The Mangekyō Sharingan awakening project had barely gotten started before it failed.
Aside from letting Ensei Uchiha experience anger, nothing had happened.
The special chakra extracted from Itachi Uchiha's brain hadn't helped either.
Whether it was because there was too little or because different people needed different kinds of special chakra, it had no effect at all.
Since the experiment had failed, Ensei Uchiha simply waited for the Izanagi encoded in the Transcription Seal to take effect and change what had already happened.
Izanagi and the Transcription Seal really were the perfect combination.
The only drawback was that Izanagi couldn't change the past. It could only alter events after it had been activated.
Oh, right. It was also possible that using Izanagi was why he hadn't awakened the Mangekyō Sharingan.
After all, theoretically, the time affected by Izanagi could be considered an illusion cast upon the world.
Even with a Three Tomoe Sharingan, using Izanagi probably wasn't enough to qualify for the Mangekyō.
In any case, though the Mangekyō Sharingan experiment had failed, Ensei Uchiha hadn't given up on ways to grow stronger. Instead, he prepared another option.
That was right: the Tenseigan.
After cloning a hundred thousand Byakugan, Ensei Uchiha had planned to replace his own eyes for a while.
But when he discovered that he could draw on the Byakugan's visual power after sealing the hundred thousand eyes inside himself in the manner of a Jinchuriki, he abandoned the idea.
Original eyes were still the easiest to use. If he could avoid replacing them, he should.
There was another reason, too: the hundred thousand cloned Byakugan probably weren't pure enough.
Now that he had discovered his own lack of strength, Ensei Uchiha began preparing to continue replicating the Tenseigan.
First, he cloned Hinata's eyes. As two of the only eyes in the original story whose purity met the standard, they were something Ensei Uchiha watched closely during the cloning process.
But after they were cloned, he still couldn't find any difference between them and other Byakugan.
So Ensei Uchiha began putting his backup plan into action: purifying the Byakugan himself.
How would he do it? Naturally, he would leave that to the all-purpose chakra.
But this approach had another problem: how could he confirm that the Byakugan were pure? How could he tell what counted as impurities and what was truly part of the Byakugan's power?
Ensei Uchiha didn't know, of course. But he could use a simple method: purify the cloned Byakugan with chakra drawn from the hundred thousand Byakugan inside him.
He couldn't tell what exactly the purification produced, so all he could do was increase the number of test subjects and improve the odds of success.
For that purpose, Ensei Uchiha cloned a hundred pairs of Hinata's eyes and began running purification experiments like mad.
A month later, only six pairs of Byakugan remained. Of those six, only two pairs still retained their Byakugan form; the rest had undergone unknown mutations.
Setting aside the differences among the mutated eyes, Ensei Uchiha could already sense that the two remaining pairs had something different about them compared to other Byakugan.
Whether their purity was high enough still needed to be determined through specific tests.
At first, Ensei Uchiha had planned to replace one pair of his own eyes.
But during this time, he discovered that the God Tree fragment he had obtained had undergone an unknown mutation under the onslaught of his chakra and Natural Energy.
To describe it, it looked like White Zetsu flesh that wasn't quite so white?
No, unlike White Zetsu's lifeless appearance, this white substance looked more like the skin of the Otsutsuki Clan.
"Could this thing grow a Ten-Tails?"
"I remember Kaguya Otsutsuki brought a God Tree seed to the Shinobi World. Since it's a tree, it should be able to produce seeds, too."
Ensei Uchiha stared at the thing he had created, lost in thought. Ten-Tails cells? God Tree seeds? Was it a trap or an opportunity?
Next, Ensei Uchiha put his Tenseigan replication project on hold and began studying the mass of white material.
After more than a month of research, he discovered that this thing really did seem to originate from some kind of special entity in the Otsutsuki Clan.
It could absorb various kinds of chakra or Natural Energy to grow, and once it reached a certain stage, it could also give energy back.
That trait was very much like the original Ten-Tails.
So Ensei Uchiha named it the Mini Ten-Tails and began studying it in detail.
Ultimately, by using its ability to give energy back, Ensei Uchiha successfully obtained two Mangekyō Sharingan.
Why two, rather than a pair?
Because Ensei Uchiha only had the flesh of three kinds of Mangekyō Sharingan: Kamui from Kakashi Hatake and Kotoamatsukami from Shisui Uchiha.
As for Itachi Uchiha's ocular technique... it was powerful, but not practical enough to satisfy him, so he had given up on it.
After obtaining two Mangekyō Sharingan, Ensei Uchiha had reached a certain limit in how much he could feed the Mini Ten-Tails.
At this point, the Mini Ten-Tails had grown to more than three meters tall. Other than the Byakugan's visual power inside Ensei Uchiha, only Natural Energy could meet its needs for growth.
Besides, perhaps because he had fed it so much of his own chakra, Ensei Uchiha could now sense the Mini Ten-Tails' state and abilities.
There wasn't much to say about its state: it was always growing, and its need for energy increased day by day.
As for its abilities, the Mini Ten-Tails came from the Demonic Statue of the Outer Path and had inherited some of the Ten-Tails' ability to absorb Natural Energy and return energy.
But perhaps because it lacked the chakra of the Nine Tailed Beasts, when it returned energy, the Mini Ten-Tails didn't produce a Chakra Fruit. Instead, it released special chakra that caused nearby objects to evolve.
Now that Ensei Uchiha could sense the Mini Ten-Tails, he could control the release of this evolutionary power to a certain extent.
That was how Ensei Uchiha had obtained the Mangekyō Sharingan in his possession.
At first, all he had managed to clone from that flesh were basic Single Tomoe Sharingan.
Now that he had obtained the Mangekyō Sharingan, Ensei Uchiha had, in theory, achieved his original goal and could choose to return.
But as he looked at the Mini Ten-Tails before him, an urge surged through him. If his plan succeeded, he would possess talent or abilities on par with the Otsutsuki Clan.
If it failed, he could always abandon this body.
After thinking it over for a long time, Ensei Uchiha decided to take the gamble.
But first, he needed to choose a Clone Body to use while his original body underwent evolution.
And now, the Tenseigan Cloning Project, which he had set aside for a long time, could continue.
He selected one pair of the two special Byakugan to serve as the Tenseigan's vessel, then extracted his own cells and fused them with some cells from the Hyuga Clan to clone a new body.
Next, he placed the Byakugan inside it, used the Spirit Transformation Technique, and entered the new body...
Before you continue