The silence in the sun-dappled garden was no longer peaceful; it was charged, brittle, and heavy with the weight of an impossible truth. Kushina stared at Renjiro, her vibrant features frozen in a mask of pure, uncomprehending shock.
The revelation hung between them, not as words, but as a fundamental restructuring of reality. The jar of Hashirama's cells, the terrifying prize of a moment ago, was now forgotten, a trivial artefact compared to the living miracle—or monster—sitting across from her.
Her voice, when it finally broke the stillness, was a thin, strained thread of sound.
"When?" she managed to utter. "When did you… discover this?"
Renjiro's head tilted slightly, his blind gaze directed at the table between them.
"From the moment I lost an eye while on a mission with the Police force," he replied, his tone disturbingly matter-of-fact.
"The initial injury… it wasn't a clean loss. By the time I was planning on restoring my eye, my body already began building something new in the ruins. I felt it happen. The itch of new nerves, the press of forming tissue… a new lens, a new iris, all woven from nothing but chakra and bloodline memory."
Kushina's mind, kicking back into gear, moved from the 'what' to the staggering 'how many.'
Her eyes, wide as saucers, scanned his face as if she could see the ghostly echoes of countless ocular surgeries beneath his skin. "How many?" she breathed.
"How many pairs?"
Renjiro gave a small, almost imperceptible shrug. "Roughly twenty pairs. Though some were… lost. Destroyed during experimentation."
The shift from horrific revelation to casual laboratory talk was so abrupt it briefly short-circuited Kushina's shock, replacing it with a spike of incredulous curiosity.
"Experimentation?" she echoed in concern, "What in the world were you doing, Renjiro?"
A faint, grim smile touched Renjiro's lips. "In a manner of speaking. Those experiments are how I awakened the Mangekyō Sharingan in the first place."
The final, definitive lock of understanding slid into Kushina's mind with a sound of dreadful finality. Her breath caught again. The shock returned, redoubled, a cold wave that washed away the last of her teasing demeanour.
She had just been told that a man could regrow one of the world's most coveted Kekkei Genkai, and now he was casually mentioning that he had farmed those eyes to emotionally torture himself into achieving their ultimate evolution.
She put a hand to her temple, a soft, helpless laugh escaping her. 'Can I take any more surprises today?' she wondered, feeling the world tilt on a terrifying new axis.
As Kushina grappled with the enormity of it, Renjiro allowed her the time, as he was aware of the impact of the news.
'What I can do is impossible,' he mused. 'No Uchiha in recorded history, no Hyūga, no wielder of the Ketsuryūgan or any other visual prowess, has ever regenerated a lost eye. The eye is the window of the soul, the seat of the dōjutsu—unique, fragile, irreplaceable. You lose it, and it is gone forever, barring theft from another.'
He considered the First Hokage's legendary healing, 'Could Hashirama have regrown a Sharingan if he lost one? Unlikely. His power was a vast life force, not specific genetic replication.'
Kushina drew a long, shuddering breath, visibly pulling the scattered pieces of her composure back together. The shock in her eyes was being steadily replaced by the keen, analytical focus of a seal master and a survivor.
"Your general healing," she asked, her voice steadier now, "has it been weakened? Slowed? Altered in any way by… by this specific process?"
Renjiro considered. "Not that I've observed. Cuts close, bones knit, chakra exhaustion abates at the usual rate."
Then he paused, recalling her earlier point. "But you said it yourself. If it were functioning 'normally,' it should have prevented the Mangekyō's degradation. Or at least reversed it. So logically, it must be affected. The system is working, but not on the eyes. It's as if my body sees the degenerated Mangekyō not as an injury to be healed, but as… spent fuel to be replaced. The regeneration is hijacked, redirected."
Kushina's eyes lit up. She was on the trail now, the puzzle pieces aligning in her mind. She nodded slowly.
"That's it… that might be it," she murmured, more to herself than to him. "It's not that the healing is weak. It's that it's been… reprogrammed. By the Sharingan itself."
Renjiro leaned forward, his blindness making his focus seem even more intense. "What's your theory?"
Kushina shook her head sharply. "No. Not yet. It's incomplete. I have a hypothesis, but stating it now might bias the observation. I need data. Raw, firsthand data."
Her gaze, now fierce and determined, locked onto his sightless eyes. "I need to see it. The regeneration process. From the moment of loss to the moment of emergence."
Renjiro went very still. "You mean… now?"
"Yes," Kushina said, her voice leaving no room for argument. "Now. While I'm here to monitor every spark of chakra, every shift in your biological signature. Before we introduce the wild card of Hashirama's cells into the mix. We need the baseline."
In the space of that demand, a profound and simple truth settled over Renjiro. He did not question her. He did not hesitate. He trusted her. This fiery, passionate, fiercely loyal woman was one of the few anchors he had in a world that sought to use or discard him.
She understood the price of being a vessel for impossible power. His internal voice was calm.
'When the time comes, she will be the one to help me sell the lie that Hashirama's cells restored my sight. She will protect this secret because she understands what it means to carry one.'
He let out a long, resigned sigh, a sound that held the weight of countless private agonies. "Alright," he said, his voice quiet but firm.
He held up his right hand. Chakra, visible as a faint, shimmering blue aura even to non-sensory eyes, coalesced around his fingertips.
"Zzzzt-hummm!"
It hummed with a high-pitched sound, taking on the precise, razor-sharp quality of chakra scalpels. The air around his fingers warped slightly, a heat-haze of concentrated energy.
Renjiro's left hand came up to steady his own head. His right hand, glowing with lethal precision, approached his face. There was no drama, no flinching.
The tips of the chakra scalpels met the skin at the inner corner of his right eye, just beside the bridge of his nose. A faint sizzle, the smell of ozone and something organic burning.
Renjiro's breathing remained even, but a fine sheen of sweat broke out on his forehead. His jaw was clenched tight. With a final, gentle tug, he withdrew his hand.
Resting on his blood-slicked fingers was his right eye. It was clouded a dead, pearlescent grey. A single tear of clear fluid, mixed with a thread of blood, traced a path down his cheek from the now-empty socket.
Without pause, his chakra-encased fingers moved to his left eye. The process repeated. The sizzle, the careful intrusion, the surgical detachment. The snap of the second nerve. A minute tremor ran through his arm this time, the strain and the trauma beginning to compound. He withdrew the left eye, a twin to the first, and placed it beside its counterpart.
He lowered his hands, the chakra scalpels dissipating with a faint pfft of released energy. He sat upright, his head held high, two dark, weeping sockets where his eyes had been. Blood, dark and slow, welled at the corners, tracing twin crimson paths down his pale cheeks to mingle with the sweat on his jawline.
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