My mind was blank. With a dragging cold in my chest, I watched as my parents' hearts beat slower and slower.
After the flash, the Nine-Tails moved into the seal on my stomach, which I couldn't even feel. Kushina and Minato just collapsed to the ground, living out their final seconds.
The God of Death still loomed over us. He was giving his summoner his last moments, knowing the man wasn't going anywhere.
Bursts of wind sounded nearby. Three shinobi appeared and, in a panic, rushed toward us. The oldest of them lifted me from the pedestal... Someone familiar? Oooh... a younger Hiruzen... Compared to the pain inside me, though, I felt almost nothing. I'd run out of strength to suffer. Only the burning in my chest stayed.
"Fourth-sama!" a worried jonin shouted, lifting the Hokage into a sitting position.
His comrade did the same for Kushina.
All three stared in alarm at the terrifying, gaping wounds. It was amazing anyone with injuries like that was even still alive.
"Minato... Kushina..." Hiruzen spoke their names with bitterness; his hands trembled.
Don't you go dropping me now... I noted melancholically in my head.
"Hiruzen-sama..." A strained smile appeared on Minato's face again. "Forgive me... I have to leave you..."
The old man turned a desperate gaze to him.
"Please, pass my words to the people of Konoha... I want them not to think of my son as the vessel of a monster... that only brings grief. Let them know him as a hero..."
"Y-yeah..." Hiruzen nodded firmly. "I'll tell them."
"Third..." Kushina said quietly. Hiruzen stepped closer so he could hear her better. "Take care of him..."
"Of course. Don't worry," the old man nodded without hesitation.
"His name... is Naruto..."
…
…
The pull in my chest got even worse...
Kushina's heart stopped.
And it hurt like hell...
Hiruzen watched sadly as the young woman's life ended.
"Kushina-sama," the jonin called, shaking her, but when he turned to the Third, he saw only a slow shake of the head.
The Hokage shifted his gaze to Minato. His eyes had gone lifeless, frozen on the elderly shinobi.
At that moment, the Shinigami moved. With its free hand, the one without the beads, it pulled a tanto from its maw. Then, opening that maw wide, it sucked the "soul" of the Fourth, along with half of the Nine-Tails, into its bottomless stomach. After carefully putting the weapon back, it vanished without sparing anyone a glance.
"Hokage-sama?" asked the shinobi who'd been holding Minato.
"Let's go. We need to take everyone to the hospital... and bury the dead with dignity."
A few days later. Evening
In a spacious office with a view of Konoha, a not-so-young man was once again sitting in the Hokage's chair. Whatever that reincarnator might say, he didn't have any gray hairs yet, so "old man" was a bit of a stretch.
Folding his hands under his chin and lighting his pipe, he sat there, thinking.
Sarutobi Hiruzen was in a foul mood. He had just come back from the cemetery, where they had honored not only two of Konoha's heroes—Minato and Kushina—but also many other Leaf shinobi... and his wife, Biwako. The old lady who'd delivered their baby.
In one moment, problems had piled up higher than his head. But the main question he still couldn't answer was: How? Judging by the wounds on that medic-nin and Biwako, how had someone managed to get into the place where Kushina was giving birth? The Fuinjutsu Division had put the best possible protection seal on that rock. Even he, the Third God of Shinobi, would've had to work on it for a long time to break it. On top of that, there'd been a not-weak team of ANBU on guard outside—operatives who specialized in combat. Yet they were all found strangled; none of them even managed to make a sound—they died right at their posts... After that, the unknown enemy still managed to fight one of the strongest shinobi in the Leaf's entire history—the Fourth Hokage. Even exhausted, Minato, in that state, could've beaten several elite ninja, but he couldn't handle the one who showed up...
Every loss, every burned leaf, echoed as a dull ache in Hiruzen's chest.
In the end, it came out that to pull something like this off, it had to be an insanely strong shinobi. He got into the village in a way the barrier never sensed. Killed so many people... Only someone on the level of Uchiha Madara would be capable of that. The fox's eyes as it broke free had clearly shown a Sharingan, which meant an Uchiha was involved in the incident. But Madara was dead! One of Hiruzen's own sensei, the First Hokage, Hashirama, couldn't have lied... Or could he? Not that it changed much. That enemy wasn't here, unlike a bunch of other problems.
The village was in mourning. A lot of streets and houses were destroyed. That had to be dealt with.
Thankfully, it wasn't as bad as it could've been. As soon as the fighting started, Hiruzen had ordered the young shinobi and civilians hidden under barriers in the bunkers inside the Hokage Rock. The Leaf's future was intact, even if their hearts were wounded. But... time would heal that.
With a sad sigh, Sarutobi exhaled a cloud of smoke, thinking of his wife.
It should heal...
The title of Hokage means a highly respected shinobi who leads the Great Hidden Village of the Leaf. And that title is for life—and even after. Even if a new Hokage is chosen, it doesn't mean the previous one loses his authority.
After the Nine-Tails incident, a village council was convened, and one of the issues raised was the next leader. Hiruzen had readily offered to shoulder that burden again. He understood the village needed a leader, and since Sarutobi already had experience, he was the one who'd handle the aftermath of the tragedy better than anyone.
But one of the councilors—Shimura Danzo—was against it. The councilors' authority was almost equal to that of a Kage. Shimura argued: what kind of Hokage was Hiruzen if he hadn't even managed to protect the Fourth? But Sarutobi defused the situation with a smile, saying he'd hold the post until they found a better candidate.
No one else objected, aside from that same councilor. Even the other two councilors, who often opposed some of Hiruzen's decisions, didn't say a word against it.
And why was that. Sarutobi, though he was a clan ninja, always put the village first. That was the Will of Fire, left behind by the almost-extinct founding clan, the Senju. Despite being one of the strongest in the village and having fought in three wars, the man had stayed soft. At least toward the people of the Land of Fire. It was in his nature to try to solve conflicts peacefully. It wasn't always effective, or even useful. But overall, it worked out okay. The other two councilors disagreed with him on some things, but they respected the title of Hokage and met him halfway. The three of them, by the way, had been on the same team in their youth, led by the Second Hokage. But the Konoha Council also included Danzo—a long-time rival of Hiruzen and pretty much his opposite. Not soft at all, and a fan of radical solutions. In their youth, all four of them had to work together. Later, after the Second's death, it was through that joint work that they managed to create something like a balance of views and, together, lead the village toward prosperity.
Whatever some people might think, Hiruzen, like all the councilors, aimed for Konoha's prosperity. The difference was in the paths they took to get there. Still, the final word was always the Hokage's... even if Shimura sometimes forgot that.
And so, the student of the Second Hokage kept on fulfilling the duties that came with his post.
Uzumaki Naruto's POV
…
Once that nightmare ended, they moved me to a hospital ward, where there were other babies in beds along the sides.
For two days, I just stared at the ceiling and slept. That time was like a fog. Nothing else stuck. Now it's the end of the second day, and I... feel a lot better.
In a short time, I'd gotten really attached to my new parents. I don't know—or don't remember—why, but blood ties mattered to me. And... it was hard to lose them.
Honestly, that applies way more to Kushina. I'd spent almost all my time only with her. For the months I'd been inside her, I mostly felt satisfaction from my progress in manipulating energy, plus a constant warmth and this feeling of support in whatever I tried to do. Without her, the outside world feels so cold... Like they threw me out on the street and then demolished my house right in front of me... Yeah, probably not great to miss a person the same way you'd miss a building? (-_-`)
So my depressive mood started to crack. Besides, what good did it do me anyway? If we're honest, I'd have been evicted from that "house" sooner or later regardless. But there was that warmth I wanted too, just of a different kind now.
Even if it wouldn't have all been smooth, Kushina and Minato were my closest relatives. We could've had a good relationship, mutual support, and all that stuff people like me need. The fact I'm a reincarnator who somehow crawled into the body of their unborn son doesn't bother me at all. My new shell didn't have a personality—what personality are we even talking about at that age—so the shell belonged to no one. Blood ties are undeniable, which means again that Minato and Kushina are my relatives. That's how they should be seen, and the fact my mind appeared in this body doesn't change that at all.
Anyway, again: there's no point thinking about it. They're dead, and I've got to keep existing in this unholy world somehow. Preferably in comfort. And it's still a bit early to think about that. My options for preparing right now are pretty limited.
I swept my "gaze" across a few cribs with "bars" in the rather long room. Once I calmed down, I managed to get my sphere-vision back under control. Meaning I could focus on something, shift my view like I was swiveling a camera floating in the air, or even close the "lens" so I didn't see anything at all.
The room stayed exactly the same as before. I, on the other hand, was slowly getting bored. These two days, I guess, had been a good rest. But with every second, my mind, now recovered, started spitting out more and more intrusive thoughts. The energy was starting to just burst out of me, and it needed direction. So, while there's time, why not start preparing for the future right now?
I "prodded" my chakra core—looked fine. With a light effort of will, I started circulating the energy faster and faster. I clenched my "mighty" little fists, then relaxed them. This energy was so dense... The chakra flowing through my channels was way richer than my soul's energy and, even in a newborn body, surpassed my soul by orders of magnitude.
In the womb, all I'd really done was sometimes send chakra around in circles, without doing anything weird with it. I remembered how members of the Hyuga clan in the anime could block strikes with streams of chakra. So back then, releasing it through those tiny special points—tenketsu, which I barely managed to find and can now feel pretty well—seemed like a bad idea. There were three hundred and sixty-one points—nothing better to do in the womb, so I counted. But now, I'll start slowly trying to let some chakra out.
After about ten minutes, I switched to soul energy. It had gotten stronger, but for some reason my sphere-vision had shrunk compared to what it had been There. As for why, I could only guess it was because of the presence of natural chakra in this world. I literally didn't know what else could be messing with it. Kushina's chakra, even if it was probably different from the world's, had interfered with my soul as well. I should probably be grateful my soul's abilities were only cut by some fraction. Looked like that hit all the abilities that interacted with the outside world. My "feelers" had also gotten a bit harder to make than before.
Those feelers, as far as I remembered, didn't interact with the world at all. Or rather, judging by the resistance I felt when I pushed them out of my body, that wasn't entirely true. But that masked bastard hadn't even noticed them. Which is actually good—I'd just found myself a future project: figure that out. It's not like I've got anything better to do right now anyway.
Twenty minutes later
My mood was getting darker. For another reason, barely related to the last few days' events. Everything around me seemed to grow dimmer, and not because it was evening.
Rage spread through my veins like ice...
With the clang of steel, thoughts overflowing with hatred started echoing in my head.
Pain is the universal language. This world is rotten. It created me exactly like this just to humiliate me. By causing me pain, it clearly showed me it hates me.
But at the same time, the world is blind. It doesn't understand when its actions make others suffer.
But pain gives birth to understanding. Pain is the only way to reach harmony.
This world will know pain. And then it will understand true peace... with me.
"Waa-aa-aaah!" the kid in the next crib suddenly started bawling, cutting off my thoughts.
"A-aa! Mwaaa!"
"Ee-vaaah!"
One after another, to my confusion, the babies around me started crying. What the hell now?
Yeah, I'd shit myself. Literally. And yeah, I was pissed about it. "Cultivating" hatred, you could say. But why react like this? It doesn't even stink... yet.
On the first floor of the hospital
Sarutobi Hiruzen walked into the building, looking grim. Not long ago, he'd held a meeting with the villagers who'd taken part in the fight against the Nine-Tails, though the "old man" hadn't liked how it turned out.
The meeting had been about his new ward, Naruto.
Now, the Hokage had come to check on him.
The hospital was almost in the heart of the village. There was no ANBU security here. Who'd attack a building full of shinobi, even if they were wounded? And do it alone, since getting a pack of shinobi through here unnoticed would be basically impossible.
But, to his surprise, as he approached the stairwell, Sarutobi felt something threatening. He immediately bolted toward where he'd been heading.
At the same time, the escort of a few special shinobi that always followed the Hokage started moving. They caught the hand-signal command from their threat-sensitive leader and instantly headed for different exits. The ninja were hoping to drop the intruder into a kettle, with them on one side and the Kage on the other.
Back to Uzumaki Naruto's POV
Suddenly, the door flew open, and Hiruzen burst in, his two-toned robes swirling around him. (?! ) What the hell is he doing here?! Was he standing outside the door or what? Why?
"Hmm..." He looked around the room. All ten cribs were in place; only kids inside. "Strange."
He said something I didn't get once he'd finished his inspection. I still didn't understand the language. And I had barely any idea how to learn it. But that's something I can work on later.
When the old man rushed in, I got nervous. But then the thought flashed through my head that it was pointless—I couldn't do anything anyway. So I started calming down.
I heard rustling, and before I could even react, a few more ninja appeared in the room. These ones were in black uniforms with gray armor on their torsos and painted porcelain masks.
Is there some kind of masquerade going on around here or what?
"All clear, Hokage-sama. No source of killing intent detected," one of the ANBU operatives reported.
"We lost them..." Hiruzen said darkly. "Sweep the area and the hospital."
"Yes, sir," three shinobi answered at once, then vanished.
The old man kept frowning and glancing around the edges of the room after that. Another half minute later, he let out a heavy sigh and walked over to my crib.
He looks at me, I look at him. To my eyes—which still haven't learned to see the world properly—he's just a dark, blurry silhouette.
"I kept my promise, Naruto..." he said to me, but I still didn't understand the words. "At least, I tried... one of them. I'm sorry, but not all the villagers see you as a hero. The loss of their loved ones has blinded them. Even if they try to show me the opposite. I hope you find the strength in you to forgive these cracked leaves..."
He fell silent for a few seconds.
"Your chakra reacts in time with my voice. And at the same time there are so many different shades in it. An emotional child... I hope you don't cause as much trouble as your mother did," he chuckled to himself.
The door opened again, and this time another old man came in, with a cross-shaped scar under his lips. His clothes were also in two colors—probably white... and something else, darker than the Hokage's.
What the hell is he doing here?!
"Danzo?" Hiruzen was surprised too, though not as much as I was.
"I was going to wait for you at the residence, but I sensed killing intent," he answered coldly, then turned to me for a second. "Is everything alright?"
"No, since someone showed up," the Hokage's frown came back. "We couldn't find them."
"I still propose we leave him with me in Root. The jinchuriki will be safe there."
"And I still say that's not happening," Sarutobi's tone got a lot more heated. "To grow up whole, a child needs to know what care is."
"No. He needs to live through hardship to grow strong and understand his place," Shimura got a glare filling up with anger in response to his words. "Hn. Have it your way."
"I'll arrange surveillance for him. Naruto's safety is my concern. He was entrusted to me, so I'll handle everything else," and just as fast as Hiruzen had gotten angry, he calmed back down. "Why did you come?"
"Funding."
Sarutobi's face twitched.
"Is everything alright, Hokage-sama, Elder-sama?" a nurse suddenly stepped into the room.
"Yes," the one called "Hokage" nodded and waved her off. Then he turned to the other man. "Let's go. This isn't the place."
Well, that was a conversation, I noted once they'd all left. Fantastic. So what the hell am I supposed to think now? Am I moving into Root's basements or what? Yeah?
Time started to gallop.
No, they didn't take me anywhere.
But with each passing day, life didn't feel any easier. If anything, it got harder. My mind, though it had kind of gotten used to it, still missed the constant stream of information and was howling from boredom. Training with energies was, sure, a fun activity. But I couldn't do it non-stop. On top of that, there was the problem of slow progress. That slowness just got more obvious over time. Not only because I kept running out of ideas for what to do, but also because my activity–sleep cycle had shifted more toward activity.
The pressure in my head kept ramping up, like... I'd been locked in solitary. No human interaction, no way to move properly. Even working with energy didn't help shake that feeling off. I don't actually know what solitary is really like—never been. But I guess it's something similar.
Two more weeks passed like that, until my genius mind came up with an equally genius idea. Or rather, after two weeks, I learned to really throw myself into a certain activity—meditation.
Sadly, I didn't have internet access. There wasn't even internet in this world. So I had to meditate by feel, going off whatever I understood "meditation" to be. Focusing on different thoughts, then on the world around me, then on the "inner" side of my being. It was that last one that fascinated me the most—the endless flow of chakra through my channels, which I couldn't exactly see but could feel in crazy detail, so a phantom image of my chakra system formed in my head.
For some reason, meditation never got boring. That wonderful state of calm, as the days went by, took the pressure off me. The days started flying by way, way faster than before. Later, I even started catching myself spending whole days in complete silence doing literally nothing. So I had to start planning things out, setting a goal to spend at least some time every day on self-improvement. Luckily, I had some experience with that—forcing myself to do something useful and a rough idea of what discipline is.
Six months later
Sadly, I hadn't been counting how many days I'd lived since I was born, but over my relatively short life so far, there had been a few events worth a quick mention. They'd moved me several times to different rooms with other kids my age living there. Right now I spend most of my time in a private ward in the same hospital. Sometimes they drag me out to a shared room for the "conditionally-sapient vegetables." In other words, to my peers.
After some amount of time, my paws got strong enough that I learned to walk. It was when they took me to my age group that I got especially physically active. Concentrating on anything more mentally demanding in the middle of constant, unintelligible babbling was harder, so I didn't have many other options. Usually I'd wander around and, like some kind of maniac, stare at the babies for several minutes at a time. Maybe my behavior looked weird from the outside, but sometimes it was fun.
Right now...
A guy with a bored face was standing by my crib, leaning over the bars of my "prison." He was showing me cards with pictures and hieroglyphs and then saying what I was almost a hundred percent sure was the word for whatever was on the card.
"Yoru," he said, showing me a night sky with little stars and a moon. Below was the hieroglyph 夜.
"Y-yo-ru," I repeated. Pretty sure that meant "night."
He suddenly said a word that sounded a lot like "sucky," then pointed at the moon. That threw me, and since I didn't answer, the guy repeated himself and pulled a card with a huge moon from the stack on the nightstand and showed it to me.
"Tsu‑u‑ki‑i," he drew the word out, repeating it.
Aaaah... it finally clicked that I'd just misheard.
"Tsuki. (日)"
So my language lessons had started recently. Honestly, proud of my outstanding intellect—among infants for sure—I spent a bit of time pretending I didn't get what they wanted from me. Not for too long, though. I remembered that in the world of Naruto—now my world—there were "geniuses" who could do a crazy amount at a very young age.
First half hour I played dumb on purpose, the next two... because of "enunciation issues"?
I hadn't practiced speaking before and eventually just forgot about it. But if they'd come to teach me, it meant my body had to be capable of something along those lines.
Fact was, by then my body's eyesight had developed enough for this kind of thing.
And also, I wanted my first word to be something special.
That's where the "enunciation issues" came in.
Imagine my surprise when they handed me a card with three whole hieroglyphs, 査克拉, and showed me a picture I remembered clearly—a little guy with channels and a flame in his stomach. "Sa-ku-ra," if you write it out in romaji. Not to be confused with "sa-kura," which is the local cherry tree with pink leaves. The first has three syllables, the second has two, and they sound different.
The word "chakra" was what I ended up saying first, and for some reason I'm weirdly proud of that now.
At first, I doubted these cards were even supposed to have hieroglyphs on them. What business do babies have learning to read? But, as it turned out later, there's plenty of point.
After about a month, when I'd learned a couple hundred words, the lessons switched to groups of three. So besides me, there were two other kids my age, and still one instructor. And that's when I realized I'd apparently been subconsciously downplaying my own intellect. And way too much at that. Because my peers, who I thought would be at least a little behind, had actually overtaken me. The brains in the two little skulls on either side of me were working so fast they were beating me to the answers! So I had to really push myself for a while before our pace evened out and then I finally pulled ahead.
Are kids at this age really supposed to be able to do that? We aren't even a year old yet, I think.
Apparently, yeah. But the record of the time I lost to babies will forever remain a shameful stain on my life's history... Same as every time I went in my diaper... The only good thing is that no one will ever know.
_____
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