Ninja of Marvel World - Chapter 1
Chapter 1: The Cost of a Pirated Stream
The buffering wheel spun in the center of the cracked screen, a circular mockery of patience.
It was 2:00 AM in a cramped apartment that smelled faintly of stale curry and damp plaster. The ceiling fan overhead wobbled rhythmically, cutting through the humid, suffocating air of the Indian summer, but it did little to cool the middle-aged man lying on the thin mattress.
He tapped the screen of his mobile phone aggressively.
“Come on, come on,” he muttered, wiping a bead of sweat from his forehead. “Not now. Not right at the climax.”
He was watching Naruto Shippuden on a website that was questionable at best and malicious at worst. It was the Kakashi versus Obito fight—the taijutsu sequence that every anime fan revered as holy scripture. He had seen it a dozen times, but tonight, insomnia had demanded a rewatch.
His phone, a budget model that had seen better days three years ago, was radiating heat against his palm. It felt less like a piece of technology and more like a coal plucked from a barbecue. The glass screen was almost too hot to touch, the battery groaning under the strain of high-resolution video decoding and the ambient temperature of the room.
“Just five more minutes,” he rationalized, shifting his grip to the edges of the phone case to save his fingertips from singing. “Let me just see the Mud Wall counter one more time.”
The video stuttered, pixels bleeding into green and grey artifacts, before freezing completely. Then, the inevitable happened.
A pop-up ad took over the screen.
It wasn’t one of the usual ads for betting apps or shady loan sharks. It was a simple, black screen with white text, formatted in a font that looked suspiciously like the jagged calligraphy of a ninja scroll.
[DO YOU WANT TO BE A NINJA?]
Below the text were two buttons: [YES] and [NO].
He rolled his eyes. “Who writes this copy? ‘Do you want to be Ninja?’ Grammar is dead.”
He moved his thumb to close the tab, to find the tiny, microscopic ‘X’ hidden somewhere in the corner, but the phone lagged. The heat surging through the device spiked. His thumb, slick with sweat, slipped.
Instead of closing the ad, he clicked [YES].
“Oh, for god’s s—”
He didn’t finish the sentence.
The phone didn’t glitch. It didn’t redirect him to a phishing site. It simply gave up. The lithium-ion battery, pushed beyond its thermal limit, decided to rebel.
There was a hiss, a sudden blinding flare of white light, and then a deafening BOOM that shattered the silence of the apartment block.
Pain. searing, white-hot pain tore through his hand and face. Then, absolute darkness.
—
The first thing he noticed was the smell.
It wasn’t the smell of burnt plastic or singed flesh. It was the smell of antiseptic, floor wax, and something sickeningly sweet, like cherry-flavored cough syrup.
He groaned, his eyelids feeling as heavy as lead curtains.
Am I dead? he wondered. Or just maimed?
His thoughts immediately raced to his bank account. If he was in a hospital, he was in trouble. His insurance had lapsed two months ago. A private hospital would skin him alive financially before they even treated his burns. A government hospital would be cheaper, but he might catch three new diseases just by breathing the air in the waiting room.
He forced his eyes open, bracing himself for the sight of a peeling ceiling or a crowded general ward.
Instead, he saw pristine white tiles. A privacy curtain with a soft, pastel pattern. A comfortable, adjustable bed that didn’t squeak.
Oh no, he thought, panic rising in his chest. This looks expensive. This looks like the VIP suite.
He tried to sit up, but his body felt strange—light, frail, and achy in a way that didn’t match his usual morning back pain.
“Easy there, son. You took a nasty hit.”
The voice was deep, professional, and speaking English with an accent that was definitely not local.
He turned his head. Standing beside his bed were a doctor and a nurse.
He blinked. Then he blinked again.
They were white. Not just the doctor—which wasn’t unheard of in top-tier medical tourism hospitals in Delhi or Mumbai—but the nurse too.
His internal monologue paused. Wait. A foreign nurse? In India?
It didn’t add up. India was the country that exported nurses to the world. Kerala alone probably supplied half the nursing staff for the Gulf and the UK. The idea of importing a nurse to India was like importing sand to the Sahara. It made no economic sense.
“Where…” his voice cracked. It sounded higher, reedy. He cleared his throat. “Where am I?”
The doctor checked a chart attached to the foot of the bed. He was wearing a white coat with a stethoscope draped casually around his neck. “You’re in the clinic, Karan. You blacked out.”
Karan? Who is Karan?
“Clinic?” he repeated, ignoring the name for a moment.
“The school clinic,” the doctor clarified, flashing a sympathetic smile. “We checked your vitals. No concussion, thankfully. Just extreme exhaustion and dehydration. You fainted during the altercation in the hallway.”
Altercation? Hallway? School?
The middle-aged man lay back against the pillow, his mind racing. He remembered the phone exploding. He remembered the fire. He should be in a burn unit, not a school nurse’s office. And he certainly shouldn’t be hearing about ‘altercations.’
He decided to stay quiet. If this was a misunderstanding, he didn’t want to accidentally admit to something that would cost him money.
“When can I leave?” he asked, testing the waters.
“Whenever you feel up to it,” the nurse said kindly. “But you should drink some juice first. Your blood sugar is low.”
He nodded slowly. He swung his legs off the side of the bed. As his feet touched the cold linoleum, he looked down.
The legs sticking out of the hospital gown were not his legs. They were skinny—alarmingly so. The knees were knobby, the calves lacking any muscle definition. There were faint, yellowing bruises on his shins.
He stood up, swaying slightly. He walked past the doctor, mumbling an excuse about needing fresh air, and moved toward the window.
He pulled back the blinds.
He expected to see the chaotic traffic of Gurgaon. He expected autorickshaws, honking horns, and the haze of pollution.
What he saw stopped his heart.
A sprawling green lawn. Red brick buildings. Yellow school buses lined up in a neat row. And there, fluttering proudly in the center of the courtyard, was a flag.
Stars and Stripes.
The United States of America.
Teenagers of various ethnicities—Black, White, Asian, Hispanic—were walking across the lawn, carrying backpacks and wearing varsity jackets.
This isn’t India, he realized, a cold shiver running down his spine. I’m in America.
He gripped the windowsill, his knuckles turning white.
Suddenly, a sharp pain spiked in his temples. It wasn’t the heat of an exploding phone this time; it was an influx of information. It felt like someone was shoving a zip file directly into his hippocampus and hitting ‘Extract All’.
Images flashed before his eyes, vivid and relentless.
A name: Karan Malhotra.
Age: 16.
Citizenship: American.
Faces of parents he didn’t recognize, but his heart ached for. An Indian couple, smiling in a photo taken at Niagara Falls. Then, shouting matches. Broken plates. A father packing a suitcase. A mother crying, then screaming about a secretary. The father shouting back about a coworker named Joe.
Divorce.
The memories shifted. He was ten years old. A courtroom. Custody battles that weren’t about who wanted him, but who had to take him. Both parents remarried quickly. New families. New babies. Step-parents who looked at Karan like he was a stain on a new carpet.
Boarding school. Then, a cheap hostel.
The memories grew darker. Loneliness. The wrong crowd. A small bag of white powder. The fleeting high that made the hunger go away. The skinny reflection in the mirror. The bullying.
Oh, the man—now Karan—thought, the headache subsiding to a dull throb. This kid… his life was a mess.
Karan Malhotra was a ghost in the system. His parents sent checks to cover his rent and tuition at a community high school, mostly to keep him away from their new, perfect lives. He lived in a rundown studio apartment. He worked under the table at a convenience store. He didn’t eat enough. He smoked too much.
And today, just an hour ago, he had been cornered near the lockers by three guys from the football team. They hadn’t even beaten him badly; one shove was all it took. Ideally, a shove shouldn’t knock someone out. But Karan’s body was so frail, so ravaged by malnutrition and substance abuse, that his head hit the locker, and his lights went out.
That was when the soul of a middle-aged Indian anime fan had slipped into the void left behind.
“Are you okay, Karan?” the doctor asked, noticing him staring blankly out the window.
Karan took a deep breath. The air in his lungs felt different. Cleaner, but thinner.
“Yeah,” Karan said. His voice sounded steadier now as the memories settled. “Just… getting my bearings.”
He turned away from the window. “I’m going to head home. I think I just need to sleep.”
“Take it easy,” the doctor advised. “And Karan? Stay away from those seniors. I’ve sent a report to the principal, but… well, you know how it is.”
Karan nodded. He knew exactly how it was. In any country, in any world, the strong ate the weak.
He walked out of the clinic, navigating the hallways by instinct. The school was large, clean, and terrifyingly loud. But as he walked, something strange happened.
A blue, semi-transparent screen flickered into existence in the upper left corner of his vision.
He swatted at it, thinking it was a floater in his eye. His hand passed right through it.
He stopped in the middle of the hallway, ignoring the weird looks from passing students. He focused on the text.
[Ninja System Initialized]
[Welcome, Host.]
Karan nearly laughed out loud. You have got to be kidding me.
The ad. The explosion. The question: Do you want to be a Ninja?
“It wasn’t clickbait,” he whispered in disbelief.
He focused his intent, and the panel expanded, covering his field of view like a holographic interface.
—
Name: Karan Malhotra
Ninja Level: 0 (0/1)
Status: Civilian
Bloodline: None
Jutsu: None
Points: 0
[Quest]
[Mall]
—
It was pathetic. A completely blank slate. But there were tabs at the bottom. [Quest] and [Mall].
He mentally clicked on [Quest].
—
[Daily Quest: The Road of Youth]
To forge a vessel capable of holding chakra, one must first conquer their own body.
Objectives:
Pushups: 0/200
Situps: 0/100
Pullups: 0/100
Squats: 0/500
Running: 0/30km
Time Limit: 24 Hours
Reward: 100 EXP, 10 Points.
Failure Penalty: None (But you remain weak).
—
Karan looked down at his arms. They were like twigs. His wrists were so thin he could wrap his thumb and pinky around them with room to spare.
“30 kilometers?” he muttered. “I’ll die. I will literally die of cardiac arrest before I hit the 5k mark.”
It was the Might Guy training regimen, or at least a variation of it. For a ninja, this was a warm-up. For a malnourished drug user, this was a death sentence.
He tabbed over to the [Mall].
A grid of icons appeared, showcasing everything a Naruto fan could dream of. Scrolls, weapons, vials of blood, glowing eyes.
He checked the currency exchange rate in the corner.
[Exchange Rate: $1 USD = 1 System Point]
“Capitalism,” Karan sighed. “Even in the afterlife, cash is king.”
He browsed the prices.
E-Rank Jutsu/Item/Bloodline: 100 Points ($100)
D-Rank Jutsu/Item/Bloodline: 1,000 Points ($1,000)
C-Rank Jutsu/Item/Bloodline: 10,000 Points ($10,000)
B-Rank Jutsu/Item/Bloodline: 100,000 Points ($100,000)
A-Rank Jutsu/Item/Bloodline: 1,000,000 Points ($1,000,000)
S-Rank Jutsu/Item/Bloodline: 10,000,000 Points ($10,000,000)
Karan did the mental math. To get a simple Sharingan—not even the Mangekyou, just the base model—he would need ten million dollars.
“I work at a convenience store,” he reminded the System dryly. “I make $7.25 an hour. Do you know how many slushies I have to sell to buy a Rasengan?”
The System, naturally, did not reply.
However, a new notification popped up, pulsing with a golden light.
[New User Bonus: Beginner’s Gacha]
As this is your first time accessing the System, you are granted one (1) Random Character Template.
[Explanation:] A Template grants the potential, talent, elemental affinities, and innate knowledge of a specific Shinobi. It does NOT grant their peak power level. You must train to unlock the potential.
Karan swallowed hard. This was it. This was the make-or-break moment.
If he rolled a civilian character like Teuchi the Ramen Guy, he was doomed to make noodles for the rest of his life. If he rolled someone like Iruka or Mizuki, he would be a mediocre ninja at best—cannon fodder in a world that he suspected was much more dangerous than just high school bullies.
“Please not Tenten,” he prayed. “I don’t have the budget for weapons. Please give me something sturdy. Something with hacks.”
He mentally pressed the [Spin] button.
A roulette wheel appeared in his vision, faces of hundreds of anime characters blurring past. He saw the red hair of Gaara, the blonde spike of Naruto, the brooding face of Sasuke, and the terrifying pale visage of Orochimaru.
The wheel slowed.
Click… click… click…
It passed Rock Lee. (Thank God, Karan thought. I can’t do that much exercise).
It passed Sakura.
It slowed down near a pale, blue-haired boy with yellow eyes.
It stopped.
[Congratulations!]
[Character Template Acquired: Mitsuki]
Karan froze in the middle of the school corridor, his mouth slightly agape.
Mitsuki. The “son” of Orochimaru. The synthetic human.
A rush of cold energy washed over him. It wasn’t painful like the memories; it was soothing. It felt like cool water flowing through his veins, repairing, knitting, and changing him on a cellular level.
Knowledge flooded his mind. Not memories of Mitsuki’s life, but memories of how to move. How to mold chakra. The feeling of Wind Release cutting through the air. The sensation of Lightning Release snapping at his fingertips. The ability to dislocate joints, to stretch limbs, to summon snakes.
And something else. A hum.
He could hear a low-frequency buzzing in the air. He could feel the life force of the students passing by—not visually, but as a sensory pressure.
[Trait Added: Jugo’s Clan Constitution]
You passively absorb Natural Energy from the environment.
[Warning:] Your current body is too weak to handle Sage Mode. Do not attempt to gather Sage Chakra until Ninja Level 60. Attempting to enter Sage Mode now will result in immediate cellular necrosis and death.
“Okay,” Karan breathed out, feeling a strange new vitality thrumming beneath his skin. “No Sage Mode. Got it. I prefer my organs on the inside.”
He checked his status again.
—
Name: Karan Malhotra
Ninja Level: 0 (0/1)
Status: Civilian
Bloodline: Jugo (Passive Regen, Nature Affinity)
Affinities: Wind, Lightning
Talent: A-Rank
Jutsu: None
…
Points: 0
[Quest]
[Mall]
—
He had hit the jackpot. Mitsuki was a tank. High regeneration, incredible versatility, and a talent ceiling that peaks the Human race. He will definitely become a Kage level ninja.
But looking at his hands, he was reminded of reality. He had the software of a Ferrari, but the hardware of a rusted bicycle. If he tried to punch a wall now, his hand would shatter, regardless of his “A-Rank Talent.”
He needed to fix this body.
He pushed open the heavy double doors of the school entrance and stepped out into the bright American sunlight. The air smelled of exhaust fumes and cut grass.
To his right, near the bike racks, he saw a teacher—a gym coach with a whistle around his neck—yelling at three students.
Karan recognized them instantly. The bullies.
“I don’t care what he said!” the coach was shouting. “The kid is in the clinic! You three are on detention for a week!”
The bullies looked bored, scuffing their sneakers against the pavement. They knew a week of detention was nothing. They would be back to shoving kids into lockers by next week.
He adjusted the strap of his backpack, turned his head, and began the long walk to his apartment.