too. That was why the village always had people walking around looking completely spent.
He arrived at the training grounds.
Rock Lee had already started training there.
Aside from his usual physical conditioning-running, striking wooden posts, and so on-his training consisted of catching sheep.
The problem was... no matter how hard he tried, he had never once caught Weslie or Sparky.
What Rock Lee didn't know was that every few days, Zeff had Wolffy come over and upgrade the two Mechanical Sheep.