In truth, his previous life had been much 'lower' than this one.
Painfully ordinary.
By his thirties, he had become the kind of office worker who spent most days doing work he did not particularly care about, then went home and escaped into games, novels, manga, anime, and whatever other fantasy caught his attention.
No wife.
No children.
No great career.
No serious ambition left.
Just enough income to keep going and enough entertainment to avoid thinking too hard about how little he was actually doing with his life.
Hopeless might have been too dramatic.
Wasted was probably more accurate.
Even his death had been unimpressive.
A rare vacation.
Bad luck.
Water.
Then nothing.
Fugaku felt surprisingly little regret about leaving that world behind.
There were people and memories he still valued, certainly, but he had never built much there worth clinging to.
The only person he had truly cared about there was his mother, who had raised him alone.
She had died from illness not long before him.
If anything, that version of himself had been even duller than the sixteen-year-old Fugaku who collapsed three days ago, not to mention him now.
And far less fortunate by birth.
This life was dangerous.
Much more dangerous.
But the starting position was almost absurd by comparison.
A most powerful kind of bloodline.
Access to elite instruction from childhood.
A trained body.
Political status.
A respected family name.
A command position at sixteen.
If someone like Fugaku had been born on Earth, the closest comparison would probably have been inheriting one of the largest corporations in the world, raised from childhood to take it over, surrounded by powerful rivals and internal politics.
Then, decades later, somehow allowing all of it to collapse around him.
Higher stakes here, obviously.
Much higher.
But the principle was similar.
The old Fugaku had started from an enviable position and ended in ruin.
The Earth version of him had started with far less and done very little with that too.
The more Fugaku considered it, the more ridiculous his current starting hand looked.
Not perfect.
Far from safe.
But compared to what he had been given on Earth?
A jackpot.
The only truly stupid thing would be wasting it twice, or not doing anything more with it.
He had always wanted to 'be someone'.
Even on Earth.
For years, he had carried that vague ambition without ever having the talent, discipline, position, or luck to make anything real out of it.
Eventually, he had accepted that he probably never would.
Now that excuse was gone.
This world had actually given him chips worth playing.
And a system brutal enough that the winner could take almost everything if he climbed high enough.
True, there was no internet here.
No games.
No endless stream of entertainment waiting whenever life became boring.
Fugaku almost laughed at the thought.
Those things had mostly been coping mechanisms anyway.
Ways to make an unremarkable life easier to tolerate.
If he now had a genuine chance to accomplish something significant, why would he choose distraction instead?
No.
He had to aim high.
That was the correct mindset.
The strongest power he could obtain.
The greatest influence and status he could build.
And, while he was being honest with himself, the best women he could find.
That particular part of life had been severely lacking on Earth.
Fugaku's thoughts paused.
"The best..."
Then another memory surfaced.
Blonde hair.
Amber-brown eyes.
Violet diamond seal on her forehead
A ridiculous temper.
Tsunade.
His former fantasy crush.
Fugaku stared at the ceiling for a second.
If his timeline was right, she should not have become seriously involved with Dan Katō yet.
Which meant...
He actually had a chance.
The thought would once have sounded delusional even inside his own head.
Now?
He was Fugaku Uchiha.
Sixteen, already a Police captain, heir to the village's and even the world's present-day strongest shinobi clan, and holding advantages no one around him could even imagine.
Strangely, nearly dying and awakening an entire previous life had done far more for his confidence than it had damaged it.
For the first time, wanting more did not feel like fantasy.
It felt like planning.
What was a six-year age difference, really?
The original Fugaku's memories confirmed that much.
That Tsunade Senju was only five or six years older than him.
A terrifying number indeed.
Fugaku almost laughed.
More importantly, the rumors matched what he remembered from Earth.
Her temperament was considered a bit 'odd', to put it mildly, but that had never stopped people from calling her one of the most beautiful women in Konoha, if not much beyond it.
Fugaku smirked.
Perfect.
He had never actually seen her in person.
As expected, their circles, duties, and political surroundings had simply never crossed closely enough.
Strangely, that 'difficulty' also did not bother him now.
It made him even a bit more excited, like solving a difficult puzzle or doing a hard but gratifying quest.
If anything, his confidence was getting a little ridiculous.
So the so-called fantasy crush from his previous life was real, alive, and still somewhere in the same village.
An actual S-rank 'female calamity' walking around Konoha.
He found himself looking forward to seeing what ink and pixels looked like translated into reality.
And, eventually, perhaps considerably more than seeing.
He also knew, from both memory and experience, that this version of him had been actually considered exceptionally handsome.
Again, a sharp contrast to his previous life.
That was hardly surprising in hindsight.
The Fugaku he remembered from the story had almost always been shown as a middle-aged man, yet the few illustrated appearances and images of his younger self had already suggested the same thing.
Strong features.
A masculine face rather than the softer kind of male 'beauty'.
A pronounced jawline.
Heavy cheekbones.
Straight nose.
Dark eyes.
Combined with his still youthful skin, it now gave him a look that was mature without actually making him seem older than he was.
The same applied to the rest of his body.
Fugaku was already taller and broader than nearly all boys his age, and even many adult men, with naturally wide shoulders and a dense frame that training had only sharpened further.
Not bulky.
Just solid.
The old Fugaku had never thought much about why.
The current one had a better guess.
Some basic biological and hormonal principles from Earth clearly still applied here, after all.
And if he had to put it in crude terms, Fugaku had probably won the genetic lottery there too.
Apparently, this life had truly been generous in more ways than one.
Fugaku's thoughts lingered on his body for another reason.
Not only vanity.
After all, this was not merely a biological world.
It was a supernatural one.
Chakra itself was created by combining physical and spiritual energies, the two together in sum forming the 'chakra reserves' from which a shinobi drew more on demand.
And which half of that equation did the average Uchiha usually lag behind in?
Physical vitality.
Not disastrously.
Certainly not compared to ordinary people or even most shinobi.
But compared to clans such as the Senju or Uzumaki, the difference was obvious.
Fugaku looked at himself differently now.
A naturally large frame.
Dense musculature.
Strong recovery.
Good endurance.
"Testosterone..."
Excellent nutrition since childhood.
Years of advanced training.
Whatever combination of genetics and hormones had produced his unusually robust build, it had implications far beyond appearance.
His physical energy should already be unusually high for an Uchiha.
Which immediately produced a less flattering realization.
He had been an idiot for not exploiting that harder.
Taijutsu.
Even more conditioning.
Everything that developed the body should indirectly improve one half of the foundation from which his chakra was produced.
Why had he treated physical training as merely one part of being a competent shinobi?
It should have been one of the priorities.
Especially for him.
Moreover, his baseline chakra was hardly 'ordinary' to begin with already.
Compared to civilians.
Compared to civilian-born shinobi.
Compared to most clan shinobi, hijutsu, random chakra mutation, or elemental kekkei genkai-based clans included.
The Uchiha had also spent generations selecting for, training, and producing warriors, like most other proper shinobi clans in existence today.
But beneath that lay even something older in their case.
Kaguya.
The God Tree.
The chakra fruit.
The Ōtsutsuki.
However diluted the connection had become after generations of human blood, traces of that origin still remained inside the Uchiha today.
They had to.
Otherwise the Sharingan itself made no sense.
Even a tiny fragment of that inheritance was enough to place the clan structurally above almost everyone born without such ancestry.
Actual shinobi were already a few percentiles of the world's population.
Clan shinobi were rarer still.
Families that had spent centuries preserving techniques, selecting for useful traits, arranging marriages, surviving wars, and raising children specifically for combat naturally produced better averages than civilians thrown into the Academy system.
And above even most of those sat the remaining bloodlines carrying some trace of the ancient Ōtsutsuki inheritance, which was like a 'divine cheat code' and truly 'alien' in comparison.
By Fugaku's rough count, only a handful still mattered.
Six, depending on how generously he defined continuity.
The Uchiha.
The Senju.
The Uzumaki.
The Hyūga.
The Kaguya.
And the surviving lunar branch descended from Hamura.
Looking at them now, Fugaku almost found the comparison funny and the overall situation very instructive in terms of how the greatest power was definitely a double-edged sword.
The Uzumaki were walking toward catastrophe and did not seem to realize how close it was.
The Kaguya had already degraded into a clan whose bloodlust increasingly overshadowed whatever forgotten greatness their inheritance once promised.
Hamura's descendants on the moon were heading toward their own silent extinction.
The Senju had voluntarily dispersed themselves so thoroughly into Konoha that their bloodline was already nearly fully diluted into the wider village.
And the Hyūga, for all their strength, had built an entire political system around deliberately crippling most of their own clan through the Caged Bird Seal.
Fugaku stared at the ceiling.
"...When you put it that way..."
The Uchiha were doing remarkably well.
Strongest coherent descendant clan.
Still large population.
A functioning hierarchy.
Their dōjutsu still intact.
Their name still feared across the shinobi world.
The situation was not good.
But compared to the rest of the family tree?
Almost comfortable.
Fugaku's expression flattened.
"For now."
That was the important part.
He already knew what happened if they mistook temporary strength for permanent security.