Chapter 7: The Orphanage
The scrub-level ninja's voice was flat. "Pair up for taijutsu practice. The last ten will get no dinner tonight."
With emotionless faces, the thirty or so children formed fifteen pairs. No one dared to partner with the bigger, stronger kids, while the smaller ones looked terrified. It was clear this wasn't their first "taijutsu training" session.
Once they were in pairs, facing each other, the Chunin nodded and waved his hand.
A clumsy yet vicious brawl erupted. None of the orphans wanted to go hungry; they all knew the gnawing pain of starvation.
Before long, a dozen children were bruised and bleeding. One boy's eye was swollen completely shut, but he was still flailing wildly, trying to fight back. The supervising Chunin made no move to stop the violence.
"Ume-neechan," Dana asked quietly, "I thought the orphanage was established less than a week ago. Isn't taijutsu supposed to be taught at the Ninja Academy?"
From Ume's explanation, Dana began to understand how the Hidden Cloud's orphanage really worked.
What was an orphanage? A place to house orphans. And how were orphans created?
In the ninja world, only children with the potential to become shinobi were given a place in an orphanage. The countless thousands of ordinary orphans were left to fend for themselves. No hidden village would waste money and resources raising children who couldn't contribute to its military strength, unless they were the children of their own fallen shinobi.
The ninja world was currently at peace, so most of these thirty-odd children had been gathered by the Cloud from across the Land of Lightning and its neighboring countries. Some were victims of famine, some had lost their families as collateral damage in a ninja mission, and others had simply been abandoned.
In reality, they were the lucky ones. They no longer had to worry about starving to death. Their less fortunate peers were still fighting for scraps on the street, getting their heads bashed in over a piece of bread, only to die in some forgotten alleyway or cave.
A small fraction of the children were the descendants of Hidden Cloud ninja. In peacetime, their numbers were few, and without exception, they were all from civilian-born shinobi families. When a ninja from a clan died, their children were raised by their own kin. No matter how bad things got, they would never be sent to an orphanage. The only ones who ended up here were the children of common shinobi who had no relatives willing to take them in.
And the sole purpose of the village raising these children was to turn them into soldiers. While the Hidden Cloud wasn't as ruthless as Konoha—which was known to groom orphans as pure cannon fodder and even use them for human experiments—their methods were still highly militaristic.
The orphanage itself was modeled after Konoha's. While it had earned the village some goodwill, it wasn't a high priority for the Cloud's leadership. The Chunin in charge was clearly a simple-minded man. To him, putting a group of children who had arrived less than a week ago through brutal military training was perfectly normal.
But to Dana, something about it felt deeply wrong.
Perhaps it was a sense of foreboding, or perhaps it was simple pity from watching children his age get beaten bloody in the mud. Whatever the reason, Dana felt that this was no way to run an orphanage.
These kids had been in the village for less than a week. They had no sense of belonging and were undoubtedly scared and uncertain. And the village's response was to subject them to this?
This wasn't how you nurtured the next generation of shinobi. This was how you cultivated rogue ninja and ticking time bombs.
I know the Cloud's orphanage is probably better than most, Dana thought, but that's no excuse for doing a poor job. You can't just create a group of marginalized, unstable people, especially when you plan on giving them deadly powers.
Dana pursed his lips and turned to leave. At this moment, he had neither the authority nor the ability to do anything about it.
Dana walked back to the Yotsuki compound, gave the pastries to his mother, and sat with her for a while before returning to his small library to continue reading.
To his surprise, someone was already there.
"Dana," the Third Raikage said. "How has your training been?"
"Same as always," Dana replied glumly.
His father and the entire Yotsuki clan were deeply invested in his training, but for years, nothing had changed. As he got older, the speed and volume of the chakra he could mold increased, but the goal of filling his internal "soccer field" was still a distant dream.
(The soccer field, of course, was Dana's own metaphor. To everyone else, his chakra was simply being absorbed by his body.)
The Third Raikage asked a few more questions about his training, which Dana answered honestly. Then, A changed the subject.
"Is this notebook yours? Did you invent your own form of encrypted symbols?"
Dana looked at the notebook in A's hand, and his blood ran cold. My notes...
He had been writing down his questions and observations in the notebook using Chinese characters. While the Naruto world used kanji, which were derived from Chinese characters, the usage was different, much like in modern Japanese. Dana had thought using his native written language was a foolproof method of keeping his thoughts private.
He had clearly underestimated the skills of a ninja. Encryption and code-breaking were mandatory subjects for them, though Dana had no idea just how advanced their methods were. He could only hope his father hadn't understood it.
A part of him was annoyed with the Raikage. It was bad enough to read someone's diary without asking, but to bring it up to their face? He really didn't take a child's privacy seriously.
He was bullying him because he was young.
"Yes, Father," Dana forced himself to say, gritting his teeth. "When I'm reading, sometimes I get an idea and write it down. The... code... is something I came up with myself."
A looked surprised. He was a busy man and rarely paid attention to his sons' daily lives outside of their training. He had come to the library on a whim and found the notebook. At first, the writing was incomprehensible. But by using his familiarity with some of the characters and applying standard ninja code-breaking techniques, he had managed to decipher about seventy or eighty percent of it. Though his understanding was still basic, he had seen some very interesting things.
As for privacy... what privacy does a six-year-old have? Not in his village.
The Third Raikage glanced at Ume, who gave a slight nod, confirming the notebook was Dana's. Whatever else it was, the "code" was impressive. It seemed like a comprehensive system, capable of conveying a vast amount of information, almost like a real, fully-formed language.
If Dana knew what his father was thinking, he might have banged his head against a wall. It was a complete and magnificent language. He had assumed he was perfectly safe.
Ninja are something else, he thought. I was careless...
(In reality, if there are sufficient records of a written language, it can be deciphered and reconstructed even without a teacher, especially if its historical evolution is known.)
Completely unconcerned with the fact that he was violating his son's privacy—because children have no rights, apparently—the Third Raikage flipped open to a page and pointed. "You wrote here... 'The village's periodic—ah, economic source is singular, the risk is too high.' What does that mean?"
"It's nothing, Father. Just random thoughts," Dana said, his face flushing with embarrassment.
"It's alright, Dana. Answer my question. Consider it a test. A shinobi needs a sharp mind as well as a strong body."
Seeing that he couldn't bluff his way out, Dana hesitated.
He had written a lot of important things in that notebook. And from the looks of it, even if he didn't explain, A would eventually decipher it all himself.
If that was the case, he might as well use this as an opportunity to push some of his own ideas.
Well... he thought to himself. In a world where six-year-olds can be sent to war, being a little precocious is perfectly normal, right?