"Teacher Kakashi, did you say fifteen days?"
The girl had been turning it over carefully and caught the timeframe her teacher had mentioned.
"That's right. Fifteen days. I'll only be teaching you for fifteen days."
Kakashi smiled slightly and continued. "After that, someone else will take over."
"He's a junior of mine. You've already met before. In terms of the sheer number of Water Release and Earth Release jutsu he knows, he doesn't have as many as I do. But his understanding and application of the techniques he has runs far deeper than mine. I've asked him to take over your remaining fifteen days. With him teaching you, I think you'll gain a tremendous amount, and not just in Earth Release. Your Water Release will benefit too."
Already met?
Sakura blinked, and her mind quickly landed on the ANBU ninja she had encountered during their mission to the Hidden Waterfall Village.
"Thank you, Teacher Kakashi."
Kakashi smiled, then said, "Then let's begin. We'll start with the theory and fundamental properties of Earth Release. Earth Release is a discipline that allows the user to alter the hardness, composition, density, and gravitational pull of matter, as well as reshape terrain..."
Kakashi walked through the principles and key points of Earth Release in thorough detail. Sakura pulled out her well-worn study notebook and listened with complete focus, writing and filling in notes as she went.
Whenever she hit something unclear or difficult to grasp, she asked directly. Kakashi answered each question with patient care.
Afternoon. The sun blazed overhead.
In a cemetery not far from the Uchiha district.
Early that morning, after receiving a cartload of white chrysanthemums delivered by Yamanaka Fu, Sasuke had come here to pay his respects.
He went through each grave methodically, clearing away the overgrowth and setting down the fresh, fragrant white chrysanthemums.
By the time he finally reached the gravestones belonging to Uchiha Mikoto and Uchiha Fugaku, most of the day had already passed.
Sasuke knew it was something of a waste of time. He didn't mind wasting this particular amount of it.
He had taken over this body, the last surviving blood of this clan.
In matters like this, in rituals like this, he didn't mind spending the time. He was even willing to do it with genuine care.
Besides, today was a special day.
He stood looking at the two gravestones for a long while. His lips moved slightly, as if there were something he wanted to say. In the end, he swallowed every word.
What right did he have to say anything?
To these two, he was probably nothing more than the one who had taken their child from them. Their eyes had been kept by him all this time, a kind of desecration.
He hadn't wanted it to be this way. If he had the choice, he would rather have gone back to a life like his previous one.
Clocking in and clocking out every day. Going to the gym occasionally to lift some weights.
Coming home to read, or sit around picking at his feet and playing games, catching up on shows he'd missed. A plain, ordinary, unremarkable life was fine by him.
But the reality was that he had still taken the life that belonged to their child.
Saying something like "we've merged" or "I'll live on as Uchiha Sasuke" sounded hollow even to himself. So he said nothing at all.
After standing in silence for a long time, Sasuke swept his gaze across the dense rows of gravestones and turned to leave.
Today was a special day. The day he would transplant the Mangekyou Sharingan.
Although Sasuke had awakened the Mangekyou Sharingan three months ago, and the eyes of his closest blood relative had been in his possession since then, he had not chosen to transplant them immediately.
Because he hadn't had the time, or the right opportunity.
The original timeline never gave a specific duration for how long it took Sasuke to advance to the Eternal Mangekyou.
The anime only made clear it was a long time. The Fourth Great Ninja War had been going on for quite a while from the Five Kage Summit onward before Uchiha Sasuke appeared again.
When Sasuke had roughly mapped out his timeline earlier, he estimated that stretch at well over a month at minimum.
As for the other known Eternal Mangekyo holder, Uchiha Madara, he was completely useless as a reference.
In both the manga and the anime, it was handled in a single scene cut. One moment, and he had the Eternal Mangekyo. Who could say how much time that transition actually represented?
So Sasuke had taken the original as his reference and set one month as his advancement window.
At the time, he had needed to remain in Konoha for a period, continuing his life as a Genin.
Vanishing for a full month without reason wasn't possible, and performing missions while blind was out of the question.
Now, three months had passed since his Mangekyou awakening. He had grown accustomed to it, learned to work with it.
And the one-month gap between the Chunin Exam preliminaries and the finals was the best opportunity he was going to get.
Sasuke could give the straightforward reason that he was going into isolation to train, disappear for a stretch without anyone thinking anything of it, and return without raising a single eyebrow.
____
Kubisaki Marsh.
Thick green miasma hanging everywhere, and swampland like rotting mud beneath every step.
Fusion or transplant?
Lying quietly on the makeshift operating table, Sasuke let the question drift through his mind.
The original timeline never showed or addressed this directly. But if it were a fusion, then why did Uchiha Obito always say "replace" and "transplant"?
If it were a transplant, where did the original eyes go?
And if it truly worked by transplantation, then theoretically one could awaken two pairs of Eternal Mangekyou rather than just one.
Then again, the question of how a transplant would even work was its own problem.
Did you remove your original eyes first and then implant the new ones into the socket? Or did you layer the new ones directly into the existing socket?
"Go ahead and start."
Sasuke let out a quiet breath, drew out a glass vial filled with liquid, and addressed the two Shadow Clones standing before him.
The two clones took the vial, exchanged a look, and each raised a hand: one gripping a scalpel, the other glowing with green medical chakra.
"Then, if you're ready, we'll begin."
The original gave a nod. A clone's hand passed gently over the area around his eye socket.
Within moments, a faint, sharp sting arrived. Sasuke's world went dark.
To clearly sense every change as it happened, he had chosen not to use any anesthetic.
"Based on what we worked out beforehand, you may feel swelling, sharp pain, and possibly some emotional shifts during the procedure. Please say something immediately if anything feels wrong."
"Understood. Get on with it."
Sasuke nodded, and at the same moment sealed as much of his dojutsu's power as he could deep within his mind.
If the transplant theory was correct, then sealing the power residing in his own eyes into his mind and then fusing it with the power of the newly transplanted Mangekyou would be the most viable method he had envisioned.
A clone carefully extracted the Mangekyou Sharingan from the vial, lifted Sasuke's eyelid, and made a precise incision along the outer edge of the eye socket. It was about to continue when Sasuke spoke.
"Just place it directly."
The moment the clone brought Fugaku's Mangekyou close to his eye, Sasuke felt a sudden resonance.
A resonance between the eyes of closest blood, like two things that had always belonged to each other recognizing one another. In that instant, he understood what the transplant was truly supposed to be.
"Understood."
The clone nodded, and pressed the eye gently against Sasuke's right eye.
What followed was like a sugar cube meeting hot coffee. A quiet, remarkable reaction.
Two entirely different eyes merged into one, blending together seamlessly, as though they had never been anything but a single whole.
"What's happening?"
Because his optic nerves had already been severed, Sasuke couldn't see what was occurring in his own socket.
He could only feel a surge of fierce, piercing pain, and what seemed to be tears of blood running down his face.
"The Mangekyou pattern in your eye is changing. It's slowly combining into a new design."
The clone gently wiped the bloodied tears from the corner of the original's eye, watching as a curved triangular shape slowly emerged at the center of the six-pointed star Mangekyou, and answered.
"Good."
The tension in Sasuke's chest eased slightly.
"Continue with the left eye."
___
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