The biggest draw of all came in the last few days.
Aoki Yuuichi, finally convinced by Chiba Shun's methods, had started showing up in person every single day to guide a handful of the more promising students.
A jonin. Personally teaching them.
For free.
That alone was enough to make people in the village dizzy.
And the children Aoki singled out as having talent? In the eyes of many visiting ninjas, those kids were nowhere near as gifted as their own sons and daughters. Once that comparison started spreading, everyone began asking the same question.
If their children entered the Ninja Academy, wouldn't they also have a chance to receive special attention?
That thought was enough to shake people.
Of course, the ones most tempted were usually lower-ranking ninjas and commoners rather than jonin or members of established ninja clans. People at the top still looked down on the academy.
But for Chiba Shun, that was more than enough.
When those ordinary ninjas and a great many civilians began sending their children to the academy, causing enrollment to swell once again, Aoki Yuu couldn't stop smiling.
He felt as though the genius he had been waiting for was finally about to appear.
This time, more than three thousand new students entered the academy, and Aoki personally inspected every one of them.
Their ages varied wildly. Some were still little children who belonged in preschool classes, where they would first learn basic literacy and numbers. Others were already old enough to have refined chakra.
After spending so long looking at half-starved orphans with average talent, Aoki Yuuichi found himself more and more satisfied with these children from ordinary families - children who had been raised better, fed better, and whose bodies were visibly healthier.
Once the enrollment period ended, he directly rewarded Chiba Shun with a B-rank ninjutsu.
It didn't come from the academy's collection. It was one of Aoki Yuuichi's own techniques.
Chiba Shun was overjoyed.
After finishing the arrangements for the newly enrolled students, he immediately memorized the scroll.
Unfortunately, it was still a Lightning Release technique: B-rank Lightning Release, Lightning Explosion.
It was a ninjutsu built on top of the Lightning Ball Technique, one that sharply increased its destructive power.
After reading through the description, Chiba Shun could not help but feel a little emotional.
Kumogakure's stock of other elemental ninjutsu was pitifully small, and even the quality was nothing special.
But when it came to Lightning Release, they had truly explored it to an astonishing degree.
Take this Lightning Explosion, for example. By rights, it should have been fairly difficult to learn. Yet the scroll contained painstakingly detailed training steps, even more thorough than the original training method for the Rasengan.
I'll hand this one to Sakai Yuu later, Chiba Shun thought. Aoki Yuuichi created it himself, so he probably wouldn't care too much if I quietly pass it on to Sakai Yuu.
That day, Chiba Shun sat in his office, going over the academy's accounts for the past month.
Those little brats had been doing all kinds of simple jobs around the village. After completing a task, they got to keep eighty percent of the payment and handed over the remaining twenty percent.
Naturally, the twenty percent belonged to the Ninja Academy.
Aoki Yuuichi took the larger share of that portion. Chiba Shun took the smaller one.
That did not mean the two of them were embezzling funds. Neither of them cared enough about such a tiny sum to stain their hands with it. But that money could be used on the children they personally favored.
There had never been fairness in the ninja world.
Even among the cannon fodder produced by the same Ninja Academy, there were different grades of cannon fodder.
Just as Aoki Yuuichi was quietly selecting disciples with outstanding talent, Chiba Shun was doing the same.
The difference was that Chiba Shun valued unusual talents more.
He paid particular attention to those with potential in medical ninjutsu, genjutsu, or non-lightning elemental affinities.
There was no point in fighting Aoki or the village over some natural Lightning Release prodigy. A genius that Kumogakure could already train on its own would never fall into his hands. Only talents the village was bad at nurturing had a real chance of ending up under him.
So he cast a very wide net.
Through repeated theory tests, practical drills, and careful observation, he searched for hidden gifts among the students. If he suspected a child had potential in a certain field, he would arrange private meetings, give that child extra help, and, in the process, continue his steady work of ideological conditioning.
In a little over half a year, he had already interviewed seventy or eighty children.
Chiba Shun was quite content with this life.
His strength was rising little by little in the middle of these ordinary days. At the same time, watching the students he favored improve bit by bit gave him a deep, unexpected sense of fulfillment.
Still, peace had a price.
Over the last six months, Chiba Shun had been eating huge meals with alarming frequency. His appetite had grown far faster than expected. Now, one sitting was equal to roughly five highly nutritious meals.
If he ate barbecue at a restaurant every time, each meal would cost about five hundred taels. That meant fifteen hundred taels a day.
Fortunately, he had used his authority to arrange for the Ninja Academy's logistics department to process ingredients on his behalf, cutting the cost roughly in half.
Only once in a while did he splurge on restaurant meals or treat a few chunin colleagues to something extravagant.
Even so, in just six months at the academy, he had spent nearly two hundred thousand ryo on food alone.
The hundred thousand taels he had earned from completing a B-rank mission had been nowhere near enough to cover his expenses.
Thankfully, the academy paid him fifty thousand taels a month. Over six months, that came to three hundred thousand.
On top of that, after exposing Matsuda Sane as a Root intelligence operative and reporting the matter through Aoki Yuu, Chiba Shun had been credited with another B-rank mission.
The reward that time was the lowest possible amount for a B-rank mission - fifty thousand taels.
That meant he should originally have had about two hundred and fifty thousand ryo in cash.
Unfortunately, once he became a chunin, his expenses rose sharply in every area besides food.
Weapons alone had become an enormous burden.
He had thought that once he stopped running missions, his costs would fall.
Who would have imagined that training itself would burn through money so quickly?
Just to practice the Four-Sword Style, he had broken ten long swords. The chunin partner who trained with him had broken around the same number, and all of that had been paid out of Chiba Shun's pocket.
That meant sixty thousand taels had vanished on swords alone.
Back when he and Sakai Yuu trained together in the past, they had mostly used wooden swords, which cost next to nothing.
But the training effect had been poor. Once Chiba Shun finally had some money in hand, he had naturally switched to real blades.
When he sat down and calculated everything properly, even he was shocked.
After factoring in the replacement of depleted kunai, senbon, ninja pouches, explosive tags, and uniforms, Chiba Shun had only one hundred and fifty thousand ryo left.
In other words, even though he had not completed a single outside mission in the last six months, he had still managed to save fifty thousand taels.
Thank goodness Aoki Yuu pays me well and never delays my salary, he thought.
If life continued at this pace, Chiba Shun felt that he would not need to worry too much about money again, at least not until he became a jonin.
But peaceful days never lasted for long.
Trouble arrived soon enough.
That night, after a long day of work, Chiba Shun returned to his residence inside the Ninja Academy grounds.
He had barely lain down when the sudden ringing of a bell snapped him awake.
The sound came from a small warning device he had set up himself.
If someone came looking for him openly, they would naturally approach from the front door and the alarm would not trigger. But if anyone tried to sneak in from another direction, he would know immediately.
The instant he woke, Chiba Shun threw aside the blanket and sprang upward like a drawn bowstring releasing.
He had prepared for exactly this kind of situation long ago. The moment he moved into this little courtyard, he had already started planning how to survive an assassination attempt. He had practiced the sequence many times. By now, it was instinct.
At nearly the same moment, the intruder outside also realized that something had gone wrong the instant the bell rang.
There was no longer any point in being stealthy.
The assassin broke straight through the wall with a blade and slashed down at the bed where Chiba Shun had supposedly been sleeping.
As expected, the blanket was split in two.
There was no body underneath.
Realizing he had missed, the assassin immediately twisted aside with sharp, disciplined reflexes.
His reaction speed was excellent. Experience was written into every movement as he dodged the counterattack that came down from above.
Even though he failed to land that surprise strike, Chiba Shun showed no disappointment.
He pulled back to widen the distance while forming hand seals at high speed, then slammed a palm toward the ground.
The assassin's expression changed the moment he saw those seals.
Several shuriken flew toward Chiba Shun, clearly meant to interrupt the technique before it could be completed. At the same time, the attacker flooded chakra into his feet, ready to evade in any direction.
But the ninjutsu he expected never came.
After dodging the shuriken, Chiba Shun completed the motion and struck the ground.
The next instant, several explosions rang out in succession.
The ground of the entire courtyard collapsed.
Both Chiba Shun and the assassin dropped together into the darkness below.
That was the real trap.
Long before this night, Chiba Shun had secretly hollowed out the entire courtyard underneath the surface. Strictly speaking, the hand seals he had just formed were not meant to release a ninjutsu at all. They were only there to trigger the mechanism.
This kind of sudden sinkhole trap was something he had learned from the original story.
Even Uchiha elites in the canon had failed to avoid that kind of setup without relying on Izanagi, so how could an assassin who was merely chunin-level hope to escape it cleanly?
And Chiba Shun had not stopped at the collapse alone.
He had packed the underground space with layered traps.
The moment the assassin fell, a few stifled groans rose from below - and then silence.
Chiba Shun himself, of course, was unharmed.
He knew every safe foothold in the deathtrap he had prepared.
Even so, he did not immediately emerge.
There was no guarantee the attacker had come alone.
Suppressing his chakra as much as possible, he stayed hidden underground without making a sound.
Very quickly, he realized his caution had been absolutely justified.
There were two more people still waiting outside.
It had been a three-man assassination squad from the beginning.
The loss of one companion did not provoke any reaction from them. They simply remained still, watching and waiting for Chiba Shun to show himself.
But to their surprise, even after successfully springing the trap, Chiba Shun remained patient.
Seeing that he refused to expose himself, the two assassins knew they could not delay any longer.
This was the heart of Kumogakure. They had very little time.
They had only dared attempt the assassination tonight because Aoki Yuu was away from the academy. If they dragged things out until Kumo reinforcements arrived, they would be finished.
One of them cast a look at the other.
The first possessed some sensory ability, but with Chiba Shun suppressing his chakra, he could no longer pinpoint his location quickly. That left the job to his companion, whose specialty was ninjutsu.
That companion did not disappoint.
After forming a rapid string of hand seals, he slapped both palms against the ground.
He was an Earth Release ninja too, and the technique he used was clearly advanced - at the very least B-rank.
From below, Chiba Shun immediately sensed the danger.
At the same time, he confirmed something else.
These three were definitely not from Kumogakure.
It wasn't that the Hidden Cloud lacked powerful Earth Release users altogether, but such people were extremely rare. There was no way one of them would be serving as an infiltrator from another village.
Konoha? Chiba Shun's mind flashed. Could this be Root again? Is this because of Matsuda Sane?
The moment that thought surfaced, he burst out from underground.
He had no choice.
If he stayed where he was, that powerful Earth Release technique would bury him alive.
But the instant he broke into the open air, a slash of cold light cut toward him.
The sensory ninja was also an expert swordsman.
And judging from his skin tone and build, he looked every inch like a true Cloud shinobi.
An enemy spy had infiltrated the ninja ranks of Kumogakure itself.