6 Chakra

I don't remember everything about my previous life, but I remember the word, fuck, and its many uses. And I think fuck, sums up my condition very nicely.

If this was indeed the world of Naruto, then my plans of a long and worry-free life just got thrown in the toilet and set on fire.

This was a death world. A world full of monsters, and I'm not just talking about the tailed beasts. There are shinobi out there that have the capacity to wipe out cities, but also the willingness.

Lying on my back, I tried to dredge up everything I remembered about the Naruto series. Of course, I couldn't quite remember every detail as I didn't follow the series religiously, but I remember the broad strokes.

Of course, that was assuming this world was the same as the series, which I highly doubt. There were already a ton of conflicting sources of information. There was manga, anime, books and don't forget all the movies.

In the end, I decided not to worry about all that and focus on more immediate concerns.

First, I needed to find out more about the situation I had been born into. Tsunade's appearance gave me a few clues. We were obviously in Konoha, and judging from her appearance, I was guessing we were probably past the 2nd shinobi war. But, I needed more information because it's impossible to determine her age. Tsunade uses a special jutsu that keeps her appearance young. Only when her chakra is completely exhausted does her true appearance come out.

Wanting to know more, I focused on the young kunoichi shinobi with the Konoha headband. She had dark hair and dark eyes, but otherwise, I recognized no recognizable features. Of course, identifying people would be much easier if I could understand what was being discussed.

The only strange thing I could pick up on was that she seemed to have a friendly relationship with Tsunade.

Didn't Tsunade have an apprentice besides Sakura? What was her name? I racked my memories, trying to remember.

Without meaning to, I let out a sound of annoyance, bringing everyone's attention back on me.

The young kunoichi moved closer to me, thinking I was upset. Then, as her face came into better focus, the name dawned on me. Shizune, her name was Shizune. Although, for the life of me, I couldn't remember her last name.

I tried to do the math, but since I didn't know her age in the series, that made it difficult to determine when I had been born. But, going off her young age, it's safe to say I wasn't born in Naruto's generation.

A sinking pit formed in my stomach; I vaguely remember that the time before Naruto's birth was full of turmoil. The 3rd great ninja war was the longest and bloodiest conflict in the Elemental Nations in well over a century.

Seeing that I was in distress, my mother scooped me out of the crib and held me close. Then, she started humming and rocking me back and forth. I'm not sure if she was using some jutsu on me, but it actually helped calm me down.

Once my thoughts were clear, I decided, for now, it didn't matter when I had been born. Instead, I needed to come up with a plan. How I got to the Naruto Universe may never be answered, but now that I'm here, it's time to make some goals.

As I lay in my mother's arms, I tried to think about the future. Countless ideas and plans were considered and then quickly discarded. It was all too much, too many factors to consider. Instead, I needed to break things down into more manageable pieces and focus on what I could control.

In the end, I settled on one goal, power. It didn't matter what I wanted to do. It wouldn't matter what I wanted if I didn't have power. Until I got strong enough, I would be at the mercy of others, which was unacceptable. I wanted to rise to the top and go wherever I wanted to go without fear.

Of course, the first thing I need to accomplish is learning the language. There was so much to learn, and understanding people was the first step in acquiring said knowledge. Not to mention, being a baby sucks, and not knowing what was being said all the time was driving me nuts.

Even though I was still entirely mystified by everything that had happened, at least one mystery was solved. All that energy I had been feeling had to be chakra. I'm not sure how it all works, but I remember there being a type of shinobi called sensors. Sensors were rare and could detect chakra from a distance.

Of course, the series never depicted how sensors detected chakra. Not once did they imply it was painful. It felt like being stabbed directly in the brain with an ice pick or having someone use a bullhorn right next to your ear.

Thankfully, they made this magical room for me. It kept most of the noise out of my head. Now that I think about it, all the weird lines and symbols in the room have to be seals of some sort. I couldn't see much detail. Anything farther than a few feet got blurry.

Panic shot through me as I realized the door to the room had come into view. It was that time of day again. Once a day, my mother would take me from the safety of the sealed room. It wasn't for very long, but I never enjoyed being outside and having my mind bombarded with information about what I now understood to be chakra.

Mom hummed gently, trying to put me at ease. But it didn't help. The second she opened the door, my mind was flooded with information. I could feel an uncountable number of chakra sources, each like a spotlight in the dark. It was too much for my brain to handle. It was like trying to hold back the ocean.

Later that night, I woke up when I felt the person that felt like darkness incarnate enter my room. For the first time, I didn't pretend to be asleep. I needed to know who this person was. Maybe it would give me another clue to my situation.

Unfortunately, when I opened my eyes, all I could see was a dark silhouette standing over me. Using my minimal control over my vocal cords, I made a noise that I hoped sounded like a baby being curious.

The shadowy silhouette moved a bit closer, letting a stray beam of moonlight from the small window expose his face. The man's age hovered somewhere in between middle-aged and old age. His hair was dark but beginning to take on a grayish hue. There were harsh lines in his face from a lifetime of making hard decisions.

As I took in his features, I froze in shock when my eyes spotted the scar on his chin. The scar was old, faded with age. It was in the shape of a sharp X. What the fuck was Danzo doing in his bedroom watching me sleep? Whatever it was, it couldn't be good. I remember what he did to his subordinates, forcing them to kill their best friend—doing his very best to turn them into emotionless tools he could wield. No fucking way was he doing that to me.

Thankfully, Danzo didn't stay around for very long; after he disappeared, my resolve to get stronger only intensified.

Rather than close my eyes and drift off, I turned inward, looking for my chakra. Being reborn should give me a significant advantage over any of my peers. If I can figure out how to mold chakra, I can grow my reserves and practice moving chakra throughout my body.

I spent the next few hours looking for any sign of energy within me. I was puzzled when I couldn't find anything. Was I doing this wrong? You would think being a chakra sensor would let me find my own chakra. Well, unless it's like trying to use your eyes to look at your face.

The next few days passed, and I still couldn't detect a whiff of chakra in my body. I squashed the small voice in the back of my head that suggested maybe I had been born with no chakra or damaged coils. I refused to believe I had been reborn into the Naruto Universe only to be unable to use chakra.

If I remember the lore correctly, chakra is created from mixing physical energy and spiritual energy. Perhaps it's because I'm only a month old and don't have enough physical energy to develop chakra. Or maybe it's the fact that I have no idea what I was doing. It would be nice if there were an instruction manual or something.

The following five months passed in a blur. Thankfully, most of my time was spent sleeping or eating. I would have gone mad if I had been awake all day. But, the good news is that I made a lot of progress on the language issue. They say the best way to learn a language is to immerse yourself into it, and I was fully immersed.

Of course, it helped that everyone spent their time with me using exaggerated facial expressions and opened their mouths widely when they spoke to me, trying to teach me. Part of me wanted nothing more than to scream at them that I wasn't a baby. But, even though it was a little humiliating, it was very effective at teaching me the language. I still couldn't follow conversations all that well, but I was improving.

I figured out my new name ages ago. My name was Senju Taiyo. I'm a little embarrassed to admit that at first, I thought my first name was Senju. But then I finally figured out that the family name went first.

So my first name was Taiyo.

I still wasn't sure how I felt about that. It certainly helped that I couldn't remember my name from my previous life. I didn't know if I felt like a Taiyo. The name didn't feel like me. But maybe being Taiyo is just something I will have to grow into.

Speaking of improvement, I've learned how to crawl. I know I shouldn't sound so braggy. It's just crawling. But figuring out how to move around on my own is a massive improvement to my life. Lying around all day is boring as hell.

I'm still stuck in the sealed room, but I've gotten a much closer look at all the seals on the wall. Although, I have to admit, sometimes I lose track of time looking at them. It's like a whole other world opened up to me, with a whole new language and with rules I haven't figured out. But, one day, I will figure them out.

Of course, I don't spend all day in the room. My mother has been bringing me out for increasing amounts of time. Nothing I do seems to sway her. I'm still completely overwhelmed by the amount of chakra I can sense. But, I have to admit, things are becoming a little clearer to me the more time I spend outside.

It's gotten a tad bit easier to separate all the different chakra sources. Sometimes, I can even get a sense of the people I can detect. Hopefully, one day I will be able to function normally. There has to be a way to ignore everything, but nobody will bother teaching a baby how to do it.

In other news, it's been a few months since I've seen Tsunade and her apprentice Shizune. I have a feeling that she'll be back one day. But I doubt she will stick around permanently, too many bad memories here.

Feeling sleep overtaking me, I decided to take a nap.

I awoke later in the day and after making sure I was alone. I decided to spend some time meditating. I had yet to succeed in detecting any chakra, but I swear I thought I could feel something the last few times.

I closed my eyes and reached inward. I had a sneaking suspicion that one of the things holding me back was that I had no clue where to start. I was doing this blind, with no information on where to begin. It shouldn't be too hard to figure out if a knucklehead like Naruto can figure it out.

If only I could see someone go through the process, someone young, someone just starting out. I had tried to figure it out by sensing my mom and grandmother's chakra. But, their chakra seemed to be in a cycle of some sort. It felt automatic, like breathing. I was betting once you got started, molding chakra just became second nature.

Reluctantly, I came to a conclusion.

The best way for me to learn was my sensing ability. I needed to find a young chakra source, someone who was just starting, and see how they did it. The only issue would be finding them in the massive sea of chakra sources I could detect.

The next day when it was time for my daily excursion, for once, I didn't just try and ignore everything. Instead, I tried to separate the chakra source I was sensing. It wasn't easy. Most were moving around, and they all blurred together.

I focused on the smaller sources, looking for someone just getting started. Just as I was starting to make some progress, my mom returned me to my sealed room. Part of me wanted to throw a fit, but I buried that feeling. I knew that patience would be a crucial part of my future as a shinobi, and I might as well start getting used to it right now.

Over the next few days, I got better at searching through all the noise. I still couldn't maintain my concentration very long, at most only a minute or two. But, that progress gave me hope for the future, that I would be able to ignore everything I could sense one day.

On my fifth day, I finally found what I was looking for. I found a tiny unstable source of chakra that was flickering in and out. Over the past few months, I had learned that someone's chakra could tell me a bit about them. The sense I got from this chakra was young. I guessed that its owner was probably only four or five years older than me.

Whomever I was sensing seemed to be in a specific pose, meditation. Deep within the individual, there was a swirling mixture of energy. Two sources, one physical and the other spiritual, each source coming together to make something greater.

The swirling mixture almost seemed like a whirlpool. Once it got moving, it produced chakra. Once the chakra was made, it started moving through the person's body along a set path, like a circulatory chakra system.

Before I could sense anything else about the person, the flood of other chakra sources made me lose track of the person. But that didn't matter. I had somewhere to start.

That night, I tried to mimic the pose that I sensed. I focused on visualizing what I had sensed early in the day—energy coming from my body, mixing with the spiritual energy produced by my mind.

As I sat in my crib meditating, I got the feeling that I had one part of the equation down. There was almost a physical weight to my spiritual energy. I had it coming out of me in spades. I guessed that part of the reason for my abundant mental energy was because I was born aware. But, as for the other part of the equation, physical energy. I couldn't feel anything.

Now more than ever, I was convinced by my theory that part of the problem was that I was a baby. Finally, after not feeling anything happening, I almost gave up. But, eventually, I felt something shift inside of me. It felt like my body was able to squeeze a drop of physical energy out of my cells.

Deep within me, that drop of physical energy mixed with some of my mental energy and created the first chakra hint in my body. Before I could celebrate, a wave of dizziness crashed into me. I felt woozy, and the world started spinning. By the time I toppled over, I had already passed out.

Sharp hunger pains woke me up in the morning. I felt weak like I hadn't eaten in days. But none of that mattered. I had my first taste of success. I could finally feel my chakra. It was tiny, no more than a thimbleful. But, this was only the beginning. Over time, my chakra reserves would grow and my control with it.

The next six months passed by, and I turned one. I spent every free moment molding my chakra, which was quite a bit for a baby. When comparing them to kids, my chakra reserves still weren't anything to be impressed about. But, for a baby, my reserves were massive.

A few months ago, Tsunade wandered back into the village. She didn't stay long. Maybe about a month before leaving. I got the sense that she would always be coming and going, never staying for very long. So whenever she was around, I tried my best to cheer her up.

On my first birthday, a worrying piece of information was revealed. One that confirmed that this world was slightly different than the one I knew from my previous life.

Danzo was my grandfather!