Ren rubbed his forehead with a wince as Tenten left the store.
After he asked her about her affinity, her expression fell, and she shared with him that it was Earth, something quite useless for a weapon user.
Sure, she could harden her weapons. But that wouldn't really help all that much. She deemed it was not worth sinking the years of effort into mastering her affinity when the payoff was something barely usable in a fight.
It was a major sore point for her.
And Ren understood Ino's problem with the girl right there and then. She started rambling about it, about how she wished she had lightning or wind affinity. Once she got going, the girl just wouldn't stop, while he could only sit there with a strained smile, listening to her woes.
He did ask... so telling her to shut up would be awkward.
With a herculean effort, Ren managed to steer the conversation back toward seals. Which was a mistake. Because somehow, the bun-haired girl got even more enthusiastic. Seals were her hobby, and she was now on a roll. Her mouth was firing question after question at Ren about his seals.
He found it quite endearing. For the first five minutes.
After that? Just kill him now. This was why he employed Ino in the first place. So he wouldn't need to deal with annoyances like this.
The saddest part, however, was finding out that Tenten wasn't really talented at sealing arts. She simply did not have the necessary imagination for it. Her questions were enough to show Ren that.
He didn't tell the girl that. Sometimes, ignorance was bliss.
But her way of thinking was rigid and inflexible. It was a mindset problem. The way she was looking at the world around her would make it hard for her to become more than average, even if she sank a lot of time into learning seals.
The storage and explosive seals were pretty much her limit. She could learn how to write seals. Anybody could do that with enough effort. But creating her own seals... that was a bit beyond the girl.
Correcting her mindset would not be impossible. But it would be more effort than it was worth. Ren was not about to spend months doing it. He quickly crossed out seals as a possible solution for making the girl stronger.
That led him back to the Elemental Affinity, and they did agree to meet again in three days when Ren told her he might have an idea on how to make her stronger. Tenten decided she was going to bring Gai with her and ask him for advice.
Ren respected that. It was the smart thing to do. Ren was a stranger to her despite the fact that she spent the last hour trying to talk his ears off. Bringing her mentor, who was responsible for her training, made sense.
It showed the girl was not an idiot, unlike a certain blonde-haired knucklehead who would let any shady, toad-riding, and bathhouse-peeping old warty man teach him.
Sure, it worked out for Naruto, but that was beside the point.
Well, at least this talk with Tenten cured Ren of his slight attraction to the girl. Sure, she was cute, but he wouldn't be able to live with somebody that talkative.
Ino was his limit. She was boisterous and loud, but she knew how to enjoy some nice companionable silence. He glanced at the blonde girl who had just come out of the backroom.
... Ren was probably biased. Ino was not any better. But she was an acquired taste for him by no-
"You are thinking something rude, aren't you?" Ino startled him a bit as she interrupted his thoughts and narrowed her eyes at him.
"... No?" Ren owlishly blinked, keeping his poker face up. "I was thinking you look particularly nice today."
Hearing him, Ino snorted. "Sure you were." She rolled her eyes at him, not believing him even a little bit.
"What even gave you that idea?" Ren asked, a bit taken aback and Ino just nonchalantly shrugged.
"You had that look."
Raising his eyebrow, Ren dryly spoke. "I don't have any sort of look."
He really didn't! Or at least, he didn't think he did. He was pretty sure he kept his poker face up properly.
"Of course, you do." Ino rolled her eyes at him with mirth shining within them because she found his denial adorable. "We've been together long enough for me to recognize it."
"You Yamanakas and your psychology voodoo." Ren snorted and shook his head before he turned his head down toward the documents he had on the counter in front of him.
"Nah. Just some old-fashioned woman's intuition." Ino hummed as she walked next to Ren and peeked at the documents. "Hm? You have finally gotten approval for your Anti-Pregnancy Seal?" Her eyebrows rose in surprise. "Finally. It has been a week! I was afraid they would reject it or something." She said in a relieved tone.
Ren glanced at her and hummed in response before refocusing on the documents. "It's politics. Somebody up there really does not like what I am doing, so they do what they can to hinder my progress." He shrugged. It didn't matter much.
Medical seals, unlike others, required approval from the village if he wanted to sell them. His Anti-Pregnancy Seal, or AP Seal for short, was not exactly a medical seal, but an argument for it could be made. It did affect a biological process, considering it could switch fertility on and off.
So, Ren decided to play it safe and presented it at the hospital for testing before offering it for sale in his shop. It should have taken like twenty minutes for some medical ninja to check that the seal has no adverse effects.
Instead, it took an entire week before Ren heard back from the hospital and got his approval. That told him they were ordered to be extra thorough in looking for a flaw.
Honestly, if the AP Seal was not something several clans were invested in, Ren had no doubt he would not be getting said approval to sell it even if the seal passed all the tests.
Because that's how politics works when you piss off high level politicians.
Alas, even the Hyugas, as much as they disliked Ren, were invested in a seal that could prevent unwanted pregnancies. Most clans were very interested in it, so whoever was targeting Ren, they had a mighty hard time smashing that 'rejected' stamp on his request papers.
As distasteful as it was, rape and kidnapping was something that happened quite regularly in this world. Especially to kunoichi. But sometimes to ninjas as well. You can not train kids to steal, kill, cheat, and lie without accidentally raising a few psychopaths. All villages had these kinds of people.
Every kunoichi went on a mission with knowledge that she might lose, and death might not be the worst that could happen to her in that situation.
This AP Seal was to give these women one less thing to worry about. Unless they unlocked their seal, the women were not going to have a surprise in nine months after surviving being passed around the entire enemy squad for days on end.
There is a reason why Konoha's orphanages are almost always so full, after all.
And even men would benefit from the AP Seal. Surprisingly or not, it was actually not females who the enemy villages wanted to kidnap for their 'breeding programs'. No. They, most of the time, targeted the males. Hinata and Kushina were exceptions, rather than the rule.
It's why the clans were so invested in seeing the seal approved. If a man were captured and had the AP Seal? Then yeah, he would die in captivity. But at least the chance of him to be forced to sire an offspring with his bloodline significantly decreased.
The clans were positively greedy for that.
And the most important part, the reason why most kunoichi and ninjas would buy it, the seal was also a great birth control tool.
What else to say?
You don't need a condom if you can make yourself momentarily infertile with a small burst of chakra. People were going to buy it. Ren had no doubt about that. In fact, he would not be surprised if the seal turned out to be one of his best sellers.
It wasn't as if Ren was going to make the seal expensive either. The price he had in mind for it was a thousand Ryo. Practically, a hundred bucks. But for a ninja, that was actually pretty cheap for a permanent seal like this. A good kunai set was around seven hundred Ryo.
A thousand Ryo was pretty cheap. Ren could have set it to fifty thousand, and people would still buy it. But he created it as a quality of life improvement for Konoha's ninjas. It was supposed to get him some sweet, sweet reputation points. Making it expensive would be counterproductive.
That was why he could only wryly smile when somebody wanted to screw with him via delaying the testing of this seal.
"It's a good thing that we can finally start selling it. Some clan ninjas were really getting impatient. With this, I can start making appointments for it." Ino sighed, already sounding put out by just imagining the clusterfuck of a work that was awaiting her with these seals.
Ren chuckled and reached out with his hand, gently patting Ino's head. "I feel you. It's going to be really hectic." He nodded and relocated his hand from her head toward her lower back before he grasped her hip with said hand and pulled her into a half-hug. "Reserve only one person every thirty minutes, though."
Applying the seal would take around two minutes per person. But it was practically a charity. And there were thousands of ninjas in the village. Ren decided to take his time with it. His shop was open for around twelve hours, and with accounting for breaks, his clone could mark twenty people with the AP Seal per day with a half-hourly schedule.
That sounded manageable, and it would give the clone at least some time for tinkering with seals in between customers.
"Alright." Ino agreed and gave Ren an affectionate peck on the cheek and grinned as she bent over in a way that perfectly showcased her curves and caused Ren's attention to slip toward her. The blonde girl retrieved a small notebook from under the counter, giving Ren a quick smirk to show him she noticed where his eyes were roaming, before she opened the book and pushed it toward Ren on the counter.
"Here," Ino spoke. "You wanted me to mark down every purchase of the" She glanced into the open notebook to check the names, "Fireball Scroll, Rockwall Scroll, and the Wind-Slash Scroll."
"Oh, you have already sold some of them?" Ren asked in mild surprise.
These were his more experimental seals for which he created a Secrebo that could print them. They did exactly as their names suggested.
The Fireball Scroll was a seal that practically created and sent a C-rank Fireball technique at the opponent.
The Rockwall Scroll created an earthen wall of rock that could block weaker C and B-rank techniques.
And the Wind-Slash Scroll pretty much sent a slash of sharp wind at the enemy.
Ren was inspired by magical scrolls from games and stories from his previous life and tried to create something similar. Besides, if he remembered correctly, there was this dipshit scientist in Boruto who had already/is going to manage to accomplish something very similar, so he decided to give it a try.
Ren found out that making these seals was tricky, but not overly difficult. But it was a new concept for the ninjas, so he didn't expect people to buy some of them so fast, considering he put them up for sale only yesterday.
Sadly, these Jutsu Scrolls, as Ren named them, were not as convenient as they sounded. The technique was created by the seal and as such, it required pretty much a slightly more chakra than if the person actually used said technique normally. The user needed to power up both the activation of the scroll and the technique within.
The upside? For example, the Fireball Scroll. It allowed people who did not necessarily have the Fire Affinity or did not know the Fireball Technique to be able to use it. All they needed was to buy the scroll.
Now, Ren was aware this was not something that would catch a jonin off guard. It also took a lot longer to take out a scroll and activate it than simply using a learned technique.
The Fireball Scroll would be pretty much useless for anybody who knows the Fireball Technique because not only does it take a second or two longer to cast through the Scroll, it also takes a little bit more chakra, and the technique is hard-set in the scroll, so it can not be adjusted.
But for your regular genin or chunin? He believed these Jutsu Scrolls of his could revolutionize how people in these ranks fought. It gave them options, much like the Exploding Tags enabled even weaker genin to have the potential to cause a lot of damage.
He was still surprised that Ino managed to sell fifteen Fireball Scrolls, thirteen Rockwall Scrolls, and seven Wind-slash Scrolls.
Ren glanced at the smug blonde girl.
She would have been an amazing scammer.
He was proud of her.
---
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