AN: Sorry for the long delay in my other stories, and welcome to a very quick story dump. The basic framework of this story came to me in a dream last year, and just wouldn't leave me alone until I saw it to completion. All 10 chapters will be posted together, and I do have ideas for both a continuation and an alternative ending that I scrapped when I liked what I came up with better. Though I don't know if they will ever be polished enough, or I'll come back to finish them and publish, but you never know. Quick warning to Naruto die-hards, I am sorry …I don't know the Manga well enough to go into more detail than I do at times, and also please cut me some slack in the technicality of everything …this is fanfiction! If you hate it, move on please ;)
As always, I own nothing …and this is a work of fanfiction, so please enjoy it for what it is …the mad ramblings of an author you decided to take a chance on, because of the clever story description!
Shin Ikeda
By Kassien
Written: 10/28/22 - 7/30/23
Rated: M (Mature - language, violence, death, torture, sex, minor drug use [ch. 10], & language) Listed language twice for a reason!
Chapter 1: What the hell just happened?
"What the hell just happened?" I asked myself in a total panic, trying to turn my head and see what was going on around me as light and colors seemingly exploded while I was unable to move or really focus on anything.
The last thing I remembered was entering that crazy old Fortune Teller's tent in the back corner of the weekend Flea Market, privately chuckling at her overly dramatic presentation. There were a lot of colored lights and different smells that I was told would help guide the vision of my future. I sure as hell wasn't expecting whatever the hell this was, having thought the batty old lady a total fraud until just seconds ago, when my whole world exploded into color and left me feeling all tingly and blinking spots, while a feeling of being completely wrung out went down my jelly like body and my blurred vision couldn't focus on anything going on around me.
I will freely admit that I had a moment of absolute and utter panic unlike anything I had previously felt, like every single possible emotion my body was capable of was trying to come out all at once, leaving me hyper aware and yet still in a fog of uncertainty. I couldn't tell up from blue, or left from loud, everything just swirling into a mess of confusion of color and sound that left me more tired than I could ever remember.
Then there were large shadowy shapes around me that started moving and talking, though it sounded like it was coming from a different room and in a weird language that I couldn't for the life of me place. The sounds and voices did eventually get louder in volume after I felt a powerful pressurized sucking feeling throughout my ears and nose and mouth that wasn't even remotely comfortable, but left all sound seemingly screaming afterwards as whatever was blocking the sound was forcefully removed and the voices were now bouncing around inside my head painfully.
It took seemingly hours, but could have only been minutes for how out of it and confused I felt after everything that was happening around me, until I slowly started to piece together what the hell had just happened to me.
I was just born as a freaking baby, and have my complete mind and memories still of the life I was just living until moments before entering that crazy Fortune Teller's tent, this wasn't right.
Did I die, and get reincarnated? Was that what the weird feelings I experienced were?
While I had often wondered about reincarnation and what happens when we die, I never would have expected it to actually happen and that I would go through it with my memories of my previous life completely intact. It was actually quite frightening to think I could die so easily and just be pushed into the next body with no warning, and gave me a long period of fear as I realized that I was starting over as a baby with all my adult memories and cognitive brain function. How was I supposed to behave like a baby when I barely remembered my own first childhood let alone the early development years, and never managed to settle down and have kids of my own at the age of twenty? I was completely lost as far as babies go, and now I was one. It didn't fill me with a sense of peace or anything like that, and in fact sounded absolutely horrible at every level to have to go through …again.
Even worse, I quickly found out that every single action on my part, from trying to turn my head or move an arm, or even think too long, was utterly exhausting beyond measure, and I had to constantly fight just to stay awake a bit longer and help make sense of what was happening. It was completely outside of anything I had ever really believed in or thought possible, but I had somehow been reincarnated into a newborn baby, and couldn't understand a single fucking word being frantically spoken around me, and filling me with a feeling of dread for the long years of boredom in front of me.
+—-Shin Ikeda—-+
Years wasn't too far off, as it took over three years until I was even able to start understanding some of the language that was my new normal, and my pseudo-Japanese was still abysmal and left me constantly looking stupid and picked on by the other orphans. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I was an orphan born out of wedlock, with the added shame of having no last name and having never left the orphanage property itself. The orphanage named me Shin, meaning "new", as my mother died before she could name me herself. Not that I had any memories of my mother, just a large blurry shape and faded unintelligible Japanese sounding words that I couldn't understand at the time or even remember now.
The only lucky thing due to my learning disability, was that I was completely left alone by the other kids, as nobody wanted anything to do with the stupid kid that couldn't talk and left me to my own devices despite my insanely young age. The orphanage wasn't one where the kids were all well cared for and loved, we were treated pretty much like cattle, and there was a surprisingly steady amount of kids that were continuously being adopted or at least moving on to somewhere else, with new kids constantly cycling in to fill the empty spaces. It was rather surprising to my small and constantly itchy body, when I was finally able to be present for the quarterly roll call, and watched as three figures with weird but somewhat familiar looking headbands went through each of the kids to inspect and adopt almost ten percent of our number.
Those five to ten kids, depending on how full the orphanage was at the time, were all quickly whisked away and adopted, never to return to the orphanage to visit friends, as the remainder of us continued on with our lives until the next few months. By the second roll call, I grew suspicious as it was the same three headband wearing people that seemed weirdly familiar, to again do their rounds of the kids, selecting seven the second time, most of the older loners, and I began to wonder what was happening and where I really was, and didn't have a good feeling about either. We never made it to the third roll call as the week preceding it, in early October was the day when everything changed.
It started with the largest and heaviest spike of intense hatred I had ever felt in either life, so much that it physically burned my small body from the inside out, replacing the constant itching under my skin with a burning acid feeling. Almost immediately after the feeling started, even larger physical explosions that shook the ground started sounding progressively closer and louder, and it became even harder for me to breathe with the added pressure surrounding me in a thick fog. The burning was so intense inside my body, I quickly grew hoarse from screaming in pain, but it was just as quickly snuffed out in the largest and closest explosion yet, that rocked the very orphanage foundation causing it to shake as if in an earthquake, and me to feel like the floor fall out from under me.
The burning under my skin though had become so painful that I didn't even realize anything going on around me, as the building I was inside was suddenly obliterated into scraps of wood and debris, with me half crushed and bleeding amongst the wreckage, still in too much pain to focus on anything else but the internal burning and external pressure and feeling of hatred thick in the air. Luckily, the large explosions seemed to be now getting further away, but that continued suffocating feeling didn't repent at all, causing me to panic even further. In my panic, I touched something inside of me that reminded me of the itch under my skin, that for a brief moment, caused the intensity of the pain to fade, but left me even weaker and in danger of being further crushed by the wreckage I was trapped under.
Feeling the encroaching darkness and sluggishness of my broken and crushed body, I desperately reached one final time for that itchy tingly feeling inside me and let it fill me with warmth for all of two seconds before my vision began to swim and a deep cold settled in my body. As I was fading out of consciousness I saw a slim shadowy figure leaping a seemingly impossible distance to crouch next to me, and gently run her glowing green hands over my pain filled body until a warm numbness settled over my cold body. I was in such shock at the impossibility of what I witnessed, that when I got my first look at the pretty young redhead my eyes widened incredibly and it took a moment for the very familiar headband she wore to register in my previous pain filled mind.
I could only choke in shock as my numb body froze at the hitai-ate of the Village Hidden in the Leaves was reflected back at me, on the ninja headband of my savior, and my whole world came to a screeching halt of fear.
No, I couldn't possibly somehow have been reincarnated into the world of Naruto, it was just fiction right? That only happened in crappy fanfiction?
This world was full of chakra monsters and shinobi that I was completely unprepared for, and it had been years even since I last watched some of the Manga, and even now while thinking about it, I struggled to remember most of the plot. I wasn't a Naruto expert, and not even really a novice, as I couldn't even remember how the series ended, just that Naruto and Sasuke were really important in battling the Akatsuki, and Madara's or Pein's plans to put the world under a genjutsu or their control through combining and controlling the nine Bijuu. But, I don't remember how it all played out, did the good guys win, everyone saved, or were a lot of good people killed along the way before Naruto could grow up to save the world? How did Sasuke fit into it all too? Why can't I remember these details, and how the hell did I even end up in this world?
At least it seemed I was born in Konoha, as any of the other villages would have been even more problematic and dangerous for my survival, and at least this way, I would be involved in a lot of the action to hopefully survive, that is …if I survived the fucking Kyuubi first.
I unfortunately didn't have a lot of time for a full fledged freak out, as after a few seconds of glowing green hands over my now warmer and at least numb body, the slim figure I could now tell was a Kunoichi, had picked me up under her arm and started sprinting through destroyed and deserted streets in the blink of an eye. The speed was intense, and nauseating as I tried to look around me unsuccessfully at the blurring colors and shapes, though I did occasionally get glimpses that scared me more than helped. The destruction of the Kyuubi was insane and all encompassing in the part of the village we were in, and now knowing that it was still thundering through the village, had me terrified that I wasn't anywhere near safe yet.
I didn't even get a chance to thank or warn my savior, when the building we had just reached seemingly exploded from within, as a single negligent swipe of a large red chakra tail sent debris and rubble raining down all around and above us. Burying me for the second time in minutes, and now trapped under several floors of destroyed housing and wreckage. A desperate last act of the courageous kunoichi was the only reason I would be found many hours later despite several critical injuries half protected under the broken body of my savior, as the only survivor in a three block radius.
+-Shin Ikeda—-+
Somehow, as the only survivor, and found being protected by the final act of Konoha Chunin, Arkane Ikeda in the wreckage of her family home, it was assumed I was her child. As her small Clan compound consisted of the two large buildings we were buried under, there was nobody alive who knew her well enough to verify whether or not I was her child and was likewise given a decent inheritance to collect after the business with the village wide funerals was over. In the weeks afterwards, while recovering in the hospital, I was proven mature enough (or quiet enough) to be given a small apartment to look after myself before I had even turned four years old. I couldn't even begin to understand the logic until I remembered I was in the Elemental Nations, where genius genins graduated at five, and chakra demons were sealed into babies to grow them into village controlled weapons, and knew I was in for a difficult next few years.
Difficult was an understatement, as I spent the next two years in an almost constant state of chakra burns and chakra exhaustion as I continuously flared and used up my chakra every day, in an effort to increase my reserves and pathways while I was still young and my body adaptable despite not knowing how to really go about it but it seemed to work. I had some time to implement my plan, and spent each night before bed methodically emptying my chakra with the hope it would grow back the next day stronger, and though the progress wasn't always visible, steady progress was being made. I quickly realized after a major panicky freak out about the major powers in the Elemental Nations, that the only way to survive in this world, was to be the best I possibly could, as anything else just meant a quick death or subjugation.
And I definitely did not want to die …again, if that is even what happened when I was somehow reincarnated into this body and world my previous life knew only as fiction. I was still of the belief that this entire world was simply a dream, a hallucination brought on by the batty psychic's incense, or I had a brain aneurysm and was lying in some hospital bed in a coma having this otherworldly experience. But no matter what I did, or how many times I pinched myself, every day I woke up with my new body and chakra feeling like they were both on fire while my memories of my first life slowly faded some, and realized I had to keep motivating and pushing myself even more if I wanted to be prepared for some of the things to come, and grab whatever this chance was with everything I had.
When I wasn't groaning in pain or slumped over in exhaustion from my daily efforts to increase my chakra and control, I was reading through the small library worth of scrolls that survived and I had inherited from the ashes of the Ikeda Clan. My reading comprehension had likewise grown to incredible levels, and thanks to a kind vegetable merchant, my pronunciation and verbal understanding levels weren't anywhere as abysmal as they were in the orphanage, even if I was growing unused to talking. I had to force myself to speak occasionally as I wandered the market for my groceries and clothes, one of the few things I left my apartment for, the other was obviously training.
Training wasn't anything to brag about though, as I mostly just made sure I was limber and flexible as my already internally abused body protested greatly anytime I tried to push it further. Knowing I didn't want to develop any bad habits or do certain exercises wrong, I was prepared to let the Academy teach me the proper methods of physical training, or at least research it myself. Likewise, I ran some and did a lot of stretching to make sure I had some level of stamina and physical fitness, and so the Academy wouldn't be too much of a shock, even though I expected it to be.
Holy Hell, the Academy was just as intense as I thought it would be, as half of the original class had dropped out after the first two months as the physical aspects alone were somewhat intense for most six year old kids. Also, many of them join with large dreams of ninja life, but even the very basics of the Academy is too much for them and they quickly learn how much time, energy, and effort goes into even the most basic of ninja skills. It's actually fairly common, and the Civilian Academy actually starts their semester after the initial dropouts from the Ninja Academy fall to them to educate, in order to get more students.
The classroom educational aspects weren't a joke either, though for someone of my experience, they were rather simple even if I could see it being quite challenging for most six year olds. I spent those first months physically working myself to the bone at every moment, just to ensure I stayed with the top half of the class at all times. The training and exercise was as brutal as I expected it to be, but I was slowly getting stronger and faster and tougher, and could see the slow conditioning of soldiers for what it was. Seeing some of the brutality and forms of encouragement, I could only cringe when our instructors constantly told us it was only going to get harder, seemingly trying to discourage the weak minded and filter out the chaff from the wheat.
And filter them out, they did! By the end of the first year our class lost another half of their number and then they combined two sections into one going forward and graduating to the second year. That was when I and only about a dozen other orphaned civilians or no named Clan kids were introduced to several representatives of Konoha's more famous Clans, a shy Aburame boy, a branch male Hyuga, female twin Inuzuka's with their dog companions, and even an Uchiha boy that most in the class thought was the best of them all. I was just considered book smart at the moment as most of my "orphaned" group were considered at the bottom of the class hierarchy, something that was encouraged by the Sensei's weekly Class rankings that often favored the more famous clan kids.
Most of the rest of us, both the civilian kids and orphans, didn't have the same advantages and early training that the bigger Clans could provide for their children, and that gap was quite obvious over the first two years. It didn't help that the teachers usually pitted the weaker students against the strongest in an effort to either encourage them to get better or discourage them to quit now, while feeding the ego of the Clan kids, and hurting their development at the same time. It wasn't a great system, and as an "old soul" I could see the problems and favoritism for what they were, and tried to stay out of the politics of it all and keep my head down. I was easily able to keep the top academic spot both of the first two years, even after joining the other class, but was still a little behind some of the other better clan kids in the physical department.
That physical gap had started closing by the end of my second year, as I fought tooth and nail to get better and learn everything the Academy had to teach me, and combined with the extra work I was putting in at home, I was really starting to get stronger. Since I took everything I learned home and grinded those moves, exercises, and skills until they became second nature to my abused and growing body, and continued pushing myself as much as I could without a jinchuriki cheat code. This was where my early years of chakra manipulation and training really started to pay off, as I learned through desperation, how to cycle my chakra throughout my body to help ease some of the sore muscles and tendons and other damage accumulated from training.
I also learned how to use that cycled chakra to strengthen my bones and muscles to perform athletic feats of incredible skill, but only practiced that occasionally in the privacy of my apartment as I wanted to get a stronger physical base before I started using the chakra crutch.
Instead, I had continued to expand my reserves and pathways by using up my chakra every night before bed, and then focusing again on control exercises I remembered from fanfiction stories in a never ending loop of training. It had my Academy Sensei approach me at the start of my third year, to ask about me unlocking my chakra, as it was evident to anybody who was chakra sensitive or a sensor, that I had already done so.
"I unlocked it during the Kyuubi attack that killed my family and Clan compound," I replied flatly to Sanji-Sensei, knowing that few people in Konoha would question that excuse any further, and was proven right when he simply flinched.
"Well," he continued after a second to regain his train of thought, "you shouldn't flair your chakra as you are doing it, that is how most shinobi call for help."
"Oh, sorry sensei," I replied with wide eyes, as I had been doing that occasionally throughout the days when I was stuck at the Academy, and I had chakra to bleed off.
"It's what made me realize I needed to approach you," spoke Sensei Sanji quietly, while looking at me seriously, "also …if you can flair your chakra, than I am instead going to teach you how to compress and suppress your chakra, as the techniques are similar despite doing the opposite thing."
"Thank you sensei," I replied quickly and with an eager look in my eyes that had my teacher give me a knowing look and small grin, as he began describing the process while I nodded along.
The moment I started to figure it out, compressing my chakra was another exercise that I used to help my chakra growth and control. It was an incredibly weird feeling, as I realized the itch I felt under my skin was my chakra flowing through my chakra pathways, and after feeling stupid for not realizing it sooner, I was back to practicing and grinding. It ended up not being incredibly helpful to my class growth, as that third year in the Academy, everyone's chakra was unlocked as well. With the unlocking of everyone's chakra in class, which coincided with another 25% reduction in our class size as many other students failed to make the cut, the competition started to get even more intense within the class.
With the unlocking of chakra, we quickly got into the general cycling of that chakra into their bodies to start getting us all familiar with the feeling, as it would be a large part of our growing ninja skills. It also really started being apparent who was taking their training seriously, as the gap between the best and worse students quickly grew, as those strong in chakra or in cycling it through their bodies, quickly rose to the top of the class' physical rankings. Here, I began to struggle again, as I made it a point to suppress my chakra instead of using it to fill my body, causing me to have to keep up with the other young superheroes without my own super powers in an attempt to get stronger the old fashioned way first.
I think it was working, as despite having to struggle to keep my place in the class as others started using their chakra and I continued to hold back, I was still keeping up, barely, and it only encouraged me to push harder. As a side effect however, others in the class started thinking I was falling behind, and started to slowly dismiss me as a serious challenger for the top spot, which was just fine for me. I knew that I had to be strong, but I also knew that I wasn't anywhere near ready to graduate and would need all the time I could get safely in the village in order to increase my chances of staying alive throughout this crazy world.
I had to continue to read through and study the scrolls left to me by the Ikeda Clan, of which I was still the sole member in the village, despite having never actually met any of them except "my mother, Arkane" for one minute before she died. From those scrolls however, I learned two really important and helpful facts about my unusually adopted family. First, they came to Konoha from the Land of Whirlpools with a strong affinity for Water users during the reign of the Nidaime Hokage. And second, they owned a single large Fuinjutsu scroll from Uzushiokagure, that was more valuable than anything else I could have found.
It took until my second year in the Academy until I was even able to start reading and understanding the beginnings of the large Fuinjutsu scroll, and quickly learned that this was a long, very long, process. It started with getting my penmanship perfect, and hours upon hours spent studying thousands of kanji and their meanings, then moving into basic sealing arrays, to try and determine their purpose and be able to recreate them. By the end of my third year, after almost two years of study, I had finally reached the appropriate level of artistic drawing that qualified me to try my first seal, a special seal that was a gift of the Uzumaki Clan to Ake Ikeda, when he moved a portion of their Clan to Konoha over fifty years previous.
The seal was drawn in chakra filled blood on the user's stomach, and would actually integrate with your chakra network to help widen and smooth chakra pathways, and to help increase the density of your chakra. Not quite to the unnatural levels the Uzumaki's own seals and bodies were, they were nevertheless an important resource that was only going to help me in the long run. The end of the third year of the Academy, despite everyone thinking I was falling behind, actually marked my slow return back to the top few spots as my body was quickly adapting and growing stronger and faster to keep up with my chakra using classmates, even when I wasn't pumping my chakra through my body.
Likewise, by the time of my fourth year at the Academy, I was glad they were going to move on to the beginning stages of the "Academy Three" Ninjutsu techniques, as I needed more things to work on and improve upon. I had successfully integrated the Ikeda Clan Seal on my stomach over the break, and could already see a significant increase in my already strong chakra's density and flow. Though, I continued to suppress said chakra at the Academy, but even doing so, with all the time and training I spent on Taijutsu, I was starting to top everyone in our class boughts, including a completely pissed off Jiro Uchiha, who finally saw his position at the top in jeopardy by the end of our fourth year.
When our class returned for the fifth year at the Academy, Jiro was significantly stronger himself, having received Clan training from his father after successfully performing the Great Fireball technique that was a Rite of Passage for his Clan, and was becoming an insufferable braggart. I was also starting to see visible signs of strain between the Uchiha Clan members and the rest of Konoha, though it didn't cut down on the boy's fangirls from my class, or the excited talk of the younger Uchiha Heir in the early years of the Academy following in the footsteps of his already legendary brother. I thought about anything that I could do about the Uchiha Massacre I knew was approaching, but I wasn't really in any position to help or even affect the outcome, had never met or encountered Itachi Uchiha, would more likely be a suspect if I did mention anything to either side, and resigned myself to a horrible fate for another Konoha Clan.
By my fifth year at the Academy, my Fuinjutsu had finally reached a point where I could make my own basic storage seals and explosive tags, and slowly started building up a small inventory of both, after selling some of my early ones for a decent amount of money. I knew it was early, but I was slowly trying to build up and create the beginning structure of my adopted Clan, starting with a decent bank balance to cover emergencies, a large library of scrolls and techniques I was adding to as often as I could which wasn't much right now, and a decent inventory of equipment for an Academy student at least. I knew I had a really long way to go, but was at least now able to store just about anything I wanted to keep, and as I developed my Fuinjutsu further, only more opportunities would present themselves.
The biggest of these opportunities was at the end of the Ikeda Fuinjutsu Scroll where instructions for gravity "weight training" seals were found and quickly devoured. By the end of my fifth year in the Academy, I was again starting to physically dominate several of my opponents, including Takao Hiroto the biggest and strongest of the taijutsu ranks, and a frustrated Jiro Uchiha who was constantly trying to keep ahead of me or best me in class as I was seen as the only true rival to the top spot. I didn't have the heart to tell him that I was still holding back on my chakra output significantly, using only about 20% of my capacity and still having plenty of chakra for the Academy Three ninjutsu, and among the stronger chakra users even with the recently added "gravity weight seal" and limited chakra handicap I was using.
I really wasn't bragging, or even trying to shine in the spotlight like so many of my peers were eager to do at the first sign of success, and always made sure I wasn't the first to complete something, but always near the top. I also liked to really get things mastered versus just learning enough to get by, and used the more boring moments of class to work through various finger exercises and was constantly practicing my hand seals and chakra manipulation as they were essential skills for any good shinobi, all the while practicing chakra control every day all day, with various leaves I held or eventually moved around my body to increase my control. I had become quite good at multitasking, and my control really began to grow during that fifth year with all the exercises and work I was doing to improve, especially the Academy Three.
The Kawarami no Jutsu, or substitution was an absolute must for any ninja, and I had worked hard to get mine down to the single tiger hand seal, though I was hoping to get it without any hand signs by graduation and felt confident I would eventually accomplish that goal. Next was the bunshin or clone technique, which I learned enough to be successful, but didn't really see myself using illusionary clones and was waiting to try for an elemental clone or shadow clone after I graduated. The last, is the henge or transformation technique, which was coming along well, though mine was more illusionary than I liked, and I knew Naruto at least in the Manga could produce solid henges, and continued to train this until I reached that stage of changing into a perfect undetectable replica of anything I wanted.
My other training was coming along really well by the time for my last year at the Academy, and I was somewhat surprised how quick the time passed when you were working yourself to the bone every single day. After school, my days were even busier as I tried to squeeze as much out of every day that I could, constantly telling myself to keep pushing regardless of my fatigue or pain levels, and could see the steady growth in my skills and chakra. Years of constantly draining my chakra before bed, then compressing and concealing most of it throughout the day as I still trained turned out to be insanely beneficial, and it was safe to say that nobody in my class even came close in terms of chakra reserves.
Control was still a constant problem for me on the few occasions when I did try to let loose, but that had more to do with my chakra being compressed most days, I wasn't yet able to truly train all out, and knew I would need some time adjusting once I did cut loose. For now, I was content with what I was showing at the Academy as one of the top three in nearly everything, and in no hurry to leave the safety of the village while I was still training myself up. I actually had to ease up near the end of the final year to make sure Jiro Uchiha was named Rookie of the Year, cementing his place on a team with this year's dead last and top kunoichi, while I hopefully got to blend into a more balanced team.
The graduation tests themselves were a joke for me, and I was soon waiting in the Academy one final time, with my new Konoha headband securely fastened over my forehead, to learn who was going to be my Jounin Sensei and teammates, excited to soon be a real ninja. Looking at my classmates, only a small few of them had the potential to ever stand out as ninja and not just fashion disasters, and I was glad that I got to select my own uniform going forward, for now sticking to the Konoha standard everything, until I was strong enough to stand out. I was even happier to learn that Team 1 consisting of Rookie of the Year Jiro Uchiha, with both a superiority and inferiority complex, the dead last and dead weight of Kai Endu, and kunoichi of the year, Sia Hideki, their only normal member, were assigned to the only Uchiha Jounin available, and completely out of my hair.
"Team 4," came the announcement from Sensei Sanji, "under Jounin Sensei Doto Akimichi, we have Takao Hiroto, Ito Hikari, and Shin Ikeda!"