Chapter 1: The Nine-Tailed Incident
In City A, the night was thick as ink, tightly wrapping around the old residential area.
In a gray, six-story building, a rental room of less than twenty square meters was still illuminated by a faint light.
The air was filled with the unique, slightly scorched, warm smell of instant noodles and electronic products that had been running for a long time.
Naoki, a black-haired youth, was curled up in the sunken seat of an ergonomic chair that had long since collapsed. The cold light of the screen was the only moving color on his face.
On the computer screen in front of him was the intense battle scene of the Naruto mobile game arena.
It was the final match of a Best-of-3, and the atmosphere had been stretched to the limit.
His fingers flew over the keyboard and mouse, moving so fast they almost left afterimages, and his mouth wasn't idle either.
"Little brother, how's that for a comeback with White Mask Obito?" Naoki curled his lips into an arc that he considered charmingly evil, but was actually slightly bloated from staying up late.
His voice was pressed low, carrying the deliberate sense of control typical of a game streamer.
On screen, his "White Mask Obito" and the opponent's "Menma" were maneuvering in the midfield. Both of their health bars were bottoming out, and the scarlet warning borders were flashing rapidly.
Chakra light flowed over Obito, who had four energy orbs stored. The icon representing the rebound was lit; it was his capital for the gamble.
"Pressure~ Little brother, why are you feeling so much pressure?" Naoki clicked his mouse lightly, and the character performed an exquisite intangible maneuver, dodging Menma's probing basic attack.
"If I were to use Fire Style, wouldn't you be finished?"
Before the words fell, the Menma on the opposite side seemed unable to hold back and used a skill. Naoki's eyes lit up!
Almost instinctively, he pressed the rebound, then manipulated White Mask to dash forward with a "Kamui" intangible grab, catching Menma, and then used a basic attack to reach the best position in the midfield.
"If you use Substitution, I'll use my Ultimate. Even if the 3000-point players came, they'd use this move."
Menma, in the end, couldn't hold back and pressed the Substitution button.
Naoki was quick-witted.
"Summoning Jutsu: Gedo Statue—"
Before the word "Statue" could even leave his mouth, the unexpected happened!
The network indicator in the bottom right corner of the screen suddenly turned red, and the screen froze violently, as if glued by invisible glue.
The gorgeous skill effects and smooth character movements all solidified into a heart-stopping, lagging screenshot.
Naoki's fingers, suspended in the air, pressed down, but only received hollow tactile feedback. The Gedo Statue he anticipated did not appear, and the brilliant light of the ultimate release was nowhere to be found.
A fatal fraction of a second.
The opponent was clearly unaffected.
Menma seized this once-in-a-lifetime freeze, accurately launched a first-skill grab, and firmly controlled the White Mask that was standing still!
"Damn it!" Naoki's heart tightened, and his adrenaline surged.
When the screen finally struggled to return to smoothness, his character was already being comboed. In a panic, he smashed the Substitution key.
White smoke exploded, and the substitution was successful. But the rhythm had completely fallen into the opponent's control.
The freed Menma didn't hesitate at all and pressed the Ultimate. The character soared into the air, condensing a chilling, pitch-black Chakra sphere in front of his chest with one hand — Ultimate: Ultra-Big Ball Rasenringu!
"This is a parting gift." The game sound effect declared coldly.
The pitch-black sphere of destruction crashed down, swallowing the entire midfield and the last sliver of White Mask's health.
The word "Defeat" in scarlet, huge, angular Chinese characters slammed across the screen with a force that was almost humiliating.
Immediately after, the opponent's damned, cheeky "patting head" emoji (an action where a Q-version Ninja gently pats the top of another Ninja's head) began to jump rhythmically in the center of the screen, over and over again, as if mocking him in silence.
"WTF—it lagged!!"
Naoki's voice rose sharply, sounding harsh and abrupt in the quiet of the late night room.
A wave of heat, mixed with unwillingness, anger, and the frustration of being toyed with by the system, rushed to the top of his head.
He could feel his ears and neck heating up rapidly, and his vision even went a little black.
"If I hadn't lagged, could you have won, little brother?! I didn't even get to use my Ultimate! And you're still patting my head!"
He growled at the still Menma avatar on the screen that seemed to be mocking him, his knuckles turning white from clenching his fists.
The opponent seemed unsatisfied and even deliberately stayed on the settlement screen, letting that "patting head" emoji continue for a full ten seconds.
Ten seconds. Each second felt like a dull knife cutting into flesh, slicing through Naoki's fragile nerves and self-esteem.
The string of reason snapped.
The accumulated fatigue, dissatisfaction with the status quo, frustration over the game loss, and that glaring "patting head"... all emotions converged into an uncontrollable brute force.
Naoki let out a low growl, his right fist carrying all his strength, smashing fiercely toward the glowing monitor in front of him that bore the weight of failure and mockery!
There was no crisp sound of glass shattering as expected, nor was there a scene of parts flying everywhere.
The moment his fist touched the cold screen, the surface, which should have been hard glass, suddenly rippled like water.
Immediately after, the center of the ripples turned into a viscous, deep, rotating vortex, emitting a dark suction force.
"What—?!"
Surprise only had time to flash through his mind for an instant before that suction force became violently wild.
His entire arm, which he had thrown out, was swallowed up as easily as if it had fallen into an invisible quagmire.
Then came his shoulders, torso, head... His vision was filled with bizarre, incomprehensible colors and lines, and a sense of weightlessness suddenly seized his whole body, as if stepping into thin air from a high-rise building.
In his final lingering consciousness, there was only the endless depth of the vortex and the feeling of nothingness as he was completely devoured.
...
Excruciating pain.
It felt as if he had been thrown into a ten-thousand-ton hydraulic press to be crushed, only to be roughly pieced back together.
Every bone was wailing, every muscle was spasming, and every cell was screaming for a strange existence.
Then came suffocation. Cold air, carrying dust and the smell of burning, forced its way into lungs that had never been used before, triggering a completely uncontrollable, weak, yet sharp physiological reflex—
"Waa—!!!"
A loud, piercing cry belonging to an infant exploded in this noisy background. This cry stunned Naoki himself.
Struggling through the physiological discomfort that threatened to tear his consciousness apart, he managed to pry open his eyelids, which felt like they were glued together.
His vision was blurry, a complete mess, with only large patches of color blocks and swaying light and shadows.
The world was like a kaleidoscope seen by a patient with high myopia and astigmatism, twisted and blurred.
But the sounds were incredibly clear, even terrifyingly so.
A woman's shrill, distorted scream, a man's rough roar, the terrified, heart-wrenching cries of other children, the continuous, muffled roar of house walls collapsing in the distance, the clattering of rubble and stones falling... and, covering all of this, the beastly roar that seemed to come from the depths of hell, full of pure hatred and the desire for destruction!
"Awoo—!!!"
The roar seemed to carry substantive sound waves, vibrating his fragile eardrums until they buzzed, and even the ground beneath his swaddling clothes trembled slightly.
Where is this? Wasn't I playing games in my rental room?!
Disordered and fragmented memories finally struggled to piece together: game, lag, patting head, smashing the screen, bizarre vortex... Transmigration? This absurd vocabulary, accompanied by a huge sense of panic, slammed into his chaotic thinking.
Before he could digest this information, a more primitive, stronger sense of crisis poured over him like ice water, causing him to stiffen instantly.
That was the fear stemming from the deepest part of his genes, the fear a creature feels when facing a natural predator, facing a natural disaster that it cannot understand or resist!
"Get down! Get down quickly!"
"Protect the children! Take them to the shelter!"
"Water Release: Water Formation Wall!"
In the blurry, swaying light and shadows, several figures wearing dark vests and moving as fast as the wind seemed to flash by.
Immediately after, a scorching heat wave, like a wall of fire coming face-to-face, suddenly rushed over. A huge wooden beam, as thick as an adult's waist and still burning at the end, wrapped in sparks and thick smoke, smashed down near him with a rumble!
The heat wave roasted his skin, smoke choked his nasal cavity, and the infant's fragile senses endured an unprecedented impact.
Nine-Tailed... Is this the Nine-Tailed Incident?!
Despite his blurry vision, that iconic, hatred-filled Chakra roar, that earth-shaking scene of destruction, instantly overlapped with the famous bridge in Naruto in his memory.
As a veteran player and fan, he had watched the relevant animation and manga descriptions too many times!
I... not only transmigrated, but I transmigrated into the Ninja World and became an infant on the night the Nine-Tailed attacked Konoha?!
Hell difficulty! Desperate start! How is this any different from deleting the account and starting over?!
Panic, like cold vines, instantly wrapped around his young heart, almost making him suffocate again. The infant's body couldn't withstand such violent emotional fluctuations at all, and he could only let out more helpless cries.
Just as despair began to spread—
A point of faint light suddenly lit up at the edge of his blurry vision, or rather, directly in the depths of his chaotic consciousness.
That light was soft but clear, quickly dispelling part of the darkness brought by the terror.
The light condensed, stretched, and finally turned into a simple, realistic yet illusory scroll phantom.
The scroll slowly unfurled automatically, and on it appeared an incredibly clear interface layout, icon style, and font that he was familiar with to the point of being unable to be more familiar...
It was none other than:
[Naruto Mobile Game] Login Interface!
The simple logo, the familiar background image, and below it was the clear [Enter Game] button.
Only, this interface was translucent, suspended above his chaotic field of vision, strangely overlapping with the hellish reality scene around him.
At the same time, a cold, emotionless mechanical voice sounded directly in his mind:
[Host adaptation detected... Soul frequency matched... Energy coordinates locked...]
[Binding Naruto Mobile Game System...]
[Binding successful.]
[Welcome, player: Naoki.]
[Current server: Ninja World (Unique)]
[Warning: Abnormal space-time fluctuation detected... World line converging... Key character data has mutated unexpectedly]