My arrival into this world was seamless. In what felt like no more than the blink of an eye, I felt myself being transferred from my comfortable living room, about to head off to bed, into a scene straight out of a horror movie.
The first thing I noticed was the sound of thundering, relentless rain. The unpleasant noise formed a stark contrast to the silence of the living room I had been enjoying only moments prior.
The next thing was the smell. It felt vaguely familiar, although more intense than anything I had ever come across before. It was the smell of copper and iron. Blood, I realized.
Slowly, I opened my previously closed eyes.
There was a piercing pain in my eyeballs. Like someone had inserted two burning rods into them. It took my eyes a few moments to adjust to the sudden flood of light invading them before I could see properly again.
I will forever insist that what happened next was an entirely appropriate reaction to what I was seeing before me.
I gagged.
My stomach convulsed and my muscles tightened in reflexive panic. I barely had time to turn my head to the side before bile burned my throat, spilling hot and acidic across the wooden floor. I squeezed my eyes shut again and sent out a frantic prayer that what I had just seen was only imagined.
I raised my head again and slowly opened my eyes, staring at the unchanged scene in front of me in numb shock.
There was blood. Everywhere. Thick, bright red blood. It was pooling along the boards of the floor, streaking up walls, and splashed onto the furniture. Never in my life had I seen a scene more ghastly, nor that much spilled blood in one place.
Shaking my head I focused on the elephant in the room. The one I had been ignoring until now. There were bodies lying on the floor. Two of them collapsed near the side of the room. They were clothed in civilian garb, faces frozen in expressions of desperation and terror.
My stomach lurched violently again. I gagged, dry this time, and fell back on my knees, pressing trembling hands against my mouth.
„What is this? What the hell is happening." I whispered in horror.
No one answered my question. There was no one to hear it. I was surrounded only by death.
Have I gone insane? I wondered. Did I fall asleep and this is some kind of twisted lucid dream?
That had to be it. Anything else was too crazy to even consider.
Quickly abandoning that frightening train of thought, I looked down at my hands and focused on my body.
My limbs felt alien. Too light. Too small. And yet… somehow stronger than they were before. The feeling was hard to put into words, but I knew instinctively that something major had changed inside me. This body felt nothing like the one I had been living in for the last sixteen years of my life.
Deciding that this was a problem far too big for me to deal with right now, I lifted my head and focused on the wall opposite me. My eyes locked on the third dead body in the room, the one I had been avoiding.
It was grotesque.
Flattened and smashed into the wall, the corpse barely resembled a human being. Limbs bent at impossible angles, armor crumpled inward, and flesh pressed and contorted against the wall. It was… horrifying, and disgusting.
I had never seen a dead body in person before, a privilege of growing up in a first world country I knew. The sight of what used to be a human being almost made me throw up again.
„This is insane." I whispered.
For what felt like ages, I was struck completely silent. Simply staring at the ruined corpse with macabre fascination.
Is this how a body looks after being hit by a train? Fuck if I know.
I gagged again, bile rising hot and bitter. My eyes still burned and I knew with absolute certainty that I would never forget the sight in front of me. Never, for as long as I lived.
⸻
I don't remember leaving the room.
One moment I was surrounded by blood and death, the next I was standing in an empty street. Rain striking me in sheets, soaking through my clothes and hair. I stumbled blindly into the open air, slipping on wet stones and mud.
Feeling utterly overwhelmed, I was barely able to keep my footing. Rain filled my mouth. It clung to my eyelashes and plastered my hair to my cheeks.
Suddenly losing control of my body, I collapsed forward onto the sodden ground.
I stayed there in that hunched over position for what felt like hours, but could in truth not have been more than a couple minutes. I was shivering violently, arms wrapped around my torso, letting the rain soak me entirely. Every muscle shook with restrained tension. My heart pounded like a drum of war inside my chest.
Holy shit… this is real. I finally admitted to myself, voice trembling inside my head.
There was no use in pretending otherwise. Not only had I never experienced an actual lucid dream before, despite my best efforts, but I was sure that no dream could ever be as realistic as this. Whatever this was.
Neither the cold nor the irritating feeling of rain hitting my body were something that could be faked. I did not know what was happening, but that did not matter, because this was happening. Whether I wanted it to or not.
I was always a firm believer in rolling with the punches. Despite this situation being more extreme than anything I had ever experienced, I knew what I needed to do now.
Forcing myself upright on trembling legs, I slowly stood up. My vision blurred with exhaustion. Mental and physical.
Something was wrong with my eyes. I had noticed that the moment I first opened them in this strange place. It would have been hard not to notice. Going from being near sighted to what had to be beyond 20/20 vision was pretty obvious. I did not stress that fact too strongly however, there was a time and place for everything and right now, I had more urgent things to take care of.
I lifted my chin up into the sky, letting the rain plaster my hair against my face, and took a deep breath.
My still racing mind slowly began to anchor itself.
I catalogued the sensations I was experiencing. The wet clothes sticking to my skin, the sharp bite of cold in my lungs, the steady pulse of rain against my cheeks.
The pain in my eyes had begun to dull and the strange energy inside me, making me feel more alive than I've ever felt before, started to feel even more overwhelming than it had been the moment I first arrived in this world.
⸻——————-
I returned to the house.
The two bodies lay on the floor in the same position I had left them in. One of them, the male one, had a Kunai sticking out of his chest, while the female figure had a kunai imbdded in her throat. A dark, sticky pool of blood had gathered beneath them. When I left the house in my panic, the blood was still spreading. Spreading across the room like bright red spiderwebs. In the time since it had begun to cool and dry, losing some of its luster.
The male body had dark hair and pale skin.
Intellectually, I knew that this body must share some resemblance to this man, given the fact he was its father. However, I did not see it. I had seen my reflection in the mirror next to the door while entering the house and we looked nothing alike.
No. I thought to myself
„This body takes after its mother entirely." I shifted my attention to the other corpse. The woman had red hair, clinging to her face where blood had fused into it. I was sure that in life, she was a woman of startling beauty. An Uzumki trough and trough.
One of the last surviving members of a legacy that could trace its roots back to the Sage of Six Paths himself. Now there is nothing left of that undoubtedly brilliant woman.
Only a dead husk.
I swallowed hard. Despite my best efforts and determination to stay strong, my stomach heaved violently again. I forced my gaze off of the dead woman and turned toward the third body, the shinobi.
The body was crushed, mangled beyond recognition, yet one damning piece of clothing remained. The unmistakable sign of the body's identity and its allegiance. A headband with the leaf of Konoha carved proudly onto its surface.
"This is a shinobi," I whispered, voice strained. "This is a shinobi who I killed."
A shiver ran down my spine and I shook my head. Stealing my nerves. "I know I did. This world. I am in the Naruto universe"
The thought, despite how ridiculous it sounded even in my own head, anchored me. My rapidly beating heart and trembling hands began to slow down. I turned around and stared intently at the corpses of Nagato's parents, my parents, and tried to remember their names. Nothing came. I was never the biggest Naruto fan and it had been ages since I watched the show.
"I took over your son's body," I confess to the empty room. Then, voice louder, I address the shinobi, "And I killed you. Well… the previous owner of this body did. But I doubt that distinction would matter much to you."
I swallowed thickly. „If there is one thing I do remember, then it is that you did not mean to kill them. You thought they were enemy shinobi. You panicked. You acted on instinct and when you realized that they were just civilians, you apologized. To me, their son. And yet still…I killed you."
The corpse began to fade out of focus as I turned my attention inwards. Assessing how that admission made me feel.
I do not feel guilty, I realized. Even though it was not really me that did the deed. I still would have expected to feel at least some amount of regret over what had happened.
I didn't.
All I felt was disgust at the state of the body and complete apathy for the person it used to be. It was a startling revelation.
Like the vast majority of people living in the 21th century, I had never killed before. Popular media had convinced me that I was supposed to feel something once that fact changed.
Grief, shame, sadness. Anything that would properly honor the gravitas of taking another person's life. I felt none of that while looking at this particular corpse.
I was unsure what to make of that. Nor did I know what this would mean for me going forward.
⸻——
The room's silence was once again interrupted only by the rain outside, after I fully regained control over my previously erratic breathing pattern.
I exhaled slowly, centering myself. The shivering stopped. Slowly and methodically, I forced my attention outward.
There was something I needed to do.
Without further delay, I walked towards the door and left the house for the second time since I arrived into this world.
I observed the street that unfolded before me and looked at the ground with judging eyes. Seeing that it would not serve my purposes, I began to circle the building until I arrived at the back of the house.
A feeling of relief overtook me as I found what I had been looking for. Soft ground. I took a couple steps forward until I found an appropriate spot and lowered myself to my knees. My fingers sank into the wet mud as I began to dig. My arms started to ache immediately, muscles protesting the strain and the rain, which I was really beginning to hate, pelted me relentlessly. Through it all, I kept digging.
This body… it should not be able to do this, I thought. Amazed at my fast progress.
I was prepared for an hours-long battle against the very earth when I stepped outside. A battle that would end with wounded and abused fingers. Yet, that fate did not come to pass. My hands moved through mud and displaced one handful of earth after the other with barely any effort.
This is crazy, no child should be this strong.
Then it properly hit me, chakra. The power that allowed the people of this world to perform superhuman feats. Subconsciously, I must have been augmenting my strength. The desperation and necessity of the situation forcing my body to access a pool of strength that had been laying dormant until now.
I suppressed a sudden thrill of excitement. This was not the time for that. The task at hand deserved my full attention. It was the least I could do.
⸻——
Minutes later, the hole was deep enough. I returned for the male corpse first, grimacing at the weight. I lifted him into a crude parody of a princess carry. I tried finding a more respectful mode of transport for the man that used to be my father. I truly did, but if there existed a better way for a child to carry an adult's limp body, I did not know of it. He was too tall and I was too short.
Once I arrived at the hole. I placed the dead man gently into the makeshift grave. Mud squishing beneath the weight.
Then I returned for the woman.
Her red hair plastered in blood made me feel a mixture of emotions that I was entirely unwilling to address. Instead, I turned my head away and forced myself to keep going. Once at the burial site, I carefully put her next to her husband. I tried to put them into a position that would be at least somewhat dignified. I failed. There was no dignity to be found in a grave dug up by a child's hands from wet mud.
Deciding that I had done the best that I could, I finally stepped back and looked at the result of my efforts.
With a solemn look I took in the two dead bodies lying together in the mud, surrounded by displaced earth. It was not pretty, nor was it particularly sacred in any way. Certainly not what I once imagined when thinking of the word grave.
I filled the grave back up again with steady hands.
I did not bury the shinobi. Objectively, I knew that I should. It was the moral thing to do. The man I had been raised to become would have buried him, but I could not. His body had been mangled beyond repair and while I had not much trouble with carrying around corpses that were mostly intact, I could not bring myself to deal with the ruin that had been made out of the shinobi's body.
All I could do was hope other Konoha shinobi would eventually come around and deal with it once they identified him as one of their own. For that purpose, I would leave his headband untouched.
⸻
After I finished my work and walked back to the front of the house, I took one last moment to collect myself.
A strange calm had overcome me the moment I placed the last bit of earth over my dead parent's grave. I thought that once I was finished, I would begin to panic in earnest.
I had just lost everything after all. Twice over. My previous life, my real life, was stolen from me and my old world remained firmly out of reach.
I was taken from my very home and put into a place that could only be described as hell from the perspective of any modern human. Then I was immediately confronted with the fact that I just lost everything once again.
I was not unfamiliar with the concept of transmigration. God knows that if there was one thing my taste in media had prepared me for, then it was this exact scenario.
What I was not expecting to have to deal with however, was being placed into a new world, only to immediately lose out on what could have been a loving family. The one thing I never truly had in my first life.
It was a shit situation, no better way to put it.
This world was a death trap. And I was an orphan stuck in a country devastated by war. Forces greater than anything I could currently imagine nor hope to resist, using it as their personal battleground.
If I wanted to survive, I could allow neither doubt nor hesitation to poison my mind and impair my judgment. Giving up was out of the question, after all, I was not entirely helpless. I possessed the most important resource this world had to offer. I had potential, and talent. But even more importantly, I had the Rinnegan. The Eyes of a God.
They might not have been mine, but to hell with Madara goddamn Uchiha. It was his decision to abduct an innocent child and implant his cursed eyes into them. He gave them up willingly. They belonged to me now. And I was never going to give them up.
To be frank, If I had my way, I would make sure that Madara never even had the chance to try to reclaim his eyes.
I straightened my shoulders, exhaled, and planted my feet into the muddy ground. My gaze fixed forward and my mind made up.
I would survive. I would master this body. This power.
I would not die in this place and end up as another nameless dead in a pointless war, like that Konoha shinobi, nor would I allow myself to be killed by the first enemy with malicious intent, utterly helpless, like my parents. I would survive this and I would thrive.
And one day, I mused. I will make that fucking plant responsible for this whole mess regret ever letting Madara put me anywhere near the Rinnegan.