“Oi! Stop pushing!”

“I was waiting here for an hour! Don’t even think about cutting in line, bastard!”

“Hey! No violence in here! Stop or you will get kicked out of the store!”

“Can you speed it up, please? I just want to buy my exploding tags. I am already late for my team meeting!”

“Gai! Tenten! Over here!” Ren yelled through the heavy noise of the crowd in his shop and beckoned them to head toward a side entrance to the back room as he noticed them staring at the chaos in front of them in disbelief.

Mornings were always the worst.

But fortunately, he had two very helpful girls to deal with it. He glanced at Ino and a brown-haired and brown-eyed teenage girl next to her, who were dealing with the customers in a practiced fashion after blundering their way through the hectic past week. They were veterans by now.

The girl was Hinata, or at least her clone, under henge. She couldn’t really work in a shop like this wearing her normal face. Her clan would march here with pitchforks and demand she stop sullying the dignity of Hyuga if they knew.

Ren inwardly rolled his eyes.

So, Hinata opted to help anyway. Just under the henge. And sure, pretty much all of his customers were ninja. They knew the brown-haired shop attendant was under a transformation. Which was considered incredibly rude according to ninja etiquette. But what were they going to do about it?

Complain to the wind?

Some chunin idiots tried to complain to Ren, but he simply told them they didn’t need to come if they did not want his wares. That shut them up quickly, and there was no problem ever since.

Of course, some Hyugas had ‘suspicions’. That naturally led them to do something rude and foolish like opening their Byakugan to try and peer past the henge despite the warning not to do so plastered over half the entrance.

They thought themselves clever and decided to fuck around.

Naturally, they found out when they experienced the anti-Hyuga flashbang seal point blank to their face, making them fall to the ground screaming and whimpering as they held their eyes in pain.

Not even Hinata could use Byakugan within his store, because that seal? It was active all the time. The second somebody activates a dojutsu, boom, they get to experience how it feels to be painfully blind for a few seconds.

The best part?

His store was registered as his clan’s property. And that meant, by entering, people nonverbally acknowledged to abide by his clan’s rules. And no, ‘I didn’t know!’ was not an acceptable excuse. Everybody knew what. It was common sense in the village.

The amount of power abuse that opened up with that was honestly kind of disgusting, but Ren didn’t cross any line despite making use of that rule extensively.

For example, he was not obligated to inform others of his clan’s rules. But they were expected to obey them. It was one of these unfair privileges the clans had and used in a very low-key fashion to bully others from time to time.

So, when the Hyuga clan’s main house representatives showed up, all red-faced and angry about Ren possessing something that could counter their venerable bloodline? He simply told them to fuck off, kinda like they did to him in the past, which made them sputter and bristle in disbelief at the disrespect.

But leave they did. Because he was a part of a clan now. If he were just a regular ninja with a store, he had no doubt they would drag him in front of the village council by now to rip him a new one through politics and nepotism.

It was sad, but that’s how these things in the village worked.

“You’ve got a lot of very youthful people shopping here today.” Gai commented just as they ducked into the quiet back room, leaving the chaotic atmosphere of the crowd in the shop.

“Sorry. Mornings here are quite busy. Everybody wants to buy our Exploding Tags before the daily supply runs out, and this is the result. The afternoons, on the other hand, are nice, quiet, and peaceful with barely anybody visiting.” Ren ruefully sighed and gave Gai a helpless smile.

He did not want to complain about the business going well. But he just… he didn’t expect it would go this well. He was definitely experiencing suffering through success, and it was a very bittersweet feeling.

“Ah. I have heard of that! The cheapest Exploding Tags in the village, right?” Tenten exclaimed with wide eyes, still coming to terms with the fact that she and her teacher were almost stomped over by the crowd. It was worse than Konoha’s market during peak hours!

“Yeah. It’s first come, first served, and the supply is limited, so… that.” Ren shook his head as they reached a couch, and Ren beckoned the duo to sit down after he took his own seat, and a shadow clone popped into existence next to him.

Without sharing even a singular word, the shadow clone turned on his heel and headed toward the small kitchenette at the other side of the back room, intending to make and bring them some tea.

“Our exploding tags are sold at eighty percent of the usual market price.” Ren elaborated for the weapon-obsessed girl who seemed to be interested in the topic. “And since they are one-time-use items that most ninja use in large quantities, there is always a massive demand for them. People buy them in bulk, ten or twenty pieces at once, so twenty percent off on each tag saves them a lot of money.”

Just because Ren gave the Secrebo that could make Exploding Tags to the village, it didn’t mean he would not construct another one in order to start selling the tags. In fact, the one he gave away was his third successfully created one.

His Secrebo could print a thousand exploding tags in half an hour. And that was pretty much the daily limit for Ren right now. Funnily enough, he was limited by the supply of chakra ink. His sources could sell him only so much of it every day.

It was honestly a good problem to have. But it was a problem nevertheless.

A thousand exploding tags might sound like a lot. But…

The very third day after he started selling his tags, he was visited by an ANBU dipshit mook who wanted to ‘make achievements’ and tried to strong-arm Ren into giving the seals to the ANBU division at even more discounted price.

Ren flipped him off with an eye roll and shut the door in his face. Seriously, some people. He was running a business here. Not a charity.

An hour later, Yugao in all her masked glory showed up, and they properly negotiated a contract between him and the ANBU. Ren understood why the ANBU did it. They were the village’s not-so-secret black ops and assassination division that had some of the best ninjas from Konoha serving under its flag.

The respect and fear they garnered from the general populace most likely let them strong-arm people like that, left and right, getting good supplies for very cheap. But Ren was not having it. They can pull these tricks on civilians, not him.

And indeed. The new negotiation was much more reasonable.

No more discounted prices. Eighty percent of the market value was the lowest Ren was willing to go, and while Yugao put in the token effort to lower the prices further, she quickly backed off when she understood it was not happening. Ren was already exceedingly generous there.

But give people a finger, and they will try to take an entire arm.

He also only agreed to supply them five hundred tags a day, keeping the remaining five hundred for his shop. To be honest, he slightly regretted that decision because selling the tags himself turned out to be a nightmare.

But it is what it is.

Yugao was not happy about getting only five hundred of them either. It was nowhere near enough to satisfy the needs of the entire ANBU division, so the poor schmucks will still need to buy some full-prized tags from somewhere else, but five hundred was still better than zero, so she agreed and they parted after signing the contract.

That meant Ren only had five hundred exploding tags he could sell every day. And with everybody taking at least ten to twenty of them at a time? He could satisfy only around thirty to thirty-five ninjas per day.

The others were shit out of luck. They would need to go and buy full-priced tags somewhere else.

It was why nobody made a fuss about Ren selling the tags under the market price. The other sellers just scoffed and thought of him as an idiot. They did not and would not care as long as their own stock was sold.

But it was alright. They had no idea about how easily it was for Ren to produce said tags. Only those who knew gave him some jealous looks, but that was the extent of it.

To make things clearer, an experienced seal maker could make one exploding tag in around one to five minutes. Even taking into account the most hopeful estimates, where he never made a mistake and managed to churn them out at the rate of one minute a piece, which was a highly unrealistic expectation, the seal maker would still need a thousand minutes a day to produce them. That was a little bit under seventeen hours of uninterrupted work.

That was what the uninformed idiots thought Ren was doing. And that was why they were scoffing or laughing at him behind his back.

But the joke was on them.

The Secrebo printed the tags in half an hour for literally no effort on his part other than pouring in the chakra ink, sealing a stack of paper inside of it, and activating it. It trivialized the mass production of seals and made the actual work costs close to nonexistent.

This was why Ren could afford to sell his exploding tags so cheaply and still make a fortune.

Hell, he could single-handedly satisfy the demand of the entire village if the Secrebo worked around the clock and if he had enough chakra ink.

But that would have made every other seal maker, whose livelihood depended on selling exploding tags, his enemy, so Ren refrained, and instead, he sold different seals, too.

Like the Lunchbox seals.

After all, he had never promised not to sell them himself when he gave the Secrebo capable of making them to the Akimichi clan.

“I am sure you two could speak about seals for a long time,” Gai, dropping his jovial attitude, spoke in a serious tone, and his eyes fell on Ren with an intangible weight, “but we came here for a different reason. You told Tenten you could help her become stronger?”

Ren felt the silent threat in the man’s words and inwardly wryly smiled. Yeah, his offer was kinda sus, wasn’t it?

Gai was just looking out for his student. Ren could respect that.

So, he just shrugged. “I said I have some ideas. If she can make something out of them, that will be up to her.” He nodded toward Tenten, who sheepishly rubbed her cheek, feeling how the atmosphere in the room turned awkward.

Ren’s words caused Gai to slightly relax. “I see! Then what are you waiting for!? Tell us your youthful ideas, my friend!” He grinned and gave Ren a thumbs-up gesture, which made him chuckle.

The man was acting that way to fuck with people. Ren was certain of it.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep