Death didn't come with a trumpet fanfare or some spooky reaper cloaked in black. It came with a sickening crack—the sound of my skull splitting open on a concrete curb while trying to shield my idiot younger brother from some even bigger idiot in a varsity jacket.
I guess karma's into irony, because I spent my life trying to understand immortality through science, through gold, through the unbreakable bonds of atomic weight and philosophical metals—and ended it with a human fragility so ridiculous it'd be laughable if it wasn't… you know. Fatal.
My name was Dr. David Heller. PhD. Tenured professor. Geneticist. Otaku. Black man with a doctorate in biometallurgy who used to quote Fullmetal Alchemist in staff meetings and got Naruto seals tattooed on my inner wrists just to feel something after my divorce.
And now?
Now I'm twelve years old again, staring at the ceiling of a cramped apartment in what I immediately recognize as the Hidden Leaf Village, and my reflection looks like Michael B. Jordan if he fell into a vat of melted gold.
My name is Kintaro Renkin now. And I was just born on the same damn day as Naruto Uzumaki.
Oh. And there's a glowing HUD floating in front of my eyes that keeps blinking the words:
> [System Error: EXP Loop Glitch – Infinite Training Enabled.]
[Initiate Auric Synchronization? Y/N]
So yeah. This is gonna get weird.