What was the single, unifying trait among all the multiversal Suzukis?

An insatiable drive for wealth.

In the eyes of idealistic shounen protagonists, money might seem trivial or entirely useless. But for anyone who actually understood how the modern, normal world functioned, it was the ultimate necessity.

Why did shinobi accept assassination missions? Why did Jujutsu Sorcerers risk their lives against curses? Why did Hunters willingly walk into apocalyptic dungeons?

Money. It was the only absolute truth. Even Hiruzen Sarutobi, the legendary Third Hokage, was ultimately forced to bow his head to the Daimyo of the Land of Fire simply because the Daimyo controlled the nation’s purse strings.

Because of this brutal reality, Suzuki understood the sheer, terrifying importance of financial security. He knew what it was like to survive on near-expired ingredients and stale rice during his childhood. He remembered shivering in the cramped, drafty warehouse of his own property while he desperately tried to manage a fledgling rental business.

Not all of his tenants were decent people. In fact, many of them were absolute scum—grifters and vagrants who wanted to loiter, waste his kindness, and forcefully squat on the property, fully aware that the landlord was just a defenseless orphan living alone.

If it had been the old Suzuki, he would have had no physical way to handle that problem. But everything changed after the day he saved Hinata Hyuga.

They met again, talked, and when she wanted to formally thank him, he casually invited her over to his house. The moment she stepped onto the property, the atmosphere among the parasitic tenants instantly grew suffocatingly tense.

Unlike ignorant street kids, those adult grifters knew exactly who the Hyuga Clan was. Suzuki didn’t have to throw a single punch. He simply let Hinata hang out at his place, cooked her some nice meals, and watched as every single person who had planned to exploit him suddenly became too terrified to even look in his direction.

Hiashi Hyuga, Hinata’s strict father, was perfectly aware of this dynamic, but he didn’t stop it. Suzuki never explicitly flaunted the Hyuga name; it was a subtle, highly elegant method of maintaining his business and surviving the harsh ninja world. Furthermore, Suzuki was actively helping Hinata become braver, subtly tutoring her to build her confidence. This arrangement greatly pleased Hiashi, as both he and Suzuki knew that showing weakness within the Hyuga Clan was tantamount to social suicide.

Hinata was incredibly kind, which made her inherently unsuited for the cutthroat role of Clan Head. But that didn’t mean she lacked potential—the fact that she would eventually give birth to prodigies like Boruto and Himawari proved her dormant genetic talent.

Suzuki primarily viewed Hinata as a little sister and a student he needed to guide. But pragmatically, keeping her close was a massive business success. With the unspoken backing of the Hyuga Clan shielding him, no one in the village dared to mess with the orphan kid’s rental properties.

Did anyone genuinely think running a business in Konoha was easy?

It was an absolute nightmare, especially for an academy student with only slightly above-average talents. Adult business partners constantly tried to swindle him. To counter this, Suzuki systematically befriended Ino, Shikamaru, Choji, and the rest of the elite clan heirs. By weaving himself into the social fabric of the Ino-Shika-Cho formation, he built an untouchable social shield.

Still, he strictly limited his business ventures to real estate and charcoal. He knew he couldn’t afford to relax. To truly secure his future, he had to prove his worth as a shinobi and catch the attention of the higher-ups—a goal he had successfully achieved by becoming Hiruzen’s shadow disciple.

If I didn’t have the Manager and the multiversal connection...

Suzuki knew his original ceiling. Without his alternate selves, his progress would have flatlined. At best, he would have become a high-ranking logistics officer in Konoha, or perhaps a moderately wealthy civilian merchant. It would have been a stable, peaceful life, but his status would have always been subservient to the true monsters of this world.

That crushing reality was exactly why he had never genuinely entertained the thought of romancing Hinata or Ino in the past. No matter how close they were as childhood friends, the social divide was absolute. Elite clan heiresses did not marry painfully average orphans.

The suffocating pressure of being a weak, isolated young man in Konoha—lacking both economic power and combat strength—used to crush him every single night. He remembered staring blankly at his bedroom ceiling, paralyzed by the sheer anxiety of his own mediocrity.

But the Manager had shattered that ceiling.

His trajectory had violently shifted. Jutsu, physical prowess, bloodline limits, learning capacity, and limitless wealth—everything he once thought was mathematically impossible was now directly within his grasp.

Yet, ironically, this newfound power had made him sloppy. He had unexpectedly let his guard down. He hadn’t even noticed the two furry creatures tailing him for the past few days.

"Manager."

[Affirmative. We have detected the presence of these feline entities lingering in the user’s immediate vicinity multiple times over the past 72 hours.]

What a pathetic failure, Suzuki thought, mentally berating himself.

Of all the lethal threats he had been calculating, he had completely ignored his immediate surroundings. He had assumed his low-profile Genin status kept him off the radar. Even though he was Hiruzen’s disciple, they had kept it strictly classified because Suzuki wasn’t strong enough yet to survive being a political target. (Though Hiruzen certainly didn’t mind Suzuki occasionally leveraging the Hokage’s name to boost his own business—it only further cemented the old man’s image as a benevolent, all-powerful grandfather figure).

So, who should he actually be wary of outside the village walls? Danzo’s Root, the aggressive expansionists of Kumogakure, or... Orochimaru, who harbored a deep, festering malice toward Hiruzen.

Because his mind had been preoccupied with those S-Rank threats, he had completely ignored the two ninja cats currently shivering in the alleyway.

"If you want to leave here alive, you’d better give me a very good reason why you’ve been stalking me," Suzuki said, his voice dropping to a deadly, cold whisper. "Otherwise, you aren’t going back to whoever sent you."

Because his mind had been preoccupied with those S-Rank, world-ending threats, he had completely, foolishly ignored the two ninja cats currently shivering at the edge of the hot spring.

"If you want to leave this room alive, you had better give me a very good reason why you’ve been stalking me," Suzuki said from the water, his voice dropping to a deadly, cold whisper that cut through the thick steam. "Otherwise, you aren’t going back to whoever sent you."

The two furry creatures gulped audibly. Their feline faces twisted into almost human-like expressions of absolute terror. They looked at each other, nodded frantically, and dropped to their knees.

"W-WE ARE YOUR BIGGEST FANS, SUZUKI-SAMA!" they declared in unison, bowing so deeply their furry foreheads smacked against the wet tiles.

"...."

Suzuki, sitting waist-deep in the water, stared down at the two cats in dead, unbroken silence for a long, agonizing moment.

He didn’t buy it for a single second. Without moving a muscle, he subtly flared his chakra, deliberately increasing the ambient temperature of the hot spring to a suffocating, blistering heat. The water around him began to bubble menacingly, turning the humid air scalding. He needed to apply a little pain first, just to ensure their next words were the absolute truth.