Naruto: The Shameless Uchiha Tycoon

Dying, as it turned out, was not the most disorienting part of his existence. Waking up was.

Cold air bit aggressively at his wet skin. His lungs burned, seizing in a blind panic. It forced a reflex he didn’t consciously initiate.

”WAAAAAAAH!”

A ragged, piercing wail tore from a throat that felt entirely too small.

He tried to open his eyes, but his eyelids felt like they were glued shut with gunk and exhaustion. The muscle memory of a thirty-year-old man screamed for his body to sit up. To assess the threat.

His limbs completely refused to obey.

The neural pathways were sluggish, misfiring in wild, uncoordinated spasms. He tried to raise an arm to shield his face, but his fist merely jerked and flailed weakly through the air.

What’s wrong with my body? he panicked, his mind racing. Am I paralyzed? Stroke? Car crash?

When he finally managed to force his eyelids apart, the light was blinding. It seared his unadjusted retinas. His vision was a chaotic smear of colors that slowly, painfully began to resolve into terrifyingly massive shapes.

Giant faces loomed over him.

A colossal man with dark, severe features stared down, his head the size of a boulder. A woman beside him leaned in, her hair cascading down like a massive waterfall of black silk.

”He’s beautiful, Fugaku,” the giant woman whispered, her voice exhausted but thoroughly laced with pride.

”He has the eyes,” the deeper, stern male voice replied, rumbling like thunder. ”A strong heir for the clan. The Uchiha will need him.”

They were speaking, but the sounds were a muffled, booming drone that vibrated right through his fragile ribs.

Wait a minute... he thought, his panicked brain trying to process the syllables. It was structured. Rhythmic.

What language is that? It sounds... Japanese?

He blinked, thoroughly confused. Wait, if this is Japanese... where are the subtitles?! How the hell am I supposed to understand anything without subtitles?!

The giant woman cooed, a sound that echoed like a bell in a cavern, and reached down for him. Her hands were the size of dinner plates.

Absolute, primal terror spiked in his chest. He tried to scramble backward. To push her massive fingers away. He thrust his arms forward in a desperate, defensive block.

His blurry vision caught movement right in front of his face.

He froze. The wailing caught in his tiny throat.

Those weren’t his hands. Or rather, they were, but they were completely, fundamentally wrong.

Instead of the calloused, adult hands he remembered having just moments ago, he was staring at two tiny, pudgy, wrinkle-covered fists. The fingers were short, uncoordinated, and currently waving aimlessly in the air.

He moved his right index finger. The tiny, stubby digit in his vision twitched in response.

The realization hit him with the force of a freight train.

The people weren’t giants. The room wasn’t massive.

I am small.

The utter lack of motor control. The spontaneous crying. The blurry vision. He wasn’t paralyzed in a hospital bed.

He was an infant. He had been reborn.

Before his adult consciousness could fully process the sheer, mind-breaking impossibility of the situation, the giant woman scooped him up. He was pressed against a chest that smelled faintly of jasmine, sweat, and something sharp and metallic.

Blood.

The deep, stern voice of the man rumbled again from above. The softer, exhausted woman replied, rocking him gently.

The neurological strain of holding an adult lifetime of consciousness inside a newly minted, unformed newborn brain reached its absolute limit. His vision swam. The massive, alien faces faded into a low hum, and the suffocating, heavy darkness of infant sleep dragged him forcefully under.

”Slurp... gulp... slurp...”

When he woke up again, instinct had already taken over. He was wrapped in a warm blanket, nestled firmly against a soft, bare chest.

He was breastfeeding.

Now, normally, an infant feeding is a wholesome, beautiful moment of maternal bonding.

But he was not a normal infant.

He latched on with absolute fervor. He wasn’t just drinking for survival; he was dining like a king at a five-star buffet. His tiny hands gripped the soft, pale flesh of his new mother’s breast, kneading it with a shameful amount of enthusiasm.

If anyone had looked closely at his tiny face, they wouldn’t have seen the innocent, contented smile of a newborn baby. They would have seen the lascivious, shameless grin of a fully grown man taking maximum advantage of his reincarnation perks.

Milk has never tasted this good, he thought, sucking harder. Maybe being a baby isn’t so bad after all.

It had been exactly one month since he was born into this new world.

There was no magical ”memory digestion.” He wasn’t a transmigrator hijacking someone else’s body; he had simply been reborn as an infant, armed with the mind of a thirty-year-old.

But slowly, the fog began to clear. His vision sharpened. His motor control slightly improved. And most importantly, thanks to his adult comprehension, his brain began to decode the language spoken around him.

It was indeed Japanese. As he lay in his mother’s arms, staring up at the ornate wooden ceiling, he started piecing together the words spoken by the giant woman whose tits he had been shamelessly sucking, and the giant man who stared at him with heavy, imposing expectations.

Mikoto.

Fugaku.

When he first put the names together, followed by the red and white fan crest painted on the walls of the compound, a brief, blinding flash of fanboy excitement had ignited in his tiny chest.

I hit the jackpot, he had thought. I got reincarnated into Naruto. I’m an Uchiha.

Visions of spinning Sharingan, massive fireballs, and god-tier Susanoos had danced in his head. He was going to be a prodigy. He was going to be an untouchable powerhouse.

But that fleeting excitement had died a brutal, suffocating death the moment he learned enough of the language to understand the context of his parents’ hushed conversations.

”He has the look of a strong heir. The clan will need him, Mikoto. The casualties... they are heavier than expected.”

”I know,” she whispered, her voice tightening. ”The Sannin are pushing the front lines, but the Hidden Rain is a meat grinder. Even with Hanzo negotiating, the skirmishes are bleeding us dry.”

That day, Ren realized the truth. His tiny chest rose and fell rhythmically, while his mind raced with cold, unadulterated terror.

The Hidden Rain? The Sannin pushing the front?

He did the math.

He hadn’t been reborn in the peaceful, nostalgic era of Konoha Year 57. He wasn’t going to go to the Academy with Naruto and goof off while eating ramen.

He was decades early.

The Second Shinobi War was just wrapping up. Which meant the Third Shinobi War—the bloodiest, most devastating, desperate conflict in the history of the elemental nations—was going to erupt in exactly ten years.

Ten years.

He would be prime drafting age.

Will of Fire, Ren thought bitterly, staring at the ceiling. What a load of absolute, unmitigated bullshit.

The village preached about the ”Will of Fire” and ”protecting the next generation” as if it were some holy doctrine. But Ren knew the reality of the lore.

When the Third War hit its peak, Konoha wouldn’t hesitate. They would slap headbands on six-year-olds and throw them into muddy, blood-soaked trenches to buy time for the adults. They would use children as cannon fodder to secure political leverage and resource monopolies.

He wasn’t in a cool anime. He was in a militaristic death cult wrapped in a veneer of found-family propaganda.

From the open window, a commotion drifted into the room.

”Get the stretchers! Medics, to the gates now!” a voice screamed from the streets below.

Fugaku’s posture stiffened. Mikoto stood up, her hand instinctively drifting to a kunai pouch hidden under her casual robes.

”It’s the returning platoons,” Fugaku said, his voice dropping to a grim monotone.

Ren managed to roll his head to the side, peering through the wooden slats of his crib toward the window. He couldn’t see the street, but he could hear it. The sounds were straight out of a nightmare.

The wet, ragged coughing. The frantic screams for medical ninjutsu. The sobbing of a young boy—he couldn’t have been older than eight—screaming that he couldn’t feel his legs.

”The Second War is taking a heavy toll,” Mikoto whispered, walking over to the crib and placing a protective hand on Ren’s small chest. ”Perhaps... perhaps by the time he is old enough for the Academy, the fighting will truly be over.”

No, it won’t, Ren thought, a cold sweat breaking out across his forehead. It’s going to get so much worse.

If he showed even a fraction of the ”Uchiha Genius” the village expected of Fugaku’s firstborn son, he would be fast-tracked. He would be labeled a prodigy. And in this era, being a prodigy didn’t mean you got to be cool; it meant you were deemed highly efficient military hardware, ready to be deployed to the slaughter years ahead of schedule.

If he became a ninja, he was going to die in a ditch before he ever hit puberty.

A clan nurse bustled into the room a moment later, bowing respectfully to Fugaku before approaching the crib. She smiled mechanically, pulling a small, smoothly sanded wooden toy kunai from her apron.

”To foster his warrior spirit, Fugaku-sama,” she said, gently placing the wooden blade into Ren’s tiny fist.

Mikoto smiled proudly. Fugaku looked down, his dark eyes heavy with the expectation of a father looking at his future weapon.

Ren stared at the wooden blade in his hand. The wood was polished, harmless, meant to condition him from the cradle to view killing as a game.

He looked at Fugaku, a man who would undoubtedly train him to become a perfect, emotionless soldier for a village that saw him as expendable artillery. He thought about the screaming eight-year-old bleeding out in the streets outside.

Screw the Will of Fire, Ren decided with crystal-clear, cynical clarity. And screw this village.

With deliberate, intentional weakness, Ren opened his fingers.

The toy kunai slipped from his grasp, clattering uselessly against the wooden floorboards of the crib.

Fugaku’s proud expression faltered slightly. Mikoto blinked in surprise.

Ren closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and let out a loud, pathetic, wailing cry, thrashing his limbs like the weakest, most untalented infant to ever bear the Uchiha name.

I am never, ever becoming a ninja.