Rian Chapter 03 (Patreon)

The final decision I had to make was my parentage, and then it appeared that I could design how I would look once I grew up. That old god really went all out with this, didn’t he? Parentage was a hard choice. Senju and Uchiha were the outright best choices, but was that even possible? If I chose Uchiha, would I be born in a clan right before it’s about to be burned to the ground?

The options were tremendous. I could pick any, but choosing clans from outside the village would make it impossible for me to be born in the village. I click my spawn location as Konoha, and eighty percent of the clans are removed outright. Senju and Uchiha were both still selectable. Wait a second… If I pick the Might family, will Guy have to have a wife? No, it would have to be his father with the timeline, so I’d be Guy’s brother.

Might Dai (or Duy) was a potential choice, but it would mean putting all my eggs in one basket if I chose that. I would have a body strong enough to be great at Taijutsu, but at the cost of everything else. I couldn’t pick the Hyuga, as cool as their eyes were, if I was a branch family I’d be straight fucked… Wait… Why was Uzumaki selectable?

I read that many of the Uzumaki naturally incorporated into most villages, but would my parentage be obvious? I could change my red hair, but there was no changing my parents' appearance, so if they had red hair, they’d give away my bloodline. It didn’t seem like anyone noticed the red hair in the manga, but that was probably an oversight. If someone needed a vessel, I might get carted off if it was found out I was an Uzumaki… But was that a bad thing?

I could possibly end up as the nine-tails jinchuriki if Minato chose not to sacrifice his child, even better if I got the yin half of the nine tails, so I didn’t steal one of Naruto’s trump cards. The Senju, Uzumaki, and Uchiha had too many good things, and I couldn’t decide on which two I wanted. Senju would almost guarantee I would become Hokage. They didn’t like to say it, but three of the five kage were Senju. It was very much who you knew that determined if you could become the Hokage.

They were good at everything; they had better bodies that were great for ninjutsu, could learn ninjutsu easier, and even fought against the Uchiha, whose eyes made them the strongest genjutsu users on the planet. The Uchiha were so worn down from all the fighting that they were willing to partner with their biggest enemies just to get a chance to stop fighting them.

I also might get access to wood release, which was arguably the most broken kekkei genkai. But it was based on luck; choosing Uchiha would guarantee the sharingan. I knew that out of the three choices, Uzumaki was a guarantee, they just had too much bullshit tied to their bloodline to pass up on. Increased lifespan, sealing chains, increased chakra, wound healing blood to anyone who bit me, can surpress their chakra signature making them invisible to chakra detection techniques, kagura minds eye, and seal mastery.

The Uchiha were known for a few things. Most were great fire release users, and most could use ninja tools to an above-average proficiency… That alone wouldn’t make them anything special. It was their sharingan that would make you want to choose the Uchiha bloodline, but everyone always remembers the positives and never the negatives that come with them.

First, unlocking the sharingan wasn’t as straightforward as everyone would assume. You either had to go through a traumatic experience or be naturally gifted to unlock your sharingan while you were young. Sure, Itachi, Shisui, and Sasuke unlocked them when they were young, but they were the exception to the rule. Let's assume that maybe only one out of every ten Uchiha can actually open their eyes, and that limit goes for every further tomoe they’d add. 

So one out of every hundred Uchiha were two tomoe, and one out of every thousand Uchiha were three tomoe. Then you had to watch your loved one die to upgrade it at that point to upgrade to mangekyo. After you did all that, you’d always have to be worried your friends or family members would want to murder you so they could upgrade their eyes. It made me wary to pick Uchiha, even though the sharingan was so strong.

I decided to play it safe. I also didn’t know if the kekkei mora I chose would come with an ocular power, and the sharigan might contradict it. I chose Uzumaki father and Senju mother. I chose this option because I didn’t want to force the world to make Kushina marry a Senju just for me to be born. I didn’t know how the system would determine my parents, so by picking them, it might rewrite the world to make it happen.

Holy shit, what if my dad turns out to be Nagato? That’d be fucked up, but honestly better than being brothers to Naruto. Trying to keep the story as close as I physically could so I could take advantage of it was one of my strategies.

With my parents' chosen, I got to design my character. I wasn’t going to go Elden Ring crazy with my appearance; in fact, I was going to try to create the most beautiful human I could instead of a green abomination with a nose the same size as my head. For some reason, I was just feeling blue. Sky-blue hair and eyes is what I went with. Peacocking sounds silly until you see it work over and over again.

Red would be cool, but it would definitely show off my Uzumaki heritage, which is something I was trying to avoid. Wait… The only person I knew with blue hair was Konan. Was I setting myself up with this hair color? That was just me overthinking it. Fit, naturally athletic, tall, hung, handsome. I was heavily putting my thumb on the ‘will females find me attractive scale’.

I wasn’t ugly in either life, honestly… I think I’d have preferred it as it would have made more sense why no one liked me. It would have made more sense at least, but I was just average. Average appearance, average height, and average weight. Being so average made me practically invisible to everyone. That’s why I hated that I had the same body when I went to the second world and became a hero.

Average in our world was below average in the hero world. Only the constant effort back then improved my physique. If I had a better physique, I could have gotten more out of the hero class. It might have taken far less time to kill the demon king, but it was enough. They didn’t realize how close I was to giving up… If I didn’t have the promise of another life after, I very well could have given up.

Locking in my choices, I feel myself slowly fade. Being born sucked, but I was glad I didn’t have to spend eight months gestating first. I knew that life was going to be extremely boring for the next few years. Thank god I could understand everyone and didn’t have to learn a new language. My mother and father were fuzzy, and I couldn’t make anything out but their hair colors. Red for my father and dark blue for my mother. I felt my eyelids get heavy as I fell asleep.