Kushina found herself unmoored by a simple statement of potential. The idea that the Mangekyō Sharingan was not the apex, that there existed a horizon beyond the cliff-edge of blindness, was a tectonic shift in her understanding of the world.
Her mind, once racing with the implications of Madara Uchiha's legendary, enduring power, slowly stilled and focused. The historical horror was pushed aside by the immediate, practical problem before her.
She took a deep, steadying breath, the last of the evening light through the window catching the determined set of her jaw. Her eyes, when they met Renjiro's newly crimson gaze, were no longer wide with shock, but sharp with pragmatic intensity.
"Listen," she began, her voice firm, cutting through the heavy air. "Your 'instincts,' however strong, aren't a research protocol. We have one jar. One finite, irreplaceable sample of the Shodai's cells. That's it." She pointed a decisive finger at the innocuous ceramic container, which now seemed to glow with ominous potential.
"Lord Third would never part with more. He'd rather die with him than see Konoha's greatest biological treasure wasted on failed experiments. We get one shot. So we don't fire blindly."
Internally, Renjiro couldn't help but chuckle, a dry, humorless sound. 'She's right, of course.'
His thoughts spun forward, a habitual game of political chess. 'Maybe we could get more when Minato becomes Hokage…'
But the hope died as quickly as it was born. 'No. Minato would make the same call. No Hokage, no matter how personally loyal, would hand out pieces of the First like candy. It's the ultimate village secret.'
"Agreed," he said aloud, nodding. "So, what's the first move? We can't just… sprinkle them on and hope."
Kushina crossed her arms, "The first move is understanding the baseline evolution. We need to map the pathway to the Mangekyō before we can even think about a road beyond it. I need to see, to feel, how a standard Sharingan becomes a Mangekyō."
Renjiro's brow furrowed. "And how do you propose we do that?"
A faint, terrifyingly casual smile touched Kushina's lips. "Simple. We make a pair."
Renjiro stared at her, his Sharingan narrowing. "You just finished telling me, in graphic, soul-scarring detail, that I cannot afford to regenerate more Sharingan. Was that a different Uzumaki five minutes ago?"
"Flick!"
Kushina reached out and flicked his forehead, the familiar, sisterly rebuke so incongruous with the monstrous subject matter.
"I know what I said, you idiot. I'm not telling you to regenerate new ones. You said you have a stash. Extras. So we use those."
Renjiro's gaze drifted to the shelf where the jar sat. Containing the blind, greyed-out Mangekyō from his original eyes and the perfectly healthy, three-tomoe Sharingan he had just removed.
"We have a spare pair right there," he said, gesturing. "And the… originals, though they're spent."
Kushina followed his look, her mind calculating. "How many pairs did you… consume, for lack of a better word, to force your original Mangekyō awakening?"
"Two," Renjiro answered.
Kushina nodded, as if confirming a hypothesis. "Then we'll need to dip into your reserves. How many do you have in storage?"
Renjiro hesitated. Each pair in his stash represented a private ordeal, a session of gruesome self-surgery and lonely recovery. They were his emergency fund, his grim insurance policy.
"Enough. How many do you need?"
Kushina's smirk returned, wider this time, edged with the thrilling audacity of a born rule-breaker staring down a foundational law of nature. "Bring the whole stash. We might need to run the process more than once to get a clean read."
Renjiro's eyebrow twitched. The sheer boldness of it was both alarming and, he had to admit, perfectly Kushina. He sighed, the sound of ultimate surrender.
"Give me a few minutes."
Now that his sight was restored, the world was not just visible but navigable with a precision he had missed desperately. With a sharp shunshin-crack of displaced air, he was gone from the room, the speed noticeably sharper, more confident without the constant, compensatory focus of his chakra field. The journey to his home and back took mere minutes.
He reappeared in the Namikaze room with another, larger jar. This one was filled with a clear, faintly blue, chakra-infused preservative liquid. Suspended within, like a collection of grotesque, crimson marbles, were numerous pairs of Sharingan eyes.
He set the jar down on the floor with a soft thud. The eyes within shifted slightly, catching the lamplight.
Kushina let out a low, appreciative whistle. "Good. You stored them in chakra-saturated saline. Prevents cellular decay and preserves the innate ocular chakra pathways. Smarter than most med-nin."
"I had a lot of time to get the formula right," Renjiro replied, his voice dry. He knelt beside the jar. "So, the demonstration. You want to see the evolution."
Using a set of long, sterile tweezers he produced from a seal on his wrist, he carefully extracted two pairs of eyes from the liquid. He placed them on a clean black cloth. Then he began. He didn't need to implant them; that was for the final step. Instead, he channelled a specific, complex stream of his own chakra into the first pair, simulating the brutal, recursive feedback loop of trauma—not the physical pain, but the psychic echo of it, the chakra signature of profound loss and despair. The eyes on the cloth glowed faintly, the tomoe spinning wildly but achieving nothing.
He then 'discarded' their energy signature with a dismissive pulse and repeated the process on the second pair, but this time, he layered the chakra signature of the first, 'traumatised' pair over it, mimicking the catalytic transfer of spiritual weight that occurred when one pair was sacrificed to awaken the next.
To Kushina's senses, it was a chillingly simple algorithm: trauma, transfer, evolution. The chakra in the second pair condensed, intensified, and for a brief, simulated moment, flickered with the deeper, more complex pattern of a Mangekyō before fading, as the lifeless eyes lacked a living brain to sustain it.
"It's… it's almost like a chakra equation," Kushina breathed, her analytical mind enthralled.
"A terrible, awful math."
"It's not simple," Renjiro corrected, gently placing the now-inert eyes back into the preservative. "If it were, every Uchiha would have one. It requires a specific, profound quality of trauma—a loss that fundamentally rewires the soul. The chakra process is just the mechanics. The fuel is pure agony." He let out a short, bitter laugh.
"Given what I… experienced, before I ever came to Konoha, it's no wonder my Mangekyō 'came easily.' The fuel tank was already full."
Kushina's expression darkened, the professional fascination replaced by a quiet, profound sadness. Renjiro saw the shadow cross her face and quickly moved on, unable to bear the weight of her pity.
"The problem," he continued, "is the next step. The evolution beyond the Mangekyō. It requires another pair of Mangekyō. From a close blood relative. A sibling, ideally. Their eyes act as a… a compatible donor graft, healing the spiritual degradation and unlocking the stable form." He spread his hands, a gesture of emptiness.
"An impossibility for me."
Kushina was silent for a long moment, her gaze intense, boring into the middle distance as her brilliant mind dissected the problem. The pieces—biological, spiritual, genetic—tumbled in her head. Then, her eyes snapped back to his.
"So, technically," she said, each word deliberate, "what you need is not the eyes of a sibling, but the… the biological and spiritual blueprint. Their DNA. Their chakra signature. The essence of that close genetic bond."
Renjiro nodded slowly. "Technically, yes. The eyes are the vessel, but the key is the shared lineage, the compatible soul-structure."
A triumphant, daring light ignited in Kushina's eyes. She leaned forward, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial whisper, as if the walls themselves might be shocked by her conclusion.
"Then we don't need the Hashirama cells for this step. Not for the evolution itself." She paused, letting the implication hang. "We have a closer genetic match. A direct blood relative."
Renjiro froze. The world seemed to tilt on its axis. The ambient sounds of the evening—the distant calls of vendors closing shop, the rustle of the trees outside—faded into a ringing silence. He knew, with a sudden, terrifying clarity, exactly who she meant before she even said the name.
"We can use Miwa's chakra instead."
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