"Boss, can you get me a bento, please?"
Jin was wearing a plain black short-sleeved shirt and shorts. On his back, the red-and-white fan symbol declared unmistakably that he was a member of the Uchiha clan. He stood there, staring fixedly at the lunch boxes displayed on the counter, practically drooling.
Honestly, even if he hadn't been wearing those clothes, it wouldn't have made much difference. Under normal circumstances, no ordinary villager would have the guts to wander this deep into Uchiha territory.
"Uchiha Jin, you piece of trash, you're a disgrace to the Uchiha clan!!"
The furious, scolding shout made Jin, who had been fully focused on choosing his lunch, lift his head. The one who came out of the shop wasn't the uncle who owned the place, but a little bean sprout. It was the owner's son, a boy named Uchiha Yehuo.
"Forget it."
Uchiha Jin shook his head helplessly. He decided he wouldn't buy the bento after all; he remembered he still had some vegetables at home and could just throw together something quick. When Yehuo saw Jin completely ignoring him, he immediately yelled another provocation, dripping with sarcasm.
"Don't think pretending you didn't hear me will solve anything! You failed the ninja exam again, didn't you?"
To his total surprise, Jin grinned at him, baring his teeth, raised a thumb in a blatant thumbs-up, and replied with a rather proud expression:
"Nice guess, you hit the bull's-eye."
Yehuo's anger spiked to the point it was almost shooting out of his ears. How could someone be this shameless? Since when did the noble Uchiha clan produce members who couldn't even pass a basic ninja exam?
"You damned bastard, do you have even a shred of Uchiha dignity—"
"I'm just gonna cut you off for a second, but you might want to take a look behind you," Jin said, suddenly interrupting his tirade.
Yehuo stubbornly stayed put. "I'm not falling for that cheap trick!" He was absolutely sure that the moment he turned his head, Jin would take the chance to vanish without a trace. Based on his experience at school, he had already fallen for that one before.
"What do you think you're saying to Jin, you insolent brat?!"
A huge hand clamped around the back of Yehuo's neck—his so-called "neck of fate"—lifting him off the ground. He flailed in the air, screaming, "Waaaa!" in panic. A lame, middle-aged man with a face twisted in fury was holding his own son up like a stray cat. This was the shop owner, Uchiha Yemu.
"I'll settle things with you in a bit."
After saying that, Yemu tossed Yehuo back into the house and turned toward Jin, his expression instantly softening into warmth and kindness.
"This kid just needs a good beating now and then. Don't mind anything he says. It's no big deal that you didn't pass this time, little Jin. What matters is that you keep working hard."
He picked up a carefully prepared bento and handed it to Jin.
"And take this too. Don't go home on an empty stomach."
"Uncle Yemu, how much do I owe you for this?"
"It doesn't cost a thing. Whenever you want to eat, just come and get one."
"Deal, Uncle."
Jin nodded, then turned and started walking home. When he judged he was at a safe distance, he pulled out a fifty-ryō coin and casually flicked it backward. The coin traced a perfect arc through the air and landed right on the counter.
"This kid…" Yemu chuckled, picking the coin up from the counter, then hurriedly shouted, "You paid too much!"
"It'll go toward next time!" Jin's voice drifted faintly from afar.
As he watched Jin's figure grow smaller in the distance, Yemu's expression grew complicated and heavy.
"What a shame. Even though his parents were Jōnin, he turned out to be a ninja with no talent at all for ninjutsu."
In a clan that worshiped strength above everything else, Jin's life was anything but easy. And there was nothing Yemu could do to help him. All he could do was sigh in helpless frustration.
Yehuo stumbled back out of the house, rubbing his sore head.
"Why, Dad? Just because of that useless loser, you treat your own son like this?"
He was the biological son here, for crying out loud! Why did it feel like his father liked Uchiha Jin more than him?
"You little brat!"
Yemu started rolling up his sleeves. Yehuo immediately sensed that things were about to get worse and tried to escape, but he was caught on the spot. Yemu grabbed a broom leaning against the wall and began beating Yehuo with it, scolding him furiously between each strike.
"Your father's life was saved by Jin's father! And you still dare treat Jin like that?! Don't you realize he only comes here to buy things so he can support our family's business?!"
Yehuo couldn't take in a single word; his brain was completely flooded by the pain surging through his body.
"Stop hitting me! I get it already! I know I was wrong!!"
"If I don't beat the lesson into you today, you'll never take my words seriously."
Whack, whack, whack.
The broom smacked down with such intensity that even passersby on the street couldn't help but flinch and suck in a breath.
Jin's walk home wasn't exactly peaceful either. Out of nowhere, a flock of "soybean sprouts"—tiny kids who hadn't even started school yet—appeared and surrounded him. They started circling him and chanting a mocking rhyme.
"The Uchiha's pride, the Uchiha's Jin, the Uchiha's trash, can't ever win! Fails the exam, no ninja he'll be, forever a loser, just wait and see!"
Jin, far from getting offended, started humming along to their rhythm, completely ignoring the insulting lyrics. In the end, it was already a done deal; getting mocked by a bunch of kids wasn't exactly life-threatening.
"Hmm~ hmm~"
He even started hopping around with them, feeling that their dance wasn't nearly energetic enough. After all, he was only twelve himself, so acting like that wasn't exactly out of character.
The passing Uchiha clan members glanced at the scene with all kinds of expressions: contempt, scorn, indifference, and even a hint of pity here and there.
Jin just kept hopping along in time with the kids' improvised chant, and his mood noticeably improved. The kids, however, were not amused. They were here to mock and humiliate him, not provide accompaniment for his little performance.
"Bleh!"
They all pulled faces at him in unison, stuck out their tongues, and scattered, fleeing in all directions. Jin didn't stop; he kept bouncing along the road all the way back home.
"Honestly, childhood is the time when we should fully experience the carefree joy of being a kid."
Even though the atmosphere around him was anything but friendly, as long as he could enjoy himself a little, that was good enough.
When he got home, he lit three sticks of incense in memory of the parents of this life, who had died in the war.
"Even if this isn't a common custom in this world, it should have some symbolic meaning, I guess."
Jin looked up at the black-and-white portrait of his parents and let out a powerless sigh.
He felt immense gratitude toward the parents of this life for giving him a second chance at existence. In his previous life, he died in a laughably stupid way—crossing the street without looking at the traffic light and getting flattened by a construction truck. A life that had seemed so full of promise had vanished in an instant, only for him to wake up in this world of Naruto, torn apart by wars, and, to top it all off, reincarnated into the Uchiha clan.
It was like watching an old man deliberately drink arsenic: apparently life was too long and he wanted to shorten it. You had to laugh or you'd cry. A perfect tragicomedy.
And that's not even mentioning this so-called "era of unstable peace." Sure, there wasn't a Great Ninja War raging at the moment, but small conflicts broke out nonstop, and the final battle still awaited somewhere in the future. If he somehow managed to survive this period, the Third Great Ninja War would still be waiting for him. And if he miraculously lived through that too, then the next thing coming his way would be the Uchiha clan's massacre.
How was that any different from living with a guillotine hanging above his neck, waiting to drop at any moment?
As for failing the ninja exam, that wasn't some clever act to avoid danger or keep a low profile. He had really, truly failed it. Twice. The previous exam had tested the Bunshin no Jutsu (Clone Technique). This time, it was the Kawarimi no Jutsu (Substitution Technique). Unfortunately, he couldn't perform either of them, not even at a basic level.
He might honestly be the only Uchiha in the clan's entire history who couldn't unleash a single ninjutsu.
As for the Sharingan, the clan's famed hereditary eye technique, he didn't even bother hoping for it. He was making the entire transmigrator community lose face. To awaken the Sharingan, you had to go through soul-deep emotional agony. As for the Mangekyō Sharingan, that thing demanded "extreme love." Later on, Madara chose Obito not because he was some unparalleled genius, but because he loved deeply enough to hate with the same terrifying intensity.
For Jin, "extreme love" was something from a distant fairy tale. Even experiencing normal, everyday emotional swings was hard enough for him. He genuinely struggled to form attachments or bonds to this world. And emotion was the most important trigger for those eyes. Just look at Sasuke: on the night of the clan's extermination, after all that rage and grief, he only awakened a single tomoe in his eye—that alone showed how incredibly difficult that kind of emotion was to reach.
But the main reason he couldn't use ninjutsu right now absolutely had to be mentioned.
"Damned Goldfinger (Cheat System)!!!"
His "cheat" was called Deduction. It could deduce and create anything: from immortal cultivation techniques (Xianxia-style) all the way down to simple methods to fall asleep quickly. Anything could be deduced.
Sounds insanely powerful, right? The catch was that the conditions were brutal. The restrictions were insane.
First, to deduce something, a text box would pop up, and he had to type in his idea and the direction he wanted to take it. Then, and this was the real problem, he had to provide the technical foundation himself.
For example, if he wanted to deduce "postpartum care for a sow," he'd first have to feed the system biological knowledge about pigs, detailed techniques about the birthing process, and veterinary nursing procedures for postpartum care.
At that point, why not just go buy a proper textbook on sow postpartum care?!
Basically, to deduce anything, he first had to provide the underlying logic and data.
"This is literally the same as studying on my own and then inventing something based on what I learned! Where's the advantage?!"
The only truly praiseworthy aspect was its accuracy. Anything the system finished deducing was guaranteed to work—no detours, no dead ends, no failures in practice. A mad scientist would probably lose their mind with joy over it.
"You should've gone to Orochimaru, not me, damn it!"
Well, thinking about it more calmly, maybe going to Orochimaru really would be a decent option; it might actually become the key to rising up in this world.
The most important thing, and the worst restriction of all, was this: the moment something was successfully deduced, it would be force-learned into him on the spot.
And he had already paid a terrifying, painful price for that.
To test the deduction ability, he had dug out and read through every single ninjutsu scroll his parents in this life had left behind. There were a lot of them. The vast majority were all kinds of Fūinjutsu (Sealing Techniques). He didn't remember his parents ever being on a Sealing Squad, until he came across a particular entry in his father's journal that said:
"If I undo the seal on the Kyūbi (Nine-Tails) and seal it into myself, becoming a Jinchūriki, then with the Kyūbi's power, could the Uchiha clan finally produce a Hokage?"
Who would've thought? His parents hadn't just been ordinary ninjas; they'd been part of the radical faction—so radical they'd practically predicted the future without knowing it. As the heir to this radical Uchiha bloodline, this was… worthy of applause.
Except it wasn't. It was a nightmare.
Mito Uzumaki hadn't even died yet when they wrote that, and they were already dead before her. What a joke. They were playing with fire.
Putting the politics and radicalism aside, the simple fact was that he had inherited a mountain of Sealing Techniques and studied them day and night. He didn't understand much of the deep theory, but he memorized the patterns. And then, suddenly, he had a "brilliant" idea.
If I use Fūinjutsu as the main foundation, and replace the concept of "extracting chakra" with "storing chakra," turning it into something like "Internal Energy" (Neigong in martial arts), would that work? And when I want to move chakra, I just adjust the seal to direct it however I like. Is this viable?
Goldfinger said it had huge potential. And so, a "Seal-Based Chakra Internal Energy" was conceptualized and born.
This Chakra Internal Energy had some terrifying properties: it could slow aging, massively increase recovery ability, and strengthen the body. It was, without a doubt, a variant of Tsunade's Yin Seal.
If that were all, it would've been great.
But this "Basic Chakra Internal Energy" he created was abnormally possessive and domineering: chakra could not leave his body. Whenever he tried to expel chakra—like when forming a jutsu—the Internal Energy would forcibly suck it back in.
The tragic result was that using ninjutsu became a distant fantasy.
And because the system had force-learned it into him, he had no way to undo it, no way to cancel the technique.
Jin's tears were practically all cried out on the inside. And that still wasn't the worst part. The truly outrageous, vicious part was this:
To evolve, deepen, and raise the cap of this technique, he needed other people to increase his ceiling.
Goldfinger, at least pretend to be human.
He wasn't human.
So there was nothing Jin could do.
Uchiha Jin: (╯‵□′)╯︵┴─┴
What was he supposed to do? He was completely powerless. The "Basic Seal-Type Chakra Internal Energy" he had designed had level stages. He needed to gradually expand the seal, strengthening everything from his physical body to his lifespan. If he could one day extend the seal across his entire body, then maybe—just maybe—he'd finally be able to use normal ninjutsu.
What kind of garbage game mechanic was this?!
"Somebody just destroy this world already, please."
Jin's face was the very picture of a man on the verge of a total mental breakdown.