They would all confirm that he was born here.
That this cold, damp, inhospitable place was where he came into the world. And that they wouldn't be lying.
The documents stated his name was Kagerō, in neat, sharp script and wrapped around his wrist with a tiny white band. If questioned, the nurses would smile with professional ease and reply, "Yes, born in the third-week storm. Room C of the Orphan's Ward. The one with the mark."
If pressed, they'd point to the back of his neck where a faint red seal in the shape of a salamander's fang was etched into his skin.
A mark of property.
A mark of fate.
To them, it was proof that he belonged to Amegakure's future. That he was to be shaped into a tool. A soldier. A shinobi. Perhaps, if he lived long enough, even a killer.
But they'd be wrong, too.
Because before he was Kagerō, before the poison had seared itself into his veins before chakra screamed through his small vessels like fire, he had been another person.
A nobody.
Not a soldier. Not a genius.
Just some kid who read books.
A boy from a world without chakra, where war was a fading dream and life, flawed as it was, quiet, forgettable, and secure.
Eventually, he could not recall his former name. It was like attempting to capture mist in a clenched fist, always elusive, never resting. But he recalled enough to understand that this existence was not his initial one.
He recalled death. Or something akin. A silent drifting away, and then darkness. No god. No judgment. Just. the sensation of falling.
And pain.
No gentle transition. No solace.
Simply waking up in a crib, lungs incapable of screaming, nerves on fire from the inside.
Even now, lying swaddled in thin cloth, held in the arms of a worn nun, he still wondered if this was real. Maybe it was a delusion. A dream.
But pain does not lie.
__________________________________
The orphanage took care of his survival. That much, at least, remained the same.
His needs were addressed in plain form. Fed, bathed, dressed. When he wailed, someone was there. When he gazed too intently without a blink, someone fretted. And when his small frame folded into sleep too soon, a doctor was called in.
But nobody looked beyond appearances.
Kagerō's own mind, clear and hot underneath its infant facade, was sinking under monotony.
There were no books. No speech. No movement but jerking limbs and the shiver of metal cribs in the wind. His sole refuge was inwards. Into that warm, alien presence that curled just beneath his skin. Chakra.
As a kid in his previous existence, he'd always been curious about what it would be like to possess supernatural abilities. To sense magic, or energy, or ki moving through his veins. Would it feel like electricity? Flame? Air?
The reality?
It became stale. Quickly.
Yes, it was warm and fuzzy the first few times, like sipping hot cocoa after a cold walk outside. It was his rush. His high. But like all highs, it crashed.
Left him tired.
Drowsy.
Drifting off to sleep without warning.The nurses believed he was sick.
The doctors tested for fevers, parasites, and chakra collapse early onset.
Nothing definitive.
To them, he was simply one more peculiar child in a rain-drenched orphanage of ghosts and state secrets.
But Kagerō knew better.
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With days of painstaking experimentation—of spasmodic brows and furrowed, chubby-faced grimaces under his blanket—he at last achieved something new:
Stillness.
Not the stillness of sleep. Not the stillness of observation.
A state of meditation in which he might sense chakra without draining it. Where it ran just below the surface, not thrust, not pulled, merely existing.
It was like dipping a brush into paint but never drawing across the page.
He remained there for hours. Suspended in his own breath. Sucking slowly on his bottle when hunger pangs arose, then withdrawing once again into himself. His grown-up brain trapped in a toddler's body had discovered its first real respite from powerlessness.
He did not try anything reckless. No muscle upgrades. No energy surges. No forced awakenings.
He'd learned enough xianxia novels back in his previous life to know better.
One misstep and he might be the cautionary tale: a baby who brashly propagated energy and cooked his own heart like a potato chip. And he didn't even have a benevolent sect elder in reserve to mend him with pill clouds and dragon blood.
No. He would go slow.
--------------------------------------------------------
That's when he saw it.
His chakra..altered.
Initially, it had been like mist. Light. Thin. In a hurry to get away. It dissipated immediately when he barely touched it.
Gaseous.
But with time—precisely after successive, cautious passage through his body—it condensed. Coalesced.
What had been vapour was now a stream. Denser. Heavier. Still flowing but with mass.
It wasn't a sight, but he could sense it. The manner pressure is sensed in your ears before rain.
It no longer disappeared the instant he willed it to stop. It persisted.
Chakra, he found, could change.
And not merely in application. In essence.
__________________________________
He started constructing a hypothesis.
Chakra, as the world described, was created through the fusion of physical energy from the body and spiritual energy from the mind.
But what if those two elements were unequal in most individuals?
What if an individual possessed excess of one side?
In his case, an adult's mind had been stuffed into the newborn body. His spiritual power—his will, his awareness, his experience—was twenty or thirty years in advance of his body.
The chakra he generated was initially unstable. All mental energy is precariously attached by physical capability.
Gaseous. Inapplicable. Ungraspable.
But the more he had cycled it, the more his body increased—even incrementally—the more it steadied. The more it is balanced. The spiritual force flowed, tied itself to his limited physical force, and became functional.
Liquid chakra.
It was still delicate. It drained him after too much time inside it. But it no longer disappeared like breath on a windowpane.
It held.
He couldn't tell if this was specific to him, or if it was simply the way chakra developed naturally in all people. But this change—this inner alchemy—felt like advancement.
So he gave it a name.
Not out loud, of course. His baby tongue was still too awkward for words. But in his head, he referred to it as:
"Usable Chakra Reserve."
Not big. But actual. Measurable.
A cup of water rather than mist in the air.
__________________________________
He considered what this was telling him.
If chakra was spiritual and physical energy, then a person's chakra reserves would be tied to their potential—body and mind synchronized.
The body was simpler to cultivate. Diet, exercise, training. All normal.
But the mind?
The mind was more complicated. And he had no way of knowing how long his cognitive edge would last. He hadn't been a genius in his previous incarnation. No prodigy. Just interested. Just hungry.
Perhaps by the time he was six or seven, his advantage would wear off. Other kids would catch up. Their chakra would stabilize. They'd be taught. Trained. Fed jutsu and shaped into weapons.
Kagerō couldn't risk being just on par with them by then. Especially considering how shinobi from the major villages had better resources, teacher, environment and even cheats like sharingan.
He had to be ahead.
Desperately.
Because average in this world meant one of two things:
You died in the crossfire of someone else's ambition…
Or you were a pawn in someone else's war.
And in Amegakure? You weren't even recalled.
__________________________________
Kagerō then meditated.
And learned his breath.
And observed his chakra move.
As the rain murmured against the windows and the ward lights burned in exhausted cycles, Kagerō slowly formed himself.
Not a shinobi. Not yet.
But something much more dangerous at present:
A child who knew the system.
And intended to destroy it.