The Shopkeeper of Konoha

A boring evening on Sunday.

Garfield, an average IT job worker, was just grazing at the stars on the rooftop of his rented home. Average would actually be a wrong term here. He graduated from one of the reputed universities of the USA and then got a job in Silicon Valley, California. He was one of the luckiest people who had landed a job and that too on Google.

He had worked hard and slogged his days through the university, published papers, got great grades and even participated in workshops. His resume was already mind blowing and after years of struggle he had landed himself a job in one of the most prestigious positions anyone of his age who aspired to be in the IT industry could hope for.

But there was a downside in this. In order to land himself a good job, he sacrificed his social life. He was called a nerd all his life. Though the times have changed and nerd was no longer a taboo term in society but that label didn't exactly attract anyone in his life. In his university life, his grades did attract some gold diggers but he never paid heed. There was a very weird obsession. Obsession of seeing himself in a secured future.

He had seen how his parents struggled all his life, and he promised himself long ago that he would do anything possible to get his shit together. And so he did.

Now that he achieved it, he felt that he had reached the end goal of his life but didn't know what he should do more. He needed a purpose apart from his regular job.

So, on this boring Sunday evening, he sat on the roof watching the skies. The city of San Jose was brightly lit and this made watching the stars more difficult due to the light pollution. He sighed to himself contemplating his life. It had been two weeks since he joined the company. After starting his new life, he was now actively searching for something in his life that would give him some meaning.

While grazing at the stars, out of nowhere he saw a meteor falling from the skies. It looked very small from afar but this was enough to make Garfield quite happy. Meteors were very rare for Earth and the ones which do enter the Earth atmosphere were mostly broken wreckages of the satellites.

But even then a ball of hot burning compound with its ass lit made Garfield expectant and did what any other slightly superstitious person would have done. He made a wish looking at the meteor.

'God, if you are out there, please provide me with an interesting life.'

After making the wish, he continued watching the meteor which had slowly turned from a small dot of fire to a small round of bright yellow ball. Garfield was a little puzzled. He couldn't understand why this fake meteor hadn't just vanished.

"This is odd!" Garfield thought and continued scrutinizing the falling meteor. But as time went by the meteor had started getting bigger and bigger. And before Garfield could understand what the hell was going on, the meteor seemed like it was coming straight for his position.

"Oh. Shit!"

Garfield didn't know why he felt that the meteor was coming for him but his instincts told him to run and so he went towards the staircase. But it was already too late for Garfield. By the time he opened the door, he felt a burning hot sensation in his back and soon lost unconsciousness.

Before his thoughts stopped, the only thing that could run in his mind was

"I wanted an interesting life, not an interesting end!"

---------

Konoha Hospital.

A boy with black luscious hair of about 12 years of age lied down in the bed with bandages on his forehead and his leg. But if one looked closely into the face of the boy, one could see that the eyelids were moving a bit, but the nurses and the doctors were busy handling the crisis that had just occurred in the village.

The boy was called Aoto Yamazaki. The young child who was the son of one of the many commoners in the famous Konoha village in the world of Shinobis. He had been transferred to the Hospital because of one of the recent situations the village had faced and was now being treated at the Konoha Hospital after he suffered from injuries.

The boy had a cute white face which still had some baby fat on his cheeks. He was wearing the green apron provided by the Hospital.

With a start the boy opened his eyes. He felt an immense pain in head but after a moment of enduring the pain he was able to make sense of the things around. He could see a white ceiling overhead. There were green drapes on both sides which didn't allow him to look further. Though the boy didn't have a window on the bedside, he took a random guess that it was night since he could see the bright lights overhead throwing different shades around.

"The meteor really fucked me up!" Aoto thought. But the thoughts didn't complete as he was dumbstruck. Normally when a person has a monologue in his mind, he or she mostly does that in their native language. Here came the twister. Aoto thought this in a completely different language.

The thought wasn't the only thing that had struck him. He moved his head a bit and looked at his body under the small blanket. His eyes registered the body of a very young boy! Aoto almost screamed at the top of his lungs in fear.

"What the hell was going on?"

If it wasn't clear, then let me make it clear. The soul, the brain, the memories of the young child named Aoto had been replaced by Garfield. The child Aoto had died in its body and now Garfield just got isekai-d. ( I will refer to the child as Aoto itself)

Aoto checked his body multiple times to make sure his eyes weren't hallucinating. He really had replaced the mind of a boy and he didn't know how he did so.

"Did the meteor give me a new life? Do I have to live a life like those novels I read? Did I get a new chance in life?"

As Aoto was trying to make sense of what was happening to him, a tall man with a white overcoat, carrying a stethoscope came and saw that boy had his eyes open.

"Ah. Aoto-kun.. It seems you have woken up. Are you feeling alright? Do you feel pain?"

"Uh... I am just feeling a strong headache doctor."

"Oh! You were under rubble when we found you and a small head injury. It's lucky that you didn't sustain any other wound. Give it some time, you will do fine."

"Thank you doctor."

Aoto had replied to the doctor involuntarily and soon he realized that the language he was speaking was Japanese. He had watched enough Japanese anime to know what his own language was. Maybe because he had replaced the mind and body of another guy, it gave him the proficiency of another language.

The doctor checked his body one more time before leaving. The doctor had little sadness in his eyes when he looked at the boy. This unlucky child had just lost both his parents in the unfortunate accident that had happened in the village.

The Nine Tails had attacked the village the previous night and his family of commoners was one of the few casualties that were axed in this. The only person who was alive in this nuclear family of theirs was the young child. He didn't give the boy the new information that his parents had died as he was still under trauma. It was better to lay down the information on him when the child felt better.

Aoto finally understood what had happened to him. He had been isekai-d to a different place and time. He just didn't know what kind of place this was. It took him a full 10 minutes of staring in blank space to gulp down what he had been shoved in his mouth.

"I wanted an interesting life, meteor-ossan! Not a new life." Aoto thought about the part where he wished for the meteor. He was sure that that weird object from space was the reason behind his current predicament.

Now all he had to do was to understand what kind of new world he had been pushed forward to. With those thoughts, his brain felt heavy and later just drifted off to sleep.

----

The next day

Aoto woke up feeling a sense of hunger and thirst. He wanted to shout to call for food, only to see that a glass bowl that had food and a glass of water had been laid on the nearby table. Without much thought, he took it on his lap and just munched down the food. After a few minutes of passing, he felt satiated.

He took another look around and found that there were less people passing by as compared to the previous time he woke up, where he found few people walking in quick steps.

"I wonder what kind of world this is? A magical world? No! The technology here is a little advanced and I didn't see anyone with any special attire to denote the fact that this is a magical world. Maybe I have traveled back in time?"

As if to answer such doubts, random memories suddenly got poured in on his head out of nowhere. He was barraged by loads of information in a matter of seconds. Aoto didn't feel pain as the new information poured in, but it did make him uncomfortable for some time.

It took a few minutes for him to digest all the information that had arrived and by the end he knew what kind of world this was in. One of the most unstable worlds Aoto had known. The world where people died left and right.

A world where in a span of just 60 years there had been three massive wars, if that wasn't unstable then he didn't know what was. Even his old world had only suffered from two wars. There had been small scale wars among countries for sure but it didn't have the instability of the current world.

The world that he had arrived at was the world of shinobis or some people termed them as ninjas. A world that came from the drawing pencil of Masashi Kishimoto. Of course Aoto knew about this world because it was a world famous anime in his previous life.

The anime which went by the name Naruto. A boy ostracised just because he had been sealed with the Nine tails inside him. The same Nine tails that had caused havoc a few nights ago and the reason he was in the hospital.

From his memories, he knew that he had been a commoner and he was sent to a regular school. His parents had a normal bakery store in Konoha. He was a regular child who went to school on days and helped his parents with their shop by evening.

They had almost a near perfect family, his father had come as a refugee during the 2nd Great Ninja War. He fell in love with another woman in the village and married her. And thus had him.

But everything crumbled in one night. Konoha always gave people a sense of security, but this sense went down the drain with the attack.

"At least I don't have to go to the front lines ever." Aoto thought as he prayed for his deceased parents. They had gone out at night during the attack and this proved fatal for their family. Aoto almost had tears in his eyes thinking of his parents.

He wasn't sure for which parents he was more sad about. His dead parents or the ones he had left behind in his previous life.