Living as a baby wasn't all that different from being stuck in a bed.
Thinking back on it, honestly, it might have been worse.
At least an old man in a bed got to keep some dignity. A baby didn't. The body did what it wanted, when it wanted, and you were just cargo. Hungry when it decided you were hungry. Dirty when it decided you were dirty. Tired at all the wrong times. Angry without any proper tools for expressing it besides crying and flailing like a hooked fish.
Most of that time passed in a long, warm blur. I had flashes. Moments where I was truly there—thinking, watching, getting annoyed enough to make noise just to prove I still existed.
One of the worst came while one of the matrons was changing me.
In my last life, I had argued grazing patterns, hay prices, and the proper age to cull a bull nobody had the sense to geld. I had paid taxes. Fixed fences. Buried good dogs. Raised children. I had been a man with aches in his knees and opinions about weather.
There I was now, laid out bare as a plucked chicken on a changing cloth.
I had tried to glare at the woman with all the cold authority of a grown man.
Instead I rolled halfway onto my face, discovered I still couldn't hold my own head up for more than a few wavering seconds, made an outraged noise that came out wet and pathetic, and got flipped back over with the absent competence one might use on a sack of rice.
"There now," she said. "Strong lungs."
Strong lungs, I thought bitterly, while my legs kicked uselessly in the air. A man's pride could survive reincarnation. It could not survive being powdered.
As if that weren't enough, I sneezed on myself immediately afterward.
That was the sort of insult infant life specialized in. It never stopped at one.
Those sharp, lucid moments never lasted long. They wore me out too quickly. Thought itself felt expensive. I would be awake, furious, humiliated, and thinking clearly for a handful of breaths, then time would smear and slide, and I would drift again.
Still, things accumulated.
Voices. Faces. Smells. The thin warmth of milk. Sunlight through paper screens. Soap. Rice. Herbs. Clean linen if I was lucky. Hell I was pretty sure my name was Tai. It sure seemed like it anyways.
And under all of that, strangely, sometimes, hunger came with something else.
Not for milk.
For salt. For fat. For char and marrow and the deep, steady comfort of beef cooked low and patient.
It made no sense coming from a body with barely enough teeth to gum its own fist, but the want sat in me all the same.
It took maybe a year before my mind and whatever passed for my soul finally shook hands and put me back in the driver's seat.
That was, in hindsight, an alarming development.
The first thing that happened when I truly snapped into place was that I got blinded by light.
Not ordinary light.
A hard white gleam, bright enough to stab straight through my sleep-heavy eyes. I blinked, squinted, and tried to focus, only to realize it wasn't light at all.
It was teeth.
A full set of blinding, aggressively enthusiastic teeth attached to a face that had no business existing in the real world.
Young man, one might even say YOUTHFUL. Bowl cut. Eyebrows so thick and certain they looked drawn on with a ruler and conviction. He was grinning like he had just won a war nobody else knew had started.
Behind him, the sun was rising.
Of course it was.
Of course this lunatic had the sun behind him like the heavens themselves had agreed to support the performance.
He gave me a thumbs-up.
A full, proud, emotionally overwhelming thumbs-up.
Then he shouted, at a volume no toddler should have survived intact:
"MY SON! TODAY IS THE DAY WE BEGIN TO UNLOCK YOUR YOUTH!"
I stared at him.
He stared at me.
And in that moment, I understood three things with perfect clarity.
First, I was in Konoha.
Second, I had been born into a family of lunatics.
Third, my mother teaching me Japanese turned out to be one of the few kindnesses fate carried over intact..
You would think that after two years, even with only scattered stretches of lucidity, I would have figured out who my parents were and where exactly I had landed.
I hadn't.
Up to that point, I had mostly understood my life as a sequence of competent women, shared naps, and institutional food. Not bad, exactly. Just communal. Structured. Impersonal in the way systems are impersonal even when the people inside them mean well.
Later, I learned the place was part of a Senju-run compound, where children were watched while their parents worked missions, recovered, trained, or otherwise risked death for the village.
Efficient. Sensible, even.
A little unsettling if you thought too hard about it.
At the time, all I really knew was that I had been fed, cleaned, watched, and passed from one set of hands to another with the smooth rhythm of a place that did this often.
That was how I had gone two full years without truly understanding who had a claim on me.
Then one morning, just after my soul finished bolting itself properly into my body, I got screamed at about youth by a man glowing like a motivational poster, and it finally clicked.
Might Duy was my father.
Now, I knew that name.
Not at first with all the weight it deserved, but enough. It had been there in the old memories, somewhere between late-night anime marathons and the soft ache of getting older. I knew what kind of man he would become. I knew what he would mean, one day, to this world and to the son who came after me.
The Eternal Genin.
The man who opened the Gates.
The man who would throw his life in front of death with a smile if that was what protecting the people he loved required.
A man I respected.
Eventually....
Right then, with dawn behind him and his teeth still shining like a threat, he looked less like a legend and more like a teenager who had lost a fight with a barber and decided to make that everyone else's problem.
Even I could tell something was off.
He had one of those wispy mustaches—thin, uncertain, clinging to his face like it wasn't fully committed to the idea of existing. The kind boys grew when they wanted to look like men and ended up looking like they had made a mistake in public.
I stared at him.
He beamed at me.
And for the first time since waking in that world, I had the distinct feeling that my second life was not going to be quiet, dignified, or orderly.
It was going to be loud.
It was going to be absurd.
And if the way he scooped me up was any indication, it was going to involve an unreasonable amount of exercise.
That last part proved true almost immediately.
Duy did not handle me like a fragile child. He handled me like a tiny training partner with low but promising stats. Once I was steady enough to stand, he would set me down in the yard with all the solemn ceremony of a master unveiling a prodigy and clap for me whenever I managed not to fall over.
Most children wobbled. I braced.
Most children cried and reached. I planted my feet, scowled at the ground, and tried again.
If I fell, I got angry before I got hurt.
One of the older caretakers noticed before anyone else. She watched me squat down, push up, wobble, correct, and do it again with the red-faced determination of a man trying to save his livelihood.
"That one's odd," she muttered to another woman as she shook out a cloth nearby.
The other woman said "Have you seen his father?"
She wasn't wrong.
I didn't have a grasp for chakra yet. Nor did I have any bloodlines. I certainly didn't have a hold on fate.
But I knew bodies.
Bodies could be strengthened.
Bodies could be fed.
Bodies could be made into something dependable through work, patience, and stubbornness.
So while my father shouted about youth like a man trying to frighten the horizon itself, I made a quieter decision.
The body came first.
Everything else could wait.