A few weeks had passed since he met Kiyomi at that time.
By then, Ryusei had begun sending his stealth shadow clones farther south, into the wider southeastern front where Fugaku himself commanded.
He scoured every notable signature, combing through individuals one by one.
Strangely, he found little of value.
Beyond the two Uchiha brothers he had already marked, there weren't any more special Uchiha bloodline elites scattered anywhere.
Even Hyūga's presence was thin; few side branch members were posted, and none with unprotected Byakugan worth taking.
At least, that was what he thought at first.
Eventually, patience paid off.
His clones picked up something odd, almost overlooked.
An individual who seemed ordinary at a glance, in civilian dress, carrying himself like a regular shinobi.
But when Ryusei pushed closer with his sensory net, he realized why he had missed it before. The man had only one Byakugan.
Ryusei's grin sharpened. "So this is the one. The timing, the place… Ao must have taken it from him later."
The man's backstory fit perfectly into the pattern Ryusei already knew.
Just like Mukai Kohinata, there were always remnants, partial Hyūga descendants from the era before the clan even bound itself to Konoha.
Families with diluted bloodlines that the main clan ignored, assuming they lacked the potential to awaken anything meaningful.
Every so often, though, one of them manifested an imperfect one-half of Byakugan.
Forgotten, unprotected, left to serve as ordinary shinobi.
Mukai still lived, somewhere in ANBU under Hiruzen. But this one was different. He had been sent to the front.
Ryusei's clone shadowed him patiently, waiting for the right moment. It came during an unusual skirmish against Kirigakure.
In the chaos, he struck cleanly, stole the eye, killed him, and spirited it away before anyone could notice.
And so, currently, Ryusei sat quietly in his hidden base, staring at the prize he had wanted more than anything.
A single Byakugan rested in his palm.
It wasn't perfect, just one eye, not two.
And he had no way to wear it openly, not yet. But it was a start. The first step toward something greater.
Holding that peculiar eye in his palm, Ryusei's thoughts drifted further.
This confirmed some of his theories.
Danzo and Hiruzen had probably hoarded more Byakugan users than anyone realized.
Who said the Cursed Seal couldn't be circumvented in more roundabout ways?
It didn't always have to be direct theft.
What if a side branch member, secretly loyal to them, was 'paired off' purpose with some ordinary woman outside the clan, selected by them?
Then, years later, the child awakened a Byakugan, untainted, without any cursed seal binding it.
That offspring could be raised in secret, molded into the perfect tool.
Danzo, especially, would never hesitate to play such a long game. Hiruzen, too, if it kept power within his grasp.
Still, Ryusei could see the limits. The Side Branch blood was suppressed on average, weakened over generations.
Even if the Byakugan was technically easier to awaken than the Sharingan, there was no guarantee.
And when the partner was non-Hyūga, the odds dipped further.
Even if a Byakugan manifested, it would likely be weaker than the parent's, perhaps even imperfect, one-eyed, like this one, fractured bloodline echoes.
Not to mention the risk.
If the Hyūga caught wind of such schemes, or if it spread to the wider village, the scandal could outweigh the reward.
So, at best, there were probably only a handful of such cases.
Enough to justify keeping a few imperfect Byakugan operatives in the shadows.
But those would never see the light of day.
They would live their whole lives confined, guarding the Hokage's office, buried inside Root's underground, or serving Danzo on endless external missions.
They could never be paraded openly.
Which meant for him, the chance of ever crossing paths with one, let alone stealing their eye, was slim to none.
Even slimmer than ambushing a main branch Hyūga on the Suna front.
So Ryusei dismissed it from his serious plans.
Instead, it seemed the Hokage had been careless, or perhaps that individual had only awakened his Byakugan recently, or managed to keep it hidden until now.
Either way, it allowed him to be dispatched to this front, and Ryusei to steal it with little effort.
The only reason Ryusei even caught it was because he had flooded the sector with dozens of his stealth clones, combing through every squad one by one.
A single clone could shadow multiple squads, sometimes an entire company.
And with his experience alongside Kanae, he had grown intimately familiar with the chakra signature of the Byakugan.
In the end, dojutsu were just specialized chakra manifestations, and Ryusei could recognize them easily now.
So he took it.
As for the man himself, Ryusei judged his case different from the deliberate "breeding" theory he'd considered before.
This one seemed more like an accident of blood, an old, diluted, and forgotten line that happened to resurface after generations, producing a stray Byakugan that no one thought to guard properly.
"Ao… a man who made a career out of parading a single borrowed eye. Pathetic. And now I've taken it before he even had the chance."
It wasn't the only thing Ryusei had done over the past few weeks.
His real body, when not directing his company, conversing with Kanae and Renjiro, mapping the Kirigakure's hidden pockets everywhere, or intercepting Kirigakure squads slipping in from the sea, around the area they were directly guarding, had continued training relentlessly.
Most of his focus went into refining his clones, making them even stealthier.
After all, what he was preparing for was no small task. He intended to not only linger or probe, but to perfectly kidnap two of the most talented Uchiha of this generation, both from prominent elder lineage.
And in the future, he wouldn't stop there; his hands would stretch toward the Hyūga Main Branch to the west as well.
By now, Ryusei judged his Stealth Shadow Clones to rank just below Mū's "Dustless Bewildering Cover" in the entire history of shinobi stealth.
A bold claim, but one backed by fact.
All of his fuinjutsu theory and jutsu shiki knowledge had been poured into them, pre-programming chakra with seal arrays and hand signs that dictated stealthy behavior at the core automatically.
It was a big difference maker whether you pre-program something for only one purpose, from the beginning, versus trying to change your own body afterward into something else.
Once spawned, the clones could layer his usual sensory suppression mode on top, making them nearly undetectable.
No one on the entire southeastern front had managed to sense him so far.
Still, you could never be too certain.
The drawback remained.
Shadow Clones, no matter how refined, didn't have the same durability as his real body.
It was their greatest weakness, one he had already seen firsthand during the Kumo raid.
They could be dispelled relatively easily during combat engagement situations.
This limitation was what separated them from Mū's true replication technique.
Mū's Fission Technique, for example, could divide his entire being into perfect halves, but if one of those halves died, so too did half of his chakra.
Ryusei's clones, on the other hand, could be replenished, to an extent, their chakra recycled back into him if close enough.
Ryusei also weighed the idea of approaching Fugaku directly, many times, seeing whether some form of alliance could be struck with him, and, through him, the entire Uchiha clan.
But unlike with Tsunade or Orochimaru, there were obvious limitations.
With Tsunade, he had a natural affinity and shared connections.
With Orochimaru, he had already built a strange kind of trust through shared research, on top of the fact that he understood the man far more intimately, thanks to all the "screen time" he'd had in his past life.
Fugaku, on the other hand, obviously remained a far more obscure figure to him. His goals, if he had them, were also probably different.
It was easier to aid Orochimaru's experiments than to somehow "fix" the village's hostility toward the Uchiha, which seemed to be Fugaku's main aim.
If persuasion through words didn't work, then another kind would. The kind where Ryusei's fist, and the overwhelming power behind it, would make the case for him.
By then, he already had Tsunade firmly at his side, and Orochimaru at least leaning toward him as a backer.
With those two foundations, Ryusei felt some optimism that he could one day pull Fugaku in as well and end those laughable attempts to isolate the 'little enchantress' Kiyomi away from him.
Ideally, it would reach the point where the Uchiha themselves would beg him to draw closer, treating him like a savior rather than a threat.
But he wasn't reckless. He knew he still needed to grow.
Fugaku was already around thirty, and though Ryusei wasn't certain if he had awakened the Mangekyō yet, his intuition told him it was only a matter of time, probably sometime during this war.
There was no need to hurry anyways. He also first had to clean up their own section and increase his prestige even more.
By now, the entire area was mapped in detail. Every enemy aura had been measured against his own, every blind spot marked, every weak point where he could concentrate force to systematically erase them.
Still, Ryusei wondered if it might be smarter to wait, see if a bigger fish wandered into his net first. A true Kiri elite.
Besides, he had just secured this new Byakugan. There was no rush to launch a full cleanup.
He intended to test it, to play with it, before making his next decisive move.
"First, let's call Kanae…" Ryusei grinned. Even he felt too disgusted at the idea of replacing his own eyes when it wasn't necessary.
Better to leave that kind of precision work to her.
With her medical control, he also wouldn't feel a thing, and the chance of complications was even slimmer.
And, if he was being honest, he also wanted to see the look on her face when he showed her that.