However, such good days did not last for more than a few years.
Hanzo of the Salamander from the Land of Rain, whether he had a screw loose or was just incredibly stubborn, actually took the initiative to spark a Shinobi War, attempting to fight the three great powerhouses of the Ninja World single-handedly.
The Third Tsuchikage of the Stone Village, Onoki, was a schemer.
His political slogans shook the heavens, but it was all bark and no bite.
Instead of directly sending troops into the Land of Rain, he chose to station his army along the border.
The Sand Village, dirt-poor and desperate, had been eager to start a Shinobi War for ages.
Seizing the opportunity, they deployed troops to the Land of Rain, pillaging and burning everything in their path.
As the hegemon of the Ninja World, Konoha, in order to maintain world peace—or, more likely, to protect its own interests—could not just stand by and watch its neighboring “good friend,” Sunagakure, grow big and strong.
Thus, in the Land of Rain, a bizarre, chaotic three-way free-for-all emerged among the Rain Ninja, Sand Ninja, and Konoha Ninja.
In the early stages, the Sand Village siphoned resources from the Land of Rain, recovering quite a bit of strength.
Once their offensive was halted by Hanzo of the Salamander and Konoha, they shifted their strategic focus to open a new front.
Sunagakure had long coveted the fertile lands of the Land of Fire.
Now, with a perfect pretext to deploy troops, they decisively marched into the Land of Rivers, intending to invade the Land of Fire from the eastern front.
It was at this time that Sasuke’s predecessor had joined the main Konoha force and rushed to the Land of Rivers front to resist the Sand Ninja.
After holding out on the battlefield for over half a year, he ultimately could not resist the call of the Six Paths’ Pure Land.
A Sand puppet master dealt him a near-fatal blow.
It was during this brush with death that he had transmigrated.
Fortunately, right after his transmigration, he spent over a week recovering in the Konoha Hospital.
Otherwise, throwing a complete rookie like him—who had not even killed a chicken before—directly onto the battlefield would have been no different from sending him to his death.
Before transmigrating, he was just an ordinary 996 corporate slave living under the red flag.
Even his transmigration had been remarkably mundane.
He had simply fallen asleep after an exhausting shift of overtime and woke up to find he had inexplicably transmigrated, becoming Sasuke Umino.
He was not some Konoha orphan; his parents were both alive, and he had a younger brother and sister.
However, in the Umino family, he was currently the only ninja.
Inheriting his predecessor’s memories and emotions allowed him to quickly master all of his ninja skills during his recovery period.
Otherwise, without a cheat or any lethal skills, he probably would not have lasted half a day on the battlefield.
True, after transmigrating, his mental strength skyrocketed, and his Chakra nearly doubled.
His Chakra control was even on par with some medical ninja.
But he came from an ordinary civilian family, after all.
With mediocre bloodline talent, Chunin was his limit.
Had he transmigrated a few years earlier, avoided consuming massive amounts of Ration Pills during his rapid growth phase, and steadily unlocked his potential without rushing, he might have had a decent chance of becoming a Jonin through the trials of war.
Now, this body had already reached adulthood, and its potential was basically exhausted.
Significantly boosting his Chakra and physical faculties was almost impossible.
Unless he mastered “Aunt Snake’s” core technology, or underwent some mutation.
Although he had not finished watching *Naruto* in his previous life, only getting up to *Shippuden*, he still knew the general plot of the latter half.
*Naruto* was also known as *The Legend of the Eyes: The Five-Village Brawl*, *My Father, the Sage of Six Paths*, *The Thousand-Year Entanglement of Uzumaki and Uchiha*, and *Black Zetsu’s Quest to Save His Mother: Struggling Against Cheaters*.
While shouting about hard work and hot-blooded determination to change everything, in the end, it was all about “knowing pain”—and every single bit of it was fucking pedigree, fate, and genealogy.
On the surface, it was a hot-blooded anime, but in reality, it was brutally dark and cruel.
Now that he was in the real Naruto world, he felt it viscerally.
It was not just the Otsutsuki clan of the Six Paths who cared about bloodlines; the ninja clans, the civilians, and especially the nobles all cared about lineage.
Take Ikaku Umino, who shared his background.
Both of them were vassals of the Sarutobi Clan, from the same small fishing village, and likely shared a fallen samurai ancestor.
Simply because Ikaku Umino’s family had been among the first wave of immigrants to Konoha in its founding year, they had managed to secure a spacious house in a prime location from the Senju clan practically for free.
As Konoha expanded, the value of that property had skyrocketed several times over.
Furthermore, Ikaku’s father had been in the right place at the right time, becoming part of the first generation of shinobi.
While he had admittedly met the Sage of Six Paths early on during the First Shinobi War, he had at least used his good looks to marry a teammate from a minor ninja clan before his death.
This improved the genetics of his offspring, giving them a bit of ninja clan blood.
Consequently, his posthumous son, Ikaku Umino, became a second-generation ninja, entering the elite Class A of the Ninja Academy.
Compared to a second-generation ninja like Ikaku, Sasuke was a textbook first-generation civilian entrepreneur ninja.
He had only lucked into the Ninja Academy because his entire family pooled their resources to support him alone, and because of the political leverage of being a vassal to the Sarutobi Clan.
Even then, he had only barely squeaked into the ordinary class.
Right after graduating from the Academy, Ikaku was led by a Konoha Jonin captain to complete missions, while Sasuke could only follow a Chunin squad leader, grinding away at low-ranking missions to gain experience step by step.
Later, by force-feeding himself Ration Pills and surviving countless life-or-death situations, he finally became a Chunin.
It looked like he had caught up, but in reality, the gap was only widening.
Though both were now Chunin, their status and prospects were night and day.
Ikaku was now a member of the Sarutobi Legion’s Fire Style Unit.
He earned plenty of merits, stayed relatively safe, and belonged to the inner circle of the Third Hokage’s direct subordinates.
His future was boundless.
Surviving this Shinobi World War would practically guarantee his promotion to Jonin.
Once he accumulated enough merit and was reassigned from the Fire Style Unit, the Third Hokage would surely place him in some influential department; the Barrier Corps or the Ninja Academy would be great choices.
In comparison, a first-generation civilian ninja like him would have to thank his lucky stars just to survive this war.
As for becoming a Jonin—setting aside his current issues with Chakra capacity and physical limits—the mere channel for acquiring Ninjutsu had already choked him.
In this cruel Ninja World, Ninjutsu meant power, and its methods of transmission were basically limited to bloodlines, maternal inheritance, and sexual transmission.
Indeed, the Ninja World was so brutal that even “sexual transmission” was virtually non-existent.
Monopolies and class solidification were everywhere.
But that was not the scariest part; the scariest part was that almost everyone believed this was perfectly reasonable.
Had he not been born in Konoha, he probably would not have even had the chance to sell his life in exchange for Ninjutsu.
This showed just how difficult it was to acquire Ninjutsu and climb the social ladder in this unforgiving world.
As a transmigrator who had watched *Naruto*, he knew how to train the Rasengan series of Ninjutsu.
But the Rasengan was an A-rank Ninjutsu.
He did not have “ton-level” Chakra, nor did he even have “pound-level” Chakra.
His Chakra was only slightly above that of a standard Chunin; casting a regular B-rank Ninjutsu would consume more than half of it.
Learning an A-rank Ninjutsu—especially the Rasengan, a hand-seal-less technique of pure Chakra projection—with his current Chakra reserves would probably drain him dry and leave him utterly physically exhausted if he tried to force it.
As a rule of thumb in the Ninja World, B-rank Ninjutsu generally required the difficulty level of a Jonin to learn.
Even Kage-level powerhouses typically fought with B-rank Ninjutsu, using A-rank Ninjutsu as trump cards, while S-rank Kinjutsu and ultimate techniques were desperate, life-risking trump cards.
Don’t look down on B-rank Ninjutsu or dismiss the rank of Jonin.
How could obtaining a B-rank Ninjutsu be easy?
And becoming a Jonin was even harder.
Elite Jonin, who were a level above regular Jonin, were terrifying figures capable of commanding entire fronts in the other four great Hidden Villages, with the sole exception of the wealthy Konoha.
In small hidden villages, elite Jonin were basically of the village leader level, and in some, even a standard Jonin could become the leader.
Although the political status of a hidden village leader was lower than that of their country’s Daimyo, it was not by much.
This showed just how high the status of a Jonin was in the Ninja World—they were true elites, belonging to the class of nobles with actual power.
Even in Konoha, where powerhouses gathered like clouds, Jonin were scarce.
A Konoha Jonin possessed the right to vote for the Hokage.
In Konoha, even those clan children with ninja pedigree—who possessed incredibly rich resources and Ninjutsu tailored to their bloodlines—spent their lives striving merely to become a Jonin elder.
Kage-level powerhouses were, after all, extremely rare.
Even the prestigious Uchiha Clan of Konoha, who possessed the bloodline of the Six Paths, could not guarantee that their members would become Jonin, let alone a normal civilian family.
For ordinary civilian families, having a single ninja in the family made them the “prodigal child” spoken of by neighbors.
Becoming a Chunin was considered a great success, fulfilling the family’s hopes and realizing one’s own life value.
As for Jonin, it was strictly in the realm of dreams.
Becoming a Jonin meant having a vote for the Hokage, equivalent to being the leader of a minor hidden village.
If compared to his previous life, it was like a commoner working their way up to become the leader of a small country.
One could imagine just how difficult that was.
If a civilian family produced a Jonin, it was not just a matter of starting a new page in the family tree; they would become the founding ancestor.
If their descendants thrived, they might even establish a minor ninja clan of their own.
For most civilians, “becoming Hokage” was just a slogan.
“Becoming a Jonin” was the real pursuit.
Not everyone was Orochimaru or Minato Namikaze; the dreams of most civilian families were simply not that grand.
Only the villagers of Konoha—a first-tier city in the Land of Fire—harbored such “dreams.” The ordinary civilians of the Land of Fire outside of Konoha spent their lives chasing nothing more than a bite of food and basic safety.
If they did have dreams, it was merely to become vassals of the ninja clans or noble lords—the equivalent of securing a government job.
But without connections or a specialized skill, they did not even have the most basic opportunity to do so.
And that was just the treatment of ordinary civilians in the Land of Fire.
For the civilians of the Land of Rain, life was precarious, and lives were as cheap as dirt.
They probably dreamed of nothing but finding a way to immigrate to the Land of Fire, even if it meant being a second-class citizen in a major power.