Chapter Text
Reincarnation, without exaggeration, was a fucking mess.
Shikamaru couldn’t even say with certainty how he had died, or why he had ended up here. By here, he meant a room inside an unfamiliar house—one that did not belong to him in any conceivable sense of ownership or memory.
And, truthfully speaking, the harder he tried to grasp those fragments of his former life, the more faster they slipped away, as if they were nothing more than sand running through his fingers. So remembering his death was out of the question. More precisely, it simply wasn’t something he could manage at all.
Eventually, he stopped trying. Not out of acceptance, but because persistence yielded nothing but cognitive static that already crowded his mind.
The only thing he knew for certain was that. One evening, he had gone to sleep in his own room as usual, and the next day, for reasons that defied every shred of logic, he woke up as a newborn infant.
On top of that, for some reason, he was now a girl and had a new “grandfather”.
“C’mon, Shikamaru, give your grandpa a smile!” the bizarre old man boomed over him yet again, rattling a toy right in his face like he was trying to exorcise a damn spirit.
Fine, this was undeniably too much, even for him. Shikamaru meant to let out a tired sigh. Instead, thanks to his current horrifying condition, he drooled involuntarily.
Shit.
Everything Shikamaru had managed to deduce over the course of several months could be reduced to a handful of unsettling truths.
First. Yeah, he really was an infant.
That fact alone felt like a personal insult. After everything he had once endured—after spending what felt like an entire lifetime just to master the simple act of walking without humiliation—being reduced to a creature that couldn’t even control its own limbs properly bordered on offensive.
Second. His cognitive abilities had deteriorated into something resembling overcooked porridge left forgotten on a stove. Sticky, sluggish, and painfully uncooperative. His instincts demanded nothing more than crying, sleeping, and producing an endless stream of undignified drool. And despite the proud architecture of his once-brilliant mind, it was currently losing an embarrassing war against biology. Resistance, at least for now, seemed futile. Adaptation was even worse.
Third. He was constantly surrounded by a single overwhelmingly large, absurdly loud elderly man, along with a rotating cast of strangers who likely served as caretakers.
Fourth. His parents, judging by all available evidence, had either vanished without explanation or been quietly erased from existence before Shikamaru had even managed to focus his newborn vision on them. There were no familiar voices, no comforting patterns of recognition—only absence where something essential should have been.
Fifth. Everyone around him spoke in a chaotic, incomprehensible language. It wasn’t simply foreign; it felt almost deliberately alien, as though the structure of speech itself had been rearranged into something unrecognizable. Not a single word aligned with anything he knew. No familiar syntax. No predictable grammatical rhythm. Just an endless, distorted stream of sound that made his skull ache in protest.
Which led him to a rather uncomfortable conclusion. This was not any village he had ever known.
And sixth—arguably the worst of all—
He was, without a doubt, a girl. Yet, inexplicably, everyone continued to address him as “Shikamaru.”
Shikamaru had never been one to jump to dramatic conclusions or inflate minor inconsistencies into grand theories. But even he couldn’t deny that the accumulating evidence refused to form anything other than a highly troubling picture. Piece by piece, the situation resolved itself into something inescapable.
He was trapped in a world that did not belong to him.
And from the very first day, that world had shown absolutely no mercy.
The language barrier alone was not merely a wall—it was an entire mountain range, jagged and endless, stretching far beyond any reasonable expectation. The people around him only reinforced the strangeness. They were enormous. Not just tall, but disproportionately massive in a way that made even adult proportions feel distorted. Especially the elderly man—his grandfather, Shikamaru assumed—whose presence alone seemed to bend the atmosphere.
Shikamaru, still confined to the body of an extremely small infant, found himself constantly dwarfed by them all. It was as though these people had been raised on something engineered specifically to accelerate growth, as if childhood itself had been supplemented with unnatural tonics meant to stretch bone and muscle beyond normal limits.
Then again, there was the sound.
Their speech refused to settle into anything recognizable. It lacked the familiar cadence, the linguistic anchors he instinctively searched for. No patterns he could decode. Just a continuous, chaotic surge of phonetics crashing over him in waves, each one harder to endure than the last. It was so disjointed, so unstructured in his perception, that it left him with a dull, persistent pressure behind his still-developing mind.
Out of that overwhelming noise, however, one fragment remained consistent.
One name. “Shikamaru.”
It always came from the same source—the towering old man who would scoop him up with hands like oversized slabs of meat, lifting him without effort as if he weighed nothing at all. Every time it happened, the name was shouted with such forceful familiarity that it nearly vibrated through the air itself.
There was no mistaking it.
Even through the haze of infancy, even through the fog of linguistic incomprehension, he could recognize that sound.
It was his name. That realization only deepened the growing unease in his chest.
Because as Shikamaru stared down at his own body—small, fragile, unmistakably female in form—his thoughts began to assemble themselves into something far less comforting than confusion.
Why would an elderly man, clearly convinced of his identity, refer to a baby girl with a boy’s name?
Theory One: The Optimistic One.
His new parents were simply extraordinarily lazy—an attitude Shikamaru would normally respect on a deeply spiritual level. Perhaps they had picked a pre-approved name for a boy, decided it was “close enough,” and never bothered to verify the actual gender of their child.
Efficient. Minimal effort. Almost admirable.
Almost. Because alas, that version of events stopped making sense the moment he remembered he was, in fact, currently female. And that detail alone downgraded the theory from “reasonable” to “deeply questionable.”
Theory Two: The Realistic One.
They had desperately wanted a male heir.
That, too, was not unheard of—especially judging by the stern, almost oppressive presence of his grandfather. A man like that did not radiate emotional flexibility. It was entirely plausible that he had simply decided reality itself was negotiable. That somewhere between expectation and birth, he had made a silent declaration. This is a grandson, and refused to revise it ever since.
Selective denial, enforced with enough stubborn willpower to bend perception itself.
Unpleasant, but believable.
Theory Three: The Paranoid One.
In this version of events, biology itself in this world was fundamentally broken. Perhaps people here genuinely could not distinguish between male and female infants. Perhaps classification systems had degraded over time into something so primitive that nuance no longer existed.
It was, admittedly, the most absurd explanation.
Which, sadly, did not automatically disqualify it.
As for his parents, Shikamaru could only construct hypotheses based on their total and complete absence.
The fact that only the thunderous old man remained as his sole caretaker already suggested that the situation was far from stable. In fact, if one applied even the most basic logic, the conclusion practically wrote itself.
Whatever had happened to them, it had not been pleasant. Konoha-style catastrophic event? Highly plausible.
A localized equivalent of a Fourth Shinobi War? Disturbingly possible, given the underlying tension he occasionally sensed in the air of this world.
Or maybe they had simply been swallowed by one of those colossal sea creatures he occasionally glimpsed through the window, when his careless grandfather forgot to draw the curtains. Massive, indistinct shapes beneath the water’s surface, moving with the slow inevitability of things that did not care whether they were seen or not.
His mother, judging by the heavy, almost funerary silence that had surrounded his cradle in the earliest days, had almost certainly not survived childbirth.
And his father…
Well. His father had likely followed her at some point. Before. After. The order hardly seemed important anymore.
Either way, expecting their return would have been an exercise in futility.
And, if he were being completely frankly—
Good. He had no particular desire for parental interference anyway.
In the end, responsibility for his newly questionable existence had been unceremoniously transferred to the grandfather.
The same towering old man with wire-framed glasses, who perpetually smelled of weak, over-steeped tea, aging paper documents, and something heavier beneath it all—a pressure in the space that did not quite behave like chakra, yet still made the world feel slightly compressed whenever he entered a room.
It was loud. It was chaotic. It was exhausting in a way that made even basic observation feel like work.
Shikamaru already found himself yearning—deeply, sincerely—for the quiet dignity of drifting clouds and doing absolutely nothing at all.
But for now, his greatest daily accomplishment remained far more modest.
Do not vomit on the grandfather’s formal uniform.
A goal both awkwardly simple and alarmingly difficult.
But for the moment, it was enough to count as survival. Probably.
This was the list Shikamaru mentally recorded under the category of achievements by the time he reached what he could only estimate—roughly and generously—to be his first full year in this world.
1. He had finally escaped the crawling caste. (A monumental victory over gravity itself, and over his own infantile helplessness.)
2. The stage of enforced silence had officially come to an end, although its lingering consequences still haunted his attempts at coherent speech.
3. His grandfather—still loud, still enormous—had finally acquired a proper identity in Shikamaru’s mind.
Sengoku! The man, not the Warring States period, though.
Escaping the humiliating existence of what he privately referred to as “the larva phase” brought him an almost spiritual level of relief. Now he could walk properly. And, in cases of extreme necessity, such as avoiding unwanted embraces from his grandfather, he could even run.
Quite well, in fact.
Faster than any normal human child should reasonably be capable of.
Sengoku, however, did not seem particularly disturbed by this anomaly. The old man appeared to have no functional understanding of how children were supposed to develop in the first place, and thus simply accepted Shikamaru’s early sprinting ability as a matter of course. Perhaps he considered it a sign of exceptional genetics. A hypothesis that, sadly, lacked any real supporting evidence.
Still—
God, what a process it had been.
Learning to walk again with a body whose center of gravity seemed permanently lodged somewhere around the oversized spherical head was not merely exhausting. It was actively hazardous.
Shikamaru had long since lost count of how many times he had collided headfirst with solid oak furniture at full speed, rebounded off polished floors after misjudging his own momentum, or simply miscalculated a turn and ended up face-first against a wall.
The repeated sound—“thud”—echoing through the nursery had gradually evolved into a source of genuine psychological concern for Sengoku.
The grandfather would storm into the room with the urgency of someone responding to a battlefield breach, only to find Shikamaru calmly rubbing yet another bruise on his forehead. Sengoku would then stare at him in prolonged silence, his gaze narrowing as if attempting to determine whether the child’s already questionable mental condition had suffered permanent structural damage.
How embarrassing.
Speech had not been much kinder.
For months, Shikamaru had felt as though a dense mass of wool was lodged in his throat, while his mouth had been sealed shut with invisible adhesive. Every attempt to articulate even a basic chain of reasoning emerged as nothing more than distorted, bubbling nonsense—“bu-u-u” and similar verbal disasters.
Eventually, the paralysis faded.
His tongue now moved freely, yet the linguistic framework of this world remained stubbornly absent from his mind. The result was a strange compromise. He could speak, but only in a chaotic fusion of half-remembered sounds, misaligned phonetics, and improvised vocabulary stitched together on instinct.
The end product was… unpredictable.
Occasionally, even the goat in the corner—who had developed a suspicious habit of chewing paper—would pause mid-bite and stare at him with what could only be interpreted as either deep respect or profound disgust. Shikamaru had not yet decided which.
Even so, the arrangement was functional.
He could walk. He could speak.
And, most importantly, his long-term objective of becoming an inconspicuous piece of household furniture was steadily progressing.
Efficiently with minimal unnecessary effort, just the way he preferred.
The only remaining problem was Sengoku.
Specifically, the fact that the man insisted on shouting at full volume every morning as though the entire fortress required immediate military awakening.
That, Shikamaru concluded, might require strategic intervention.