The first thing he knew was pressure. An awful, crushing weight on all sides, squeezing the air from lungs that felt too small, too new. Then, the cold. It was a deep, damp chill that seeped right into his bones—bones that felt fragile and alien. A desperate, gasping reflex kicked in, and he dragged in a breath. The air was thin, frigid, and stank of wet dirt, charcoal, and underneath it all, the coppery tang of old blood.
*I can't move.*
Pure, undiluted panic fired through nerves that weren't fully his own. His arms and legs were useless logs, flailing weakly against the rough cloth swaddling him. A coffin? Was he buried? He tried to yell, to scream for help, but what tore out of his throat was a thin, pathetic wail that made his stomach clench with horror.
*That… that's not my voice.*
His vision was a mess of smeared shadows and dull light. He squeezed his eyes shut—*these aren't my eyes*—and scrambled for a memory, any memory. Headlights. Blinding and fast. The screech of tires tearing through the night. Then… nothing. The end. He'd made peace with that.
This wasn't peace. This was a fresh hell.
As the sheer terror receded a fraction, the blurry world started to make a grim sort of sense. He was bundled in a rough, scratchy blanket, lying in a wooden cradle. The room was small, walls made of unpainted timber, lit by a single, grimy window showing a gray sky. The sound that really drove it home wasn't the silence; it was the other cries. A chorus of weak, miserable wails from all around him.
An orphanage.
The thought landed like a physical blow, knocking the phantom air from his lungs. He was a baby. A helpless, drooling, *infant*. And he was completely, utterly alone.
"Shh, now, little one. I know. I know."
A woman's voice, frayed at the edges but gentle, cut through the panic. A face swam into his blurry view. Young, but with eyes that looked decades older, her hair pulled into a simple, messy knot. She wore a dark, plain kimono. She lifted him, and the world tilted nauseatingly.
As she shifted him in her arms, his gaze drifted over her shoulder. There was a small, low table against the wall. On it sat a pitiful collection of things. A chipped clay cup. A stuffed animal, so worn its species was a mystery. And next to them, two things that made his new, tiny heart feel like it was being squeezed in a vise.
Two photographs in simple frames.
The first showed a young couple. The man had spiky, silver hair and a kind, ordinary face. The woman… her hair was a riot of brilliant red, tumbling over her shoulders, and on her cheeks were faint, whisker-like marks.
The word rose from the depths of his other life, a cold stone of certainty dropping in his gut.
The second photo was the same couple, but the man was now holding a tiny, blanketed bundle. *Him.* Their smiles were wider, blindingly full of a future that had been stolen.
And placed before the pictures, like relics on an altar, were two dented, scratched-up forehead protectors. The Konoha spiral was there, but a deep, vicious groove was gouged through each one.
The symbol of the dead.
The caretaker followed his line of sight, her sigh heavy with a grief that wasn't hers to carry. "Your parents," she said, her voice thick. "they were good people.they were killed during the 2 shinobi world war."
It all crashed down on him then. The rebirth. The helpless body. The orphanage. The red-haired mother. The dead shinobi parents. It wasn't a nightmare; it was a diagnosis.
He was in Konoha. And he was trapped inside the bloody, beautiful story of *Naruto*.
A sound ripped from him then, a raw, ragged wail that had nothing to do with hunger or a wet cloth. It was the sound of a soul screaming in pure, helpless grief.
As the woman tried to soothe him, something flickered at the edge of his sight. A cold, blue rectangle of light, like a tear in reality.
**[ System Initializing... ]**
It hung there for a second, a promise of something, anything, to hold onto. Then it glitched, the text scrambling into nonsense.
**[ Error ....Error occurred ]**
A sharp, staticky pain needled behind his eyes.
**[Legacy Bloodline Interference... Unstable Matrix...]**
**[Compensating... Transferring Core Package...]**
**[Package Delivered. System Integrity... Failing.]**
The silence in his head was deafening.
He was in the cold room, with the crying and the rocking. But he was different. He could feel the knowledge sitting inside him, dormant but real. A seed waiting for water and sun. There was no guide, no menu, no easy way. It was just him now. His will, his spirit, and the deep well of chakra he could feel sleeping in his gut, a legacy from his red-haired mother.
The caretaker, misreading his sudden stillness, laid him back in the cradle. "There now. Just sleep."
He stared up at the cracked wooden ceiling, his mind no longer spinning in panic, but sharpening to a single, cold point.
No system. No family. No one coming to save him.
Just a secret, burning in the dark. And a lifetime to learn how to make it his own.