Julian did not know what happened after his death.
One moment he was dead and the next he somehow regained consciousness and opened his eyes.
He found himself standing on the side of some cliff with blood staining his hands and tall trees surrounding him on the other sides.
Far below he could hear the rush of a river moving quickly through the darkness.
He looked down at his hands for a long moment and then spoke out loud in a voice that felt strange in his throat.”This does not look much like any afterlife I ever imagined.” “I expected either complete nothingness or some kind of judgement hall with serious looking beings asking me about all the bad choices I made.
Instead I get a cliff, trees, and blood on my fingers.
If this is heaven then the interior designers need better training.
If this is hell then it is far quieter than the stories always claimed.
Either way I seem to have skipped the usual orientation speech.” He looked carefully at his surroundings and then froze in place.
In the distance he could see a line of hills and on one of those hills there were large faces carved into the stone.
From this far away he could not make out every detail but the shapes were clear enough to stir something deep in his memory.
He knew he had seen those faces before.
He was certain it was not Mount Rushmore from his own world.
He had seen those carved faces in the anime called Naruto.
His younger brother Justin had consistently persisted until Julian finally agreed to watch it.
Julian had never held any real interest in anime and had always thought of them as simple cartoons meant for children.
That opinion had always made Justin angry and the two of them had argued about it more than once.
Thankfully Julian had only watched the original Naruto series and never the sequel called Shippuden because he had been far too busy trying to find a cure for his brothers illness and had no free time left.
He looked down at his own body and knew at once that this was not the body he had lived in for nineteen years.
For one thing he could tell that this body was much younger than he had been when he died.
The limbs felt lighter and the muscles were denser and more responsive.
It was clearly a body that had been trained hard for many years.
He raised one hand and examined the fingers and the callused skin that belonged to someone who had never spent years under laboratory lights.
“Did I somehow occupy the body of some character from that Naruto show my brother loved so much?” he mumbled while turning his hands over and studying them from every angle.
“But how is any of this possible?
Science cannot explain a transfer of consciousness from one dead body on Earth into a living body inside a fictional world that was drawn on paper and shown on television screens.” He also realised that the voice coming out of his mouth was a little heavy yet it still carried a childish undertone.
He shook his head slowly as another thought pushed its way forward.
“Justin used to talk about something called isekai all the time.
He said it was when a person from our world woke up inside another world that was usually full of magic or strange powers.
Is this that kind of situation?
But how can that be real when those stories are just cartoons drawn by artists and written by people who make things up for entertainment?” He shook his head again and finally looked at his other hand which for some reason refused to open as if the body itself was fighting against his will.
It took all of his remaining willpower and strength to force the stiff fingers to uncurl.
When the palm finally opened he saw an eyeball resting there.
The eye held an unusual pattern.
Julian was not freaked out by the sight of a human eye.
He had seen and done far worse things during the years of experimentation while he tried to cure blood cancer.
Bodies and organs and blood samples had been part of his daily work.
What confused him was why this particular body was clutching an eyeball so tightly that the fingers had locked around it.
He felt a strong instinct that the eye was important and that throwing it away would be a serious mistake.
He closed his fingers carefully around it once more and kept it safe.
He searched the pockets and pouches on the clothing this body wore and soon found a kunai.
The weapon was well maintained and polished until the metal shone.
He spoke with quiet satisfaction as he lifted it.
“Just what I wanted.
Something that can act like a mirror.” He turned the kunai around and used its shiny surface to see what he looked like.
As the reflection of his new face appeared in the metal his eyes widened.
While he had never held deep interest in anime he was still a genius for a reason and he rarely forgot things that he had once learned heard or seen.
He had seen this face before.
It was the face of one of Konohas S rank criminals only a little younger than the version he remembered from the anime.
“Itachi Uchiha,” he mumbled while staring at the reflection.
He looked closer at the eyes reflected in the kunai and felt another wave of surprise.
Instead of the simple three tomoe pattern of Sharingan, he expected he saw something different.
The design resembled a red three bladed shuriken or a spinning pinwheel.
It looked similar to the pattern on the eye he still held in his other palm yet it was not exactly the same.
He continued speaking aloud as he tried to piece the situation together.
“With blood on my hands and this body standing far away from the Leaf Village everything points to the fact that I have arrived at a time after Itachi massacred his own clan.
An eyeball in my hand that looks awfully like an Uchiha Sharingan also supports that idea.” His thoughts turned inward while he kept staring at the Sharingan reflection on the kunai.
‘My options are rather limited now.
I am a criminal to the Leaf Village which means this body is considered a home that has rejected me.
The entire village of trained killers will be after me soon enough.
With my limited knowledge of this world as well as the shinobi arts I am as good as dead if they find me.’ ‘Not that I care much about dying again considering I died only a few moments ago on Earth.
But if Justin were here he would be so excited to learn all the jutsus of this world.
He would have laughed and asked a hundred questions about every technique and every bloodline ability.
He always loved stories where ordinary people gained strange powers.’ He kept looking at the reflection and spoke out loud to steady himself.
“I guess I will do the same thing my brother would want.
I will live the dream the way Justin always hoped someone could.
He used to say that if he ever woke up in another world he would explore every corner and learn every skill he could find.
Since he is not here I will try to carry that curiosity for him.
I will not waste this strange second chance even if I never asked for it.” A deeper question rose in his mind and he spoke it out loud.
“But the question remains.
What happened to the real Itachi Uchiha and why am I inside his body right now?
Did his soul leave the same way mine left Earth?
Is he gone forever or is he still somewhere inside waiting to wake up?” As he finished speaking those words memories that did not belong to Julian Kane began flashing through his mind with sudden force.