Half an hour later.
The air grew thick with the scent of cheap powder and stale alcohol.
He had reached the red-light district.
But this was only the entrance.
Sosuke bypassed the heavily made-up women soliciting customers and slipped into an alley beside a pawnshop bearing the sign of the Daikokuya.
At the end of the alley stood a rusted iron door.
A blind man crouched by the entrance, playing an erhu. The melody was desolate, dragging like a funeral dirge.
Sosuke stopped in front of the blind man.
"I want to buy meat," Sosuke said.
"What kind of meat?" The blind man didn't stop bowing his strings. "For pork, go to the morning market. For beef, go next door."
"The meat that never fills you up."
This was the passcode the one-armed old man had given him.
It referred to ninja beast meat—flesh that contained chakra.
The erhu stopped. The blind man raised his head, fixing his pale, milky eyes on Sosuke.
"Entry fee. Five hundred Ryo."
'F*cking extortion.'
Sosuke dug out the last of his money, counted out five hundred Ryo, and tossed it into the chipped bowl in front of the blind man.
Clink.
The iron door opened a crack.
A complex stench hit him immediately—a heavy, suffocating mix of raw blood, harsh spices, and the musk of wild predators.
Sosuke turned sideways and squeezed through.
This was the underground black market of Konohagakure.
It wasn't massive, but it was fully equipped. There were no storefronts here, only stalls spread across the dirt.
The vendors kept their faces covered. They didn't speak, communicating only through hand signs.
Sosuke ignored the stalls peddling contraband drugs and unidentified scrolls.
He headed straight for the butcher at the very back. It was a stall marked by a massive beast's skull hanging from the rafters.
Chunks of grotesque, misshapen meat were piled high on the chopping block. Some of it was still twitching. Other pieces emitted a faint, unnatural luminescence.
"Horned Bear paw, three thousand Ryo."
"Wind Tanuki liver, five thousand Ryo."
The vendor was a heavy-set, scarred butcher wielding a massive bone cleaver, currently busy dismembering a giant python. It was likely the descendant of some summoning beast, or perhaps a predator that had violently mutated out in the wild.
Sosuke stared at the cuts of meat.
The chakra fluctuations were palpable.
Even without activating a sensory jutsu, his physical body was practically screaming for it. The craving was visceral—like a junkie staring at a fresh hit of heroin.
"The cheapest," Sosuke asked. "What's the cheapest meat you have that can be used to refine chakra?"
The butcher shot him a sideways glance.
"In the bucket over there."
He pointed his cleaver toward a wooden barrel near his boots. Dark red strips of meat floated inside, looking like discarded, bloody offal.
"Fire Salamander scraps. They're a bit toxic, so you have to boil them for a long time. Five hundred Ryo a pound."
Five hundred Ryo.
Sosuke touched his pocket.
Empty. His entire net worth couldn't even afford a single pound of literal garbage.
This was reality. Without money, you didn't even earn the right to eat trash.
But Sosuke didn't leave.
He stood there, staring at the bucket. He was waiting for an opportunity.
People moved around him, conducting their shady business. No one paid any attention to the broke kid.
Sosuke slipped his hands into his wide sleeves. His consciousness sank into his mind.
****.
This time, it wasn't silver.
He was generating gold.
But he didn't generate a crude gold bar. He generated a gold ring.
The style was archaic, engraved with intricate, complex patterns—a totem from an ancient civilization he had seen in a museum in his past life.
To make it look authentic, he manipulated the structural generation of the surface, introducing microscopic wear and tear alongside deliberate scratches.
Artificial aging.
For someone who could freely control the generation process at a molecular level, this was trivial.
A few seconds later, a gold ring that looked as if it had just been dug out of the earth, heavy with the weight of centuries, rested in his palm.
Sosuke left the butcher.
He took a lap around the black market, finally stopping at a stall that specialized in antiques and fenced goods of unknown origin.
The vendor was an old man wearing a monocle. He looked scholarly enough, but his eyes were predatory, like a vulture.
"You buying?"
Sosuke placed the ring on the stall's black cloth.
The old man picked up the ring. He weighed it in his hand first, then pulled out a jeweler's loupe, examining it meticulously under the lamplight.
"These patterns..." The old man frowned. "This doesn't look like anything from the Land of Fire. Nor the Land of Wind."
"Dug it up near the border of the Land of Lightning," Sosuke lied effortlessly. "Probably a burial item from before the Warring States Period."
The old man studied it for a while longer.
This couldn't be faked. The gold was real, and the craftsmanship and degree of degradation were authentic. If it were a modern forgery, the finish would be too harsh, too clean. But this ring possessed the heavy, undeniable patina of time.
"How much?" the old man asked.
"Fifty thousand Ryo," Sosuke demanded, opening with a highwayman's premium.
"Five thousand." The old man immediately lopped off a zero.
"Thirty thousand."
"Eight thousand. Not a Ryo more. This thing has an unknown origin; I'm the one taking the risk."
"Fifteen thousand. Otherwise, I'll melt it down and just sell the raw gold."
Sosuke made a move to snatch the ring back.
"Fine, fine, ten thousand." The old man clamped his hand firmly over the ring. "Young man, don't be so hot-headed. Ten thousand Ryo, in cold cash."
The old man counted out a stack of bills.
Sosuke took the money without a shred of hesitation, turned, and walked away.
A 'fake antique' with a production cost of absolute zero had just been exchanged for ten thousand Ryo.
This was the value of intellectual property.
It would also serve as one of his primary sources of wealth in the future. Compared to blindly fencing raw gold and silver, selling 'artifacts' and 'art' commanded a significantly higher premium—and was a hell of a lot safer.
Sosuke returned to the butcher.
"Give me ten pounds of the Fire Salamander meat."
He slapped five thousand Ryo onto the bloody chopping block.
"Also, I'll take that snake's gallbladder."
The butcher froze for a second.
'This broke rat from earlier was actually loaded?'
But he didn't ask. In the black market, those who talked too much died quickly.
He deftly cut the meat, wrapped it in heavy oil paper, and handed it to Sosuke.
"Fire Salamander meat runs violently hot. If you gorge yourself and start bleeding from the nose, don't say I didn't warn you."
Sosuke hefted the heavy package of meat.
It wasn't just meat.
It was power.
It was chakra.
It was the absolute cornerstone of his survival in this world.
By the time he walked out of the black market, dawn was breaking. The eastern sky was turning a pale, fish-belly white.
Sosuke returned to the shop.
He didn't rest immediately. After securing the doors and windows, he dumped the package of Fire Salamander meat into a basin.
The stench was foul. It carried a heavy, pungent odor of sulfur.
As a ninja beast native to volcanic regions, its muscle tissue contained volatile, highly concentrated Fire-nature chakra. If it wasn't boiled long enough, eating it would likely result in perforated intestines or severe heavy metal poisoning.
Sosuke sliced off a half-pound piece.
Without adding oil, he tossed it straight into a pot of boiling water.
The water bubbled violently. The meat turned a dead ash-gray, while the broth seeped into a grotesque, unnatural red.
Sosuke fished the meat out. Ignoring the sharp sulfurous fumes, he forced it down in large, aggressive bites.
The texture was dry and incredibly tough. It was like chewing through industrial rubber.
And it was blindingly spicy. Sliding down his esophagus, it felt like he had just swallowed a red-hot coal.
"Ugh..."
Cold sweat erupted across Sosuke's forehead. His stomach went into violent spasms.
It was his body's severe immune rejection of a foreign chakra source.
He immediately sat cross-legged and formed a hand sign—the Ram seal, the most fundamental seal recorded in his scroll, used to focus the mind.
'Digest it.'
'Absorb it.'
Sosuke ordered himself mentally.
His mental energy was intensely focused, actively guiding the chaotic thermal current rampaging through his stomach.
The heat surged through his chakra pathways.
Agony.
His meridian pathways felt as though they were being violently scoured by sandpaper, burning with blistering, localized pain.
But following this agony came the body's stress-induced evolution.
To combat the extreme heat, his cells began to divide at an accelerated rate. The newly reconstructed cell membranes grew denser, building structural resistance to high temperatures.
This was the true value of this 'meal'—using Fire-nature chakra to temper the physical body, artificially forcing a physiological tolerance to extreme heat.
His core body temperature spiked, his blood accelerating into a thunderous, boiling rush.