Orochimaru walked through the corridors with a smile that showed just enough teeth.
To anyone watching, it would have looked like hunger.
Anticipation. The familiar pleasure of approaching fresh prey.
But Sasuke Uchiha was not the center of his hunger anymore.
Not truly.
That realization amused him.
Sasuke was valuable, yes.
A rare cherry placed neatly on top of a far larger design.
His fixation on bloodlines hadn't faded in the slightest; if anything, it had sharpened.
Crystallized.
The difference was that Orochimaru finally understood what he had been doing wrong for decades.
It wasn't that bloodlines mattered.
It was that only certain bloodlines mattered.
And that understanding had not come from Sasuke.
It had begun years ago, on a remote island, with a white-haired bone-wielding boy.
That encounter had changed everything.
Through him, Orochimaru had perfected the vessel process far beyond what he'd thought possible.
Lifespans extended. Compatibility stabilized. Rejection minimized.
But more importantly, it had forced Orochimaru to look deeper, beyond techniques and mutations, and ask a far more dangerous question.
Why.
Why did some bloodlines bend the rules so naturally, while others shattered under even lesser strain?
The answer had taken years of obsessive research, but when it came, it was elegant.
Selective lineage.
A convergence.
Not many bloodlines, but a handful, all tracing back toward something ancient.
A single origin. A demigod root branching outward like a great, invisible tree.
Uchiha, obvious.
Senju, unavoidable.
Uzumaki, a simpler truth than most realized.
Hyūga, surprisingly late to reveal itself, but undeniable once seen.
And that white-haired boy's lineage, obscured, distorted, yet unmistakably part of the same structure.
There were possibly others.
Once you knew where to look.
Of course, the concentration of that bloodline within a single individual mattered as well.
So why wasn't Sasuke the answer?
Because Sasuke was incomplete.
The Uchiha bloodline was powerful, but skewed.
Too spiritual. Too Yin-heavy.
Eyes that rewrote perception, will, and illusion.
Magnificent, yes, but not the flesh Orochimaru desired.
Not the foundation.
Eyes could be transplanted.
Flesh had to endure.
That was the flaw that had ruined him again and again.
Forcing greatness into inferior bodies.
Grafting Hashirama's cells into vessels that were never meant to bear them.
Treating perfection like an add-on instead of an origin.
So the solution was obvious.
Make the body himself.
The thought was daring. Even insane.
And that was exactly why it thrilled him.
He already possessed the most advanced transmigration technique in the world.
He understood the soul now, not as a mystery, but as a mechanism.
His grasp of flesh, genetics, chakra, and life itself surpassed anyone alive.
What if the workaround to his decades of failure wasn't refinement.
What if it was creation.
Why force Hashirama's cells into a body that rejected them, when he could grow a body born from them.
Designed from inception.
Shaped for purpose.
And why stop there.
Why not enhance it further.
Infuse it with that White Snake Sage's refined serum.
Let it gestate under multiple divine influences at once.
A convergence of flesh, chakra, and natural law.
A body that did not adapt to power.
A body that expected it.
Of course, it was still only a concept.
Scribbled into his journal.
The instruments didn't exist yet.
The methods weren't fully mapped.
Growing an entire body, altering its seed so fundamentally, would take time.
Years, perhaps.
But Orochimaru was patient now.
And when that form was ready, when that vessel finally existed, then Sasuke's eyes would matter.
Then the Sharingan would take their rightful place, not as a foundation, but as a crown.
He stepped into the chamber.
Sasuke stood waiting. Kabuto at his side.
Orochimaru's smile widened, not predatory now, but pleased.
"Yes," he thought as his gaze met the boy's. "You'll do nicely."
Just not the way you think.
Orochimaru's footsteps echoed softly as he stopped a few paces in front of Sasuke.
Up close, the man's presence pressed in on him, not through chakra alone, but intent. Cold. Curious. Measuring.
"So," Orochimaru said lightly, eyes sliding over the curse mark on Sasuke's neck, "you came without being dragged. How refreshing."
Sasuke didn't bow. Didn't speak. He met the snake's gaze head-on.
Kabuto smiled faintly to himself and stepped half a pace back, already relegating himself to the background.
Orochimaru chuckled. "Straight to business, then."
He raised a finger. "The curse mark you bear is incomplete. Powerful, yes, but unstable. Left as it is, it will rot you from the inside. Pain. Madness. Death."
Sasuke's jaw tightened. "Then fix it."
That earned a low laugh.
"I will," Orochimaru said. "I'll guide you through its second state. Purge the side effects. Elevate it from a burden into a weapon. The Sound Four survived it. You will do far better."
"Because I'm stronger," Sasuke said flatly.
"Because you're Uchiha," Orochimaru corrected, amused. "And because you want it badly enough."
Sasuke didn't deny it.
Orochimaru circled him slowly. "I'll train you personally. Ninjutsu. Taijutsu. Kenjutsu. Power Konoha would never give you. You'll be my subordinate." He paused, smile sharpening. "My finest one."
Sasuke's eyes narrowed. "I don't serve anyone."
Orochimaru stopped behind him. "Of course you do," he whispered. "You just choose what you serve."
Silence stretched.
Then Sasuke spoke, voice low and certain. "I'll take your power. I'll use you to kill Itachi."
Orochimaru's smile widened, delighted rather than offended. "Excellent."
Kabuto adjusted his glasses. "Your room is prepared. Training begins immediately after your recovery. We usually rotate between different hideouts."
Sasuke turned away without another word.
As he followed Kabuto down the corridor, Orochimaru watched his back, eyes gleaming.
"Yes," he thought. "Grow. Burn. Sharpen yourself."
The door slid shut behind them.
And the game moved one step closer to its end.
Why not simply take Sasuke now?
Why bother with training at all, when extraction was always the end?
The answer was irritatingly simple.
Sharingan responded best to its original owner.
It grew with them, sharpened through use, stress, repetition, and lived experience.
Eyes taken too early were dull things, powerful but shallow, lacking the depth Orochimaru required.
There was an immeasurable difference between freshly awakened three-tomoe eyes and those carried by a seasoned Uchiha elite who had bled, killed, and survived with them.
So Sasuke had to mature.
Not just his dōjutsu, but everything.
His chakra control. His instincts. His chakra reserves.
His spiritual density. His body. A blade was only as good as the hand that wielded it, and Orochimaru refused to harvest unripe fruit.
Mangekyō, however, was another matter entirely.
That problem still annoyed him.
He couldn't awaken it himself.
Not after transplantation.
Not ever.
Unlike Sasuke, Orochimaru did not love, in the slightest, even.
Not truly. Not in the way required.
He didn't care about family, friends, comrades, or even his own body.
Even gender meant nothing.
Identity meant nothing.
Loss meant nothing unless it interfered with progress.
The only pain he truly felt was frustration when his ambition went unmet.
And that was insufficient.
If greed alone awakened Mangekyō, every Uchiha would have had it.
No, his research on this was detailed.
Even among the Uchiha, only specific bloodlines responded.
And beyond blood, there was the emotional catalyst.
Love twisted into hatred.
Bonds shattered violently.
Family. Friends. Lovers.
Orochimaru was far past that point.
So the Mangekyō had to be awakened externally.
In Sasuke.
And only then claimed.
How, exactly, remained unclear.
Sasuke cared about Itachi.
That much was obvious.
But revealing the full truth of the massacre, of Konoha's role, of manipulation layered upon manipulation, that might be premature.
Push too early, and the blade snapped.
No matter.
Orochimaru filed the problem away.
Once the next iteration of the curse mark was fully embedded, Sasuke would belong to him regardless of distance.
An imprint that transcended location.
A leash that never slackened.
Mangekyō could wait.
There were many tools available.
Itachi himself. The truth.
Sasuke's former teammates.
Carefully timed despair.
Or maybe even just let nature play its course?
Plenty of options.
For now, fatten the Sharingan.
Refine the vessel concept.
Perfect the birth process he had only recently dared to imagine.
Orochimaru returned to his quarters and unrolled the latest set of diagrams, eyes tracing lines of chakra circulation and genetic convergence with almost reverent focus.
A strange smirk crossed his face.
Unbidden, his thoughts drifted to a white-haired boy on a distant island.
Infinitely more intriguing than Sasuke's clean, predictable trajectory.
A variable. An anomaly.
A puzzle that still refused to settle neatly into any model.
He wondered what the boy was doing now.
And whether he was stagnating.
Because if he was, Orochimaru thought lazily, then soon enough, he would take everything he had away from him and fulfill what he failed to do on that day.
...
Orochimaru remained absorbed in his thoughts as another idea began to surface.
If the seed he had planted truly took root, and the fruit he was cultivating inside Sasuke ripened fully, then what would happen when they finally fused?
What kind of result would that truly produce in the end?
History already whispered the answer, if one bothered to listen.
Why had Senju and Uchiha always stood above the rest?
Who was actually the most powerful individual in recorded history?
The Sage of Six Paths.
Strip away the myths, the slogans, the moralizing, and one name remained at the apex.
Not in some sentimental, philosophical sense, but in raw historical fact.
Orochimaru felt a flicker of irritation at himself.
He'd ignored the connection for decades, dismissed it too easily.
Senju and Uchiha had warred endlessly, their powers manifesting in such opposite ways, flesh and spirit, Yang and Yin.
So, how could they possibly belong to the same origin?
And yet.
What if that polarity was the proof instead, the entire time?
Not divergence, but incompleteness.
Two fractured inheritances of a single essence.
Two halves of one whole.
The same Sage.
The same power.
The same Rinnegan.
The realization made his pulse quicken.
Orochimaru licked his lips slowly.
It was still only a hypothesis.
A distant possibility. A dangerous one.
But what if he was about to create something even greater than he'd ever imagined?
Yet, he understood now that he had barely scratched the surface of something far larger.
This wasn't a revelation.
It was a symptom.
The first sign that he'd stepped onto a road where every answer only revealed deeper complexity.
Reality was never clean.
Never elegant.
It only appeared that way until you looked closely enough.
And this framework still didn't explain everything.
The Hyūga, for one.
And that white-haired boy's clan, which clearly didn't fit neatly into the Senju–Uchiha dichotomy. Likely Kaguya.
That clan felt both older and cruder, which would explain perfectly why it had remained beneath notice for so long.
As if its power had never been refined, only squandered.
Orochimaru didn't arrive at that conclusion through appearance or folklore.
He arrived there the only way that mattered, by elimination.
Over the last two or three years, he'd combed through clan records obsessively, focusing on obscure clans that showed even faint traces of the characteristics the boy displayed.
He crossed off the Uzumaki soon enough.
He had Karin on hand for direct comparison, and he had studied their scattered survivors extensively in the past, and knew their traits far too well to mistake them for something else.
The Senju followed for much the same reason.
He knew their remnants intimately from Konoha, had their cells, understood their chakra signatures, their strengths, and their limitations.
Whatever the boy was, it was similar, in some way, but it wasn't any of them either.
One by one, the candidates fell away.
In the end, only one remained.
A strange, nomadic clan from the Land of Water, wiped out roughly seven years ago, destroyed as much by their own madness and primitivism as by outside forces.
He didn't discard them for lacking the boy's specific bone manipulation.
That kind of trait could easily have vanished over generations, especially in a clan so short-sighted and self-destructive, one that never preserved or refined what it had.
What mattered was something deeper.
That same overwhelming, Yang-heavy physicality. Bodies that were unnaturally tough.
Traces of regeneration. Excess vitality pouring into brute strength and survivability.
Power, raw and abundant, but never refined.
They had buried it themselves through ignorance, lacking even a basic understanding of shinobi refinement, discipline, or control.
Wasted potential, stamped out before it ever learned how to become subtle.
And that, more than anything else, made them fit.
It was a clan he had considered long before, even before meeting that boy. Back then, he hadn't grasped the true extent of their potential, only that they were worth deep study.
He had even lingered around the period of their destruction, suspecting he might stumble onto something worthwhile, but nothing ever came of it.
Now, he could investigate them only through indirect traces.
They had been wiped out completely.
All except that one boy.
And that, in itself, was strange.
It still didn't prove anything definitive, however.
Orochimaru was the first to admit that.
But among all known lineages, it was the only one that fit well enough to be worth some serious consideration.
And even with this newfound understanding, the gaps in his knowledge felt endless, and he felt not pride, but hunger.
It didn't explain the true nature of the Hyūga, nor whatever unsettling power had begun to surface around them in Konoha.
It didn't explain the leader of Akatsuki, a man who presently somehow bore that Rinnegan.
And it certainly didn't explain Madara Uchiha.
Was he truly dead?
The more Orochimaru traced that newer thread through history, the stranger it became, too.
Akatsuki wasn't just a mercenary group or a collection of missing-nin as well.
Its ambitions were not only too grandiose but also too specific. Too informed.
Who had even conceived the idea that all tailed beasts could be fused back into one?
How did they even know it was possible?
And by what method did they intend to do it?
Orochimaru realized, with faint amusement, that he'd never bothered asking those questions before.
Now, he couldn't stop.
Additionally, the entire historical records didn't merely thin out at some distant point before and even during the Sage's times; it looked as if they malfunctioned.
Cleanly. Abruptly.
As if history itself had been cut, edited, or deliberately curated past a certain point.
That disturbed him.
And thrilled him.
Orochimaru was a researcher before he was anything else
Not merely a scientist, but a historian, an archivist, a scavenger of truth.
He had dug deeper than anyone else, chasing any fragment that might lead to growth.
And the deeper he went, the more the world itself began to feel artificial.
Too neat. Too simplified.
As if something, or someone, had shaped it that way.
The unknown yawned open before him, vast and terrifying.
Orochimaru smiled. Nothing excited him more.
"Ninshū… strange, very strange," he thought. "But not a priority, at least not yet."