Chapter 335: The Difference in Ocular Power

Chapter 335: Chapter 335: The Difference in Ocular Power

Late at night, inside the aerial fortress.

"Huff... huff..."

Hyuga Kagami was down on one knee, his chest heaving as he gasped heavily for breath.

Large beads of sweat rolled down from his forehead, traced along his cheeks, and finally dripped onto the stone tiles beneath him, leaving a clearly visible puddle on the floor.

Only after resting for quite a while did Kagami finally recover. Gritting his teeth, he forced himself back to his feet.

Although he had long expected developing Blaze Release to be no easy task, it was only after actually attempting it that he realized the difficulty of developing Blaze Release far exceeded his imagination.

The most troublesome part was that he had to activate Susanoo. Only by using the golden flames produced while Susanoo was active could he barely touch upon the threshold of Blaze Release’s nature transformation.

In other words, if he wanted to practice the nature transformation of Blaze Release, he had to maintain Susanoo for extended periods of time.

Even with the Eternal Mangekyo Sharingan, which could restore his ocular power, maintaining Susanoo for such a long time still placed an enormous burden on Kagami.

After all, this Eternal Mangekyo Sharingan originally belonged to Uchiha Ryota. Although the Fire Release clone possessed Uchiha blood, these eyes were ultimately not the clone’s own. In terms of compatibility and the chakra consumption of its ocular abilities, using them was undoubtedly more taxing for the Fire Release clone than it had been for their original owner, Uchiha Ryota.

Wiping the sweat from his face, Kagami once again activated the Eternal Mangekyo Sharingan and unleashed Susanoo.

After repeated practice, he had also figured out a few tricks for conserving chakra while training Blaze Release. For instance, right now, he only activated an incomplete version of Susanoo. As a result, only several phantom golden ribs surrounded his body instead of a complete golden giant.

Kagami deliberately slowed down his hand seals, forming them one by one at a rate of roughly one seal per second.

He did this because, during his training, he had discovered that fusing the nature transformations of Fire-natured chakra and Lightning-natured chakra was extremely difficult. Both types of chakra were inherently unstable in nature, and trying to fuse two unstable forms of chakra together to produce a new nature transformation was already an extraordinarily difficult task in itself.

Moreover, throughout this process, Kagami also needed to use the golden flames of Susanoo as a medium while simultaneously injecting the ocular power of the Eternal Mangekyo Sharingan.

Therefore, Kagami had no choice but to slow down his hand seals. Only then could he barely accomplish both the fusion of two different chakra natures and the perfect infusion of his Sharingan’s ocular power.

This point alone was enough to show that, when it came to chakra control, there was still a clear gap between Kagami and those true geniuses.

After completing all seventeen hand seals, Kagami shouted in a low voice, "Blaze Style: Flame Dragon Technique!"

Whoosh...

In an instant, a dazzling golden fire dragon erupted from Kagami’s mouth and spiraled through the air above the training room, illuminating the entire chamber as brightly as day.

This Blaze Release ninjutsu Kagami had just performed was something he had developed directly from the C-rank Fire Release ninjutsu, Dragon Flame Technique.

However, because he also needed to infuse Lightning-natured chakra and the ocular power of the Eternal Mangekyo Sharingan, the original four hand seals required for Dragon Flame Technique had expanded into the current seventeen.

Still, with a little more work, Kagami was confident he could reduce the number of hand seals to fewer than ten.

Of course, none of that was the real issue.

The true crux of the problem was that Kagami had to be in the Susanoo state before he could complete the nature transformation and produce the golden flames that represented his own Blaze Release.

But while Susanoo was active, he could already use the ocular power of the Eternal Mangekyo Sharingan to control those golden flames directly.

That meant a Blaze Release that could only be used with the aid of Susanoo was completely meaningless, because it proved that his Fire Release clone had never truly mastered the Blaze Release Kekkei Genkai in the first place.

It was similar to how Kagami’s Yin Release original body could take a shortcut by entering Tenseigan Chakra Mode and condensing Truth-Seeking Balls. Yet his Yin Release original body was not truly at the Six Paths level, nor did it possess the physical or spiritual strength of a genuine Six Paths-level being.

"Why can Sasuke use Blaze Release in his normal state, while I can’t?"

Gazing at the golden flame dragon still circling overhead, Kagami furrowed his brow.

In the shinobi world, there was actually no such thing as an ability that belonged exclusively to one person. As long as the necessary conditions were met, any ninjutsu could be performed.

With that in mind, Kagami carefully considered exactly what he currently lacked compared to Sasuke at the time when Sasuke developed Blaze Release.

"Is the fusion of my two different chakra natures still not perfect enough? Or is my current ocular power inferior to Sasuke’s at that time?"

After pondering for a moment, Kagami gradually formed a hypothesis.

As far as the fusion of Fire-natured chakra and Lightning-natured chakra was concerned, Kagami felt that although his execution was far from perfect, it was still reasonably competent. Therefore, the problem probably did not lie there.

In that case, the problem had to be his ocular power.

By the time Sasuke developed Blaze Release, he already possessed the Eternal Mangekyo Sharingan. Moreover, those eyes had been obtained by fusing his own Mangekyo Sharingan with that of his blood relative, Uchiha Itachi, making them eyes that were perfectly compatible with both his body and soul.

Coupled with the fact that he also possessed Indra’s chakra, Sasuke’s ocular power at that time had already become extraordinarily powerful. Among the Uchiha of that era, it could be said that he was second only to Six Paths Madara.

Therefore, the ocular power of Kagami’s current Fire Release clone should indeed be inferior to Sasuke’s at that time.

There were only a few ways to increase ocular power: awaken a higher form of dojutsu, slowly accumulate power over a long period of time, or, as had happened in the original timeline, have the Sage of Six Paths directly bestow upon Sasuke the Yin Power—the portion of Six Paths power representing spiritual energy—allowing Sasuke to awaken a tomoe Rinnegan in an instant.

Aside from those methods, there were basically no other alternatives.

The Eternal Mangekyo Sharingan currently residing in the eye sockets of Kagami’s Fire Release clone was already the highest form of the Sharingan. If he wanted to increase its ocular power through further evolution, his only option was to absorb the power of the Senju clan’s Sage Body and evolve the eyes into the Rinnegan.

But evolving the Rinnegan was by no means as simple as combining an Eternal Mangekyo Sharingan with the power of the Senju clan’s Sage Body.

One had to remember that Uchiha Madara possessed both Indra’s chakra and the Eternal Mangekyo Sharingan. After his battle at the Valley of the End, he faked his death and obtained cells from the First Hokage.

Yet even after several decades of accumulation, it was only when he was nearing the end of his life that he finally managed to awaken the Rinnegan.

From this alone, it was clear that the Eternal Mangekyo Sharingan and the Sage Body were merely the minimum threshold required to evolve the Rinnegan.

Anyone who thought that possessing a pair of Eternal Mangekyo Sharingan meant they could easily produce the Rinnegan was undoubtedly far too naive...