The light screen in the sky, like a merciless judge, hurled the past buried beneath blood and lies before Sasuke Uchiha's eyes, frame by frame.
Boom!!!
Sasuke Uchiha's entire understanding of the world collapsed in that instant, then painfully began to rebuild itself.
The pure, absolute hatred he had borne for Itachi Uchiha—the thing that had kept him alive all this time—suddenly began to crumble.
Yet that hatred had not vanished. It had become tangled with too many emotions he could not put into words.
My brother slaughtered our entire clan for me?
The thought churned endlessly through Sasuke's mind.
He would rather Itachi had been a monster who had fallen purely for power! Then his goal of revenge would have been clear!
But what was he supposed to do now? Keep hating the brother who had shouldered everything to protect him, whose hands were stained with their family's blood?
Or try to understand that love, twisted beyond recognition?
The sheer confusion and contradiction nearly drove Sasuke mad.
His feelings toward Itachi tore him between hatred and a faint glimmer of understanding. Nothing in his heart was simple anymore; he could never return to the straightforward hatred he had known before.
Then the Canopy Screen shifted to the conversation between Danzo and Naraka, and Sasuke heard Danzo coldly explain why he had spared Sasuke Uchiha, in the tone of a man discussing an object.
"A specimen! A vessel! A useful blade!"
Those words shattered all of Sasuke Uchiha's confusion and pain, igniting something far more violent in their place!
Hatred!
A boundless hatred for Shimura Danzō, sunk so deep into his bones that all the waters in the world could never wash it away!
*So that was it! He had survived not through luck, nor because Itachi's "sacrifice" held some