Pain!
Intense, searing headache!
Shinsuke jolted upright, clutching his head with both hands and gasping for breath.
An unfamiliar ceiling, a bare and simple Japanese-style room, and this frail, weak body.
'What is this... did I... transmigrate?'
Shinsuke was completely dumbfounded.
A moment ago, he had been that miserable office drone who had pulled seven consecutive all-nighters to meet a project deadline and finally collapsed in front of his computer, eyes going dark.
And then, the next moment, he had transmigrated.
'The life of a corporate slave really is worthless.'
Before Shinsuke could even finish lamenting his brief and wretched existence, a surge of memories that did not belong to him crashed violently into his mind, and the intense mental shock nearly made him black out and faint all over again.
The original owner was called Uchiha Shinsuke.
A member of Konoha's Uchiha Clan.
A genin who had only recently graduated from the Ninja Academy.
And then what?
That was it.
No, there were also some fragmented images: shuriken flying wide off-target at the training ground, the contemptuous stares of peers his own age, and the label of "useless trash."
Sparse chakra, a feeble body, and even the most basic Body Replacement Technique performed haltingly and with great difficulty.
'Damn, could this starting situation be any more hellish?' Shinsuke, or rather Uchiha Shinsuke as he should now be called, couldn't help cursing inwardly.
The fact that the original owner had even managed to graduate from the Ninja Academy at all was something he owed entirely to the Nine-Tails incident of the past.
In that catastrophe, the Fourth Hokage and his wife, the golden flash of lightning, had died in battle, and Konoha's ninja forces had suffered devastating casualties.
To replenish their fighting strength, the village elders had relaxed the graduation standards, allowing a whole wave of stragglers like the original owner to scrape by with the title of genin.
With that level of ability, the original owner was without question the very bottom of the Uchiha Clan, and on top of that, the original owner had a timid and weak-willed personality.
Because of this, the original owner was frequently bullied by several delinquent youths within the clan.
Right at that moment.
"Bang!"
The already-dilapidated room door was violently kicked open.
Blinding sunlight flooded in, and Shinsuke, who had been in the dim room for so long, instinctively squinted his eyes.
Three young men stood blocking the doorway, all wearing Uchiha Clan clothing with the fan insignia printed on the back, their faces wearing mocking smiles.
The one at the front was named Uchiha Shigeru.
"Well, well, our trash Shinsuke has finally deigned to crawl out of bed?" Uchiha Shigeru's tone was full of undisguised contempt.
The two lackeys behind him burst out laughing along with him.
"Shigeru-nii, didn't you know? I heard that at yesterday's shuriken throwing drill, he missed all ten throws, every single one! Hahaha, what a real honor he brings to our Uchiha Clan!"
"He's worse than the kids from civilian families, he might as well quit being a ninja and go beg on the streets!"
Shinsuke's body instinctively shrank back, which was the deep-rooted timidity and self-loathing from the original owner's memories asserting themselves.
Shinsuke wanted to speak up and refute them, but found his throat dry and couldn't get out a single word.
This body was too weak and frail, and though his soul was that of an adult, his body was a coward's.
Seeing that Shinsuke wasn't making a sound, the impatience on Uchiha Shigeru's face grew heavier.
"What's wrong, trash, did we hit the mark and now you've gone mute?"
Uchiha Shigeru looked down at Shinsuke on the bed with a condescending gaze, "Cut the nonsense, today is when you pay protection money, where is it? If you can't produce it, don't blame us brothers for teaching you a good, hard lesson!"
'Protection money?' Shinsuke's brow instantly knotted together.
In the memories, these guys would exploit the fact that they were stronger than the original owner and come around every few days to extort him, calling it "protection" while in reality it was nothing but pure shakedown and extortion.
"I don't have any."
Shinsuke was no longer that meek and submissive Uchiha Shinsuke.
He had been squeezed enough by bosses and clients in his previous life, and now that he had transmigrated, he was still supposed to get pushed around by a bunch of little punks?
No way in hell!
"Ha? What did you just say?" Uchiha Shigeru looked as though he had heard the most absurd joke imaginable, the muscles on his face twitching as he broke into a vicious grin, "No? Looks like you're asking for a beating!"
Before the words had even finished falling, Uchiha Shigeru lunged forward, grabbed Shinsuke by the front of his shirt, and roughly hauled him off the bed!
"Thud!"
His frail body made solid, unforgiving contact with the cold wooden floor.
"It seems you don't know the meaning of the word 'rules' unless someone teaches you a lesson in color!" said Uchiha Shigeru, lifting his foot and driving it without mercy straight toward Shinsuke's abdomen!
Humiliation!
Rage!
Indignation!
Why should he!
'I just transmigrated and I'm already getting beaten? I dropped dead in my previous life, and now I get bullied in this one? Who the hell did I wrong?'
'Damn it! Where's my golden finger? Where's my system? If it doesn't show up right now I'm going to get beaten to death!'
Shinsuke screamed furiously in his mind.
In the very instant before Uchiha Shigeru's foot came crashing down.
"Ding!"
[Detecting host's intense will to survive and burning desire to change fate.]
[Family Growth System binding successful!]
[Detecting host's current predicament, distributing beginner gift pack now.]
The cold and mechanical electronic chime that rang out inside Shinsuke's mind at this moment was sweeter to him than any sound in the world!
'A system?! My cheat has arrived?!'
Shinsuke's pupils contracted sharply, and a surge of wild elation rose from the bottom of his heart, instantly sweeping away every shred of negative emotion.
It had come at just the right moment!
As the beginner gift pack opened inside his mind, the very next second, an indescribable torrent of warm energy materialized from nowhere throughout every corner of his body.
Shinsuke's entire body was filled in an instant by this force!
The chakra that had previously been so faint as to be negligible erupted in a savage and explosive surge!
Every inch of muscle, every single cell, greedily devoured and absorbed this power.
Chunin-level chakra!
Shinsuke could feel it clearly: the power within his body had undergone a complete and earth-shattering transformation, reaching the level of an ordinary chunin!
But it still wasn't over!
Right on its heels, a burning sensation spread from deep within his eye sockets, and this was the kekkei genkai unique to the Uchiha Clan.
"Ngh!"
The violent stimulation made Shinsuke unable to suppress a sharp cry of pain as he covered his eyes with both hands.
Uchiha Shigeru's foot stopped mid-air, and he was thrown off for a moment by this sudden and unexpected development.
"Stop playing tricks!" Uchiha Shigeru spat, but a vague and inexplicable unease stirred in his heart without reason, and he felt that something was off.
A few seconds later, Shinsuke slowly lowered his hands.
Where his pupils had once been black, they were now replaced by an eerie, vivid crimson.
A single tomoe was slowly revolving around his pupil!
'From this moment forward, I am no longer the office drone Shinsuke, I am Uchiha Shinsuke!'
'The Uchiha Clan will become great because of me!'
The Sharingan!
A one-tomoe Sharingan!
The kekkei genkai belonging to the Uchiha Clan had, in this moment, fully awakened!
The air seemed to freeze solid in that instant.
The triumphant expressions on the faces of Uchiha Shigeru and his two lackeys solidified completely, replaced by a look of pure stupefied shock, as though they had seen a ghost.
"Sha... Sharingan?!"
How could this trash Shinsuke, this clan-wide laughingstock of a straggler, possibly awaken the Sharingan?!
Ignoring their shock, Uchiha Shinsuke slowly rose from the floor, rolled his shoulders to loosen his joints, and felt the unprecedented, surging power within his body, the chakra flowing smoothly through his channels as though it had always been there.
Under the vision granted by the Sharingan, everything looked completely different from before.
Uchiha Shinsuke looked at Uchiha Shigeru and the others standing before him and said in a cold voice, "What was it... that you just said?"