-------------------------------
Read 20 advanced Chapters on www.---patreon.com/Regulus_dragneel
-------------------------------
The resonance happened before Shisui understood what was occurring.
Something in the boy's eyes responded to the energy radiating from the Mangekyō, responding the way a string responds to the note it is tuned to, not through effort but through nature. Black tomoe materialized in Shisui's irises on their own, drawn out by proximity to a power that shared the same origin. And then the pattern came, rising from somewhere beneath ordinary sight, a configuration that had been sleeping in the boy's bloodline waiting for the correct pressure to wake it.
A four-pointed windmill, black against scarlet, perfectly symmetrical.
Danzo looked at it for a long moment.
"So that is how it is."
He had not expected this. He had expected talent. He had not expected this.
In all of Konoha's records, only a handful of names had ever achieved Mangekyō Sharingan. Uchiha Madara. Uchiha Izuna. Uchiha Kagami, though that information existed only in the memories of a few survivors from Senju Tobirama's students. The Uchiha clan as a whole did not know about Kagami.
This ten-year-old boy had just become the fourth in the village's history.
Kagami, Danzo thought, studying the pattern in the child's eyes. Is the missing power from your left eye living inside this child?
The question had been sitting unanswered since the transplant. When Danzo had received Kagami's left eye from beneath the tombstone, he had found only a fraction of its power remaining. He had searched the inherited memories for the explanation and found it without difficulty. Before his death, Kagami had transferred the power of his left eye to his son, a final protection passed through blood and intention. When Shisui's father died on the front in the Land of Water, that power had moved again, settling into the grandson through a channel that ordinary people would never have found a use for.
For an ordinary person, it would have remained a latent secret. A remnant of something they could not access.
For a genius of Shisui's caliber, combined with the death of someone he loved, it had become the exact pressure required to reach the highest level of Sharingan.
........
"Is this... Mangekyō Sharingan?"
Shisui's voice was controlled for a ten-year-old. Genuinely controlled, not the forced steadiness of a child trying to appear older. He had studied the Uchiha clan's secret scrolls comprehensively, the kind of dedicated study that most children his age did not have the patience for. He knew what Mangekyō Sharingan was in the abstract. Every clan scroll mentioned it, usually briefly, usually at the end, as though the authors were uncertain how much to say about something so rare it bordered on mythological.
Seeing it in the eyes of another person standing three feet away was a different category of experience entirely.
"Don't be surprised," Danzo said. "You carry it too."
He folded a single seal with his right hand. A water mirror formed, smooth and still, and in its surface Shisui saw his own eyes looking back at him. The four-pointed windmill turned slowly in the reflection.
The boy stared at himself for a long moment.
"What does this mean?"
"Do you want to understand it?" Danzo let the mirror dissolve. "Then follow me."
........
They moved through the forest beyond the village, following a path that existed more in knowledge of the terrain than in any marked trail. Danzo walked at his own pace. The boy kept up without apparent difficulty.
Then Danzo stopped.
Shisui was in front of him.
He had not seen the movement happen. One moment the boy was behind him. The next he was standing at the boundary of the forest path, having covered the distance between them in the time it took to register that he had moved at all. The technique left no visible trace, no displaced air, no sound of footsteps accelerating.
"Not a poor Flicker Technique," Danzo said, studying him with the particular attention he reserved for things that exceeded his expectations. "With that talent you will not yield to Minato."
Hiraishin was space-time ninjutsu, the kind of technique that redefined what movement meant. Its development required a base speed that exceeded ordinary human physical limits. In the memories he had inherited and in everything he had observed since arriving in this world, Danzo knew of two shinobi who had possessed that foundation. His teacher, Senju Tobirama. And Namikaze Minato, the man whose star was currently rising above everyone else's in Konoha's sky.
A third had apparently been developing quietly in the background.
"You're exaggerating, Danzo-sama." The boy's composure was genuine rather than performed, the particular steadiness of someone who has already thought carefully about the gap between their current ability and the standard they are measuring themselves against. "Minato-senpai is Konoha's hero. I am only a child who shows some promise."
"It seems your father always thought of you as younger than you are."
He activated the Sharingan in his right eye as he said it. The three tomoe shifted into their rotation, and the invisible current of genjutsu moved through the point of eye contact with the precision of a technique being applied by someone who understood exactly what they were doing and how much force was required.
Shisui recognized it the moment it touched him. He had mastered every genjutsu technique in the Uchiha clan's archive, and recognition came before resistance could form. He understood at the point of contact that this was a memory transmission, not an attack. Completely harmless. He held still and let it arrive.
........
Time moved strangely inside the technique.
What felt like a long passage was only moments in the external world. Danzo had selected carefully from what he carried, drawing out the thread of Uchiha Kagami's life as it existed in the inherited memory and shaping it into something a ten-year-old boy could receive and hold without being overwhelmed by it.
The brightness of the man came through. The openness. The sensitivity that had always sat slightly at odds with the world of shinobi, which did not generally reward sensitivity in its practitioners. The hope he had carried for the village and the clan, the belief that the gap between them could be closed if the right people chose to close it. The choice he had made at the end, in his last days, about where to place what remained of his power.
Shisui received it all.
The grief of losing his father was still present in him, fresh and not yet fully integrated. What arrived through Danzo's transmission met that grief and did something to it, gave it a shape it had not previously had, connected it to something larger than a single loss. The Will of Fire, which every Konoha shinobi spoke of as an inheritance, became briefly and specifically real for the boy rather than abstract.
The four-pointed windmill in his eyes began to stabilize.
"Now I understand," Shisui said.
His face had the expression of someone who has just organized something that had previously been scattered. Not peace exactly. Clarity.
Danzo released the technique and let it dissolve.
........
"Our village is called Konoha," Danzo said. He kept his voice at its usual flat register, but something in the words had weight that did not come from tone. "The name was chosen by the First Hokage. His intention was specific. He wanted a place where the clans would find no reason for disagreement, where each person's sacrifice would serve the whole rather than the family, where the distinction between strong clans and weak ones would eventually become meaningless."
He paused.
"That intention has never been fully realized. Even after the First Hokage and my teacher dissolved the Senju clan at great cost to themselves, the clan system that prevents genuine equality persisted. Kagami understood this. He was Uchiha, and he understood it anyway, which cost him something every day of his life. That is why he shared his view with me. That is why he trusted his eyes to me in the end. He hoped that with them I might one day see what he never got to see."
The wind moved through the trees around them, unhurried.
"Your grandfather's life was full of suffering. He suffered for the clan and for the village, simultaneously, which is a harder thing than suffering for only one of them. His generosity exceeded all of us. We old men built this world of shinobi and then found ourselves unable to fill it with what we originally intended. Peace. Real peace, not the kind that exists between wars." He looked at the boy directly. "The future belongs to your generation, Shisui. Not to ours."
........
The four-pointed windmill in Danzo's eyes began to spin.
Dark emerald chakra gathered around his body and extended outward, taking shape the way intent takes shape when the power behind it is sufficient, forming something enormous and translucent, bones of light resolving into the suggestion of a colossal figure that enclosed the boy in its palm without crushing him, holding him the way something vast and protective holds something small and significant.
At the same moment, the Mangekyō pattern in Danzo's right eye flashed with sudden intensity.
And copied.
........
He had known since the transplant that Kagami's right eye carried a technique he had come to call Mata Furui Toriku, the highest form of Sharingan's copying ability. Not the ordinary duplication of ninjutsu that three-tomoe Sharingan could perform, but something deeper, capable of recording and reproducing techniques at a fundamental level, including Kekkei Genkai, including abilities that should not have been transferable by any ordinary means.
With a single eye, the capacity was limited to one stored technique.
With a pair of Mangekyō, even with the left eye weakened by the partial transfer of its power to Kagami's bloodline, the capacity expanded. Three techniques could be held and accessed.
His right eye currently held two.
The first was Shinra Tensei, absorbed through the resonance event in the room with Konan, arriving through pathways he still did not entirely understand, rooted in the Rinnegan's residue that the technique had left behind.
The second had just been added.
Shisui's dojutsu, newly awakened, not yet named by its user, received and recorded in the moment the boy manifested it for the first time.
Susanoo.