The sky was a dull, overcast gray — not the kind that warned of thunder, but the kind that smothered the light. Mist rolled over the sea like a breathing thing, curling and retreating with each distant crash of waves. Somewhere along the coast of the Land of Waves, a boy lay motionless on a bed of black sand and jagged stone.
His eyes snapped open.
He gasped, body jerking violently as if pulled from drowning, though no water clung to him. His chest heaved. Cold air seared his lungs. He blinked up at the sky, every muscle tensed as though from a fight — or perhaps a fall. Then the cold set in. Deep, bone-chilling, wet cold that gnawed at his skin.
"Where…?" he croaked, voice raw.
The mist offered no answers.
He sat up slowly, clutching his head. His fingers curled into thick, dark hair — messy and slightly damp. A name tickled the back of his mind, and it wasn't one he had known in the life he remembered before. Kaien.Kaien Mizukari.
He stared at his hands. Lean. Strong. Calloused in strange places. Definitely not the ones he'd had before.
This wasn't Earth.
That much, he understood instinctively. This was the Naruto world — or rather, the Shinobi World. He could feel it. Not just in the eerie silence of the mist or the chill crawling over his shoulders, but in something deeper.
Something in him.
He closed his eyes and reached inside.
And felt it.
Chakra.
The moment was raw. Electric. Like waking up with a second pulse thudding beneath his skin — not blood, but something more fundamental. The flow of energy from core to fingertips, vibrating softly in his bones. He didn't need confirmation.
He knew.
He had reincarnated.
Kaien stumbled through the dense bamboo forest hugging the coast, one hand dragging along trunks for support. His clothes — dark gray travel gear with a high collar, reinforced shoulders, and shinobi-style bracers — were foreign to him, but functional. Whoever this body had been before, it was his now.
By the time the mist thinned, he'd found a dirt path and followed it to a modest fishing village nestled between two cliffs. The houses were small and weather-worn, roofs draped in moss, their edges sagging slightly with time and sea air. A few men worked on nets, casting wary glances as he approached.
Kaien slowed his steps. He was a stranger here. Alone. No headband, no village name. Just… a wandering teen with wild eyes and a ninja's stance.
He knew how that would look.
An older man — perhaps in his fifties — straightened from mending a net. His eyes narrowed. "You from the mainland?"
Kaien nodded. "Just… passing through."
"Most who pass through end up dead these days."
Kaien offered a faint smile. "Not planning on it."
The old fisherman — called En — eventually allowed Kaien to stay in an abandoned shack behind the docks, in exchange for helping move crates and repairing tools. Kaien kept to himself, practiced chakra control at night, and listened. Always listened.
Gatō. Bandits. A bridge builder named Tazuna stirring hope. The Hidden Mist's former tyranny. The Third Shinobi War's scars. Kaien absorbed it all like a sponge.
And most importantly: the timeline matched.
He wasn't just in the Narutoverse. He was in the Land of Waves Arc. Right before Team 7's first real mission. He had days, maybe a week, before Kakashi, Naruto, Sasuke, and Sakura arrived.
And that terrified him.
"I'm not ready. I'm just some guy who watched the anime ten years ago. I barely know how to control chakra."
But even so, part of him itched to act. To do something. Because he knew how things went. The blood. The betrayal. The tragedy of Haku. The corruption.
He couldn't stop everything.
But maybe he could build something.
That night, he sat alone on the rocky cliff above the village, moonlight barely piercing the fog. He breathed slowly. Deeply. Hands resting on his knees.
He let chakra flow.
The technique was instinctive — not learned from scrolls but inherited. Swift and silent. The wind barely stirred as his figure flickered, and then reappeared five meters to the right.
No sound. No buildup. Just speed.
Swift Release.
His heart raced.
I didn't even weave signs... it's movement-based. Muscle chakra priming. So this is how it feels...
Again. This time, forward. His form blurred, then snapped into focus. The rush made him grin.
It was the first time he'd felt alive since waking up.
A few days passed.
Kaien helped around the village by day and trained in secret by night. He practiced walking on tree trunks, holding chakra in his feet. He burned through half his stamina learning how to sense fluctuations. But progress was happening.
And then it came: his first accident.
He was meditating near a pool tucked in a bamboo grove, water still and clear. He'd been experimenting with chakra nature transformation — trying to produce water and fire separately. Water came first, easily. It misted off his palms with a chill sensation.
Then he added fire.
A sharp hiss exploded from his hands.
BOOM.
Steam surged forward in a violent wave, knocking him backward. Trees sizzled. The pool boiled at the edges. His arms were red and aching.
Kaien sat up, coughing.
"Ow. Holy hell — that's not just steam, that's Boil Release.""Okay. Okay, it's real. That's the second one…"
He grinned through the pain. Two Kekkei Genkai. Swift and Boil.
Maybe the world had given him a shot after all.
The next night, smoke rose in the east.
Kaien rushed through the forest to find a small farmhouse ablaze. A group of thugs — Gatō's men, by their uniforms — had set it alight and were laughing. A woman cried out from inside.
He didn't think.
Swift Step. In a blink, he was among them.
The first didn't see the hit coming. A scalding palm slammed into his throat — Scalding Palm — sending him crumpling with a shriek. The second tried to draw a blade. Steam exploded in his face. The third fled screaming into the night.
Kaien kicked open the half-burning door, lifted the woman onto his back, and disappeared in a flash of speed.
He collapsed with her in the safe clearing, coughing, his skin blistered.
She wept and bowed. "Thank you… thank you…"
He said nothing.
The fire burned behind them.
Rumors of a "ghost ninja" began to spread among the villagers. Silent, fast, and cloaked in mist. No one knew who he was.
Kaien kept his hood up and his mouth shut.
But he began marking trees in the deep forest with seal tags — basic ones, for now. Alerts. Tripwires. Anchor tags for future barriers.
Not a village yet.
But the first stones of one.