The moment Hikaru opened his eyes, he realized something unexpected—
nothing seemed to have changed at all.
The world was still filled with color. There was no strange overlay of red and black, no stark realm of black and white woven together.
At the sight of that, Hikaru finally let out a quiet breath of relief.
That meant his eyes hadn't gone wrong.
They were still his own eyes.
Especially after he took out a kunai and angled it to catch the moonlight, using the reflected surface as a makeshift mirror, he became completely certain—
there was no obvious outward change to his eyes at all.
"So I only inherited the power, but the eyes themselves didn't visibly change?"
Hikaru thought to himself as he slowly, somewhat stiffly, rose to his feet.
He had been sitting here from morning until night. Only because he was a shinobi with an absurdly strong physique could he stand up so casually now. If it were an ordinary person, sitting that long would probably have left them in serious trouble.
Chakra surged quickly through his body, easing the discomfort in his limbs and restoring vitality to his frame.
But he did not leave.
Instead, he remained standing where he was, staring at the kunai in his hand as if it were a mirror.
Though his eyes showed no visible transformation, he could clearly feel the immense power sleeping within them.
It contained that same destructive force he had sensed before.
Only now, it was astonishingly obedient.
Those powers rested silently inside his eyes, with no sign of unrest.
And as if it were instinctive—like something born with him—Hikaru found that he seemed to know how to control these eyes.
More strangely still, he also seemed to vaguely understand what kind of abilities they possessed.
"But if I want to fully understand them, I'll have to activate them first…"
He took a slow breath.
As a Senju, he had never imagined he would one day possess an ocular power.
Yet fate seemed to be playing a joke on him. With the aid of his system, he had really obtained something that should never have belonged to a Senju.
The trouble was, this leap was far too large.
If he was going to reference someone, it should have been someone like Uchiha Madara.
Madara had shattered the thousand-year divide between Indra and Asura, fusing their powers together to create all things.
That path might not have suited Hikaru, but no matter what, Hikaru at least understood the Sharingan.
He even knew where one could eventually obtain an Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan in the future.
And yet instead of gaining the power of the Sharingan—
he had somehow acquired a pair of eyes that had evolved from the Byakugan into something he couldn't even identify.
The excitement of first obtaining them had already begun to cool, leaving behind a faint sense of confusion.
"When I first took Ao's Byakugan… wasn't I planning to see if I could extract the Ōtsutsuki-related power hidden inside it?"
Hikaru tried to recall what his original intention had been after killing Ao and obtaining that eye.
But too much time had passed.
He had nearly forgotten.
And after suddenly gaining an entirely new pair of eyes, he had become even more swept up by the result.
Still, things had already reached this point.
There was nothing worth complaining about.
If anything, he hadn't lost out at all.
Taking a deep breath, Hikaru suppressed the restless excitement in his heart.
He intended to test these eyes properly.
Following the instinctive information fed back to him after obtaining them, he slowly guided his chakra.
This was the first time he would activate these eyes.
He had to be careful.
Cautiously, he directed chakra into them.
The instant he did, the power sleeping in his eyes awakened.
That destructive energy began to stir once more—but his eyes themselves seemed to form a prison around it, keeping it from running wild.
Then, as more chakra flowed in, Hikaru suddenly realized his vision had changed.
The world itself was still colorful, just as before.
But now he found he could see unbelievably far.
"And if I want…"
He murmured to himself.
His gaze fixed on a Konoha shinobi squad moving in the distance.
It was obvious they had just completed a mission and were on their way back to the village.
Within Hikaru's sight, he could clearly see the fluctuations of chakra inside their bodies.
What was even more interesting was that the chakra did not appear as a single blue tone.
Each shinobi's chakra showed different colors.
"These are… chakra attributes?"
Hikaru grasped it almost immediately.
If he looked carefully, the colors were vivid and layered. Combined with his experience cultivating seeds and harvesting their fruits, it wasn't hard to guess that the different colors corresponded to different chakra natures.
"My field of vision can stretch extremely far, and I can see the state of chakra itself. That part resembles the Byakugan."
"But distinguishing chakra attributes… that doesn't seem like a standard Byakugan ability."
"And beyond that, these eyes don't seem to possess copying abilities, genjutsu projection, or the extreme level of insight the Sharingan has."
"So this probably doesn't have much to do with the Sharingan after all."
In Hikaru's understanding, the greatest strength of the Sharingan was never merely copying techniques or casting genjutsu.
Those were powerful, certainly.
But in real combat, its true terror lay in its overwhelming insight.
That near-supernatural dynamic vision—the ability to instantly read the enemy's method of attack, direction, intent—
in the high-intensity world of shinobi combat, where death could come in the next second, it was unbelievably effective.
Hikaru did not possess that sort of insight.
His combat style had never been elegant.
He couldn't instantly dissect an enemy's weakness and finish them off in one clean stroke.
What his sensory ability gave him was location, approximate movement, and the general shape of an incoming attack.
Even with only that, his performance in Sunagakure and Kirigakure had already made him seem like a monster.
Just look at Uchiha Madara, the man who pushed the Sharingan to its peak.
Facing thousands of shinobi, he moved like a butterfly weaving through flowers—graceful, merciless, beautiful, and deadly all at once.
That kind of thing simply couldn't be envied into existence.
If you didn't have it, you didn't have it.
Still, Hikaru wasn't disappointed.
Who said explosive, overwhelming power couldn't beat Madara?
Just look at Naruto.
Or Guy.
Wasn't the Eight Gates—something all but suicidal in nature—also a state of extreme explosive output?
"Besides, I have Nine-Tails Chakra Mode and Sage Mode. Those are both burst-type states too."
As Hikaru thought that, he withdrew his gaze from the returning Konoha shinobi and lowered it to the kunai in his hand.
"Hm?"
The moment his eyes landed on the mirrored surface, even though he had already prepared himself mentally, he still froze.
Because his irises had changed.
They had turned a pale blue.
And within those blue pupils, threads of light shimmered faintly.
He had seen eyes like this before—
in the anime.
Naruto's son, Boruto.
The so-called divine Eye.
Hikaru didn't actually know what kind of eye the divine Eye truly was.
But if he had to make a serious guess, then it probably belonged to some mutated branch of the Byakugan.
After all, Boruto's mother was Hinata.
As the possessor of one of the purest Byakugan bloodlines, Hinata might not have displayed overwhelming battle strength, but there was no questioning her bloodline or talent.
A child born from Naruto, inheritor of Asura's chakra, and Hinata, the princess of the Byakugan—
if that child didn't turn out special, that would have been stranger.
The emergence of the divine Eye was perhaps the clearest evidence of that.
But Hikaru didn't actually know what the divine Eye's abilities were.
He hadn't paid much attention to Boruto in the first place.
The only thing he clearly remembered was what the eye looked like.
"Could mine really be the divine Eye?"
He couldn't help but think in that direction.
Naruto was the inheritor of Asura's chakra.
Hikaru, meanwhile, had directly obtained a fragment of Asura's power.
If that force fused with the Byakugan's power and produced something like the divine Eye, it didn't actually seem impossible.
But there was still one major difference.
If he remembered correctly, the sclera of the divine Eye seemed darker—so dark that if you didn't look closely, it almost resembled the aftereffects of Impure World Reincarnation.
Hikaru's sclera, however, remained completely white.
Normal.
The only visible change was in the pupils.
And if one looked closely…
there was even a trace of the Tenseigan in them.
"Though the Tenseigan has a black center in the pupil, while mine is still pale blue. So they're clearly not the same."
Quickly, Hikaru compared his new eyes to the divine Eye and Tenseigan from memory.
The conclusion was both encouraging and frustrating.
The good news was that these eyes clearly weren't simple.
Especially because, after activating them, more information had begun surfacing in his mind—
including details about their unique abilities.
That part genuinely pleased him.
The frustrating part was that the eyes seemed to resemble the divine Eye in some ways and the Tenseigan in others.
That made things troublesome.
Because it meant Hikaru had no reference point whatsoever for how to improve them.
It was exactly like the Bloodline Limit combination he had fused before.
Since there was no existing framework or record to follow, he had no choice but to research and develop it on his own.
"One headache after another. Did the system know I was planning to build a lab and start researching jutsu, so it deliberately dumped a pair of impossible eyes on me?"
He couldn't help grumbling inwardly.
Of course, it was only a complaint.
The system had no real self-awareness, and almost certainly no logic engine of that sort.
What he received from it was, bluntly speaking, just luck of the draw.
Whether he was blessed or cursed by fortune would only be known from future results.
Still, at least for now, he counted himself lucky.
Especially after he finished digesting the information on these eyes completely.
The data matched his earlier guesses fairly closely, though what he had deduced before was only the most superficial layer.
Before being fully activated, the eyes functioned like a weakened fusion of the Byakugan and the Sharingan.
Insight remained.
Long-range vision remained.
But neither had reached their peak.
Only after fully activating them would the real power of these eyes bloom.
For example, once fully activated, they could grant him a state of super-insight.
As for what level that state actually reached, Hikaru found that rather irritatingly vague.
According to the system, he would be able to see anything he wished to see.
And that was all the explanation it provided.
It was infuriatingly consistent with the system's usual behavior.
It never explained anything clearly.
You were always expected to figure the rest out yourself.
Fortunately, Hikaru had long grown used to that.
He believed actual combat would reveal what he needed to know.
And right now, his main interest was not this so-called super-insight state.
What truly captured his attention was another ability that belonged to these eyes.
A chakra mode unique to them.
Hikaru genuinely had not expected these eyes to possess a chakra mode.
Even more surprisingly, from the information he received, these eyes had four stages in total, with each stage possessing its own unique abilities.
At present, he was only at the initial stage.
He hadn't even reached the true "first stage" yet.
And yet even now, he could already enter a chakra mode.
That alone was enough to show just how great the potential of these eyes was.
"Though at my current stage, the amplification and duration probably won't be very impressive. After all, this is still only the initial form."
Power always grew step by step.
That much Hikaru already understood, so he didn't complain too much.
Besides, he noticed that he really did have an absurd affinity with chakra modes.
Sage Mode counted as a kind of chakra mode.
Nine-Tails Chakra Mode obviously did as well.
And now he had obtained another one.
Did that count as the convergence of three flowers at the crown?
Feeling that destructive power jumping restlessly inside his eyes, Hikaru slowly calmed himself.
That force was probably the key to building this chakra mode.
And the sheer quality of that power truly made even him feel a chill.
Taking a deep breath, he gradually shut down the activated state of his eyes.
Then he turned his gaze toward the other trees.
Tonight really was a night of harvest.
These new eyes were already an enormous reward.
But it wasn't over yet.
After all, he had planted more than just that.
He was still very curious what Kimimaro's bone—the product of Dead Bone Pulse—would yield.
And beyond that, he had also planted the Three-Tails' power.
Thinking that, Hikaru started walking toward the other trees.
"What exactly are you trying to do, Shin?!"
Inside a room in the Uchiha compound, Uchiha Shin stood there with a calm expression, looking at several men around his age.
No matter what, they still couldn't forget what had happened several hours earlier.
They had been gathered together, discussing plans, when Saya's father suddenly led people in a surprise strike against them.
The operation had been clean and decisive.
And Saya's father himself was frighteningly strong.
On top of that, they had already cleared the surrounding area themselves, which meant no one noticed when the lightly guarded group was completely subdued.
Looking at the fury on their faces and the disbelief in their eyes, Shin sighed inwardly.
These men had once been his comrades.
More than that—
they had been his friends.
They had known each other since childhood.
They had once held similar beliefs.
Once walked toward common goals.
And yet now things had come to this.
It might not yet be open bloodshed, but it was already close enough.
Shin could feel it clearly.
Whatever friendship remained between them had shattered completely tonight.
He was in pain too.
But no matter how much it hurt, he had to endure it.
He had to harden his heart and face everything coldly.
From the moment he accepted Hikaru's proposal, he had known this day would come sooner or later.
The path he had chosen could only be walked together with those who understood and supported it.
No matter how close their relationship once was, if they could not understand, then in the end they could only become strangers.
Or even enemies standing with blades drawn against one another.
"What I'm doing is naturally for the sake of this clan."
Shin looked calmly at his old friends and spoke slowly.
"The clan has already reached a critical point of life and death. It may not look obvious now, but I can tell you this with certainty—we've already been targeted."
"So what?!"
One of the Uchiha elders glared at him angrily.
"That still doesn't justify betraying the clan, let alone turning against the Clan Head!"
"You arrest us today to clear away obstacles for yourself. Then what? Tomorrow, will you start killing anyone else who opposes you?"
Another elder roared in rage, his eyes practically blazing.
"I will never approve of this. You're already planning to move against the Clan Head too, aren't you?"
"Perhaps. Or perhaps not. Who can say what the future holds?"
Shin neither admitted it nor denied it.
That answer sent a chill through the elders in the room.
They truly couldn't understand why Shin had changed into this.
He kept saying it was for the clan.
But was there really any need to go this far for the clan?
They acknowledged one thing:
Shin's reforms within the Police Force had indeed been effective.
But the price of those reforms had been the interests of their own clansmen.
And while his words—Is the Police Force Konoha's Police Force, or the Uchiha's private guard?—had once struck deeply at the heart of the issue…
they still didn't know what sort of danger the clan was truly facing.
Without knowing that, they could neither accept nor support Shin's drastic course of action.
"Shin… things have already reached this point. Can't you at least tell us what's really going on?"
One of the elders could no longer endure the uncertainty.
He truly thought Shin had gone mad.
But the trust built over years of knowing him told him things could not be that simple.
He wanted to understand why it had all come to this.
And just as he said—
they were already fully restrained.
They posed no threat anymore.
No matter how unwilling they were, there was nothing they could do.
The room was covered in restrictions, their chakra sealed. Escaping was little more than a fool's dream.
"...Sigh."
Shin let out a deep breath.
Then he looked at them and spoke slowly.
"Now that things have reached this point, I can tell you some of it."
"Whether you understand or not, you will not be leaving this room until I finish what I must do."
"And to explain all this… I have to start from over a year ago, when I first intended to send Shisui into ANBU…"
Saya's father clutched his chest as he lay on the ground to the side, his gaze complicated as he watched the two figures clashing ahead.
With the warning his father, Uchiha Shin, had given him, he already knew that beside the First Elder stood a man like an Asura, silently protecting him.
How strong that man really was, Saya's father had never clearly understood.
After all, he himself was one of the few within the clan to possess the three-tomoe Sharingan.
And he had gone to war.
Even if others had protected him along the way, he had still witnessed the cruelty of the battlefield and fought with his own life on the line.
But only now—when he led his own men and the accompanying ANBU operatives to eliminate the First Elder—did he finally understand something.
Even among those who possessed the three-tomoe Sharingan, the gap between them could still be suffocating.
Everything had gone smoothly before this.
They had silently eliminated guards along the way without alerting a single person.
But the moment they moved to seize the target, that man appeared.
And only then did Saya's father feel a disparity unlike anything he had known before.
That man, dressed all in black and wearing a bizarre mask, moved like a ghost. His mastery over the Sharingan crushed Saya's father so completely that there was almost no room to resist.
It was the first time he had ever seen someone use the Sharingan so flawlessly—genjutsu, taijutsu, and ninjutsu woven together into one seamless whole.
But who exactly was this man?
How could someone this terrifying remain completely unknown?
That question echoed constantly in his mind.
At this moment, he had already been defeated.
Watching the figure slowly approach, Saya's father gritted his teeth and prepared to make a final desperate stand—
but at that very moment, an ANBU shinobi suddenly appeared.
He looked young.
Silver-haired.
And in his hand he held a short ninja blade.
For a moment, Saya's father froze.
Because this appearance felt strangely familiar.
He had seen something similar nearly ten years ago.
"He looks so familiar… a little like the White Fang."
The thought flashed through his mind, though it did nothing to lessen his worry.
"So young, and already a minister? But the enemy he's facing is no ordinary opponent. This may end badly…"
He truly did not believe this young ANBU minister could defeat that Asura-like man.
After all, that was the power of the Uchiha.
Such strength was not something an ordinary minister could casually handle.
As an Uchiha himself, his feelings were painfully conflicted.
Part of him wanted the minister to win.
And yet another part of him deeply believed in the supremacy of Uchiha power.
Caught in that contradiction, his expression slowly changed.
"This kid… how is that possible?"
"So ANBU really has come. As expected—everything happening tonight has Konoha's shadow behind it."
Within the Uchiha compound, the First Elder spoke coldly while other Police Force shinobi kept him from leaving.
The moment Kakashi appeared in his mask, the old man understood something.
What had happened tonight had gone far beyond his expectations.
He truly had not imagined that Uchiha Shin would actually dare to move against his fellow clansmen.
That decisiveness was remarkable.
And for the current Uchiha, that kind of decisiveness was precisely what they lacked.
But when such decisiveness appeared in the hands of a political enemy, it became something else entirely.
The First Elder had long wondered why Shin's personality had changed.
After investigating, he discovered that Shin had sent quite a few clansmen into ANBU—among them the clan's little prodigy, Uchiha Shisui.
That alone revealed enormous implications.
It meant Shin had most likely already forged a full connection with Konoha.
Reality seemed to confirm it.
Shin's changes were obvious.
He had grown more confident.
More forceful.
And everything he did had gradually tilted toward Konoha.
He had even begun openly confronting Clan Head Uchiha Fugaku.
As for Fugaku, the First Elder had never thought much of him either.
Indecisive in action, hesitant in judgment, lacking the firmness a clan leader should possess—
always thinking only of how to balance internal factions rather than make a clear choice.
If the clan were in a peaceful era, such a person would have made an acceptable leader.
But now the clan's situation was plain for anyone to see, and even so he still would not make a decision.
That was what truly disappointed him.
Still, disappointment was one thing.
Fugaku was still Clan Head.
And so the First Elder still had to respect him.
Especially now, when Shin had already forced Fugaku closer to their camp.
Kakashi didn't answer.
His gaze remained fixed, heavy and focused, on the masked man who stood like a blood-soaked Asura.
He didn't know the full truth of what had happened within the Uchiha.
Hikaru had never explained much.
But after arriving, Kakashi could roughly guess what this was—
a civil struggle within the Uchiha clan.
And Hikaru's hand was likely somewhere inside it.
He did not want to be involved in such a matter.
But it was Hikaru's order.
And so he would obey.
At most, after it was over, he would return and demand a proper explanation.
Kakashi stood there without moving.
But the crimson Sharingan in his exposed eye had already begun to rotate slowly.
Clang!
In an instant, he spun around.
His ninja blade flew from its sheath, wrapped in crackling blue chakra, and intercepted another blade coming from behind him.
The shrill cry of metal rang through the open courtyard.
Kakashi narrowed his right eye slightly, the red tomoe in the Sharingan spinning rapidly.
At that same moment, another swordsman-like figure appeared behind him in eerie silence, while the man in front of him pressed harder.
There was nowhere to retreat.
The blade from behind thrust forward without hesitation and pierced straight into Kakashi's body—
yet the Asura-like man immediately leapt away to the side the moment he saw it.
In the next instant, Kakashi burst up from the earth below, his ninja blade slashing viciously toward the masked man.
"A clone technique?" the man said after evading Kakashi's strike. His voice was calm. "Not bad. You actually saw through my trick. Was it that eye?"
"This is Obito's eye."
Kakashi held his blade steady. After a brief silence, he finally replied.
"My name is Uchiha Tatsumi. Remember it."
The man who looked like an Asura—Uchiha Tatsumi—spoke in an utterly level tone.
"For an outsider to wield the Sharingan this well is impressive. But that eye still belongs to the Uchiha."
"Then prove you can take it," Kakashi replied.
His gaze turned cold.
The chakra in his body began surging like a storm.
The next second, he lunged forward.
Electric arcs began dancing over his body.
His blade carved through the air, and in a flash of lightning-fast motion, it had already swept across Tatsumi's throat.
But Tatsumi's reaction speed was terrifying.
With a slight forward lean, he avoided the cut, and his own blade whipped toward Kakashi in return.
For a time, the courtyard was filled with the endless clash of steel.
The speed the two men displayed was almost impossible to follow with the naked eye.
They were like twin streaks of light colliding again and again, their battle skill and predictive timing so refined that simply watching them made one dizzy.
Saya's father sat frozen on the ground.
He had never imagined that such a young ANBU minister would possess this level of strength.
Right now, only one thought filled his mind:
How in the world had this kid trained himself to this point?
By now, he already knew exactly who this ANBU minister was.
After all, in all of Konoha, there was only one outsider who possessed an Uchiha eye.
And then suddenly—
the two figures who had been clashing nonstop broke apart.
Both looked uninjured, as though everything just now had been an illusion.
Kakashi adjusted his grip on the blade in his hand.
Then he rushed forward again.
This time, Tatsumi did not advance to meet him.
He stayed where he was and rapidly formed hand seals.
"Fire Release: Great Fireball Technique!"
Kakashi gave a cold snort.
His steps paused for the briefest moment, and then he leapt sharply to the side.
But just then, a warning exploded in his instincts.
His body reacted instantly.
With a light touch of his foot against the ground, he drifted several meters diagonally forward.
At the exact same moment, a kunai tore through the air and sliced past the edge of his clothes.
Kakashi didn't even need to look.
He already knew his outfit had definitely been cut open.
And the instant he landed, Tatsumi was already at his side.
The blade in Tatsumi's hand slashed mercilessly toward Kakashi's throat—
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