I stood at the threshold of the orphanage I'd just been kicked out of, pondering the transience of existence. I was deeply occupied with the structure of the universe and the question: should I head to my new place of residence or wait for the system's calibration to finish?
The second option won. Just four hours and some minutes left—I can wait that out. My patience is more than enough for such a short stretch. A trifle compared to two years of HELL. My patience stopped being merely ironclad. It crystallized into the realm of mythical metals, like mithril or adamantium. These early childhood years either temper your will and endurance or drive you insane.
The "Player's Mind" skill dutifully kept me from madness, so I absorbed only the best from it. I endured and bided my time with all my strength.
Countless times, I was tempted to open the Seal and let the Fox out for a stroll. Beyond my own hardships, I was spurred by the moral realization that the Fox is a rare, endangered creature, and keeping it locked up is inhumane. Only one thing held me back—I had no idea how to crack that damn Seal open.
I don't call the orphanage HELL. Everything there was predictably canonical, so it was fine: the hateful, fearful, and disdainful glares from the caretakers, and the corresponding treatment from other adults. The kids, mimicking their attitude toward me, followed suit. I was surrounded by a full spectrum of pressure and alienation. By the way, many who end up in Uzumaki Naruto's shoes call these conditions hell. I disagree.
HELL is the newborn ward in the hospital. Isn't that surprising? Whose sick mind would make such an association? If I were an outsider, I'd think the same.
But reality is harsher than you can imagine. Picture this: you're tightly bound, completely immobilized, lying on your back in a room with a white ceiling and equally monotonous walls. There's nothing to rest your eyes on. I was positioned so I couldn't even see a window! And 24/7, all you hear in the room are screams and crying.
Human speech was sporadic. It came slightly less often than the scheduled rounds by the embodiments of evil, known in common parlance as the medical staff. Usually silent nurses would feed you, clean you, and swaddle you again. The moments that broke this despair were the brief feelings of being full, sleeping (thankfully, the body shuts down on its own despite the noise), and the sensation of a clean butt. A clean butt was a particular delight. Hygiene was on a schedule, not as needed. If your skin wasn't inflamed, it was bearable. But with diaper rash and maddening itching, with no chance to scratch—that's HELL.
And so I lay there, in impotent rage, unable to change a thing.
I could talk for hours about the staff at the local nursery, using nothing but profanity. Word quickly spread about who the vessel of the destroyer demon was. Many in the hospital had lost family and friends. Their pain and hatred toward the Fox poured out on me in full measure. They didn't kill me only because of the Hokage's orders—or maybe out of an animalistic fear of breaking the Seal.
My days were filled with every possible petty cruelty. For example, feeding me 2-3 times a day and once at night instead of a proper schedule. An infant in the first three months needs to eat every 2-4 hours, including at night. Their favorite trick was ignoring diaper changes. They'd do anything within my line of sight, ignoring all my attempts to get their attention. The nurse who finally deigned to do the dirty work with me would always spell out in vivid detail how I was worse than shit. Those were the rare moments of so-called human speech.
I get that the Fox ruined many lives. I get that their hatred is aimed at the Fox, but they take it out on a defenseless child. It's much easier to blame me and exact revenge on me than to give the Nine-Tails himself a good smack.
I understand the reason for their hatred toward me. Their pain of loss burns them from within, but that's no excuse for all the torment they put me through. I'm a vindictive, vengeful bastard with a peculiar sense of humor. The richness and variety of my imagination—my only distraction from the oppressive reality and physical discomfort—can attest to that. My gamer abilities will let me fulfill my desires. I almost feel sorry for my tormentors, but only a tiny bit. I'm still capable of human empathy.
When I was transferred to the orphanage, I had several well-thought-out plans for world domination, a list of candidates for my personal harem, and an endless catalog of gruesome revenge for each member of the medical staff. A separate pastime was devising ways to drive a battle-hardened, mission-seasoned ANBU to gray hair. With my adult consciousness but limited capabilities, the task was nontrivial.
Imagine this: a quiet Konoha night. The hospital. Patients are peacefully sleeping in their beds. The night shift of medical ninjas is bored in the break room. An ANBU stands guard. Silence and calm. Nothing foreshadows trouble. Suddenly, from the children's ward:
— Mu-ha-ha-ha-ha!
A shinobi bursts into the room. The children are sleeping peacefully. A thorough search of the room and surrounding areas yields nothing: not a single trace of an intruder. The ANBU calms down from the adrenaline surge and leaves the children's room. After walking a few meters down the hallway, he hears a quiet but very distinct laugh from the bedroom:
— Ku-ku-ku-ku-ku…
Got the picture? Scary, right?
ANBU operatives lived in a harsh reality. The paranormal activity repeated with alarming regularity but no temporal pattern. My practice of sinister laughter and mimicking Orochimaru laid the groundwork for my future image as a world ruler.
The second most effective method was the intense stare. Yes, exactly—even ordinary people can feel someone's gaze on them, and shinobi are especially sensitive to it, particularly if the watcher intends harm. So, an ANBU stands at his post, feeling someone watching him intently. Over time, a sense of danger joins that feeling, as if an unknown threat is about to strike. But when he turns around, he sees only children playing peacefully. By the end of the second year, some of the guards developed nervous tics and bouts of paranoia from my pranks. What else can you call it when, after another of my nighttime dark-lord laugh sessions, they searched for the culprit by looking under the chamber pots?
There was one particularly notable incident, about a month before I was sent to the orphanage. A new nurse, hired to replace one who was too impressionable, must have been really pissed at the Fox. Naturally, since the Fox was out of reach, I became the target of her vengeance. Nothing new there, except she had no sense of limits. On her first day allowed near me, that bitch dropped me while taking me out of the crib. Supposedly by accident. She was a damn good actress—she gasped and fretted so convincingly, running around me, lamenting how clumsy she was and begging for forgiveness. But the vile smirk that appeared on her face when she approached to take me for treatment spoke of zero remorse and killed any doubt about the "accident."
Looking at that smirking piece of trash, I kind of lost it. So I stared straight at her, pulling a face like Ichimaru Gin's, pointed my index finger at her, then ran it across my throat, all while feeling an overwhelming desire to give her a horrific, agonizing death. She jumped back to the wall, turning as pale as it, pointing at me and trying to say something. I just stretched my grin wider. After that, she rolled her eyes and collapsed in a faint. An ANBU guard burst in, kunai at the ready. I tried to play dumb as usual, acting like a child, clapping my hands and cooing. It didn't work.
For the next eight hours, I played the role of a scared, clueless child—which came off very convincingly since I genuinely didn't understand a damn thing and was pretty freaked out by the prospect of them extracting the Fox from me. But thank the gods of gaming, it all worked out. They put me through a slew of tests and analyses, taking samples from places I didn't even know existed. They even wanted to do a mind check, but the Yamanaka present at my examination teleported away the moment he heard about it. I'm still trying to figure out how. It didn't look like a shunshin—there should've been a swirl of leaves or smoke. The Fourth's Flying Thunder God technique has a distinct sound effect, but there was none. I could chalk it up to my slow reaction, maybe he just left really fast. But judging by the stunned faces and wide eyes of the others, I'm not the only one wondering.
Despite all my fears, they didn't hand me over to Root for experiments. They sent me back to the hospital, where I stayed for the remaining month before the orphanage.
Life at the orphanage was unremarkable. The caretakers quietly hated me, the kids tried to bully me, but after a couple dozen broken noses and fifty knocked-out teeth, we settled into an armed neutrality. Of course, for every broken nose and tooth, I got triple the punishment from the caretakers, even though I didn't start the fights. That just egged the little brats on for another attempt. But eventually, even the dumbest ones figured out that I didn't care about the teachers' punishments, and in the end, they were the ones who ended up beaten. This was only possible because I fully recovered overnight while my opponents didn't—that's the whole secret. Sure, they didn't stop pulling sneaky pranks and setting me up, but the direct attacks ceased.
I'm not sure what fueled my regeneration—the Fox or the system. It didn't bother me much. But a peaceful life wasn't in the cards for me, and the other kids and caretakers had nothing to do with it. The system's warning, which I took as a dumb joke, turned out to be prophetic. Yes, the one about mosquitoes. Those little bloodsuckers—not the kids, the actual mosquitoes—nearly ate me alive on the first spring nights. The hospital had special insect protection, but the orphanage wasn't about to waste money on such a luxury. Because of someone's greed, I had to seal the windows and spend hours before bed exterminating every mosquito that had flown into the room.
I was snapped out of my memories by a shout from one of the caretakers.
— Get the hell out of here, demon! — And he gave me a kick to speed me up.
No worries, I'm not one to hold a grudge—I'll take my revenge and forget I did, then keep on avenging. Looks like it's not meant to be. I so wanted to get a quest like everyone else, something like "reach the house without dying on the way" and naturally pick up a couple of indispensable skills along the way. Oh well, I'll have to wait for the system to launch at my new place. And judging by the caretaker's glare, if I don't leave the orphanage grounds in the next five seconds, they'll carry me out feet first. Wait for me, my new home—I'm on my way.
I reached the apartment pretty quickly and without incident, which was a bit disappointing. No cool techniques or skills were needed. I just pulled my hood over my head, hid the whiskers on my face, and didn't have to sneak through deserted alleys or hide in dark corners. If the system were already active and gave skills for that, I'd have crawled to the apartment on my belly. But since it isn't, there's no point in messing around.
The state of my new place left much to be desired—a lot to be desired. Let's start with the fact that the lock on the door was purely symbolic, and the door itself wasn't exactly sturdy. Add to that the sparse furniture, which probably remembered the First Hokage in his youth, and a two-inch layer of dust covering the entire modest space of the apartment. To be fair, not everything was bad—the view from the window was stunning. That's pretty much where the perks of this place ended. The list of flaws, discovered while trying to make this shack look like a livable room, could be written on a roll of toilet paper, in tiny handwriting, on both sides.
After finishing the cleaning, I glanced at the timer—it showed just over forty minutes left. With great satisfaction, I flopped onto the bed to wait for the system's calibration to finish. In forty minutes, a new life would begin, full of amazing possibilities and endless prospects. Lost in my sweet dreams, I didn't notice as I dozed off.
Danzo set aside another report and tiredly massaged his temples. Leaning back in his chair, he sighed and started reviewing the next report. At least the last two years had been calmer, Shimura mused. After the Fox's attack, spies and saboteurs had crawled out of every crack, and he'd had to deal with them all. On top of that, because of the Fox's jinchuriki, he lost four specialists, which made rooting out spies even harder. The worst part was they still couldn't figure out what kind of defense the kid had. Examining the bodies and the surviving—but insane—team member yielded no useful information, and there were no mentions of it in the scrolls or personal notes seized from the Fourth's house either. But those were minor issues compared to the fact that an unknown shinobi—or group of shinobi—managed to infiltrate the hospital, right into the ward where the jinchuriki was, and leave without a trace. All they left behind was laughter, which many heard and described as eerie and blood-chilling. Beyond that, no clues—except for one jonin, assigned by Hiruzen, who swore by all the Kami and Rikudo that he heard Orochimaru's laugh. Orochimaru's involvement was plausible since he was an expert in stealth infiltration, but just showing up to laugh in the jinchuriki's ward without taking any samples or data argued against it. Reports also placed him elsewhere during some of the incidents, though that wasn't definitive proof of his innocence.
The frequency of the incidents suggested they were likely diversions meant to distract from other key targets and demoralize their military forces. That's what both Root analysts and the Nara clan concluded.
They only identified the saboteur by chance. It turned out to be Yumi Itsuki, a hospital worker, caught during a failed assassination attempt on the jinchuriki, which she tried to disguise as an accident. They couldn't take her alive—she used an unknown technique to stop her own heart.
From ANBU operative Falcon's report:
…Sensing a very faint killing intent, I immediately arrived at room four, where the jinchuriki was. In the room, I found the jinchuriki with a severe head wound and Itsuki standing a few steps away. Upon seeing me, she used an unknown suicide technique.
The jinchuriki's examination revealed no tampering with the Seal's function or integrity, nor any other hidden harmful effects. A mind check was deemed impossible. Judging by the team's reports, Hiruzen had also attempted to probe the jinchuriki's mind—there's no other way to explain Inoichi Yamanaka's reaction to the request for a mind check.
After that incident, they conducted widespread checks and purges of the hospital staff, security, and personnel services. The investigation uncovered numerous violations and several spies. As for Yumi Itsuki herself, a check of all her connections and contacts turned up nothing, leading to the confident conclusion that she was an SS-class specialist in covert infiltration and sabotage. After the saboteur's death, the strange incidents stopped, and the activity of other spies and saboteurs significantly decreased, suggesting a possible conspiracy—likely involving the Uchiha.