"No way!" Ino refused without a second thought. Shikamaru grew anxious and asked, "But... Shogi is really interesting. Why don't you want to learn it?"
In Shikamaru's mind, there was no game more fun than Shogi. The battles on that small 9x9 grid held an enchanting magic. He could play all day without getting tired, or play for a year, two years, or even a lifetime without getting bored... He was utterly perplexed: Ino is clearly like me, so why doesn't she like it?
Ino said, "If I don't want to, I don't want to. There's no 'why'!" She then added a stinging blow to Shikamaru, "Besides, I don't think a trashy game like Shogi is interesting at all. Every single piece gives off a foul stench..."
"You're talking nonsense!"
Shikamaru retorted huffily, standing his ground against Ino!
However, before Shikamaru could argue further, Mrs. Nara scolded, "Shikamaru, as a boy, you must be gentle with girls..."
Rebuked by Mrs. Nara, Shikamaru stuffed all his resentment and annoyance back into his stomach, falling silent like a mute gourd.
Ino said, "A truly interesting game is Go. Every piece, whether black or white, is the same—you won't feel any difference between them. When a piece is placed on the board, it has four 'liberties.' Whether you're surrounding someone or being surrounded, it's all a choice of wisdom... Gathering strength, being interconnected, choosing what to keep and what to discard—victory is determined by 'Qi' alone! I won't foolishly try to protect some 'King'!"
Shikamaru argued, "The King—that's the core. If there's no King, then what's the point of winning or losing?"
Ino sighed and said, "Oh, my foolish Otouto... If you hold onto such thoughts, you'll forever be nothing more than a frog in a well."
"A frog in a well? What does that mean?"
A child's attention is fickle and hard to grasp; their tempers flare up quickly and vanish just as fast.
Curious about the "frog in a well," Shikamaru completely forgot his previous anger.
"A frog in a well—well, it's a little story. It's about a frog living in a dry well who had never left. One day, a bird flew by and told him how vast the world outside was and how big the sky was. But the frog didn't believe it. He pointed at the mouth of the well and said: 'Look, the sky is only this big. I see it every day. Don't try to trick me!' This story is called 'The Frog in the Well'."
Although she wasn't trying to "show off," when she said the four characters for "The Frog in the Well," Ino instinctively used a pure Chinese accent.
"The Frog in the Well—what does that mean?"
Having not yet learned to read or write, Shikamaru naturally didn't understand the meaning of those four characters. He hadn't yet learned this kind of authentic Kun'yomi in its absolute sense.
"Jǐng dǐ zhī wā..."
Choji felt this way of pronouncing sounds one by one was very interesting, so he followed suit and repeated it.
The mothers of Choji and Shikamaru were shocked once again... "Little Ino is only this old, and she's already starting to learn Kun'yomi?"
Mrs. Yamanaka hadn't found a chance to brag yet, but this gave her the perfect opening... "You have no idea. Our Ino learns those obscure Kanji much faster than she learns Hiragana or Katakana. You know how those characters have so many strokes and are so hard to remember... Heavens, I don't even know how she memorizes them—she learns them after just one look. She can even apply what she's learned to other things..."
Concepts like pictograms, ideograms, phono-semantic compounds, combined ideographs, derivative cognates, and phonetic loan characters; or radicals, components, and structures like top-bottom, left-right, semi-enclosed, and fully enclosed... and so on.
No one in the Ninja World knew these things. Their only way of learning these characters and Kun'yomi was rote memorization.
It was impossible for them to build a connection between the sound, shape, and meaning of the characters.
Therefore... the speed at which Ino "learned" appeared increasingly incredible and unscientific—but while Ino had finished learning Kanji and her literacy far exceeded that of the entire Yamanaka Clan, she somehow struggled with the supposedly simple Hiragana and Katakana... This was also a fact.
Ino: Of course, I won't say that I already knew Hanzi in my past life. Even if you use Traditional Characters here, and even if some meanings have changed... if you've learned Simplified Characters, reading these Traditional ones is a piece of cake, right?
Kanji possesses a magical traceability. Once a person has learned the characters from the downstream of their development, they don't need to relearn to easily identify the upstream characters, even tracing back to the very source—as long as one is willing to put in the effort, even Oracle Bone Script can be recognized.
Conversely... if a person learns the upstream script and tries to look downstream, it becomes very difficult.
For example, someone who has learned Traditional Characters might be completely in the dark when looking at Simplified Characters, not recognizing what's written at all.
"Now Ino knows more characters than we do. I even tried testing her with a book once—she read the whole thing without missing a single word."
Mrs. Yamanaka emphasized her daughter's strengths and ignored her weaknesses, looking quite radiant as if her status rose with her daughter's.
In comparison, the Nara and Akimichi boys of the Ino-Shika-Cho trio seemed even more humble. Choji's mother took it in stride—the Akimichi Clan never relied on their brains anyway, so she just listened for fun. But Mrs. Nara decided to get competitive—her husband had an IQ of 180, so her son's IQ must be high too. Now that the Yamanaka Clan's Ino was already... Mrs. Yamanaka sighed, "Sigh... my husband even said that this child is growing too fast, which isn't actually good..."
Mrs. Nara and Mrs. Akimichi were both speechless.
Even the master of humble-bragging couldn't be this blatant—it was simply bullying!
...In a great mood, Mrs. Yamanaka bought Ino a blue bow with white spots and tied it in her hair.
The bow moved with the little girl; it bounced with every step she took, full of lively energy.
"Oh, what a beautiful bow. Did you Go shopping with Mommy this afternoon?" As soon as Inoichi Yamanaka returned home, he saw the bow on his daughter's head. He picked her up and praised her. Mrs. Yamanaka said gently, "Yes, I went shopping with the Nara and Akimichi families today... Hehe, the three little ones were quite interesting."
Mrs. Yamanaka helped Inoichi Yamanaka take off his ninja uniform and change into loose home robes.
"Work wasn't too tiring today, was it?"