The first thing he felt was cold air on his skin.
Then came the sounds—too sharp, too close, and far too loud. Muffled barking, crying, and the rustle of movement. His body was swaddled in something scratchy. His limbs were short, weak. The light that flooded his eyes when they opened was golden and dust-thick.
This was not a hospital room.
This was not a lab.
He had been somewhere else before. He knew that much.
In another life, he had been a man of sterile halls and synthetic light. A bioengineer, one of the few who dared to ask what life could become if design were more deliberate. Instinct, he used to say, was just a relic of evolutionary laziness. Everything that crawled, flew, or swam held patterns—he studied them not to marvel, but to improve.
That life ended in a hospital bed, breath stolen by a degenerative failure human ingenuity couldn't outpace.
And now?
Now the air was wild. It smelled of fur, sweat, and sunlight through old wood. A woman bent over him, cradling him in warm arms. Her smile was big and crooked, her cheeks painted with two bold stripes.
"He's got clear eyes already," she said, looking up. "That's good luck."
Another voice, masculine and gruff: "Looks like a loud one. Strong lungs."
He wanted to speak. To ask what year it was. What language they spoke. To ask where he was, who he was.
But all that came out was a tiny, pathetic wail.
The people cooed.
He screamed louder.
---
Years passed. He learned to walk before he learned to speak, and he learned to run before he ever asked the name of the village.
The Inuzuka compound was not built for quiet. Dogs were everywhere—running, barking, training. The clan children raced with them through muddy courtyards and over wooden beams. There were no formal lessons, only experiences: catch the dog, feed the dog, dodge the dog.
He was named Torao. He accepted the name easily.
He had dark hair, tan skin, and wide gray eyes. The other kids said he stared too much, that he wasn't loud enough. That he was weird for watching the pups instead of wrestling with them.
But Torao loved to watch. Not because he disliked others, but because observation was the first tool of a scientist. In his past life, he had dissected the movement of bats, traced the genome of wolves, modeled the musculature of toads. Now, with none of his old technology, he returned to the basics. Paper, pencil, and presence.
Like how a pup learning to track would sometimes freeze, ears twitching, even when there was no sound. Or how one dog, no more than three months old, instinctively shifted its weight before jumping from the rooftop of the kennel.
Masao, a boy slightly older than him, sat next to him on the roof one day, watching the same pup. He had a round face and dirt always under his nails.
"Why do you always watch and draw?" Masao asked.
Torao blinked. "Because I want to understand how they move."
Masao grunted. "They just do. It's instinct."
"Exactly." Torao's voice was calm. "But instinct is built. Encoded. Passed down. If I can trace it, I can learn from it."
Masao gave him a look. "You talk like you're old."
Torao smiled faintly. "Maybe I am."
---
His first notebook was a collection of scrap pages folded into a cloth pouch. He drew the pups in detail: muscles, paws, ears, tails. He noted patterns. Which pups moved first when danger appeared. Which ones always knew when food was coming. Which ones slept with one eye open.
He compared them to the children. There were similarities.
And there were not.
The dogs moved with purpose even in play. Not because they were taught, but because something deeper compelled them. Something beneath thought. Torao knew it well.
Instinct, after all, was programming. Just low-resolution code.
He began to suspect that instinct wasn't just in the muscles.
It was something structural. Engineered.
And if nature could write it, so could he.
---
He spent his days surrounded by the Inuzuka—loud, expressive, fiercely bonded to their ninken. His mother, Kana, was sharp-tongued and dependable. She had two hounds and a reputation for leading patrols near the border. His father, Takuma, was quieter, with calloused hands and a steady, grounding presence. He repaired homes and trained hounds in his spare time.
Torao was born to them, and while neither had expected a child so odd, so focused, they accepted him with a kind of grudging fondness.
He was proud to be Inuzuka. But he didn't imitate the dogs.
He studied them.
He respected their structure, not their spirit.
It caused tension. A boy named Jinta once said he was trying to "act above the pack."
Torao only shrugged. "I'm just not trying to be the pack."
Kana noticed. One night, while feeding the hounds, she looked at him from across the courtyard.
"You don't have to be like them to be one of us," she said.
He paused, then nodded. "I know. But thank you."
Torao had no jutsu. But he had paper. He had memory. He had questions—about chakra. How did it shape the beasts around him? Did it amplify their instincts, refine them, or overwrite them entirely? What part of a creature's structure did chakra cradle, and what did it leave untouched? These weren't answers he could find yet, but the questions were beginning to take shape.