Chapter 256: Rinnegan
Dang-dang-dang!
The heavy, rhythmic tolling of the clock echoed through the silent room, marking the arrival of a new day. The moment the clock hands aligned perfectly at midnight, Ren, who had been waiting with bated breath, immediately summoned the System interface with a mental command.
A translucent blue screen shimmered into existence before his eyes, illuminating his face with a soft, digital glow.
[Perform a ten-pull?]
The prompt hovered there, taunting him. It was the most addictive question in the multiverse.
"Confirm!"
Ren tapped the button without a shred of hesitation. His finger moved with the practiced speed of a veteran gamer. After seven long years of hoarding resources and resisting the urge to gamble, the luck he had accumulated was bound to explode tonight. He could feel it in his veins—a tingling sensation that whispered of greatness.
"Give me a top-tier Gold Legendary!" Ren prayed aloud, his eyes glued to the screen. "Come on, don't let me down!"
The familiar, yet always mesmerizing gacha animation began.
The digital screen darkened, transforming into a vast, swirling void. The Universe split open before him, revealing a canvas of infinite darkness. Then, galaxies began to reverse their spin, nebulae collapsed, and from the depths of the cosmos, ten brilliant stars converged in the virtual sky. They burned with the intensity of dying suns before plummeting toward the earth.
Whoosh! Whoosh! Whoosh!
One after another, the meteors streaked down, their trails shifting colors as they broke through the atmosphere. White... Blue... White... Blue...
Ren held his breath, waiting for the golden glow that signified a jackpot.
Soon, all ten stars landed, embedding themselves into the virtual earth.
"No gold?!"
Ren stared at the results, his jaw going slack. He was momentarily speechless. Ten cards lay face down, radiating a mixture of common white and rare blue light, with only a single purple glow amidst the pile.
"Seriously?" he muttered, slumping back in his chair.
However, he quickly rationalized the situation. He knew the mathematics behind the System. The drop rate for a Gold Legendary in a ten-pull was only about ten percent. Statistically speaking, not pulling a gold was the norm; pulling one was the anomaly.
It was just that lately, his luck had been defying the odds. He had been hitting gold so frequently that failing to see that golden luster felt jarring, like missing a step on a staircase.
"Well, at least there's a Purple," Ren sighed, consoling himself.
Purple Epic cards had a drop rate of nearly fifty percent. Overall, the odds were decent. He already owned a significant roster of Gold Legendaries, so he didn't strictly need a Purple card for combat power. However, Purple cards were excellent fodder. They provided a decent amount of Experience Points when recycled.
More than the EXP, his curiosity was piqued. He wondered which character from the multiverse had answered his summons this time.
"Open."
The card shrouded in purple light flipped over.
"It's him!"
Ren's eyes lit up with recognition.
The character on the card wore a long black cloak adorned with ominous red clouds—the uniform of the most notorious mercenary organization in the ninja world. He had deep-blond hair, with long bangs completely obscuring his left eye. A specialized scope was attached to his face, and his hair was tied in a high ponytail. On his right index finger, he wore a ring bearing the kanji for "Blue" (青, Ao).
"Deidara!"
Ren recognized the S-Rank Missing-nin from Iwagakure immediately.
Deidara's debut in Naruto Shippuden had been nothing short of spectacular. He had infiltrated Sunagakure alone and successfully kidnapped Gaara, the Fifth Kazekage and Jinchūriki of the One-Tail, defeating him in aerial combat.
His catchphrase echoed in Ren's mind: "Art is an explosion!"
Though Deidara was undeniably a villain—a terrorist bomber with a twisted sense of aesthetics—Ren rather liked him.
Deidara was reckless, crazy, bold, and possessed a certain cruel charisma. He was a villain with a distinct personality, obsessed with the fleeting beauty of his creations. He lived for his art and eventually died for it.
[Recycle the selected character?]
The System prompt appeared, offering him the choice to convert the character into raw power.
"Recycle!" Ren commanded without hesitation.
[Ding! Recycle successful—your mana has increased!]
After checking the stats, Ren decided to recycle the entire batch of ten cards, Deidara included.
It wasn't that Deidara was weak. His overall strength was solid; he possessed the Explosion Release kekkei genkai and could create microscopic bombs (C4) that disintegrated enemies at a cellular level. With the right tactics, he could ambush and kill opponents far stronger than himself. His ultimate move, C0, was a self-destruct technique that turned him into a nuclear bomb with a ten-kilometer blast radius—power rivaling even mid-to-high tier Gold Legendaries.
But Ren had zero interest in suicide tactics.
"I'm not going to blow myself up just to win a fight," Ren scoffed.
With six Gold cards already in his arsenal, mid-and-low-tier Gold characters were essentially just high-quality EXP packs to him. A Purple card like Deidara, while cool, simply couldn't make the cut for his main lineup.
Composing himself, Ren shook off the disappointment and prepared for the next round. He still had points to burn.
[Perform a ten-pull?]
"Confirm!"
Let's go again. The law of averages has to kick in eventually.
The cosmic animation played out once more. Ren leaned forward, staring at the screen like a desperate gambler at a slot machine.
"Gold! Gold! Gold!" he chanted, trying to will the pixels to change color.
The meteors fell. The dust settled.
"..."
The animation ended—again, no gold. Only a solitary purple light shone among the whites and blues.
Twenty pulls. Still no Gold card.
A surge of disappointment welled up in his chest. "System, be honest with me. When did Gold get so hard to pull? Did you secretly nerf the rates in the last patch?"
[System Message: Seems you're getting cocky. The Gold odds have always been low—there is even a 100-pull pity timer implemented for those with truly terrible luck. You have hit Purple twice in a row; statistically, your luck is actually above average. Don't get greedy, Host.]
Ren rolled his eyes at the text. Combined, the probability of Purple and Gold sat at a bit over fifty percent. Ren had hit that fifty percent mark twice consecutively and was still complaining.
"Fine, fine. It's just my bad luck then," Ren grumbled, waving a hand dismissively.
The System seemed to fume silently at his attitude. He had already won the statistical coin toss twice and still called it bad luck; the kid was getting full of himself.
Ren tapped the glowing purple card to flip it.
Once again, the image revealed a figure draped in the iconic black cloak with red clouds. This time, however, the figure was a handsome teenage boy with dull red hair and heavy-lidded eyes.
"This is… Sasori?"
Ren blinked, looking closer at the details. It wasn't the hunched figure of Hiruko, the scorpion puppet, but the true body hidden within.
Sasori of the Red Sand.
Ren nodded in appreciation. "Another Akatsuki member."
In the lore, Sasori was a genius puppet master from Sunagakure who had defected after turning the Third Kazekage into a human puppet. He had partnered with Deidara to capture the One-Tail Shukaku.
Ren recalled his final battle. Out of a twisted form of mercy or perhaps hesitation, Sasori had left an intentional opening in his defense, allowing himself to be killed by his grandmother, Chiyo, and Sakura Haruno. He was a man who sought eternal beauty in puppetry to escape the pain of human mortality—a slightly tragic figure.
[Recycle the selected character?]
"Recycle!"
[Ding! Recycle successful—your mana has increased!]
Like Deidara, Sasori's strength was so-so in the grand scheme of Ren's current power level. While his poison and army of a hundred puppets were formidable against armies, his individual destructive power was too weak to keep in the main rotation.
Ren took a deep breath. "Third time's the charm."
He started the third ten-pull.
[Perform a ten-pull?]
"Confirm!"
The gacha screen reappeared, the swirling galaxy reflecting in Ren's eyes. Three consecutive ten-pulls. It reminded him of his old life on Earth, of those pay-to-win mobile games where he'd blown years of New Year's cash chasing a limited-banner "waifu" or a meta-defining character.
Whoosh!
The stars fell.
One radiated a deep, royal purple.
And then...
BOOM!
A blinding, majestic golden pillar of light erupted from the impact crater on the screen.
"Gold!!"
Ren jolted up from his chair, his heart skipping a beat with excitement.
"Finally!"
Gold at last—and a Purple on the side. This ten-pull was pure profit. The drought was over.
"Let's see the appetizer first."
He tapped the Purple card.
The card flipped, and Ren almost laughed. Yet again, the black cloak with red clouds appeared.
"Tch… did I poke the Akatsuki nest or something? Why are all the pulls Akatsuki members today?"
Ren couldn't help grumbling, though he was smiling.
He recognized the figure instantly. A tall, tanned man with green eyes, wearing a white hood and a black mask.
Kakuzu.
"The Treasurer of the Akatsuki," Ren mused.
Kakuzu was infamous for many things: his greed, his five hearts, and his mastery of Earth Grudge Fear. But to the fandom, he was the biggest victim of Naruto Uzumaki's Wind Release: Rasenshuriken.
"His life's greatest feat was 'fighting' the First Hokage and escaping alive," Ren chuckled. "Which probably means he threw a shuriken at Hashirama from eight hundred meters away and then ran for his life."
He was an EXP pack with zero hesitation needed. Ren didn't even bother looking at the stats before queuing him for recycling.
"Now... for the main event."
Ren turned his attention to the Gold card. It pulsed with a heavy, rhythmic light, signifying a power far greater than the previous draws.
He reached out and tapped it.
Flash!
The golden light shattered, revealing the character within.
The instant the character appeared, Ren gasped. The air in the room seemed to grow heavy, as if the mere image of this character exerted a spiritual pressure.
"It's him!!"
The artwork depicted a frail, pale man with vibrant red hair, seated in a mechanical walker. He wore a crimson robe, but it was his face that commanded attention.
Specifically, his eyes.
They were not human eyes. They were purple orbs with a ripple-like pattern spreading from the pupil—concentric circles that represented the cycle of life and death, order and chaos.
The Rinnegan.
The eyes of the Sage of the Six Paths. The apex Dōjutsu of the Naruto world.
"Nagato!!"
Ren breathed the name with reverence.
This was the true leader of the Akatsuki, the man who controlled the Six Paths of Pain from the shadows.
Even now, years after watching the show, Ren remembered Nagato's dazzling debut. He wasn't just a strong ninja; he was a god among men. He had crushed the Legendary Sannin, Jiraiya, with ease, tearing off his arm and sinking him into the depths of the ocean.
Then, he had stormed Konohagakure single-handedly. He bypassed their sensory barriers, decimated their forces, and when they refused to hand over Naruto, he flew into the sky.
Ren could almost hear the voice echoing in his mind: "This world shall know Pain."
With a single Shinra Tensei (Almighty Push), he had obliterated the entire village, leaving nothing but a massive crater where a superpower once stood.
"Had it not been for the Nine-Tails going berserk, Nagato alone could have razed Konoha to the ground and killed everyone there," Ren analyzed.
His iconic line, referencing the cycle of hatred, was so profound that it became legendary. Of course, Ren also chuckled remembering the fan-misheard lyric that sounded like "A single bag of rice bears several floors," but the true weight of the character was undeniable.
Moreover, in the power-scaling discussions of his previous life, Nagato had earned the nickname "The Kage-level Quality Inspector."
It meant that if you couldn't beat Pain, you weren't truly a top-tier Kage. He was the benchmark for god-tier power.
"And his reanimated form was even crazier," Ren thought, recalling the war arc.
During the Fourth Ninja World War, Kabuto Yakushi reanimated Nagato. At that time, Nagato was frail and lacked mobility, yet he single-handedly overwhelmed the perfect Jinchūriki of the Eight-Tails (Killer Bee) and the Nine-Tails (Naruto in Nine-Tails Chakra Mode).
Had Kabuto not been incompetent in controlling him, and had the opposition not included the tactical genius of Uchiha Itachi wielding the Sword of Totsuka, few entities in the entire series could have subdued Nagato.