As for how Kimimaro had awakened the Tenseigan, that part was never accidental.
A year earlier, when he took Hinata's original eyes and seized those ten Byakugan pairs from the Hyūga main branch, it had never been for storage.
They were never meant to sit idle.
They were resources, components, meant to be used immediately.
He hadn't expected the Tenseigan to awaken outright.
Not that fast.
But he knew those eyes were essential to the process.
There was only one true precedent.
Toneri.
And the truth was, the Tenseigan's awakening was widely misunderstood, much like the Rinnegan.
It was not Senju plus Uchiha. Not even Indra and Ashura, no matter how many people repeated that simplification.
Momoshiki himself possessed Rinnegan, and he had nothing to do with those diluted bloodlines.
The core was always purity.
More precisely, the concentration of the right Ōtsutsuki essence.
On Earth, that meant Kaguya's lineage.
And even more specifically, Hagoromo's for the Rinnegan.
Indra and Ashura, as his sons and reincarnations, simply carried enough of the necessary components to trigger it under the right conditions.
The Tenseigan followed the same logic, just along Hamura's line.
Closeness to Hamura Ōtsutsuki.
Density of that inheritance.
That was why Toneri had succeeded.
His existence itself was a genetic atavism, a near-perfect echo of Hamura after centuries of isolation.
So how could Kimimaro do the same?
He had two options.
Rewrite his genes entirely, which bordered on impossible even for him.
Or mimic the condition.
The key insight was this: the Tenseigan required two aspects of Hamura's heritage.
Otherwise, there would have been no need for Byakugan stolen from an Earth-bound Hyūga like Hanabi in the first place.
It wasn't only purity.
It was contact between both halves.
Kimimaro already possessed one.
The Kaguya bloodline was a Sage Body lineage, crude and degenerated, but unmistakably aligned with Hamura's physical inheritance.
Weaker than Toneri's, yes, but still present.
What he lacked was the Sage Eye side.
So he compensated with strength there.
Toneri had taken one Byakugan.
Kimimaro took around ten.
Not raw, either.
Cultivated. Refined. Engineered.
Using science and the Byakugan's unique properties, he and Emi discovered over time.
Hinata's eyes formed the core.
The rest of the Hyūga stock was broken down, evolved, and recomposed through Emi's Yang mastery and microscopic precision, layered and harmonized into a single ocular structure.
When that composite Byakugan came into contact with Kimimaro's imperfect Sage Body inheritance, something unprecedented happened.
It worked.
A unique case in the shinobi world.
Kimimaro awakened a legitimate Tenseigan, over time, not meaningfully different from Toneri's in nature, only in compatibility.
The power was there. The authority was real. The limitation lay elsewhere.
His body still wasn't ready.
That was why Hashirama's cells had become urgent.
With the Tenseigan already awakened, what he needed now was a vessel capable of sustaining it.
Greater vitality. Greater regeneration.
Greater Yang reinforcement.
Every Sage Body enhancement mattered.
Hamura's path alone wasn't enough.
So he would take Hagoromo's as well.
Hashirama cell integration, perfected and stabilized, offered exactly that.
A fusion of Sage Body inheritances, one lunar, one terrestrial.
Only then, with that unique kind of body, would he truly catch up to his eyes.
However, this Tenseigan acquisition had not been quick.
After transplanting the newly created composite Byakugan, it took Kimimaro months longer than Toneri had needed, and that was only after many more months spent refining and stabilizing it in the first place.
Only recently had the process finally reached completion.
Emi was a different case, Kimimaro thought, his gaze lingering on her striking face, now further accentuated by those half-formed, faintly luminous eyes.
She had followed a similar path, but it had unfolded differently.
Over time, she had cultivated and fused enough Byakugan on her side to reach this state, patiently, methodically.
The process had been slower; it took her years after all, and far more limited in scope, but the result was still extraordinary by any human standard.
And yet, this was clearly her ceiling.
The returns diminished sharply beyond this point.
Pushing further would have cost far more than it could give back.
Emi had recognized that early and adjusted without hesitation, abandoning further ocular expansion and redirecting her full attention toward Hashirama cell research instead, which they all needed now.
It was the correct decision.
She lacked a Sage Body lineage.
Unlike Kimimaro, she had no innate foundation to carry those powers deeper.
Even reaching this level, these fine traces of something greater, was already an achievement bordering on the impossible.
Still, the effects were undeniable.
That pseudo-Tenseigan-like, slight pressure energy of her Byakugan had intensified.
After all, Kimimaro had long understood from Kaguya's "Byakugan Pressure" that the Tenseigan's so-called gravity control was simply that same principle taken to an extreme. Turbocharged, refined, and weaponized.
Seen through that lens, it wasn't surprising at all that Emi's evolved Byakugan had begun to show faint traces of the same underlying ability.
At least as far as her current, advanced applications of the Gentle Fist were concerned.
Emi's entire perception had changed, not merely sharpened, but altered in character.
A unique form of vision had emerged as well, something that didn't exist cleanly within any established category.
But the concept of this kind of new vision still didn't sound particularly absurd to Kimimaro.
After all, for example, Momoshiki's Byakugan had shown the ability to glimpse fragmented futures around himself.
That alone proved the Byakugan wasn't entirely a static and more stable kind of dōjutsu; it had room for some aberrations, for individual evolution into something more specialized.
The difference was scale, not principle.
In Momoshiki's case, the wielder was an Ōtsutsuki god. In Emi's, she was simply relentless.
A lifetime of overusing her Byakugan, pushing it far past what was considered reasonable, combined with their later procedures, had forced it to adapt in that way.
And adaptation, in this world, was often indistinguishable from awakening.
What she'd gained wasn't borrowed or artificial. It was her own.
In Kimimaro's estimation, that alone soon placed her on the threshold.
Quasi–Six Paths.
So, he glanced up from the papers and toward her eyes again.
"How's the new vision progressing?"
Emi didn't answer right away.
She leaned back slightly, her lids lowering for a brief moment before lifting again as the faint glow shifted, veins and the Byakugan pattern flaring open around that pale bluish light at the center.
"It's… clearer," she said, searching for the words. "Those translucent shapes I mentioned before, they're more pronounced now. Like layers. I can focus on them, or shut them out completely."
She tapped the side of her head with one finger. "I figured out how to toggle it. Keeps the strain down."
"Good," Kimimaro said at once.
She smiled faintly. "It's still strange. It's natural energy, but not the way sages sense it. I'm not feeling it through my body. I'm seeing it. Flow, density, distortions. Like the world forgot to hide it from me."
Kimimaro's gaze sharpened with interest. "That's better than sensing in terms of pure awareness, obviously."
Emi blinked. "It is?"
"Yes, if you can learn to integrate that into your current Eighty Gods Vacuum Attack," he said evenly, "you'll stop fighting on a Hyūga scale entirely. That level of compression, guided by visible natural energy, would be colossal."
She paused.
"Colossal how?"
"Most Susanoo wouldn't hold, for example," Kimimaro replied without hesitation. "Not even Akane's current one."
For a heartbeat, Emi just stared at him.
Then her grin broke wide and unguarded. "You're serious."
"When did I joke that much?" he said.
She laughed quietly, clearly pleased, shoulders lifting just a little. "Wow. Guess I'll have to work harder then. Wouldn't want to disappoint you after putting me above an Uchiha avatar."
Kimimaro returned his attention to the table, voice dry. "I wouldn't have said it if it wasn't already within reach."
Her smile lingered longer than it needed to.
Kimimaro wasn't exaggerating.
Emi would never become a Sage Mode user, no matter how refined her control grew.
Her physique simply wasn't built to internalize natural energy safely.
But this path, this way of using it without becoming its container, was something else entirely.
If developed properly, she could wield natural energy externally with even more precision than those ancient monks and samurai Konoha relied.
There was more to it than vision alone.
Standard Hyūga Rotation barely extended a few meters, even at Hiashi's level.
Emi had already shattered that limitation.
First, by perfecting it.
Then by layering Wind Release into the rotation itself, turning it from a defensive dome into a cutting storm.
Its sharpness, force, and reach had expanded into the dozens of meters.
After her eyes evolved, she added that strange Byakugan pressure on top of it, giving it density rather than mere spread.
If she focused purely on force now, fifty meters was already possible.
However, this wasn't some wide, dispersive technique like a "Majestic Flame Destroyer", for example, with one of the largest areas of effect.
It was omnidirectional. Compressed. Shredding.
If natural energy could be folded into that structure carefully, deliberately, then hundreds of meters were no longer unthinkable.
A true calamity.
But these wouldn't be techniques for prolonged combat.
They would be decisive moves, used sparingly, only when the moment demanded it.
Final attacks.
And once she reached that stage soon, there would be no doubt left in his assessment.
Emi would stand firmly within the Quasi–Six Paths realm even more decisively.
For a moment, the thought simply settled.
Then Emi tilted her head slightly, eyes unfocusing as if she were watching something only she could see.
"…You know," she said slowly, tone drifting somewhere between curiosity and excitement, "if I can already see the flow of natural energy like this…"
Kimimaro glanced at her.
She straightened, momentum clearly building. "I mean, I'm already shaping it outside my body, not internally like a sage. Throw Polarity Release or even just Wind Release into that, and… staying on the ground starts to feel optional for me."
He paused.
Emi's eyes lit up, hands lifted unconsciously, fingers spreading as if feeling invisible currents. "I mean, if I let the wind do the lifting, and use pressure to stabilize myself instead of pushing against the ground…"
Her mouth curved upward, unmistakably pleased with the idea forming in her own head.
"I could fly."
Kimimaro stared at her.
Not disbelief.
Surprise.
"…Huh," he said after a beat.
She turned to him immediately, eyes shining. "Right? And from above, I wouldn't even need to throw the Eighty Gods Vacuum Attacks forward anymore. Just drop them. Compress them downward. Let gravity and pressure do half the work."
There was a brief silence.
Then Kimimaro exhaled softly, something close to a quiet laugh escaping him. "I was going to suggest it eventually."
Emi grinned, smug now. "Too slow."
"You'd be harder to hit," he admitted. "And terrifying."
"That's the goal."
He studied her for another second, reassessing. "If you manage that, most battlefield control techniques become irrelevant."
She clasped her hands behind her head, rocking back on her heels. "So I get to fly, punch people from the sky with giant invisible fists, and make everyone below question their life choices."
"…Try not to enjoy it too much," he said dryly.
"No promises," Emi replied instantly, smile wide and unapologetic.
Kimimaro looked away, but there was clear approval in his voice. "Just don't rush it. External natural energy also isn't forgiving."
"I know," she said, still smiling. "That's what makes it fun."
He shook his head once, amused despite himself.
Yes.
This path suited her perfectly.
Eventually, she might never truly cross into Low Six Paths territory.
Just like Saya, just like Reika, their ceilings were still there, locked at the Quasi tier within the ranking model he had long since constructed for himself.
Firm.
Unforgiving.
A hard boundary drawn not by talent or ambition, but by the deeper architecture of blood, body, and spirit.
Perhaps only Akane would one day truly step onto the same level he occupied now, assuming the Hashirama cell graft reached full mastery, much like Obito could.
After all, the Uchiha, especially ones burdened with conceptual hax-like abilities of that caliber, had always possessed that kind of potential, brutal, unstable, but real.
And yet.
Kimimaro hadn't expected this.
Not from Emi.
Not because she lacked intelligence or ambition, far from it, but because this was usually his role.
He was the one who connected dots, who translated abstract power into concrete shinobi utility.
Emi was the genius of execution, refinement, and science. He brought the ideas, she made them real.
And this time, she had reached the idea first.
Despite having never studied the theory behind natural energy in depth, the way he had in the past, and only stumbling onto it almost by accident recently.
That, more than anything, caught him off guard.
Flight.
Not a flashy trick.
Not symbolism.
A structural advantage.
The shinobi world was still fundamentally grounded.
Ninety-nine percent of combat doctrine assumed terrain, footing, angles measured in meters, not altitude.
Even the strongest techniques were designed around lines of sight, arcs, cover, and gravity being immutable.
Remove that assumption, and the entire battlefield warped.
From above, most defenses lost meaning.
Walls, formations, terrain advantages, and even many large-scale techniques became clumsy or misaligned.
And for Emi in particular, the compatibility was almost absurd.
Her Gentle Fist fused with Polarity Release, or even with Wind Release alone, already gave her lift, vector control, sustained three-dimensional movement, and real offensive reach.
Add externalized natural energy as the fuel she had been missing all along, layered through her evolved pressure manipulation and various Gentle Fist constructs, and the air itself ceased to resist her at all.
It became just a medium.
She wouldn't merely move across the battlefield anymore.
She would dominate it from above.
Giant vacuum fists crashing down from the sky.
Rotational pressure fields pressing vertically, not outward.
Enemies pinned not by a single technique, but by the environment itself turning hostile.
Escape paths crushed before they formed.
Formations flattened under invisible weight.
Perfect for breaking armies, not duels.
Hundreds or more at once, not one opponent at a time.
It was the complete inversion of traditional Hyūga combat.
Not precision within reach.
Overwhelming control of space.
This wasn't refining the style anymore.
It was transcending it.
A battlefield god's vantage point.
Kimimaro exhaled slowly, a faint, almost amused disbelief settling in his chest.
He hadn't overlooked this because it was complex.
He had overlooked it because it was obvious in the wrong way.
Too clean. Too cinematic. Too… main-character.
Yet precisely for that reason...
Emi, meanwhile, was practically vibrating with restrained excitement, eyes bright, posture animated in a way that had nothing to do with science and everything to do with imagination.