[Brain Storage Area: Everyone is welcome to store yours here. If I get writer's block, I'll sneak a few to supplement my own.]
(PS: This book ignores all content related to the Boruto manga; the setting only goes up to the Boruto movie.)
"Hokage… the Sengoku era… and I ended up in this damned Uchiha clan. It's like I've been asked to die all over again!"
By the river not far from the Uchiha Clan Compound, a long stream wound its way through the entire settlement.
Six-year-old Uchiha Kure sat cross-legged on the riverbank. Picking up a few smooth pebbles with pleasing patterns, he flicked his wrist lightly and sent them skipping across the water.
As the stones bounced across the surface, leaving ripples behind, he stared at the shimmering river and couldn't help complaining about his miserable fate.
In his previous life, he had barely reached the age of twenty-four before something happened—he probably died.
Anyway, the result was the same: he woke up in a daze and had transmigrated into this extremely dangerous world. Worse still, it was during the most brutal era imaginable, and he had been born into the most warlike and unstable clan of them all.
His parents in this life had been killed two years ago on the battlefield by members of the Hatake Clan.
Logically speaking, that made him an orphan. He was then adopted by the current Great Elder of the clan—his distant cousin in name.
His biological younger brother, Uchiha Taki, had been adopted by the clan head, Uchiha Tajima.
That's right.
The father of the most infamous antagonist in the ninja world—the mastermind behind countless conspiracies in the early and middle stages of history—the so-called Asura of the Ninja World…
Uchiha Madara.
Of course, the current "Asura of the Ninja World" was just a chuunibyou kid right now, walking around all day with a self-important expression and saying the same lines to everyone he met:
"Did you train today?"
"Let's go to the training ground and spar."
The frequency of these two sentences coming out of Madara's mouth was about the same as people saying "Have you eaten?" or "Nice weather today" in Kure's previous life.
As for how the brothers Kure and Taki managed to attach themselves to the two most powerful figures in the Uchiha clan…
Apparently, during that battle two years ago, the clan head had been set up by the Nara Clan.
Their own "cheap father," a quasi-Kage-level shinobi, had voluntarily stayed behind to hold the line. He sacrificed himself so that the clan head and the Great Elder could escape safely, preserving the clan's leadership.
Strictly speaking, the adoption actually lowered their generational status. Their parents had originally been from the same generation as the Great Elder and the clan head.
But even a three- or four-year-old like Taki could understand priorities. Seniority meant nothing compared to having powerful backers.
Besides, the Great Elder was already over forty and had never had children. With Kure as his only nominal son, it was basically like gaining a child in old age. That meant Kure could obtain almost any cultivation resource he wanted.
After all, in this world, there were very few things the Uchiha clan couldn't get their hands on.
Uncle Tajima's household, on the other hand, was extremely lively.
Including the adopted Taki, he had six sons in total.
The eldest, Uchiha Madara, was half a year younger than Kure.
Then there were Uchiha Taki, Uchiha Izuna, and Uchiha Gen, all three years younger than Kure.
The youngest were the twins Uchiha Tsuki and Uchiha Hi, who had just celebrated their second birthday yesterday.
Before transmigrating, Kure had been extremely familiar with the plot of Naruto. During his own chuunibyou phase, he had fantasized countless times about becoming an Uchiha—awakening the Sharingan, activating Susanoo, and crushing the entire world.
But now that he had actually become an Uchiha, he realized that his former self had just been someone who admired from afar without understanding the reality.
In this era, knowing the plot of Naruto was almost useless.
The events depicted by Masashi Kishimoto wouldn't happen for decades.
Most of the knowledge stored in his brain provided no help at all for the situation he currently faced.
The original story barely mentioned the Sengoku period, but from the few flashbacks in Madara and Hashirama's memories, one thing was absolutely clear.
The Sengoku era was unimaginably brutal.
Major battles every three days. Minor skirmishes every two.
The mortality rate was terrifyingly high, and the average life expectancy was terrifyingly low.
Even in a super clan like the Uchiha, those who lived past twenty were still a minority.
Countless so-called genius ninja were sent to the battlefield the moment they turned eight.
Most of them became pitiful names people talked about a few years later.
Those who survived would simply be thrown back into the next battle, repeating the cycle.
Under such circumstances, let alone surviving until the main plot of Naruto, Kure wasn't even sure he could live long enough to see the founding of the Hidden Leaf Village.
After all, he knew exactly how absurd the "Gundam-level" battles between those two monsters became toward the end of the Sengoku period.
If he didn't reach Kage-level strength, he feared that even the shockwave from one of their casual attacks might kill him.
However, Madara and Hashirama founded the village when they were around thirty years old.
That meant at least ten to twenty years remained before that time.
The reason Kure had been so anxious recently was because he suddenly remembered something Madara once said in the original story.
When Uchiha Madara first met Senju Hashirama, he mentioned that he had once had five brothers.
At that time, only one of them remained alive—
Uchiha Izuna.
In the anime, that line was simply background information meant to highlight how cruel the Sengoku era was.
But now that Kure was living in this world himself, he had no choice but to treat that single sentence as critical intelligence.
If you thought about it carefully, the amount of information hidden in that one line was terrifying.
As mentioned earlier, including the adopted Taki, Madara indeed had five brothers.
In this era, four deaths within one family wasn't unusual.
But the problem was this:
Madara was only seven or eight years old when he first met Hashirama.
Which meant that event would happen within the next year or so.
In other words—
Within this short period of time, the four brothers Taki, Gen, Hi, and Tsuki would all die.
No matter how you looked at it, that was extremely strange.
Putting aside the two-year-old twins for a moment, Taki and Gen were only three or four years old. Even after three years, they would only be six.
Children of that age would never be sent to the battlefield.
Which meant they could only die inside the Uchiha Clan Compound itself.
So what kind of situation could lead to children inside the clan's headquarters being slaughtered like that?
Actually, Kure didn't particularly care about the exact reason.
But the children inside the compound weren't just Tajima's sons.
Right now—
he himself was also one of those children living inside the compound.
Originally, he had believed he could at least live peacefully until the age of eight before experiencing the true brutality of the Sengoku era on the battlefield.
At the moment, the Uchiha Clan Compound was one of the few relatively safe places in the entire era.
But now that he thought about it…
Whether he could even survive the next two years was already a question.
During the Sengoku period, sending children to the battlefield was indeed common.
However, for a major clan like the Uchiha, children younger than eight were rarely sent to the front lines.
The reason was simple.
This world was fundamentally different from the one he came from.
On Earth, as long as someone held a firearm, their combat power was almost the same regardless of age.
Some people even believed that a bullet fired by a child could be more dangerous. That was why ruthless warlords often organized child soldiers.
But the Naruto world was completely different.
Here, ninjas relied heavily on individual strength.
The combat power a Chunin could unleash far exceeded that of a dozen Genin.