For someone who took pride in their intelligence, it took me an embarrassingly long time for me to realise that I had been reincarnated into Narutoverse and that my parents weren't anime obsessed cosplayers.

Sure, being reincarnated was a strange experience. After months of being suspended in amniotic fluid, being pushed through the birth canal and realising that I was a baby, my first few weeks of life were spent recovering from the trauma.

It took me about a month to realise that the two big blobs that were my parents were actually Nara Himiko and Nara Shota. The smaller blob that I was pretty sure was my elder sibling was Shikaku Nara. As I had seen the Mount Rushmore type thing that was definitely the Hokage mountain (though I wasn't able to see the number of head due to my poor eyesight), I realised that I was in the era after the founding of Konoha. And the only Shikaku Nara I had read about during this era was Shikamaru's father, I was able to tentatively place myself in the same generation as Minato and Kushina. Which meant that there were three highly dangerous Great Shinobi Wars were yet to happen, in which I had very high chances of dying.

This realisation led to an intense bout of crying which led to me exhausting myself to sleep, due to my highly emotional and fragile infant body.

I had considerably calmed down after my nap and was able to think more clearly. There were many ways following which I could completely avoid the wars and live a safe and violence free civilian life, either in Konoha or somewhere else. I could run away, or pretend to be not be able to use chakra (which I could feel running beneath my skin even as a baby), or fail the Shinobi academy and end up as a desk ninja. There was no need to be involved in the canon events. Everything had turned out fine in the end, didn't it? With Naruto as the seventh Hokage and peace in the Elemental Nations m

But I had already lived my safe and violence free civilian life. This was my second chance. If I was not supposed to be involved, why was I even reincarnated in this world with my memory intact? I was not delusional. Being reincarnated did not give me plot armor. There was a very high probability of me dying if I try to change the timeline, or heck even become a ninja. But I had already lived a life, hadn't I? Granted it wasn't as long as I would have liked it to be, but this was my second chance. I could spend it trying to survive in this harsh, dangerous world, or try to change it.

At the end it wasn't that hard if a decision. To borrow from Harry Potter, 'I always had a saving people thing.'

I am going to die horribly, ain't I?

I quickly found out that as an infant making plans to change the future was a useless endeavour. Not only was my tiny brain not equipped to deal with complex thought processes and immediately shutdown to sleep whenever I tried to push it, I also required more knowledge of this world (on what was described in Manga and anime).

So, I postponed the plan making to my toddler years and decided to enjoy being a baby, which was more difficult and it sounded. I didn't care for breastfeeding and relieving myself in diapers, but suffered them with waste because of necessity. Furthermore, there were only so many times you could enjoy playing the Japanese version of peekaboo with your parents without getting bored.

Along with that, my brother, who could not be more than a year to older than me, had decided to experiment on me, trying to find out how I would react if he poked me in different parts of my body with different amount of force. I had decided to just grumble a bit rather than to cry, which made me tired in a short while. It wasn't like I could escape, I was barely able to roll over. Shikaku would be surprised to find out later in life that normal babies don't just grumble when you poke them with your finger in the tummy.

My physical, mental and social limitations forced me to focus on the previously absent aspect of my life- chakra. For someone who had lived for more than 30 years without a lick of chakra, it was pretty obvious to me when I knew what I had to look for. It was like liquid energy present beneath my skin. once I was aware of it I found it impossible to ignore. With the knowledge that chakra was going to be an essential asset to my future, I decided to start early which chakra manipulation.

I knew about the leaf sticking exercise and therefore spent a week trying to make my baby blanket stick to my hand. It turned out that the trick was to basically gather all the chakra I had in my body and expell it from my palm. Following my success I fell asleep and didn't see anything wrong with that, since randomly falling asleep was what I did now. But waking up to see the worried faces of my parents in what could only be a hospital room, I decided to be a bit more conservative with my chakra training.

Obviously, being baby I had very small amount of chakra, which led to the previous episode of chakra exhaustion. Now, constantly using up my chakra was one way to gain reserves but I didn't want to trouble my parents with any more out of the blue comas. Therefore, using my innovative mind, I came up with a plan to use chakra without exhausting it.

It basically consisted of using my anatomy knowledge to imagine all arteries and veins in my body filled with chakra and then I willed my chakra to travel along this pathways like blood did. After a few days I got the hang of it. This way the energy for just circulating inside my body and was not wasted, thus conserved. I was learning to control chakra and was increasing my reserves (and as I noticed a few days later, also my muscle strength) without side effect of chakra exhaustion.

I wanted to declare myself a genius for this innovation but decided to consider this boon for what it was and not get cocky. This was probably the first hurdle I had crossed in a very long obstacle race.

My toddler years weren't very interesting except that I finally got used to being Nara Mishika, daughter of Nara Himiko and Nara Shota and little sister and experimental subject of Nara Shikaku. I also slowly strengthened my grasp on japanese, both written and oral, something that wasn't one of my strong points in my past life. It was wonderful how plastic a child's brain was. Combining that with an already developed psyche, learning a new language was child's play, literally.

I was four years old when a major change was introduced to my routine, which by then included reading, playing with Shikaku, chakra training (still a secret), lessons with mother and physical excercise with Shikaku (which would probably progress to taijutsu training). Uzumaki Kushina had been brought to Konoha from her home island of Uzushio and she was in need of a playmate. As I was nearest to her age among the clan children, my father volunteered me for the task.

I was very excited to meet the toddler version of Naruto's mother but it turned out to be a major letdown. She was a whiny brat and didn't even come out of the room to greet me. I could sort of empathise with her. She had been sent away from her home and family to a strange village to a life of uncertainty and danger. Except that, unlike me, she was an actual 4 year old.

I gave it up as a dead duck when she didn't answer after 15 minutes of knocking and coaxing and resigned myself to return home, when Mito-sama, a lady who had enough grace in her pinky finger that I had in my whole body, who was Kushina's gaurdian, asked me to stay for tea.

I agreed without thinking about the implications and subsequently fumbled my way around the traditional Japanese tea ceremony. I was positive that I had made pretty big blunders, but Mito-sama was kind enough to ignore them, until the end that is.

"Mishika-chan, you should pay more attention to your tea ceremony lessons. They are as important for a kunoichi as chakra training, and definitely more important than unauthorised chakra training."

I was about to apologise for my atrocious manners during the ceremony when I caught the last part. "I'm not sure what you're talking about, Mito-sama." I am not proud to say that I froze.

She gave me an exacerbated look. "Uzumaki's are very good at chakra sensing. I can sense you circulating your chakra at this moment."

I quickly stopped the self made chakra control excercise which had become second nature for me, and tried to think of a plausible excuse.

"Oh, that is very good chakra control. Fairly impossible to achieve at four years of age." She remarked. "Especially for a Nara."

"What do you mean by that?" I bristled, apparently having developed a sense of pride for my clan, which I had been previously unaware of.

"Nara's do not start their children's chakra training until they are six. Which means you've been training on your own. You've been fairly lucky till now but chakra training is dangerous. There's a reason it is not done without supervision."

"But.."

"Don't worry." She interupted me. "I won't tell your parents. I have a condition, though."

"What condition?" I asked warily.

"You have to come here every day to learn new chakra control excercises."

"What?"

"You have the best chakra control I've observed except for my granddaughter. It would be foolish to leave you to fumble on your own and potentially cripple yourself." Mito-sama stated, matter-of-factly.

And that was how I gained my first sensei.

My acquaintance with Uzumaki Mito gradually turned into a fuinjutsu apprenticeship in fuinjutsu. I had been very enthusiastic in my agreement when she had asked me if I wanted to learn basic sealing, knowing I had to grab anything that could give me an advantage in the ninja world. Fuinjutsu did not come as easily to me as controlling chakra did, but I was greatly benefited by having a competent teacher and knowledge of calculus from my past life.

Even with those advantages, after six months I was barely able to match a novice from Uzushio. Kushina, when she had got out of her slump, mercilessly teased me for my supposed incompetence. However, Mito assured me that I was making good progress, especially for a non-Uzumaki. She told me that with my chakra control I would be much deadlier on the battlefield than a standard seal expert, because of me being able to use chakra to apply seals, even if I didn't master fuinjutsu to the Uzumaki level. I couldn't wait for the day I would be able to do that.

Despite spending long hours with Mito working on chakra control and fuinjutsu, I did not slack off in clan training with Shikaku. It started with basic physical conditioning and shuriken and kunai handling. Normally, a Nara child is supposed to start training at 6, but I was able to whine my way into Shikaku's lessons, with whom my relationship had developed further. I was more like a twin to him than a younger sister. He never got offended when I learnt something earlier than he did as he shared a typical laid back attitude with most of the Nara clan.

Nara excelled at shadow manipulation because of their chakra normally had a very small yang element compared to yin element, which they had in spades became of their genius level intellect. I, on the other hand, had a very large reservoir of yin chakra even for a Nara, courtesy of my previous life. That, along with my superna chakra control, led me to be able to control shadows without any hand seals when tou-san finally taught it to us.

While, I was busy dreaming up ways to make that useful, tou-san looked less than pleased with my achievement.

He took me to the clan council that evening where I was told the story if Nara Shikane, who was the clan head about 200 years ago. She was a prodigy at shadow manipulation and was able to manipulate shadow just by thought. Over the time, the shadows became a part of her luring her away from the physical world. She was the most powerful kunoichi of the Nara clan but committed suicide at 20.

I couldn't suppress shivers when elder Shoto ended the story.

That was certainly an effective way to ensure that I wouldn't go overboard with the shadow manipulation technique.