Maya despised the gacha wheel with everything she had.
She'd always been a pretty, bright, cheerful kid — well, the 'cheerful' part took deliberate effort (namely, shameless cuteness-farming for Influence Points), but the 'pretty' part required no work at all.
At five years old, on the day she gave the all-school first-year speech, she'd looked up at the crowd and announced she was going to be Student Council President. The entire school had been stunned.
At seven, she hand-delivered a 50,000-word campaign manifesto to the principal — a comprehensive, detailed plan for school reform titled What I Will Do When I Become Student Council President. The maturity and precision of that document genuinely moved the old man. He wasn't particularly surprised, though. A few streets over, Howard Stark's playboy son Tony had soldered circuit boards at four and designed a car engine on his own at seven. By comparison, this Maya girl seemed like a perfectly ordinary prodigy.
Once in office, she'd used serious force to clean up the school environment — literal force, in several cases involving loud, oversized boys who ended up crying. To promote academic and physical development across the board, she organized a packed calendar of events: sprinting tournaments, trivia competitions, math olympiads, singing contests, ballet recitals, violin showcases. In every single one, the Student Council President walked up to the podium, cheeks flushed — whether from excitement for her classmates' progress, from personal triumph, or from the quiet satisfaction of watching her Influence Points total climb, she never quite said.
She'd also entered every competition she could find — district, city, state, national. She'd collected Outstanding Student awards from New York City for multiple years running and had even taken a national honor. The education community had noticed. There was a prodigy in Hell's Kitchen.
But it wasn't always lonely at the top. At one national biology competition, a girl named Helen Zhao took first place right out from under her. That loss reminded Maya that the Marvel Universe had its own depth. She checked Helen through the system: Gold Lv.1 Knowledge, Diamond Lv.8 Mind — her biology knowledge surpassed most undergraduates, and her raw cognitive ability topped Maya's original spec by a full tier.
(Author's note: The author personally considers the Extremis Regeneration Cradle to be a higher-tier system than the Extremis Virus — not in terms of technological advancement, but in terms of stability. The Regeneration Cradle works for anyone; the Virus has always been locked in the experimental stage. Just a personal take.)
With Tony Stark a few streets away on top of that, Maya quietly shelved any thoughts of skipping grades. She settled in, kept her head down, and kept farming points in her little pond.
At age ten, she finally crossed 10,000 Influence Points and blew it all on a Silver 10-pull.
Nothing came up gold. Not even silver. The only notable result was a Bronze Lv.7 Hunyuan Scripture and a heap of filler items.
Right. She'd designed this system herself. She knew exactly what the odds were: the Silver wheel had a negative fourteen percent base chance of producing a Gold item. Without buying a VIP Supreme aura — which added fifteen percent, meaning a net positive one percent chance — even a dedicated whale running 100 pulls would be lucky to see a single Gold item. The Gold wheel had negative twenty percent odds for Diamond. The Diamond wheel had negative twenty-five percent odds for anything higher.
Even within the same tier, the base odds of a matching pull were fifteen percent.
For free-to-play players, the system offered the Black Market Trader after spending 10,000 coins — one randomly refreshed item per real-world day, holdable on a two-slot personal shelf. Slots could be expanded. Refreshes could be purchased. Everything could be purchased, and everything scaled up in price as you went.
Whether you had money or not, the answer was always: spend more.
Jack Ma once joked: if you have money, that's gaming; if you don't — well, that's your problem.
Back in his past life, the boss had praised Jia Baoyu lavishly for designing this system. Finish this and I'll promote you to team lead.
And now, by a cruel twist of fate, Maya had fallen headfirst into the pit she'd built.
After unlocking the Black Market and watching it refresh seven or eight hundred times over the following years, not a single cultivation root had appeared. Every item was content from the Naruto universe.
She'd tried clicking on the Hunyuan Scripture in her inventory to get started — and the system had immediately popped up a notice: Greetings, valued player. Please first exchange for a Mortal World spiritual root physique before beginning cultivation of the Hunyuan Scripture!
Maya had gone cross-eyed on the spot. Her own system apparently wasn't even finished. The Naruto-universe content was complete and functional, but the xianxia side looked like only partial data had ever been imported. Which meant — almost certainly — the system had no spiritual root physique entries at all.
By 1993, at age thirteen, Maya had completely given up on immortal cultivation. That path had ended before it even began.
A powerful kunoichi isn't a bad life. It's fine. It's fine. It's fine.
Besides — even if she ground all the way to the Foundation Establishment stage, that would take another decade. Thanos would arrive before then. What was a Foundation Establishment cultivator going to do about that? She might not even be able to handle street-level criminals.
More critically: the older you got, the harder training became and the lower your ceiling. By traditional age-counting, at thirteen, she was at the absolute last window.
Time was running out.
Back at home in the evening, Maya finished the pork knuckle Jennifer had braised — the apartment was thick with the smell of star anise and Sichuan pepper — then skipped the TV and went straight to bed.
She had a plan. Tonight, she would take the first step toward becoming a female Hokage.
Then her quilt was yanked off.
A rush of cold air hit her. Maya had been kneeling on her mattress with her forehead pressed into her pillow, murmuring to herself in concentration. The sudden intrusion shocked her into a yelp.
Before she could flip over and see who it was, Jennifer's voice floated over:
"Baby, what are you doing? Why are you kneeling in your blankets with your butt in the air?"
Maya's face went scarlet. Years of cultivated dignity — obliterated in an instant. She whipped upright.
"Oh my god, Jennifer! You'd better have an excellent explanation for this, because we are not done!"
Jennifer lay down beside her with a look of pure innocence and held down her daughter's flailing arms. "I knocked for ages and you didn't answer. What was I supposed to do? Come in through the wall?"
Maya's blush faded slowly, but her heart rate returned to normal. "Fine. What couldn't wait until morning?"
Jennifer started fidgeting immediately, eyes sliding away. "That... well, that... okay, sweetheart, it's like this..."
(Chapter ends at Jennifer's hesitation — continued in Chapter 4.)