The name, Miwa, hung in the air of the dim room not as a suggestion, but as a seismic event. For a long moment, Renjiro was utterly still, the vibrant crimson of his restored Sharingan fixed on a point in the middle distance, seeing not the wooden beams of the ceiling but a cascade of memories—a shared laugh, a matching pair of dark eyes, the unique, harmonising signature of her chakra. The idea was a key sliding into a lock he had long ago welded shut. But the pragmatist in him, the survivor, immediately saw the flaw.
He let out a slow breath, the hope that had flickered in his chest guttering out. He shook his head, the motion weary. "We can't use Miwa, Kushina. It won't work." He gestured vaguely toward the jars, toward the preserved evidence of his own brutal journey.
"She only ever awakened the basic Sharingan. Three tomoe, yes, but never the Mangekyō. Her eye's pattern… it doesn't contain the evolutionary step we need. Grafting her template would, at best, give me another standard pair. It's a dead end."
Kushina, however, was not deterred. She leaned forward, her violet eyes blazing with the light of a puzzle coming together. "You're thinking about this like an Uchiha historian, Renjiro. I'm thinking about it like a fuinjutsu master and a living chakra reactor." She tapped her temple. "I'm not talking about using her eyes as a donor graft. I'm talking about using her chakra as a mutagen."
Renjiro blinked. "A… mutagen?"
"Exactly!" Kushina's voice gained momentum, painting a vision with her words. "We take two pairs of normal Sharingan from your stash. We don't try to evolve them with your trauma. Instead, we saturate them, drown them, in a purified, concentrated stream of Miwa's chakra signature. We force her foreign, yet intimately related, spiritual energy to overwrite the ocular chakra pathways. The conflict, the fusion—it could trigger a mutation. Not a recreation of your Mangekyō, and not a copy of hers, but something entirely new. A synthetic Mangekyō, born from the forced marriage of two souls' chakra."
She spread her hands as if presenting the idea on a platter. "That new, synthetic Mangekyō pair—born from her essence but not requiring her actual eyes—could then be used as the 'donor' for your own evolved eyes. It satisfies the requirement of 'a close relative's Mangekyō' in spirit, if not in the exact, gruesome letter of the law."
As she spoke, a parallel realisation dawned on Kushina. 'I don't even know what his Mangekyō abilities are.'
The thought was a quiet sidebar in her racing mind. Every Mangekyō user had unique, terrifying gifts, but Renjiro had never disclosed his.
'If he hasn't told me,' she reasoned, a pang of protective understanding softening her excitement, 'it must be deeply personal. Or deeply dangerous. I won't press.'
Renjiro, meanwhile, was floored. He stared at Kushina as if seeing her for the first time. Her mind didn't just work outside the box; it incinerated the box and used the ashes to draw a brilliant new blueprint. The sheer, audacious creativity of it left him breathless.
"You… you really think that could work? Not just in theory, but in practice?"
"The chakra dynamics are sound," Kushina said, her confidence unwavering. "The risks are catastrophic—we could destroy the donor eyes, corrupt the chakra sample, or trigger a backlash that ruins your optic nerves permanently. But as a proof of concept? To see if we can create a Mangekyō-level chakra signature artificially? It's the most promising lead we have that doesn't involve playing roulette with the First Hokage's will-of-the-woods."
If Kushina's proposal was a spark, it ignited a wildfire in Renjiro's imagination. His mind, so often confined to survival and reaction, exploded into a realm of terrifying possibility.
'If chakra-grafting works… if I can use a genetic relative's essence to forge a new Mangekyō…'
The implications spiraled outwards, dizzying and immense. He wouldn't be limited to Miwa. He visualized clandestine operations, careful extraction.
'Fugaku.' The now clan head's stern, powerful chakra, potentially yielding a Mangekyō of unknown capabilities.
'Itachi.' The prodigy's genius, his unique mastery, could produce something incomprehensibly potent.
'Obito.' His Kamui, a space-time manipulation of unparalleled utility…
'Sasuke.' The pure potential of the last loyal son…
'Shisui.' The Kotoamatsukami, the ultimate genjutsu, the power to rewrite wills without a trace…
He could become a living archive of Uchiha power. He could mix and match, creating hybrid abilities. He could evolve multiple pairs of Eternal Mangekyō, each with different specialties. The path unfurled before him, not just to stability, but to a form of power that skirted the edges of myth—power that could eventually rival the Otsutsuki themselves, those celestial beings who treated tailed beasts as pets and nations as gardens.
The grandeur of the vision was so intoxicating that he had to physically grip the edge of the table to steady himself. The cool wood beneath his fingers was a tether to reality.
'Easy,' he cautioned himself, the voice in his head cutting through the glorious noise. 'Don't get lost in castles in the sky. One step. One eye at a time.' He reined in the dizzying future, focusing on the immediate, tangible goal. What would his first Eternal Mangekyō look like? What abilities, born from his own soul and catalysed by his aunt's essence, would stabilise into permanence? The curiosity was a clean, burning flame, preferable to the chaotic bonfire of ambition.
His recentered thoughts were shattered by a soft click from the front of the house.
The door to the room whispered open, and Minato stepped inside. He carried the faint, fresh scent of the autumn evening and the subtle, metallic tang of recent travel. His presence was a calming, blue-gold energy in the charged atmosphere.
He offered Kushina a small, tired smile that held a world of private understanding, a silent communication that made a faint blush rise to her cheeks. He then turned to Renjiro, his expression shifting to one of polite, concerned warmth.
"Renjiro. It's good to see you."
'And now I feel like a third wheel,' Renjiro thought with an internal sigh, the intense, clandestine mood of the last hour evaporating under the gentle lamp-light of domestic normalcy, Minato brought with him.
"Minato," Renjiro greeted him, nodding respectfully.
"I heard about your… condition," Minato said, his cerulean eyes briefly flicking to Renjiro's own, now visibly crimson and whole. "I'm sorry I wasn't there."
Renjiro offered an awkward, dismissive laugh, a hollow sound. "It's… it's handled. My squad was ambushed near the Valley of the End just as the war was about to end. I paid the price." He gestured loosely toward Kushina.
"Fortunately, Kushina was able to help me restore my vision."
Minato's smile warmed, his gaze lingering on Kushina with open pride and affection before returning to Renjiro. "I'm glad. You've been through enough."
Kushina, her blush fading, seized the shift in conversation. Her voice was softer now, edged with a concern that had nothing to do with ocular genetics.
"Minato… how are they doing? Have you seen them?"
The change in Minato was immediate and profound. The gentle warmth drained from his face, replaced by a grim, bone-deep exhaustion. The lines around his eyes seemed to deepen in the lamplight. The air in the room, once buzzing with scientific possibility, grew heavy and cold.
"They're not," he said, the words simple and devastating. "They're not doing well at all. Kakashi is… closed off. Worse than ever. Rin is trying to be strong for everyone, but she's breaking inside." He paused, swallowing hard, a rare show of emotional difficulty for the unflappable Yellow Flash. "And with Obito's body never recovered… they can't even pay their final respects. There's no grave to visit. No closure. It's just… an absence."
The words washed over Renjiro, but one phrase snagged in his mind, hooking into his consciousness with cold, sharp barbs.
'Obito's body never recovered.'
His head turned slowly toward Minato. His Sharingan, moments ago alight with visionary ambition, now fixed on his sensei with laser intensity. His voice, when he spoke, was dangerously calm, each word precisely enunciated.
"Minato. What do you mean, 'Obito's body'?" He needed confirmation.
Minato met his gaze, his own eyes shadowed with a sorrow he made no effort to hide. He took a breath, as if steadying himself to deliver a blow he'd already given too many times.
"Renjiro," he said, the name a gentle hammer. "Obito is dead."
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