Dawn's light filtered through the rotting boards of the shed, drawing lines of dancing dust. Kenji hadn't slept. His mind, that of an adult accustomed to night watches and paranoia, had been spinning in a closed loop: pain, assessment, planning.
The boy's body protested with every heartbeat. Hunger gnawed at his insides, but thirst was quelled for now. The first thing was recognition. Of himself. Of his new weapon.
He sat, his back against the cold wall, and closed his eyes. Not to meditate, but to sort through the files of his past. Saturday nights, borrowed manga, endless theories on online forums. Naruto. It wasn't just entertainment anymore; now it was a survival manual.
Concept 1: Chakra. Physical energy + spiritual energy. It is drawn from the cells and mixed with life experience at the chakra's gathering point, the hara, the center of the abdomen. Then it flows through the chakra circulatory system, a network distinct from the bloodstream, toward the 365 tenketsu, release points.
He opened his hand and concentrated. Not on a technique, but on feeling. Something responded, a weak, hesitant current that sprang from his center and snaked up his arm. It was clumsy, inefficient. Like trying to write with your non-dominant hand, he thought. It was expending more energy than it was channeling. He needed control. And for that, according to the canon, there was…
Concept 2: Control Exercises. Molding chakra in the feet to walk on water or trees. He didn't have a lake, but the principle was the same: constant and precise release. He tried, directing a thread of that energy toward the sole of his bare foot. Nothing happened. He didn't even know how to "release" it correctly. Frustration. He tried again, more roughly. A small flash of heat, and a sharp pain in his ankle. Too much. You forced it. You'll hurt yourself.
He took a deep breath, suppressing the urge to curse. Control was about finesse, not brute force. It was about learning the exact pressure needed to pull a trigger without the weapon moving. He would have to train him from scratch.
Concept 3: The Eyes. The Sharingan. The cursed legacy of the Uchiha. It was activated by severe trauma, an emotional shock that transformed chakra into a catalyst for mutating the retinas. The Original child… had seen Itachi. He had felt absolute fear. That should have been enough.
Kenji brought his fingers to his eyelids. He hesitated. Part of him didn't want to know. Those eyes were both a treasure and a death sentence. But ignorance was a luxury he couldn't afford. He searched for a puddle of rainwater among the rotting wood. He knelt before it, his childlike, emaciated reflection staring back at him.
He concentrated. Not on a trauma he didn't feel, but on the chakra itself. He directed a flow, this time more carefully, toward his eyes. It wasn't to activate anything, it was to… feel.
It was as if a switch deep in his brain, one he hadn't installed, flipped.
A sudden warmth, not painful but intensely vivid, erupted behind his eyeballs. His vision of the puddle transformed. The world didn't slow down, but it became denser with information. He saw the microscopic turbulence of the water, the grains of dust floating with sharp trajectories, the subtle shifts of light in his own pupil. And in the center of his irises, a faint but unmistakable blood-red hue, with a single black tomoe, small and unstable, slowly rotating.
A one-tomoe Sharingan. The most rudimentary stage. But it was his. Irrefutable proof of what he was. An Uchiha.
He deactivated it immediately, cutting off the flow of chakra. Normal vision returned, along with a slight dizziness and a palpable tiredness in his eyes. It consumes energy. A lot. I can't keep it active yet.
He stared at his reflection, now normal. The plan was reformulated. Those eyes… they were the key to copying techniques, to perceiving the flow of enemy chakra, to seeing through illusions. But they were also a scarlet flag. If anyone saw them, he would be dead. Danzo, the Anbu, the Hokage himself… or Itachi, if he suspected he had left witnesses.
He couldn't afford to be seen. Not yet.
He stood up, ignoring the creaking of his joints. He peered with extreme caution through a crack in the floorboards. Outside, Konoha was waking up. The morning sun bathed the streets, merchants were beginning to open their stalls, a few civilians hurried by. The world went on. The massacre of an entire clan was, for most, a distant rumor, a shinobi affair best left unspoken.
He saw a team of Genin pass by, not much older than his current body, laughing and shoving each other. They were weak, careless. But they were within the system. They had a place, food, training. He was a ghost, a continuity error.
His gaze fell upon a fruit stand an old man was beginning to set up. The man was distracted, arranging apples in a precarious pyramid. The opportunity was clear, sordid, and familiar. Theft. Not out of ambition, but out of sheer necessity.
But first, control. If he was going to move among the people, if he was going to steal unnoticed, he needed to master his body. This alien body.
He spent the morning in the dimness of the shed, doing basic exercises. Modified push-ups (he couldn't do a full one), squats, stretches. Every movement was clumsy; the neuromuscular coordination of an adult in a child's body didn't fit. He had to relearn everything.
And between sets, he returned to the chakra. Not to project it, but to feel it circulating. To try to guide a steady stream to the tip of a finger. Sometimes he failed. Sometimes he felt the energy escape, wasting away in the air. But little by little, after hours of exhausting repetition, the current became a little less erratic. A little more obedient.
It was minuscule progress. Insignificant to any ninja at the academy. But for Kenji, every atom of control gained was one more bullet in the magazine, one more millimeter of edge on his knife.
By midday, hunger was a sharp pain. The Sharingan and the exercise had depleted his reserves. He peered through the crack. The old man at the fruit stand was serving a customer.
This was it.
He dusted himself off, smoothed his dark hair, and made sure his normal brown eyes showed no trace of red. He breathed, becoming not a frightened child, but a shadow.
He left the shed and blended into the flow of civilians, moving with a low, swift determination that drew no attention. He approached the stand from the blind side. Her small, agile hand slithered like a snake between the baskets. Her fingers closed around two firm apples. In the same movement, she turned and disappeared between two adjacent stalls, without looking back.
Her heart pounded, but not from fear. It was from the adrenaline rush of a successful operation. She returned to the shed, her temporary refuge, and devoured the first apple with animalistic voracity. The sugar hit her system, a wave of tangible energy.
As she chewed the second, more slowly, she listened. Voices of civilians passing nearby spoke in low, worried tones.
"The Uchiha Military Police... all dead in one night."
"Itachi Uchiha... I thought he was a loyal prodigy."
"Something was wrong with that clan. Too proud, too powerful."
It seemed they would soon declare Itachi Uchiha an S-class criminal. Good. It meant there wouldn't be an open manhunt for survivors. It meant he could breathe, just a little, as long as he wasn't recognized.
He finished the apple, put the core and seeds in his backpack (just in case), and lay down. The physical exhaustion, real and profound, was beginning to overcome the hypervigilance of his mind.
He looked at his hands, now a little firmer. Then, at the crack through which the light of the setting sun filtered.
He wasn't a hero. He wasn't a ninja who dreamed of becoming Hokage. He was an intruder, a parasite in the body of a victim, in a village that had sacrificed a clan for its "stability."
And from the shadows, with the sour taste of the stolen apple still in his mouth and the potential of a Sharingan latent in his eyes, Kenji Tanaka began to devise his first real plan in the shinobi world.
The learning process began now. And he would do it his way: dirty, pragmatic, and merciless.