Dressed in a hunting robe, Uchiha Kei no longer looked much like a shinobi.
He looked more like an onmyōji.
Once certain things became reality, there was no choice but to believe in them.
Things like the resurgence of spiritual energy.
Things like the Night Parade of One Hundred Demons.
After confirming that his earlier conjectures had been correct, Kei had no interest whatsoever in Hiruzen’s actions.
Hiruzen confidently believed that his movements were sufficiently secretive that Uchiha Kei could never discover them.
And even if Kei did find out, it would not matter.
His greatest trump card was still his overwhelming strength.
But from Kei’s perspective, all of this was nothing more than pointless nonsense.
Hiruzen was essentially trying to outwit thin air.
There had never been anything truly new under the sun.
Every year, new rain fell upon the same old eaves.
Hiruzen’s methods were nothing special.
They could not even be considered particularly clever.
With Hotaru’s ability at his disposal , Uchiha Kei had a complete understanding of Hiruzen’s arrangements.
Before Konoha discovered the true capabilities of Hotaru, the entire village was effectively undefended against Kei’s intelligence network.
Who would ever imagine that a butterfly fluttering actively around them could actually be a spy?
As for Hiruzen’s supposed ability to bring Konoha’s various factions together, that was merely Hiruzen’s own wishful thinking.
Could the relationships between Konoha’s top combatants really be reconciled so easily?
Tsunade’s lover and younger brother had both died under Orochimaru’s command.
Orochimaru was dissatisfied with Minato.
Might Duy had remained a genin for his entire life because Hiruzen did not want his true strength exposed, but Hiruzen could not stop others from mocking him.
And Jiraiya was constantly running around outside the village.
Could Tsunade’s rejection have had nothing to do with that?
And now Hiruzen wanted to use Tsunade as leverage to win Jiraiya over?
What was that old man thinking?
Did he really take Jiraiya for an idiot he could fool?
Besides, why did Hiruzen assume that because he wanted to play shogi , Uchiha Kei had to play shogi with him?
Couldn’t Kei simply flip the board over and play Fighting Landlords instead?
If Hiruzen dared to lead his forces against him, Kei would simply detonate the hundred thousand explosive tags he had planted throughout Konoha.
Then they could see whether Hiruzen wanted to deal with the resulting disaster or continue fighting his civil war.
Besides, the timing, terrain, and human factors were all important.
And the most important of them—timing—was not on Hiruzen’s side.
Within a few days, the Sand and Mist shinobi would be fighting at Konoha’s doorstep.
If Hiruzen recalled his top combatants to the village without sending them to reinforce the front lines, would he dare bear responsibility for a defeat on the battlefield?
That old man...
Once he became stubborn, there was nothing else in his eyes.
He had poured all his energy into targeting Uchiha Kei and had long since forgotten to observe the situation around him.
Perhaps Konoha’s dominance over the shinobi world for so many years had made the old man believe that nobody would dare provoke the tiger.
Kei hated this kind of self-righteous old man more than anything.
That was why Kei paid little attention to Hiruzen.
There was something far more important occupying his attention.
Kei’s previous speculation regarding the relationship between the Uchiha’s Mangekyō Sharingan and the gods had been proven correct.
But not completely.
Kei had confirmed that the awakening of the Mangekyō Sharingan among the Uchiha was indeed connected to the gods.
However, it also required a specific trigger:
The overwhelming sorrow of being pushed to the brink of life and death, when one’s heart had suffered a loss greater than it could bear, combined with a sincere prayer to the gods.
In other words, when someone was truly at the end of their rope, they needed to sincerely pray for divine protection.
Therefore, cultivating faith merely made it easier to place Uchiha clan members into the necessary state for awakening their eyes.
But the prerequisite remained the same.
They needed to experience an enormous amount of negative emotion.
This was probably the fundamental reason the Uchiha Clan’s records concerning Mangekyō Sharingan awakening were incomplete.
After all, which powerful person would be willing to admit:
"At the time, I really had no other choice. I could only pray to the gods and beg for divine intervention. And, well... somehow, the heavens actually answered me."
It was just like successful people rarely mentioned that they had simply gotten incredibly lucky and happened to stumble upon an opportunity.
Once Kei understood that the opportunity itself was more important, he realized the problem.
It was easy enough to make his subordinates develop faith in the gods.
But putting someone into that state of overwhelming grief, where their heart had been broken by an unbearable loss, was extremely difficult.
A person needed to be emotionally sensitive enough to reach such a state.
At the same time, they needed to lose something they valued more than their own life.
Only then could that kind of despair be triggered.
And that depended entirely on one’s life experiences.
Someone without faith and with an extremely selfish personality would have a very difficult time reaching such a state.
For example—
Kei himself.
Thus, apart from Oboro, who existed specifically as an experimental subject to prove that this was indeed the correct method of awakening the eyes, everyone else had failed.
Some people did possess things they valued deeply.
Some had even gained something they treasured more than their own lives through the System’s arrangements—namely, Kei himself.
But Kei could not exactly use himself as an experimental subject.
Naturally, the others were not so easy to deceive, either.
Only Oboro, who possessed an unusually rich emotional nature and firmly believed in the Future Buddha, was simple enough for Kei to deceive into awakening her eyes.
After all, Oboro was a useless F-rank whose two Purple-tier Summon slots were occupied by a single person.
She had also possessed powerful ocular prowess from the beginning.
Her potential should have been the greatest among all of them.
So, when Kei approached Oboro with an expression of profound grief and told the girl, who prayed devoutly to the Buddha every day, that Gen’nosuke had unfortunately been killed in battle in the Land of Rivers...
The overwhelming grief Oboro felt made awakening her eyes remarkably easy.
Her blue Sharingan, which had possessed three tomoe, transformed into a six-tomoe form.
At the same time, she awakened two ocular abilities.
The first was Satsuma Jambudvīpa.
Its power was extraordinary—so extraordinary that it could alter reality.
As long as the user refused to acknowledge something, that thing simply would not happen.
The price, however, was one eye.
Although the ability was incredibly powerful, it was not particularly useful.
It was still essentially a nuclear weapon.
If Kei ever reached the point where he had to use something like this, then things had already become so disastrous that there would be little point in struggling any further.
The second ocular ability was Samadhi of Loving-Kindness, a powerful healing ninjutsu.
As long as there was sufficient chakra, the user could heal as many people as they wanted, for as long as they wanted.
Unfortunately, Oboro was only an F-rank weakling.
At most, she could barely heal a group of roughly a hundred people at once.
Such a powerful ocular ability was being wasted simply because it could not produce battlefield-scale results.
She had essentially become an incredibly powerful support specialist who could both disable enemies and heal allies, yet because she did not have enough chakra to sustain her abilities, she could only sit on the sidelines.
How could Uchiha Kei possibly tolerate that?
Therefore, when Oboro excitedly used her ocular abilities, she did not go blind.
And when she later learned that Kei had been lying to her—that Gen’nosuke was perfectly fine and still living his life happily—the girl immediately became cheerful again.
Then she ran off to play without a care in the world.
Because Oboro’s chakra reserves were insufficient, Kei had no choice but to find another solution himself.
And that left Hotaru in an awkward position.
Kei had given Hotaru a completely baffling assignment.
He ordered her to visit Orochimaru and ask him for his summoning contract with Ryūchi Cave.
Upon receiving the order, Hotaru did not immediately set out as she usually did.
Instead, she waited for Kei’s next instruction.
Kei was somewhat surprised.
Why hadn’t his order been carried out immediately today?
"Hotaru, is there a problem?"
Hotaru was somewhat incredulous.
Her master had seemed a little absent-minded lately.
Could he have been working himself too hard?
How could he have forgotten something this important?
"My lord, you haven’t given me anything to offer Orochimaru in exchange."
Kei tapped himself on the head with his folding fan.
Too many things had happened recently.
He really had failed to explain himself properly.
"Hotaru, just go and ask him. Don’t worry. As long as it’s your request, Orochimaru won’t refuse."
Having said that, Kei simply returned to contemplating his next problem.
Hotaru departed, though she remained skeptical.
This was the first time she had ever had even the slightest doubt about one of her master’s actions.
She had never even met Orochimaru before, much less had any sort of relationship with him.
Why would Orochimaru refuse her?
The principle of never disobeying Lord Kei’s will was deeply engraved in Hotaru’s mind.
So she strictly carried out his orders.
But this visit only made Hotaru even more bewildered.
Things really had gone exactly as Lord Kei said.
But...
Wasn’t Orochimaru being a little too nice?
From the moment Hotaru saw Orochimaru, she witnessed a man who had lost most of his humanity calmly conducting human experimentation.
And the subject of his experiments was none other than Anko Mitarashi, his former beloved disciple.
Hotaru thought that a person like this could not possibly treat her kindly.
One wrong move, and she might become the next subject on his operating table.
But this was Lord Kei’s order.
So Hotaru braced herself and spoke.
"Mr. Orochimaru, Lord Kei asked me to request the summoning contract for Ryūchi Cave from you."
Hotaru had already prepared herself for Orochimaru to turn hostile.
Yet no one could have expected what happened next.
The moment the seemingly inhuman Orochimaru looked up and saw Hotaru, it was as though his humanity suddenly returned.
A smile actually appeared on that corpse-like face.
The rejection Hotaru had been certain would come never materialized.
Orochimaru handed over the ninjutsu without the slightest hesitation.
And that was not all.
He even invited her to stay.
He prepared tea and snacks for her.
He asked about her life.
He showed concern for her health.
And in the end, he even wanted to accompany her back to the Naka Shrine.
This single old man had been single for so long.
Could he possibly have some ulterior motive toward her?
She was already married, after all.
Hotaru, now a married woman, began imagining scenes that absolutely should not have been appearing in her mind.
Orochimaru leered at her and said:
"Madam, surely you wouldn’t want to fail to carry out Lord Kei’s orders?"
Hotaru shook her head vigorously, casting the inappropriate thoughts from her mind.
Ah... if this continues, Mr. Kogorō is going to misunderstand.
Just what kind of charm had she used on Orochimaru?
Wait.
No!
It was Lord Kei who had somehow drugged Orochimaru!
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