Chapter One: Rubatosis. The unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat.
Thankfully, I didn't have to go through the trauma of birth while being aware. Or should I say rebirth? Eh, whatever. Not that important.
In all actuality, I expected this to happen, though not quite so soon, nor so boringly.
Should I be going the DoS route to clear this up? … Nah. If people were reading this like every other SI-OC fic I'd encountered, then they should've known that I was going to drag things out, no matter how much I wanted to be brisk.
But.
Those were needless details, and I was already rambling too much. Time for my twenty-words-or-less explanation, One Punch Man style!
Yo. I'm Minahiru Ryūtama. Welcome to my screw-up of canon, peasants. Have fun.
It wasn't the chakra.
It wasn't the fact that I'd died.
It was simply the problem of having too much brain for too little of a head. My Bodysnatcher no Jutsu stuffed the soul of a girl in her mid-to-late teens into the body of a little, newborn infant, who honestly did not deserve what happened to it.
As a result? Migraines, very painful ones, while the infant's brain developed enough to contain all the memories needed. I'm one-hundred percent certain that I'd lost memories in the process, only retaining the bare bones. Things like my name, general personality and appearance, my most precious things and people
And… that's pretty much of what I remember of a life long gone. I didn't even remember how I died.
No wonder I had next to no trouble letting go of that past.
But the fact remained - Farah Ekmekçioglu had died and had somehow, someway, slipped unnoticed through the machinery that was post-mortem judgement and into the body of a newborn girl.
As far as I knew, I never stopped crying . I'd never had a fantabulous pain tolerance, and hey, when you have the synapses of a newborn? Hoo-wee, but did I ever have a set of lungs on me.
(It was new. Being loud, that was. I'd learned to be quiet, before. Not now, apparently.)
The only thing that made me stop? The most cliche (and terrifying) way of making squalling, reincarnated (and normal) babies quieten and possibly frighten them to death - Kyūbi.
Hmm, how to describe this? Well, I guess I should explain the chakra first.
Usually, kiddies were born with locked chakra systems. This was why civilians didn't have the capability to defy physics like ninja. Only people with unlocked chakra held the key to unlock other people's chakra - in other words, ninja.
It was a really bad idea to unlock the chakra of an infant, because, you know, they're little squishy red balls of flesh, cartilage, and impressive screaming. Guess what happened when the Kyūbi rampaged for about the span of two minutes through Konoha?
Every man, woman, and child got minorly infected with the Kyūbi's chakra, but children were the most susceptive. The weakest died. Miscarriages, tumors, illness ran rampant along with pure destruction. While the ninja were more resilient, no person went spared.
It's horrific, as you can imagine. What's more? The Kyūbi unlocked every child's chakra system, so infants also died from simple chakra stress. When you couple that with a person who's never felt chakra in their life, only pictured it?
I'm surprised my second life didn't end prematurely.
(Suddenly, I'm really, really glad Earth never unlocked chakra. A bijū was worse than any hydrogen bomb, if they decided to get stinking mad.)
As it was, well. I will say but one word - pain. Also: imagine if your blood was replaced with acid. Yeah. It's that level of fun.
I pretty much shut up after that. What was a pathetic migraine compared to the Kyūbi? It was like trying to compare a lake to the ocean - not even a contest.
Of course, newly-acquired pain tolerance levels led to me feeling very much awake thanks to the pressure in my head, which led to me being bored and investigating my surroundings, which led to discovering my situation.
I'm pretty sure my first thought was, oh. Oh, my. Then the second was, screw it, my existential crisis can wait. I'm sleeping on this, and I'm going to freak out in the morning.
I… didn't really have an existential crisis, actually. I couldn't remember a lot, so there wasn't a lot to mourn. Plus, I had a baby's span of attention and my focus kept getting grabbed by others things. All I could remember about my friends and family was their names, general appearance, and that I'd loved them.
You couldn't mourn something you couldn't remember.
(I was always a bit of a psychopath.)
So, I moved on to other things… such as the pretty colors in my head that eerily coincided with the other squalling brats and hassled nursemaids. Remember that at this point, I didn't know that the acidic terror that was Kyūbi was Kyūbi. Even if I had my suspicions, I eventually dismissed my budding sensory ability.
Besides, apparently I had asthma in this life, leading to coughing and hacking if I so much as laughed. I will tell you right now that breathlessness is incredibly stressing and if you die, you better hope it's not by drowning or strangulation.
It's scary.
(I guess that's where I started to grow my backbone. First, I lived through the Kyūbi Attack. Then, I survived multiple asthma attacks and the irritating sensation of chakra in me. Imagine if you had warm tree sap smeared onto your arm and it dried there. It's weird, it shouldn't be there, and it's damn near impossible to get off.)
(I always hated tree sap.)
It was at that point that I figured out I was in Japan, and likely female. One of the nursemaids had smiled wearily at me and had called me "Ryū-chan." Me being the weeb I was, I knew 'ryū' meant 'dragon' and 'chan' was meant usually for females unless you wanted a cute address for a guy.
Or something.
Weeaboo as I was, I was not an expert on honorifics.
Even so, I probably had a sick name if I had 'ryū' in it. Any dragon, whether Western or Eastern, was awesome. (I like dragons. Childish? Yes. Do I care? No.)
I will spare you the humiliation that is infancy and move on to when I was able to walk, talk, and eat semi-solids alongside formula. I will tell you this - don't get reincarnated unless you're blissfully unaware of your past life. Basically everything about being a baby is a pain, literally or figuratively.
Today was the first day I would go outside.
Today was also when I figured out where the hell I was.
I'd assumed Japan when I figured out that the adults were speaking Japanese, but I didn't leave out other possibilities, such as the Ninja Continent, or maybe even Dragon Ball Earth or One Piece (in which case I was fucked because I hadn't watched either anime). Maybe I was in Amestris, or behind Wall Maria. I could've been on Death Note Earth.
All I could think when I saw a jōnin and his flak-jacketed team was shit.
Because the Elemental Nations? The place full of mercenaries and assassins? The place where they told physics to take a hike and gave it a kick out the door for good measure? The place where Obitobi, Zetsu, Madara, and Kaguya presided over humanity; the place where Naruto and Sasuke duked it out in the Valley of the End?
I was not the person to be reborn in this place.
… Well, at least if I wanted to influence things, I could do it directly, considering the team's jackets had been green, therefore I was in Konoha…
Then I remembered one little factor -
Danzo.
Greetings, thou who hast stumbled upon this fledgeling, tiny story. Welcome to hell and damnation.
Alright, I'll stop being dramatic. But I want to thank you, dear reader, who has deemed this interesting enough to read. Hopefully, you'll grow to like this story and my SI-OC, Minahiru Ryūtama.
I will say this now - I don't intend to have romance for a very, very long time, and even when I bring it in, it won't be a main focus. I think that once I get into the romance, it'll be in the hypothetical sequel, centered around The Last and getting to Boruto's graduation. Yeah. That far away. But I'm getting too ahead of myself.
The rating, I'm 99.9% certain, will rise. Sorry about that. If you don't like it... well, why are you reading this in the first place? I don't even know if I'll follow through with Renascent. That being said, while I will say that the next chapter will come fairly soon, don't expect frequent updates nor a fixed schedule to which I will conform to. This was published on a whim and it will remain so. Sorry to disappoint.
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto. Naruto belongs to Masashi Kishimoto, and that's not my name.
With that - Iggy OUT.