Paradise Found

CHAPTER 1

Chapter 1

The day I died was a day I was expecting for some time.

I'd had time to say my goodbyes, I'd written a brief will and testament to where I wanted my things and meager savings divided and distributed, and I'd had my large, annoying, and loving family at my side when it happened.

For many months I had wrestled with an aggressive cancer in a war-torn and impoverished country that couldn't provide the type of treatment I needed to fight it. My family that was too poor to send their eldest daughter to one of the richer, western countries that had thoroughly trained doctors and newer medicines and equipments.

I was one of nine children born to my parents, a couple who owned a bakery in an overcrowded city where rich and diverse lands bordered that of Egypt. Those ancient lands I called home were contested, and they sat nestled between two angry countries and an even angrier ocean.

My family had been loud, obnoxious, loving, and joyful though poor. Did I mention loud?

I was loathed to leave them at only twenty-three years of age. My life had hardly even begun by the time it was snatched from me, and I had struggled for months with the terrifying question of what lay in store for me when it became clear that my time was running out.

I was raised as a Muslimah in my first life.

I had lived as well as I could; peaceful, hard-working, and obedient to my parents - studying as much as I could for the chance at one of those coveted scholarships that were awarded to the hardworking students of our province, and working in the bakery with my parents and siblings when I wasn't studying.

I had held out hope that my good actions and intentions in this life would be enough to grant me access to the rewards that had been promised in the afterlife. I had believed in what I was supposed to believe and done what I was supposed to do.

So, as you can imagine, it came as a complete surprise when I found myself taken from one life and forced into another when I was supposed to have been sent to either heaven or hell, Jannah or Jahanem, Fire or Paradise. Whatever you wanted to call it, the meaning was all the same.

That's what was supposed to have happened to my soul after death. That's what I had been taught, what I had believed to be true.

Yeah, that's what was supposed to have happened.

It came as an even bigger shock when I recognized the world I had been placed into after my death was one that was supposed to be fictional, which certainly wasn't the heaven or hell I had expected. A story, a manga, a television series that I had watched with two of my younger brothers on occasion. That's all it was supposed to be. A story. Fiction, and nothing more.

I was stubborn at first, refusing to use the word 'reincarnation', a word I had never believed in. I refused to trust that any of my surroundings actually existed, and I refused to accept the horrifying transition between realities that my soul had been forced through.

The first few months of my life in the Village Hidden in the Leaves were ones of complete and utter denial.

I spent a good few weeks crying myself to sleep at night and mumbling things in my native tongue of Arabic when my senses had developed enough to allow me speech. I had missed my family. I was frustrated that I couldn't understand this new language. I was confused and scared, as anyone might be if they had found themself in a similar situation.

Why was I here? How had I come to be here? What would happen now that I was here? These were all questions I had no answer for. Not yet, anyways.

I was lucky that I had been a child when I'd made the mistake of speaking anything other than Japanese. It was passed off as nothing more than innocent baby babble. I realized then, as I cried and blubbered in slurred Arabic at my confused grandfather, that it was a mistake I could never afford to make again.

That was the last time I ever spoke my mother tongue aloud.

It was new, terrifying, and different. In my first life I had often imagined how interesting life might be in a different place, time, or universe, but none of those fanciful daydreams had ever touched on the terror that I had found in my new life. It was a type of fear that was completely soul consuming, one that left you in awe and in reprehension that you might have lost your sanity somewhere along the way.

For the first few years, I lived in a horrified daze, swallowing compliantly while I was force fed this strange new mixture of language, food, culture, and civilization that was so different from my own. The first year passed in agony, and I spent my days playing masquerade while dreaming of and longing for a different time and place throughout the nights.

My hours during the day were spent learning and absorbing new information, settling into this new skin and new identity that I'd been given while all the while questioning how any of this could possibly be true. Nights were spent in wonder, pondering how it was I came to be here, and sometimes in grief, wishing that I had just stayed dead. There were times it seemed that the emotional agony of being ripped from my family and thrust into this strange new world was unbearable, too much for one soul to carry on its own.

But I learned to carry it. Over time, my disbelief morphed into melancholy, and then melancholy into a firm resolve to survive.

And when I finally decided to quit moping and start living this second chance at life I had somehow found, I began to watch and learn. I began to observe and collect as much information as I could, while committing what I remembered of the original plot to memory so that I would not forget. Eventually, I was able to figure out when I had been born in regards to the timeline I remembered.

I was young when Minato became the Hokage, my grandfather and I had even attended his ceremony, and then the public funeral that inevitably followed some years later after one of the most terrifying nights I had ever lived through.

The village I was born in was on the brink of war with another neighboring land that was also supposed to be fictional. Tensions were running high and suspicions even higher. People whispered in the streets of spies caught and tortured to death. Children were trained as child-soldiers and indoctrinated with a village-first ideology that was quite persuasive - persuasive enough to die for - persuasive enough to kill for.