The return was not gentle. It was a violent, physical snapping taut, like a bowstring released after being drawn to its absolute limit. Renjiro's eyes flew open, but they did not see.
For a heart-stopping second, there was only blinding, formless white pain behind them, a searing afterimage of the psychic cataclysm he had just endured.
Then, reality reasserted itself with brutal clarity.
He was on his back. The cold, unyielding solidity of the floating island's bedrock pressed against his spine. A ragged, desperate gasp tore from his throat, the sound raw and loud in the vast, silent darkness.
He rolled onto his side, muscles screaming in protest as if he had just fought a three-day battle without rest. Every fibre felt strained, trembling with residual tension.
He was drenched in sweat; his clothes stuck to his skin, cold and clammy in the high-altitude night air. He pushed himself up onto his elbows, his head swimming, and took in his surroundings with frantic, grounding focus.
He was on the plateau part of the island. The same stunted pines stood as silent sentinels against the star-flecked black velvet of the sky. The familiar, eternal wind sighed through the rocks, a cold, clean counterpoint to the feverish heat of his own skin.
Above, the constellations of this strange realm wheeled in their alien patterns, untouched and unconcerned. The jar containing the spare eyes lay where he'd left it, a dark lump against the stone. This was real. Solid. He was here, not there. Not in the grey space. Not in the memory-house. Awake.
A shinobi's ingrained discipline made him check the time. He focused on the position of the recognisable constellations, correlating them with his mental internal clock. The calculation took mere seconds. The result sent a fresh, different kind of chill through him.
Only minutes had passed.
Maybe ten. Fifteen at the absolute most. The sun had fully set, leaving only the profound night, but the celestial shift was minimal. The mismatch was profound, unsettling in a way that hours or days of lost time would not have been.
That entire journey—the confrontation, the memories, the terrible choice—had been a storm contained in a teacup of real-world time. It had felt epic, deliberate, a lifetime compressed. The universe, it seemed, had registered it as a brief, violent fever dream.
As his breathing began to steady, the pounding of his heart receding from his ears, he turned his attention inward. He listened, not with his ears, but with his mind, his self.
Silence.
Not the deafening silence of the inner void, but the normal, empty quiet of his own skull. No voices. No whispering presence. No pressure of another consciousness sharing the space behind his eyes.
He probed deeper, tentatively, waiting for the familiar, frustrating block of the tri-wheel Mangekyo, or the cool, distant resonance of the six-pointed star.
Nothing. Just… him.
A hollow, creeping doubt began to insinuate itself. Had it all been a hallucination? A stress-induced psychotic break brought on by chakra exhaustion and the psychological weight of his secrets?
A vivid, symbolic dream conjured by a mind trying to rationalise its own power's limitations? The silence was absolute, and in that moment, it felt almost like a disappointment, an anti-climax. Had he gone through that soul-rending ordeal for… nothing?
He ran a more deliberate internal diagnostic. Chakra flowed smoothly, a bit depleted from the earlier Susanoo manifestations and the soldier pill, but stable. No strange spikes, no foreign signatures, no instability.
His body was tired, sweaty, but otherwise normal. No lingering pain behind his eyes. The contradiction was maddening. Such a profound internal experience should have left a mark, a scar, a change in the flavor of his energy. The lack of any tangible evidence bothered him more than any physical pain would have.
He recalled the Original's explanation of the choice he made.
Coexistence.
A partnership. A permanent link. If that was what he had somehow, unconsciously chosen in his meditative agony, then where was the other half of the partnership? Where was the link? Was "coexistence" just a polite term for the Original's final dissolution, leaving only a cleaned-up repository of memories? Or had he misunderstood the mechanism entirely?
The uneasy calm that settled over him felt like the silence after a battle where the enemy had simply vanished, leaving behind only the eerie, unanswered question of their intent.
Then, it hit.
It was not a voice. It was a wave.
A torrent of sensation and experience crashed into the shores of his consciousness with the force of a tsunami. He staggered, his legs buckling, and he threw out a hand to brace himself against a nearby boulder, the rough stone biting into his palm. This was not the curated, looping memory of the bath time. This was raw, unfiltered, and vast.
He saw, felt, the sun-drenched, winding streets of Uzushiogakure, not as ruins seen in pictures, but as a living, breathing city. The smell of salt air and forging furnaces, the sound of waves against the spiralling sea-walls, the vibrant, swirling red hair of people who smiled with a familiar, fox-like sharpness.
He felt the cobblestones under smaller feet, the secure grip of a father's—Takeshi's—hand, calloused and warm. He knew the layout of a house that was not Miwa's, with a room that looked out over a training yard where whirlpool symbols were painted on posts.
Names surfaced with emotional weight: an aunt who taught him basic sealing strokes with infinite patience, a cousin he'd raced along the rooftops, the specific, comforting scent of his mother's—Sachi's—hair as she carried him, asleep, to bed.
These were not facts learned second-hand. These were lived experiences, complete with the emotional weather of the moment—the boredom of a lesson, the exhilaration of the race, the profound safety of that carried sleep.
And then, perspectives shifted. He saw himself—or rather, the body—from the outside. The confusion in Miwa's eyes in the hospital tent the first time "he" spoke with an un-childlike vocabulary.
The fierce, silent pride during his Jonin promotion ceremony, a pride tinged with the lonely ache of being a ghost at the feast. The sheer, gut-wrenching terror during the fight with the Kumo Jinchuriki, screaming internally at actions he could not stop.
Renjiro slumped against the boulder, breathing heavily as the flood began to ebb, leaving behind a saturated landscape of a second childhood, a second life, fully integrated into his own. The memories weren't compartmentalised. They didn't feel like files accessed from storage. They felt like his. Yet, he could trace their origin. The emotional familiarity was there, but the ownership was shared, dual-sourced.
A quiet, heavy thought settled in the wake of the deluge. Philosophers and Yamanaka alike said memories shaped identity. They were the bricks of the self. So what did that make him now? A structure built with two different sets of bricks, some forged in a hidden village of whirlpools, others in the clinical sterility of a hospital in another world? He was no longer just Ethan-who-became-Renjiro. He was also Renjiro, who watched Ethan. The sum was greater and more complicated, than its parts.
Almost without conscious thought, driven by a need to test the new foundation, he activated his Mangekyo Sharingan.
There was no dramatic surge of power, no violent chakra flare. It was… smooth. Effortless. The world sharpened, details snapping into hyper-clarity under the starlight, but it didn't distort. It felt stable. Grounded.
And with the activation, knowledge simply appeared in his mind. Not as a voice explaining, not as a scroll unfurling in his vision. It was understanding, immediate and complete, as if he'd always known it but had only just remembered.
The abilities of the tri-wheel Mangekyo—his Mangekyo, now fully accessible—revealed themselves.
Bunshin no Aida (分身の間) — "Between Selves."
The power to exist, briefly, in two positions at once. Not an afterimage, not a Shadow Clone. Two fully real, physically present bodies, both him, both capable of independent action. The damage either taken would be shared, pooled into a single toll on his system. The sensation of the ability in his mental grasp felt stable. There was no disorientation at the concept, no fear of memory overlap or identity fracture.
It felt as natural as choosing to step with his left foot or his right. A division without disintegration.
Kōkai no Kagami (後悔の鏡) — "Mirror of Regret."
A genjutsu of profound intimacy. It did not impose foreign images. It became a perfect mirror, reflecting back at the target their own deepest, most unresolved regrets, given form and voice.
The illusion would be constructed from the target's own mind, using their own chakra and memories against them, making it devastatingly difficult to break. As he comprehended it, Renjiro felt anchored* Using such a psychologically invasive technique would have once risked drowning him in feedback, in the echoes of his own regrets.
Now, he understood his own regrets too well and had made peace with their ownership. He could hold the mirror steady without his own reflection distorting the glass.
He let the Mangekyo fade. The intricate pattern receded, the crimson light dying, leaving only the natural starlight. A deep, resonant ache settled behind his eyes—not the sharp pain of damage, but the profound fatigue of a muscle that had finally, fully been used for the first time.
He exhaled slowly, the plume of his breath visible in the frigid air. The wind whispered around him, carrying away the last vestiges of his sweat and fever.
One final thought crystallised in the clear, cold silence of the night, a logical conclusion to the internal war's ceasefire.
The path to the Eternal Mangekyo Sharingan was no longer a theory, a desperate gamble based on stolen eyes and hope. It was a clear, sequential step.
He had resolved the fundamental instability within. He had unified—or at least, peaceably co-governed—the warring sources of his power. The eyes were no longer in conflict.
They were ready.
All that remained was the final, physical sacrament. And for the first time, it felt not like a monstrous necessity, but like the next, inevitable chapter in a story he was now fully, unequivocally authoring.
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