My first few months in this new world were a blur, quite literally. It turns out that your eyes need time to adjust to the outside world, and the process was slower than I would have liked. Even as my vision began to return, I struggled to recognize my new family, and the language barrier posed a significant challenge as well.
Born to a young civilian couple, I could only pray that the attack by Kurama had already passed and that we were safe.
On another note, I quickly discovered that there isn't much you can do as a baby: you eat ,which was extremely embarrassing, digest that food, and sleep.
With so little to occupy my time, I turned to experimentation, attempting to reach for my spiritual powers and the newly acquired chakra. Unfortunately, I had little success. Having a physical body significantly dulled my spiritual powers; they were still there, but teleportation was not going to happen anytime soon.
The only lingering effect from my old abilities that still functioned, albeit very weakly, was my eye enhancement.
As the months went by, my body grew larger and stronger, and at last, I could move on my own. While it was just an awkward baby crawl, I appreciated any mobility at this point.
I will have to convince my parents to get me a potty soon, I refuse to make poo poos in my pantses any longer.
During this time, it also became easier to understand the people around me. I figured out my new name: Ryuuzaki. I also learned that the Fourth Hokage was still in office, a realization that shook me to my core.
There was no way I could escape Kurama as a six-month-old baby who could barely crawl. My mother was also pregnant again, which filled me with both happiness and terror.
"Was I brought here just to die as quickly as possible? Did Marzanna actually send me here only to claim my soul?" Such thoughts raced through my mind at light speed, pushing me into further experiments, especially concerning my mindscape and the recovery of my spiritual powers.
Unlike my old world, where mystical powers, mindscapes, and bending the laws of physics were merely tales of fantasy, here, they were a daily routine for the people. Most accepted these phenomena as normal and natural, but my inner scientist was dissatisfied with the explanation of "That's just how things are."
So, I decided to delve deep within myself, meditating and focusing, just like I did after my death. As days and weeks passed, I finally managed to enter my mindscape.
Entering it for the first time felt like whiplash; my head throbbed with a dull pain, and all around me was nothing but darkness and suffocating silence.
Slowly, the silence abated, giving way to the ambient sounds of a room, and the darkness transformed into something familiar.
I found myself standing in the middle of a room filled with small tables, chairs neatly tucked around them. Right in front of me was a large bookshelf overflowing with books of every kind. To my left stood more bookshelves and a closed door; to my right was a window that overlooked a city intersection. Behind me was a bar with bar stools, and upon the shelves behind it sat various types of liquor.
As I looked around, I burst out laughing, something I hadn't done in two years. It felt so good that I laughed until it hurt.
Who would have guessed that my mindscape would resemble my favorite bar from my past life?
After calming down, I noticed something curious: I was standing almost as tall as I used to be. I rushed to the bar to check my reflection.
"This is not how I remember myself," I muttered. Instead of my usual brown eyes, I found deep forest green ones, the same color as Moldavite.
My hair, once completely black, was now a light color, almost pink, and appeared to grow in a chaotic fashion.
My face seemed unusually youthful, maybe that of a young teen, definitely not an adult. Even the stubble I used to have was missing.
I walked away from the bar, contemplating this new information.
"Is my soul merging with this new body? I certainly look like a blend of my baby appearance and my old self." My baby eyes were indeed the same forest green color, but my hair had taken on far more pink than I remembered seeing in the reflection.
Deciding to think about it later, I began to explore my mindscape. I opened a few books and flipped through them.
"They seem to record my memories, including those from my past life," I noted, which explained the sheer number of books. My eyes wandered toward the door near the bookshelf, which led to what had been the staff room and toilets. I reached for the handle and pulled it open.
"That's different," I thought as I stepped through. Before me lay a forest clearing, as if nature itself had invaded my mind.
Various trees surrounded me, ranging from small shrubs to mighty redwoods in the distance. Small pink crystals grew near the trees, resembling mushrooms, and at the center of the clearing lay a lake fed by two streams, one much larger than the other.
The larger silver stream flowed powerfully to my left, carving its way through bushes and grass, while the smaller, deep blue, almost purple stream coiled to my right, weaving between roots and shrubbery.
I looked back the way I'd come, spotting a small log cabin with an open door—the inner sanctum of my mind.
Just as I was preparing to venture further, I was abruptly pulled back, waking in the living world. I found my father picking me up, making faces at me, and placing me in a stroller. It looked like it was time to go play outside.
It was now the end of April, almost exactly eleven months since my new life began.
I could waddle around quite expertly at this point; running was possible, though still somewhat clumsy. For the last few days, I had been home alone with a family friend keeping an eye on me while my parents were in the hospital, my mom was giving birth, and my dad was freaking out.
It was nice, reminiscent of my first life when I got a little brother in my past life. However, this also put my anxiety into overdrive. Minato was still Hokage, which meant Kurama would attack soon. I suspected I had only five months left until that fateful October night.
My experiments intensified, but my chakra still wouldn't work at all. At least I discovered the problem with my spiritual powers: my body was simply too weak to use them in any meaningful way, and they had changed drastically.
I no longer had perfect 360 vision; instead, I could see clearly, with sharp details at an incredible distance. I could notice any muscle twitch and even movement of chakra when enhancing myself, but I couldn't perceive anything else.
No perfect memory, no ability to copy movements. It was a little disappointing, but right now I will take anything I can get.
I frequently ventured into my mindscape to work and noticed that it grew with my mastery over it. I could now spot birds in the trees, small insects crawling through the undergrowth, and even small mammals hopping around.
I was interrupted from my inner musings by my babysitter.
"Mommy and Daddy are home, little Ryuu," she said, picking me up and delivering me into the living room.
We were welcomed by my family, with my dad taking me into his arms and showing me my new sibling.
"Look at her, Ryuu," he said, clearly pleased with himself, almost as if he had just discovered the secret to world peace. I looked at the small bundled-up baby in my mom's arms; she had the same pink hair as me.
"This is your little sister, Sakura," Mom said, positioning the small child closer to me. My brain short-circuited for a moment.
"Had I been so focused on what-ifs that I completely forgot?" My mind raced. It seemed so obvious in hindsight: green eyes, pink hair. Even if I never heard our family name, my own paranoia and survival instinct had made me lose sight of the obvious.
I must have been staring into nothingness for a bit too long, as I heard my mom say,
"Are you alright, Ryuu?" clearly concerned. That snapped me back to reality.
"Sister…" I murmured, still shaken by my failure to spot the obvious. Thankfully, my family believed I was just getting used to having a smaller sibling.
Being Sakura's older brother was interesting, and it would be even more so as she grew; she was just a newborn for now.
"At least now I know we should survive Kurama," I thought, filled with relief as I lay in bed, unable to sleep.
"I need to be more perceptive; I need to look around more." More thoughts flashed through my mind. I had been so focused on regaining my powers that I hadn't noticed the extremely obvious signs, all because I had only been paying attention to my mindscape and meditation.
"I can't stop yet, though; there is still so much to try," I thought bitterly.
Accessing my chakra felt like a dead end. The feeling was there, but it just wouldn't move. Every time I sat by the lake in my mindscape, the silver river would cause the small lake to overflow whenever I tried to access my chakra, while the small, deep blue stream barely increased in volume.
This led me to my latest and most unfortunate theory: my Yin, or spiritual energy, was so overwhelmingly more powerful than my Yang, or physical energy, that it was impossible for me to use chakra until my body started to catch up.
Additionally, the physical body did indeed limit my spiritual power, as it could not flow freely; instead, it flowed into the chakra lake and then into my chakra system.
I realized that I would have to gain full control over chakra first if I ever wished to use it effectively.
Fortunately, there are such things as Yin Release, and while they are not the same, they make me believe that accessing my pure spiritual power should be possible in the future.
I closed my eyes, thinking of what was to come, and slowly drifted to sleep for the and first time in a long while, looking forward to tomorrow.
The air grew colder as the sun slowly set, an eerie silence falling across the entire village like a blanket. Even in this cold, silent evening, I could not sleep.
It was that day, that night when I hoped nothing would change for my new family. I kept looking out of the window toward the Hokage monument, anxious yet resolved to endure. As I kept my vigil, the night deepened, making it hard to stay awake, but no matter how tired I was, I could not close my eyes.
Suddenly, the feeling of cold vanished, as if all the icy air had ceased to exist. Instead, it felt warm and dry, like in the middle of a drought.
Then, pressure slammed down on me as if trying to suffocate me just by existing. I froze, unable to move a muscle as thundering footsteps echoed through the village, showing no regard for the houses in their path.
Just as quickly as the pressure came, voices erupted around me, yelling and screaming. I couldn't make out the words clearly, but soon the first explosion rang through the air.
A roar, louder than anything I'd ever heard, shook my bones and caused a small earthquake, knocking things down from shelves. It seemed that the Konoha ninja had attacked Kurama, and he was not pleased.
If the villagers were not awake yet, this would definitely rouse them. I still couldn't see anything; my window faced the Hokage monument, and Kurama was summoned on the other side of the village.
A massive jet of flames pierced the night sky above all of Konoha, illuminating the entire village from end to end, moving beyond the monument. Another mighty roar accompanied it.
I heard many popping and whooshing sounds around the neighborhood; the Third Hokage was ready to fight.
"We need to hold it until Minato arrives!" his voice carried through the air, brimming with power.
"Enma, now!" sounded another order, followed swiftly by a loud impact. It resonated through the ground as if a punching bag had been struck right behind me.
"Push it out of the village!" was the last command I heard before the ninja force sprang into action. Just then, my dad rushed in, completely terrified, picked me up, and started running down the stairs, through the front door, with Mom and Sakura close behind.
He led the way, trying to get us to the safe shelters beneath the Hokage monument. As he carried me, I finally caught a glimpse of the fox.
Standing on the outskirts of the village, in a trench it created just by being pushed, sat the enormous fox. Its fur blazed orange, and its eyes glowed blood red.
It rose, all nine tails unfurling behind it, and a deep purple ball began to form in its mouth.
"Down!" I yelled. My baby voice and limited vocabulary allowed for little else. Dad, as if on instinct, grabbed Mom and pushed us all into a nearby alley.
The blast of pure chakra erupted, tearing through the nearby houses. Just being close to it for even a fraction of a second almost made my parents pass out; the pressure was suffocating. I focused all my spiritual power on staying awake, trying to infuse some into Dad.
As I did, a small shockwave burst forth, lessening the pressure around us. But there was nothing more I could do; my body couldn't handle a second use of whatever power I had managed to conjure.
Focusing my eyes on the street we were running down, I gasped. No more than twenty meters away, everything had been vaporized: houses had disappeared, the ground cracked and torn asunder, and flying debris barely missed us.
As we got back up, another explosion rang through the air this time from beyond the village walls, a sound unlike anything I'd ever heard, an ominous boom that carried the assured death of anyone caught in it.
We continued running, me still peering over Dad's shoulder toward the fight as best I could. In an instant, a giant toad plunged from the heavens, landing on the enormous fox and pinning it to the ground. Then, in the blink of an eye, they both vanished.
Even without looking directly, I understood exactly where Minato had teleported. It was as if I could see without needing eyes.
Although everything was unclear, every figure was a vaguely human-shaped blob of color, I could grasp the situation unfolding above the village, in the forest beyond the Hokage monument. The yellow blob, which I assumed to be Minato, teleported away and back almost instantly, bringing a red blob and a very small orange blob, while the immense greenish-yellow blob desperately tried to hold down the fiery orange one.
But before I could witness the sealing, an overwhelming wave of tiredness swept over me, forcing me into sleep. My head rested against my dad's shoulder.