Step 3

I stood on the doorstep of the orphanage from which I had just been kicked out, and pondered the frailty of existence.

I was very preoccupied with the structure of the universe and the question: move to a new location or wait for the end of the calibration of the system.

The second option won. There are only four hours and minutes left, and I'll wait for them.

For such a short period of time my patience is more than enough.

Nothing compared to two years of HELL.My patience has ceased to be iron.

It crystallized to the level of mythical metals like mithril or adamantium. These years of early childhood harden the will and stamina or drive one mad.

The Gamer's Mind skill had kept me safe from madness, so it only brought out the best in me. I bided my time and waited with all my might.

There is no limit to all my impulses to open the Seal and let the Fox out for a walk.

In addition to my oppression, I was driven to action by the moral realization that the Fox was a rare and endangered animal, and it was inhumane to keep it locked up. One thing that held me back was not knowing how to open the damn Seal.

HELL is not what I call an asylum.

In it, everything was canonical, so it was normal: the hateful, fearful, and contemptuous looks from the educators and the corresponding attitude from the other adults.

The children, copying their attitude toward me, echoed them.

I was surrounded by a complete set of pressures and alienation.

By the way, many people who got into Uzumaki Naruto call these very conditions hell. I don't agree with them.

The Hell is the newborn ward in the hospital.

Isn't it amazing?

In whose sickest mind could such an association come? If I were an outsider, I would think so, too.

But reality is tougher than you can imagine.

Well, imagine being tied up tight.

Completely immobile, you lie on your back in a room with a white ceiling and similarly monochrome walls.

Nothing to stop looking at.

I was lying there so that I couldn't even see the window! And in the twenty-four-by-seven mode, all you hear in the room is screaming and crying.

Human speech was fragmentary.

It was a little rarer than the scheduled rounds by the incarnations of evil, called in common parlance by the nursing staff.

Usually silent babysitters give you something to eat, wash your face, and swaddle you again.

What brightens up this hopelessness are the moments of satiety, sleep (good thing the body shuts itself off despite all the noise), and the feeling of a clean ass.

A clean ass is a special treat.Hygiene is scheduled, not as needed.

If there was no inflammation on the skin, it was tolerable.

But with diaper rash and insane itching without the slightest chance of scratching, that's what HELL is.

So there I lay, powerless to change anything.

I can talk about the local nursery workers for hours using only foul language.

News quickly leaked out to the masses as to who the keeper of the "demon-destroyer" was.

Many lost family and friends in the hospital.

Their pain of loss and hatred for Fox poured out in full force on me.

They didn't nail me just because of Hokage's orders, or maybe because of an animal fear of breaking the Seal.

My day was filled with every possible nastiness.For example, feeding 2-3 times a day and once at night instead of a full schedule. An infant in the first three months generally needs to eat every 2-4 hours, including at night.My favorite option is to ignore the diaper change. Do anything within my sight and ignore all my attempts to get my attention.

The baby-sitter, who still had to condescend to do her dirty work with me, was sure to say, in great detail, that I was much worse than shit. These were the rare moments, so to speak, of human speech.

I understand that Fox has ruined many lives. I understand that their hatred is directed at Fox, but they take it out on a defenseless child.It's a lot easier to take the blame and take revenge on me than it is to slap the Nine-Tailed Fox himself.

I understand the reason they hate me. Their pain of loss burns from the inside, but it is not an indulgence for all the bullying they do to me. I am a vindictive, vindictive bastard with a peculiar sense of humor.

The richness and variety of my imagination can be seen in the fact that it is what has distracted me from oppressive reality and physical discomfort. A gamer's abilities would allow me to realize my desires. I even feel pity for my tormentors, but only in the least. I am still capable of human empathy.

When I was transferred to the asylum, I had several elaborate scenarios for the conquest of world domination, a list of candidates for my personal harem, and an uncountable catalog of terrible vengeance against every member of the nursing staff.

A separate fun was figuring out ways to bring a battle-hardened and mission-hardened ANBU to the gray hairs. With my adult mind, but limited resources, the task was non-trivial.

Imagine this.

A quiet Konoha night.

Hospital.

Patients sleep peacefully in their beds.

The night shift of the med-nin's is bored in the break room.

The ANBU is on guard.

Silence and tranquility.

Nothing portends trouble.

Suddenly, from the ward of the children's ward comes the sound:

- MU-HA-HA-HA-HA!!

A shinobi flies into the ward. There are children sleeping peacefully in the room.

A thorough check of the room and the surrounding area yields nothing: not a single trace of unauthorized presence.

The ANBU recoils from the adrenaline wave, calms down and leaves the children's room. After walking a couple of meters down the corridor, he hears a quiet, but very specific laughter coming from the bedroom:

- KU-KU-KU-KU-KU

You visualized it? Scary?

ANBU fighters lived in a harsh reality.Paranormal activity recurred with enviable regularity, but without temporal patterns.

My training in sinister laughter and my imitation of Orochimaru was laying the foundation for the future image of the world's ruler.

The second most effective method was the stare, yes, that's right, even ordinary people can feel someone's eyes on them, and shinobi are extremely sensitive to it, especially if the staring person wants to cause harm.

The shinobi is standing at his post and feels that he is being watched closely, but after a while he also has a feeling of danger, as if an unknown person is preparing to attack him.

But when he turned around, he found only children playing peacefully. My jokes gave some of the guards a nervous tic and bouts of paranoia by the end of the second year.

How else to call the fact that they even looked under the night pots when searching for the intruder after another night of my dark lord's laughter training.

There was one very remarkable incident, just a month before I was sent to the orphanage. A new nurse, who had been hired to replace an over-impressive employee of the nursery, was apparently very angry with Fox, and of course I was the object of her revenge for Fox's unavailability, which was nothing new in principle, except that she had not seen any shore at all.

The first day she was allowed near me, this thing, pulling me out of the playpen, dropped me. Allegedly by accident.

She was a very good actress, of course; she was oohing and ahhing so believably, running around me, wailing how awkward she was and apologizing, except for the nasty smirk that appeared on her face when she came up to take me to treatment, indicating a complete lack of regret and killing the slightest doubt that what had happened was accidental.

Anyway, looking at that smirking bitch blew my mind a little bit. So I just looked at her face and made an Ichimaru Gin-style face, and pointed my index finger at her, then ran it down my throat while feeling the strongest urge to give her a gruesome and painful death.

She jumped back against the wall, flattening herself against it, pointing her finger at me and trying to say something, to which I just stretched my smile wider, then she rolled her eyes and fainted, and a guard flew into the room with a kunai in his sights.

I tried, as usual, to play dumb, pretending to be a child, clapping my hands and making a mocking noise. It didn't work.

For the next eight hours, I played a frightened, incomprehensible child, which was very believable, because I really didn't understand shit and was quite frightened at the prospect of a fox being taken out of me.

But thank God of Games, everything turned out all right. Of course I got all sorts of tests and analyses taken from places I didn't even know I had.

They even wanted to arrange a consciousness test, but Yamanaka, who was present during my test, just teleported away as soon as he heard about the consciousness test. I'm still trying to figure out how?

It doesn't look like a Shunshin, there should be a whirlwind of leaves or smoke, and the technique of the Fourth, Flight of the Thunder God, gives a specific sound effect, and it was not there.

I could have put it down to my lack of reaction, and in fact it just came out, only very quickly. But judging by the extended faces and square eyes of the others, I wasn't the only one who was wondering.

Despite all my fears, they did not take me to the Root for tests, but returned me to the hospital, where I stayed for the rest of the month before the asylum.

Life in the orphanage did not stand out, the teachers quietly hated me, the kids tried to bully me, but after a couple of dozen broken noses and fifty broken teeth, we established an armed neutrality.

Of course, for every broken nose and tooth, I got triple punishment from the teachers, even though I didn't start the fights, which spurred the little ones on to try again.

But then even the dumbest realized that I don't care about punishing teachers, and in the end they are the ones who are beaten.

The only reason this was possible was that I was recovering fully overnight, but my opponents were not, and that was the secret.

No, they didn't stop sneaking around and setting us up, but there were no more direct attacks.

What was the source of my regeneration, I'm not sure; it could have been the fox or the system.

This question didn't bother me much.

But I was not given a quiet life, and the other children and even the educators had absolutely nothing to do with it.

The warning from the system, which I took as a stupid joke, turned out to be prophetic, yes, the one about the mosquitoes. These little bloodsuckers, not children, but mosquitoes, nearly ate me alive on the first nights of spring.

The hospital had special protection against insects, and no one at the orphanage was going to spend money on such luxuries. Because of someone else's greed, I was forced to block the windows, and for several hours before going to bed I had to exterminate all the mosquitoes that had managed to fly into the room...