There were no streetlights in Akaiwa Town on this rainy night.
Only the occasional, jagged flash of lightning illuminated the uneven silhouettes of the rooftops.
Sosuke ran through the alleyways.
He didn't run fast. The muddy ground was too slick. More importantly, he was clutching a sack of precious brown rice tightly against his chest. This was his lifeblood for the coming days.
The dying ninja's warning echoed relentlessly in his skull.
"Iwagakure's Explosion Corps will level this place tomorrow."
Tomorrow.
The word was dangerously vague. Did that mean dawn? Morning? High noon?
Sosuke couldn't afford to gamble. Under the cold, pragmatic logic of shinobi warfare, night raids were the standard. He had to get out of the town immediately.
But how?
Akaiwa Town was under a strict curfew. The gates had been barred at sunset and were heavily guarded.
Scale the wall? That was suicide. Armed patrols walked the perimeter, and the slick stone face was ten meters high.
Sosuke skidded to a halt at a dark intersection. He ducked behind an abandoned feeding trough, heaving ragged breaths. The freezing air stung his lungs. He needed to calculate his next move.
If he tried to force his way through the gates, the guards would skewer him with their spears. If he stayed in the town, he would be blown to pieces.
He had to manufacture an opening.
Sosuke peered down the street. At the far end, a tavern's lanterns still flickered, bleeding the muffled sounds of drinking games and drunken curses into the rain. It was a gathering hole for ronin and local thugs.
Sosuke narrowed his eyes. He fished something from his pocket.
Not silver. It was the slab of heavy, salt-cured meat he'd purchased from the Tanaka Merchant Guild. He carefully scraped off a thick layer of salt frost and wrapped it in a dead leaf.
Then, he activated his ability. [Precious Metal Generation].
A piece of gold materialized. It was no bigger than a fingernail. Finding a jagged stone in the dirt, he deliberately scored the gold's surface, covering it in deep, ugly scratches.
He tossed this 'damaged' gold into a mud puddle right outside the tavern door. Only a single corner breached the murky water, reflecting a faint, tantalizing yellow in the dim light.
Then, he retreated into the shadows.
And waited.
A minute later, a hulking, drunk brute shoved the tavern door open to relieve himself. He unbelted his pants and pissed against the corner of the building.
Just as he shivered and turned to go back inside, the corner of his eye caught the mud puddle.
It was humanity's most primal sensitivity to precious metals.
The brute froze. He squatted down, plunging his thick fingers into the muck.
It was heavy. Dirty and scratched, yes, but the dense, oppressive weight of pure gold couldn't be faked.
"Gold..."
The brute sobered up instantly. His first instinct was to stuff it deep into his robes.
But from the darkness, Sosuke threw a stone. It clattered sharply against the tavern's wooden door.
"Who's there?!"
The noise startled the men inside. Two of the brute's companions stumbled out into the rain.
"What's going on, Number Three?"
Then they saw it. They saw what Number Three was clutching so desperately against his chest, and the piercing, undeniable glint of gold leaking from his fist.
Greed is the ultimate accelerant.
"Is that gold?"
"Three, we split what we find!"
"Piss off! I found it!"
The argument exploded in an instant. Shoving escalated to thrown punches, and then to drawn blades. For these vagrant samurai—men who lived with their heads tied to their waistbands—a single nugget of gold was more than enough reason to gut each other.
The chaos erupted.
The clash of steel drew the patrol. Guards sprinted down the street, torches raised.
"Break it up! Curfew violation!"
The captain of the guard was a short-tempered man, leading the charge by brutally swinging the shaft of his spear into the crowd. But the blood-crazed samurai were beyond caring about town guards. The gold was kicked around in the bloody mud; every time it changed hands, a throat was slashed.
"It's mine!"
The noise woke the neighborhood. Shutters banged open down the street.
Taking advantage of the total distraction, Sosuke kept his head down. He hugged the shadows of the wall and crept toward the far side of the town gate.
Half the guards had abandoned their posts to break up the riot. The remaining two were craning their necks, trying to watch the bloody spectacle.
Sosuke didn't rush them.
He waited. He needed a better window.
Then, the sky lit up.
It wasn't lightning. It was a streak of blinding white light, plummeting from the heavens, tearing through the rain like a meteor.
Sosuke's pupils shrank to pinpricks.
The ninja had lied. Or rather, a shinobi's concept of time was fundamentally different from a civilian's. When he said 'tomorrow,' he meant the very second the clock struck midnight.
Tomorrow was right now.
The white light slammed into the lord's manor in the center of town.
There was no sound. For the first agonizing second, the world seemed to stop.
Then, a gargantuan, crimson lotus of fire bloomed into the rainy night.
BOOM—!!!
A shockwave of pulverized stone, water, and sheer kinetic force slammed outward like a solid wall. The ground bucked violently. Sosuke felt as if a massive, invisible hand had swatted him against the masonry. A high-pitched, agonizing ring ruptured his hearing.
Detonation.
This was the method of the shinobi. No grand speeches, no declarations of war. Just pure, unadulterated annihilation.
Akaiwa Town broke. It shattered completely.
Screams, sobs, and the deafening roar of collapsing architecture instantly drowned out the storm. People swarmed out of their homes like headless flies, most without even grabbing their clothes.
"Enemy attack!"
"The Iwa-nin are here!"
The guards at the gate entirely abandoned their posts. They were only human; they feared death too. Someone threw down a spear and bolted into the dark. The massive wooden gates were forced open by the sheer, crushing pressure of the panicked mob.
Sosuke blended into the tidal wave of bodies.
He was shoved and battered from all sides, but he locked his arms around his bag of rice. That rice was more vital than his own ribs.
Through the crush of the crowd, he spotted the "One-Eyed" man. Missing a shoe, the mercenary was dragging the little girl along, fighting desperately through the throng. The girl was sobbing, her face smeared with mud. Their other two companions were nowhere to be seen—likely separated in the chaos, or trampled to death underfoot.
Sosuke didn't call out to them. He lowered his head, wrapped a ragged cloth around his face to kill his presence, and kept moving.
Outside the gates lay the wasteland.
The crowd scattered in every direction. Some ran for the hills; others plunged into the dense woods.
High above, a few more white streaks fell from the sky.
Exploding clay. The signature jutsu of Iwagakure's Explosion Corps. Every subsequent detonation erased dozens of lives from the earth.
Sosuke didn't run for the hills. Elevated terrain provided physical cover, but it also made for a prime tactical target for shinobi securing the high ground.
He did the exact opposite. He threw himself into a roadside drainage ditch.
The trench was filled with knee-deep, putrid black water. He didn't care. Wading through the filth, he trudged aggressively toward the low-lying riverbank. It was wide-open terrain, completely devoid of structures. Shinobi rarely wasted precious chakra bombing empty mudflats.
He slogged through the ditch for half an hour.
Only when the towering inferno behind him shrank to the size of a fingernail, and the earth-shattering explosions dulled to the muffled rumble of distant thunder, did he finally drag himself up onto the riverbank.
It was a desolate stretch of jagged rocks. The rain still poured, washing the filth from his body but rapidly stealing his core temperature.
Sosuke found a narrow fissure between two massive boulders and squeezed himself inside. It was a suffocating fit; he had to curl tightly into a fetal position.
But he was safe.
He wedged the bag of rice at the very back, using his own body to block the freezing wind.
With trembling, numb fingers, he reached into his soaked robes and pulled out the scroll. The one the dying ninja had given him.
By the erratic flashes of lightning, he read the title. The cover was stained with dried blood.
Basic Chakra Refinement Method - Modified.
The handwriting was erratic and frantic. It wasn't a standardized printed manual; it was a handwritten copy.
Sosuke didn't open it immediately. He checked his perimeter first.
No one. Just the relentless hiss of the rain against the rocks.
He took a slow, deep breath, forcing his hammering heart to decelerate. Tonight, he had witnessed a true shinobi war. Human lives were less than weeds. Even a fortified, guarded settlement like Akaiwa Town was nothing but a fragile paper toy before a shinobi Explosion Corps.
That tough 'One-Eye' mercenary, the shrewd Guild Master Tanaka—in the face of absolute power, none of them had the capacity to resist.
Power. Only chakra was the true currency of this world.
Without it, even if he could generate mountains of gold and silver, he was just a fattened sheep waiting for the slaughter.
Sosuke slowly unrolled the parchment.
The very first line anchored his attention.
'Chakra is the fusion of physical energy and spiritual energy.'
He had heard this exact concept ad nauseam in the manga of his previous life. But the very next line was something entirely new.
'To refine chakra is to squeeze the cells. Every extraction is an overdraft on one's life. Commoners without a Kekkei Genkai must proceed with extreme caution.'
An overdraft on life.
Sosuke rubbed the coarse paper with his thumb. This was a cultivation method adapted specifically for a commoner.
Shinobi born into the Great Hidden Villages were supplemented with high-calorie nutrition, medicinal baths, and constant monitoring by medical-nin since childhood. Because of this biological support, they could afford to violently extract chakra.
But a commoner? A civilian ate coarse brown rice and drank untreated water. If they forced their cells to produce energy, the physiological result was rapid cellular degradation, severe hypoglycemia, premature aging, and eventually, sudden cardiac arrest.
'No wonder...'
Sosuke pictured the dying ninja's face. Sallow skin, deeply sunken eyes. The man had only been in his thirties, but physically, his biology mirrored a failing fifty-year-old.
That was the cellular toll.
Sosuke fished a single grain of raw rice from his robes and placed it on his tongue. He began to chew it slowly.
The grain was rock-hard and tasted of dirt. But he ground it down meticulously, refusing to swallow until it was completely reduced to a starchy paste, maximizing the caloric yield.
He had infinite gold and silver. That equated to infinite purchasing power. As long as he survived the night, as long as he found the right supply chains, he could buy the highest-grade caloric proteins and medicinal herbs to synthesize the deficit of this cellular toll.
That was his foundational advantage.
Sosuke closed his eyes. Following the anatomical diagrams in the scroll, he began the agonizing process of isolating his physiological 'physical energy.'
In the freezing, rain-swept darkness, crammed inside a rock fissure, a young vagrant took his first deliberate step onto the path of the shinobi.