“If only I had transmigrated a little earlier.
Even without a cheat system, I wouldn’t be living on borrowed time like this, right?” Others got Six Paths bloodlines straight from the womb, or at worst transmigrated as cute little kids just starting at the Ninja Academy, giving them plenty of time to grow and power up.
He, on the other hand, had transmigrated half a year ago—straight into the body of a critically injured, dying twenty-year-old cannon-fodder Chunin.
A prime age of twenty might sound like he gained a few extra years of youth from the experience.
In reality, given that the average ninja lifespan was barely in the teens, he was practically a battle-hardened elder.
Worse yet, this was the Second Shinobi World War, and he was currently stationed on the front lines in the Land of Rivers.
High age and high risk—he was one step away from the grave at any given moment.
When he first transmigrated and heard people calling him “Sasuke,” he had briefly wondered if he’d ended up as Sasuke Uchiha.
Unfortunately, he never found his best buddy “Naruto.” Only later did he learn his name was Sasuke Umino.
Bearing the Umino surname as a Konoha ninja, his mind instantly jumped to “Konoha’s Babysitter,” Iruka Umino, as well as Iruka’s Jonin parents who both perished during the Nine-Tails’ Rebellion: Ikaku Umino and Kohari Umino.
Sharing the Umino surname, he had initially assumed he was related to Iruka Umino.
A family capable of producing two Jonin must be one of those low-profile, quietly formidable ninja clans never mentioned in the original story, right?
Even if he hadn’t scored a Six Paths bloodline, being born into a Konoha ninja clan would still be a win.
Starting out in a ninja clan meant he wasn’t born at the finish line, but at least he’d start half a lap ahead of the common civilian draft horses.
Unfortunately, reality dealt him a harsh blow.
Piecing together the fragmented memories in his mind, he realized that Konoha had no such thing as an “Umino Clan.” He wasn’t even related to Ikaku Umino or Kohari Umino; instead, his family was deeply tied to the Sarutobi Clan.
His ability to become a ninja—and even a citizen of Konoha—was entirely thanks to the Sarutobi Clan.
For three generations, his ancestors had been commoners—vassals of the Sarutobi Clan who belonged strictly to the tenant-farmer and servant class.
Although the Sarutobi Clan wasn’t a top-tier powerhouse like the Senju Clan or the Uchiha, it was still a prominent, high-ranking ninja clan.
They even maintained a dedicated Fire Style unit and held vast properties across the Land of Fire.
The Sarutobi Clan’s main business was being shinobi.
While some members lacked ninja talent and chose to manage the clan’s assets, there were never quite enough of them.
Managing such a sprawling enterprise alone was beyond their capacity, so promoting trusted household servants to assist in running these businesses became their primary choice.
His grandfather, Dairo Umino, happened to be handsome and basic-level literate, so he was promoted by the expanding Sarutobi Clan to assist their external affairs members in managing fishponds and mines around the Akihabara area.
Though his status was low—only slightly better off than tenant farmers scraping a living from the soil—at least he didn’t starve and could afford to raise several children.
During the Warring States Period, human life was as cheap as grass.
Becoming a vassal to a powerful clan and securing a safe place to live was something countless people dreamed of.
When Konoha was founded, many vassals followed their patron clans into the village to bolster its population, settling down as Konoha citizens.
The Umino family didn’t make it into the first wave of immigrants during Konoha’s initial founding, but they caught the village expansion.
After Hiruzen Sarutobi became the Third Hokage, Konoha underwent another expansion.
Rootless refugees could hardly match the reliability of house-born servants.
Responding to the Sarutobi Clan’s call, the Umino family moved into Konoha as part of the second major migration wave.
They proudly upgraded from tenant servants to self-employed city dwellers—specifically, residents of a top-tier metropolis in the Land of Fire—achieving a modest leap up the social ladder.
However, the Umino family lacked strong backers within the Sarutobi Clan back then.
Competition for servant posts in the Sarutobi household was fierce, and they ultimately lost out to older immigrants and families who had offered up their children to secure patronage, completely missing out on drawing a permanent paycheck from the Sarutobi Clan.
They had no choice but to settle into life as ordinary Konoha citizens, serving as headcount to populate the village.
Living in Konoha was no easy task.
Though called a village, Konoha was actually a sprawling metropolis with a population exceeding one hundred thousand, where the cost of living was astronomically high.
Housing prices and rent were absurdly steep.
Even before the inflation of Naruto and Sasuke’s era, a single bowl of ramen cost fifty to sixty ryo.
When it came to housing, ninja and war orphans generally received basic subsidized housing, while regular citizens had to rent or spend a fortune buying a place.
Ninjas were truly high earners, which made everything expensive.
Had the Umino family not previously managed fishponds for the Sarutobi Clan and known how to raise and gut fish to earn a living, they would have gone bankrupt long ago, been driven out of Konoha, and reduced to penniless vagrants.
Starting a new business selling fish in Konoha’s fish market, they weren’t like some criminal mastermind fishmonger—they were just bottom-tier fish sellers earning an honest living.
After basic expenses, they barely kept food on the table.
If not for eating unsold dead fish and shrimp to slash their food expenses, a bottom-tier civilian family like theirs could never have pooled enough resources in a single generation to turn his predecessor—a completely average kid without any lucky genetic mutations—into a proud ninja.
The fact that his parents had renamed his predecessor “Sasuke” in his childhood showed just how desperately the Umino family hoped to nurture a powerful shinobi.
Naming him “Sasuke” wasn’t a reference to Sasuke Uchiha, but to Sasuke Sarutobi—the father of the Third Hokage, Hiruzen Sarutobi, and a Kage-level powerhouse who lived in the era of Hashirama Senju.
Naming him Sasuke was by no means an attempt to act like Hiruzen Sarutobi’s father; rather, it was a gesture of deep respect and admiration.
In Konoha, even more people named their kids “Hashirama,” and names ending in “-rama” or “-ma” were as common as stars in the sky.
Heaven did not fail their devotion in the end.
By skimping on everything and pouring all their resources into one child, the family finally raised a ninja.
With that, the Umino family achieved another social leap, rising from bottom-tier civilians to the ninja class.
While shinobi weren’t nobility like the samurai of old, they still possessed plenty of privileges.
At the very least, their fish stall was no longer subject to market cuts.
Those cuts used to exceed their actual profits; before, they were essentially working for others and making pocket change for backbreaking labor.
Of course, if selling fish hadn’t been so grueling and thin on profit, the business never would have fallen to them in the first place.
Ever since his predecessor graduated from the Ninja Academy and became a Konoha Genin, the Umino family’s fortune had taken an earth-shaking turn.
His predecessor had graduated from the Ninja Academy at age ten in Konoha Year 28, during the longest period of peace in the Ninja World.
Between the First Shinobi World War and the Second, which began just last year, lay more than a decade of peace.
Perhaps thanks to the Sarutobi Clan’s political clout, his predecessor entered the Ninja Academy near the end of the First Shinobi World War.
Though his aptitude test barely met the cutoff line, he wasn’t disqualified and squeezed into the Academy’s ordinary class.
By the time he graduated, he had perfectly missed the First Shinobi World War.
Shinobi were high earners; even a Genin earned a handsome income during peacetime.
Yet high earnings came with high risks.
Even during peacetime, unexpected incidents could arise during missions.
Cases where an ordinary C-rank mission suddenly escalated into a B-rank mission were rare, but not unheard of.
Having survived several unexpected mission complications and endured life-and-death trials over six years, he finally clawed his way up to become a Konoha Chunin just before reaching adulthood.
Becoming a Chunin multiplied his income several times over, giving the Umino family another major leap up the social ladder.
Genin were expendable fodder, but Chunin were the backbone of Konoha.
Various hidden perks gradually opened up to him, such as redeeming mission merit points for Ninjutsu scrolls, low-interest home loans, and more.
Though the super-low-interest properties developed by the Senju Clan were long sold out, the Sarutobi Clan was also quite adept at Earth Style infrastructure construction.
Even if the housing they built was pricier, carried higher interest, and wasn’t on the main thoroughfare, it was still real estate in a prime city of the Land of Fire, bound to appreciate significantly in the future.
Less than a year after becoming a Chunin, his predecessor moved out of the Senju low-rent housing and bought his own home on a mortgage.
Two years later, he had fully paid off the mortgage and even secured a small storefront in the fish market for his family.
No wonder every Konoha villager wanted to become a ninja.
It wasn’t about the Will of Fire at all—it was because being a shinobi was genuinely lucrative!