CHAPTER 2

The realization of how impossible it seems when you already present yourself to the world as an adult and a person capable of reasoning, and the thought of some occurrences becomes insignificant.

Until the age of two, it is as if the body is moving on autopilot, and the time before one learned to speak is completely absent from the memory. For someone who is living his second life it's quite a blow to realize that he didn't even pay attention to such an important detail before. Therein lay the reason for one youth's retreat into the philosophy of human behavior.

Point by point: yes, he was reborn, and yes, he remembers virtually nothing of what happened from the time he was born until he was about two years old.

Adam Volpi in his old life, now Yoshida Yuske realized his plight of being reborn and how it affects a person when something like this happens to you. There was no need to complain, no one in their right mind would do that. Trading the life of a cripple for the body of a healthy person, albeit a child, is quite a favorable exchange. Being too young is also correctable, or rather will correct itself in time, the youth believed in this sincerely.

The very knowledge that reincarnation is possible and there is a second chance made one doubt a bit about the rightness of what was going on around them, but overall things were not so sad.

Though who was he fooling, he was shaking with excitement from the prospects that the new life promised, and all because of the phenomena and circumstances that had appeared to him since the beginning of his conscious presence in this - another, so mystical, though dangerous, but no less delightful world.

Imagine living with envy towards normal people who can play games and explore surreal worlds on their monitors, and then suddenly you discover that you are in one of those worlds and have far more options than the provided program code on a computational system.

The first task was to accept the incomprehensible phenomenon of being reborn in the body of a child, and the next was to make a survey of his surroundings. The room he was in was small, with all the necessities of life for a single person, though rather small one.

He slept not on a bed, but on a futon laid out for the night, hence the conclusion that he was most likely in the Asian part of the continent, but that was before he was able to find out the key information for him. The double wooden windows were the very thing that destroyed everything sensible about him.

He would probably stand there all day, gazing at what is commonly referred to as Hokage Mountain or Hokage Rock, a notable feature of which are the sculptures of the faces of the village leaders. Before finding out this detail, Yuske wondered about the architectural style of the place he was in.

This topic has been a long-standing source of many disputes, remaining an unsolved mystery, because it is difficult to explain this mixture of European and Asian architecture in the style of Leaf, and the presence of electricity, rather than helping, only further stirs the pot.

However, it was the Hokage Mountain he saw that brought a drop of logic to what he saw and forced him to accept his new reality.

Another phenomenon difficult to accept was the unconscious reference to Yoshida Hana and Yoshida Sodha as parents. Adam, aka the current Yuske never had a close relationship with his parents from the previous world, who dumped him into the care of doctors and researchers. Accordingly, the present parents, too, were not the most habitual thing to be received by the youth.

The form of address also underwent a change once control of the body was taken by his own mind. He couldn't know if there was a different soul in him before the age of two, or if all people on autopilot were like animals existing in their early years.

Things get a little weird when a child stops calling his parents dad and mom one day, but the requirement to be treated as an adult and the inability to accept anyone as his 'parent' prevented Yuske from referring to them that way.

It helped partly that adults address each other by their first names, and the child's behavior of following them and also addressing them by their first names did not arouse suspicion, making everything be taken as an innocent childish antics. And the fact that the parents couldn't get enough of their two-year-old made the task even easier. For the most part, it was the mother who made this kind of thing possible.

The first time the father heard his son address them as "Sodha-san" and "Hana-san", he tried to conduct an educational process: how important it is to know and follow these silly social customs, but was immediately interrupted by the mother, who liked the child's perception of their identities, sounding like a childish prank and joke. With a single glance she signaled to her husband to shove his customs and rules into one dark and private place.

Yuske was not going to miss such an opportunity and started calling them just like that from that moment on, sticking to his own principles. Getting attached to someone is a luxury for someone who has acquired loneliness due to them being neglected by those around them, which is exactly the opposite of the case with kids like Naruto. The latter has been alone since birth and with all his actions has been striving for intimacy with people and their recognition of his person.

Yuske's situation was fundamentally different, as his acquired loneliness was a product of his parents' unwillingness to have a cripple in their lives and waste their time on him.

Because of all that was said, it was impossible for him to overcome himself and call the biological parents of his new body the way a normal child would. It was easier for him to start behaving this way from the very start and demand to be treated as an 'adult' at an early age.

The parents themselves were civilians, with no particularly significant background or status in the village.

Yoshida Hana is a thirty-seven year old housewife with black hair below her shoulders and average height, with a tired look whose eyes seem to smile only when she looks at her son.

Yoshida Sodha on the other hand is a former ninja, though retired being the rank of genin, not of a very large build, also with brown eyes and short cut dark brown hair.

The reason for his retirement was that he was fed up with all the bloodshed and killing, and he didn't want to continue watching the violent strife between shinobi. This is all the more significant when you consider the period of his growing up, which was during the first shinobi war, where he miraculously managed to survive. His retirement at the rank of genin is the reason why he was not involved in the events of the second and third shinobi wars, because such ninja are not much use on the battlefields.

Another element could be a business run by the Yoshida couple in the form of a small store selling ninja necessities, ranging from inexpensive throwing weapons to essential shinobi equipment. It wasn't until Yuske was a little older and asked more from his parents that he got a picture of the family business.

The goods were delivered by suppliers from small villages where there wasn't as much need for them because of the small number of ninja, but on the other hand, there were artisans and it was their goods that traders brought to villages like Konoha, and then either sold them themselves or handed them to small stores at a markup.

The youth was not interested in all of this, only an enemy of common sense, or a complete coward, not willing to use the chance that he was given and enjoy an unforgettable adventure, would mess around with money and other useless things in the shinobi world. 

Yuske had no problems with the language either, people here spoke mostly in Japanese, occasionally using words from English. That's the charm of the world based on manga, but there is some mystery in these creations, if after death you can find yourself in such a strange, but amazing world.

He did not have to learn anything, so to speak, the perks of being a cripple: so much free time that out of boredom anyone would want to watch anime in the original, and even study ancient, extinct languages.