Naruto : Monsters

"Now open wide."

I glared down at the offending spoon that was filled with a foul sludge that may have been, in the loosest sense of the word, food. I shifted my eyes up to my primary caretaker, Nanako, and gave her a look of such hatred that any sane man would have run away in fear.

Unfortunately, as I had long ago discovered Nanako lacks any sense of self-preservation because instead of fleeing for her life, she instead continued to try to force the spoon into my tightly clenched mouth.

"Come on Hikaru-sama," she told me, "it's good for you."

If it's so good for me then why don't you eat it then? Damn it, woman, I want some meat. Beef, chicken, I'd even make due with fish or even some scrambled eggs, just not this mush of rabbit food you keep trying to feed me.

Stop that! Swatting the spoon as she tried to force it into my mouth, I glared back at her with all my strength as I resisted her attempt to force-feed me. I swear woman if you feed me that crap one more time I will slap you.

When it became apparent that I would not budge, she changed tactics and tried praising me instead, "Good children are the ones who eat their food Hikaru-sama. Now, who's a good boy?"

Not me you hag. You want a good boy, then go get yourself a goddamn dog and leave me alone. But I wasn't stupid enough to say a thing out loud. I knew despite her grandmotherly appearance, Nanako had the heart of the devil and she was not above using dirty tricks to get what she wants. So instead of answering I just crossed my arms before me and levelled my best killer glare at her.

Unfortunately, my killer glares are nowhere as effective as they used to be now that I was in a two-year-old body.

"Ohh, don't you look so cute when you brood Hikaru-sama." The woman actually had the audacity to coo at me.

Okay, now that's crossing the line! "I don't brood-" a spoon was shoved into my mouth as I tried to tell the old woman off, and quickly depositing it's content before I had the time to so much as blink.

…Oh that conniving little bitch!

"There, now that wasn't so bad wasn't it?" Nanako set the spoon and bowl down before picking me off from the high chair she trapped me in earlier. "Really Hikaru-sama, for someone who acts so smart all the time, you only show your true age at moments like this."

She gently set me on the ground before shooing me away. "Run along now Hikaru-sama, I've got work to do and I'm sure you want to get back to your books."

You may have one this round woman, but this is far from over!

I was however smart enough to keep my thoughts to myself as I turned and ran away. The last time I talked back to her, Nanako force-fed me another bowl full of that mush. See? A Devil I tell you.

Still, now that I was finally free from her clutches I could get back to work. Turning the corner I sprinted down the corridor, ignoring the servants and the occasional off-duty ninja who always made sure to give me a polite bow as I passed. It was a little bit weird at first having grown adults bowing to a toddler but I got used to it eventually, and now it was more of an annoyance than anything.

After turning two more corners and sprinting down as many halls, I skidded to a stop as I reached my destination. Before me, a pair of large wooden doors loomed. They were completely different from the sliding panels, shoji, that acted as entryways for the rest of the compound.

The closest of the two guards that stood on either side of the door, one of the few that were stationed inside of the compound instead of outside or patrolling the perimeter, held the door open at my approach, granting me entrance to the room within.

Giving him a quick nod of thanks, there is no way I could have opened the doors with my tiny body, I slipped in and the guard swiftly shut the door behind me. Quickly walking up to the railing before me, I paused and took a moment to take everything in and properly appreciate the room. It was, to put it simply, heaven.

I was standing next to the railing of the second-floor landing. Below me were rows after rows of wooden shelves, each filled to brim with scrolls and books. The lighting that hung off the ceiling clearly illuminated the place despite its lack of windows, revealing the few figures that silently perused through the books. Some were sitting on the handful of desks set to one side of the room, carefully scanning through the delicate scrolls.

This here is the Hyuuga Clan Library, and it was perhaps the most wonderful place on this entire planet. It has scrolls that were so old that they were written from the time before the founding of the Hidden Villages. 

They spanned every range of topics imaginable, from chakra theory to 'modern' medicine to history and everything else I could possibly think of. There were even some scrolls that were rumoured to have been written from the time of the children of the Sage of Six Paths, making them over four hundred years old, though I couldn't get my hands on a copy so I couldn't be sure.

And perhaps the primary reason the library had been made were the scrolls that held information on every fighting style and ninjutsu techniques that the clan has ever encountered in its history. 

While many of these techniques were useless to the Hyuuga as a whole, we either lacked the prerequisites to use them or they clashed with our style of fighting, they could still teach us how to counter and fight anyone who used those techniques against us. Knowledge, as I was often told, is power.

With our eyes we could see how our enemy's jutsu's functioned, and while we couldn't mimic it like the Sharingan could, we could understand how they worked and through that figure out how to deal with them should the need ever arise. And on the few occasions that we ever found anything useful, we reverse-engineered the technique before integrating it into our fighting style. It was through this method that the Gentle Fist was perfected over the centuries.

I hadn't known the place even existed until a few months ago. I was only given permission to enter after I had learned to read and had exhausted the entire supply of books available to me.

Speaking of which, learning to read was far easier than learning to speak. For some reason that I could not understand, Kanji seemed to exist in this universe. The Japanese language didn't, neither did Chinese, but somehow their writing system did. After spending several days pondering the enigma I gave up and chalked it up to one of the world's unexplained mysteries.

Still, for all of my progress I doubted they would have allowed me in here had I been an ordinary child, no matter how much of a prodigy I was turning out to be. It seemed that being the son of the man in charge and clan heir to boot has its perks.

That's right, nepotism for the win.

For the last few months, I've been spending every waking moment I could in here. Researching the world and, most importantly, the secrets of chakra. It was the one thing that the memories of my former life could not help me with, so I was understandably desperate for any information I could get my hands on.

I would stay here from after dawn to dusk every single day without leaving. Okay, so I tried to stay without leaving but that damn she-devil Nanako wouldn't let me. She'd pop in here several times a day to drag me by the ear out of here if she needed to, forcing me to eat any missed meals and even play with the other kids. Which I do not need to tell you was an incredibly boring experience. 

Ever have an intellectual conversation with a three-year-old? No? Then consider yourself lucky because it usually involves them picking their noses and rubbing their boogers all over you.

The only time I wasn't here by my own will was during my morning run. Let me start by saying how much I hated running. I always did and always will. It was every bit as boring as laying in my bed as a newborn toddler had been. But I knew it was crucial to get into good physical shape to achieve my long term goals and I had always been told it was important to get into the habit early on, so I ran.

Every morning I would run with some of the older kids, six-year-olds who had just begun their training. The instructors wouldn't allow me to train with them no matter how much I pleaded with them, deeming me to be too young to start, but they did allow me to join them in their run, finding no harm in it.

And I must admit that it was much harder than I thought. Even though this body was much stronger than any two year old had the right to be, probably due to all the chakra it held, it was still a child's. 

Just trying to match the six years old for their morning run tuckered me out for the entire day, and that's without the actual combat training the kids had to go through afterwards. Something I'm no doubt going to hate when the time came for me to go through them myself.

And that was why I spent most of my time here. My experience with running taught me that my body was still far too underdeveloped to properly train other than practising with my Byakugan. So if I couldn't train my body, I decided to train my mind. Knowledge was a power equal to any other in this world, sometimes more so.

So I spent my days reading and running, slowly growing stronger as I did.

...

If you like the story so far, please throw some power stones.

======================

If you want to read ahead of the public release on p atreon.

p @treon Link :

 p atreon.com/sybife

 |● sybife