Aoki Yuichi, the head of the Ninja Academy, was a young jonin who had already earned a reputation as a genius among ordinary shinobi. After reading through Chiba Shun's file, he lifted his head and looked at Shun with open confusion.
"You know what state the Ninja Academy is in right now," he said. "It started with twenty chunin instructors. Now there are only three left."
"You managed to kill a chunin-level enemy at thirteen. That means you have real talent. So why come here, to an organization that's already one step away from being shut down? What exactly are you after?"
Shun smiled, calm and confident. "Senior Aoki, the academy ended up like this because you picked the wrong direction."
Aoki's expression turned strange, but he did not interrupt. He simply watched him, waiting.
Shun continued, "You wanted to use the academy to cultivate your own people, didn't you? Build a group of loyal subordinates, improve your standing in the village, and create a power base of your own."
Aoki fell silent.
Shun had hit the mark. That was exactly what Aoki had intended. The result, however, was the academy's current half-dead state - neither truly accepting students nor truly rejecting them, with no numbers to speak of and no elite talent worth mentioning.
"The academy's first duty," Shun said, "is to produce cannon fodder."
"The second is to sift real elites out of that cannon fodder."
"The first part doesn't bring you much personal benefit. But without the first, you never create the conditions for the second."
That finally made Aoki's face change. He lowered his head and seriously mulled over Shun's words.
A moment later, he looked back up. "Talk. What exactly is your plan?"
Only then did Shun know this trip had not been wasted. A bright grin flashed across his face.
"The academy needs to expand," he said. "Every orphan in the village should be brought in. Not just that - we should search across the Land of Lightning, even beyond it if necessary, and gather orphans wherever we can."
"Only when the numbers are large enough can the academy actually serve a purpose."
"After that, they need to be taught loyalty. They need to believe in the village, depend on the village, and be willing to die for it."
He leaned forward slightly, his tone sharpening.
"Senior Aoki, you need to face the truth. Most of the academy's students will never amount to much. At the most basic level, if they can refine chakra and throw a few kunai, they can be sent onto the battlefield."
"Once the academy proves useful, the village will start investing more resources. Only then will the children of commoners begin entering in greater numbers. And only after that will the children of shinobi families follow."
"And it's from those children that the real geniuses your predecessors want will appear."
When Aoki first heard the proposal to expand enrollment, he had wanted to object. The academy was already short on funds. How was it supposed to take in more children?
But the second half of Shun's argument caught him at once.
In recent years, the academy had indeed produced students, but Aoki knew better than anyone that most of them lacked genuine fighting spirit. Compared to someone like Chiba Shun, who had followed chunin and jonin on missions since childhood and learned what blood and danger felt like, those students were soft.
Still, one phrase in particular had snagged his attention.
"You said they'd need to be taught loyalty," Aoki said slowly. "How?"
Shun answered with four simple words.
"The Will of Lightning."
Aoki frowned. He rolled the phrase around in his mind for several seconds before asking, "Like Konoha's Will of Fire?"
The question itself carried contempt.
Aoki had never believed in Konoha's Will of Fire. If something like that truly existed, then why had Konoha been cornered in war? Why had so many died? Why had they been forced to hold out until allied support arrived? To him, that sort of slogan was just noise.
So he had never once considered borrowing the method.
Shun nodded. "Exactly like that. Only a belief like this can make cannon fodder useful."
"And how do you intend to spread this 'Will of Lightning'?" Aoki asked, now openly curious.
Shun had already thought it through. He did not hesitate.
"We smear Konoha," he said. "And we praise the Raikage of the past."
Aoki immediately shook his head. "You may not know this, but Senju Hashirama was acknowledged as the strongest shinobi in the world back then. Even Uchiha Madara was far beyond what our Raikage could have handled."
"Konoha has the prestige to sell its own myths. We don't."
Shun laughed. "Of course I know how terrifying Hashirama Senju was. That's exactly why Konoha should be painted as even more monstrous."
"We describe Konoha as a demon, and our First Raikage as a hero who rose up against demonic oppression."
"The final clash between Hashirama and Madara becomes a fight between rabid dogs - an internal struggle over unequal spoils."
Aoki's mouth opened a little in instinctive disbelief.
Shun pressed on without mercy.
"The Senju and Uchiha are ambitious schemers who wanted to enslave the entire shinobi world. Kumogakure, on the other hand, is the pure land that protects the ordinary people of the Land of Lightning from being bullied."
"Those two monsters are already dead, but the clans beneath them inherited their ambition."
"Konoha is rotten within and greedy without. They're at each other's throats internally while still trying to stretch their hands outward."
"They started the Second Great Ninja War."
"And all of these orphans we brought in? Their parents died because of Konoha's ambition."
"Now the Third Raikage has given them a home. So they should fight for the Raikage. Fight for the village."
Aoki was speechless.
The Second Great Ninja War had obviously begun because the other four great villages moved after seeing Konoha weakened. Yet in Chiba Shun's mouth, the entire blame had become Konoha's.
Still, Aoki understood what he was hearing.
This was deliberate distortion. Controlled narrative. A carefully manufactured truth.
And that, perhaps, really was brainwashing.
He had originally planned to ask more questions before deciding whether to admit Shun into the academy. By now, he felt no such need.
After a moment, he inhaled deeply and asked the most important question instead.
"What do you want?"
Shun answered without even blinking. "I want access to every ninjutsu the Ninja Academy has ever handled."
He was a disgrace to transmigrators, he thought with ruthless honesty. Up to this point, he had not even learned a proper standard elemental ninjutsu.
"And I want a salary worthy of the work," he added. "I'm an orphan. I don't have parents or elders supporting me. If I'm going to improve my body, I need food. A lot of it."
He did not bother circling around the point or speaking in hints.
But this kind of bluntness fit Kumogakure's temperament perfectly.
Aoki narrowed his eyes, then nodded. "That's fine."
Shun wasn't done. "And when you have time, I'd like guidance in cultivation as well."
Aoki studied him for another moment before replying, "Fine."
Then, after a brief pause, he said, "I'll write up a reform proposal for the academy and submit it to Lord Raikage."
Shun smiled faintly. He reached into his ninja pouch and handed over the scroll he had prepared in advance.
Aoki blinked, then took it and unrolled it on the spot.
The more he read, the more questions he asked. The two of them argued, refined, and discussed details for an entire day before Aoki finally let Shun go.
***
For the next ten days, one topic dominated discussion throughout the Hidden Cloud Village.
The nearly dead Ninja Academy had suddenly begun a massive expansion, and the order had come directly from the Raikage himself.
Every orphan within the village was to be sent to the academy. Teams of shinobi were dispatched to search for more orphans throughout the Land of Lightning. Even more shocking, the Raikage had overruled objections and personally approved new funding for the academy's expansion.
The village buzzed with debate.
Should ordinary families send their own children there too?
In the end, almost nobody did.
Most still preferred to place a child directly under a chunin's care. Better yet, if a jonin happened to notice the child and take interest, that was even more ideal.
At the academy, one chunin instructor might have to teach dozens, even hundreds of students. How could that compare to the focused instruction of a personal mentor leading a small team?
So in the end, only the children no shinobi wanted were sent there to try their luck.
During those days, Chiba Shun stayed so busy he almost never had time to sit down.
He was not teaching yet. He was handling logistics.
The academy had originally housed only a few hundred students. Now more than two thousand new children had flooded in all at once.
And they were of every possible age.
Some were old enough to glare at the world with hollow, wary eyes. Some were little more than infants who still had to be carried.
Fortunately, the expansion also folded the orphanages into the academy system. Their caretakers came along as well, taking charge of food, living arrangements, and the day-to-day care of the youngest children.
Even so, it took half a month just to stabilize the situation enough for formal classes to begin.
When the first class was finally held, the teacher standing before the academy's thousands of children was Chiba Shun.
He stood on the playground and looked over the dense sea of fidgeting bodies. The air was restless and noisy, full of whispers, crying, shoving, and thin hunger.
He drew in a deep breath.
Then he began his very first lesson in indoctrination.
Ordinarily, something like this should have been done by the Third Raikage himself, the same way the Third Hokage, Hiruzen Sarutobi, had personally embodied Konoha's ideals.
But the Third Raikage was a mountain of muscle and violence. A man like that had no talent for this kind of work.
Shun raised one hand high, coughed heavily to command attention, and let his voice ring out across the field.
"Do you know why you became orphans?"
"Do you know who killed your parents?"
The playground quieted by degrees.
Most of the younger children stared at him blankly. They barely remembered their parents at all. What they did understand was something much simpler.
Children with parents were treasured.
Someone fed them hot food. Someone bought them toys. Someone cared whether they slept warmly at night. Some even received resources for cultivation.
Orphans got none of that.
From a very young age, they had to learn how to survive on their own. The slightly older ones had to work for food or scraps of money just to stay alive. As for cultivation resources, those were luxuries from another world.
Children without parents came to understand the cruelty of the shinobi world earlier than anyone else. They grew up faster. Their resentment rooted deeper.
That was why Shun's opening words bit so hard.
The older children, especially, were no longer restless. Their eyes had fixed on him. They were waiting.
Waiting for the answer.
Who had done this to them?
Shun let the silence stretch for one more heartbeat.
Then he gave them the answer in a voice that was clear, forceful, and impossible to misunderstand.
"It was the Land of Fire."
"It was Konoha."
"It was the Hokage."
"It was the shinobi of Konoha."
The words fell like hammer blows across the packed schoolyard.