Konohagakure. The Uchiha Compound.
The night air was thick with the stench of iron and death. Silence had swallowed the district whole — a silence born not from peace, but from the absence of anyone left alive to scream. The lanterns that once lined the streets of the proud Uchiha clan now flickered over cobblestones slick with blood, casting long, trembling shadows across walls streaked in crimson.
Inside the main house, the last conversation of Uchiha Fugaku and Uchiha Mikoto was reaching its end.
Fugaku knelt with his back straight, his jaw set, his eyes dry. Beside him, Mikoto mirrored his composure — serene, heartbreaking, and utterly resolved. They had already made their peace. They had already said what needed to be said.
"Itachi," Fugaku spoke, his voice low but unwavering. "Compared to the pain you will carry… ours will last only a moment." A faint, sorrowful smile crossed his weathered face — the smile of a father who understood, even now, the impossible weight pressing down upon his eldest son's shoulders. "Do it… Itachi."
Mikoto closed her eyes. A single tear traced down her cheek, but she did not tremble. She did not beg. She simply breathed — one last time.
Schlick.
Two arcs of blood erupted simultaneously, painting the paper doors and wooden window frames in streaks of wet scarlet. The sound was almost gentle — a soft, splitting whisper — and then the heavy, final thud of two bodies collapsing to the tatami floor.
Uchiha Fugaku and Uchiha Mikoto fell together, side by side, just as they had lived.
The blood pooled outward from beneath them, dark and gleaming in the lamplight, spreading slowly toward the edges of the room like an ink stain that could never be washed away.
Itachi stood over them. His ANBU blade dripped steadily. His expression was carved from stone — utterly blank, utterly still — but behind his eyes, something shattered so quietly that no one in the world could have heard it.
He looked down at his father's face. Even in death, Fugaku's expression held a trace of that final smile.
Itachi raised his free hand and reached toward his father's closed eyelids. Fugaku possessed his own Mangekyō Sharingan — a secret kept even from most of the clan. Itachi knew that if those eyes were ever harvested, they could be transplanted into Sasuke, granting him the Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan. He had already planned for Sasuke's future — had already prepared his own Mangekyō as the catalyst for his little brother's evolution. He did not want a second pair complicating that path.
He would destroy his father's eyes. It was the logical thing to do.
His fingertips hovered an inch from Fugaku's face.
And then — he froze.
A sound. From the doorway.
The soft, horrified gasp of a child.
Itachi's blood went cold.
No. Not yet. He's too early.
He turned his head slowly, and there — silhouetted in the open doorway, small frame trembling against the faint light of the burning district beyond — stood Sasuke.
Seven years old. Wide-eyed. Shaking.
Sasuke had seen everything.
The boy's dark eyes were locked on the crumpled forms of his parents — on the blood fanning out across the floor — on the blade in his brother's hand. His mind refused to process it. Every synapse screamed denial, but the image had already been seared into him, branded into the deepest folds of his memory with a permanence that no amount of time would ever erode.
His knees buckled.
"Nii-san!!!" The scream tore itself from Sasuke's throat — raw, broken, barely human. His small hands flew to his head, fingers clawing into his own hair as if trying to physically rip the image out of his skull. His voice cracked and splintered into something between a sob and a shriek. He collapsed to his knees on the blood-slicked floor, his entire body convulsing.
"Nii-san… why… why…"
Itachi stared at his little brother for a long, agonizing moment. Then, like a man pulling a mask over an open wound, his expression hardened. The grief vanished. The guilt vanished. What remained was cold. Measured. Cruel.
It's early, he thought. He wasn't supposed to arrive yet.
Then: No — this may actually be better.
Itachi turned fully to face Sasuke and looked down at him with those terrible eyes — the three-tomoe Sharingan blazing like crimson pinwheels in the darkness, each one spinning lazily, almost mockingly, casting faint red light across the tear-streaked face of his younger brother.
"You're not worth killing," Itachi said, his voice flat and toneless. "Not even close."
Sasuke clutched his skull. The pain was blinding — not physical, but something deeper, something structural, as though the very foundation of his psyche was fracturing under the weight of what he had witnessed. His vision blurred. His body shook so violently that his teeth chattered. His head felt as though it were about to split apart.
And then Itachi's eyes changed.
The three tomoe in each iris shifted, elongated, merged — reforming into the terrible, elegant geometry of the Mangekyō Sharingan. The air around Itachi seemed to grow heavier. The shadows in the room deepened. The temperature plummeted.
"Tsukuyomi."
The word fell from Itachi's lips like a death sentence.
The world shattered.
Reality dissolved. The walls of the Uchiha main house melted away, replaced by an endless expanse of inverted color — a sky of deep, bleeding crimson stretched above a world rendered in stark black and white. Sasuke found himself standing in a void that was neither real nor unreal, a space that existed entirely within the architecture of Itachi's mind.
Tsukuyomi — the most terrifying genjutsu of the Mangekyō Sharingan. Within this illusory dimension, the caster held absolute dominion. Time, space, perception, pain — all of it bent to Itachi's will. Seventy-two hours of subjective experience could be compressed into a single second of real-world time. And within those seventy-two hours, Itachi could make his victim experience anything. Anything.
He chose the simplest cruelty.
He made Sasuke watch his parents die. Again.
And again.
And again.
The blade fell. The blood sprayed. Fugaku and Mikoto crumpled to the floor. Sasuke screamed. The scene reset. The blade fell. The blood sprayed. The bodies fell. Sasuke screamed. Reset. Again. Again. Again — an infinite, recursive loop of the worst moment of his life, played on repeat with merciless clarity, every detail rendered in perfect, agonizing fidelity.
Sasuke's mind should have broken.
Any normal child's mind would have broken.
But then — something happened.
Deep within the labyrinth of Sasuke's consciousness, far beneath the layers of trauma and terror, something stirred. Something that had been sleeping for a very, very long time.
The endless repetition of agony hammered against a locked door inside his psyche — over and over, blow after blow, like a battering ram striking ancient stone. Cracks spiderwebbed across the surface. Light leaked through the fractures.
And then the door shattered.
At a certain point, mid-scream, Sasuke simply… stopped.
His body went still. His expression went blank. The frantic, thrashing, sobbing child vanished — and in his place was something else entirely. Something quiet. Something cold.
Outside the Tsukuyomi, in the blood-soaked reality of the Uchiha main house, Itachi watched as Sasuke's face underwent a transformation that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand on end. The boy's wild, anguished expression had been replaced by an eerie, unnatural calm — the kind of calm that belonged on the face of a man who had already died once and found the experience boring.
Itachi narrowed his eyes. Something was wrong.
"Sasuke?" he said carefully.
The boy did not answer immediately. He was staring at the ground, his bangs shadowing his eyes, his small shoulders rising and falling with slow, measured breaths.
"Is that so?" Sasuke murmured, almost to himself. His voice was different. The pitch was still that of a child, but the cadence, the inflection, the weight behind each syllable — it belonged to someone far older. Far more dangerous.
He did not answer Itachi. He was not speaking to Itachi.
He was speaking to himself — or rather, to the flood of memories that had just erupted through the broken dam inside his mind.
So that's what happened, the voice inside his head whispered. I remember now. I remember everything.
The intense psychological trauma of the Tsukuyomi — that relentless, hammering anguish — had done what seven years of peaceful childhood never could. It had jolted his dormant mind fully awake. It had triggered his awakening.
Because the soul inhabiting Sasuke Uchiha's body was not merely Sasuke Uchiha.
Not entirely.
In another life — in another world — he had been someone else first. He had transmigrated to Academy City, the sprawling metropolis of scientific progress and esper development, and had risen to its absolute pinnacle. He had become the strongest. The untouchable. The one they called the Number One — the most powerful Level 5 esper in Academy City.
Accelerator.
His ability: Vector Manipulation — the power to control any and all vectors that came into contact with his body. Kinetic energy, thermal energy, electrical impulses, gravitational force, light, sound — every vector, every directional quantity in the physical universe could be redirected, amplified, negated, or reversed at will through skin contact. Bullets reflected back at their shooters. Punches returned with a thousand times their original force. The wind itself became a weapon, and the earth beneath his feet a tool.
It was the ultimate defense and the ultimate offense rolled into one.
Later — when he was eighteen or nineteen, the details blurred at the edges — his brain had suffered catastrophic damage in battle. Rather than relying on the Misaka Network's computational support through a choker-style electrode — the conventional solution — he had chosen a far more radical path. He attempted to directly integrate a prototype super-brain processor — an experimental neural enhancement that would render him independent of any external network.
The integration failed. His consciousness fractured. He died.
Or so he thought.
Instead, he woke up as a newborn in a world of shinobi and chakra, crying in Mikoto Uchiha's arms, with the super-brain processor still embedded somewhere in the deepest architecture of his neural pathways.
For seven — no, nearly eight years — the processor had remained dormant. Sasuke's infant brain had been too underdeveloped to activate it. His past-life memories had slumbered alongside it, locked away behind a wall that his child's mind simply lacked the processing power to breach. He had lived as Sasuke Uchiha — purely, completely, genuinely — loving his parents, idolizing his brother, chasing after Itachi's shadow with the earnest adoration of a little boy who wanted nothing more than a poke on the forehead.
But now the wall was gone.
The super-brain was online.
And with it came a torrent of spiritual energy so vast and dense that it saturated every cell of his being — power that dwarfed anything a seven-year-old body had any right to contain. The computational capacity of the processor merged with the innate spiritual energy of an Uchiha prodigy's developing chakra network, and the fusion was cataclysmic.
The Sasuke who had known only the warmth of his mother's cooking and the quiet pride in his father's eyes — that gentle, innocent child — did not disappear. Those memories were real. Those emotions were his. Six years of life lived in earnest could not be erased by the return of a past life's consciousness.
But they could be transformed by it.
Sasuke covered his eyes with one hand. His fingers trembled — not with fear, but with rage. A low, guttural sound built in his chest. His face, half-hidden behind his palm, twisted into something hideous — a rictus of grief and fury and dark, vicious understanding.
Six years, he thought. Six years I lived in this family. Six years of Mother's voice. Six years of Father's silence that meant more than words ever could. I loved them. I love them still.
And you took them from me, Itachi.
You took everything.
Itachi sensed the shift immediately. Every instinct honed through years of ANBU operations screamed at him that the situation had deviated catastrophically from his plan. But the plan was all he had left. Without it, everything — every death, every sin, every sacrifice — became meaningless. He could not afford deviation. He would not afford it.
He steeled himself and delivered his scripted line, the words tasting like ash on his tongue:
"Foolish little brother. Hate me. Despise me. Cling to your wretched life and run. Run, and live in shame. And when you have the same eyes as mine… come find me."
Silence.
Then Sasuke laughed.
It started as a low chuckle — barely audible, almost gentle. Then it grew. It swelled. It rose in pitch and volume until it filled the blood-soaked room like the howl of something unhinged.
"Nii-san," Sasuke said, lowering his hand from his eyes. His voice was eerily steady now, laced with a mocking warmth that made Itachi's stomach clench. "Between the village and the clan, you chose the village. You always did love Konoha more than anything, didn't you?"
Itachi said nothing. His jaw tightened.
Sasuke tilted his head, and a grin split across his young face — too wide, too sharp, too knowing for a seven-year-old. "So how about this? Instead of me hating you… how about I destroy your precious village instead? Let me be the one to take everything you love. Then you can hate me. Then you can desperately grow stronger to stop me."
His voice rose with every word, climbing toward a fever pitch of deranged glee.
"Doesn't that sound fun, Nii-san?"
Itachi's blood turned to ice.
"What?" The word escaped him before he could stop it — raw, unguarded, stripped of all pretense.
No. This is wrong. This isn't how it's supposed to go.
In every scenario Itachi had painstakingly constructed — in every sleepless night spent agonizing over the shape of his brother's future — the Sasuke standing before him should have been running. Fleeing into the night, weeping, screaming, begging for his life. A traumatized child driven by terror and hatred down a narrow, controlled path toward strength — strength aimed squarely at Itachi and Itachi alone. A weapon forged in grief, pointed in a safe direction.
Not this.
This Sasuke was not afraid. This Sasuke was not broken. This Sasuke knew things he had absolutely no way of knowing.
How does he know I chose the village? How does he know about the decision? Who told him?
A name surfaced in Itachi's mind like a serpent rising from dark water.
Danzō.
A wave of cold fury washed through him. His fists clenched at his sides until his knuckles turned white, nails biting into his palms hard enough to draw blood. If Danzō had interfered — if that one-eyed schemer had reached Sasuke before tonight, had poisoned his brother's mind with the truth in order to turn him into a weapon aimed not at a rogue missing-nin but at the Hidden Leaf itself —
Everything Itachi had sacrificed would unravel.
Every corpse. Every sin. Every moment of his parents' blood drying on his hands.
All of it — for nothing.
"Sasuke!!!" Itachi's voice cracked like a whip. His Mangekyō Sharingan blazed to life, the intricate pattern spinning violently, churning with barely restrained power. Killing intent flooded the room — dense, suffocating, the pressure of a seasoned ANBU captain unleashed without restraint.
But Sasuke did not flinch.
Instead, the boy lowered his arm from his face completely and looked up at his brother with a smile that did not belong on any child's face.
"Hahahaha!!!"
The laughter erupted from Sasuke's small body — wild, unrestrained, almost joyful in its madness. He doubled over, clutching his stomach, his young frame shaking with the force of it. The sound echoed off the blood-streaked walls, mingling with the distant crackle of fires still burning throughout the Uchiha district.
And then Itachi saw his brother's eyes.
The breath left his lungs.
Sasuke's irises had transformed. The familiar dark onyx was gone, replaced by a deep, luminous crimson — and within that crimson, a pattern was taking shape. Not the simple tomoe of a newly awakened Sharingan. Not even the three-tomoe configuration of a mature one.
A six-pointed star — intricate, geometric, impossibly complex — rotated slowly in each of Sasuke's eyes, its edges sharp as razors, its lines burning with a light that seemed to pulse with its own malevolent heartbeat.
The Mangekyō Sharingan.
A fully awakened Mangekyō Sharingan.
In the eyes of a seven-year-old boy.
"How…" Itachi whispered, the word falling from numb lips. He stumbled backward — one step, two, three — his sandals scraping against the tatami as his body moved on pure instinct. His scalp prickled. His skin crawled. For the first time in longer than he could remember, Uchiha Itachi felt the cold, primal bite of genuine fear.
"How is that possible?"
He had intended to stimulate Sasuke's Sharingan — to awaken the basic form through emotional trauma, planting the seed that would one day blossom into the strength Sasuke needed. That was the plan. A standard three-tomoe awakening at most.
Not this.
The Mangekyō Sharingan required the trauma of losing someone precious — and it required a mind mature enough to process that loss in a very specific way. A seven-year-old should not have the psychological architecture to support its activation. The chakra cost alone should have knocked Sasuke unconscious the instant the pattern formed.
And yet those eyes were open. Those eyes were stable. And the power radiating from them — dark, heavy, pulsing with an almost physical weight — was not the flickering, unstable output of a fluke awakening.
It was controlled.
Those blood-red eyes, with their slowly rotating six-pointed stars, radiated a malice so thick it seemed to darken the room itself — an evil, ancient pressure that rolled off Sasuke's small frame in waves, pressing against Itachi's senses like the killing intent of something far, far older than any child had any right to be.
Itachi's training took over.
Threat assessment: unknown. Origin: unknown. The eyes are real — not genjutsu. His chakra signature has changed. He's different. Something happened inside the Tsukuyomi. Something I didn't account for.
Neutralize. Now.
In a flicker of movement almost too fast for the human eye to track, Itachi vanished. The Body Flicker Technique carried him behind Sasuke in an instant — a blur of shadow and displaced air. He appeared at the boy's back, one hand already raised in a precise knife-hand strike aimed at the pressure point at the base of Sasuke's neck.
"You're too young to control those eyes," Itachi said, his voice forcibly calm, clinical — the tone of a shinobi making a tactical decision, not an older brother confronting the impossible. "Your body doesn't have the chakra reserves or the mental fortitude to sustain the Mangekyō. If you keep them active, they'll destroy you."
I need to knock him unconscious, Itachi calculated, his hand descending. Then seal the Mangekyō before they burn through his optic nerves. He's still just a child — his coils can't handle this output. If I don't act now, he'll go blind before he ever has the chance to —