Most people don’t remember dying.

  Ken did.

  He remembered the fluorescent lights, the cubicle walls, and the cold floor of the office where his heart gave out at twenty-nine. No funeral. No one cried. His body was found three days ter when his manager noticed productivity had dropped.

  That should’ve been the end.

  Instead, he woke up screaming—with tiny lungs, Sharingan blood, and the weight of a second chance on his chest.

  He was born into the Uchiha cn, but not the part anyone cared about. The branch family—too distant for power, too cautious for politics. His parents stayed quiet, bowed low, and hoped the fire of the main house never reached them.

  Ken didn’t compin. Not at first.

  The world was dangerous, chakra was real, and death could come fast. He kept his head down, trained hard, and stayed out of the way. A background character in someone else’s tragedy.

  But he knew how this story ended. He knew about Itachi, about Shisui, about the cn that would be reduced to ash in the name of peace.

  And for a while, he told himself not to interfere.

  Let the main characters do what they’re supposed to. Let history happen. Survive.

  But surviving isn’t living. Not really.

  So when he turned eight, Ken picked up a sword. Quietly. Relentlessly. He didn’t have genius. He didn’t have ambition. He had something else—memory, discipline, and the kind of stubborn patience only a former saryman could master.

  He wasn’t going to be a hero. That wasn’t the goal.

  He just refused to die a second time without doing something that mattered.

  Ten years before the massacre, in the quiet corners of the Uchiha compound, a boy named Ken began sharpening a bde—not to change the world, but to be ready when it did.

  And when the fire came, he’d be waiting in the smoke.