Chapter 7

So Chiha, what actually happened for me to tell him about chakra wa...."

I was already outside and running away from our house before I could hear the rest of it.

After running about a hundred meters I heard the thing I was absolutely dreading to...

... No, probably everyone in the neighbor heard it.

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" IITTTOOO!!! "

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Today was my 3rd birthday. Today was also the day I would get to meet my estranged paternal grandparents for the first time.

Because of the Yin and Yang intensive chakra difference in biology of our three clans, even before the founding of the village, ever since the time of the Warring Period there was an understanding that no intermarriage was going to occur between the Yamanaka-Nara-Akimichi trio. Because we were allies long before joining Konoha.

There were outliers in all times, and some actually went against the common understanding and married. But whenever there was an intermarriage, apparently the child born through their union would always be stillborn. That is excluding the civilian and non-chakra-possessing members of the clan.

Which honestly made a lot of sense to me because the clans of Yamanaka, Akimichi, and Nara were so close to each other, they might as well be a single clan. Even in politics they are always together and have always been together for as long as anyone can remember.

Because of this closeness between each other, there would have been a lot of intermarriages, which would have led to all three of the clans becoming one eventually because of everyone sharing everyone's ancestors.

That's why only civilians and non-ninja personnel marry within our three clans. For a baby that is born safe, healthy, and mainly alive out of inter-clan marriage, with at least one parent who unlocks chakra, was never heard of.

That was apparently not only in our clan, but in the whole world. You rarely find people with multiple Kekkei Genkai because inter-clan marriages are frowned upon, discouraged, or outright banned in many places.

The decades or even centuries of using hidden jutsus or Kekkei Genkai apparently affected the clan's blood and made changes in it, making it incompatible with other users. Hence, marrying within the clan or marrying a non-clan member was okay in many clans. The big clans usually preferred the former to the latter.

Which was also what actually made my mother stand out, because she was the first documented success of an inter-clan marriage between any of our three clans with ninja parents.

Even after my mother was born, intermarriage was still discouraged because of how fragile my mother was.

That was why it took everyone by surprise when she became a genin through sheer force of will and even successfully made it onto a team under a Jonin, which is a privilege given only to, at most, 15 students a year. The rest need to join the genin corps and rise up from there as you do normally in an army. Apparently, that's how it worked in all other hidden villages too.

And that was the reason my paternal grandparents were estranged from my now-deceased father. Apparently, they were very much against the marriage between my father and my mother.

They thought, rather reasonably, that because my mother was already so weak, if she married a Yamanaka, then they would surely not be able to have babies because of how diverse the bloodlines would get for me.

And my father went against their wishes and married my mother anyway, because of love, and also because he had support from my mother's parents, who intermarried themselves, and Jiji, who had supported his son.

The fears my Yamanaka grandparents had turned out to be reasonable because apparently there were a lot of complications during my birth.

But that's a story for another time. Back to the matter at hand: it was the first time I was going to meet my paternal grandparents. Obaasan was actually understanding and had some goodwill towards them, but Jiji didn't like them much. So I didn't really know what to expect.

Will they blame me for my father's death? Will they love me? Will blood be thicker than water? Will Jiji provoke them and an argument break out? And more importantly, how should I react? I loved my mother and father because of how I could still remember the feeling I had of them from even inside my mother's womb.

But I probably didn't know they had died or didn't know that feeling was of my mother and father until I gained all my memories. That's why I didn't have any guilt about loving Obaasan and Jiji. But I didn't know about this new set of grandparents.

I mean, that's why it took them three years to reach out. Because of them being guilt-ridden that their last words with their son were during a big fight about how I was a mistake. That's why we had to postpone today's chakra lesson—because they reached out to try to reconnect with me.

Since the accident four months ago, by today I had learned to sense and access my Yang chakra by now and only sense my yin Chakra. Which seemed to be a lot. The reason would be because I was actually stillborn, dying before even living in this world. But somehow I fought on and continued to live.

I mean, I didn't have any guilt about taking over someone's body or something because my soul was there inside my mother before even giving me birth, and someone who was a product of all three clans should have been at least mentioned in the anime.

So I was kind of sure whatever was going to happen, it was my presence in this body that actually brought it to life.

In the end, I decided on a very simple strategy: to go with the golden rule—to treat them how they treated me.

Well, Obaasan did say I inherited my father's eyes, so there was little chance of them hating me when I reminded them of their son.