August 8, 1988
England, Little Whinging, 4 Privet Drive
For an entire week, I observed my new family. Of course, I did more than observe them. I also studied this world, picked up the natives' habits and etiquette, and learned what one was supposed to say and do in different situations. In that respect, the family turned out to be quite well-mannered.
The local calendar stunned me! During my previous visit, I had already been floored by the fact that they counted years from the birth of some local god. But on top of that, their months did not even contain the same number of days! The Month of the Rat, which they called 'February' here, sometimes had only twenty-nine days! The last time I had been in England, it had been the local year nineteen ninety-six. Harry had said he was about to turn sixteen, which meant that, by a little simple arithmetic, I ought to be eight years old in the local year nineteen eighty-eight.
The day I entered Harry's body fell in the Month of the Horse, or August. At least they also had twelve months, just like us. Their moon, however, was tiny, and it was completely unrelated to the days of the month. For example, on the night from the first to the second of August, the full moon had only just begun to wane. How did people here orient themselves at all? Did they really rely entirely on scraps of paper covered in numbers and calendars with kittens?
I learned written English in a week. It turned out to be such a simple language! I already knew some of the letters, and there were almost no ideograms or symbols. You wrote things almost the way they sounded, with only a few sounds represented by combinations of two or three letters. Beautiful! The only drawback was that written records became very long.
Dudley-kun taught me the local writing system and how to read. He was so surprised by my request that he agreed.
I had also noticed something strange. Individually, the Dursleys were not that bad. If I followed certain rules, they could be reasoned with. Aunt Petunia gave me more food when I asked. She allowed me to train in the garden after I loosened the soil in the flowerbeds and pulled out the weeds. D-rank missions were extremely simple here, and I handled them easily even in this tiny body.
Once, I said that I would make my shirts smaller and sew them up myself. Aunt Petunia brought out a device she called a 'sewing machine' and used it to alter my clothes until they fit.
Uncle Vernon let me help him too. I enjoyed drilling holes while he tested the tools his company apparently manufactured. The sound of the drill reminded me of the 'Chidori' and 'Rasenshuriken' at the same time, which made me terribly nostalgic.
My cousin Dudley turned out to be a decent tutor. In six days, I learned to read reasonably well instead of sounding out every syllable, and I could write too, though not as quickly as I could write shorthand in my native language.
The Dursleys tolerated me and controlled themselves quite well when they were alone. But whenever they gathered together... It was as though something inside the family snapped. The moment all four of us were in the same room, they practically twisted with irrational hatred toward me. They said nasty things. They shouted. They could punish me for no clear reason. It was very strange. So strange that I began to suspect magic or some other form of interference, perhaps drugs or mental manipulation. My friend Ino had told me a few things about her clan and some of its techniques. Harry had also mentioned that something similar existed in the wizarding world.
Over the past week, meditation had allowed me to recover almost all of those three days in nineteen ninety-six and what Harry had told that woman writer. I remembered the key moments and my own thoughts about them with certainty. Harry had found it difficult to view his family from the outside. He hated them in return, but something was clearly wrong here. My sense of 'wrongness' was shrieking every bit as loudly as Uncle Vernon's drills.
Vernon-san had gone to work, and Dudley had left to play with his friends. I decided to speak with Aunt Petunia. In general, I liked the woman. She might have been insecure and had plenty of 'cockroaches in her head', but among shinobi I had met people far stranger than her. During our travels, Jiraiya had taught me not only fūinjutsu and ninjutsu, but also the keys to human souls. Especially female ones.
Aunt Petunia had to know that Harry—that I—was a wizard, since her own sister had been a witch.
Compared with my world, this one also had shinobi aristocrats from Great Clans, or wizarding aristocrats. As far as I understood, Harry's father and his godfather Sirius belonged to that group. Then there were hereditary shinobi, whose parents belonged to the warrior caste; here, those were ordinary, established wizarding families. There were also shinobi born to townspeople or peasants whose chakra systems were developed enough to let them enter the warrior class, though such first-generation warriors could usually become genin at best. In the magical world, people like that were called 'Muggle-borns', because non-wizards were called 'Muggles'. Apparently 'mage' was another word for 'wizard', probably in the same way that 'shinobi' and 'ninja' were different readings of the same thing.
Such divisions would exist in any world where some people possessed something that set them apart from the majority.
My mother came from a Great Clan—the Uzumaki—while my father was rumored to have come from ordinary townspeople. No one could say for certain, though, because he had been an orphan and had still managed to become Hokage, the strongest and most respected warrior of our hidden village. I was an Uzumaki half-blood. Harry's situation was similar, except that his father had been a wizarding aristocrat and his mother a 'Muggle-born'.
When a shinobi was born into a peasant family, it was like receiving the Sage of Six Paths' blessing. By sending their son or daughter to serve in a hidden village or a garrison, the family gained certain privileges, a temporary exemption from taxes, and most importantly, protection. Here, however, a family into which a mage was born seemed to receive nothing. At most, they learned that magic existed. People treated it as an unbelievable miracle. But something told me that a great deal of hard work and study stood behind that 'miracle'. Harry had apparently studied something for five years and still could not even clean his clothes with magic.
Harry had said that his aunt considered him and his parents 'abnormal'. No one had spoken that way around me so far. From Ino's explanations, I knew that mental interference worked in a peculiar way: it pulled out feelings that already existed and intensified them. If you felt irritation, someone could fan it into hatred. But if you had no bad feelings or emotions toward a person or phenomenon, then no matter how hard they tried, they could not create negativity from nothing.
That was why calm and cold calculation were so important. On the other hand, most of the emotions shinobi showed were fake. If you became genuinely angry in battle, you risked losing control of the situation, and that could be fatal. Of course, when I had been little and unable to control myself, the Kyuubi had gladly 'connected' to me. 'Possession by the Fox' was intoxicating. The aftermath, however, was something I would not wish on an enemy. My encounter with 'Dark Naruto' had also made me reconsider many things in my life. In short, zen was everything.
The psychotropic substances I had used could also produce effects similar to mental manipulation, perhaps even stronger ones. But it was indeed easier to build upon something that already existed. To make someone trust you completely, you first had to make them like you. Sometimes I managed it without stimulants. Jiraiya said I had charisma and a talent for 'talking people around', inherited from my father.
Returning to Petunia-san, she had most likely envied her sister a little for entering a magical world of wonders and sweet gingerbread. But then... Then Harry's parents had been killed, and Harry himself—a 'half-blood aristocratic boy'—had been placed with a 'peasant' family that had, at best, only vaguely heard of magic. Meanwhile, everyone in the magical world adored him from afar and practically worshiped him like the Sage of Six Paths.
I had grown up surrounded by, to put it mildly, a complete absence of love. No one at the Academy had wanted to teach me anything. But I had known almost from infancy that I was a shinobi. I grew up in a village full of shinobi, dreamed of becoming one, and did everything possible and impossible to develop my body and learn to use chakra. I spied on other people's training and copied their exercises. Had a teacher appeared earlier in my life—and had he not been a depressed, apathetic bastard like Kakashi-sensei...
Even so, by the age of twelve I knew several techniques, could fight, and had developed a system of behavior that reduced the amount of abuse I received from everyone around me. Harry, on the other hand, had turned eleven when someone metaphorically smacked him over his scarred forehead with a dusty sack and announced, 'You're a wizard, mate, and all that. Pack your things for Hogo-whatever-it-was School.'
The boy did not even know which end of a magic wand to hold. And behind all of it stood Headmaster Higekane*, wearing Sarutobi Hiruzen's benevolent smile. When Harry had told his story, the negligence of the people in charge had amazed me. But once I 'dug deeper' while living in the skin of an eight-year-old wizard abandoned with a Muggle family, the story began to stink... to take on entirely new colors.
I carefully found out that the Dursleys received no allowance or financial support for keeping me, so it was hardly surprising that I wore hand-me-downs. They were fairly decent ones, actually; I had owned worse. My appetite was no smaller than Dudley's. Or perhaps it was the other way around: I ate so much and was always hungry because of my chakra-magic, while an ordinary boy had started eating just as much after watching Harry—that is, me. And what parents would give their own precious child less than a sickly-looking boy devoured? That explained why little 'Dudders' was such a round-cheeked 'sweetie'. Vernon constantly grumbled at dinner that I was eating them out of house and home. Well, yes, my portion was as large as my uncle's, and he was a grown man. Even after eating, I nearly licked the frying pan because I was still hungry. It was not as though the 'poor orphan' survived on air, but looking at me, one might think I was nothing but a pair of green eyes behind glasses.
I almost felt sorry for myself. I could barely look in the mirror without crying. Right.
But there was another enormous 'but'. Harry and I had visited the bank, and he had his own account and everything else. That meant his family had left money, and someone ought to have been responsible for caring for such a 'golden boy', the hero of the magical world. Sasuke had lost his parents and clan when he was about eight, but he seemed to have had some kind of guardian who managed the clan's accounts and gave him money for living expenses. Sasuke had been placed in an apartment away from the Uchiha district so the sight of it would not reopen his wounds, and he ate...
In general, that was strange too. It was as though they deliberately kept the Hero in miserable conditions so that, after eleven years of shit, the magical world would look like a fairy tale where he was the true main character, destined to kill the Ultimate Evil. What bullshit! Bee-san and I had not even been allowed to participate in the war that had been started because people wanted to possess us. Here, a boy had been seriously fighting a grown, experienced wizard whom no one else could defeat since the age of one. Sure.
In any case, it was time to find answers to some of my questions and theories. I decided to begin with Aunt Petunia, the most accessible source of information currently available to me.
* 髭鐘, 'Higekane', can loosely be translated from Japanese as 'beard with bells'. Naruto could not remember long, complicated English surnames that twisted his tongue, so he invented nicknames.