The moment he regained consciousness is something he'll never forget. It was a spring morning, a particularly sunny day, as he later learned, 33 years after the founding of Konoha, and he was only 6 years old.
But what no one knew was that inside that child was the mind of a 45-year-old adult from another world, who had just died in a plane crash, an unfortunate programmer and anime fanatic, who was in the wrong place at the wrong time…
Reality is very different from what one expects in a situation like this, as the then-child knew firsthand. Suffering an unexpected death, transcending to a completely different reality and being in a different body, is not something a normal person can accept suddenly, and our protagonist was no exception.
His name, Ichizen Touki, is something that's commonplace these days, just as his old name is a thing of the past. But back when it all began, the identity conflict was a serious problem that led to countless mental breakdowns, exacerbated by the loss of an entire life in his old world, including family, friends, and dreams.
His first few days were a complete nightmare, with him completely disoriented and experiencing fleeting lapses in consciousness. He later learned that he had been traveling at the time and that halfway there, he caught a cold that nearly killed him, although perhaps that was what really happened.
Upon regaining consciousness, Touki found himself in a completely different world. At first, he didn't really know where he was, perhaps thinking this was the famed land after death or something similar, but he quickly dismissed that as he began to feel a great pain throughout his body (even with a cold), since supposedly, in heaven, one doesn't feel pain. Furthermore, after managing to recover, the first thing he encountered upon leaving home and traveling to the nearby enormous city was the enormous rock monument with three very familiar faces.
His surprise was enormous. "I'm in the damn world of Naruto," he exclaimed, almost crying from excitement and horror at the same time. One of the coolest worlds in manga and anime, but also one of the most dangerous. A world of almost constant conflict where only the strong can survive.
What followed was a long period where Touki tried to get used to life in this new world, trying to make sense of his new identity, an orphan whose parents had just died and who was now in the care of his only living relative, his uncle named Ichizen Hiro.
The destination of the journey where Touki apparently died of fever is a humble hut in a village very close to Konoha, just 5 kilometers north, next to a small hill with a privileged view of the surrounding area. His uncle, a charcoal maker, immediately accepted him upon learning of the surprising fate of his brother, who had long been the only relative he had.
At the time, he didn't even have a memory of his uncle, but that didn't stop him from quickly becoming acquainted with him, who provided his only emotional support in his growing uncertainty. Thanks to him, he easily learned the complicated language of Naruto's world, obviously Japanese or some derivative.
The first year was a year of disappointments and broken dreams, because for Touki, nothing was like the fantasy stories he had seen so often in his original world. When he tried to awaken the famous chakra, he not only found out that he was not a genius, but that he was not even accepted into the ninja academy. The process was a true ordeal, full of expectations, favors called in by his uncle, and a lot of hard work, but the reality was that when he managed to access his chakra, he found that he did not even meet the minimum requirements to enter the academy. Even if he tried his whole life, he would not be able to use even the most basic ninjutsu and become a genin.
So, with no talent, no special powers, and not even a powerful family, Touki fell into a deep depression, to the point of even considering taking his own life, but fortunately for him, his uncle managed to convince him that a normal life has many virtues that the boy was not taking into account. What his uncle did not know, however, is that Touki is someone who spent much of his life dreaming of adventures in fantasy worlds, and not being able to experience the power of the world of Naruto was a blow from which it is not easy to recover.
Thus, Touki's second year was one of absolute appreciation for life. The boy, as a way of forgetting his disappointment, dedicated most of his time to learning his uncle's trade, polishing his writing, and experiencing the simplicity of the society he now found himself in. Part of him even began to think about a future, starting a business, finding a good wife, and starting the family he was never able to have in his past life. Due to various circumstances, he was never able or had the time to marry and have children.
But everything changed for the boy the day he witnessed something that awakened his former self. It was a day like any other, preparing to mine coal for a fairly large production. However, both he and his uncle had just come down with a cold, making them in no condition to work. And since they couldn't risk the coal getting wet in an unexpected downpour, they decided to request help through a mission to Konoha, something that everyone in the region is accustomed to doing from time to time.
A group of three genin arrived to help with the heavy lifting, making use of their excellent physical condition, but one of the genin, a boy bored of digging coal from the enormous pile by hand, decided to use earth ninjutsu to speed up the process. No one paid much attention to the young ninja, who, with a few hand seals and impeccable execution, caused most of the earth covering the coal to move underground. What no one noticed was Touki's reaction, who remained petrified for almost a full minute with his eyes wide open, which then transformed into a thoughtful face for the rest of the workday.
The very night of the genins's visit, the boy couldn't sleep because he was so excited, his mind working at astonishing speeds and thinking of infinite possibilities. The moment he saw the young ninja execute the hand seals to activate the ninjutsu, his eyes saw not simply hand movements, but a language, and above all, algorithms. Perhaps it was fatigue due to the cold, or perhaps he was simply delirious, but that moment changed his vision of the possible ways to use chakra.
Touki always knew that hand seals were tools to aid in the activation of jutsus, primarily in the molding of chakra within the ninja's body, which were essential in learning and which could later be omitted. But Touki looked at the seals not with the eyes of a ninja of this world, but with the eyes of a programmer, who for some reason saw a language perfectly capable of doing more than it seemed to promise.
Touki's new obsession led him to exhaustively research everything he could about hand seals. He discovered that at the academy, it was part of the curriculum to fluently execute the twelve different seals used for the various jutsus, so he made it his number one goal to perfectly master these seals before anything else.
Bird, boar, dog, dragon, hare, horse, monkey, ox, ram, rat, snake, and tiger—these were all the boy thought about in his free time as he tirelessly practiced the seals. The work, more than arduous, was incredibly repetitive, because, as he learned, the goal is to make the act almost instinctive.
Touki spent months practicing, increasing the dexterity of his hands and experimenting with the little chakra he was able to generate, mostly failing. Expectations were never high, but the inability to achieve even a small amount began to erode some of his enthusiasm.
Then, despair began to well up in the boy's heart, and his practices transformed into desperate searches for results, often meaningless repetitions of seals in the most random way possible. Chakra was evidently the most determining factor in his failure to make sense of it all, as it was very difficult for him to access and distribute it throughout his body, so he began to locate it only in his hands.
The moment that changed everything up to that point was when Touki, in a near-delirious state and only practicing seals erratically, began to increase his speed in an act of desperation, provoking a completely unexpected reaction by emitting a small flare for a fraction of a second. The act caused such a shock that he even fell backward.
He had done it. Somehow, without really knowing what he had done, the boy had managed to trigger a chakra reaction, without any outside help. His smile was enormous, but to solidify his discovery, there was the process of repeating the experiment and understanding how he did it, which turned out to be more complicated than he had thought.
Unfortunately, Touki was unable to immediately repeat the flare, as he didn't really remember what he did, nor the seals he used, all he knew was that he performed them much faster than normal.
It all came down to repeating and repeating until the same thing was achieved, an act that took weeks to find a clue as to what had happened. The fact is that during one of his many attempts to quickly use seals, he encountered a strange anomaly when executing the horse and tiger seals, with a small amount of chakra in his hands, consecutively and within a span of no more than two seconds. The result was a slight warmth in his hands, with no external manifestation, but evident to Touki.
A scientific approach was then used to address the results obtained, based on the assumption that there are combinations of seals that, when performed over a period of time, produce chakra-derived manifestations. What remained to be done was to continue testing different combinations and see if the pattern was repeated.
Starting with only double combinations, or 144 possible variations, it took Touki only a couple of days to discover that the phenomenon could be replicated, as long as the execution of the seals took less than two seconds. To be precise, he encountered seven other strange phenomena, most of them too bizarre to describe.
As time passed, a great change began to form in Touki's mind. As the combinations became triple (1,728 possibilities), the boy gradually began to feel that each of the discovered phenomena possessed a kind of familiarity, as if their meaning were a vague memory from a forgotten era.
Having completed three years in the world of Naruto, Touki had already tried all possible triple combinations, finding a large number of phenomena that he ended up cataloging in a journal that little by little began to grow fat with information, all in English so that no one but him could understand it.
Unfortunately for the boy, the combinations still didn't provide anything to work with successfully. There were many phenomena that could be identified as clear elemental manifestations, yet they failed to form an acceptable logical language. Even his instinct told him to take things a step further. But here things began to get difficult, as quadruple combinations represented a great physical challenge, even more so with a body that hadn't fully developed. Practice was extremely necessary to achieve a speed that wouldn't exceed the two-second barrier.
Touki began to notice certain patterns in the types of combinations that guaranteed results, but he still decided that it was necessary to test all 20,736 possible combinations in the case of quadruple variants, as at this point he couldn't afford to lose valuable information.
At the age of 10, Touki finally managed to identify a combination that had a clear elemental identity, in this case fire. Furthermore, by combining it with a series of other combinations, almost instinctively, he created the longed-for flare that started it all. That day, the boy couldn't help but cry himself to sleep with joy. Afterward, it was all about further experimentation, trying to find more types of elements.
Near the end of that same year, the most significant event he had experienced up to that point occurred: he discovered an extremely rare combination. Casting this particular set of seals unleashed a response he'd never seen before, drawing energy from his surroundings and concentrating it in his hands. But what was truly surprising was that when combined with an elemental combination, he transformed all that natural energy into the corresponding element—fire, water, wind, etc.
The weight of the discovery was significant, as it meant the closest thing to controlling a type of senjutsu, which was obviously not practical in the end, since conjuring a simple fireball capable of flying toward a target theoretically required an absurd number of seals, which was the system's biggest problem so far. However, the idea of being able to access an external energy source demonstrated that there was a future in the development of the new language.
From then on, discoveries began to emerge one by one, from combinations capable of reacting to external stimuli to some that seemed capable of storing chakra (similar to capacitors). Everything piled up in such a way that it seemed like Touki was putting together a puzzle.
Already at 11 years old, Touki took another step toward the future of his language, finding a way to translate the command set into a physical object. He always knew this would inevitably be the path forward, given that his body had always lacked the capacity to withstand anything his hands had conjured. A single experiment was enough to realize that natural energy is like poison to an unprepared body, nearly losing a finger in the attempt.
The first successful experiment on a physical object was a wooden ladle, the implanted command being one that allowed it to heat up at one end. The result was very similar to when someone executed the summoning jutsu in the anime series, as a large number of strange symbols surrounded the ladle, then left some equally bizarre lines printed on it, which soon disappeared. Following his own programming, Touki simply took the ladle and channeled a certain amount of chakra into the handle, triggering a reaction that revealed the set of printed lines again, finally ending up igniting the utensil as if it were a torch. A failure within a success.
Experiments on physical objects gradually took center stage for Touki as the results became increasingly practical, but it was during one in particular that he discovered the true potential that could be obtained from everything he had done. The experiment in question was one of the many variations of applying fire to a metallic element, this time on a nail. However, from the beginning, the combination of seals left a strange feeling in the boy's mind, as if something was telling him it was simply perfect. And indeed, the result after activating the nail was a much larger than normal flame, which, contrary to everything he had seen before, simply did not go out. The fire continued to burn for almost ten minutes straight, slowly extinguishing itself without any external stimulus, leaving the nail almost red-hot.
Touki realized he had hit the nail on the head (figuratively) with something that could revolutionize Naruto's world. But first, he had to determine the cause of the experiment's outcome. First, he replicated the result without any problem and on different objects, except for flammable ones, because it made no sense. Second, he tried to isolate external influences, conducting the experiment indoors, obtaining a notable increase in duration. Finally, inspired by his former world, he decided to perform the closest thing to an exercise in a vacuum, activating the object inside a glass bottle sealed with cork and wax, resulting in a fleeting initial flare and an intense white light, which transformed the bottle into a true lamp, until the wax melted and the cork charred.
In theory, if Touki could isolate the strange reaction he discovered in an environment free of air and external elements, he would be perfectly capable of achieving a perpetual reaction. But the idea of having in his hands the solution to the mythical dream of infinite energy (at least within a world with chakra), rather than delighting him, filled him with profound fear, for he knew full well what the authorities of this world would be capable of to gain access to information of that magnitude. So Touki decided to stop thinking, for the time being, about exploring the possible applications of infinite energy; instead, he decided to call the phenomenon a perfect or natural cycle, undoubtedly destined to be part of ambitious future experiments.
By the age of 12, Touki had mastered all possible quadruple combinations and was ready to begin compiling an initial version of the seal language, as he was unable to execute a quintuple combination. But everything came to an abrupt halt the day his uncle passed away, a completely unexpected event, apparently a respiratory arrest while he was asleep, which left Touki more affected than he expected.
Without realizing it, Touki had begun to rely too heavily on his uncle, especially emotionally. Finding himself without anyone by his side and needing to find a living, the young man was forced to put much more effort into what remained of his life: the coal business, a relatively simple but physically demanding trade, especially considering he went from merely helping out to doing the entire job.
It took Touki several months to get used to living alone, and several more to master the art of producing decent charcoal that would be accepted in some blacksmith shops. By the time the young man seriously resumed working on his seal language, he was approaching 13.
Compiling the seal language turned out to be much simpler than initially anticipated, perhaps due to the instinctive nature of many of the algorithms. The sheets were filled one after another, completing several journals with practical data, experimental results, theories, and algorithms. The icing on the cake ended up being several complete programs, designed to test different aspects of the first programming language in the history of this world, named by Touki "RedChakra 1.0," partly jokingly as if it were a computer language.
With nearly 180 combinations, all executed in less than 2 seconds, and interspersed with each other in less than 2 seconds, Touki executed, not on the first attempt, but on the 35th, the first complete program on a kitchen knife blade. The program in question, already successfully registered, allowed the knife blade to be heated to three different heat levels, as well as to cool the blade suddenly.
By the time Touki had the completed knife in his hand, working as it should, the level of bliss he felt was something he'd only rarely felt in this life. The knife's blade heated smoothly, concentrating specifically on the edge, first to a sizzling temperature, then to levels capable of burning objects, passing through a near-red-hot state, and finally emitting a large amount of steam when it was extinguished, all thanks to the elements of fire and water.
At that moment, with the blade burning in his hand, Touki understood the fate that awaited him. His seal language opened the door to infinite possibilities, though he first had to make sure he didn't die in the initial stages. He needed protection and weapons, as well as help to break through the barrier of quintuple combinations, as his attempts made it clear that it was a nearly impossible task for him.
The days passed and the monotony of life made the young man lose track of time and what was happening around him. Until that moment, Touki had kept away from everything that was not his work and his research, almost completely isolated from what was happening around him, first because of the initial disappointment of not being able to become a ninja and then because his head was more focused on his research. In the end, if it weren't for the fact that he had to periodically go to Konoha to deliver his coal, he would not have noticed the fourth face that appeared on the Hokage monument.
"Oh-oh," was the first thing Touki thought when he saw Minato's face next to the other Hokages, and he knew exactly what it meant: disaster for everyone.
The young man quickly learned about the latest developments in the village, through acquaintances he didn't see often and by asking around at newspaper shops. Fortunately, Minato hadn't even been in office for two months, which meant there was still time before the Kyubi unleashed hell on Konoha.
Touki felt like his world was collapsing around him, remembering that the history of this world isn't one of peace and sanity, but one of tragedy, sometimes senseless. The young man ended up berating himself greatly for his poor preparation up until then and promised himself that it wouldn't happen again.
Feeling like he was working against the clock, the young man, already at 14, focused all his attention on producing the strongest instruments he could make with the knowledge he had, prioritizing what would allow him to survive the impending catastrophe.
• Using the elements of earth and water and a complex program capable of detecting the approach of elemental chakras through metal plates, he created a vest capable of reacting to elemental attacks, producing a double protective sphere around the user. The vest, capable of automatically recharging its energy (for one hour), can be activated three times at low power or once at full power, depending on the threat level.
• Using the element of wind and a highly offensive program, he created a pair of steel bracelets capable of executing veritable whirlwinds in the targeted direction. The bracelets require several minutes to charge and only have one discharge. Unfortunately, when used, the bracelets are locked in the discharge position; otherwise, the user would be thrown in the opposite direction of the attack, although this feature can be disabled.
• Using the elements of fire and lightning and a program focused on causing controlled detonations, he produced, with the help of several blacksmiths (since he separated the manufacturing process into multiple parts, so no one could decipher what he was doing), the world's first firearm, a double-barreled shotgun, disguised as an umbrella, capable of firing both buckshot and steel slugs. The weapon has little accuracy, but at short range it doesn't seem like many could dodge the attack. Reloading is slow, as it is fired through the barrel, like a musket.
While working, Touki never stopped gathering information whenever he could, especially from Minato, so when he learned of his wife's pregnancy, he understood that the time of disaster was approaching. A small part of the young man longed to somehow tell Minato of the impending danger, but fear prevented him. How could he deliver this precious information, without drawing attention to himself, to one of the strongest men in the world? Even if he wanted to communicate through other sources, the likelihood of being discovered was too high, resulting in a tragic fate at the hands of interrogators like the Yamanaka, or worse, entering the radar of Obito and Zetsu.
The preparations left much to be desired. No matter how hard Touki tried, what he could produce with the "RedChakra 1.0" language was more limited than he expected, as he encountered two major problems that were impossible to overcome for the moment. First, the materials used to inscribe the programs represented a limitation due to their quality, since not all steel is capable of withstanding the stress of large concentrations of chakra, thus preventing him from taking full advantage of the programs. Second, the language ended up having a structural limit, since for some reason, the programs could not exceed 600 (approx.) combinations of seals, since if they did, they would simply decompose before they could be inscribed on the artifact, which placed a real limit on the power they could wield.
In the end, the young man couldn't help but stop going to Konoha when he calculated that it was more or less the last months of Kushina's pregnancy, ready to hide in the underground shelter beneath his house, which he used to test his creations, or simply flee. Touki's panic was a stark contrast to the unusually festive atmosphere of the village, which had just recently emerged from a long and bitter war.
The moment of truth came one October night, when Touki was, as he had been for several days, watching from the hill next to his house. Fortunately, the disaster occurred on the opposite side of Konoha, much further away than the 5 kilometers his house was from the village's perimeter walls. But that didn't stop the young man from feeling insignificant in the face of the spectacle of destruction that could be seen in the distance, starting with the gigantic aura of fire that stained the horizon, as well as the countless attacks that sought, without success, to defend the village. Tears fell from Touki's eyes, as he felt more humble than ever, promising himself that he wouldn't rest until he was able to protect himself or eliminate such a threat.
The days following the disaster were filled with immense sadness, with Touki helping in every way possible with the relief and rescue efforts for the victims, especially those buried in the rubble of buildings. Never before in his two lifetimes had the young man seen so much death firsthand, with a level of gore that starkly highlighted the difference between reality and the cartoon he knew. So much so that part of him understood the irrational hatred the villagers displayed toward Kurama in the television series.
Three months after the disaster, Touki decided it was time to leave Konoha, as it was the precise moment in Naruto's timeline when the world was at its most peaceful. The reason for such an important decision is simple: Konoha is too dangerous for him to conduct his research, as a fully militarized village and characters like Danzo and Orochimaru do not provide the freedom the young man needs to work without fear.
Two months later, armed with supplies for a long journey, as well as several additional artifacts to protect himself, a 15-year-old Touki truly began his great adventure.