“Naruto, I’m sorry.
You’ve only just been born, and yet you have to go through something like this.
Don’t be afraid.
Mom will stay by your side and protect you, and Daddy will protect you too.”
A gentle voice stirred a dormant consciousness awake.
He slowly opened his eyes, then froze.
The first things he saw were an unfamiliar room, an unfamiliar ceiling, unfamiliar walls, and beside him was an unfamiliar woman.
She was stunningly beautiful.
Wait.
She’s huge.
He suddenly realized that, for some reason, she looked enormous in his eyes.
Everything about her was gigantic, like a giant towering over him.
“Huh?
Naruto?
Wait.
I know her.
Isn’t that Kushina?”
He froze again.
Instinctively, he wanted to cry out in surprise, but what came out instead was nothing more than a baby’s babbling.
For reasons unknown, a foreign soul had crossed over into this world.
This was the world of Naruto.
Even more unbelievable, he had transmigrated into Uzumaki Naruto, and the story had arrived at the night of the Nine-Tails’ attack.
The beautiful woman before him was Uzumaki Naruto’s mother, Uzumaki Kushina.
She also possessed a secret identity.
She was Konoha’s Nine-Tails Jinchūriki.
Compared to male Jinchūriki, female Jinchūriki had one fatal weakness.
During childbirth, the seal restraining the Tailed Beast weakened significantly.
Even Kushina, a member of the Uzumaki Clan who had mastered numerous sealing techniques, could not avoid it.
A masked man had taken advantage of the moment she gave birth, broken the seal imprisoning the Nine-Tails, and released it.
At this very moment, the beast was rampaging through Konoha.
The current Fourth Hokage, Namikaze Minato, who was also Naruto’s father, was confronting the sudden enemy.
What Minato did not know was that the masked man was actually his former student, Uchiha Obito.
Obito had once been Kushina’s favorite child.
She had treated him almost like a younger brother and had said more than once that she hoped her own child would grow up to be a little more like Obito.
But Kushina could never have imagined that the person responsible for this disaster, the one who might destroy her entire family, was the very child she had cherished so deeply.
It all stemmed from the Third Great Ninja War, a conflict that still had not truly ended.
After the death of a girl named Nohara Rin, Uchiha Obito came to hate this world, a world filled with hatred and endless war.
More than anything, he wanted to escape it, or create a new one, a world where Rin still lived and war no longer existed.
Thus, Uchiha Obito fell into darkness.
He abandoned everything he once held dear.
Even his teacher and Kushina meant nothing to him anymore.
Inside the newborn Naruto, countless thoughts raced through his mind.
Relying on the memories of the original story, he rapidly pieced together the current situation.
He knew exactly what would happen next.
Once the Nine-Tails was extracted, Kushina’s death was already inevitable.
A Jinchūriki died once their Tailed Beast was taken away.
Not even the Sage of Six Paths had been an exception.
As a descendant of the Uzumaki Clan, one of the Sage’s bloodlines, Kushina could do no more than delay the inevitable.
Her death had already been decided.
Once that happened, Konoha would lose both its Jinchūriki and the power of the Nine-Tails.
The Third Great Ninja War had not completely ended yet.
If the other villages learned of this, another major conflict could erupt at any moment.
That was why a Jinchūriki had to exist.
Moreover, to defeat the masked man and prepare for the even greater threats that would appear in the future, Minato, both as Hokage and as a father, would most likely place his faith only in his own son.
After all, this was the Nine-Tails.
Its power far exceeded ordinary imagination, and among all the Tailed Beasts, it was unquestionably the strongest.
It was practically a cheat-level advantage.
The only problem was that once he became the Nine-Tails’ Jinchūriki, he knew exactly what awaited him.
The villagers would transfer all their hatred for the Nine-Tails onto him.
Out of fear, they would despise and reject him.
He did not particularly care.
He possessed knowledge of the plot and understood just how valuable the Nine-Tails’ power truly was.
If he could completely master it, he could almost rival half of the Sage of Six Paths’ strength.
When the Sage separated the Ten-Tails, the Divine Tree, into the nine Tailed Beasts, the One-Tail through the Seven-Tails each received only a small portion of its chakra.
The Eight-Tails received a much larger share, while the Nine-Tails alone inherited nearly eighty percent of the remaining chakra.
What Uzumaki Naruto cared about more now was why he had transmigrated in the first place.
It was completely inexplicable.
He clearly remembered falling asleep at home.
Then, without warning, he became Uzumaki Naruto.
Anyone would find such a thing impossible to believe.
“Is this a dream?”
Naruto wondered silently.
He already understood that he couldn’t speak yet.
Even if he could, he wouldn’t know Japanese.
Yet strangely enough, he could understand every word Kushina had spoken earlier.
Was that some special ability granted to transmigrators?
Or was it because they were mother and son?
Perhaps their blood connection allowed him to understand her naturally.
Before Naruto could figure it out, there was a sudden flash.
A handsome figure instantly appeared beside the bed.
He had short, golden-blond hair and wore the Hokage cloak, with the words ‘Fourth Hokage’ emblazoned across the back.
It was none other than Naruto’s father, Namikaze Minato.
“The Flying Thunder God Technique.”
Naruto shouted excitedly in his heart.
The technique really was incredible.
More than looking cool, it was unbelievably fast.
As long as a marker had been placed beforehand, Minato could instantly teleport to that location, almost no different from true instantaneous movement.
Minato immediately came before Kushina and Naruto.
Without wasting time on explanations, he gently lifted both his wife and newborn son into his arms.
Kushina trusted Minato completely.
Without asking a single question, she allowed him to carry them away.
The next instant, all three vanished.
When Naruto could see clearly again, they had arrived in a desolate wilderness.
The area had probably once been a forest, but now it had been reduced to complete ruin.
The landscape itself had been reshaped by terrifying power, leaving behind nothing but barren earth.
Not far away stood a gigantic monster.
It was a colossal fox standing dozens of meters tall, with nine enormous tails swaying behind it.
The Nine-Tails.
“Kushina, I need your help,” Minato said.
The understanding between husband and wife required no explanation.
Before Minato could say anything more, Kushina gathered all her remaining strength.
More than a dozen chakra chains burst from her back, shooting toward the Nine-Tails and wrapping tightly around its massive body.
At the same time, she erected a powerful barrier around the battlefield, preventing anyone from entering while also ensuring the Nine-Tails could not escape.
It was time to deal with the Nine-Tails.