Chapter 409: Hyuga Kagami’s Speculation

Chapter 409: Chapter 409: Hyuga Kagami’s Speculation

"Unfamiliar?"

Looking at the Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan in Shisui’s eye sockets, which had already stopped evolving, Hyuga Kagami fell into thought for a moment before slowly saying, "Get some proper rest first. Your physical condition is still unstable right now, and an accident could happen at any time."

According to Kagami’s estimate, even if everything went smoothly with the transplant surgery, it would still take at least two weeks, and as long as a month, for all the hidden risks to disappear and Shisui’s condition to completely stabilize.

Shisui was already utterly exhausted. After hearing Kagami’s words, he simply closed his eyes and began resting on the operating table.

To him, this transplant surgery had been no less grueling than a life-or-death battle—in fact, it had been even more exhausting than one. At this point, he truly didn’t have an ounce of strength left.

Taking advantage of the lull, Kagami cleaned up the wrecked operating room, setting the toppled instruments upright one by one before reconnecting them to Shisui’s body.

Immediately afterward, he began recording the data displayed on the various instruments while sinking into thought.

There was no doubt about it.

After Shisui successfully suppressed the First Hokage’s cells within his body and completed the fusion of Yin Release and Yang Release, the Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan in his eye sockets had indeed entered a state of evolution.

However, that evolutionary state had not lasted very long, and the driving force behind the evolution seemed insufficient as well.

Kagami silently analyzed the situation and concluded that there were three possible reasons why the evolution had failed.

The first was the absence of ōtsutsuki Indra’s chakra.

The First Hokage’s cells inevitably contained traces of ōtsutsuki Asura’s chakra. Therefore, if the necessary condition for evolving the Rinnegan truly was the combination of ōtsutsuki Asura’s chakra and ōtsutsuki Indra’s chakra, then what this failed evolution had most likely lacked was precisely that missing portion—

ōtsutsuki Indra’s chakra.

The second possibility was that Shisui was not the original owner of this Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan.

The original owner of these Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan was Uchiha Ryota. Perhaps Ryota’s own body had to serve as the vessel in order for this pair of Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan to evolve into the Rinnegan.

After all, Madara’s Rinnegan had evolved from his own Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan.

The third possibility was a lack of sufficient chakra.

This was not baseless speculation on Kagami’s part.

One had to remember that Uchiha Madara’s great battle with the First Hokage had taken place when the two were already middle-aged. After that battle, Madara used the forbidden technique Izanagi to fake his death and deceive both the First and Second Hokage. Then, using a piece of the First Hokage’s flesh that he had bitten off and kept in his mouth, he successfully transplanted the First Hokage’s cells into himself.

And yet, Madara did not awaken the Rinnegan until he was already old and nearing the end of his life.

That was precisely why he had no choice but to entrust his Rinnegan to Nagato, who possessed the bloodline of the Uzumaki Clan, hoping that Nagato would eventually use the Samsara of Heavenly Life Technique to resurrect him so that he could return to the shinobi world in his strongest state.

From this alone, it was clear that Madara had not evolved the Rinnegan immediately after transplanting the First Hokage’s cells. Instead, he only awakened them when he was nearing death.

The interval between the two events had lasted several decades.

Kagami secretly speculated that there were two reasons why it had taken Madara so long to evolve the Rinnegan after transplanting the First Hokage’s cells.

First, one of Madara’s Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan had been used to activate the forbidden technique Izanagi and had completely lost its ocular power. Thus, although Madara possessed ōtsutsuki Indra’s chakra as well as the Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan, he only had the ocular power of a single eye remaining, leaving the strength of his Yin Release insufficient.

Second, evolving the Rinnegan might require an enormous amount of chakra.

Even after the First Hokage’s death, Madara had continued lurking in the darkness. Perhaps, during all those years, he had actually been continuously accumulating chakra.

Madara had mentioned to Obito on several occasions that his life was being sustained by the Gedo Statue behind him.

However, the Gedo Statue, as the husk of the Ten-Tails, had originally been sealed within the moon. Even if Madara had managed to steal the Gedo Statue from the moon, what he obtained should have been nothing more than an empty shell.

There was no way such an empty husk could continuously supply him with chakra and sustain his life.

There was only one possible explanation.

After Madara stole the Gedo Statue from the moon, he had spent the following decades continuously feeding chakra into it, using the Gedo Statue as a vessel to store that chakra and gradually accumulate the amount required to evolve the Rinnegan. It was only when he reached the end of his life that he finally amassed enough chakra to successfully evolve his Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan into the Rinnegan.

Otherwise, there was simply no way to explain why Madara, already old, physically weakened, and nearing death, had managed to evolve the Rinnegan precisely when his stamina, ocular power, and chakra were all in decline.

It completely defied the natural order of things—unless there had been some other vessel storing the chakra he had accumulated since his prime.

And if even a powerhouse on Uchiha Madara’s level had needed to accumulate chakra for several decades before barely gathering enough to evolve the Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan into the Rinnegan, then even after accounting for the fact that Madara had only possessed the ocular power of a single Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan, it was not difficult for Kagami to reach one conclusion:

Evolving the Rinnegan required an absolutely enormous amount of chakra.

"Haa..."

Letting out a long breath, Kagami inwardly shook his head.

"As expected, evolving the Rinnegan isn’t that simple..."

Through Shisui’s transplant surgery, he could now be certain of one thing: merely possessing the Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan and transplanting the First Hokage’s cells was not enough to evolve the Rinnegan.

As for which necessary elements were still missing, Kagami already had a rough idea.

The problem was that gathering every single one of them would be far too difficult. And since the Rinnegan was not his primary objective, he had no intention of delaying his Kekkei Mōra Plan for something that, to him, was ultimately optional.

Several hours later, Kagami and Shisui slowly walked out of the underground operating room.

Itachi, who had been waiting in the tree, immediately rushed over. Seeing that Shisui was safe and sound, he exclaimed happily, "I knew the surgery would succeed!"

Shisui merely shook his head with a bitter smile.

For him, this surgery had truly been a brush with death.

Kagami instructed Itachi, "For the next week or two, Shisui can’t use chakra at all. Stay by his side during this period. Ideally, don’t leave him even for a moment."

Itachi hurriedly nodded.

"Understood!"

Then, Kagami turned to Shisui and added, "While you’re recuperating, don’t forget to record any changes in the condition of your eyes. That data is extremely important to me."

Shisui replied, "Don’t worry, Senpai."

After bidding farewell to Shisui and Itachi, Kagami slowly made his way home.

The events of the day had thoroughly exhausted him, but fortunately, everything had ended without disaster. Shisui had safely survived the surgery, and compared to that result, a little exhaustion was hardly worth mentioning.

After casually eating something, Kagami lay down on his bed and began considering the matter of his next clone.

Although the Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan currently in Shisui’s eye sockets had failed to evolve into the Rinnegan this time, its ocular power had still increased considerably.

On top of that, Kagami had now figured out a method for training Blaze Release. Therefore, it was practically a foregone conclusion that his Fire Release clone would eventually achieve complete mastery of the Blaze Release Kekkei Genkai.

With that settled, the most pressing question before Kagami became—

What chakra nature should he choose for his next clone, and whose cellular tissue should he use as the template...?