From the memorandums of Namikaze Minato,

Chapter 1

If you had the opportunity to get reborn in the Narutoverse, which era would you choose?

Well. Probably the canon era, obviously. If you were paranoid about getting killed during to the dangerous lifestyle (which you totally should be) Naruto's era was the best. It was comparatively peaceful and by the time shit hit the fan, there were a lot of strong characters around to support you. It was the ideal era if you loved the series, Konoha and its people and it was also interesting to see how your decisions might impact the timeline.

If for some reason though the canon era was out, which era would you chose then? Well, maybe Kakashi's era. Sure, the third shinobi war was bad but you'd be a kid at that time and by downplaying your skills, might be able to avoid the worst of it. Then you'd have fifteen-odd years of peace to look forward too. You'd be at least chuunin rank by the time the kyuubi attacked, an adult in the eyes of many. People would take you seriously and you'd be able to influence the early tragedies of Naruto's era with more ease.

If not Kakashi's era though, maybe the warring states era would also be somewhat interesting. To see the formation of Konoha itself, it would be like living history. Sure, the chances of influencing anything here are slim, as the only known names of that time are chakra powerhouses but it would be the most interesting era to live in as a nondescript character, maybe a desk chunin or something.

If you think about which era you'd like to be reborn in, the one that probably comes to your mind last is the one in between – the one that doesn't even have a proper name, the one when Sarutobi Hiruzen only just ascended Hokagehood and the second ninja world war spanned the continent. There's little information about that time. Sure, it is the prime time of people like Sarutobi, his famous three students and likely the beginning of ROOT. But if you were thrust into that era, that means one major war in your childhood, one major war in your adulthood and being past your prime when the world is about to end and it really matters.

Well, I got reborn into the Narutoverse and I got reborn into the no-name-era.

I didn't even get my own identity – I was reborn as one of the characters.

Now, if you had the opportunity to get reborn as one of the Naruto characters, which one would you chose if all the main characters were out?

Well, I can tell you what you probably wouldn't chose. You wouldn't chose someone who had a major positive impact on the story line, an impact that was directly bound to personal relationships. Such as a wife. After all, you wouldn't want to be pressured into falling in love with a specific woman just because doing so could save your village one day, would you? You wouldn't want to be born as someone famed to be a genius, especially if your own intelligence is average at best. You wouldn't want to be reborn as a legend, because how could you possible live up to such fame? You probably wouldn't want to be reborn as someone who saved the village via suicide before even hitting his thirties either.

And lastly, you most definitely wouldn't want to be reborn as the man who was known first and foremost for siring the story's main character.

That would just be weird.

That's right, I got reborn into the Narutoverse as Minato freaking Namikaze.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me tell the story from the beginning, starting with an introduction.

In my previous life, I was just like you. Well, probably not exactly like you but I estimate I had more in common with you than I had with anyone of this universe.

I was 24 when I died (yes I know, ironically the same age the real Namikaze died, rub it in). I used to love and devour manga and anime as a teenager. Only a few of those series managed to bury themselves so deep in my heart though that I continued to consume content on them long into my adulthood. One of them was Naruto. Once the manga was complete I continued to follow the anime. Once that was complete I caught up on all those filler episodes I always skipped. I even took a peek at the Boruto series, though I never got much invested in it. Above all though, I loved to read and occasionally write fanfictions about the Narutoverse.

My creativity was always my one strong suit in life. I wasn't particularly social, I wasn't good at sports or science or IT. I could draw and paint decently enough but what I enjoyed most was writing. I even made that my career, becoming a journalist and dreaming of one day publishing my own bestseller.

If you are reading this, then I think my suspicion is correct in that you too like to read Naruto fanfictions.

Well no, that's not right, you're probably an enemy ninja who sneaked into my rooms to glean information on me and managed to hit the jackpot by finding my autobiography. Honestly, if you managed to decode this you deserve to learn this journal's contents, seeing as I'm writing not only in code but also in English, a language that doesn't even exist in this universe and follows a completely different alphabet.

Again, I digress.

So I was hit by a truck, died, had a lovely chat with the Shinigami who told me that it would be my task to properly prepare this world for Kaguya's return, if not prevent it from happening in the first place, and then opened my eyes for the first time as a baby.

During the first three years of my new life I learned a few important life lessons. Such as, life is not fair, death is not either and babies are completely helpless. The less said about that time the better. I honestly wouldn't describe me as a human being back then. I was just a glob of flesh that had to be carried around everywhere, was making unintelligible noises, trying to grasp the concept of a completely foreign language and coming to terms with my unfortunate situation.

I was born to a civilian family and I had barely enough time to get used to my new parents and learn to cherish them before they died when I was about six years old. I'm not even sure who killed them, even to this day. I chose to never look it up. All I know is that an enemy ninja infiltrated the village, got uncovered and tried to flee. During a wild chase throughout the village, B-and A-rank ninjutsu got thrown around like candy and one of them hit my parent's house, reducing it to rubble. I was found two hours later stuck under the rocks by an Inuzuka rescue team.

From that day onward I was an orphan. And, as almost all of my parent's possessions were destroyed together with the house, I was a penniless orphan too.

Konohagakure had only the one school for children, and that was the ninja academy. As far as I know my parents never intended to send me there. It was never even discussed as an option. My father had a bakery in the lower floor and I always got the impression that I was supposed to take over the business when I was older. Children that don't train to be ninja get home schooled by their parents. Later on, some would send their children to the academy but raise them with the expectation that they shouldn't invest any effort in training for the practical portion of the education. Thus they would purposefully fail the final exam, never to become genin but still have the general education of language, history, maths and so on and the parents could focus on working while their children were at school.

I was supposed to be home-schooled by my parents but with my new orphan status, the only way for me to get any education at all was the ninja academy.

I entered ninja class almost three months late compared to all of my yearmates and nobody bothered to help me catch up. It went against my pride to be deadlast in a school full of six-year-olds when I was mentally thirty but I did have some troubles initially to find my place. I may have had future knowledge of this world and some knowledge of past history too. However that didn't mean I knew exactly what kind of information test questions specifically asked for. I had seen the map of the elemental nations many times but that didn't mean I knew where all the rivers and forests and mountains where. I was still struggling with the Japanese written language and of course I had never thrown a kunai in my life.

I seriously contemplated during that first year how I wanted to portray myself. I knew that Namikaze had been an orphan. I had no idea how his parents died and even if I did, I wouldn't have known how to prevent it from happening. Was my personal history cursed to follow Namikaze's? If so, what would happen if I lacked in ability? If fate pushed me in that same direction, I would one day in the not-so distant future have to fight off an army of 1000 Iwa-nin as well as the goddamn mind-controlled kyuubi. That was just crazy! On the other hand, if I didn't do those things… What would happen to Konoha?

I thought about it for a long time but in the end it came down to a very simple and much less heroic thought. If I didn't do my best to become as powerful as possible as fast as possible, than I would surely die in this world.

So I threw myself into my studies but I also prioritized a lot. As an academy student, I had zero access to anything to do with fuinjutsu, which was what Namikaze had been known for. My chakra reserves were average at best. I put in two hours of either taijutsu or bukijutsu practice in each day additional to what the academy taught but even so, I was only average in those areas. My average to low reserves would theoretically make me good at genjutsu. I considered that path for myself but in a world still very much filled with doujutsu users and crazy gimmicks such as jinchuuriki working with their biju being practically immune to them, I didn't consider it very worthwhile. There was a limit to what you could do with genjutsu and unless you had a particular aptitude for it, it wasn't worth the effort it would take for me to learn it.

So then, ninjutsu it was. Academy students had no access to special ninjutsu either of course but I knew that a perquisite to many techniques in that field lay in chakra control. And luckily, I had knowledge of a whole bunch of non-dangerous exercises I could practice with on that filed.

The first technique they taught us was the leaf-sticking-exercise. You concentrate chakra on your forehead to try and stick a leaf to it.

As a person from a universe that doesn't have chakra (as far as I know at least), the whole meditating on your inner energy bit was news to me. I was no faster than anyone else in figuring out how to do that exercise. Once I did master it though, I didn't stop there. I went on to practice tree-walking and later water-walking in my free time. I combined the techniques, walking on water while having various leaves stuck to my forehead, arms and legs and a log each on both hands, all of which required different amounts of chakra to uphold. I even started out on the first practice for the Rasengan, molding chakra inside of a water filled balloon to try and pop it.

Now this might sound advanced for you but I have to empathize that chakra control was what I focused most of my time on so it was only natural that I would improve most in that area.

When I was around eight my efforts paid of and I started to climb the ranks of my class. The teachers let me skip a class and I was called a progeny for the first time.

It was a weird feeling. I did not consider myself particularly intelligent or strong. I still sometimes struggle with that view people have of me today. I was just… more mature than my yearmates. I took my studies more serious than any of the other civilians and that alone was enough to put me ahead of them and on par with the clan kids. I later asked various ninja belonging to a clan how much they trained at home and how much additional work they did aside from the academy assigned homework. Most clan children only practice an additional hour at home and that not even every day. The Huuga and Uchiha are the most dedicated, with daily training of an hour. The academy grants two free days a week that are to be reserved for individual training. Most civilian-borns don't use it at all. Clan children use maybe half a day of that two times a month and even the aforementioned two clans only use six hours a day for training, granting a free day now and then if their children are doing well.

I'm sad to say that I had no significant friends growing up, no toys to play with and no hobbies to speak of. I just trained.

Partly it was out of fear. The second ninja war started shortly before I turned eight and in fact I believe that is one reason why they let me skip a year. They knew they were going to need more child soldiers soon.

Another part of me though really did enjoy training. I liked the feeling of chakra coursing through my coils, coils that I hadn't even had before. They said I was born a natural sensor but I believe my ability to feel chakra so acutely, especially my own, had more to do with the fact that I knew what it felt like not to have any chakra at all.

During my third year in the academy they started to teach us jutsu and that's when I really got into a training frenzy. Doing jutsu for me was like doing magic. I basically had super powers now, no matter if it was just the academy three!

The way my chakra moved inside of me when I did different hand seals was utterly fascinating. There are the twelve basic hand seals following the chinese zodiac, five elemental hand seals and a couple of seals specific to certain techniques or even kekkei genkai activation.

Some hand seals made my chakra flow slower, some faster. Some made it quiver, or rotate at a point, or stop altogether, causing more chakra to assemble in one point. There was a whole bunch of tenketsu on a human hand and a correctly performed hand seal made just the right ones of them touch and interact in a certain way. Some hand seals even came with emotions attached to them, however slight the change was. Some hand seals focused more yin energy in your chakra, others more yang.

For example, the seals for the basic clone jutsu are tiger, boar, ox and dog.

The tiger stands for bravery and independence, the boar for kindness and humor, the ox for persistence and stubbornness and the dog for loyalty. The tiger seal makes the chakra flow faster, it's a kind of universal jutsu activator. The boar seal channels your yin energy – this is when you have to focus on the illusion of a second self you want to form. The ox seal holds your chakra in the way you molded it during boar so that you can concentrate on the last part. The dog seal focuses your will and leashes your jutsu to it so that the illusion-clone, once complete, does what you want it to do.

Compared to that, the seals for the kawarimi are tiger, boar, ox, dog and snake. It has only one seal more. The snake stands for wisdom but also paranoia and its corresponding seal makes your chakra move swiftly in a per-determined direction, like a snake striking from the grass or slithering away quickly to make its escape.

During kawarimi, you use the tiger seal for gathering the chakra you need. The boar seal is used to gather the yin chakra to focus your senses on a nearby object you want to switch to – you never see ninjas looking around to find a nearby log after all. This is a basic sensing exercise but the jutsu can also be used without it if you memorized your environment well enough. The ox seal holds your chakra and sets your intention in stone. The dog seal lets you latch onto your chosen object to exchange with and the snake seal makes the actual switch possible.

Two completely different techniques, using almost exactly the same chakra flow.

But wait, particularly talented ninja can use a basic jutsu like that with less or even no seals at all. How is that possible? Well, if you perform the seals very fast and have done it many times, it is for example no longer necessary to use ox to hold your chakra. Ninjas who use jutsus a lot and have grown accustomed to the feeling of having chakra flow in a certain way, almost never need the tiger activator anymore. Many still use boar and dog because controlling only yin chakra is more difficult than controlling a 50/50 mix. But if you have an affinity with that or are an accomplished genjutsu user, that too is unnecessary. Ninjas who use chakra to increase their moving speed a lot might not have to perform the snake seal.

I found hand seal theory to be utterly fascinating and I probably bothered my academy teacher a lot with all of my after-lesson questions. I just wanted to understand how chakra worked. I couldn't accept that some ninja one day found out that this seal combination could be used for this purpose and be done with it. For example, why couldn't you use the monkey seal instead of the tiger? The monkey stood for humor, energy and letting loose. The seal itself let chakra rush to your hands similar to tiger. It was a bit slower and sort of curled and uncurled itself, less stream-lined than the tiger rush that was affiliated with fire and earth release.

Well, the teacher couldn't give me an answer so I tried it out and wouldn't you know, both the clone and kawarimi no jutsu do work when exchanging tiger with monkey. It just takes a bit longer for the jutsu to complete, which I admit is not really an improvement.

However, if you change the shunshin no jutsu hand seals from tiger and ram to tiger and snake, it actually does make you a tiny bit faster when crossing small distances. Granted, it also makes it a lot harder to navigate because you have to do that manually while traveling at high speeds. Using the ram seal, which utilizes yin energy to guide you on a memorized path, makes this part comparatively effortless. Don't bother exchanging ram for dog though. As I mentioned, dog leashes your jutsu to your imagination but you need the flexibility of ram, which is associated with creativity, to adapt to any changes that you might find on your memorized path or you'll just run straight into people and other moving objects all the time.

Trust me, I tried.

My, my, there I go ranting again. People do tell me that can get lost in theory and drift off into areas that go over the head of most people. I can't help it though, it's chakra!

Anyway, I had my troubles mastering the first of the three basic justu just like everyone else. However, once I started to research what the zodiac signs stood for and connect that to how the chakra felt when I performed the seals, I gained a solid grasp on why the technique was performed exactly this way. Once I had that figured out, the other two were way easier to learn. I started to ask my teacher about common C-rank jutsu I knew existed like the shunshin and even just walk though Konoha with open eyes, watching ninjas and which hand seals they used. I wasn't getting anywhere with my rasengan practice as of yet and I wondered if I could incorporate a hand seal or two in my exercises to help me with chakra control.

I worked hard to reduce the number of seals I needed to use to perform the basic academy three and I also experimented with switching the hand seals out with others. I knew that speed was key for any good ninja but my physical abilities were average. They might grow with time but time was something I didn't have. Already the academy was pushing out students faster than usual to provide more soldiers for the war.

I focused on improving the kawarimi the most. Aside from reducing the speed it took to perform it, I also practiced switching myself with smaller and smaller objects. The jutsu used a small but intensive chakra burst to move yourself into the position of the object and the object into your position. It worked similar to the shunshin in that way – though I didn't know about that at that time. My thought was that I wanted to switch myself not with a log but with something else. A kunai perhaps, preferable one that was in the air already. Imagine having a kunai thrown at you and just before it hits, suddenly you have a child sitting on your chest. Eventually, I wanted to be able to replace myself with something tiny, like a grain of sand, a nearby insect or even just a pocket of air. It took me about a year to get to that point. But once I did it and tried to figure out the shunshin no jutsu with nothing but two hand seals to go off on, I had a solid grasp on how my chakra needed to move to whisk my body away at high speed. The shunshin no jutsu is basically just a shortened version of the kawarimi. It's obvious when you know it, but the leaves that many shiniobi leave swirling behind when they use shunshin are actually the result of them replacing themselves with nearby leaves. Using an anchor on the other side to tug yourself toward makes it way easier to cross the distance. It's like putting your weight on a stepping stone or grasping a tree branch before swinging on it and using the momentum to hurl yourself forward. The object in turn gets pushed back. That's why beginners used logs, because heavy objects were easier to propel yourself off on. Shunshin users could use that mental picture to focus their direction. The more experienced they were in the jutsu though, the less traces they left behind.

Somehow someone found out that I was practicing shunshin no jutsu in my free time when I was ten and I was pushed to take the graduation exam early. When people would look back on my career decades later, they would say how amazing it was that I graduated at ten. That was not an accomplishment. In that time of war, it was normal. Nobody really noticed a genin, no matter how talented. Why bother with that when so many genin died? When people finally did take notice of me, as a chuunin and later young jonin, they would would say that this was the moment I started showing promise though, when as a civilian-born I already knew a C-rank ninjutsu without anyone having taught it to me.

Back then though I myself didn't view it as a big accomplishment. I just thought I was catching up to my peers. After all many of my year mates from the clans already knew at least one ninjutsu.

My time in the academy was passing quickly. I didn't make many connections to other children. I felt like an old man compared to them. My lack of hobbies made it hard to relate to anything they found interesting. I had no siblings to complain about, nobody took me serious enough to want to be my rival – I didn't even have a favorite food seeing as the orphanage fed us pretty much only the most bland of foodstuffs.

There was maybe one exception and that was Uzumaki Kushina.

And no, I do not fail to see the irony in that.

She was one year older than me and it was into her class I entered when I skipped a year at age eight. Kushina was loud and brash. She had no filter between her mind and mouth and was just in general a brat. To me she was even a bit of a bully. She would mock me for my soft skin, pretty blue eyes and fluffy blonde hair, saying I looked like a girl. She would lord every one of her wins over me, be it at taijutsu or bukijutsu, even though were were of a similar ability in both and I beat her as often as she beat me.

But she was so very obviously alone it was hard to hold it against her. It took me some time but eventually I understood that in her very own way, she was trying to reach out to me.

You see, Kushina regularly got mocked for her thick, blood red hair, her temper, lack of manners and round face. She didn't have the figure or air of femininity that made other kunoichi so appealing in most eyes. Her appearance was more masculine and it brought her ridicule. Sometimes, people laughed behind my back at me too, because my appearance was a bit feminine. I think Kushina insulted me so brashly partly to feel better about herself and partly as a backhanded invite to band together against gender prejudices. I didn't realize that that might be her intention though until I noticed the same behavior in another instance.

During lunch break, most students ate their bentos in the class room. I only ever had my bland rice with me, maybe with a bit of soy sauce if I was lucky enough to get any. One day Kushina sat down in front of me and unpacked a plastic bowl of cold ramen. She enjoyed the dish loudly slurping and bragged about how much better it was than whatever I had there. I just blinked up at her owlishly. The smell of the ramen was pretty strong and I remember that I wondered how I had never noticed her eating that dish before in the classroom. Wasn't Kushina supposed to be a ramen addict rivaling Naruto? I took more notice of her after that. Kushina didn't eat ramen the next day. In fact she didn't eat lunch with the rest of class at all, she just went outside and practiced taijutsu katas. That in itself wasn't so unusual, there were some other students who used the remainder of the lunch break after they were done eating to practice some more. Unusual was that she had no lunch at all with her. I watched her the following days and she never had anything with her.

Years later, Kushina would tell me why. When she came to Konoha from Uzushiogakure, the only living relative she had left was Tsunade Senju, the granddaughter of Mito Uzumaki. However with Tsunade busy in the war and later so destroyed by the death of her fiance and brother, she'd left Kushina with a nanny most of the time. Her nanny though knew about the demon sealed inside of Kushina and as most prejudiced people would, she only did the bare minimum to care for her. Kushina was just a child and she was very bad at everything considered kunoichi arts. Partly out of spite and as a personal rebellion, I'm sure. Her nanny never prepared any bentos for her and so she never had any lunch. She did have a very small allowance though and whenever she could, she used that to buy herself ramen.

Kushina had used some of the little money she had to buy ramen and then wasted it by letting it go cold just so she could eat it in front of me. She was mocking me for having so little in the hopes that I would figure out that she too, had little. In the hopes that maybe we little people could stick together. She was craving connection, of any kind, to anyone.

The last attack of the kyuubi on the village happened over thirty years ago, shortly after Konoha was founded. Just thirty years I should say for that isn't a long time at all for people to forget the feeling of helplessness in the face of such a creature. The jinchuuriki had changed since then and I don't think many knew that Kushina held it now. She didn't suffer from the same prejudice Naruto did in the original series. But she was still ostracized because she didn't belong anywhere.

In the academy there were naturally forming groups and gangs. If you just took part in a bukijutsu class and watched how the children organized themselves, you'd get a decent impression of how Konoha's politics looked at that time. There were the civilian girls and the civilian boys who both stood in their small groups. There were the Akimichis, the Naras and the Yamanakas all standing together, their clans only beginning to form their famous alliance. There were the Hyuuga and the Uchiha kids staring of angrily at each other. The Inuzuka were either trying to get into the Akamichi alliance or trying to get a rise out of a lone Aburame if they could.

Kushina came from a clan and during to her status, she didn't have the liberty to drop out of the academy if she failed the final test and do something else. She had to take her training seriously if she wanted to survive but she also had no clan to back her up and give her the resources she needed.

Then she saw me, a civilian talented and dedicated enough that he'd probably make it past the exam but with no connections to the other clans and similar to her no resources to speak of. I wasn't a confrontational person and so I never joined in the mocking she had to endure from others. Maybe she hoped that she could find a friend in me.

If she did though, it had to be very much subconscious. Because once I did realize or at least thought I realized what she was trying to do and approached her, it very much backfired on me.

When I mentioned off hand after one of the boys insulted her, that I didn't find her hair terrible at all, she went beet red, shouted that she didn't 'give a flying fuck' about my opinion and punched me in the face.

When she was so very obviously trying to suppress her tears after receiving a horrible mark in some written test, I offered to help her study. She turned her nose up at me and said she would do it on her own and she would get the best mark on the next test, and I better believe it! I couldn't help but laugh at that a bit, she reminded me so much of Naruto in that moment. Apparently thought that was the wrong thing to do because she started screeching and pulling my hair for it. Why I didn't dodge, you ask, when I just told you how I focused on improving my speed so much in my training? Well, I did that once when I beat her in a spar and then afterwards congratulated her on a good match. She insisted that we weren't done and continued to throw punches. I evaded them all and looked helplessly for the instructor to reign her in. The next day I found myself the target of petty pranks, such as glue on my chair, toothpaste in my pencil case, stuff like that. I rather wanted to nip that habit in the bud so I let her have a go at me when she was angry sometimes. She never hit me as hard when she was angry as she did when we sparred so I knew it was never really serious.

If I did have to name anyone in that class a friend though, it would've been her.