The garden air, once carrying the gentle scents of blooms and sun-warmed soil, seemed to freeze around them. Kushina's vibrant crimson chakra, which had flared in shock, now condensed into a tight, focused sphere of intense concentration, all of it directed at the unassuming ceramic jar on the table.
Her eyes, wide and in disbelief, were locked on the vessel as if it contained a sleeping dragon. The potent, verdant life force radiating from within was unmistakable—a chorus of primordial power humming a song only the descendants of Senju or those steeped in the deepest village lore would recognise.
It was the chakra signature of the Shodai Hokage, Hashirama Senju, a foundational pillar of the world they lived in, now sitting on her garden table like a forgotten teapot.
Her gaze slowly lifted from the jar to Renjiro's face, her expression tightening from shock into something harder, more suspicious. Her voice, when it came, was low and strained, each word carefully measured. "Renjiro. What is this? And how, in the name of all that's sane, did you get it?"
Renjiro, sensing the shift in her energy from pity to profound wariness, kept his own posture relaxed, his clouded eyes aimed in her general direction.
"It is exactly what your senses tell you it is," he replied, his tone calm, almost clinical.
"Preserved cellular matter from Hashirama Senju. Lord Third Hokage presented it to me personally. A reward for my contributions to the war effort." He paused, letting the official story settle.
"His explicit order was for me to use it to restore my sight."
Inside, however, Renjiro's mind was racing down a far more ambitious and terrifying path.
'While it can indeed help me heal my eyes, I need it more as a catalyst.' His thoughts were a cold stream of strategy.
'My real plan isn't just to heal the blindness, but it's to see if the Hashirama cells contain enough of Asura's legacy to catalyse the evolution into the Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan. To stabilise the dojutsu's power permanently, to end the degeneration.'
And if that failed? A darker, more practical corner of his mind presented the backup plan. 'I still have the spares. The Sharingan pairs I've… cultivated and stored. I can always excise these ruined eyes and implant fresh ones, force the trauma to awaken a new Mangekyō all over again, just like the first time.'
It was a brutal, cyclical path, but it was a path. The ultimate, distant goal shimmered like a mirage: the Rinnegan. But that required a convergence he wasn't ready for—the chakra of Indra and Asura merging within a single vessel. That was a problem for a future version of himself, one with stable, Eternal Mangekyō eyes. For now, the jar was the first, audacious step.
Kushina's suspicion didn't abate; it deepened. She leaned forward, her red hair seeming to catch the fading light like a warning flare. "Wait. Hold on. This doesn't make sense." Her brow furrowed.
"Why do you even need this?" She gestured sharply at the jar, her voice gaining an edge of frustration.
"You have your Uzumaki chakra seinōu. The regeneration. It's strong, Renjiro. Strong enough to heal the Mangekyō's degradation, I'd wager. The ability can regrow tissue, mend catastrophic chakra burns, and even regenerate limbs given enough time and energy. For you to be permanently blind from your Dojutsu overuse…" She shook her head, the motion fierce.
"It doesn't add up. How are you still blind?"
Renjiro could feel the agitation in her chakra, the way it spiked and crackled with her confusion. He needed to deflect, to maintain the façade of a man simply pushing his limits.
"The degeneration is a unique chakra-based atrophy, Kushina. My regeneration helps; it slows it, but it's like trying to bail out a sinking ship with a cup. The damage outpaces the healing."
"Bullshit."
The word was a whip-crack in the quiet garden; it was the first time Renjiro had heard the Jinchuriki curse.
Her eyes narrowed, seeing through him with an unnerving clarity. "I'm not buying it, Renjiro. I know the extent of that ability. What you're describing is a paper cut resisting a full medical ninjutsu regeneration session. If your seinōu was functioning properly, your eyes would have scarred over and then cleared. The fact that they haven't…" She trailed off, her mind working.
"There has to be another reason it's not working optimally. And if you don't know what that is, then that's even more concerning."
Renjiro fell silent. He could feel the precipice before him. He could continue the lie, weave a more complex tapestry of half-truths. But this was Kushina. Of all people in Konoha, she was perhaps the only one who might understand the burden of a power that made you a target, a secret that could get you killed. Not even Miwa could understand him in this aspect.
Renjiro remembered the cold storage seals in his private workshop, the pairs of Sharingan eyes, meticulously preserved, each a testament to his body's horrific, miraculous betrayal. He had harvested them from himself, over and over, a gruesome crop sown from his own pain and Uzumaki vitality, stockpiling them for a desperate future like the one Danzo had envisioned after the Uchiha Massacre.
'Should I tell her?' The thought was terrifying. But the weight of carrying this secret alone, in the dark, was becoming unbearable. She had offered help without hesitation. She was pointing out the flaw in his story because she genuinely wanted to solve the problem.
He took a slow, steadying breath, the scent of the garden flowers suddenly cloying. "My chakra seinōu," he began, his voice dropping to a near-whisper, "is working perfectly fine, Kushina."
He let the sentence hang, feeling her focused attention like a physical pressure.
"In fact," he continued, the words feeling like shards of glass in his throat, "it works a little too well." He reached up, his fingers hovering just before his own clouded eyes. "The Mangekyō Sharingan… it's not just a pattern on the retina. It's a chakra-based mutation engraved into the very DNA of the ocular nerves. A unique, personal signature."
He lowered his hand, placing it flat on the table beside the jar. "When the degeneration renders the eye useless… when I remove a damaged Sharingan… my body doesn't just heal the socket." He met the space where he sensed her face, his own expression bleak.
"It recognises the loss of that specific, mutated tissue. And in its place, guided by the Uzumaki vitality and the latent Uchiha blueprint… it grows a new one. A fresh, base-level Sharingan. My regeneration doesn't heal the Mangekyō. It perfectly replaces it with a blank slate."
The confession hung in the air, monstrous and unbelievable. He had just described a biological impossibility, a horrifying synergy of two of the world's most powerful bloodlines that turned his own body into a factory for the Kekkei Genkai his clan killed for.
Kushina did not move. She did not speak. The vibrant, swirling tempest of her chakra, which had been animated with suspicion and frustration, simply… flatlined. It was as if every ounce of her energy had been sucked into a vortex of utter, stupefied shock.
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