"I'm home, Mother." Sora called into the house.
Kazeki Ei answered from the kitchen, a brief sound of acknowledgment, and went back to her work. She knew her son wasn't one for conversation.
A thirty-year-old soul from another world, crammed into a ten-year-old body. That was why Sora rarely talked.
Nothing to say to kids his own age. Too formal with adults, and he'd be written off as a freak. So over the years, the words dried up. Once everyone accepted that Sora was the quiet type, he found a peace he hadn't expected. The joys and sorrows of the people around him didn't resonate much. To someone who craved silence, other people's chatter was just noise.
His father, Kazeki Taira, worked as a supervisor at the mining district these days. Wartime demand for ore was bottomless. He wasn't home, probably pulling overtime at the mine.
Years from now, in the era of the next generation, even Sasuke's family, arguably the top two strongest in the entire shinobi world, would nearly go bankrupt over a collapsed house. For an ordinary family, scraping by in Konoha was brutal.
The Sarutobi clan's iron mining operations needed plenty of hands. Sora's father worked at their mines, and the Sarutobi treated him decently enough. A retired chunin still carried some weight.
It was the same everywhere. No one got rich punching a clock nine to five. A horse doesn't fatten without midnight grain. Every civilian family dreamed of producing a ninja, someone who could stack up wealth, techniques, and connections through an endless grind of missions.
The Kazeki and Tejuno families both survived in the Sarutobi clan's orbit. Nothing unusual about that in Konoha. Taira supervised at the iron mines. Tejuno's father, Tejushi, worked as a craftsman at the Weapons Factory. The two families had been close since the fathers' generation.
Sora's aptitude might be unremarkable, but having grown up drowning in information in his old world, he trusted his grasp of patterns and systems over any Konoha native's.
The way he saw it, a civilian's life in Konoha revolved around three things: birth, death, and the great clans.
The Senju clan monopolized Konoha's real estate. The Sarutobi clan monopolized iron mining. The Ino-Shika-Cho Alliance, the Yamanaka, Nara, and Akimichi together, locked down the village's forest resources: medicinal herbs, livestock, the works. The Inuzuka clan monopolized the pet and veterinary trade. The Hyuga clan monopolized commerce channels with the Land of Fire's nobility. The Uchiha clan monopolized the village police force. And so on.
Ever since the First Hokage, Senju Hashirama, founded the hidden village, ninja clans large and small had joined Konoha, some willingly, some with no real choice. But clustering together didn't mean unity. Grudges ran deep. Conflicts never stopped.
The First and Second Hokage, both committed to the village's growth, had poured their efforts into weakening the clans and elevating civilian ninja.
The clans pushed back. They weren't fools. To resist being chipped away, each major clan found its own workaround. They leveraged their strength to seize markets, devour market share, and build monopolies across entire industries. Those monopolies, ironically, bound the clans tighter to Konoha. Monopoly profits were astronomical. By lashing their fortunes to the village, the clans became stakeholders, and stakeholders turned into loyalists.
The civilians got the short end. Once the chaos of the founding era passed, they looked up and discovered, with no power to change it, that the village had become the clans' village.
Konoha's single largest industry was, without question, real estate.
When the village was founded, only the Senju and Uchiha existed. Those two clans seized the first-mover advantage in property development and claimed vast tracts of land. The Senju specialty in Earth Release and Water Release gave them an overwhelming edge in construction. And then there was Hashirama's Wood Release, a kekkei genkai practically designed for the housing market. Sora half-suspected that the First Hokage had distributed the tailed beasts to the other villages specifically so those beasts would flatten buildings across the continent, giving Senju Construction, or whatever Senju-backed holding company, the chance to expand into cross-border real estate development. Ninja God, indeed.
The Uchiha, mostly Fire Release users, could only watch and seethe. They seethed so hard their eyes went red. Honestly, who wouldn't?
Konoha was enclosed by walls. That was a stroke of policy genius from the Second Hokage, whose intellect towered above his peers.
Limited land supply. An endlessly swelling population. A perfect recipe for skyrocketing prices. It guaranteed that anyone who wanted to buy property would need to work for Konoha for at least a hundred years. Real estate was the village's most profitable industry, befitting the status of its most powerful founding clan.
To honor the First and Second Hokage's vision, the Senju clan eventually abandoned their surname entirely, dissolving into Konoha's general population. Their real estate empire passed to various reformed branch families.
Years later, when Princess Tsunade returned to Konoha, she became the Fifth Hokage without a whisper of opposition. Unanimous support. Not a single objection.
Of course not. The entire village's housing market belonged to the Senju. Anyone who dared object could enjoy the terror of draining six family members' savings for a down payment.
Senju Clan Secret Technique: Prices Just Went Up Again, So Are You Buying or Not Jutsu.
Sora had set himself one goal. His family still rented. He had to buy a home after the Nine-Tails Attack, or the window would close forever.
The current year was Konoha 46. The Third War would end in Konoha 50. The Nine-Tails Attack would hit in Konoha 51. Both events would slash the village's population, and that meant a buyer's market. The best chance he'd ever get. The clock was ticking.
Unbelievable. He'd crossed into another world, and after getting his bearings, the very first thing on his mind was buying property in Konoha. A middle-aged wage slave's resentment toward the housing market could transcend time and space. Not even the greatest scientific minds of his old world could have stopped a salaryman's obsession with homeownership.
Compared to the Senju, the proud Uchiha had completely missed this goldmine. Maybe Uchiha Madara's early indecisiveness, his refusal to go all-in alongside the Senju on Konoha's future, had cost his clan the golden age of industry monopolization.
Later, the Second Hokage, whose intelligence eclipsed everyone in the village, assigned the Uchiha their monopoly: the police force.
Glamorous on the surface. But to grow their coffers, the Uchiha had to enforce strict regulations and fees on merchants, which bred natural hostility between the clan and the villagers. Clan expansion versus civilian exploitation: an irreconcilable contradiction baked into the structure. It didn't matter if the clan head was Uchiha Fugaku or anyone else. No Uchiha leader could fix the fundamental problem. All they could do was patch the cracks.
Once every clan had carved up Konoha's industries according to its strengths, the civilians discovered their lives growing harder year by year.
Say a civilian needed to see a doctor. They'd find drug prices gouged beyond reason. The clever Ino-Shika-Cho Alliance wore kind faces, but when it came to selling medicine, every ryo squeezed out was a testament to the Nara clan's famed intellect. The Yamanaka grew the herbs. The Nara harvested them. The Akimichi processed them into medicine. Even the original story laid this out. Seamless coordination, bleeding their customers dry without leaving a mark.
After decades of peace following the Third War, civilian life became unsustainable. In the end, the most despised clan, the Uchiha, paid the price in the form of their own annihilation, a gruesome settling of accounts for the civilians' impossible burden. The Third Hokage turned a blind eye. Danzo masterminded it. The other clans watched from the sidelines. And the civilians could only stare in horror at the bloodshed, unable to comprehend the machinery behind it.
But all of that lay in the future. Right now, Kazeki Sora had one priority: pass the graduation exam, build his strength, and survive the Third Shinobi World War.