However, he just set another container on the table eventually. "Begin trial eight."
She straightened, breath steady, expression composed, from their previous topic. "Ready."
"I really am the best assistant, and I don't know what you would have done without me..." Emi added smugly. "Though at this point, I think you're using me to replace half the machinery."
"That's because your Byakugan provides superior data."
"See?" she said, flashing a grin. "You do appreciate me."
He didn't answer.
She returned to the sample with renewed focus.
"When you first 'kidnapped' me," Emi said, her tone light but edged with memory, "I honestly thought you were going to use me. Or break me. That's what everyone else ever wanted."
She swept her hand toward the lab — the instruments, the notes, the possibilities.
"I didn't expect… this. A path that actually makes sense. Something real. A purpose. A future that isn't a cage pretending to be duty or false promises."
Kimimaro watched her hands as she worked — steady, precise, determined.
"You have and will build that future yourself," he said. "Not me."
"Maybe," she whispered, "but you gave me the direction and peace. Breathing space."
A quiet moment passed before she added with a faint smile,
"And the tools. And the books. And this entire hideout alongside this laboratory of ours."
Kimimaro set down his pen, glancing at her with that calm, unreadable look he always wore right before aiming a remark precisely where it would land.
"If you really want to repay me," he said, "then hurry up and get stronger. Akane's Sharingan just pushed her a step ahead to some extent, which means you're back at the bottom again."
He delivered it so evenly it sounded like a clinical assessment, but the faint tilt of his head made it unmistakably teasing.
Emi froze mid-movement.
Then her expression snapped into something between outrage and disbelief.
"The bottom?" she repeated, hand flying to her chest. "Me? You dare put me below Saya when she still thinks microscopes run on anger?"
Kimimaro did not deny it.
Emi jabbed a finger at him. "Fine. Watch me. I'll evolve my eyes so fast Akane won't even know what side she's standing on."
She leaned in closer, eyes narrowing with dramatic intensity.
"And when that happens, I expect you to update your little ranking chart."
"I don't have a ranking chart," Kimimaro replied.
"You do," Emi declared, "and I know I'm not allowed to see it."
He said nothing. Which, of course, only confirmed it for her.
She turned back to the sample with renewed determination.
Actually, internally, Kimimaro was already nothing short of astonished by Emi's progress.
Of all four, her growth had surprised him the most, not only because she started the weakest, but also because she began with the heaviest chains.
Her dōjutsu potential had been strangled from birth.
Not only by that ceremonial blind spot, that the skilled Hyūga side branch members could use to bait uneducated enemies, actually…
But by the full suppression enforced by the Caged Bird Seal.
A seal designed by ancient Hyūga precisely to keep their own people small.
A seal built to mute bloodline talent, limit ocular evolution, and funnel all brilliance into the Main Branch.
It should have crippled her.
It did cripple her — for years.
And yet, somehow…
She laid all the right steps.
Through sheer stubbornness, through the kind of tenacity only someone deeply unwilling to accept their assigned fate could possess…
She tore holes in that suppression.
Before he ever met her, while still trapped in Konoha, she had awakened that microscopic Byakugan sub-vision, an ability no side-branch member should have been capable of reaching.
She had developed that real-time self-healing Gentle Fist, reverse-engineering medical chakra instinctively.
She had pushed her spiritual sensitivity so far that she began brushing the edges of Yin Release.
It was nothing short of miraculous.
And after she joined him, with his tailored guidance, guidance shaped by that uncanny depth of insight he carried, thanks to him being a knowledgeable transmigrator, no other shinobi had, and by his intelligence, she advanced even faster and beyond all of his wild estimates.
She already learned, to some extent, to fuse her dual chakra affinities, wind and lightning, which was actually extremely rare in itself, into her Gentle Fist forms, and was working on fusing them next as well.
She also partially mastered Yin-based gen-taijutsu variants, which he recommended back there. Same with her deepening her Yang Release to parasitic overgrowth techniques, using Gentle Fist not to heal, but to force tumors of raw chakra into an enemy's targeted areas, external or even internal.
And the cursed seal, the single greatest weight that had dragged down her potential…
She hadn't escaped it yet, not completely, the mark still clung to her forehead like a lingering shadow, but she had broken its most crippling chains.
The bloodline suppression, the forced limitation of her ocular potential, the constant dampening of her growth… all of that had been torn apart at least.
So, what once passively and quietly strangled her power now barely held her back at all.
Because Kimimaro had taken the very chakra signature that would have killed her, the remote activation pulse meant to destroy her mind, and captured it each time it flared with those passive seals he and Ashina made.
Then, those fragmented energy signals, sealed inadvertently during their early encounters, he later refined and finally stabilized piece by piece as his scientific literacy expanded.
Bit by bit, with new instruments, better theory, and Emi's own growing precision, he purified it. Not as an attack, but as fuel.
Gradually, safely, he wove that refined essence back into her eyes and chakra system, turning what once threatened her life, from outside, into a quiet, steady vitality boost.
Instead of devouring her, it now ironically harmonized with her.
A gamble, but it had worked.
And the strangest part?
It had stabilized perfectly.
As if it had always belonged to her.
As if that energy had always been a part of the Byakugan itself, somehow, for some reason, only twisted into a tool of control…
That breakthrough unlocked something inside her.
Her instincts finally aligned with her lineage.
She began reproducing advanced Hyūga techniques she had never been taught.
It was as if she were instinctively reclaiming something that had always belonged to her, filling in the gaps left by incomplete Hyūga training and a lifetime of suppression.
Perfect Rotation. True 128 Palms. One by one, she reclaimed them all.
Now, even her own advanced Vacuum Palms in multiple elemental and chakra-altered forms.
So now, in Kimimaro's mental map, Emi finally stood at Quasi-Kage level, right beside Reika, Saya, and, after today, probably Akane as well, with her newly evolved, strongest three-tomoe variant they had forced into existence.
All of them had grown in the standard ways that came naturally with age, stronger bodies, deeper spiritual wells, larger chakra reserves, sharper control. But beyond that, each of them had carved their own path upward, to an extent.
Reika's strength came from her ever-expanding arsenal of ever more advanced Ice Release techniques and that steadily swelling Yin Seal she nurtured in silence, day after day, the mark of someone who accumulated power the way glaciers formed, slow and terrifying.
Saya's came from the refined and improved Chinoike techniques that Kimimaro and Ashina reconstructed for her, expanding her clan's butchered inheritance into something worthy of legend.
She also trained her Ketsuryūgan relentlessly with the tailored Yin–Yang drills Kimimaro had designed specifically for her eyes, exercises he had likewise given to Akane and Emi, each calibrated to their own dōjutsu to train in their free time.
All Yin for the Sharingan.
Still mostly Yin with a touch of Yang for the Byakugan.
And an even fifty–fifty split for the Ketsuryūgan.
Akane was now on the cusp of her true awakening, her Sharingan deepened in a way no natural growth curve could account for.
And as for Kimimaro himself…
As this strange little cult's patriarch and spine, he had to remain the strongest, even if only by a narrow margin.
Even if just symbolically.
He could also feel it already in his bones, literally and figuratively, that quiet shift upward.
He had stepped into 'Low Kage' level territory, at least in the way he measured such things.
And he had no intention of stopping there.