A famous character from an anime in his previous life.
Ethan knew full well that by the end of the series, Naruto's power level would blow past anything a Tier 3 card could contain. With his current mental strength, there was no way in hell he could design that version — and even if he could, this card base physically couldn't hold a Tier 4's worth of power.
So he'd aim lower. Naruto in his youth. The scrappy underdog version, before the godlike power-ups.
The story didn't need to be a perfect recreation of the original. Small changes were fine — necessary, even, since he didn't remember every detail. What mattered was using Naruto as the protagonist and building a standalone narrative around him. No flashbacks to other characters' arcs. No jumping between timelines. Just one boy's story.
An orphan hated by his entire village. A world-ending demon fox sealed inside his gut. And a dream — loud, stubborn, borderline delusional — to become the greatest leader his village had ever known.
His power came from Chakra: a life force woven from mental and physical energy.
The adventures Naruto had from childhood. The ninjutsu he mastered along the way...
As for art style — every card in this world used realism. Photorealistic paintings, Renaissance-level detail, that sort of thing.
Ethan had no intention of following that convention.
He wanted to keep the anime look. Stylized eyes. Exaggerated expressions. That kinetic energy you only got from animation.
The pen tip touched the card's surface.
Mental power began to flow.
And unlike the sluggish, labored strokes in the original Ethan's memories, this time the pen moved like it had been doing this for a thousand hours. Because it had. Muscle memory didn't care which body it was in — not when the System translated intent directly into action.
Lines spread across the card base with fluid confidence. The boy's wild, spiky hair. Determined eyes narrowed in a grin. A mouth stretched wide in that trademark smile — the one that said I dare you to count me out.
Spirit Ink only came in one color: black.
But as Ethan drew according to the image burning in his mind, the character bloomed with color. Bright blond hair. A red sage coat. Orange accents. The red pigmentation around his eyes from channeling natural energy.
The Konoha leaf symbol on the forehead protector was drawn stroke by meticulous stroke, as precise as an engraving.
Ethan was completely gone. Lost in it. The kind of focus where the outside world simply ceases to exist.
Over a decade of professional experience erupted through his hands. He'd drawn thousands of character designs in his past life — quick sketches, polished turnarounds, splash pages — but none of them had ever felt like this.
This felt like it mattered.
Half an hour later, a Uzumaki Naruto so vivid he looked ready to leap off the card stared back at Ethan from the finished illustration.
Thank God this world didn't require manual coloring. If he'd had to paint this thing by hand, he'd have been here all night.
Next came the story injection.
Ethan set down the Spirit Pen, pressed both palms flat against the edges of the card, and closed his eyes.
Mental power flowed from his mind into the card like a slow, steady stream. Simultaneously, he built the story in his head — layer by layer, scene by scene.
The Ninja Academy. The Nine-Tailed Demon Fox. Iruka-sensei's sacrifice. The Third Hokage watching over him from the shadows. Team 7 — Sasuke, Sakura, Kakashi. The Land of Waves and the battle against Zabuza. The Chūnin Exams. Training the Rasengan under Jiraiya's guidance. Pain. Loss. The refusal to give up, no matter how many times the world knocked him down.
The card began to glow.
First a faint white shimmer. Then blue, deepening steadily — before bypassing purple entirely and settling into a rich, unmistakable gold.
Ethan's eyes snapped open.
Text materialized on the back of the card, burning itself into existence:
( IMAGE HERE )
[Card Name]: Uzumaki Naruto (Sage Mode)
[Quality]: Gold (Legendary)
[Rank]: Tier 3
[Type]: Summoning Card
[Story System]: Naruto
[Cost]: 500 Psionic Energy
[Effect]: Summons Naruto in Sage Mode.
[Trait]:Nine-Tails Power — When near death, enters Tailed Beast State for three minutes. Falls into a coma after the duration ends.
[Evaluation]:"You really are something else. You remind me of who I used to be. I'm going to believe in you, Uzumaki Naruto."
[Note]: The beginning of a brand-new story. First certification. Card Maker Ethan Cole has obtained primary copyright for this system. Success rate for creating cards with over 70% similarity is halved for all other users.
[Alert]: This card has entered this month's Tier 3 Card Making Leaderboard. The leaderboard refreshes daily at midnight.
Ethan stared at the card. His breathing came fast and shallow.
He'd done it.
And it wasn't just any card. It was Gold.
More importantly, the Ninja system had been recognized by the System as an entirely new story system — and the copyright belonged to him. Starting today, anyone else who wanted to create cards within this system would need to purchase his authorization first.
But he couldn't get drunk on this just yet. There was a bigger picture to consider.
The Academy Card Master Tournament he wanted to enter? One overpowered Tier 3 card wasn't going to win it.
Low-tier Card Master battles allowed each player to bring thirty cards. There was a crystal at each corner of the battlefield. Destroy the enemy's crystal, you win. Lose yours, game over.
Both sides started with 100 Psionic Energy, capped at 3,000. Each minute was one round. Round one added 100 Psionic. Round two, 200. Round three, 300. And so on until round five, which added 500 — where it stayed for the rest of the match.
Summoning costs scaled with tier: 100 Psionic for Tier 1, 300 for Tier 2, and 500 for Tier 3.
To play Naruto, he'd need to survive until at least round three. Which meant he needed strong Tier 1 cards to hold the early game.
Of course, if he decided not to compete, none of this mattered.
But come on. He'd transmigrated into another world. How could he not stir things up?
He did feel a pang of guilt for the original Ethan, though. Kid had just... died. Burned himself out. Gone, just like that. Ethan wondered briefly if the original soul had gotten the reverse deal — woken up in a concept artist's body back on Earth.
Probably not. Life wasn't that fair.
His mental power was nearly tapped out, so making more cards tonight was off the table. Instead, he pulled up this month's Card Making Leaderboard on his System interface.
The leaderboard tracked all newly created cards and settled at the end of each month. Top ten finishers received a reward — Ethan wasn't sure what exactly, but word was the prizes were solid.
Right now, Uzumaki Naruto sat at the very top of the Tier 3 rankings.
#1: Uzumaki Naruto #2: The Wandering Blade
He tapped on second place. No detailed stats — just basic info:
[Card Name]: The Wandering Blade
[Quality]: Purple (Epic)
[Rank]: Tier 3
[Type]: Summoning Card
[Story System]: Legend of the Blade
"Not bad," Ethan murmured. "Wonder how it'd stack up against Sir Galahad in a fight."
He scrolled further. From fourth place down, it was all Blue cards. Nothing worth studying.
With his mental strength scraped down to fumes, he opened his status panel.
[Name]: Ethan Cole
[Age]: 19
[Level]: Tier 2 Card Maker (Junior)
[Mental Strength]: 37/200 (Recovering)
[Psionic Energy Limit]: 700
[Spirit Crystals]: 13
He tapped the shop icon next.
The inventory was bare-bones:
Tier 1 Blank Card Base — 1 Spirit Crystal each Tier 2 Blank Card Base — 5 Spirit Crystals each Tier 3 Blank Card Base — 20 Spirit Crystals each Spirit Pen (Junior) — Already Owned Spirit Ink (Basic) — 2 Spirit Crystals/bottle (10 uses)
"Steep..." Ethan winced. No wonder the original kid only had five Tier 3 bases. Twenty crystals a pop was brutal on a student's budget.
From the inherited memories, he knew a Card Maker's income came almost entirely from selling cards. A basic Tier 1 White card went for about 2 Spirit Crystals on the open market. Factor in the 1-crystal cost of the blank base plus ink consumption, and the margins were razor-thin.
Blue cards, though — those could fetch several times more. And Purple? Purple cards almost never hit the public market. When they did appear at auction, bidding started in the four digits.
For reference: a common Tier 2 Blue card sold for 20 to 30 Spirit Crystals, depending on its effect. A Tier 3 Blue started at 100.
Ethan checked his balance. Twelve Spirit Crystals. Plus the one he'd just spent on ink.
Thirteen crystals. That was it. The entire fortune the original Ethan had scraped together over two years of work.
As for earning Spirit Crystals — there was really only one way: killing monsters.
Ever since the Card Master System had appeared, interdimensional Rifts had been tearing open all over the world. Bizarre creatures crawled out of them on a regular basis. Kill one, and there was a chance it would drop a Spirit Core, which could be exchanged through the System for crystals.
A Tier 1 Spirit Core was worth one crystal. Tier 2 was worth five — roughly the same as a card base at that level.
But these monsters weren't easy pickings. A single Tier 2 creature typically required three to five people working together with seven or eight Tier 2 cards to take down. The things that crawled out of Rifts were wildly unpredictable — many had special abilities — and even organized teams had to tread carefully.
Card Masters died in Rift explorations every year. It was just a fact of life.
So most ordinary Card Masters took one of two paths: either you worked a normal job and traded cash for Spirit Crystals on the secondary market, or you focused on crafting and selling cards. A quiet life.
The original Ethan had taken the second path.
Ethan closed the shop and rummaged through the desk drawer. Two Tier 1 blank card bases left. Both the cheapest models.
"Not enough."
He stared at the meager supplies for a few seconds, then shrugged.
"Forget it."
He pulled out his phone. Somehow, it was already past eight. He wasn't particularly hungry, but his brain felt like it had been wrung out and left to dry.
"It is what it is."
He shuffled back to the bedroom and collapsed onto the bed without even changing clothes.
Tomorrow. He'd figure it all out tomorrow.
That night, the Card Master community went insane.
The leaderboard refreshed at midnight, and there it was — a Gold card sitting at the top of the Tier 3 rankings. A Gold card. At Tier 3.
The forums lit up within minutes.
"Someone check immediately — how long has it been since a Tier 3 Gold card showed up? Find out who made this thing."
"We need to contact this person. Get the production method. Negotiate for the copyright. Whatever it takes."
The messages piled up across every major Card Master channel and forum. By morning, it would be the only thing anyone was talking about.
Halfway across the country, the creator of The Wandering Blade stared at his System interface in stunned silence.
He'd spent months meditating on his card's backstory. He'd burned through over a dozen card bases to produce a single Purple card. He'd held the number one spot on the leaderboard for twenty straight days and felt — cautiously — like the monthly reward was in the bag.
And now this.
A Gold card. Out of nowhere. With only days left in the month.
The leaderboard only displayed the card's name, not the creator's identity. So whoever made it was still anonymous — for now.
But that didn't change the math.
He clicked through to the card's basic info, read it over once, and let out a long, slow breath.
"A Gold card..." He closed the interface. "Yeah. There's no competing with that."