Somewhere around the time I was six, I'd never celebrated my birthday with my parents so I didn't know exactly how old I was, everyone panicked. I was young, but I had the mind of an adult, so I recognized something capital 'B' bad was happening.
The Nara guards surrounding the day care as well as the deer all flocked away on the orders of Shikaku Nara, the Clan Head. They all disappeared and a group of genin came to transport myself and what few other kids were present to a shelter in the Nara grounds.
That was when I felt the energy, that dark, enraged, ravenous energy. It was all around me, coating the air, the walls, my skin, everything. I hadn't cried much to that point, but I balled like an infant when I felt that unholy malice. I thought I was going to die again. I thought my second lease on life had expired before I'd even gotten a chance to use it.
That wasn't the case. The energy was sucked away as quickly as it had appeared, and the disaster passed.
In the following days, I kept my ears open to figure out exactly what had happened. From fragments of gossiped conversations and my metaknowledge, I was able to put it together. The Kyuubi had been unleashed on Konoha, destroying much of the city and slaughtering its way through many of its ninja.
It made sense in a twisted sort of way. Danzo hadn't kidnapped me because he hadn't needed to before now. Konoho still had ninja before the Kyuubi tore through. Now, Konoho was reeling. A man capable of holding advancing armies at bay on his own had fallen, taking dozens of our best men and women with him.
Rest in peace, Fourth Hokage. Thank you for making sure I didn't get turned into a Kyuubi snack.
One good thing that came out of it was that I now knew where exactly I was in the timeline. It was good to know that I had few more years to prepare myself than the main cast of Naruto for what was to come.
I thought that it was a good timeline to be born in. If I were born a decade back, I would have to participate to great shinobi wars back to back so my chances of survival would have been pretty bad.
And if I had been born six years later, I would have been in the same generation as the main cast and that would mean that I would have to participate in chunin exams with Orichimaru lurking and then the Akatsuki without much experience and training under my belt.
At my current age, I had decent time to train myself to at least a degree that I did not become some cannon fodder shinobi but to be honest he did not know how to not become a cannon fodder in front of Pain or worse Madara.
I did not really have any gold finger as far as I knew. There was no gamer like system that gave me attributes for training and completing missions.
I did not have some template system that gave him abilities from other characters from some other world. I was not even a genius scientist that could create some technology or discovery new ways to use Fuinjutsu or create new jutsus.
I had hoped that one of my ancestors would have some secret kekkei genkai that would manifest in me but I still showed no signs of it.
But all of this did not mean that I would not give up on my dream of becoming strong.
Anyways in the wake of the Kyuubi, there was a distinct change in the atmosphere around me. The face of every adult I saw was filled with sorrow and loss. My fellow children at the 'daycare' grew in number as the building was slowly transitioned into an orphanage.
The guards around the daycare dwindled as they were called away to more important tasks. Konoho as a whole no longer had enough ninja to waste them guarding orphanages in clan compounds.
If Danzo were going to take me, it would have been in the wake of the Kyuubi attack, but I was one of the lucky ones.
Since my parents were workaholics who were always away on missions, they hadn't been in Konoha when the Kyuubi was unleashed. Both of them survived the attack.
They still went out on missions regularly, the village couldn't afford to let two chunin rest, but they were strangely spending more time at home than they had prior to the village being thrown into dire straits.
Maybe it was guilt for leaving their child alone with a monster. Maybe they just realized they wanted to live their lives a different way. I don't know what prompted the sudden change, but I was suddenly spending more time at home with my parents than I was with the many orphaned Nara children in the now orphanage.
I even celebrated my birthday with them for the first time in this life. I turned nine years old on June 12th. I knew when my birthday was now.
Feeling secure that Danzo wouldn't kidnap me with my parents around more often, I began to plot and plan. The Kyuubi had been a wake up call. I'd been far too passive.
When I was born, I figured out almost immediately where I was, but I'd made myself small and tried to avoid attention. The Kyuubi taught me that being small wouldn't protect me from the horrors of this world. If I hadn't been safely secreted away in the Nara compound, I likely would be dead right now.
This may not seem all that shocking, but death sucked. It was… It's difficult to describe. Suffice to say, I never wanted to go through that again. That meant I needed to figure out a way to keep myself alive.
I was in Naruto. Peace was a polite fiction that existed only to advance the plot. I had one option: Become so freaking strong that people fled at the sight of me like they did in the face of the late Minato Namikaze. Once more, I thank you for your valiant sacrifice, Fourth Hokage.
I had grand designs for myself in this world, but the simple fact of the matter is that there isn't much you can do as a child whether you have chakra or not.
I was able to figure out what my chakra was and how to manipulate it, though that was probably only because of my previous life. I went from a body with no chakra to a body with this weird energy that years of experience told me shouldn't be there.
The assault of the Kyuubi's chakra probably helped. I knew what weaponized, deadly chakra felt like and knew that the strange energy in me could be controlled thanks to that nightmare that still woke me up some nights.
Some secret experimentation while my parents were out on a mission to help stabilize the village let me figure out how to manipulate it and move it around my body.
This was when I started the leaf-sticking exercise. It was easy enough to figure out. Put a leaf on my skin, shove all the chakra in my body towards the leaf, profit.
When the matron in charge of the orphanage, Nuki Nara, asked where I learned how to do it, I just made up that I'd seen one of the older kids doing it.
The matron tattled to my parents about it and suddenly my parents stopped going out for missions so frequently. I got a stern talking to about safely practicing with my chakra, but it was off put by how excited my mom and dad seemed.
They were practically bouncing with energy as they helped me practice.It wasn't long before they even started leading me through some elementary katas and weapons training.