Living as a baby was, in some ways, worse than dying.
An old man laid up in bed at least gets to keep a little authority. People ask him questions. They let him glare with some effect. They do not powder his behind and call him precious while he flails like a turtle tipped on its shell.
A baby has no such protections.
The body wanted what it wanted and did not care about my opinion. Hungry when it pleased. Dirty when it pleased. Tired at the wrong times. Angry with no proper way to express it beyond crying and kicking like a hooked fish. Most of those first months passed in a warm blur of milk, cloth, and helplessness. I had flashes of real clarity—little stretches where I was fully there, fully humiliated, and much too weak to do a thing about it.
One of the worst came during a changing.
In my first life I had argued hay prices, repaired engines, buried dogs, paid taxes, and made decisions about breeding stock with the seriousness of a county judge. In my second, I found myself laid out bare on a cloth while some patient woman turned me over with the practical ease of somebody working on a sack of grain.
I tried to glare at her with all the cold offense of a grown man.
Instead I rolled halfway onto my face, discovered I still could not hold my own head up for more than a few trembling seconds, made a wet outraged sound, and got flipped back over without ceremony.
"There now," she said. "You have some strong lungs boy."
Strong lungs, I thought bitterly, while my legs bicycled in the air. A man's pride can survive a lot. It cannot survive being powdered.
Then I sneezed on myself.
That was infant life in a nutshell. It never insulted you once when it could manage twice.
Still, things accumulated. Smells first. Soap. Rice. Herbs. Sun-warmed paper screens. Linen if I was lucky. Then voices. Faces. Rhythms. I knew my name was Tai before I knew much else, and under all of that there was another thing: hunger that had nothing to do with milk.
Sometimes I wanted salt. Fat. Char. Marrow. The deep, steady comfort of beef cooked low and patient.
A ridiculous craving for a body that did not yet have the teeth to manage its own fist, but there it was.
It took maybe a year before my mind and whatever passed for my soul fully shook hands. Before that, I had been surfacing in flashes, awake in pieces. Afterward, I was back in the driver's seat.
That was when I met my father properly.
The first thing I saw was light so bright it stabbed my eyes. I squinted, blinked, and realized it was not light at all.
It was teeth.
A full set of aggressively enthusiastic teeth attached to a face that had no business existing in the natural world. Combover cut. Eyebrows thick enough to qualify as weather. A grin so earnest it felt dangerous. Behind him, the sunrise had arranged itself in such a way that he looked like a prophet of poor decisions.
Of course it had.
Of course the heavens themselves had chosen to support the performance.
He gave me a thumbs-up so heartfelt it ought to have come with a drumroll.
Then he boomed, "MY SON! TODAY WE BEGIN TO UNLOCK YOUR YOUTH!"
I stared at him.
He stared back, beaming.
And in that moment, I understood three things with perfect clarity.
First, I was in Konoha.
Second, I had been born into a family of lunatics.
Third, my mother teaching me Japanese in my first life had turned out to be one of fate's few genuine kindnesses.
You would think that after nearly two years I would have known where I was and who I belonged to. I did not. Up to that point, my life had mostly been a sequence of capable women, shared naps, and institutional care. Later I learned the place was part of a Senju-run compound where children were watched while their parents took missions, trained, recovered, or otherwise went out and risked dying for the village.
Efficient. Sensible. Slightly unsettling if you looked at it too hard.
At the time, all I knew was that I had been fed, cleaned, and passed from hand to hand with the smooth rhythm of a place used to doing exactly that.
Then this young man with the sunrise behind him shouted about youth until the walls shook, and something in my memory finally clicked into place.
Might Duy.
I knew that name. At first only as a shape in old memories, then with more weight behind it. The Eternal Genin. The fool in green. The man who would one day throw himself in front of death for his son with a smile on his face.
A man I respected.
Eventually.....
At that particular moment, with the bad mustache clinging to his upper lip and his expression lit up like a village festival, he looked less like a future legend and more like a teenager who had lost a fight with a barber and decided to make that everybody else's problem.
He scooped me up like I was not fragile at all. Later, once I could stand, he set me in the yard with the solemnity of a master unveiling a prodigy. Every time I managed not to topple over, he clapped like I had personally saved the clan.
Most children wobbled. I braced.
Most children cried and reached. I planted my feet, scowled at the ground, and tried again.
If I fell, I got angry before I got hurt.
One of the older caretakers noticed me doing squats with all the red-faced determination of a man trying to keep the bank off his land and muttered, "That one's odd."
The woman beside her snorted. "Have you seen his father?"
She was not wrong.
I had no chakra yet. No bloodline. No destiny I could hold in my hands. But I knew bodies. Bodies could be fed, hardened, trained, and built into something dependable. So while my father shouted at the horizon about youth, I made a quieter decision.
The body came first.
Everything else could wait.