Akira pushed open the wooden front gates of his villa compound, stepping into the quiet courtyard and letting out a long, weary breath.
"Finally... over for now," he thought, shaking his head at the memory of the clan elders' dramatic antics.
After feeding Snowy her portion of chilled deer meat in her iced room and tossing Po a prime slab in his fruit garden, Akira made his way to the back hallway of the main house. Sliding open a concealed trapdoor in his storage closet, he descended down a long spiral staircase that led past his standard basement, going a full eight meters deep into the earth.
Here lay his true, fully modernized underground training arena.
During the reconstruction of his home, Akira had specifically posted an anonymous, highly discreet mission at the Ninja Task Hall to excavate and reinforce this massive subterranean vault. Over the past year, he had personally reinforced the concrete walls with layered sealing matrices, layering silence and chakra-suppression arrays so that no matter what kind of destruction occurred down here, not a single vibration or stray chakra pulse would ever leak to the surface or be detected by village sensors.
Stepping into the center of the vast, open stone ring, Akira wove a quick hand seal.
POOF!
A solid Shadow Clone materialized beside him, settling instantly into a low combat stance.
Without exchanging a single word, Akira's eyes flared, thick veins bulging around his temples as his Byakugan activated in full force. He surged forward, his speed and power a blinding blur—at least three times faster and more destructive than the restrained display he had put on against Uchiha Itachi earlier that day.
TAP! TAP! TAP!
The sharp, rhythmic crackle of Gentle Fist strikes echoed through the reinforced cavern.
"Eight Trigrams Thirty-Two Palms!"
Akira's palms struck like lightning, driving precise bursts of chakra into his clone's tenketsu points. The clone barely managed to deflect the blows, leaping backward only for Akira to instantly close the distance.
"Eight Trigrams Empty Palm!"
A compressed wave of high-density air-chakra erupted from Akira's open palm, blasting through the cavern and shattering the clone's guard. He immediately followed up without giving his opponent a fraction of a second to breathe.
"Eight Trigrams Sixty-Four Palms!"
His movements became a brilliant, lethal dance of precision, sixty-four consecutive strikes striking with brutal force. Yet the clone, possessing equal skill, dug its heels into the stone floor and channeled its chakra reserves for a final defense.
"Eight Trigrams One Hundred Twenty-Eight Palms!" Akira roared softly, pushing his limits as his hands transformed into an absolute storm of blue chakra strikes.
Seeing the unavoidable wall of force, the clone crossed its arms and spun on its axis. "Eight Trigrams Palms Revolving Heaven!"
A massive, rotating dome of protective chakra flared into existence, clashing violently against Akira's barrage of strikes. The shockwave tore through the arena, cracking the reinforced floor tiles and sending a spray of pulverized stone across the walls. Unable to sustain the immense chakra consumption of the technique, the clone finally dispersed into a cloud of white smoke.
Akira dropped his stance, canceling his Byakugan as he sat down cross-legged on the ruined stone floor, taking slow, deep breaths to regulate his oxygen intake.
Looking around at the shattered floor and gouged walls, Akira let out a quiet, exasperated sigh.
"Demolished again..." he thought, rubbing his temples. "I'm going to have to spend another evening repairing this floor. Even Sister Ren is going to start complaining if I keep destroying the training grounds at this rate."
Weaving another hand sign, he summoned a fresh Shadow Clone, handing it a set of masonry tools to handle the cleanup while he headed upstairs for a hot, refreshing shower.
After washing away the sweat and soot of his training, Akira wrapped a towel around his neck and walked back down to the subterranean level, passing through a heavily sealed steel door at the far end of the hallway: his secret inheritance room.
The room had undergone a massive upgrade since his raid on Danzō's Root bunker.
Dominating the center of the room was a massive, custom-built wooden rack housing dozens of specialized, glass compartment boxes filled with a pale, blue-green nutrient fluid. Inside each glass cell, an eerie crimson light illuminated a preserved Sharingan eye, suspended silently in the liquid.
Akira stepped closer, his pale eyes quietly reflecting the haunting red glow of the floating eyes.
The Uchiha clan had suffered catastrophic casualties over the last three Shinobi World Wars, and many of their fallen had succumbed to Konoha's own blades. Based on the classified Root archives Akira had stolen, he learned that Danzō wasn't even the originator of this grisly collection. It was the Second Hokage, Tobirama Senju, who had first begun harvesting the dōjutsu of deceased Uchiha for scientific analysis. Following Tobirama's death, those research files and preserved eyes fell directly into the hands of his darkest disciple, Danzō Shimura.
Using war casualties and secret Root assassinations as a cover, Danzō had systematically harvested the Uchiha for human experimentation.
Akira cataloged his stolen stash in his mind: nine pairs of single-tomoe Sharingan, seven pairs of two-tomoe Sharingan, and three complete pairs of fully developed three-tomoe Sharingan. A total of thirty-eight individual Sharingan eyes. Countless others had been ruined or consumed during Danzō's failed experiments, leaving only these pristine specimens behind in his deep vault.
Akira couldn't help but chuckle softly at the sheer absurdity of Danzō's paranoia. The old strategist had been so confident in Root's impenetrable defenses that he never bothered to change the vault's location, fully believing his subterranean stronghold was untouchable.
Beneath the Sharingan rack rested ten specialized, reinforced vacuum containers. Inside floated pieces of pale, white organic flesh—the infamous, wood-style-generating Hashirama cells.
Of the ten samples, only one was genuine, pure cellular tissue harvested directly from the First Hokage's original remains. The remaining nine were derived cultures, bred through tragic, forced hybridization using the bodies of deceased Senju clan members.
Connecting all the glass compartments was a complex, whirring apparatus that continuously pumped air, filtered the nutrient fluid, and circulated a precise, low-frequency stream of neutral chakra through the cells to prevent any biological degradation.
To acquire this life-support apparatus, Akira had deployed a Shadow Clone into the underground black market, disguised using the same high-level concealment scroll he had utilized during his Root heist. He had paid a staggering sum of five million ryo for the bio-maintenance machine itself, plus an additional ten million ryo for heavy-duty, chakra-infused batteries capable of keeping the entire preservation system running continuously for two full years.
Beside the biological racks stood another massive, reinforced cylindrical glass container. Inside, a dense, swirling cloud of dark orange chakra glowed with terrifying intensity.
Akira stared at the containment tube and let out a soft sigh. This was the dense Nine-Tails chakra he had painstakingly collected using his sealing bowls during the aftermath of the Kurama attack. Although the total volume amounted to only two or three percent of the Nine-Tails' total reservoir, its sheer density was staggering—easily equivalent to the full chakra reserves of ten high-level Jonin combined.
Akira already had long-term plans to cultivate and evolve this tailed-beast chakra. To nourish its growth, he routed a continuous, controlled charge from his high-capacity chakra batteries directly into the chamber. Because Kurama's chakra was naturally malicious and prone to violent surges, Akira had etched dozens of intricate, heavy-duty reinforcement seals around the exterior glass to guarantee absolute containment.
Satisfied after double-checking the stability of all his hidden assets, Akira picked up a scroll detailing advanced chakra nature transformations from a side table. With the scroll tucked under his arm, he stepped out of the inheritance room, sealing the heavy iron doors firmly behind him.