Maya was paralyzed by indecision.
She currently had 12,779 Influence Points. The question was how to spend them.
Option A: Drop 9,500 on a Silver 10-pull and hope for at least one Silver-tier experience pack. Then, combined with a Transformation Jutsu skill card, she could finally learn the basic transformation technique.
Option B: Spend exactly 10,000 to buy Shikamaru's Shadow Imitation Technique outright, then use the remaining 2,000 on two Silver spins.
The problem with Option A was variance. Ten pulls might yield zero experience packs and just a handful of Silver-tier junk items. The upside was she'd at least walk away with something Silver.
The problem with Option B was that Shikamaru's technique had serious long-term limitations. In the later arcs of the series, his shadow jutsu was arguably less useful than Shino's bugs — and don't even compare it to Ino's mental-scream technique. The only reason the director kept giving him screen time was his intelligence, and even that was a stretch when the final war boiled down to Naruto and Sasuke carrying everyone else on their backs while the rest of the cast cheered from the sidelines.
The upside of Option B: almost zero risk of walking away empty-handed.
Maya rubbed her smooth, porcelain-pale cheek and made her choice.
As if she'd gamble. She bought the skill outright.
The delusional always insist they're sane. The unlucky always think one more pull will turn it around. After a decade of personal research, Maya had reached her conclusion: no matter how pretty her face was in this life, her gacha luck remained catastrophically bad.
High risk, high reward? More like high risk, high regret.
She was playing it safe.
"Ding — Shikamaru's Shadow Imitation Technique acquired. 10,000 Influence Points deducted. Remaining balance: 2,779. Thanks for shopping at this dump!"
"Ding — Shadow Imitation Technique applied. Acquired: Shadow Imitation Technique, Gold Tier 1."
The afternoon sun slanted through the glass, washing over Maya in warm gold light. It caught the dark amber of her hair and made her look, for a moment, like a fairy who'd drifted down from some other world.
Then the fairy sprouted tentacles.
Seven massive, writhing shadow appendages erupted from the wall behind her.
Slowly, they shifted. The chaotic mass thinned, organized, disciplined itself into something intentional. One by one, six of the tendrils vanished. What remained was a single, nearly invisible thread — barely a shadow at all — tracing slow loops along the wall.
Seven circuits. Then it stopped.
The tip of the thread lifted from the wall and reached upward toward the hanging light fixture on the ceiling. It coiled twice around the light bulb, delicate as a breath — and then, as if turned by invisible fingers, the bulb began to unscrew.
It came free. Drifted through the air toward Maya's desk in a slow, lazy arc.
Two meters from the ground, it slipped.
Crack.
Shards across the floor.
Maya hadn't moved once. Only after the bulb hit did she let out a long exhale.
"Shadow control range is already past 200 meters. Basic control over a person — probably manageable. But what I just did with the bulb isn't really pure Shadow Imitation anymore. It's closer to what I'd call Shadow Aggregation. Doesn't matter — every shadow technique in the Nara clan traces back to the same root: Shadow Imitation. I don't need the gacha wheel to learn the rest. I can develop them myself."
"Because I understand the fundamental principle behind Shadow Imitation: it's basic Yin Release. Chakra, at its core, drives two energies — spiritual and physical — shaped by imagination, directed by willpower, to influence the material world. Yin Release is spiritually dominant, using mental force to impose will onto reality. Yang Release is physically dominant, manifesting the imagined into the tangible world."
"Push Yang Release to its limit and you get what Naruto did — healing the dead, regenerating bone from nothing, creation from void. Push Yin Release to its limit and you get pocket dimensions, like Obito's personal space or Itachi's consciousness realm. Even Shisui's Kotoamatsukami operated at the level of soul-deep alteration — creation within the mind itself. Combine Yin and Yang, drive both to their absolute end, and creation stops being a metaphor. Infinite Tsukuyomi was the Sage of Six Paths' act of world-making. It just never reached its full potential because the Naruto universe couldn't contain something that powerful."
"Same goes for the Sage himself — he had both releases, but never fully developed them. The world he lived in couldn't hold that level of existence."
Maya smacked herself lightly on the head and sighed.
"Why am I even thinking about any of this? I'm not even an Academy graduate yet. I'm bottom-of-the-barrel cannon fodder."
She pulled up her system stats.
A panel blinked into existence in her mind:
Character: Maya Hansen (Age: 12 years and 6 months) Influence Points: 2,779
Power System: Special Genin (Listen, you absolute prodigy — do you know you're the first person in the entire history of the Naruto world to earn this designation? First one ever. And you still can't do the three basic Academy jutsu. You have basically no taijutsu. You don't know the Ninja Code of Conduct. You know what? You're worse than Guy's dad. At least that man passed the written exam. If your jutsu scores weren't legitimately insane, I'd have held you back another two years of elementary school.)
Ninja Assessment:
Chakra: 35 (Your chakra reserves are approaching excellent Chunin level. Keep it up!)
Ninjutsu: 52 (Better than the entire Konoha Twelve fresh out of the Academy!)
Taijutsu: 01 (Hey — aside from the Uchiha clan's built-in throwing mechanics, can you please learn some actual taijutsu? That's a life-saving skill, you know.)
Genjutsu: 00 (Nothing to say. You have no shame.)
Combat Experience: 03 (At this rate, don't even dream of graduating under Iruka. Go out and pick some fights. Stab some people. Practicing at home gets you nowhere.)
Special Genin designation unlocked — Ninja Profession Assessment activated. Using the Konoha Twelve era as baseline: excellent Genin: 10; excellent Chunin: 40; excellent Jonin: 160; elite Jonin: 640; Kage of the Five Great Villages: 256; Red-level: 1,024; White-level: 4,096; Sage-level: 1,634; Beyond Sage — insufficient data, cannot be determined.
Kekkei Genkai / Bloodline: None
Skills:
① Kunai Throw Technique(Taught by Itachi to 5-year-old Sasuke) Bronze Lv. 10 (You've hit the ceiling on this one. Congrats.)
② Chakra Ocean: Silver Lv. 10
③ Rasengan: Gold Lv. 3 (Learning jutsu from manga — the dream is real. Keep going.)
④ Nara Clan Secret Arts: Gold Lv. 2 (You took Shikamaru's Shadow Imitation and, through pure self-directed experimentation, reverse-engineered the foundational principles of every shadow technique the Nara clan ever developed. Shadow Imitation has been upgraded and replaced with Nara Clan Secret Arts. Not bad for someone who learned jutsu from a comic book. At this rate, 'Jutsu Doctor of the Marvel Universe' isn't a joke — it's a career trajectory.)
Talents:
① Marvel Sage Knowledge: Bronze Lv. 10 — (Pass your elementary school exams first. Your stats are locked behind that diploma. Doesn't matter if you know the cosmos — without the paper, no company's hiring you in this era.) Mind: Gold (Your brain development this past stretch has been genuinely impressive.) Expression: Bronze Lv. 5 — (Those trophies on your shelf? Garbage by Marvel genius standards. Do hard experiments. Trophies are decorations, not credentials.)
② Super Sensing Mutation(upgradeable): Gold Lv. 4
Items:(Minor items omitted)
Overall Assessment:
You're officially a proper fighting bird now. Want to get stronger? Spend points. Pull the wheel. The ultimate anime gacha wheel is waiting — Bronze pulls at 10 points each, Silver at 1,000, Gold at 50,000, Diamond at 200,000. Guaranteed reward every spin. 5% rebate on 10-pulls, 10% on 100-pulls!! What are you waiting for?!