"Pfft-"
Kushina turned her face away, covering her mouth.
Minato still wore a polite smile, but the muscles in his face were visibly twitching.
Jiraiya stared blankly at Xue Ge before finally saying, "You can just call me Jiraiya."
"Okay, Pervy Jiraiya," Xue Ge said stubbornly.
Jiraiya immediately protested, "No! I-I'm a writer! How can you call what a writer does perverted?
"I told you, I was gathering material!"
"Then where's your work?"
"Right here! Come on, I haven't even published this yet. You can read the manuscript first!"
As he spoke, Jiraiya pulled a manuscript from inside his clothes and handed it to Xue Ge.
Kushina looked surprised. "You really were gathering material? Huh? What kind of material could you get from peeping at a bathhouse-"
"..." Minato had a vague feeling that something was wrong.
After flipping through the manuscript for a while, Xue Ge nodded and closed it. "That makes sense, then."
"Right?" Jiraiya chuckled, then frowned at Xue Ge's completely unchanged expression. "Wait, why aren't you reacting at all after reading it? At your age, your hormones should be running wild."
Xue Ge set the manuscript beside his ramen bowl and turned to Jiraiya. "There's too much description of the setting and too little action or psychology. You could put more work into those."
A question mark appeared over Jiraiya's head. "You-have you written novels too?"
"No, but I know how."
Teachers in poor mountain villages were generally jacks-of-all-trades, dabbling in every subject, including language arts, of course.
Besides, Xue Ge had lived through the information explosion. To him, Jiraiya's little erotic stories were-nothing much.
"That's wonderful." Jiraiya was clearly getting excited. "Nobody appreciates my work. I never expected you to read it so seriously!"
"..." Xue Ge considered it for a moment, then raised an