Chapter One

Lee was settling in well to his life.

His new life, that was. It had taken a bit of getting used to, since it was in some ways similar to what he knew and expected, and in others it was completely different from anything that he could possibly have anticipated.

On the one hand... it was earth. Modern earth, even. All of the amenities of flush plumbing, pocket-sized cell phones, electric lighting, air conditioning, fast food outlets, and even the internet was largely the same. So long as you didn't look too closely at the specific details, like which person was voted into office here, or the precise length of a historical war there, the name of a popular burger outlet or the unique domain name of a web site, it would by and large pass for being the same.

But those differences did exist. In some cases minor and negligible, in others large enough that Lee wasn't sure how exactly things had still fallen out in such a way as to lead to a modern age so very similar to what he knew. Maybe things were different enough elsewhere that it would be immediately notable, of course, he couldn't know for sure being as this was Japan he was living in now. A country that he had been pretty generally aware of, but not familiar with the the degree of someone that had been born and grown up in it. It was completely possible that the differences would be stark and obvious to someone who had lived in a Japan for all of their life, and they were just flying over his head because it was new and a little strange to him. But in the normal way, the same as anyone who moved away to live in a distant country, and not...

... the more significant differences made it clear that all of the differences could be very simply summarized with this being an anime style 'The Earth'. It had taken him longer than Lee would be comfortable admitting to piece that together.

That wasn't to say that it was the Earth of any specific anime that he knew of, of course. Just that all of the elements were there. The off-brand one-letter-changed replacement products, the tropes, the elements of the fantastical mixed in with the mundane... all of those differences thrown in starker relief by how close it was to normal, some of the time.

Lee had been born Kato Lee. A member of the Kato clan, which was indeed 'like Kato Danzo?' if someone were to ask. The historical ninja was one of the clan's ancestors, and the clan followed in his footsteps in the path of active ninja for hire to this day. Right up to the point of having the ninja's namesake being a member of the clan, supposedly the direct reincarnation of his soul!

Not him. The lucky person, or unlucky as the case could be argued, was also named Kato Danzo. Just to make sure nobody got confused, maybe? Lee had frankly written off the whole thing as his clan being unexpectedly farcical about a curiosity of the family history, but that had been before he'd been brought in to sit on some actual and functional ninja training in progress.

He wasn't writing the possibility of a clan ancestor reincarnating into the modern era any more. This was some kind of anime-like setting, meaning you couldn't really afford to write anything off or it would crawl out of the woodwork in a plot twist later on.

In any case. The short of it was that Lee had reincarnated into a clan of modern-day ninja.

The Kato clan were specifically a Neutral clan... which was something that again could be boiled down into simple concepts, rather than a list of rules and exceptions and the loopholes through which a clan could define themselves. Simply put, as befit a world resembling an anime setting, there were bad ninja that would take on evil jobs for money and there were good ninja that would reject such offers without hesitation in all cases.

In practice it was usually something a little more complex in nature than the simple binary choice between the morality of good and evil, but when you took it in broad strokes intended for small children to use to internalize more complex ideas, that was what you ended up with. Groups of good ninja, groups of bad ninja, and groups like the Kato clan that could at the least interact cordially with both groups without things coming immediately to blows... though for the most part not at the same time. And the Kato clan itself demonstrated that there was more nuance to the dividing lines, as they had begun as the sort of evil ninja that would take any job, no matter how messy, and mellowed out into a more neutral stance over generations. Thus, the bad ninja would talk with the clan based on memories of how they had been, while the good ones would focus on the upward moral trend.

In any case, rather than the jobs you took, there was a much simpler way to tell where a given ninja stood on the morality spectrum. That was, which Shinobi School they attended. Currently or as alumni.

No, really.

With public education becoming commonplace, apparently the ninja got in on it? The government funded and set up a school for righteous good ninja, the 'Hanzo National Academy', and it was soon joined by Gessen and others, backed by other historically good ninja. In contrast, more were established and funded by corporations and corrupt politicians to train evil shinobi, such as 'Hebijo Clandestine Girls' Academy'.

... No, really. Ninja High School, where instead of sports rivalries the students are literally trained to fight each other in battles of good and evil. Hanzo seems to have strict entrance requirements, focusing on quality over quantity contrasting with Hebijo's decision to take anyone who can write an application letter and put them through the grinder of harsh training to see what came out the other end.

If Lee hadn't suspected that this was an anime kind of setting, that would have given the game away right there and then. A fewer number of elite 'good guys', facing up against an indefinite but large number of 'bad guys'? That was basically the distillation of anime tropes. Add to it that it was taking place as high school students and that the acceptance criteria were arranged to easily introduce the dramatic and sympathetic element of people that wanted to be good ninja but didn't make the cut and so had to settle for just being ninja at all?

Lee wasn't sure if it would have blown up on daytime television or anything, but that had the seeds of popularity there. It was down to luck, mostly, if it sprouted but still...

That being said, there was one critical fact to keep in mind.

If this was an anime? Lee wasn't the main character of it. Going by general anime tropes, that would be either a noble hero in one of the good-ninja schools or a tortured soul making their way through guts and determination in an evil-ninja school, preparing to inevitably see the light and turn coats to join the good guys.

It wasn't impossible that there was an anime protagonist in the Kato clan, Lee supposed, but... for one, there was a significantly more eligible candidate in that cousin, with the inherited name and will of the clan's ancestor. For another, the neutral clan being generally uninvolved and in the background meant...

... Yep, the doomed hometown rule. Nobody writes epic sonnets about the the farm-boy from the sticks if he stays out there, milks the family cow every morning, marries the baker's daughter, grows turnips and raises three or four children to live off the land. If Danzo was going to be a protagonist, then the clan was a narrative obstacle that would have to go.

As one more background character in the 'doomed hometown', Lee couldn't help but be uncomfortable at that thought. That sort of story beat usually came with an 'And I can't forgive 'them' for the death of 'everyone'', when it came down with it.

He, Lee, was a part of that wide group of 'everyone', right? So, what was he supposed to do..?

The smart option, just keeping to the sidelines and out of the way, living a comfortable and casual life with a job that paid decently and wasn't too much of a bother to cover his upkeep and expenses... it was looking more and more to Lee like that wasn't an option at all.

If that was so then it couldn't be helped.

"Demonstrate." Grandmother instructed, not in her position as a doting grandparent in her retirement, but as the last and final authority for Kato clan matters.

Lee nodded, then brought his hands together and focused his mind and will.

All around him was free-floating energy. Ki, the energy of life, produced and respired in every living thing. Passively drawn in with the breath, and then exhaled again, a form of energy that was ubiquitous. And yet, most people lived their lives day to day without any consciousness of its presence. Unable to feel it, meaning they were unable to use it.

... there was a greater consciousness in the energy. Diffuse, widely spread, and so massive as to be nearly incomprehensible. As though Lee was a dust mite on the back of a bear, or an oceanic leech clinging beneath the fin of a whale. So far beyond notice as to not even be worth finding a way to crush.

Fortunate, perhaps, because there was anger floating loose in that consciousness. If it was building up over time toward something then it was over a course of ages too great for Lee to have noticed any particular difference over the years of his life so far... but that might be to be expected, if it was the consciousness of the planet he stood on that he felt. It might be a huge problem in a century or several, in much the same way that a dormant super-volcano could in theory choose just any time to stop being dormant. That was a future problem that it wasn't really possible for Lee to do anything about, though. Yet.

And maybe it didn't really mean anything. People liked to talk about the harmony of nature, and the cycles of natural order, but the natural order included the food chain and there were a lot of losers in the wild, where the small and weak that weren't quick enough to run away became food for the strong. Taken in that light, there was plenty of resentment to float around, lifted on the breeze of millions of dying breaths.

Lee drew it in, filtering the emotions coloring the energy out and away to disperse harmlessly or drift to gather with other hazes of nature's anger. The energy itself he condensed into his navel, pulsing lightly with heat and power like the beating of a second metaphysical heart.

It wouldn't last for long, but this was just the first step. As Lee let it go, or channeled it into a specific purpose, it would leave his body again. But every time that the circulation was completed, there would be just the tiniest change to Lee's body... making it more natural, more easily done, and allowing the condensed energy to linger longer in his body until the day came that the pseudo-organ... a Golden Core... was set enough to begin generating a constant trickle of the energy without needing to gather more from the environment. At that point Lee could seal himself up in a cave without food or water for a hundred years to meditate if he liked, and not be bothered by the passage of time. Until then, though...

"So it is true. Senjutsu..." Grandmother murmured aloud to herself.

Lee knew it as 'Cultivation', but there wasn't much point in arguing against a local term... not when there wasn't even the context for it. Lee had taken a little time to check in on the status of Xianxia novels and there was nothing like the practice of Cultivation described in fiction. Oh, there were certainly mountain sects of monks... But they were either some flavor of Taoist or Buddhist depiction, calling on magic or begging aid from a higher power once their own bodies and efforts failed to match up, or they were focused on transforming themselves into something other than human to gain in personal power. Most often that would be some kind of devil or dragon.

The concept of a lone human struggling against the heavens and defeating naturally stronger beings through their own efforts had somehow fallen out of literary use since back when they put on plays about Heracles and the Trojan War in amphitheaters for public consumption.

Even an anime like 'Dragon Ball', or the equivalent of it, which was about as close as you could get to Xianxia tropes without actually being a cultivation novel... Some of the details about energy attacks and the very broad strokes of the plot were still the same, but it focused a lot more on begging for assistance from the mighty dragon that could be contacted by assembling the balls than on the direct kung-fu and power-level clashing. The demons that were generally only noted in passing through the plot were also a bigger fixture, some arcs were changed enough to be completely unrecognizable, and all of the characters that didn't fall behind eventually started sporting patches of scales or dragon horns somewhere on their body...

It was interesting. One of those little changes about the world that had no clear reason behind it, but which probably wasn't important in the long run. Ripples in a pond, as far as he could tell... Couldn't expect all of the details to be the same even if it was 'a modern earth'. Popular anime going by other names and having different plots was just to be expected.

"Did someone teach you?" Grandmother asked pointedly, before pausing. "No... that's not likely. Even if someone were to know of the clan's residences, the odds of a Senjutsu specialist choosing to teach a child of our clan, doing so secretly, and then simply leaving you here rather than taking you away with them when they left? Mind-boggling. The only practical reason to do so would be to sow discord and mistrust about a potential sleeper agent in our clan, and Senjutsu is rare enough of a thing that there is nothing that could be gained with such a gambit that would outweigh the benefit of an apprentice talented in Senjutsu. Still, to be sure... you were not taught by anyone?"

"Nobody in this world has so much as mentioned that Senjutsu exists to me, Grandmother." Lee replied, meeting the old woman's gaze.

She held it for a long few moment, searching, then sharply nodded.

"A natural talent. Rare, but not so rare as to be completely unheard of. The specifics, though..." she hums to herself. "... This changes much. A great deal. I'll need to speak with your parents about it, of course."

Lee allowed himself to be swept along in her wake, the very picture of an obedient and dutiful child of the clan.

Silent apologies went out to the namesake-cousin, but while a main character wasn't guaranteed to have a great time, they never got killed off in cinematics or as a tragic background set-piece in someone else's plot.

The eye of the storm, dead center of it, was where things were at their calmest after all.