Eighty-three years.
That was how long I managed to last before my old body finally gave up. Not a dramatic death — no accident, no mysterious illness, no enemy driving a blade through my chest. Just an old man who fell asleep in his favorite chair in front of the television, a cup of cold tea sitting on the side table beside him, and never woke up again.
My name was Kenji.
Kenji Matsuda. A former office worker who spent half his life grinding away at a desk, and the other half watching anime, reading manga, and playing games until dawn like a teenager who forgot he was already old.
A true otaku until his very last breath. That's what I'd carve on my gravestone if I could.
My manga collection stretched over a thousand titles. My old hard drive was packed with anime episodes spanning from the nineties all the way into the two-thousands. And among all of it, the one franchise that had embedded itself deepest into my heart — from the time I was a snot-nosed kid all the way until my hair had gone completely white — was Naruto.
I grew up with Naruto. I cried when Jiraiya died. I raged when Pain leveled Konoha. I stood there with goosebumps crawling across my skin when Naruto and Sasuke finally made their peace. And even in my old age, I stayed loyal through Boruto — even as many fellow fans had long since given up and moved on to other franchises.
So when my eyes closed for the very last time in that chair, my final thoughts weren't about regrets, weren't about property left unsettled, weren't about the girl I once turned down because I was in the middle of a particularly exciting arc.
My last thought, honestly, was: next week's episode is probably going to be good.
Then — darkness.
Not frightening darkness. Quite the opposite — a calm darkness, like the deepest, most restful sleep I had ever known across eighty-three years of living. No pain. No sound. Only a stillness as vast and bottomless as a sea without a floor.
I drifted there for what felt like no time at all, and also like forever. In a place like this, time holds no meaning.
Until something changed.
The darkness around me shifted — no longer empty, but like a room. Like there were walls that couldn't be seen but could be felt. And within that darkness, slowly, a light appeared.
Not sunlight. Not lamplight.
Two points of light, floating quietly before me.
I moved closer — or perhaps the darkness itself pushed me forward, I wasn't sure — and the shape of the two objects became clear.
Pistols.
Two pistols unlike anything I had ever seen in the real world or in any anime I had ever watched. The left one was white-blue, its barrel sheathed in a thin layer of eternal frost, its grip carved with patterns like asymmetric snowflakes that somehow looked absolutely perfect. The right one was black-red like embers that would never die out, thin wisps of warm smoke curling from the engravings along its surface though nothing was burning.
Both of them floated there. Waiting.
Take them.
The voice came from nowhere outside and nowhere inside. It was as though the universe itself was speaking directly to my tired old soul.
I was an eighty-three-year-old otaku who had just died.
I didn't need to think twice.
I reached out — with hands that felt like hands in this dimension, not the spotted, wrinkled hands I had known for decades — and touched both of them at once.
Cold and heat detonated simultaneously inside my soul. Not pain — more like every corner of my consciousness being rebooted from zero, like an old computer restarted with brand new hardware. Every inch of my soul trembled, and then within seconds everything went still again.
But something was different. Somewhere inside me that I couldn't point to with a finger, the two pistols now existed. Not in my hands. Not floating in that void anymore. But inside me — like new organs that had just grown in and already felt like they had been there since birth.
Good, the voice said again, and this time there was something in it that felt like a smile. Welcome, Kenji. Your true journey has only just begun.
Then everything went dark again.
And then — light.
Brutal, inconsiderate light.
I was crying before I even realized I was crying, because the small lungs I suddenly possessed apparently didn't need permission from my consciousness to do their job. The sound of an infant wailing — my own voice — filled the warm room.
My mind was in complete chaos for the first few seconds.
Wait. Is this... real?
But every doubt shattered the moment the first voice I heard clearly — not a doctor's, not a nurse's — was the voice of a young man trembling in a way that was entirely unbefitting of his reputation as an elite shinobi.
"Sarada." His voice was genuinely shaking. "Look at him. Look at his hair."
My mind, still carrying eighty-three years of Kenji Matsuda's memories in perfect clarity, processed immediately.
Boruto.
"Blonde." A woman's voice, steadier, but with a tremor at the edges. "Like yours."
Sarada.
"But his eyes..." Boruto laughed softly, and within that laugh was something that even old dead-twice Kenji understood at once: the purest happiness. "Exactly like yours when you were a baby, Sarada."
Two large, warm hands lifted my small body with extraordinary care. The grip was slightly awkward — clearly someone who had never held a newborn before — but filled with an overwhelming gentleness, as though cradling the most precious thing in the entire shinobi world.
I couldn't see clearly yet. My vision was still blurred like an unfocused camera. But I could feel the warmth of the two people surrounding me, and my old mind was already working hard, piecing every fragment together into one complete picture.
I, Kenji Matsuda, the old otaku who died in his own chair, had reincarnated into the world of Boruto.
As the son of Boruto Uzumaki and Sarada Uchiha.
The grandson of Naruto Uzumaki and Sasuke Uchiha.
The great-grandson of Minato Namikaze and Kushina Uzumaki on one side, and Itachi and Fugaku Uchiha on the other.
A genetic inheritance that even the bravest soul alive might think twice about carrying.
But on the other hand, said the part of my brain that had always stayed optimistic even in the most absurd situations, this is a whole lot better than no continuation at all.
"Saruto." Sarada spoke the name quietly, as if tasting how it felt in the air of this room that still smelled of antiseptic. "Saruto Uzumaki."
My name in this life.
Saruto Uzumaki.
I, Kenji Matsuda — former office drone, devoted Naruto fan for over seven decades — had been reborn as a character inside the very world I had loved. With two Spirit Soul weapons in the shape of pistols already dwelling within me before I had even drawn my first breath.
Out there, the shinobi world moved as it always had. Konoha stood. Shinobi trained. And beneath the surface of that quiet, threats that no one yet recognized were slowly stirring.
But for now, in this warm room, with the voices of Boruto and Sarada filling my ears for the very first time, there was only one thing I could do.
Cry.
Because these lungs weren't capable of much else yet.
And maybe — just a little — because the tired, satisfied old soul of Kenji Matsuda had finally found a reason to be excited again.
A new life. A new world. A new power.
Welcome, Saruto Uzumaki.