The first thing he felt was the heat.
It was a suffocating, humid heat that smelled of old wood and cheap detergent. This was wrong. He should be dead—frozen solid in a lab in the Swiss Alps, his chest cavity a ruin of ice and shredded muscle.
He tried to sit up, but his limbs felt like lead—heavy, short, and frustratingly uncoordinated. He looked down at his hands. They were tiny, soft, and pudgy.
Transmigration? The thought flashed through his mind with the cold efficiency of a hard drive booting up. As a retired genius scientist, he had spent his final years obsessed with this possibility. After a lifetime of solving "real" physics, he had spent his retirement drowning in the only thing that offered a spark of wonder: Anime.
He had watched Naruto four times over. He had analyzed the power scaling of Bleach, the biological limits of One Piece, and the soul-mechanics of Jujutsu Kaisen. To the world, he was a billionaire retiree; in his private sanctum, he was a man hunting for the "Source." He had traveled to the mountains of India, the hidden shrines of Japan, and the rural depths of China, looking for a shred of the supernatural energy he saw on screen.
He had died because he finally found it. The Ice Wolf—his only successful experiment—had been his proof. And now, it seemed, he was the reward.
A woman in a plain apron entered the room, looking down at him with a weary smile. "Wake up, Kenji-kun. It's time for breakfast. You've been staring at your hands for ten minutes."
He looked up at her, his eyes cold and analytical. "Don't call me that."
The woman blinked, startled by the clarity in the toddler's voice. "What? Kenji, it's your name..."
"It was a label given to me by an institution," he said, his high-pitched voice making the sophisticated words sound eerie. "From now on, call me Ryan. I insist. If you do not, I simply won't respond."
The caretaker gasped. "Ryan? That... that's not a name from around here. Where did you even hear such a thing?"
"It is my name," Ryan replied firmly. He didn't care about the local naming customs. He wanted a name that reminded him of the man who had mastered the scientific method, not an orphan boy destined to be fodder for a ninja village.
He rolled out of the small cot and walked unsteadily to a cracked mirror in the corner. Dark hair, pale skin, and eyes that held a depth of intelligence that was terrifying for a two-year-old.
He followed the caretaker out, but as he stepped into the hallway, he saw it through a window. Carved into the side of a massive mountain were three giant faces.
Ryan froze. His heart, now small and vibrant, hammered against his ribs. He knew those faces. He had seen them in the digital archives and the 4K episodes of his previous life.
Konohagakure. The Hidden Leaf.
A slow, predatory smile crept onto his face. In his last life, he was a pioneer in a world where magic was dead. He had spent years traveling the globe just to find a single spark of chakra in a wolf's blood. Here, the world was overflowing with it.
"This is it," Ryan whispered to himself. "The journey I started back home... I just had to die to actually begin it."
He looked toward the Hokage Rock. He didn't see heroes or legends. He saw data points. He saw the Bijuu—nine massive, sentient batteries of pure, unrefined energy.
"I'm going to take it all," he murmured, his eyes reflecting the cold blue of the ice that had once killed him. "Every last drop of beast chakra