The days turned into weeks, and the rumor of the Uchiha massacre went from a fresh trauma to a tragic note in Konoha's recent history. People returned to their routines. For Kenji, that normalcy was his perfect cover.
His life was reduced to a Spartan cycle of three objectives: survival, observation, and training.
The shed was no longer temporary. He fortified it from within, securing loose boards, creating a hiding place among the rotting wood where he kept his meager treasures: a threadbare blanket stolen from a clothesline, more canteens, a piece of broken mirror, and a carefully managed supply of dried fruit and stale bread. It was the hideout of an urban animal.
His training was brutal and self-taught, guided by his memory of anime and the ruthless logic of a criminal.
Chakra Control: Without a master, the Tree Climber was hell. He spent entire days in front of a tree in a secluded grove, trying to get his feet to grip the trunk. Time and again, he fell. The energy escaped in erratic bursts or stagnated, unable to flow. His frustration was a poison. Until one day, exhausted and with bleeding feet, he remembered a detail from the manga: it wasn't strength, it was balance. A constant, perfectly even release.
He closed his eyes, ignoring the pain. He breathed. He visualized the chakra not as a punch, but as a thin, even layer of glue emanating from every pore of his sole. He released it.
And he stuck. For three glorious seconds, before his control faltered and he crashed to the ground with a thud. It didn't matter. He had done it. The beginning. From then on, it was a matter of repetition. After a week, he could climb ten meters before failing. His control, though still rudimentary, was no longer nonexistent.
The Sharingan: He used it with extreme restraint, only minutes a day, to avoid exhaustion and to prevent his eyes from becoming accustomed to a level of activity he couldn't sustain. He activated it in front of his broken mirror, studying the slow rotation of a tomoe. He used it to observe insects, to track the flight of a bird, storing those movement patterns in a mind already adept at calculating trajectories and weak points. He didn't copy techniques because he had none to copy. But he was learning to see.
The Body: His five-year-old physique began to change. It wasn't the muscular build of a mini-monster like Rock Lee, but the emaciated thinness gave way to a lean yet sinewy physique. Agility increased. He could run longer, climb better, move silently. He practiced falls, rolls, how to cushion a blow. The martial arts of his past life were rudimentary, more about low blows and using the environment than elegant katas, and he adapted them to this new body.
The Academy was both his obsession and his dilemma.
From the thick branches of a tree at the edge of the training grounds, he became a specter. He watched the instructors, the children his own age—Sasuke, Naruto, Sakura, the others—repeating basic exercises. He saw the shuriken coordination drills, the chakra-shaping exercises for the Transformation Jutsu, the sprints.
He learned. Mentally, he rehearsed every movement. He criticized the children's mistakes. He analyzed the instructors' cursory explanations, filling in the gaps with his theoretical knowledge. He knew that the Shadow Clone required a massive amount of chakra and brutal control over Yang release. That the Transformation Jutsu was a complex illusion that altered perception. Theory, all theory.
But he needed practice. He needed the systematic knowledge only the Academy could provide, and the identity it bestowed. A record, a name, a place in society. Without it, he would always be a ghost, an outcast with no access to the scrolls, the missions, the information network.
How could he enroll? He had no parents. No family record. Appearing out of nowhere, a six-year-old boy (he was nearing the entry age) with no past, would raise suspicion. He would be interrogated. A simple medical exam would reveal his Uchiha chakra system, unique in its energy signature to any trained sensor. Or worse, someone might recognize the vague resemblance to the extinct Clan.
It was a problem with no immediate solution.
One afternoon, while watching an instructor review the basic hand seals for the Cloning Jutsu, frustration overwhelmed him. He knew the seals by heart: Tiger, Goat, Monkey… but executing them without the correct chakra flow was useless. And he didn't dare attempt to mold chakra for a jutsu without supervision; one mistake could shatter his tenketsu or exhaust him to death.
His gaze shifted to the edge of the field. There stood Uzumaki Naruto, a tadpole with yellow hair and garish orange clothes, ignored by everyone, awkwardly struggling with his own chakra. The future savior of the world, now an outcast. And a few meters away, Uchiha Sasuke, the last "official" Uchiha, practicing shuriken-jutsu with an obsessive, cold intensity, his black eyes filled with a hatred that Kenji understood all too well, albeit for different reasons.
They have a place here, he thought, not with envy, but with cold calculation. They are visible. I am a hole in the world. To move, I need an identity.
The solution, when it came, wasn't a flash of genius. It was a return to his most sordid roots.
He was loitering near the civil archives, a low-security administrative building, considering the possibility of stealing or forging a record, when he saw him. A woman, weighed down with packages and holding a small child's hand, emerged from the registration office. From her open bag, as she bent down to pick up something the child had dropped, a paper stamp and a folded document slipped out.
Kenji slipped past like a shadow. By the time the woman walked away, distracted, he already had the document in his hands. It wasn't a family registration. It was an application for enrollment at the Ninja Academy, already stamped, but blank. It only had the official seal and the bureaucratic signature of receipt. An empty form, waiting to be filled out.
His heart pounded, not from nerves, but with the excitement of a hunter spotting his prey. It wasn't a complete identity, but it was a foot in the door. An official, legitimate form might be enough for a first enrollment if he presented it with confidence. He would need a name. A story. And above all, he would need to blend in with dozens of other eager children.
He folded the precious piece of paper and tucked it against his chest. The plan was beginning to take shape. It wouldn't be easy. He would have to create a character from scratch: an orphan from a minor village, a refugee in Konoha, whose parents had died in some insignificant conflict. Something so commonplace it would be boring, so tragic it would discourage further questions.
He returned to his shed at dusk, his mind racing. He was no longer just a ghost observing. He had a concrete objective, a method. The Academy was no longer an insurmountable wall, but a system that could be deceived.
He sat in his corner, lit a tiny stolen candle, and unfolded the form. In the flickering light, with a pencil he'd taken from a trash can, he began to write his new character's name.
Kaito. Just Kaito. No last name. A common name, easy to forget.
The Yakuza's shadow was about to step into the light. Not to join, but to infiltrate. To learn, to grow, and to one day cease being a victim of the shinobi world and become a predator within it.
Outside, in the Konoha night, a cold wind blew through the trees. Kenji, or Kaito, smiled. It was the smile of a wolf sniffing at the corral fence, deciding that, for now, it would be wiser to disguise himself as a sheep.