Lan couldn't help recalling the strange reaction of his Byakugan when he'd met the clan head, Hiashi, a few days earlier. Its intense craving for other Byakugan had left a deep impression on him.
Thinking back on it now, he realized that it had long since foreshadowed the direction his eyes' evolution would take: they were drawing closer to the Giant Tenseigan, and were quite different from Toneri's Tenseigan.
As for exactly how they differed, he would have to learn what his eyes could do first.
So Lan began exploring his Tenseigan's abilities. He stretched out a hand toward a large tree in the distance.
The next moment, an invisible force acted upon the tree. The tall trunk began to bend, and the earth around its roots cracked apart.
Crack!
The tree was yanked into the air and pulled toward Lan. Just before it could hit him, the invisible force shifted. The oncoming tree came to an abrupt stop, then shot back even faster than it had come.
"So this is the power to control attraction and repulsion?
What an incredible ability!"
Looking at the scene he'd created, Lan murmured in amazement.
This invisible power over attraction and repulsion belonged exclusively to the Rinnegan and Tenseigan. Now that he could use it, there was no doubt that his eyes were Tenseigan. He then began testing some of their other abilities.
Huff,
huff...
Lan's breathing was ragged. His simple tests of his eyes' abilities had just consumed a tremendous amount of chakra. As expected of a powerful Dojutsu on the same level as the Rinnegan, its chakra consumption was unparalleled.
Even with the support of his Type-3 Bio-Armor, the strain of using his eyes' abilities was still difficult to bear.
And he was their original host. If someone else had to bear his eyes, it would be even more difficult.
By exploring his eyes' abilities, he had figured out how his Golden Tenseigan differed from the Blue Tenseigan Otsutsuki Toneri awakened in the original timeline. The results left him with mixed feelings.
Along with control over attraction and repulsion, and perception far superior to the Byakugan, his Tenseigan also possessed a range of miraculous abilities: transmitting chakra over a distance, giving puppets a will of their own, extracting memories, and controlling other people's minds.
He had almost all the abilities of the Giant Tenseigan on the moon. And, just as naturally, he lacked the abilities that the Giant Tenseigan didn't have.
In other words, he couldn't enter Tenseigan Chakra Mode like Toneri, or form Truth-Seeking Orbs and reach a level comparable to the Six Paths.
When he realized that, Lan felt deeply frustrated. He had gone to such lengths to obtain the power of the Tenseigan because what he truly wanted was Tenseigan Chakra Mode.
With the power of the Truth-Seeking Orbs, he could have done whatever he wanted in the Ninja World as it was now, freely pursuing his ambitions.
As things stood, he still had powers far beyond his former abilities, but they weren't enough to let him do as he pleased in the Ninja World. That was the difference his power ceiling made.
Of course, the Giant Tenseigan that could steer the moon into the Earth was certainly no weaker than Toneri's Tenseigan. But Lan's Golden Tenseigan, which resembled the Giant Tenseigan, was nothing compared to Toneri's.
The Giant Tenseigan on the moon could control countless meteorites and send them crashing into the Ninja World. It could even drive the moon into the Earth and destroy the Ninja World, while forming a barrier that allowed Otsutsuki Toneri to survive the catastrophe. Its power was simply unimaginable.
Lan's Dojutsu Power was still slowly growing, but compared to the Giant Tenseigan, his power was utterly insignificant.
First, there was attraction and repulsion. Even at his limit, he could only just manage to match the ordinary Shinra Tensei and Bansho Ten'in used by Deva Path Pain. He couldn't use the Super Shinra Tensei that had destroyed Konoha. He lacked not only the chakra but also the Dojutsu Power.
Perhaps awakening an individual Tenseigan by completing his genes had been the wrong path of evolution. This kind of Tenseigan had a far lower ceiling than one evolved from the Otsutsuki bloodline on the moon combined with the pure Byakugan of the Hyuga Clan.
Lan even suspected that the reason combining a large number of Byakugan could create a Giant Tenseigan was that the process somehow aligned with the completion of one's genes.
So if he wanted to greatly increase his eyes' Dojutsu Power, he would need to use his own eyes as the core and combine them with other Byakugan to create a Giant Tenseigan of his own.
But he dismissed the idea almost as soon as it occurred to him. Entering Tenseigan Mode had rendered his Caged Bird Seal ineffective, making it possible to remove his eyes.
However, the only Byakugan in the current Ninja World that could be removed belonged to the Hyuga Main Family. With only a handful of members, even combining all their eyes wouldn't increase his Tenseigan's power by much.
Using his own eyes to make a treasure that wasn't particularly useful would be a terrible bargain. He wouldn't do something so thankless.
Still, alongside the parts that disappointed him, his eyes had some pleasant surprises.
For one thing, his Tenseigan hadn't gone through a gestation period after awakening. It had been stable from the start, sparing him the long, weakened period Toneri had endured. Nor would his eyes revert to the Byakugan because their Dojutsu Power had been depleted, as Toneri's had. His eyes were remarkably stable.
Another advantage was his Tenseigan's ability to absorb chakra.
In the original timeline, Toneri had used the Giant Tenseigan's power to drain Naruto's chakra from a distance, defeating him in a single move after the Fourth Shinobi World War. It was an astonishing feat.
Clearly, the Tenseigan was more powerful than the Rinnegan when it came to absorbing chakra.
After the Giant Tenseigan was destroyed, Toneri lost the ability to absorb chakra from a distance. That showed that this ability belonged exclusively to the Giant Tenseigan and worked on anyone who didn't have Hamura's bloodline.
This long-range chakra absorption didn't work on people with the Byakugan. That was its one shortcoming.
Lan's eyes, so much like the Giant Tenseigan, naturally possessed the same ability. However, his range was limited to about a meter, and he couldn't drain chakra nearly as quickly as the Giant Tenseigan. Even so, it was an effective trump card for catching someone off guard.
In other words, even a Kage Level fighter facing him could be killed in an instant if they let their guard down.
Of course, that alone wasn't enough to satisfy him. What truly delighted him was that as his body adapted to the Tenseigan, his Dojutsu Power was slowly increasing, and he sensed that a new ability was about to awaken in his eyes—one clearly related to space-time.