Dad's mission schedule kept him gone for weeks at a time.
If I hadn't had the weight of a full life behind me, I probably would have resented him for it. A child would have. A child should have.
But I wasn't only a child.
I knew what work was. I knew what it meant to take whatever job came your way because people depended on you eating that week. I knew what it looked like when a man ran himself thin because there was nobody else to lean on.
And once I learned the full shape of it, it got harder still to hold anything against him.
Might Duy had me when he was fifteen. Drunk, stupid, and unlucky enough to make one bad decision with a woman who had lower standards than she should have. My mother died bringing me into the world. I didn't remember her. Couldn't. But I understood the cost of a death like that well enough.
That left a teenage genin with no money, no family worth naming, no clue what he was doing, and a baby he refused to abandon.
He couldn't raise me alone. Not in a one-room apartment. Not on a genin's pay. Not while taking missions just to keep us both fed.
So the village stepped in.
Not out of kindness. Out of structure.
Later I learned Tobirama had helped build systems for exactly this sort of thing—children watched, fed, and contained while their parents went out to bleed for the village. Efficient. A little cold if you stared at it too long. But most things designed to keep people alive are.
Dad did not disappear, though.
Not really.
Whenever he came back from missions, he took me with him.
I would sit off to the side of the training fields while he worked himself half to death beneath the sun. Kicks. Falls. Sprints. Strikes thrown with the kind of commitment most men reserved for prayer. And all the while, he talked.
Loudly.
Passionately.
Without the faintest instinct for moderation.
"YOUTH IS A FIRE THAT MUST BE FED!"
"EFFORT IS NEVER WASTED!"
"EVEN IF YOU FALL A THOUSAND TIMES, YOU RISE A THOUSAND AND ONE!"
Watching the Might family from behind a screen in my last life had been one thing. Living in the blast radius of it was another.
People stared.
Some laughed under their breath. Some looked away when he came jogging through the village with me tucked under one arm and his grin wide enough to threaten public order. At the training fields, I caught the sidelong looks. At the market, I caught the small evasions. Men who would have happily exchanged a few words with a quieter shinobi suddenly remembered urgent business elsewhere when Duy arrived shouting about effort like he was trying to wake the dead.
At the time, I thought my father was a lunatic.
Later I decided he was simply honest in a way most people were too tired, embarrassed, or frightened to be. He believed with his whole body. There was no seam in him between what he said and what he did.
That counts for a lot.
At the time, though, I wasn't convinced.
My soul, or my mind, or whatever had finally settled properly into place inside that little body, had only recently finished syncing up. I was still relearning the business of having limbs. Relearning balance. Relearning how to judge distance with eyes that sat lower to the ground and hands too small to trust.
By the time I figured out how to walk without pitching over like a drunk calf, I had already come to one important conclusion.
Something was wrong with me.
Not in the ordinary way. Not in the "this child is a little odd" sense. I was odd, certainly, but that wasn't the real problem.
This was structural.
The kind of wrong you do not solve by rubbing some dirt on it.
I could feel it even before I had words like chakra or spiritual energy. There was too much of something inside me. Not strength. Not stamina. Something quieter than that and heavier too. It sat low and deep, dense as old water in a stock pond that hadn't been stirred by wind in days.
Back on Earth, I would have called it the weight of a long life.
Here, they called it spiritual energy.
The problem was that the rest of me didn't match.
Not even close.
The first time I tried to use chakra, I was about three.
One of the older boys at the compound had learned the leaf exercise and was showing off in the yard, making a leaf stick to his forehead like he had personally discovered civilization. A few of the other children copied him. Some managed it. Some failed. Everybody acted as though this was very impressive.
I figured I might as well try.
I had spent eighty-eight years managing cattle, weather, debt, family tempers, and machinery held together by optimism. Surely I could manage one leaf.
So I sat down cross-legged in the dirt, picked up a leaf, and did what I had seen the others do.
I focused inward.
I found that lake.
And I pushed.
That was my mistake.
The moment I tried to move the energy, it surged. Not forward. Not cleanly. Not in any direction that could be called useful. It just came up everywhere at once, wild and pressurized, like I had knocked a hole in something that should have stayed sealed.
My skull rang.
My chest went tight.
White burned around the edges of my vision.
Then I threw up in the yard hard enough to fold myself in half.
The other children lurched backward.
One of them, a boy with a perpetually runny nose, stared down at me and offered the immortal wisdom of childhood.
"You're doing it wrong."
I spat, wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, and thought, no kidding.
That was the first real lesson.
I did not have too little chakra.
I had too much of the wrong half.
Later, after the dizziness eased and the ground stopped trying to slide sideways, I tried again. More carefully this time. Less force. Less reach. Just a small nudge, the sort of test you give a fence before putting your full weight on it.
Same result.
Less violent.
Still useless.
I sat there afterward with dirt on my knees and vomit sour in my nose, watching the other kids laugh and stick leaves to themselves and complain when they failed as though any of this were normal.
Then I looked down at my hands and thought through it the only way I knew.
Chakra was made from two things. Spiritual energy and physical energy. Mix them correctly and you got something usable.
Simple enough.
Except my mixture wasn't off by a little.
It was ruined from the start.
I had the spiritual energy of a man who had lived nearly a century and the physical energy of a body that still tripped over its own feet and got tired climbing steps.
That wasn't a mismatch.
That was an irrigation pipe trying to swallow a flood.
Didn't matter how much water you had. If the channel couldn't carry it, all you got was pressure and damage.
I leaned back on my hands and stared up at the sky.
Blue. Clear. Quiet.
Same sort of sky I'd known back home, as far as skies go. Different world. Same truth.
A body could only carry what it had been built to carry.
"Well," I muttered in the small, clumsy voice of a three-year-old, "that explains a few things."
A younger version of me, my first-life younger self, might have gotten angry then. Might have tried to brute force it. Might have chased some clever shortcut and made the mess worse.
But I wasn't young in the ways that mattered.
I had lived too long and fixed too many problems that did not care about impatience. Drought. Bad calving seasons. Broken equipment. Family trouble. Weak soil. Sick stock. Things that only ever answered to time, labor, and the willingness to keep going after the first ten attempts failed.
So I broke the problem down.
I did not need more spiritual energy. I had plenty.
I did not need more technique. Technique was a fine thing, but no amount of skill fixed rotten inputs.
What I needed was more body.
I looked down at myself, short arms, soft hands, narrow legs, balance like a newborn deer and felt a grim kind of clarity settle in.
"Alright," I said.
If chakra would not listen, then I would build something it had no choice but to work with.
That started simply.
Pushups.
Or what counted as pushups at my size, which was mostly controlled face-planting followed by furious correction.
Squats, holding onto a fence post so I didn't tip backward into the dirt.
Walks up and down the yard with purpose instead of toddler wandering, turning each lap into a fence check the way I would have done with cattle.
Breathing drills when I sat still.
Deep in through the nose.
Slow out through the mouth.
Steady.
Even.
Eating everything set in front of me because if it was food, it was fuel, though more than once I resented the weakness of it. Too much broth. Too much rice. Too many soft vegetables and thin protein. My body accepted it. My soul still remembered beef.
Sleeping hard and early. No wasted effort. Growing was work. If the body wanted sleep to do it, then sleep was training too.
I did not train like a child at play.
I trained like a man with a roof to hold up.
People noticed.
It was hard not to notice a toddler in the yard doing squats with the solemnity of a tax delinquent trying to save his property.
One of the older caretakers stopped me one afternoon while I was braced against a post and trying to keep my knees from shaking.
"You don't have to do all that," she said gently. "You're still little."
I looked up at her.
Tired eyes. Good hands. A woman who knew honest effort when she saw it, and knew better than to laugh at it.
"I won't be," I told her.
She blinked.
That was another indignity of childhood: every full sentence out of your mouth made adults look at you like the family dog had started quoting scripture.
Then she huffed a laugh and shook her head.
"Well," she said, "that's true enough."
I went back to my squats.
The work changed things, though not quickly.
Nothing worth trusting ever does.
Days turned into weeks. Weeks turned into months. First my balance improved. Then my breathing stopped catching so easily. I quit falling every time I turned too fast. My steps got cleaner. My back got straighter. When I pushed, there was something behind the push besides stubbornness.
Then came strength.
Quiet strength at first. The kind you only notice when something that used to feel heavy suddenly feels possible.
One afternoon one of the feed buckets by the coop got left too close to the gate. It wasn't enormous, but it was full enough that it should have stayed exactly where it was.
I crouched, got both hands under the handle, planted my feet, and hauled it up.
Not smoothly.
Not gracefully.
But up.
I managed three staggering steps before I had to set it down again, arms trembling with the effort.
An old man on the other side of the fence, there to haggle over eggs with one of the women, stared at me over the slats.
"That bucket's near your size," he said.
I looked at my hands, then at the bucket, then back at him.
For the first time since waking in that world, my body had done something that felt like proof.
Underneath all of it, the lake inside me changed too.
It felt less furious.
Like the pressure had found somewhere to go.
I still didn't force it. No sense testing a bridge before you finished building the supports. But I could feel the difference every time I breathed deep and settled into myself. The spiritual weight was still there, old and deep and far too large for the frame carrying it. Only now it no longer felt like it was trying to break the walls.
It felt like waiting.
That interested me.
Because I knew that shape. Not chakra, not ninjas, not anything mystical. Just the shape of a problem: too much of one thing, not enough of another.
You solved that the same way every time.
Slowly.
Steadily.
Without shortcuts.
I dusted off my hands, stood up straight, and looked over the yard as if it were a field in need of working.
"Alright," I said quietly.
"Let's build something that can carry the weight."