The question hung in the air of the quiet room, a guillotine blade poised between them.
"Are you lying to me… or are you possessed?"
The words, so blunt and logically devastating, struck Renjiro with a force that momentarily stilled his own frantic thoughts. He didn't react with anger or denial. He simply… froze. Stunned not by the accusation, but by the terrifying, crystalline clarity of her deduction.
He had been so focused on the mechanics of his existence—the how of regeneration, the what of stored eyes—that he had never followed the chain of cause and effect to its ultimate, spiritual conclusion.
His mind, usually a sanctuary of analysis, became a cold, echoing chamber where her logic reverberated.
Two Mangekyō patterns.
The eyes are a window to the soul.
Therefore, two windows.
Therefore, two souls.
It was an equation of chilling simplicity. It connected directly to the fundamental mystery of his being: his transmigration. The thought that had always been an abstract, almost philosophical notion—'I am someone else in this body'—suddenly gained a horrifying, physical manifestation. His blood ran cold.
'Which pattern is mine?' he wondered, a dizzying disorientation taking hold.
'The six-pointed star… does that belong to him, Ethan? Or was that the original Renjiro's soul? And the tri-spoke wheel, born from the grief for Hiro… whose soul cried out then? Mine, or a fragment of the boy who should have lived this life?' The confusion was a vertigo that threatened to upend his very sense of self.
Miwa watched his frozen silence, her expression hardening, expecting either a frantic denial or a damning confession. She did not expect what came next.
Without a word, Renjiro moved. His hand went to a small, complex storage seal inscribed on the inner band of his wrist. He channelled a trickle of chakra into it.
There was a soft puff of releasing air, and a small, clear glass jar materialised in his palm. It was filled with the same faintly blue chakra-infused preservative fluid he used for his stash. Suspended within, like two dark, deadly flowers, were a pair of Mangekyō Sharingan.
Miwa's eyes narrowed, her wariness deepening into confusion. "What is this?"
"Proof," Renjiro said, his voice flat. He held the jar up to the light filtering through the window. "These are from my original set. The six-pointed star pattern. I grew them in front of Kushina Uzumaki when we were attempting to fix my sight. This was before Hiro's death.... before the new pattern existed."
Then, with a deliberate slowness, he raised the jar until it was beside his own face. He focused, and his active Mangekyō—the sleek, tri-spoke wheel—blazed to life in his eyes, the crimson glow casting sharp shadows.
Miwa's gaze darted from the preserved eyes in the jar, their intricate star pattern frozen in death, to the living, spinning wheel in Renjiro's sockets. The two patterns, side-by-side, were undeniably, catastrophically different. No lie could fabricate this. No possession, in the conventional sense, could explain it.
He lowered the jar, his Mangekyō still active, its light reflecting in Miwa's wide, stunned eyes.
"Let's talk about probability, Aunt Miwa," he said, his tone shifting into that of a lecturer dismantling a flawed theorem.
"You know the statistics as well as I do. A fraction of Uchiha ever awaken the basic Sharingan. For those of mixed parentage, the odds drop further. If the Uchiha parents themselves never awakened their Sharingan, odds fall further."
He pointed at his own chest. "My mother did not. My father was an Uzumaki. By every known law of our genetics and spiritual heredity, the chance of me awakening even a single tomoe was so close to zero it was a mathematical joke."
He took a step closer, the jar held between them like an exhibit. "Yet I did. And then I awakened the Mangekyō. An event so rare it defines clan history. And then," he gestured to his own face, "I did it again. With a different pattern. You speak of zero probability. My entire existence is a zero probability. It has never felt normal. It has always felt like… a collision."
He set the jar down on the low table with a soft clink. The preservative fluid sloshed gently. "So, to answer your question. I am not lying. And I do not believe I am 'possessed' in the way you fear—a foreign spirit puppeteering my body. I don't know the 'how' or the 'why.' I only know the 'is.'"
Miwa stared at the jar, then at him, then back at the jar. The proof was irrefutable. Her mind, now forced to accept the impossible, began working through the new reality. She understood the rarity. She knew the eyes couldn't be stolen; Mangekyō users were myths and monsters, not people who left spare eyes lying around for theft, save for one legendary exception that only deepened the mystery.
A long, frustrated sigh escaped her, carrying the weight of shattered paradigms.
"None of this makes sense," she murmured, more to the universe than to him.
Renjiro attempted a weak, brittle smile. "I usually have that effect on people." The joke fell into the heavy silence and died without a trace.
Miwa rubbed her temples, then looked up, her practical nature reasserting itself. "The abilities. Your first Mangekyō. What were they?"
Renjiro nodded, grateful for a question with concrete answers. "Two primary ones. First: a flame. Green. It consumes chakra. Anything it touches, it drains the chakra from, leaving the physical form intact but utterly inert. A fraction of what it consumes is transferred back to me as raw energy."
Miwa's eyes widened slightly. A chakra-eating flame. It was unheard of.
"The second," he continued, "was less combat-oriented. A sealing and tracking ability. I could place an invisible, intangible chakra mark on a person or object. Once placed, I could sense its direction and approximate distance across vast ranges, almost continent-spanning. I used it sparingly. It had limited tactical use in a direct fight."
"And the Susano'o?" she asked, referring to the colossal chakra avatar that was the final gift of the Mangekyō.
"In its earliest, skeletal stage. I never had the chance or the need to develop it further before I lost those eyes."
Miwa absorbed this, filing the terrifying information away. Then her gaze sharpened, returning to his face, to the tri-spoke wheel that had replaced the star. "And the new one? The pattern Hiro's death gave you. What are its abilities?"
Renjiro looked down at his hands, his expression clouding. The confident explainer vanished, replaced by someone confused and uneasy. "I… don't know," he admitted, his voice dropping.
"What do you mean, you don't know?" Miwa pressed, leaning forward. "You've activated the pattern. You must have felt something. An intuition, a pull, a new understanding—"
"I haven't deciphered it," Renjiro interrupted, frustration edging his tone. He looked up, his Mangekyō spinning slowly, as if searching for a signal it couldn't find.
"It's there. I can feel the potential, the weight of it. It feels like the old one in terms of raw power, maybe more. But when I try to reach for its function, to understand what it does…" He trailed off, a faint tremor of something like fear passing over his features.
"What happens?" Miwa asked, her voice now low with concern.
Renjiro met her eyes, and in his, she saw not deception, but genuine, profound bewilderment.
"There's a barrier," he whispered. "A mental block. Not something placed there by someone else. It's… innate. Like the ability itself is written in a language my mind recognises but can't read. I can't access it. I can't interpret it. I don't understand its abilities at all."
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