Night had already fallen over Konoha, in the Land of Fire, but the one thing the largest ninja village never ran short of was people.
The whole street blazed with lights that turned the black night into day, and pedestrians moved through it in both directions.
A gust of cold wind made Yuuga shiver, out on the balcony eating instant noodles in nothing but his pajamas, and he sighed.
“Time really does fly.”
It had been almost two months since he came to this world.
Back then it was the height of summer, and now it was autumn.
Yuuga still hadn’t adjusted well to this life.
The world had computers and televisions, but the culture industry had never developed, so there were only a handful of works worth watching, and as of yesterday he had finished every last one of them.
When he first transmigrated, Yuuga had been pretty excited.
The cheat he came with solved the problems of identity and language, and in half a month it took him from an otaku with a combat rating of zero point five to someone with the strength of a genin.
But he got tired of it fast.
Once the novelty wore off, Yuuga went back to being an otaku who stayed home all day.
He went back inside, changed clothes, put the bowl away, and headed out.
A month of sitting at home doing nothing had burned through all his savings.
If he didn’t go out now he’d probably walk away with the title of “first transmigrator to starve to death.”
When he opened the System, a map appeared in his mind, and the scenery in front of him shifted slightly.
Right.
His cheat was the legendary one that spent years sitting in the top two of the cheat rankings alongside “the ring with the old man living in it,” with a shamelessness coefficient in the negatives.
The functions he’d found so far were simple.
One was “Game Perspective.” With it on, all he had to do was walk to a point of light on the map, talk to someone or touch something, and a quest would trigger.
Finish the quest, get a reward.
The second was the gacha machine.
Certain quests paid out game coins, and game coins let him draw.
Beyond that there was no stat panel, no exchange shop, nothing.
Out on the main street, Yuuga picked a dimmer point of light at random and strolled toward it.
In his experience, a faint white point like that was usually an errand quest.
Small reward, but easy, and he could do several in a day.
As the largest ninja village, Konoha was quite prosperous.
Calling it a village was less accurate than calling it a city.
Yuuga was in the commercial district on the east side, where Yamanaka Flowers had its shop.
Follow the commercial street to the end, turn left, walk ten minutes, and you reached one of the ordinary residential areas.
That was where he was headed.
“A wallet?”
Yuuga stopped short, standing right in the area of the white point on the map.
He picked up the wallet, and a quest prompt appeared.
[Ding!
Quest triggered: The Lost Wallet.
Return the wallet to its owner.]
This one was a bit of a pain.
It didn’t even say who dropped it.
Konoha had so many people, how was he supposed to find them?
Maybe there was a clue inside.
Yuuga opened it and looked.
Inside was a single five hundred ryo note and a hair clip.
It looked like some little girl’s pocket money.
Nothing else to go on.
“Yuuga, you finally came out!” Just as Yuuga was weighing whether to wait where he was for the owner to come back or go straight to the next quest, a pineapple-headed kid blocked his path.
Beside him was a chubby redhead working through a bag of chips without pause.
Choji and Shikamaru, the two who would later be counted among the Konoha 12, though right now they still looked a little young.
It would be a few more years before they officially became ninja.
Incidentally, Yuuga had transmigrated in Konoha Year 58, two years before Naruto’s class graduated, which was to say two years before the main plot began.
In fact, when he first arrived, even with the System, Yuuga had felt a real sense of urgency.
After Naruto and the others graduated, it was only a few months to Orochimaru’s plan to crush Konoha, and after that the dangerous events came one after another.
He had two years, and he wasn’t sure how far he could raise his strength in that time, or whether he’d survive in this dangerous ninja world.
That first month he ran quests like a madman, which was how he met Shikamaru and the rest.
Yuuga hadn’t lived in Konoha long, but when you spend all day running around doing quests and helping people, it’s hard for people not to know you.
Of course, in everyone else’s eyes, Yuuga was doing it to fit into the village quickly and get on good terms with people.
As for why he later turned into a slacker, it was because Yuuga had found a route through with no damage taken: whenever one of those dangerous events on the main plot was about to happen, just follow Ichiraku.
“Ran out of living expenses.
If I didn’t go out, even food and shelter would’ve been a problem.”
Shikamaru and Choji had nothing to say to that.
Someone like Yuuga, who holed up at home for a solid month and only came out when the money ran dry, was a first for them.
“Where’s Ino?
The three of you aren’t together today?” Yuuga asked, curious.
“Over there.” Yuuga looked where Shikamaru pointed.
Ino was standing beside the dango shop, looking a little down, staring at something on the ground.
“Confession failed again today?” Ino had been a devoted Sasuke fangirl for a while now, and with her brash personality, an expression like that was ninety-nine percent that.
“Third time this month.
I really don’t get why all the girls in class obsess over this stuff,” Choji put in.
He honestly couldn’t understand it.
Better to spend that time eating.
“Women are such troublesome creatures.” Faced with this, Shikamaru didn’t know how to comfort his friend either, and could only look up at the sky.
“Girls her age get crushes.
She’ll be fine in a few years.” Girls in Naruto matured early across the board, swooning by seven or eight.
Ino and Sakura, that pair of close friends, had fallen out over Sasuke and stayed mad at each other for years, but they matured quickly too, standing on their own by fifteen or sixteen.
As Yuuga remembered it, Ino hadn’t fixated on Sasuke all that long.
Later on there was a stretch where she only kept chasing him to spite Sakura.
After she made up with Sakura, she barely mentioned Sasuke at all.
“Is it really okay to discuss this standing that close to me?
I can hear every word.” Ino was behind them now, one hand gripping Yuuga’s shoulder and the other Shikamaru’s, furious.