The metal glowed orange in the forge, heat shimmering the air above it. Ryota held the tongs steady, his arms aching from keeping the piece centered in the coals. Sweat ran down his temples. The workshop smelled of coal smoke and hot iron, underlaid with the scent of quenching oil from the barrel in the corner.
"Keep it centered," his grandfather said from beside him, arms crossed over his leather apron. "The edges heat faster than the middle. You let it get uneven, the whole piece warps when you hammer it."
Ryota adjusted his grip on the tongs. The wooden handles were worn smooth from years of use, comfortable in his palms. He watched the metal change color—from orange to yellow-white at the center, the edges still holding that deeper red. His grandfather had taught him to read the heat by color. Wait for the right shade, then pull it and work fast before it cooled.
The forge's heat pressed against his face and his shirt stuck to his back. Outside the workshop's open door, the late afternoon sun slanted across the yard, but here by the forge the air wavered and bent.
He turned the piece, rotating it slowly. Almost ready. Just another few seconds to—
Everything tilted.
The workshop spun sideways. The floor swayed up, then down. His vision blurred at the edges, doubled, and suddenly his hands looked improper. Too small. The fingers shorter than they should be, the knuckles not quite right. The tongs felt heavy and awkward, like he'd never held them before, and there were two sets of memories crashing together in his head—a man in his thirties who'd worked construction, who'd lived in a world of concrete and steel beams and safety regulations, and a six-year-old boy who helped his grandfather forge farming tools in a village where people walked on walls and breathed fire.
Both sets of memories were his. Both felt real. But they couldn't both be real.
The tongs slipped from his grip.
His grandfather caught them before they hit the ground, smooth and fast. The glowing metal piece stayed secure in their jaws. "What's wrong with you?"
Ryota stared at his hands. The were small and child-sized. The calluses on his palms were thin, new, not the thick pads he remembered from years of construction work. Wrong. Everything was wrong.
"I—" His voice came out higher than expected. A child's voice, thin and reedy. Not his voice. "I don't feel well."
His grandfather frowned, deep lines creasing around his eyes. He set the tongs back in their rack and called toward the house. "Sachiko! Come here!"
The workshop door was already open. His grandmother appeared in it a moment later, wiping her hands on her apron. Flour dusted her sleeves as she'd been making something in the kitchen. She took one look at Ryota and her expression shifted from mild curiosity to concern. "What happened?"
"Dizzy," Ryota managed. The floor kept tilting under his feet. He put out a hand to steady himself against the workbench. "Everything's spinning."
She crossed the workshop in three quick steps and put her hand on his forehead. Her palm felt cool against his overheated skin. "You're burning up. This is that fever coming back. Come inside, right now."
His grandfather was already moving, banking the forge by using the long iron poker to push the coals to one side, then covered them with ash to slow the burn. The workshop would stay warm for hours, but the immediate danger of unattended fire was handled. He moved like a man who'd done this ten thousand times.
His grandmother guided Ryota toward the door, one hand firm on his shoulder. "Easy now. One step at a time."
The yard between the workshop and the house seemed longer than it should be. Twenty feet, maybe thirty. Everything looked familiar but different—his body knew this path, had walked it countless times, but his mind was still processing. The packed dirt under his feet. The stone border around his grandmother's vegetable garden. The well with its wooden bucket and rope. The house itself, two stories of dark wood with a tiled roof that needed repair on the left corner.
His legs moved automatically. Muscle memory from a body that wasn't originally his, guided by a mind that had lived an entirely different life.
Inside, the house was cooler. His grandmother's kitchen smelled of miso and fresh bread. She led him past the table where she'd been rolling dough, past the shelves lined with jars of pickled vegetables and preserved fruits, to the narrow stairs that led to the second floor.
"Careful on the steps," she said.
The stairs creaked under his weight. At the top, a short hallway with three doors. His room was the one on the left.
She opened it and ushered him inside. The space was small, maybe eight feet by ten, with a low ceiling and wooden floors worn pale in the center. A futon lay rolled in the corner beside a low chest of drawers. Shelves on the far wall held a few books that were basic reading primers, a mathematics textbook, a slim volume on shinobi history and wooden toys that looked handmade. A carved horse with wheels. A set of painted blocks.
"Lie down," his grandmother said. "I'll bring water."
She left, her footsteps quick on the stairs. Ryota stood in the middle of the room, staring at his hands again. The palms were calloused but lightly. A child's hands that had done some work but nothing like the rough, scarred hands he remembered from his old life. He flexed his fingers. They moved when he told them to, but they felt foreign. Like gloves that almost fit.
Six years old. The memories were settling now, sorting themselves into something coherent. He remembered being six once before, in another life, another world. Elementary school. Learning multiplication tables. Playing soccer at recess. But he also remembered being thirty-two. Remembered waking up in a cramped apartment, remembered the job site where he'd worked, remembered reading manga on his phone during lunch breaks.
One of those manga had been Naruto.
He walked to the window. It was small, barely two feet across, with wooden shutters propped open. The village spread out below of wooden buildings with tiled roofs in shades of gray and brown and faded red. Narrow streets wound between them, people walking in the late afternoon light. Market stalls in the distance. Smoke rising from chimneys. And beyond it all, carved into the mountain face, four massive stone heads watched over everything.
The Hokage Monument.
Four heads. Not five. Not six. Four.
From left to right: First Hokage, Second Hokage, Third Hokage, Fourth Hokage. The Fourth's face was the newest, the stone still pale where tools had shaped it, not yet weathered by wind and rain. The Third's face sat beside it, darker, older, the features worn by decades of exposure.
Ryota's chest tightened.
This was Konoha. The Hidden Leaf Village. Not a story. Not fiction. Real. Solid. Present.
And the Fourth Hokage was dead.
The memories clicked into place. On October tenth, one year ago, the Nine-Tails attacked. The demon fox had nearly destroyed the village but the Fourth Hokage's sacrificed himself to seal it away. The original Ryota had been five years old when it happened, living with his grandparents in the civilian quarter far from the fighting. He remembered—both versions of him remembered—the sound of explosions in the distance, the way the ground had shaken, the orange glow in the sky that lasted for hours.
Which meant Naruto Uzumaki was one year old right now. Just a baby. And the story hadn't started yet. The Academy graduation that would form Team 7 was still eleven years away.
His grandmother returned with a wooden cup of water. "Drink this."
Ryota took it. The cup was smooth in his hands, well-made, probably something his grandfather had bartered for. The water was cool and clean. He drank it all.
She felt his forehead again, her expression worried. "You're still warm. That fever you had last week, I thought it was gone, but maybe it's come back. Rest now and don't try to do anything. I'll check on you later."
She helped him unroll the futon, the thin mattress settling onto the floor with a soft thump. She waited until he laid down, then tucked a light blanket over him even though the room was warm. "Sleep if you can. I'll bring dinner up when it's ready."
"Thank you, Grandmother."
She paused at the door, looking back at him with an expression he couldn't quite read. Concern, definitely. But something else was underneath it. A worry that went deeper than a simple fever.
Then she was gone, her footsteps fading down the stairs.
Ryota stared at the ceiling looking at the wooden beams that were hand-cut, slightly uneven, with chisel marks still visible in places. His grandfather's work, probably. The whole house felt like that—built by hand, repaired over years, solid but not fancy.
Two sets of memories competed for attention, still sorting themselves out. The original Ryota had been sick last week. A fever that came and went, left him weak and tired. His grandparents had kept him home from the Academy for three days. He'd gotten better, or seemed to, his temperature dropping back to normal. But something must have happened. Some complications. A relapse that the original Ryota's body couldn't handle.
And when the fever broke this time, a different person woke up.
The original Ryota's grandfather was named Takeshi Kanegawa. His grandmother was Sachiko Kanegawa. They ran a blacksmith shop in Konoha's civilian quarter, making tools and basic weapons for other civilians. Nothing fancy, just farming equipment for the fields outside the village walls, kitchen knives for restaurants, standard kunai and shuriken for Academy students who couldn't afford the expensive stuff from proper shinobi weapon shops. They made enough to live on. Comfortable, but not wealthy.
The original Ryota had been attending the Ninja Academy for a year now, he was a second-year student. He was average at best with no special talents, no kekkei genkai, no notable chakra reserves. Just a civilian-born kid trying to become a shinobi because that's what most kids in Konoha did. The village needed soldiers and the Academy was free. Every family hoped their child might make chunin someday, earn a steady income, bring honor to the family name.
Except now that kid was gone. Replaced by someone who knew this world was supposed to be fictional. Who'd read the manga, watched the anime, knew the major story beats and character arcs and hidden threats.
Ryota closed his eyes. The ceiling beams seemed to press down on him.
This world killed children. He knew that from the story, but he also knew it from the original Ryota's memories. The Academy had a memorial stone. Names carved into granite—students who'd graduated and died on missions. The Third Shinobi War had ended when the original Ryota was four years old, but plenty of recent graduates from before his time were already dead. The memorial stone got new names every year.
The Academy graduated students around eleven, sometimes younger if they showed promise. Then those children went on missions which consisted of D-ranks at first babysitting, finding lost pets, weeding gardens. But soon enough, C-ranks, then B-ranks. The thought of death always loomed.
To Ryota, being average meant dying, being unprepared meant dying, and being in the wrong place at the wrong time meant dying.
Ryota opened his eyes again, but the room hadn't changed. It was still the same low ceiling, same wooden beams, same small space with a child's belongings on the shelves.
For him, knowledge without power was useless. He knew what was coming—or thought he did. The Uchiha Massacre in six years. The Chunin Exams invasion in twelve years. The Akatsuki. The Fourth Shinobi War. But knowing those things didn't make him strong enough to survive them. It didn't make him strong enough to protect the people around him.
The original Ryota had been weak—not hopeless, but the kind of weak that got you killed eventually. His taijutsu was below average, movements too slow and clumsy to keep up with the other students during sparring. He could recite the Academy lessons on ninjutsu theory well enough, pass the written tests if he studied, but the concepts never quite clicked when it came time to actually mold chakra. Math and reading came easier, but that wouldn't help when someone put a kunai in his throat. His chakra reserves were small, his control was worse, and his throwing accuracy was embarrassing.
His grandparents were Takeshi and Sachiko Kanegawa, and the memories showed them clearly—Takeshi teaching him how to heat metal properly, how to hammer without wasting motion, how to read the color of hot steel by the way it glowed in the forge's light. Sachiko had been the one making sure he ate enough, checking his homework from the Academy with patient persistence, walking him to class on cold mornings when his fingers were too numb to hold a kunai properly and his breath misted in the air.
They'd raised him after his parents died. Disease, apparently. Some illness that swept through the civilian quarter when the original Ryota was three years old. Nothing dramatic. No enemy attack, no shinobi mission gone wrong. Just sickness that took both parents within a month of each other. Takeshi and Sachiko had taken in their grandson without hesitation.
They were all he had left. And they were civilians: non-combatants, vulnerable in ways that shinobi weren't. When fights broke out in the streets, people like them became collateral damage, bodies counted in the aftermath without names attached.
The timeline was settling into place now, the pieces clicking together. One year had passed since the Kyuubi attack, the Fourth Hokage was dead, and the Third had been pulled out of retirement to lead the village again. The Uchiha Massacre was roughly six years away, the death of the Third Hokage thirteen years beyond that, and the Fourth Shinobi War sixteen years out if his memories were accurate.
He needed to prepare, to figure out what advantages he had if any, to learn everything the original Ryota should have learned but hadn't through some combination of laziness, lack of talent, or simple bad luck.
He'd start by finding out more about his supposed family, why a blacksmith and his wife had ended up raising a grandson who wanted to be a shinobi, what kind of tools and weapons they made and whether any of that knowledge could be useful. Beyond that, he needed to know what the original Ryota had learned in his year at the Academy and what gaps needed filling.
Ryota lay still, listening to his grandparents moving around downstairs. His grandmother's voice said something too quiet to hear. His grandfather's deeper voice answered, the words muffled by distance and the floor between them. The clank of metal, probably tools being put away in the workshop. The scrape of a chair on the kitchen floor.
They thought he was sleeping and it was better to keep it that way. Better to have time to think, to plan, to figure out his next move without having to pretend everything was normal.
The window showed late afternoon sun turning orange. The Hokage faces watched over the village, silent and permanent.
Somewhere out there, the story was waiting to happen. Characters he'd read about were living their lives, not knowing they were part of a narrative. Naruto Uzumaki was a one-year-old baby. Sasuke Uchiha was two, still living with his family in the Uchiha compound, his older brother Itachi not yet a shinobi. Kakashi Hatake was fourteen, recently promoted to ANBU, drowning in grief and guilt. The Third Hokage was an old man forced back into a job he'd hoped to leave behind.
And Ryota was a six-year-old Academy student with the memories of a thirty-two-year-old construction worker who'd read too much manga.
He closed his eyes and forced his breathing to slow. Deep breaths. In and out. His body was small and weak, but it was his now. His grandparents were downstairs, probably worrying about him. The Academy would expect him back in class tomorrow or the day after.
He had work to do.