Barely a month had passed. It was June first. The dōjutsu project still wasn't finished, and right now I was "resting" with Sakura. More accurately, only I was resting—and even that was conditional—while she was huffing and puffing for real.
Because we were sparring.
At Team Seven's training ground, our silhouettes blurred whenever we closed into close quarters. We circled each other, bent at angles normal shinobi simply couldn't manage, and under the nonstop dull thud of strikes and parries, we waited for the other to slip.
The pace was such that an elite jōnin would have no business here. Only a certain Noble Beast—and even then, only after opening two or three Gates—could've brought anything to the table against us in taijutsu.
The ground under our feet bucked with every fleeting collision, kicking up a light earthquake that carried for hundreds of meters.
Finally, when she split her attention on my layered feint—which turned into a sweep—I followed immediately, packing a solid amount of chakra into my fist and letting her reflexively close up behind a hard block…
…and drove a brutal uppercut from below.
Boom.
"Went low," I commented as Sakura flew a good twenty meters toward the stream, then tipped my head up at the sky. "Probably means rain."
Then, wasting no time, I went after her.
I was trying to keep myself around her level. But with my stronger… well, everything, I still held the advantage. Even my thoughts just moved faster.
When I got near the stream, I had to juke sideways hard; a wide pillar of water was surging at me.
It was Water Release: Water Wall, used a little differently than most people did.
Once my feet hit the water's surface, I had to spin even sharper to weave between the tentacles bursting up from below—another Water Release technique with the same vibe.
"Water Release: Water Dragon Bullet Technique!" Sakura's voice carried through the hiss of water slicing the air.
While I dodged, she—having fully seized the initiative—finished the sequence with a third B-rank jutsu.
From the exact spot I was "supposed" to move into, straight out of the water, a massive maw lunged up fast as a shell fired from the depths.
But playing the momentum, I slipped past it easily.
My own costs were minimal: basic body reinforcement, expert use of the wall-walking technique to "hook" and snap-change my movement vectors, plus Water Walking—well, to walk on water.
Sakura knew she couldn't just take me head-on, so she simply kept the chain going. Water cutters flew at me right away; I leaned away from a few and noted they'd gotten too slow.
She was tired.
So, still dodging, I just raised a hand.
"Enough," I said, and soon the attacks stopped.
As I walked closer, Sakura came into view—soaked, breathing deep from exhaustion, her hair stuck to her face over one eye. When I reached her, I gently tucked the loose strands behind her ear.
"You did well today."
"Thanks… Haah…" She flushed a little at the gesture and exhaled, tired but relieved. "I'm glad to follow you, sensei…"
My face twitched at the title. Not often, but it slipped out of her sometimes. Lately, we'd gotten pretty close. Those rare little "sensei"s short-circuited me because they felt way too formal for how close we were now.
"You're picking up Water techniques on the fly. You've got an obvious, massive affinity for it," I hummed, satisfied. "I think by twenty you'll surpass Hashirama."
"What?" She jerked up, startled. "No way, haha. The First-sama had insane chakra reserves… like you. I'm nowhere near that. Naruto, thanks, but you—"
"I'm not exaggerating. Yeah, I boosted your chakra, but it's been growing on its own, too. In a month—noticeably. In seven years, your progress will be monstrous."
A whole spectrum of emotions flashed across her face. Then, overflowing with gratitude and loyalty, she thumped a fist into her palm and bowed toward me.
I rolled my eyes.
Not exactly "samurai," but whatever, I thought, turning slightly aside. "We'll focus on Water Release. Konoha's vaults still have a lot of techniques stashed away. For now—want to go eat?"
Sakura lifted her head. The gratitude in her eyes was replaced by hunger. She nodded eagerly, and we left.
Hunger in the bodies I'd improved only hits when chakra is running low. Eating isn't strictly necessary in those cases, but if you do, the conversion speeds up chakra recovery.
We had sparred for about ten minutes. Sakura used not only those techniques but over two dozen more before our last close-range clash. So yeah—no surprise she gassed out.
But those ten minutes were great. Sakura always fought with her head, trying to herd me into traps. There was still a serious gap between us in raw power, but when I sparred with her, I couldn't fully relax—either I was actively evading, or I was forced to answer her pressure with blunt force. Definitely better—and more enjoyable—than sparring with jōnin who were already far weaker.
Heh… The bristly cat had turned into a dangerous panther. Even if some old-new habits still slipped out, bows and all.
A couple more weeks passed—packed with research, not so much with events. Only today, June fifteenth, did my clones and I finally get all the way to the bottom of that crippled dōjutsu called the Sharingan. We figured it out, modeled it for myself with every improvement I could squeeze in, and of course, stockpiled enough chakra-filled clones to make sure my new eyes would be the best of the best.
I didn't call it "crippled" for nothing. The Sharingan is hereditary—which means it's subject to a mechanism that's both beautiful and disgusting at the same time: evolution. And Mother Nature, adding bits of genome here and deleting there, mutating it every which way, really did a number on this dōjutsu… and gave me a lot of extra work.
The problem was the awakening of the Mangekyō. A normal person—even an Uchiha—can awaken it and still not be able to use it properly. It damages the eye, causes hemorrhaging, and as my research showed, creates countless micro-injuries in the chakra circulatory system of the eye itself. The reason is simple: after evolving into Mangekyō, the dōjutsu's chakra output jumps by multiples, but the chakra channels in and around the eye don't keep up. They're too weak for that kind of flow. On top of that, most people awaken the Mangekyō after they've already realized the potential of their chakra circulatory system (CCS), and in adulthood, it loses that childlike ability to adapt quickly.
So you get a closed loop. Every use of the Mangekyō creates microcracks in the channels. Chakra leaks out of those cracks and tortures the eye from the inside like fine needles. The owners go blind. And if the user is especially trigger-happy and fires off Mangekyō techniques like a Gatling gun, the self-destruction only accelerates. That theory, by the way, perfectly explains why Itachi, using his eyes carefully, went blind slowly over years, while Sasuke burned his out in a very short time.
The locals—back when they still lived in the era of spitting on science and prioritizing nothing but the desire to stab their neighbor—somehow managed to invent a fix. Their theory says you can get the Eternal Mangekyō by transplanting the eyes of a close relative.
And it does work.
A transplant introduces new chakra into the body—chakra with a different affinity—that can actually synergize with the current one. Same way genes can synergize. Together, if you're lucky, the chakra and the genes receive "new" data sets; using those, they restructure a bit. Ultimately, this reinforces the channels in the eyes, preventing future trauma, and boosts regeneration. It's all way more complicated than that, but if I simplify it brutally, part of the positive traits of the transplanted eye's original owner—both affinity and genes—gets "added" to the recipient, triggering a qualitative mutation. And since not just genes mutate but chakra too, the result can show on the body very noticeably.
But from my perspective, it's still like treating a gunshot wound with a Band-Aid. Yeah, it might help—and hey, at least they didn't smear it with shit—but the method leans way too hard on luck. Dōjutsu rejection is a very real risk; not everyone gets Madara-level lucky. Even factoring in this world's realities, the risk isn't that high… but it can still go wrong. And on top of that, a random "compilation" can assemble the dōjutsu's abilities crookedly (honestly, it always does), leaving the user to intuitively "fine-tune" them just to make them run at a decent speed with tolerable chakra costs.
My method, naturally, was far more complex—and safer. It didn't rely on a blind transplant and praying the stars aligned so everything "just worked." It relied on deliberately strengthening the eye's CCS to the required level and meticulously compiling the dōjutsu's traits—no gambling on luck.
Because my capabilities were on a completely different level, I managed to design a Mangekyō that substantially outperformed the standard model. Stronger. Able to conduct colossal volumes of energy without self-destruction.
When an Uchiha who has awakened the Mangekyō gets another Mangekyō transplanted, the eyes evolve. They become stronger, integrating better with the rest of the body. However, because they restructure around the new chakra, the transplanted eye's abilities are lost—and the old ones get installed instead: the ones the Uchiha originally awakened in their first Mangekyō.
My Mangekyō carried not two abilities, but several—Susanoo notwithstanding. Less chakra-hungry, but no less effective—if anything, more so.
That said, my eyes aren't perfect either. They can't evolve into the Rinnegan; I simply didn't give them that option. I didn't fully understand how the Rinnegan worked, and I wasn't about to graft properties into myself when I didn't even know how that energy behaved. So no matter how many times my chakra grows in raw power, evolution won't happen—unless I personally rework the eyes later. That's future business.
The procedure started the same way as the body enhancement.
First: developing a filled framework of fūinjutsu seals, a template by which the flesh of my eyes would be reshaped. I embedded every relevant piece of knowledge I had into it; even my refined Izanagi properties were used for faster, more efficient transformation.
Then: my body in the chamber. A couple of dozen of my chakra-filled clones at their stations across the nodes of the seal network.
A few hours of painstaking but precise work.
And then I opened my eyes. The iris stayed the same blue—but these were entirely different eyes now.
I climbed out of the chamber and stood still. No negative sensations. There was no point running an extra check under the analyzer; the clones had already done it thoroughly.
There was a lot—so much—dense chakra in my eyes, thicker than ever, ready to obey at any moment.
A light focus on a simple technique, and a Shadow Clone appeared in front of me under Transformation, making it look like a full-length mirror.
Again—and the pupil in the reflection flared red. A blink, and a thick black ring swelled out of the pupil, almost completely covering the crimson glow. Spinning into a circular motion, it immediately merged with the pupil and stretched into a sharp diamond that touched the iris at the top and bottom. But the black geometric shape kept transforming, as if forced outward from the other two sides, forming two smaller copies on either side. Now, against an alight red background, there was a light-devouring black elongated diamond in the center, flanked by two smaller ones.
"The design isn't exactly pretty. But the important part is what the eye can do," I noted flatly.
Then, channeling the eye's chakra into a structured technique without straining my mind, I simply dissolved into the air and appeared somewhere else.
Studying the properties from the Sharingan "tanks," as well as Indra's construct, gave me a lot of ideas. Some I implemented; some I straight-up copied.
Thanks to Kakashi's Mangekyō abilities and plenty of other samples from the "tanks," my capacity for spatial manipulation took a qualitative leap. I no longer needed markers; I could calculate conditional coordinates myself—how many units to shift, into what space, all that. And yeah, I have my own space too, usable as a transit point but not strictly required for teleportation. It's the same black dimension with a floor of chakra cubes.
My body manifested high in the daytime sky, and with wind roaring in my ears, I dove down toward the ocean I'd appeared above.
But before I flew far, my body simply hung in the air via technique. Flight was stamped clearly into the Ōtsutsuki legacy—the Sharingan—and of course I studied it. Now I could use it myself.
And then…
Even without final adaptation to the dōjutsu, thanks to understanding what does what, my body was instantly sealed inside an energy crystal.
Glowing gray, in a couple of seconds, I stood within a diamond-shaped ultra-durable barrier built into a helmet—inside a giant of chakra burning with steady white and black hues. An armored knight. Its second pair of arms became angelic wings behind its back. And in its hands was a blade—a long, elegant espada, capable of both cutting and piercing.
(Approximate illustration)
Susanoo is considered a manifestation of the soul. I designed mine in a more familiar European style, and in the colors of my soul.
Still.
With a loud whistle, the giant under my control snapped the sword a few times in quick swings. Not the most impressive thing my eyes could do.
Knowing what my dōjutsu was capable of, I began methodical testing. I decided to skip the most primitive part—charging the blade to launch a slash—and simply dispersed the espada into the air.
Feeling the wind under the wings, I enjoyed the intoxicating power. But everything in moderation.
The glow in my eyes flared brighter, and a hundred meters down along my line of sight, an entire cloud of black flame erupted.
"Amaterasu…"
Even from that distance, I could hear it spreading with a hiss, burning even the vapor.
Staring at water that had literally caught fire—water that would burn for seven days and seven nights—I winced. Just hearing the technique's name triggered phantom pain in my ass.
Seriously… Maybe I should test Tsukuyomi on Koharu? That ability was in my eyes, too. But… no. We were even over those moments, so I'd pass.
Tsukuyomi, by the way, is an extremely powerful genjutsu. With enough skill, you can trap a victim in an illusion where their sense of time is distorted—so, for example, in a few seconds, you can make them live through days of torture. A brutal Mangekyō technique, so specialized in genjutsu that even a heavyweight like the Third Hokage in his prime would have to put in maximum effort not to meet the dōjutsu user's gaze. Kakashi's eye or Madara's couldn't do that because their specializations were different. But Tsukuyomi makes its owner terrifying. And it's good that with these eyes—and with my chakra density already raised decently thanks to the body upgrade—I'll be able to resist even stronger techniques.
Next, I decided not to drag it out and tested the abilities I'd assembled from what affinity remained in the "tanks." Almost all of it was spatial work. And even something particularly "thick" and "noticeable" I'd picked up from the Rinnegan.
I spread my hands to either side. My eyes flared brighter, and the space near my hands split open into diamond-shaped voids. Exactly like the eye pattern, just single diamonds. They existed like two-dimensional cuts, with no concept of "depth," and opened into blackness from both sides.
Not only could I use Kamui—through a separate ability I could open outright portals. These, again, yawned with darkness like they led into deep space. Not quite… though that statement wasn't that far off, either.
I called this dark space the Nothingness. It's the same space where I woke up after death. Not the exact same point I'd been at. Nothingness, like space, is enormous—maybe bigger—and it isn't static; it's always moving. But for now, it would serve as a massive dump: a place to toss things so I wouldn't have to clean them up later.
After that thought, using the second ability, Susanoo's clawed energy hands seized what felt like the very fabric of the portal—and pulled toward me, a little downward.
My hearing was instantly drowned by a howling wind. The fire below bent low. Clouds in the distance began to twist and stream toward the portals. The voids became gravity concentration points, like black holes, devouring air in staggering volumes.
This technique can pull in a lot. But that's not the only way to use it. The ability responsible for creating portals was broader than that; it could also close spatial passages and help manipulate them.
The darkness winked out, leaving only a warped "frame." The air streams—previously almost fully swallowed—now rushed completely toward me and downward, bending the flames even harder, yet not snuffing them out, and applying no real pressure at all as they shattered against Susanoo's energy armor.
Still, the "frame" was only a concentrator. At my will, it dissolved too. The airflow didn't instantly weaken, but the clouds moving toward me—dissolving along the way—began to slow. The technique, now reduced to mere points that warped light, started acting more broadly.
Holding the pressure for another second, I dispelled the technique entirely, and the air soon returned to its normal movement.
I looked down. My eyes flashed—and the flame died. After that, the chakra forming Susanoo simply dispersed and drew back into me, leaving my body hanging in the air.
So yeah. Nothing ultimate. Again, the bulk of the dōjutsu's traits were already shaped into finished techniques—Amaterasu, Kamui, Tsukuyomi. And from the smaller amount that remained, these techniques were formed. Not omnipotent, but useful—and they widen the arsenal.
Finally, I spread my arms and teleported myself extremely high. High enough that I could see sharp outlines of continents, like I could almost cup the planet in my hands.
Up here, there wasn't nearly enough air to breathe. But for my body, that was no problem at all—same as the cold.
A focused thought—and under Transformation, my clothes changed into a tight blue suit, a red cape started billowing behind me, and a big letter S appeared on my chest.
"…Yeah. Not exactly canon," I remarked, then looked myself over.
If I were taller… and had a little less muscle, I thought.
And with that, the primary test of the Mangekyō's abilities was over. In the future, of course, I'd master it more, but for now, I could rest a bit.
The dōjutsu satisfied me.
The rest didn't last long. The very next day, wanting to test my new energy sensitivity thanks to the dōjutsu, I headed to an interesting building.
Konoha Prison, where they kept particularly dangerous criminals. Straight to the section where Zabuza and Haku were currently housed.
Appearing in a reinforced concrete corridor, I nodded at two startled guards and simply walked past them.
"Uzumaki-san!" One recognized me and hurried up, cutting in front. "You can't go in there. What are you even doing here?"
The shinobi looked anxious and genuinely lost.
"I can," I said calmly, then turned back toward the second guard, who was still staring. "Tell your boss I'm taking the ice ninja for a couple of hours. I'll bring him back."
The guards exchanged looks.
What I wanted was wildly off-protocol. But I had a reputation as a pretty important person who, first, was a jinchūriki; second, walked into the Hokage's office like it was his own; and third, could chase an honored elder around the village, loudly threatening to shove her ass into a meat grinder—and apparently suffer zero consequences for it. There were more points, but that was enough for the guard farther away to just nod, turn, and go find his boss.
"Uh… I'll escort you," the closer guard said, then led me down the corridor.
"You're living pretty nicely," I noted, looking over the interiors of two cells across from each other. In the left, sitting on a regular bed, was a pretty, feminine-looking boy with a scroll in his hands. Haku. In the right, Zabuza rose from his bed, waking up. This time he was without his bandages. "Separate bathrooms, everything clean. Knocked a lot, did you?"
"Hmph. You've changed. What do you want?" the former swordsman rasped, ignoring my jab as he stepped up to the bars.
"Nothing from you. Go lie back down," I said indifferently, turning away and meeting Haku's lifted gaze. His face had been healed after my clone's hit—no scars left. "I need you to demonstrate your techniques. If everything works out, we'll be out for about two hours. You'll get some fresh air."
"The air is fresh here too, Uzumaki-san," he said quietly, glancing over my shoulder.
"I'm insisting. And I promise, if you don't do anything stupid, I won't hurt you."
"…Zabuza-sama?" He pushed the responsibility for answering onto his… I don't know, whatever their relationship was—his sugar daddy?
Turning to Momochi, I met his grim stare.
"Go with him," he decided at last, making me snort.
Apparently, he had enough brains to realize he shouldn't risk ending up skewered on a sword and charbroiled again.
Soon, the two of us stood by the river at one of the training grounds.
Konoha treats its prisoners pretty gently and doesn't even damage their CCS. Still, they do take precautions. So I had to remove the fūinjutsu seal on Haku that blocked his ability to use chakra.
"Make an icicle and lift it up near me," I ordered.
The boy—stretching a bit after the seal came off—nodded and obediently followed, forming a couple of one-handed signs simultaneously.
When Haku turned toward the river, the Mangekyō lit in my eyes. When he turned back with the icicle, he could no longer see the dōjutsu in my gaze due to suggestion.
"Good. Now feed it Ice chakra, but don't let it grow—make it radiate chakra."
For about a minute, I just stared at the fairly large icicle, analyzing it. My Mangekyō's analytical abilities were enormous and didn't fall too far behind the stationary analyzer. The eyes gave me such visual acuity that if I wanted, I could slice into something and examine the insides of any cell in obsessive detail. I could make out viruses, DNA, even molecules and atoms. And my ability to perceive chakra's properties was no weaker.
After the study, I formed the same hand signs Haku had shown a moment earlier—and then, using my understanding of chakra theory, added a few more to make the task easier. All to tune the chakra in my hands as close as possible to what he was using.
Another minute or so—focused, carefully calibrating energy properties—until everything clicked into a fairly organic combination. Then, concentrating all that chakra in my left hand, I swept it outward in a broad motion, releasing it and instantly creating a rush of pale, bluish mist that, reaching the river, froze it in a fan-shaped spread.
"…You?" Haku lost the ability to speak. For five seconds he watched the huge slab of ice block the river's flow, letting only a little water slide over the top. "Are you a Yuki half-blood?"
His face turned thoughtful, like he was trying to remember whether he'd seen me before.
"I don't share your clan's blood," I cut him off immediately. "But I want you to teach me everything you know. Consider it part of the price for me sparing you two. And if I like what I see, I'll reward you."
He nodded sharply, agreeable to the point of obedience. Then we got to work.
With Mangekyō, I recorded every technique in extreme detail, expanding my arsenal—and, specifically, my understanding of elemental chakra as a whole.
Honestly, even a normal Sharingan would be enough to see what was needed to reproduce how Ice Release forms—how Wind and Water chakra mix. But local shinobi, even Sharingan users, couldn't actually reproduce it.
To create a blended element without innate affinity, you need an absurd, near-impossible level of chakra control. It's not enough to mix two elements—you also have to recreate a huge number of unique, ultra-fine properties that turn a simple mixture into a true Kekkei Genkai. The locals simply didn't have the "resolution" in their control to reproduce what they saw.
Of course, there were exceptions. One. The current Tsuchikage, for example, learned Dust Release from his predecessor—a kekkei tōta, a mix of three elements. But that's a unique case, likely years of stubborn training from early childhood under a master. They got ridiculously lucky to meet at the right time in the right place, with the right affinity and high talent for control.
In a sense, I got ridiculously lucky, too. Not with affinity, but my life led me to a point where my chakra control—boosted by my soul and my new brain—was on a completely different level. Which made it possible for me to recreate the structure of Ice Release.
Over the next hour and a half, Haku—whose chakra reserves I refilled a couple of times with one of my techniques—showed me all his jutsu. From the weakest, most insignificant ones to the most large-scale.
I couldn't replicate everything the way he could, but with Mangekyō, my brain stamped the knowledge into itself. Later I'll drill it, and in theory, once I adjust—and once my chakra at least lightly picks up an imprint of Ice affinity—the techniques should come easier.
After studying the Kekkei Genkai, I was satisfied. In a good mood, I said we could spend the next half hour granting Haku's wishes. We ended up going shopping, because it turned out Konoha Prison is nice and all—but it doesn't have everything.
"So what, you're gonna knead clay with Zabuza? With a cucumber?" I skeptically inspected the bag Haku handed me as we left the cosmetics store.
"Put it on the face. I'll slice the cucumbers and put them over my eyes—it's good for the skin, Uzumaki-san."
"My version sounded more interesting, but fine. Where to next?"
"Another cosmetics store. Yours are really good here."
"Uh-huh… honestly, I thought you'd buy delicious food. But hey, to each their own."
"Later." He nodded. "We don't have much time. Let's hurry."
Going by stereotypes, this Haku was born in the wrong body. I've got girls among the people close to me, but none of them have ever dragged me around stores like this overly appearance-picky boy did. Though maybe it was because we were in a rush?
He even tried to pry out of me how I'd gotten such smooth, flawless skin…
Those were a weird thirty minutes, but I was the one who offered.
When we returned to the prison with two dozen bags, the building chief who came out looked displeased. But at the sight of me, he chose not to open his mouth unnecessarily. He simply thanked me for keeping my word, accepted my thanks for lending out his prisoner, and left. And I, having no more business there, went back to my own affairs. Which had piled up again recently—and I really needed to sort them out.
Studying Kekkei Genkai… I can't wait to get into it.
_____
You can support me and read up to 20 upcoming chapters ahead of release at –> patreon.com/Welydora