"Hey, have you heard?" one of my crimson-haired clansmen whispered, his voice a dramatic hush that absolutely guaranteed everyone would hear. "Apparently, the Second Hokage was ambushed on his way to sign a treaty with Kumo. They say he's dead."
A collective, theatrical gasp swept through the room. I slurped my noodles loudly. It was either that or scream.
Another Uzumaki, a woman who could smell drama from three villages away, leaned in.
"Yes, I confirmed it from a reliable source! But that's what I don't get. We won the war, didn't we? Why is the winner trekking all the way to the loser's doorstep to sign the paperwork? The whole thing feels... off."
"Sigh," a third one added, launching into a performance worthy of a stage play. "Basically, all the Five Great Hidden Villages have lost their Kage now. Most of the old monsters from the founding era are gone. The world… the world is about to sustain a great change."
I stared into my broth. It was a truly surreal sight: a room full of people who looked like they'd cosplayed as a walking tomato convention, earnestly mourning a guy with fabulous white hair.
And the weirdest part? I was one of the tomatoes. The reincarnation thing really does a number on your sense of tribal identity.
It had been exactly one week since the mental dam broke and the memories of my past life came flooding back.
Waking up to the realization that you're now a supporting character in a shonen death world where five-year-olds are evaluated on their killer-instinct and emotional constipation is… jarring.
The good news is my new brain was finally developed enough to handle the download without, you know, spontaneously combusting.
This is the world of Naruto.
A place where the phrase 'child soldier' is a job description, where sacrificing yourself for the clan is considered a solid career move, and where your DNA is basically your resume. It's like a high-stakes, magical version of high school, but with more stabbing and less algebra.
I was born an Uzumaki. Sure, the history book I'm not supposed to have read yet says our clan is basically on the endangered species list, but that's a problem for Future Me.
If Present Me—a guy with the combined knowledge of two lives and the chakra reserves of a small moon—can't figure out how to stop that, then I probably deserve whatever's coming. Which, given this world, is probably a bijuu dama to the face.
Not only that, I have the cheat code. The thing that puts my current predicament from 'terrifying' into the realm of 'bizarrely complicated'.
It's a system.
[Template System]
[User: Kōji Uzumaki]
[Age: Five (Mentally: Old Enough to Know Better)]
[Current Template: Monkey D. Luffy (Peak: Gear 5)] [Template Completion: 1%]
Simple and straightforward. I get random character templates and my first pull was the goofy, rubbery, reality-bending king of the pirates himself.
The 'completion' doesn't mean how much of his power I've absorbed. It means I need to be at the level where I can beat him in a fight using only the skills I've borrowed from him. It's the universe's way of saying, 'Here's a god-tier powerset, now go punch God in the face to prove you deserve it'.
What I did get was the full starter kit: a rubber body that makes falling out of trees a hilarious affair, a vitality stat that's already through the roof, the latent potential for all three Hakis, a body able to tank a Biju dama without problem if developed.
It's like being given the world's most powerful gaming PC with all the parts installed but no graphics driver. The potential is there, but right now I'm basically just really, really stretchy and hard to kill.
The end goal of beating Gear 5 Luffy seems about as feasible as teaching a goldfish to play the piano. The guy treats the laws of physics as mild suggestions.
But even if I only ever get to 50% completion, it's more than enough to make me a walking natural disaster in a world where the current top dog is future a pipe-smoking old man known as 'The Professor'.
My immediate problem, however, is far more mundane. It's the true final boss of any isekai story: bureaucracy.
The Academy starts soon.
How in the name of all that is holy am I supposed to hide the fact that I'm no longer just 'little Kōji?
I now have the chakra signature of a jovial eldritch horror packed into a kindergartener's body. I've been keeping a low profile, mentally screaming 'NOTHING TO SEE HERE at the walls, and it's worked so far.
But that's because everyone here is family, and they're not exactly trained to look for dimensional transmigrants at the breakfast table.
The Academy, though is a place lousy with sensor-types, professional paranoiacs, and a thousand years of tradition designed to root out exactly this kind of weirdness. How do I explain the rubber thing?
"THWACK!"
The sound, a perfect, sharp crack of ceramic on cranium, echoed through the suddenly silent dining room. My head snapped forward from the impact. A lesser man might have seen stars. I, however, just saw a very familiar, very smug-looking woman now holding a now slightly chipped plate.
"Mom?" I groaned, rubbing the spot. It didn't hurt—thanks to the whole… thing… but my dignity was definitely bruised. "What was that for?"
"For not listening to a word we've said for the last minutes, Kōji," she said, her smile as sweet as the dumpling sauce. "You've been staring into your rice bowl like it's about to reveal the secrets of the universe. Did you forget we were here?"
I was about to retort that my rice bowl was far more interesting than Auntie's apart from knowing Tobirama's death when a creeping sensation crawled up my neck.
The kind you get when you realize twelve pairs of eyes have laser-focused on you. My entire family—the main branch of the clan, no less—was staring at me like I'd just spontaneously grown a second head.
I blinked, my brain scrambling. Had I mumbled something about my rubber properties out loud? Did I accidentally stretch my earlobe while thinking?
My cousin Toji broke the silence. He leaned forward, a grin spreading across his features. "Alright, Koji. Out with it. You've been weird all week. Are you in love or something?"
I rolled my eyes so hard I'm surprised they didn't snap back like rubber bands.
"Yes, Toji. I'm five. My heart belongs to the little girl who shares her dango with me. It's a tragic romance for the ages." The sarcasm was thick enough to build a fort with.
But his stupid question was the final nudge. He was right about one thing: I had been weird. And trying to hide a fundamental change to your cellular structure from a family of hyper-observant ninja—some of whom could literally sense your chakra fluctuations from a mile away—was a fool's game.
The Uzumaki side of the family with their Mind's Eye, the Senju with their legendary sensory skills… it was only a matter of time.
I thought of Great-Granduncle Hashirama. The guy literally spawned forests out of thin air and no one exiled him for being a freak. Surely my thing was smaller. Quirkier. Less… photosynthetic.
A plan, both brilliant and profoundly stupid, formed in my mind. Why tell them when I could show them? A demonstration would cut through weeks of awkward explanations.
I took a deep, dramatic breath, letting the tension build. You could have heard a pin drop. A very, very quiet pin.
"You're right," I said, my voice low and serious. All leaning in. Even Mom looked concerned now. "I… I have a secret. Something I discovered about myself last week. I didn't know how to tell you. I was scared."
Their faces softened. My father stopped chewing, a piece of vegetable hanging from his lip. My big brother Shigeru's eyes narrowed, not in suspicion, but in protective curiosity.
"What is it, son?" Dad asked, his voice gentle.
This was it. The moment of truth.
Instead of answering, I focused. With a thought, my right arm went limp, then… extended.
It wasn't fast or violent; it was a smooth, silent, slithering motion, like a pink python in a sleeve. It slid past my gaping father, weaved around my stunned Aunt Michiko, and zeroed in on its target: the last, perfect, glistening pork dumpling on a plate three seats down.
My fingers (my very own fingers, now several feet away from me) gently plucked it from the dish.
The silence was no longer curious. It was utterly bewildered.
Schloooop. My arm retracted, the dumpling held triumphantly between my fingers. I made a show of it, popping the whole thing into my mouth and chewing with theatrical slowness.
"See?" I mumbled through the delicious, savory proof of my condition. "I'm… different."
The reaction was instantaneous and glorious.
My father made a sound like a drowning cat and choked on his food. A chorus of gasps erupted. Chopsticks clattered onto plates. And Cousin Toji, in his shock, jerked backward so hard he nearly executed a flawless, unintentional backflip off his cushion, saved only by a poorly timed flail that sent a bowl of soy sauce flying.
But the first coherent words to break the chaos weren't about the miracle of elastic limbs. They came from my aunt.
"KOJI!" she shrieked, pointing an accusatory finger at my now-empty hand. "That was my dumpling! I was saving that one!"
THWACK!
This one had more heat behind it. The edge of her plate connected with my skull with a resounding BOING! that was utterly undignified.
The plate didn't break. It just bounced off and clattered to the floor, and my head wobbled comically on my neck like one of those bobble-head toys.
The collective jaw of my entire family hit the tatami mat. You could have bowled a perfect game with the dropped chopsticks.
I rubbed my head again, a sheepish grin on my face.
"Uh, yeah. Don't worry about that. It doesn't really… hurt? My body's kind of like… rubber now?" I said it like it was a minor skin condition.
Unfortunately, my moment of smug triumph was cut short. In a blur of movement almost too fast to see, my brother Shigeru used the Body Flicker Technique and materialized directly in front of me, his eyes wide with a terrifying mix of concern and scientific fascination.
"Rubber?" he breathed. He grabbed my hands, his grip firm. "How stretchy? What's the tensile strength?"
Before I could answer, he gave an experimental pull. Now, Shigeru isn't just strong; he's a "top-three-in-the-clan" kind of strong. There was no resistance. The problem was, he didn't just pull my arms. He pulled all of me. Since I was, you know, all connected.
I shot forward off my cushion like a weird, human-shaped slingshot, leaving my legs behind for a second before the rest of me caught up. I face-planted directly into his chest.
We both froze. He looked down at me, mashed against his shirt. I looked up at him, my cheek squished flat.
"...You're an idiot," I mumbled into his abs.
He coughed, his ears turning bright red with embarrassment. "Right. Sorry. Forgot the… connectedness part."
Fortunately, my mother was already in motion. THWACK! This time it was her knuckles connecting with the top of his head in the classic, universally understood 'Iron Fist of Maternal Disapproval.'
She then turned to me, her worry finally overriding her dumpling-related rage. "Kōji, honey, when did this happen? Are you okay? Explain everything. Now."
I nodded, extricating myself from my brother and sitting back down. "It was about a week ago,"
I began, weaving the truth with the necessary lies. "I was sitting in the old oak tree, lost in thought, and I slipped. I should have fallen. But instead… my feet just… stuck to the branch. My head bonked against the ground, but my legs were still up there, holding me. I was just dangling there, like a weird, human rubber."
I shuddered for effect. "It scared me. I thought I was turning into a monster. I spent days testing it—poking, pulling, prodding. It wasn't until I started reading about weird chakra anomalies and bloodline limits that I found a name for it. I think… I think I might have awakened one."
It wasn't a complete lie. The System had awakened a week ago. And I had desperately scoured the clan archives for any mention of 'Rubber Release' hoping for a precedent to make me seem less like a freak and more like a… well, a slightly different kind of freak. The Senju had their Wood, we could have Rubber. It had a nice ring to it.