Then one day, something went wrong.
That eternal, steady, sleep-inducing rhythm was suddenly broken by something.
The "walls" around him began tightening in pulses, as though some tremendous force were squeezing in from all sides, pushing his whole body in one direction.
Lin Yuan's mind buzzed. Before he could figure out what was happening, the force suddenly intensified.
Layer after layer of soft walls pressed over his body, squeezing him downward, pushing him forward, allowing no room for negotiation.
"Fuck, fuck, fuck, what the hell is happening?!"
He howled inside his head, but his body refused to cooperate.
Even though he could now clearly feel his arms and legs, at that moment, caught in that unreasonable force, they refused to obey him at all.
He felt the world spinning. The warm "nest" that had surrounded him for over half a year was spitting him out little by little. It felt as though someone had grabbed him in one fist and was squeezing him out, leaving his whole body dazed.
Then-
Light.
A piercing, orange-red light, whose appearance he had almost entirely forgotten, stabbed straight into his eyes.
The darkness that had accompanied him for over half a year was torn open in an instant. Light washed over his face, dazzling him so badly that he had no idea where to hide.
Next came the air, chilly and dry, carrying a crisp scent he had never smelled before, rushing straight against his wet skin.
Before he could shiver, a pair of hands caught him.
Rough and warm, with faint calluses on the palms, they steadily supported his back and the back of his head from below, lifting him all the way out of the "nest" where he had spent over half a year.
He curled naked in those palms, slippery fluid still clinging to his skin. At the touch of the cool air outside, his whole body involuntarily shrank in on itself.
Then unfamiliar air flooded his mouth.
He instinctively opened his mouth-and a loud, utterly uncontrollable wail sprang from his throat, clear and ringing, echoing all around the small space.
He heard a woman crying.
Crying through laughter, crying between gasps, crying with sobs that left her unable to speak.
Then a low, deep male voice added something. He kept his voice very level, but something he could not quite hold back clearly lingered at the end. "It's a boy."
The large hands supporting him gently laid him on something soft, probably a towel or swaddling cloth that had been spread out.
Then another pair of hands, lighter and gentler, took him, trembling slightly as they wrapped him in warm fabric.
He nestled against a warm chest and heard that heartbeat right beside his ear. Thump, thump, thump. So close, so loud. The sound he had listened to for over half a year now rang out again through a thin layer of flesh.
Then he heard the woman speak, with laughter, with tears, and with an earnest solemnity.
"...Zongyan."
"Uchiha... Zongyan."
Lin Yuan lay in the soft bundle of swaddling, his eyes dazzled so badly by the light that he could not open them no matter how he tried. He flailed his bare little arms and legs, with only one quip left in his head:
"...All right, all right, the name's officially registered. Uchiha Sasuke himself, reporting for duty."
He moved his mouth, trying hard to say something else, but the moment he opened it, another loud wail came out, completely beyond his control.
"...This body really doesn't cooperate," he silently added.
But as he cried, he suddenly froze-the name Mikoto had just called him...
"Zongyan"?
"Wait, Uchiha what?"
He dug that sentence out of his mind and went over it again and again. "Zongyan"-Zongyan. Not Sasuke.
"That's not right. Wasn't I supposed to be called Sasuke?!"
Lin Yuan stiffened in his swaddling on the spot, even forgetting to cry-though his body clearly had not received that "pause" command, and his throat kept howling away on its own.
But his mind had already exploded into chaos. "Fugaku and Mikoto's sons-the eldest is Uchiha Itachi, and the second is Sasuke. That's an established fact in the original Naruto story! How did it become Zongyan when it came to me?!"
He desperately rummaged through his scant memories of Naruto, going through them from beginning to end, then from end to beginning, checking over and over several times-yes, there was no Uchiha named "Zongyan" in the original.
There never had been.
Not a single one.
"What's going on? Did I transmigrate into the wrong story? Or... am I not Sasuke at all?"
Suddenly, even the warmth inside his swaddling did not feel quite so reassuring.
He had spent so long mentally preparing himself, reasoning from "I'm the Uchiha Clan's second son" to "I'm Sasuke." He had even gone over the whole storyline in his head, from the night of the massacre to defecting, the Valley of the End, and finishing the fight against Kaguya. And now the name did not match?
"No... then who exactly am I? I'm Uchiha Itachi's brother, right? But his only brother was clearly Sasuke!"
The more he thought, the more bewildered he became, the absurdity of it making his head hurt.
His bare little body squirmed aimlessly a couple of times inside the swaddling, and his mouth unconsciously let out another couple of wails, as though speaking for the adult whose head was full of questions.
"...Come on, heavens, you can't mess with me like this. So all those three months I spent mentally preparing for nothing, I was preparing for somebody else's life?"
"Wait, couldn't this be a good thing?"
The thoughts in Zongyan's head suddenly changed direction, like a car headed straight for a wall whose steering wheel was abruptly jerked aside.
"Doesn't this mean I've already disrupted the original plot just by being born?"
He went over that line of reasoning, and the more he thought about it, the more sense it made.
In the original story, Fugaku and Mikoto's second child was clearly named Sasuke, but with him, it had become Zongyan.
What did that mean?
It meant that from the moment he was born, the original Naruto storyline had already begun to veer off course.
He was not Sasuke at all. He was simply a second Uchiha son who had appeared out of nowhere, someone who did not exist in the original story.
"If even the name can change... then could the night of the massacre never happen either?"
That thought slashed in like a beam of light, illuminating every last corner of the panic that had filled his mind.
He nestled in his swaddling, his bare little body no longer flailing aimlessly, and began rapidly calculating:
The tragedy of that night in the original story had been a hopeless knot formed by countless threads and countless intertwining causes and effects.
But things were different now. This was the Third Shinobi World War, and because of his birth, Uchiha Itachi would not have to go to the battlefield at four.
And he himself-
A transmigrator with the complete script in hand, who knew the masterminds behind the scenes and the crucial turning points inside out, had plenty of time to pick that knot apart little by little.
"How is this being reborn? This is straight-up cheating."
The more he thought about it, the more promising it seemed. Even most of the panic brought on by the mismatched name had dissipated.
Although he was still just a tiny baby who struggled even to open his eyes, he had not lost a single bit of that "Naruto encyclopedia" in his head.
"Konoha High Command wants to wipe out the Uchiha? Fine. I'll take my time playing with you."
He silently laid down those words in his heart. Beneath that tender infant face was a shrewd adult mind working at full speed.
The little hand beside him gently touched his face again, and Uchiha Itachi called him "Little brother Zongyan" once more in his babyish voice, as though checking that he was still there.
Zongyan tilted his head and nuzzled back. Feeling that warmth, he grew a little more confident.
"Since I'm here, I might as well live properly," he muttered inwardly. "Anyway-it's better than being Uchiha Sasuke."
Before you continue