A month slowly passed since the academy graduation, and Ren enjoyed the relative peace of these recent times.

Sure, the village was in turmoil. The Daimyo was not happy. The negotiation and talks between him, the Hokage, and the council were still ongoing and dragged on. And while things looked like they would stabilize soon, there was still that undertone of tension subtly drowning the village because people were now aware that the village was on the brink of a massive economic crisis.

Konoha’s economic fate literally depended on the Daimyo’s decision to keep or cut their budget. But while everybody was worrying themselves sick, Ren, the man secretly behind this whole crisis, was chilling.

He had no idea that his attempt to make Danzo busy would turn into such a big deal. But either way, no matter what the Daimyo decided, he didn’t really care. It didn’t matter. He had a plan for both outcomes.

The only effect the decision would have on him was whether he would play a political simulator or an economic one in the future Hell, when it is put this way, Ren would actually prefer if the Daimyo cut the freaking budget because an economic simulator sounded way more preferable to him than dealing with politics.

But he had already decided that he would not meddle in this matter anymore.

He was too busy tinkering with wooden boxes and seals anyway. Speaking of which, Ren smiled as he finished inscribing seals on the inside of one such wooden box, and with a relieved sigh, he closed it as he leaned on the backrest of his chair, stretching his stiff muscles.

He had already failed six previous attempts to finish this damned thing, always making some minor mistake that usually set the whole thing on fire or caused an explosion.

But finally… FREEDOM!

Now he could-

He stopped as he heard the door to his apartment suddenly open. Leaning to the side, he glanced into the hall and saw Ino come in with a very unhappy frown and shoulders slumped, followed by Hinata who also looked as if she sucked on a lemon.

Ren did everything he could to not burst out into roaring laughter, but despite his herculean effort, he was still left chuckling at their misfortune.

It had been a month, and he still found it funny.

The girls expected their new career to be a tad bit more glamorous than catching cats and painting walls with an occasional babysitting or trash collecting thrown in.

Oh, yeah! Ino’s team helped a farmer gather the potatoes from his fields two days ago. That surely added some much-needed excitement to her days!

They were still so young and eager. Ren found it adorable. To be honest, he didn’t see what their problem with D-ranks was. In his previous life, everybody was portraying them as some sort of punishment, but… they were fine.

At worst, the D-rank missions were lengthy chores. And even the pay was good. On average, a genin could earn two to five hundred Ryo from a D-rank mission, depending on how long the mission would take and how demanding it would be.

That was more or less twenty to fifty dollars for one to three hours of work. For a team of four. Do it alone, and boom, the paycheck actually quadruples.

Genins didn’t need permission from their Jonin Instructor to do D-ranks either. After they were let go from their training for the day, it was their own business what they did with their free time.

These missions were not exactly cheap. They were definitely not for the broke boys. A babysitting mission, for example, would still cost the client around the equivalent of one hundred and fifty dollars in the local currency. For an hour, maybe an hour and a half of babysitting.

It was the rich and influential who hired ninjas for these tasks. Not the poor schmucks.

The poorer people hired ninjas at most once per year or half a year. When they needed to have their fence or house painted. Or some other physically demanding task they didn’t want to do, and would prefer paying the local equivalent of two to three hundred bucks for the work to be done for them.

It was easy. It was quick. And it was good money, too. What was there to complain about? Sigh. Ren shook his head. Kids these days.

Sure, the higher-ranked missions paid more. But they took longer, and there was the danger factor to consider. Also, it’s not like a guard mission or border patrol was a thrilling task. It still sucked. It just felt like it sucked less because the final paycheck was bigger and ninjas were not paragons of math, so most of them did not put together two and two to realize that spending the time running D-ranks would net them more money than one lengthy C-rank.

Sometimes.

It was on a case-by-case basis.

For the B-ranks and up, however, now these were way more worth it than D-ranks from a monetary perspective. They paid way more. But the danger was also way higher.

Of course, the village took a bigger cut, too. Taxes. Ninja or not, there was no avoiding those.

His girls were just lucky he was not their Jonin Instructor as they secretly wished. The second they started complaining like this, they would be running C-rank border patrol missions back to back until they begged him to put them back on D-rank duty.

There was usually so much thrill on these C-rank border patrol missions that the boredom would make any Nara easily excited. Ren heard that Naras actually signed up months in advance for these missions.

The village had to limit how many Naras could be sent to border patrols or caravan guarding duties because if it did not, the whole clan would be spamming those just so they could slack off and get paid for it.

Sometimes Ren thought that Naras were the only sane people in the village.

Because why would anyone take an ultra thrilling dangerous A-rank mission where you are very likely to die when you could just take a C-rank caravan bodyguard duty and be paid for sitting on your ass while watching clouds?

But of course, the common sense in this world was to take the A-rank mission because that one is higher ranked and thus ‘better’.

Was it any wonder that, at the very least, one ninja died every single day with that kind of mentality being prevalent?

On the other hand, this was fine. Ren knew he should not complain. Somebody had to do these missions. And as long as there was a long line of morons lining up for them, it wouldn’t be him.

All’s well that ends well. For him, at least.

Ren’s thoughts were interrupted when Ino and Hinata entered the living room where he was sitting, and instantly demanded a few hugs to improve their mood.

Ren didn’t protest. He quite enjoyed this routine of theirs, and he might or might not have gotten deliberately a bit handsy here and there, much to the girls’ delight.

“Is that one of your wooden seal printers?” Hinata asked with a bit of awe in her tone after they stopped hugging and she started hovering over the wooden box like a kid looking at a Christmas present.

Ren smiled at her and said. “Yes.” He then tapped its left side, straight in the middle of a drawn circle, and the upper part of said left side popped out. Ren unsealed a bottle of chakra ink from his storage seal and poured it inside before closing it again.

Then, he unsealed an empty scroll and put it on a cross painted on the top of the box. With a pulse of chakra, the scroll was sealed into the wooden box, and Ren then touched a green square painted on its right side, activating the device.

The front of the box opened and fell onto the table before one sealing tag after another started to come out of the box in some primitive imitation of a money-counting machine as the papers stacked on top of each other on the opened front side of the box.

Ren grinned at Ino and Hinata’s awed expressions. The girls had seen him do many things, but a box that created seals on its own as long as the materials were sealed within? That was probably not something they considered possible.

And frankly, the whole device was complicated as hell.

It could also print only one kind of seal. Which seal it would print depended on the seal configuration during its creation. As for this one…

“This is my preparation for my meeting with the Inuzuka matriarch tomorrow.” Ren told the girls who glanced between him and the wooden box on the table with wry smiles.

“You are not going to give her a chance to say no, are you?” Hinata asked, inwardly feeling pity for Kiba’s mom as she made herself comfortable on Ren’s lap.

“No.” Ren chuckled as his arms snaked around Hinata’s stomach, and his chin rested on her shoulder. “This deal, she will have to take whether she wants or not. For the good of her clan.”

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep