Chapter 40:
"Damn Sasuke, he's definitely doing this on purpose to get revenge…"
After a full day of taijutsu training, Naruto hugged his aching shoulders and stood in the kitchen making porridge.
Just porridge, with a bit of minced meat and some salt added…
After the Anbu had twice tasted the extremely bitter, stomach-turning "masterpiece," they looked at the mountain of salt being poured into the pot and decided not to bother checking again tonight.
Any food made like this would definitely make the two boys suffer later.
However, after watching the pair grimace their way through dinner tonight, the Anbu didn't get another chance to inspect.
On the surface, it was because Naruto — still sore from being brutally beaten by Sasuke — had forced him to wash all the dishes they had accumulated that day. In reality, tonight was the first time the two of them had eaten food that tasted like normal human cooking.
After a tiring day of training, both boys went straight to their rooms to sleep.
Lying in bed, Sasuke focused on training his chakra while listening to the sounds around him.
Meanwhile, Naruto appeared to be sound asleep under his blanket, but his soul had already left his body and gone to search the locations Uchiha Fugaku had mentioned.
The hidden rooms sealed within the clan grounds only blocked chakra detection and physical access. They offered no defense against a soul.
After finding the first location, Naruto sank his soul straight through the ground and entered the underground secret room.
The walls were made of special materials — the protection was quite well done.
But Naruto had no time to admire it. His goal was to take everything inside.
One box after another disappeared into his storage. He didn't even bother looking at them before tossing everything into the isolated section of the soul space where Uchiha Fugaku and Mikoto were kept.
Although the soul space was fixed in size, moving physical objects with his soul was far more exhausting than controlling people to do things.
After clearing one hidden room, Naruto returned to the space, marked the location as cleared, and planned to go to the next one tomorrow…
Over the following days, Naruto was woken up early every morning by Sasuke, forced to cook, and then the two of them would eat with wooden expressions before going to train.
Most of the time Sasuke would wash the dishes himself, but when he was too tired, he would leave them for later.
Because there were occasional leftover soup stains for the Anbu to check, Naruto's cooking gradually improved from "dark cuisine" to "edible" under constant surveillance…
After half a month, Naruto had successfully retrieved all the hidden treasures of the Uchiha clan and finally focused fully on his own training.
In taijutsu, Naruto was still routinely beaten, only occasionally managing to knock Sasuke down once.
Day after day passed, and school started again.
They returned to the academy, but Naruto showed no intention of moving out of the Uchiha house, and Sasuke had no plans to kick him out either.
"Naruto, you can actually cook?"
Iruka looked at the two boys who had come to find him right after the new term began and felt like he might still be dreaming in broad daylight.
Naruto's house was basically a dog kennel. Him cooking?
What a joke!
"Naruto made the onigiri… although… they look pretty ugly…"
Sasuke opened the lunchbox. Even he found them unappealing, but at least they were actual onigiri, and there was even a small side dish inside.
"Did Naruto really make this?"
Although he didn't want to believe it, Iruka still felt a sense of "the children have grown up."
The onigiri looked a bit ugly, but they were real onigiri, and there was even a small portion of vegetables.
"Iruka-sensei, you don't know how horrible Sasuke is. During the break, he forced me to learn cooking every single day. If I couldn't do it, he would beat me up badly during training…"
Naruto continued his pitiful complaint, earning a cold snort from Sasuke and a sudden burst of relieved laughter from Iruka.
Someone had been supervising him, so Naruto had learned to cook.
For Iruka, this result brought instant relief.
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