The War Orphan

Drip, drip. The gloomy sky spilled rain without pause, pattering on the ground and the leaves. The desolate surroundings seemed to lament the wretched conflict.

Beneath a tree in the forest, a ragged boy huddled with his knees drawn to his chest. Purple hair fell past his shoulders, and he stood barely a meter tall. His features were delicate, but the grime on his face and his refugee-like appearance completely obscured them.

At a glance, he seemed no more than four or five years old.

The boy was called Ueno Kei. He came from an utterly ordinary background. He was neither the descendant of some famous family of ninja or samurai nor the offspring of nobles from a great nation. He was simply the child of a common farming family. His parents were farmers in a country called Yu, which bordered the Land of Fire.

If there was anything unusual about him, it was that when Ueno Kei had come into this world five years ago, he had been different from other children in one crucial way: he was not from this world. Of course, this wasn't some melodramatic story about him taking over the body of a child named Ueno.

He had arrived in this world with nearly all the memories of his previous life. Why "nearly"? Because some of his memories were fragmented.

So it wasn't wrong to say that he belonged to this world, only that he had an extra twenty years of memories compared to an ordinary child. When Ueno Kei opened his eyes, he saw the parents of this life: kindhearted, gentle-faced, ordinary people. He felt no resistance or fear.

He knew nothing about this world. He hadn't understood the "samurai lords" or "ninja lords" his parents spoke of, either. Fortunately, aside from having to learn the language again, everything else was much the same as in his previous world.

Technology was a little less advanced, but there were things like ninjutsu, which astonished Ueno Kei. He never questioned or wondered why he had appeared in this world. He believed that death, reincarnation, and the cycle of life were perfectly normal. As for the fact that he still had memories of his previous life...

Ueno Kei had once joked to himself that perhaps Lord Yama had forgotten to make Meng Po give him her soup. He used the thought to console himself and moved on.

At first, Ueno Kei never showed much that was special about himself. He kept a normal routine and lived an ordinary life. He was simply a little more sensible than other children: quiet, obedient, and always kind to the villagers around him. From time to time, he played with the other children like any normal boy. His parents were deeply pleased.

At one point, Ueno Kei had thought he would spend this life as a farmer, growing up normally, marrying an ordinary farm girl, living a quiet rural life, and then dying just as quietly, taking nothing with him and leaving nothing behind.

He would simply experience a different life for a change.

But those plans for the future were brought to an end.

When his mother, her face twisted with desperation, screamed for him to run, and his father charged at the bandits with a hoe in his hands, Ueno Kei felt lost and terrified for the first time. He listened numbly to his mother's shouts, mechanically forcing his body to run toward the mountains behind the village.

He didn't dare look back. He didn't want to.

He wandered through the mountains day and night. When he was thirsty, he drank from streams and springs; when he was hungry, he searched for wild fruit. Fortunately, the mountains here were surrounded by many villages.

The villagers in those places often hunted in the mountains to supplement their meals, so large wild animals were scarce. That was why Ueno Kei had managed to survive as he wandered through the mountains.

Ueno Kei didn't know how long he had been running. He didn't know whether he was still in the mountains behind his village, or even whether he was still in his own country. He had no way of knowing.

He couldn't find his way back, and he didn't dare return. Though he had the mind of an adult, his body was still that of a mere five-year-old child.

A child's fear and panic still clung to him. Though he had forced himself to calm down, he had no idea what to do or how to face the future.

Ueno Kei had never left his village. His knowledge of the world extended only to a few simple things: the Five Great Nations, ninja, and ninja villages.

Leaning against the tree, Ueno Kei's eyes seemed unfocused—dull and numb.

The rain fell softly, soaking Ueno Kei. Suddenly, he began to sob uncontrollably. The sight of his parents' brutal deaths, of the kindly neighbors and friends who had died, all came flooding back to him.

At that moment, Ueno Kei was nothing like someone with an adult's mind. He wept like any ordinary child, his cries torn from the depths of his heart.

He didn't know how long he cried. As deep exhaustion overtook him, Ueno Kei folded his arms across his chest, curled up beneath the tree, and drifted into a daze of sleep.

After an unknown amount of time, Ueno Kei awoke to the sensation of being jostled. He looked around in confusion, then suddenly shivered. He was being carried on the back of a suspicious-looking figure wearing a mask.

"Human traffickers!" That was the first thought that flashed through Ueno Kei's mind. He quietly closed his eyes again. He knew that as a child, he had no way to fight back, so he did nothing reckless. He kept pretending to sleep while silently considering how he might escape.

Though Ueno Kei had cried helplessly like a real child earlier, he had only been letting out the darkness and grief inside him. He was still immersed in the pain of losing his parents and having his life destroyed, but he wasn't really a child. Figuring out how to survive—that was what Ueno Kei needed to think about now.

Just as Ueno Kei was desperately racking his brain for a way to escape his captors, the masked figure carrying him—someone who seemed extremely suspicious to Ueno Kei, and whose gender he couldn't tell—stopped. Ueno Kei wondered uneasily what was going on.

A gentle, kindly voice like a spring breeze sounded beside his ear.

"Kid, since you're awake, you can stop pretending to sleep. I'm just an old man, not some suspicious character."

When Ueno Kei heard the voice, his heart sank. A moment later, he came to his senses and slowly opened his eyes. The masked man set him down.

Ueno Kei stood on the ground. Sunlight filtered through the leaves and shone into his eyes, making him squint. He looked up at the speaker. It was a kindly old man wearing red-and-white robes and a hat with a large Fire character on the front.

Ueno Kei's first thought was, "He doesn't look like a human trafficker."

And his second thought was that what Ueno Kei didn't know at the time was that his life had changed in that moment. The gears of his once-stalled life had begun to turn again.