Breathing in a new body becomes easier with time. As does learning to live without chakra. Coming into the world, she remembered herself drowning in different air and choking on it. The energy was not chakra, she knew that. Something about it was sinister and outright diabolical. None of it felt natural to begin with. She learned to breathe the air of a new world after she died, slowly treading through the dark waters.
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Sakura knew about the concept of reincarnation after the Fourth Shinobi War. Naruto and Sasuke had been reincarnations of Indra and Ashura of the same world. Her case a bit different. Being enclosed in a small body with memories intact was aggravating. Reliving was really annoying. Having someone change your nappies because your motor functions are shit was even worse. Most of that time was spent in a blur as her mind struggled to adapt and keep up with nineteen years worth of memories trying to resurface. She was three when her brain started to bring in her old personality.
Most would call that a miracle, but Sakura liked to think of that period like a long funeral—dying made her lose things. Her village, family, and friends were all gone because she died. Thinking how people would cope with her death wasn't too worrisome. Living people move on rapidly as time brings new surprises. In Sakura's case, she was the dying kind. Her new life was a surprise, but a very uninviting one—she would rather not be here at all. The pure lands would have been better if she had no way back to her first life.
The people in this life were merely silhouette's of white in her eyes. The only similarity from the last is the pink hair she inherited from her father. In a world where brown and black are the most common, how she got green eyes is beyond her comprehension, and pink hair is an oddity in this world as well. Nothing in her lives would ever be normal, would they? She would always stand out in both of them with bright-coloured hair and eyes.
Her parents were nice people, but they didn't deserve the depressed toddler she grew to be. Sakura silently hoped that they would have another child that would give them the childish personality all parents wanted to experience when raising a child. People stopped trying to get her to smile when her mother, Kaori, had got into a car crash. From the living room, Sakura overheard her grandpa and father talking about the possible brain damage the woman would suffer if she did wake up from her coma. That theory had been debunked when she came back six months later with evident stitches on her forehead. The sight would have scared any normal toddler into a crying fit. Sakura simply stared with analytical eyes that caught a different type of attention from her mother. Something about her changed. Many people who wake up from a coma change, but the woman seemed off. She was getting an Orochimaru kind of vibe and she didn't like it. Sakura steered clear of the woman.
Dinners with the family were different. Sakura ate in silence, studying her mother. Every simple habit from the mother she knew was different. Kaori never used her right hand to eat, the woman was left-handed. She was sure that muscle memory was different compared to a complete personality change. The body's muscle memory worked in the cerebellum, while personality worked with the frontal lobe. Muscle memory doesn't change depending on a person's personality. It was like her brain had been switched with a different one. Orochimaru switched bodies by taking over their mind, body, and soul. It was like Kaori had been taken over. Sakura had shoved the theory down because of the absurdity. This world's physics were drastically different from her original world. There was no chakra available to transplant someone's mind into a body. It was scientifically unachievable with this world's current medical technology. Organ transplants are something that is only just becoming mainstream. 1998 was the first successful adult-to-adult living donor liver transplant performed, and Sakura was born a year after that. A brain and a liver are two different organs, one has a function that the brain controls and the other is the control centre for all bodily functions. The amount of knowledge and experimentation too vast for this world to handle.
Sakura had done her research, compared the two world's similarities and differences after she had seen her father browsing an application on a computer. The application had a search engine that you could ask almost anything with linked that provided sources to answers. When Jin and Kaori were asleep, she began hours of research. It was easy to learn the patterns of their habits—when to shut down the computer because one of them had to use the bathroom or get a drink of water, which is why Sakura found Kaori's new habits weird. She couldn't continue her research with this strange Kaori roaming around the house. Sakura was unable to grasp the way she thinks until she observed the woman for a period of time, a few months at most.
Luckily, most of the attention was diverged to Kaori's pregnancy and caring for that. Using her past life's knowledge of taking care of pregnant women, Sakura to predict Kaori's new habits with a better tune.
At night, the woman got up to use the bathroom most often between the hours of midnight and two-in-the-morning. She slept during the day more frequently while Jin went to work, allowing Sakura some time to continue her world comparison project—mostly the differences in medical practices. Any adult in this world would think their child to be a psychopath if they were researching how to surgical remove someone's heart in the middle of a battlefield. Prodigies in this world were few like her last, but not treated the same. One sent children to war, and the other sent them to get an early education to get taken advantage of. Neither sounded great. Sakura didn't like that this world required schooling until the age of eighteen, but maybe it was for the best to allow children to be children. It would create less of a violent world. This world experienced two world wars whereas hers experienced three, indicating a significant distinction.
Sakura started falling into her old habits when in her lab—not eating because she busy creating new medications or isolating herself. Jin was too focused on the discovery that he was having a baby boy to notice, and Kaori respected Sakura's want for privacy.
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Kanjaku did not know that the body he took over already had a child made. Those were not included in his plans for the future, but went with it anyway. The child seemed to want her space when it was just them two inside the house. That still didn't answer the inquisitive looks he received from the child, as if she knew something was off with her mother. From what is seems, the child noticed because they were a secret genius, not giving a fuck about it, or they were oblivious and were questioning something apart from themselves. Either way, he respected Sakura's expressed desire to be left the fuck alone.
He let Sakura float in the back of his mind for a few months before trying something to irk the child, possibly something that would traumatize them forever. Not that he cared, the child could die for all that mattered. The only child he needed was the one he was creating for future plans.
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Sakura sat upright in her bed, staring at the ceiling, thinking to herself, mentally noting the things down she had researched in the last few hours. It was the midnight hour, meaning Kaori would get up to use the bathroom multiple times due to the baby squishing her internal organs.
"Mama... AAAAA...aaa..."
Green eyes lazily glance in the direction of the voice that hosted a vile looking humanoid bird that had four horse feet poking out of its back. The colouring of the creature made Kaguya look pale. When the thing tried to talk out of its beak— "Baaaa...AAA"
Sakura broke out laughing at the unpredictability of that lurking in her room. For a while, she let it walk towards her or try to, it had to flip itself on it's back to use the horse legs. When it attempted to use the legs to fly onto her bed, Sakura hopped off her bed, crouching to take a look underneath its chin. She pictured human vocal cords in that long neck, setting out to figure out how it talked. To even think something like this existed in this natural world was the most entertainment she experienced for the first time in four years. Her hand turned its beak from side to side to see if it had a laryngeal prominence of the thyroid cartilage—a part of the neck nicknamed the Adam's apple. Typically, one could figure out the gender of a human's assigned gender at birth by inspecting this. The fact that this creature had one was astonishing. It seems that whatever this was had human similarities as well as animal characteristics.
"Looks like evolution really fucked you over," Sakura commented as the creature tried to bite her hand, which resulted in a loud slap in retaliation. Her hand gripped its neck as she looked the creature in its miss-matched red and blue eyes. "I wonder what your vocal cords would look like under those feathers. Should I dissect you?"
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Kenjaku watched from the doorway with an agitated frown. Kaori really had given birth to a child with the same curiosity and fucked-up tendencies he had, it was perplexing. Maybe Sakura would be more of an asset than he anticipated.