Chapter 410: Hot Spring
The process of the group dinner was nothing to write home about, but the changing expressions on the hot spring inn owner's face were quite spectacular—
Ninja really knew how to eat.
As a transcendent class possessing chakra, ninja engaged in a large amount of high-intensity exercise every day. Without sufficient energy intake, they wouldn't have the strength to run and jump around. However, generally speaking, ninja would choose small amounts of concentrated high-energy ninja food (such as Ichiraku Ramen, enjoying Konoha's financial subsidies), or even food pills and energy pills, rather than large amounts of ordinary food with low calories.
At the beginning, the owner bowed and welcomed Haruno Sakura and her group with a smile. After all, buffets welcomed slender and petite girls the most. However, soon cold sweat began to pour madly from the owner's forehead, and his face became darker and darker as the empty plates on the table piled up...
When Hinata let herself go, she was a big eater who could easily eat more than twenty bowls of ramen in one meal! The other three weren't pushovers either; even Ino, who ate the least, consumed the portion of an adult man...
"I absolutely cannot host ninja in the future!" The owner, whose face was pale and who wanted to jump off the roof, looked indignant. Running a hot spring buffet in Konoha was safe and business was good, easily making huge profits daily, except that occasionally a few ninja would patronize. If he accidentally encountered a big eater level customer, they could simply eat a shop into bankruptcy alone!
The owner began to consider whether to charge ninja 50% more for the meal. Such reverse discrimination against the transcendent class was not even rare in Konoha. If this paradoxical social phenomenon occurred in peaceful times, it might be the seed of tearing apart the society of ninja and ordinary people, leading to serious consequences. But in the current times where a storm was coming... it was just an irrelevant minor skin disease.
The ninja girls couldn't care less about the owner's thoughts and found a private women's bath for themselves.
Unlike the hot springs in Country C of her previous life, the custom here was to bathe without swimsuits, which meant... meeting each other with naked sincerity. The girls frankly and naturally shed their clothes, revealing their youthful bodies. Haruno Sakura glanced around; it was full of beautiful scenes that would be censored elsewhere.
However, Haruno Sakura was quite calm and had nothing to be excited about. Perhaps when she first transmigrated, she might have been excited—if a baby could be excited. After so many years, she had seen enough of herself, and she had everything the other girls had (at least theoretically).
It was already night with lights just coming on. The night sky was crimson-purple, the bright moon hung high, and solitary stars twinkled. On the ground, the steam from the hot spring was dense, rising like clouds and rosy mists. The dim yellow lights looked faint and ambiguous in the curling mist. The girls pushed aside the curling water mist. Their smooth and slender bodies reflected a glowing shimmer under the silver gauze-like moonlight. This scene seemed to have an intoxicating beauty.
Slender feet lightly stirred the clear pool water where the bottom could be seen. The girls slowly sat down, immersing themselves in the pool water, letting the warm spring water gently embrace their bodies.
"Phew..." Sakura exhaled with satisfaction, leaning lazily against the wall of the spring with her eyes closed.
For a moment, no one spoke.
"Sakura-chan." Ino suddenly opened her eyes and swam to Sakura with a smile.
"Hn?" Sakura was lazy and didn't want to move, responding with a muffled nasal sound.
"I heard... you went out on a mission with Sasuke alone these past few days? Could it be...?" Ino's eyes shone with the light of gossip as she leaned close to the girl.
The blonde girl's nearly fully developed body pressed up, the smooth and soft touch rubbing against Sakura's arm. As she spoke, a warm breath tickled the hair on the girl's temples and earlobes. She shuddered, shook her head repeatedly, and pushed Ino away: "Don't gossip! Sasuke and I are really not in that kind of relationship!"
"Hehe, Ino, you can rest assured. The two of them just had a fierce fight with the people of Akatsuki and had no mind for romance. You still have a chance with your male god!" Hinata also leaned over.
"I told you I don't have feelings for Sasuke anymore!" Ino replied grumpily.
"Hehe, who believes that?"
Ino rolled her eyes, knowing that continuing to speak would only make it worse, so she quickly changed the topic: "Then Sakura, are you okay? I heard that Akatsuki members are all very powerful, comparable to the Hokage?"
"It was okay, not particularly dangerous... basically a 50-50 split." Sakura skipped over this topic lightly. When relaxing, she didn't want to recall the tense battles.
Ino didn't mind Sakura's perfunctoriness. She just lay on the edge of the pool, her expression slightly melancholy: "Sakura, you've become so powerful... we only graduated from school a few years ago."
"Yeah." Speaking of this topic, Hinata also lost interest in bickering with Ino and said listlessly, "Sakura has left us so far behind... Even though I've worked very hard, I can still only look at Sakura's back..."
Suddenly no one spoke, and there was a weird silence for a while.
Haruno Sakura didn't know what to say. The gap in strength between friends was getting bigger and bigger, and she couldn't stop her progress to wait for them to catch up. Hinata's strength had actually improved very quickly. Relying on the Big Dipper Divine Fist and the improved family secret techniques, her combat power growth could even keep up with Sasuke who had turned on his red-eye hacks, but Sakura was still beyond her reach. Ino was even further behind; she had just been promoted to Chunin.
"Heh." Hinata laughed abruptly, breaking the silence. She turned her head and said to Ino, "Did you know? Those boys, using appearance, figure, personality, temperament, and strength to score, have recognized Sakura as the goddess of this generation!"
Haruno Sakura's face immediately stiffened. She waved her hands repeatedly, incomparably embarrassed: "Please spare me, they are just joking around."
Ino didn't care about the pink-haired girl's begging for mercy. She pushed aside her hand and asked with interest: "Really? So boys like the cold goddess type?"
"Help... I'm not cold," Sakura covered her face with her hands, letting out a helpless moan, "I am very approachable !"
"Approachable?"
Ino glanced at the girl who dared not show her face, the corners of her mouth raised, and repeated the phrase.
"Approachable ."
Hinata unkindly repeated it again, biting down particularly hard on the pronunciation of the first character ( Flat).
"A vast flat land (Yi Ma Ping Chuan)."
"Nailed on a board (Flat as a board)."
"Poverty-stricken chest (sounds like Extremely Vicious)."
"Princess of Peace (Princess of Flatness)."
"For others, it's 'I want to rub,' for Sakura, it's 'I want to pinch'."
"Enough from you guys!" Sakura hugged her arms, blocking their ill-intentioned gazes in front of her chest, rolled her eyes at them fiercely, and sank silently into the water.
The girls looked at each other and all laughed. The air was instantly filled with a cheerful atmosphere.
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