Calming down my jumbling mess of emotions was a little harder to do the second time. The warmth of the sun, the chill in the wind, the faint scent of decay that lingered in the air, a sign that I was living and breathing the air of a fantasy world, currently staring at the Hokage mountain, from my single-bedroom apartment located quite close to the slums of Konoha.
The shock slowly receded, leaving a kind of hollow exhaustion that felt like a hangover's bitter aftertaste—but without the fun that usually preceded it. My head still throbbed, dull and persistent, but the pain was starting to die down, and my thoughts were clearer now. Sharper. Less like I was drowning in someone else's life and emotions, and more like the two of us—Yori and me—had settled into an uneasy truce.
'No strange impulses, that's good, I'm sure this uneasy merger had left me with some baggage, but at least I'm mostly me... I think.' The philosophical thoughts about my current situation wouldn't help much, so I walked away from the window and drew the blinds once again.
'You can't be too careful in this world.' I thought.
I walked back and sat back down on the futon for a moment, breathing deeply as I tried to relax and leave behind the dread brought by my future knowledge. The sunlight filtering through the blinds illuminated the place slightly as I took my surroundings in.
'Alright. There was no guide on what to do in this situation on WikiHow, so let's try and create one. Step one: acceptance. Bitching about why I couldn't have gone to a different world wouldn't do me any good. But for once, couldn't I have gone to you know... Pokémon world or some shit?' I thought there weren't many safe worlds, were there? At least I didn't wake up in Night City. Shaking my head, I focused back on the next step.
'Right, next step. Adaptation.' I thought as I moved. I sat up slowly, testing the weight of this body. Everything felt lighter, which wasn't much to note, except I felt too light. Even though my weight was undoubtedly low due to being stuck in a child's body, the muscles powering it up and the power packed into it were the reason I felt like this.
'If I had age-appropriate strength, then this disconnect would not happen, probably, fucking chakra bullshit causing 8-year-olds to be murder machines...' I thought as I shifted my arm, it would rise faster than I expected, but I didn't take long to adjust, and my control improved rapidly. Maybe it was the advantage of having settled memories as my body quickly figured out what made it tick. My spine cracked in a way that felt both alien and familiar. My legs swung over the side of the futon, and my feet met the cold floor again, the chill biting into my soles.
'Fuck, I need heated flooring, need to move out of this dump...' I thought and paused, 'I'm in a technologically backwards era, aren't I?' I thought and cursed, 'Fuck it, I'll take Night City over this.'
I focused on the sensation as I focused on how my body moved. Then I stood, re-learning the simple act of balancing on legs a decade younger and twenty centimeters shorter than what I was used to, which should have taken a while, but I had already walked over before, and aside from some stumbling, it had been fine. The body still swayed slightly at first—my new muscles adjusting—but held firm as my mind quickly recalibrated.
'Not bad. At least I can be sure I can get done with this adjusting phase soon.'
I walked around, and as my balance quickly improved aside from that one stumble, I looked around the apartment. It looked less surreal now that the fog in my head was thinning. One room, neatly maintained, yet held no decorations. It had a wardrobe and a plain dresser. A desk that held some books and scrolls. I walked over to the sliding door and opened it forcefully, overshooting again before readjusting midway, revealing a bathroom. Behind the other door was a living room/entrance/kitchen. It all felt functional and painfully modest. Nothing excessive, nothing wasted.
'Then again, it is bigger than the studio I rented during the uni-days.' I smiled at that thought; the memories of my past life brought an ache of all that I had left behind. I wasn't always this sentimental, but it hit me today. Maybe this forced transmigration was the stimulus. 'No shit, Sherlock'
My body moved and maneuvered around the sofa almost automatically—the way Yori would, according to my memories. My hand brushed along the dresser, pausing at the cracked mirror. I stopped to process the face in the reflection. I let myself stare at it in fascination. I knew that face from the memories, of course, but seeing it move as I moved brought a sense of vertigo that resolved itself all too quickly.
...
'I'll take whatever higher power is stopping me from getting a rather severe case of facial dysmorphia. Is that a thing? I have heard about Body Dismorphia before, though, so maybe...' I thought and brought my hand to pinch my cheeks. They reddened at my actions, as the pain was fleeting, the body I was in was used to a lot more pain during training.
The boy staring back was undeniably me. I let that thought settle in as I took in my appearance. Dark hair, slightly mussed. Eyes framed by faint shadows of overwork and fatigue. A face shaped by quiet discipline rather than carefree childhood. Small, but not fragile. And rather plain, not a face that screams main protagonist by any means, a face that naturally blends in.
'Okay,' I thought after the examination. 'I can work with this, being plain and forgettable was what it was all about anyway. No need to be the big tree.'
The words—silent though they were—felt like a promise for the next steps. I'm not a hero, nor do I intend to be one. I walked over to the bathroom, intending to move on toward the next steps and not lose myself in my thoughts. I had a habit of doing that, which led to a lot of friction and disconnect in my last relationship.
Shaking my head over gloomy thoughts, I splashed cold water on my face from the basin. The shock helped. The water was clean, surprisingly, metallic-tasting, and freezing. I used the worn brush and powder to scrub my teeth.
...
And that was when it happened, the cold in my mouth and over my face, the repeated monotonous motions of brushing my teeth made me notice another change that I hadn't caught onto yet.
A warmth was blooming faintly in my core.
It was small, like someone had lit a candle underneath my ribs. A soft, spreading heat that pulsed in slow, steady waves going out and faintly flooding my body. My breath hitched as I froze.
'Chakra.' I thought as the realization hit me—my dumbass had totally forgotten about the main attraction that this world had. Sure, I had breezed through the new memories that I had access to, but until I noticed it just now, the realization that I had access to this fundamental resource hadn't settled in.
I rushed out of the bathroom and sank cross-legged onto the futon, following the guidance of what I remember from my show and my new memories. I brought my hands to rest gently against my abdomen, cupped them together, and closed my eyes.
The warmth persisted—subtle but undeniable—flowing through veins that weren't veins, along pathways that felt both physical and meta at once. Like warm water moving under the surface of my skin.
I tried to nudge it, but didn't actually know how to affect the chakra itself. Yori was taught chakra control, but his version focused on controlling the flow of chakra out of the tenketsu. Like the leaf-sticking exercise that helped learn chakra control, all it was in actuality was opening the tenketsu like a valve and then controlling and guiding a steady stream of chakra out of the tenketsu situated at the forehead.
Before moving on, I focused on all the information I had in my head from the memories and understandings driven out by an 8-year-old child from scrolls. I stopped my actions and moved. Finding the scrolls from last year's curriculum wasn't hard, they were in the bottom drawer. The good thing about Yori's meticulous nature was that he had everything arranged.
'Okay, here goes.' I unfurled it to find a diagram drawn on the scroll to the far right. It was the human anatomy doing the classic T-pose. Throughout the body, a dense network of nodes were marked, with lines connecting them, revealing the chakra network in full. I stared at the kanji written along with the scroll for a moment, understanding it quite easily, but another obvious tit-bit that I had been completely missing revealed itself.
'It's in Japanese, obviously it's in Japanese... Fuck me', I had been thinking in English all this time, and if the spoken and written language is going to be English, then it's going to be a problem.
"Fuck me." I breathed out and cursed in my native tongue one last time, realizing that the adjusting step would need to be adjusted for a longer period.
'Fuck me...'
...
---
AN: I'm trying to highlight the challenges MC faces regarding the sudden, unique shift rather than gloss over them, which may slow the story a bit. I won't linger too long, but since there is no canon arc anyway, welcome to the world of Naruto...ehh, Elemental Nations.