Chapter 22

Aoki was facing a big problem right now. Almost all the A rank missions seemed to require leaving the territory of Land of fire.

This was a problem because it took a lot of time to travel to other territories and back. Aoki knew that he would lose significant amount of training time while completing these missions.

No wonder that most A ranks and above were usually completed by the veteran ninja. Such people should already have refined much of their potential so they should not feel any problems but Aoki was different.

His problem was that he actualy had too much potential to grow stronger even though his stats were at elite jounin level already. Others would definitely smack him from extreme jealousy if they knew what Aoki was worried about. After all they also wanted to become more stronger but most of them had already exhausted their potentials and could only refine their skills now instead.

At the mention of skills , the new system function was a life saver. It was inevitable that training time mostly had to be divided in two main parts, training the body and training the skills. But from now on Aoki could use the new function to master high level skills like drinking water. The condition for that would be enough skill points though.

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Right now Aoki was on his way to visit Azuma for an important matter. He thought about many ways with which he could shorten the time required to complete A or higher rank missions. One came into his mind which was to buy information beforehand from a veteran information broker.

This conclusion was easy to make because it would definitely be easy if one already knew general location of the target rather than waste time gathering information oneself.

In this world, information exchange was actualy a very popular business at least for ninja. When it came to jounin class ninja , they tend to have one or two information sources.

The old Aoki did not prefer communication with others much and had recently promoted to jounin so he did not possess a reliable source though.

The most well known information broker organization would be the Black market of this world. The Saud organization was too large and was spread at almost every corner of the Elemental Nations.

That was fine but the organization was a dubious one so it was difficult for Aoki to straightforwardly trust them. He did not think that they would trade false information because the people from black market were too hungry for money and connections. In Aoki's mind , this greed produced doubt because it would be troublesome if they sold information about him to someone else instead. Who would like to have enemies on their tail whenever they leave the village?

So Aoki's best option was to find trustworthy broker who was exclusive to someone trustworthy. For example , the broker who did business exclusively with only Konoha ninja or even a single individual.

Big shot merchants who have business and connections everywhere , definitely recieved fresh information from their sources. It would be convenient if one could befriend one of them and trade information directly with that person.

The Capital of Land of fire housed branches of many big shot businessmen. Azuma had spent eight full years there so it would not beca surprise to Aoki if he could trade information with them. So it was not a bad choice to ask Azuma for advice on this particular matter.

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Aoki asked around and found that Azuma was unfortunately currently out on some mission. It would take some time for him to return.

Aoki could ask someone else for help too but decided against it as it would be difficult. Kakashi was out because he did not have many sources outside the village in the first place and relied on information from the village's data back or his summons which were the hounds from the anime and masters of tracking at great speed. Aoki's acquaintances were already scarce so for now he had to do something himself.

After thinking a lot , Aoki realised the usefulness of having a summoning contract and the fact that he did not possess one. From the memories, he knew that there were many different species of intelligent chakra animals in this world.

If Aoki wanted , he could use summoning jutsu now and would be reversed summoned to some land of summons who had affinity with him. But this idea could prove dangerous too.

The land of summons would be random and the possibility of encountering danger was not low.. Still Aoki did not hesitate much and decided to try this method himself. He thought that it would be better if his first summoning beast had great affinity with him.

Besides he was eager to sign a contract himself and see what kind of beast would become his partner in the future.