When Fugaku left with Itachi, Kei did not see them off.
Fugaku left satisfied.
Itachi left worried.
Neither had anything to do with Kei.
If one had to exhaust oneself with endless arguments just to achieve a goal, then it was a goal for which one lacked absolute confidence.
If your strength was sufficient, you wouldn’t need to waste so many words.
If Kei’s eye were truly that powerful, he absolutely would not have wasted so much breath arguing with this troublesome father-and-son pair.
The truth was, even Kei himself wasn’t confident.
The moment Fugaku stepped out of the shrine, Kei covered his right eye in agony and collapsed to the ground.
Cold sweat soaked through his haori.
His body visibly withered, his originally sturdy frame becoming emaciated, almost skeletal.
Sure enough, there was nothing more painful than enduring agony while simultaneously pretending to be calm.
Yes, there was something wrong with Kei’s eye.
But Kei couldn’t let anyone know.
An ambitious man’s ambitions were always exposed the moment a person in power revealed a weakness.
At this moment, Kei appeared incredibly powerful to the outside world.
In reality, however, this was when he was at his weakest.
Until he solved the problem with his eye, Kei couldn’t expose the slightest weakness. He couldn’t allow any ambitious person to develop thoughts they shouldn’t have.
Not even in front of Fugaku.
There were plenty of Uchiha who wanted to profit by taking Kei’s head.
Besides, this father-and-son pair weren’t exactly trustworthy allies, let alone the entire family of Uchiha behind them.
The entire Uchiha Clan really wasn’t what one would call trustworthy.
Arrogance, pride, and a tendency to speak too freely—those were practically Uchiha traditions.
They clearly had no intention of rebelling, yet they somehow managed to make their supposed rebellion slogans known to everyone.
Whenever it mattered most, they always seemed capable of making the most unfathomable choices.
You might think they were the natural enemies of the Senju, only for them to launch an ambitious campaign to conquer the shinobi world alongside the Senju because their clan leaders’ sons happened to be friends.
You might think their clan tradition was to follow the strong, yet when Madara was about to leave, they chose to abandon him.
In a clan like this, if you wanted to accomplish anything truly significant, you were better off making the decisions yourself.
Never let the clan members know the exact details.
Whatever you were doing, just drag the entire clan along with you.
Whatever you do, don’t let them know why.
Because with more than a thousand clan members, you’d have more than a thousand different ideas.
Who knew what kind of disaster they might cause?
Every one of them seemed capable of creating a miracle. The moment they became unhappy, they would somehow manage to evolve into something even more absurd.
Take Fugaku’s trusted subordinate, Kusumi, for example.
He had secretly sought Kei out behind Fugaku’s back. What else could he possibly want?
Kei already knew without even meeting him.
Based on the intelligence he’d gathered, Kusumi had witnessed the betrayal of the Uchiha elders and believed this was an excellent opportunity to purge the rotten elements within the clan.
He wanted to do it.
But he didn’t have the strength.
And relying on Fugaku was hopeless.
Fugaku wouldn’t do it.
As the person most eager to see the Uchiha Clan flourish, Fugaku could tolerate virtually any minor mistake made by his clansmen.
He could even tolerate someone as powerful as Kei, whose achievements had already become a threat to the clan leadership.
A few elders who favored surrender were hardly worth mentioning.
So Kusumi had begun considering secretly approaching Kei and using him to eliminate the elders.
If the elders could scheme against Uchiha Kei, then Uchiha Kei could naturally purge them in return.
Of course, everything Kusumi did was supposedly for Fugaku’s sake.
And that demonstrated the problem perfectly.
Even the people beneath you could act in your name under the banner of "doing what’s best for you," so imagine how many factions could exist among the eight hundred or thousand scattered Uchiha.
The hawks.
The doves.
The conciliators.
The surrender faction.
The fence-sitters.
The left wing.
The right wing.
Which faction didn’t have its own agenda?
A mere Uchiha Clan had somehow managed to produce a flourishing garden of competing ideologies.
And today, the scale of the incident had simply startled Kusumi, giving him even grander plans.
Otherwise, at this very moment, Kusumi might already have been standing before Kei, slandering the Uchiha elders and promising to help Kei purge the clan from within as an insider.
As for whether Lord Fugaku would accept the final outcome?
Once it became a fait accompli, could Fugaku really refuse to accept the remaining clansmen of Setsuna and Hi-no-Kaku’s factions?
Surely he wouldn’t make Uchiha Kei take them over.
And even if everything went terribly wrong, Kusumi believed that as long as he took his own life to give everyone an explanation, no one would be able to implicate Lord Fugaku.
After all, how could you blame someone who had given his life for your sake?
Fortunately, plans could never keep up with changes.
Before Kusumi could put his scheme into action, the larger incident had already overshadowed everything.
And Kusumi was merely one representative of the Uchiha.
There were countless others like him who were constantly watching for opportunities.
Just thinking about it gave Kei a headache.
Forget it.
Worrying about the Uchiha isn’t worth it.
Right now, nothing was more important than his own body.
Hidden in the shadows, Kei smiled helplessly.
With his eyes tightly shut, unable to see the sunlight, he finally felt somewhat better.
To reassure Fugaku, Kei had deliberately displayed his eye.
But he hadn’t expected this supposedly auxiliary eye to place such a tremendous burden on him.
The moment Kei had used the power of Tenzento lead the Hyakki in suppressing Susanoo, the vision in his right eye had already disappeared.
Yet because he needed to give Fugaku reassurance—to make Fugaku mistakenly believe that he had awakened the Mangekyō Sharingan as well, thereby giving him enough confidence to stand against Konoha—Kei had pretended that nothing was wrong and displayed his right eye to Fugaku.
But Kei knew the truth.
His eye was not a Mangekyō Sharingan.
It wasn’t even close.
One could practically say that Kei’s eye had become nothing more than a useless ornament.
Though even that wasn’t quite accurate.
An ornament was simply a useless decoration.
Kei’s eye had become a burden.
The situation was simple: Kei’s right eye possessed tremendous ocular power, yet it could not awaken into a Mangekyō Sharingan.
It had even lost its vision.
Uchiha Kei, who possessed no faith, was inferior even to his own sacred blade.
At least his Goshindachi had received the blessing of Amenotokotachi.
Uchiha Kei, meanwhile, had received the favor of no god whatsoever.
For a Sharingan that possessed enough ocular power to fully qualify for Mangekyō awakening yet could not actually awaken, the burden was simply too great for the weak little Uchiha Kei.
Even opening the eye for a moment required an enormous amount of chakra.
With Kei’s chakra reserves being inferior even to Kakashi’s, that eye was constantly torturing him.
The side effects were so severe that merely opening his eye to show Fugaku had drained him until he was practically skin and bones.
Under these circumstances, the Four Nations’ scrutiny and Konoha’s hostility were irrelevant.
The most important thing for Uchiha Kei right now was simply not getting drained dry.
Kei could only endure the pain, deceive Fugaku into taking a harder line, intimidate Konoha, and buy himself several months to resolve the problem with his eye.
Chakra.
Chakra.
Kei desperately craved chakra.
Whether it was to avoid becoming the weak link in his entire organization or simply to live comfortably without being tormented by his own eye, Kei needed to begin his plan to increase his strength.
"Hyōma, how are things going with Gennozuke?"
The reason Kei had only two hundred people around him was that forty of them were currently operating in the Land of Rivers under the command of Gennozuke, Oboro’s fiancé.
Their mission was to recruit the Red-Eyed Clan for Kei.
The mission had already been underway for half a year.
And now Kei needed Gennozuke to do more.
"Reporting to you, my lord. With your financial support, Gennozuke has already taken control of the vast majority of rogue shinobi and missing-nin within the Land of Rivers.
"If you weren’t specifically asking for members of the clan rather than simply people, Gennozuke would absolutely have the ability to bring the entire Red-Eyed Clan under our control."
[Uchiha Hyōma — Ninjutsu: A, Taijutsu: S, Genjutsu: A]
He was blind.
A blind man who had once possessed a dōjutsu.
He was also a genius swordsman, Gennozuke’s master, Gennozuke’s maternal uncle, and Danjō’s brother-in-law.
Hearing this, Kei felt that the plan in the Land of Rivers needed to be changed.
Having the Red-Eyed Clan would be ideal.
But if they didn’t come, it didn’t matter.
A chaotic Land of Rivers was exactly what Kei wanted to see.
"Forget about the Red-Eyed Clan.
"If they want to come, let them come. If they don’t, then forget them.
"We don’t have time anymore.
"Uchiha Azusai , how is the research into the Zero-Tails technology from the Land of Sky?"
The Zero-Tails was the thing Kei valued most among the documents Danzō had sent him.
It was a spoils of war obtained by Konoha after destroying the Land of Sky.
The leader of the Land of Sky, Shinnō, was the very man who, after his country was destroyed, buried one hundred thousand explosive tags beneath the Hokage Rock in Konoha.
Konoha, which possessed the Nine-Tails, had little interest in such crude technology.
Kei, however, was very interested.
The hidden villages’ application of Tailed Beasts was largely limited to using jinchūriki as large-scale weapons of mass destruction.
Konoha, with its mature jinchūriki development programs, looked down on the Zero-Tails because its power was insufficient and its side effects were severe.
But Kei liked it.
He already had enough large-scale weapons at his disposal and didn’t actually need the Zero-Tails for its destructive power.
What he needed was an enormous supply of chakra.
And the Zero-Tails had one particularly attractive characteristic:
effectively unlimited chakra.
The Chimera Technique could fuse summoned creatures.
So why couldn’t it fuse a Tailed Beast?
In truth, Tailed Beasts were Kei’s best option.
But at this point in history, every Tailed Beast had a known identity and belonged to someone.
Stealing one would carry far too much risk.
It would be like breaking into someone else’s house to steal a nuclear weapon.
Kei was already attracting too much attention.
It was better to remain quiet and develop in secret for a few months.
If stealing someone else’s Tailed Beast wasn’t feasible, then why not make one himself?
He already had the technology.
If I can’t build a Tsar Bomba, surely I can build a Little Boy.
So what if a single one isn’t as powerful as a Tsar Bomba?
I can make dozens or even hundreds of Little Boys.
That would not only solve Kei’s shortage of chakra, but could even be applied to his subordinates.
Jinchūriki weren’t created to fight one-on-one.
They were created for large-scale destruction.
A proper jinchūriki’s destructive power might not even compare favorably with the flexibility of dozens of Zero-Tails jinchūriki.
Hearing Kei’s question, an old man with an enormous head hurriedly replied.
"The research is already complete. We only need to conduct the final experiments and master the process completely."
[Uchiha Uchiha Azusai — Ninjutsu: A, Taijutsu: B, Genjutsu: A, Talent: Imitation]
He was one of Kei’s researchers and had been chosen by the Nekomata.
His creativity wasn’t particularly impressive.
But when it came to something that had already been created, his ability to reproduce it was first-rate.
Not only could he replicate existing creations, he could often improve upon them.
Sometimes Kei felt that this man’s value exceeded that of an entire group of Mangekyō Sharingan users.
There were so many forms of advanced technology in the shinobi world.
In his hands, practically any of them could be turned into an industrial production line.
"Then the two of you select your people and head to the Land of Rivers.
"Produce as many Zero-Tails as you can.
"As many as possible.
"Be fast.
"Don’t worry about the consequences."
"Yes, my lord!"
One of them was Gennozuke’s master.
The other was a mad scientist.
Both had long been dissatisfied with Gennozuke’s conciliatory approach.
Previously, their lord had tacitly permitted it, so they had simply gone along with it.
But now that their lord had given them explicit orders, the time wasted on conciliating the people of the Land of Rivers could finally come to an end.
And this was precisely why Kei had changed his approach toward recruiting the Red-Eyed Clan.
Because Lord Kei needed Tailed Beasts to use for fusion.
And creating Zero-Tails required a tremendous number of human lives.
One Zero-Tail required the lives of ten thousand people.
And Lord Kei’s order was to make as many as possible.
It seemed that the number of Zero-Tails that would ultimately be born would depend on one thing:
how many people lived in the Land of Rivers.
So...
My apologies, impoverished Land of Rivers.
You’re going to have to make a small contribution to Lord Kei’s future.
With a single, casually spoken sentence from a great man, the fate of an entire nation’s people had been decided.
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