# **Chapter 2: What The Clan Teaches**
**Zenin Compound, Japan — 1962**
**Ren: Age 4 | Toji: Age 3**
---
The Zenin compound had a smell.
Old wood. Incense burning somewhere in the main hall every hour of every day. And underneath both of those things something older and colder that Ren had never managed to name. Not unpleasant.
Just the smell of a place that had been serious for a very long time and had stopped explaining itself to anyone centuries ago.
He had been walking the compound on his own since he was three. Not because anyone encouraged it.
Nobody paid close attention to what the branch children did as long as they stayed out of the way of people who mattered.
Ren had understood this early and used it the same way he had used the colosseum crowd's blind spots — quietly and without announcing it.
He was four now. Small enough that most adults looked straight over his head in the corridors. Sharp enough that he looked back at everything anyway.
The compound was large. Traditional architecture throughout — sliding doors, stone pathways, wooden corridors that ran between buildings like the bones of something old.
The main house sat at the center and everything else arranged itself around it in a hierarchy that was physical as much as social.
The further from the main house your quarters were, the clearer your position in the clan's estimation.
Ren and Toji's quarters were in the eastern wing.
Far from the center. Close to the walls.
— POV: ELDER RYOZO ZENIN —
Elder Ryozo had been assessing Zenin children for thirty one years.
He had seen strong ones and weak ones and every variation in between. He had made recommendations that shaped careers and recommendations that ended them before they started.
He had delivered verdicts on children as young as two and had learned to feel nothing particular about it because feeling something about it would have made the job impossible and the job needed doing.
He sat in the evaluation room on the morning of the fourth of August and watched the two boys be brought in by one of the women.
The woman was the mother. Ryozo didn't remember her name.
She was a branch connection — brought in three years ago for bloodline purposes, given quarters, given a function, given nothing else.
She walked with the particular careful quietness of someone who had learned fast that visibility in this compound was not an advantage for women without power or position.
Her cursed energy was moderate at best. Adequate for breeding purposes. That was the calculation and everyone including her understood it.
She set both boys in front of him and stepped back to the wall without being told to.
Ryozo looked at the older one first.
Zenin Ren.
Four years old. Dark eyes that were already doing something he didn't see often in children this age — not looking at him but looking through him, cataloguing, measuring, filing away.
The boy's cursed energy was immediately apparent even without a formal reading.
It sat around him the way strong energy always did on children who hadn't learned to contain it yet — unconscious, uncontrolled, but dense in a way that made the air around him feel slightly different.
Ryozo did the formal reading anyway.
The result made him pause.
He did it again.
Same result.
He set his measuring tool down carefully and looked at the boy with slightly more attention than he had been giving him thirty seconds ago.
The boy looked back with those cataloguing eyes and said nothing.
Exceptional, Ryozo noted internally. Possibly the strongest branch child in three generations. Need to flag for main house attention.
He moved to the younger one.
Zenin Toji. Three years old. Built well — better than most at this age, with a physical solidity that was already evident.
The boy's eyes were sharp and dark and watching him with the same flat patience as the older brother.
Ryozo did the reading.
Nothing.
He did it again.
Nothing. Not low. Not poor. Absolute zero. A Zenin child with no cursed energy at all, which was — not unheard of, but rare. And in this clan rare in this direction meant only one thing.
He set the tool down.
Looked at the mother still standing against the wall with her hands folded in front of her.
"The older one shows exceptional promise," he said. "The younger one is a deficiency. You understand what this means."
The woman's expression didn't change. She had a good face for this compound — it didn't move when it wasn't supposed to. "Yes, Elder," she said quietly.
"The older one will receive standard branch investment. The younger one will receive basic provision. Nothing more." He picked up his writing tool and made the notation. "You may go."
She gathered both boys and left.
Ryozo watched them go. His eyes stayed on the older boy's back for a moment — on the unconscious density of cursed energy still radiating off a four year old who had no idea what it meant yet.
Shame about the younger one, he thought, without particular feeling. The blood was almost right.
He turned back to his ledger.
— POV: REN —
Ren didn't fully understand what had happened in that room until that evening.
He knew something had.
He had watched the old man's face carefully — the slight pause, the second reading, the way his attention shifted between them like a scale settling — and he had understood the shape of the conclusion even without knowing all the words for it yet.
The older one was worth something.
The younger one wasn't.
He sat in the eastern yard after dinner while Toji slept inside and thought about the old man's face and the way his mother had stood against the wall with her hands folded and her expression perfectly still
---
The compound ran on a simple mathematics.
Cursed energy was worth. Worth was everything. Everything else — warmth, basic dignity, the ordinary consideration one human being might extend to another — was decoration.
The kind of thing the Zenin acknowledged existed somewhere in the outside world the same way they acknowledged that other countries had different weather.
Technically true. Not their concern.
Ren had understood this by age three.
He had also understood, by age three, that his mother understood it better than anyone.
She was not a weak woman. He knew this already — had known it since before he had proper words for the knowing.
When she was alone with them, away from the compound's watching, there was something in her that the formal version of her kept carefully out of sight.
Warmth and sharpness at the same time. She told them things in the evenings in a quiet voice.
Practical things about the compound and the clan and how to move through spaces that weren't built for you.
She never told them those things anywhere the walls might carry it.
She folded her hands and stood against walls when elders spoke. She moved quietly through corridors.
She did everything the compound expected of its women and she did it with a perfectly controlled face and Ren watched all of it and filed every piece of it in the cold patient place in his chest alongside everything else this compound had taught him so far.
She was smarter than every man in this building who had ever looked straight through her.
He intended to make sure that mattered eventually.
---
The bullying started the way these things always do.
Small first. A branch boy named Kota — five years old, already carrying himself like someone who had done the clan's arithmetic and found his own position satisfactory — reached across the table at dinner one evening and took Toji's bowl with the flat confidence of a child who had learned which things were safe to take.
Toji didn't react. He sat in front of his empty space and looked at it and said nothing at all.
Ren moved his own bowl in front of his brother without a word.
Kota looked at Ren. Calculated something behind his eyes. Left the table.
Toji ate. He didn't say thank you. He looked sideways at Ren for just a moment with an expression that was hard to read on a three year old's face and completely readable anyway.
*I noticed.*
That was enough.
---
The problem was that Ren couldn't be everywhere.
The compound was large. Toji was three and mobile and completely unwilling to stay in places that were safe,
which Ren respected in principle and found exhausting in practice. There were hours when Ren was in his own training or being looked at by elders who wanted to measure his energy again, and Toji was somewhere else in the compound without anyone watching.
Those were the hours that mattered.
Ren found out the way he always found out — Toji appearing at his side later than expected, outer robe dirty, jaw set, new bruise somewhere that hadn't been there in the morning.
Never said what happened. Ren never asked because asking would have made Toji feel like he owed an explanation, which he didn't.
Third time in a week Ren went to find Elder Misao.
He was in her office. Sixty years old. Thin. A face that had settled permanently into disapproval the way a river settles into its banks.
he looked up when he came in. Looked back at her papers. "What."
"Someone is hurting my brother in the eastern yard when I'm not there," Ren said. Flat and steady. The only register this compound heard correctly. "I want it stopped."
Misao set his papers down. Folded her hands. Looked at him with an expression that was almost gentle, which from a Zenin elder was more unsettling than anger would have been.
he said. "Your brother was born without cursed energy. You understand what that means here."
"It means the clan treats him as worthless," Ren said. "I don't think that's right."
he rang the small bell on her desk.
---
The main hall floor was hardwood.
Cold hardwood in December was a specific kind of unpleasant that Ren filed away carefully because filing things away was more productive than being angry about them.
He knelt there for an hour. Palms flat. The disciplinarian's voice above him explaining the correct relationship between branch children and clan judgement in the patient tone of someone who had given this particular speech many times and expected to give it many more.
Ren listened to every word.
Said nothing.
When it was done he walked to the eastern yard and found Toji sitting in the corner throwing small rocks at the far wall. Toji looked up. Looked at his knees. "You talked to someone."
"Yes."
"Did it work."
"No."
Toji threw another rock. "Don't do it again."
"I'll think about it."
Toji looked at him with those flat sharp eyes. They sat there until the cold sharpened and the evening bell rang.
Their mother appeared at the yard entrance. She looked at Ren's knees — still red — and said nothing about it. Just held the door open and waited.
Later when Toji was asleep she sat beside Ren in the dark of their shared room and was quiet for a moment.
Then very quietly, in the voice she only used when the walls definitely couldn't carry it, she said: "You did a good thing. It didn't work. But it was still a good thing."
Ren looked at her. "The clan disagrees."
"The clan disagrees with a lot of things," she said. Her hands were folded in her lap.
Same as they always were in the formal rooms. "That doesn't make them right." A pause. "Just be smarter about when you say so out loud."
She smoothed his blanket. Stood up. Left.
Ren lay in the dark for a long time after that thinking about what she had just done — which was agree with him,
quietly, in the only space in this entire compound where she could safely do it, and then tell him to be smarter about it than she had ever been allowed to be.
---
**December 7th, 1962. Mid Morning.**
Nobody mentioned it at breakfast.
Expected.
Ren was in the training yard by the time the compound had properly woken up. Branch children's yard — small, separate, one wooden post, uneven ground,
the atmosphere of a space that received exactly as much investment as the clan felt branch children deserved, which was very little.
He worked for three hours straight.
Cursed energy output drills first. Pushing it to his palms, feeling the weight of it, learning the texture of his own reserves the way you learn any tool — handling it until it stops feeling foreign. Control was the problem currently. His output was strong —
he could feel that much without needing anyone to tell him — but strong and controlled were two completely different things and he was very much only one of them right now.
Then footwork. Then basic conditioning. Then back to cursed energy because control was the problem and problems got solved by working on them not by moving on to more comfortable things.
Three hours. Solid.
When he finally stopped his knuckles were red from the post and his breathing had that particular quality of someone who had gone exactly far enough.
He sat on the ground.
And opened the panel.
---
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**UCHIHA DEVELOPMENT SYSTEM**
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**Name : Zenin Ren
**Age : 4
**CURSED TECH.. : Kurama Chakra Mode (One Tail)(10.2%), (Tailed Beast Bomb)( Locked)
**CURSED ENERGY : 67,000 CE (1.2x Okkotsu Yuta)
Control Rank : F
*TRAITS : Sharingan(Dorm), Sage Body(lv1)
Sage body : Enhanced Body , Vast CE reserve foundation , Sage Mode (Locked)
**TEMPLATE : Kid Sasuke (Age 4)(1%)
**JUTSU : None
**SYSTEM NOTICE**
[Host — the Uchiha bloodline requires the Rinnegan as its final evolution. The Rinnegan demands both Uchiha and Senju genetics simultaneously.]
{The Senju Sage Body has been provided at significant energy cost. As a result Sharingan development will proceed at reduced speed and will follow the Sasuke template progression strictly.}
**This is not a flaw. This is thecorrect path to the Rinnegan.
Trust the process. •_•**
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---
Ren read the panel.
Read it again.
Then he looked up at the sky above the training yard — grey December sky, clouds sitting low and flat over the compound — and said out loud, to nobody visible, in the tone of a man reading the fine print on a contract he'd already signed:
"Sixty seven thousand cursed energy." He paused. "I'm four."
The system offered nothing. It had said what it had to say.
"Okay." He looked back at the panel. "Kurama Chakra Mode. One tail. Ten percent." He tilted his head. "Finally I will be able to use my curse technique.
He read the system notice at the bottom again. Slowly this time.
Sharingan dormant because giving him the Senju Sage Body cost enough energy that the eye needed to develop slowly. Following the Sasuke template. All the way to the Rinnegan eventually.
He looked at the last line.
*Trust the process.*
"Easy for you to say," he told the panel. "You're not the one kneeling on hardwood floors."
He closed the panel.
Sat in the cold training yard for a moment longer and thought about what sixty seven thousand cursed energy meant in practical terms. He was four years old.
He had more cursed energy than Yuta Okkotsu — a name he knew from his previous life as someone who had briefly been considered one of the most dangerous sorcerers on the planet.
He had more than that.
At four.
With F rank control.
*Okay,* he thought, dropping the narration for a second and just being honest with himself. *That's actually terrifying.
I could probably level this entire compound by accident if something went wrong.*
Which meant control wasn't optional. Control was the only thing standing between him and becoming a very young, very unintentional disaster.
He stood up.
Looked at the wooden post.
*Back to work then.*
---
He was still there an hour later when Toji found him.
His little brother appeared at the yard entrance, took in the situation — Ren standing in the cold, knuckles red, clearly not planning to stop anytime soon — and walked over and sat on the ground nearby without asking. Toji did this.
He didn't request permission to be somewhere. He just went there and existed in it with the complete physical confidence of a child who had decided that space belonged to whoever used it.
He watched Ren work for a while.
Then he said, "You're different today."
Ren stopped. Looked at him. "How so."
Toji thought about it with the serious weight of a child who only said things he actually meant. "Like you found something," he said. "Something important."
Ren looked at his brother.
Three years old. No cursed energy. Already being treated like a deficiency by a clan that had decided his worth before he was old enough to have a single opinion about it. Sharp eyes that saw more than they were supposed to. Hands that were already faster than kids twice his age.
The compound had written him off completely.
The compound, Ren had decided, was going to look very stupid about this eventually.
"I made a decision," Ren said.
"About what."
"About this place. About us." He met Toji's eyes. "I'm going to get strong enough that this clan cannot ignore either of us. And when that happens things are going to change. For you. For her."
He didn't need to say who *her* was.
Toji understood. His eyes said so.
He was quiet for a moment. The compound made its usual sounds around them — distant voices, wind off the walls, the structured movement of a place that ran on discipline and hierarchy and had very little room for anything else.
Then Toji said, simply, "Okay."
Not excited. Not relieved. Just okay — the way you say something when you've been waiting for it to be said out loud and now it finally has been and you can move forward.
He picked up a small stone from the ground and turned it over in his fingers.
"Can I watch you train," he said.
"You already are," Ren said.
The corner of Toji's mouth moved slightly. Almost a smile. On his face almost was a lot.
Ren turned back to the post.
Above him the grey December sky sat flat and cold over the compound walls.
*Years head start on the road become the strongest,* Ren thought.
*Better not waste it.*
He raised his hand and got back to work.
---
*— End of Chapter 2 —*.