"Neither you nor Uchiha Izuna had any children. Izuna was nearly thirty when he died, wasn't he? Yet he never even married," Uchiha Yi said, looking at Madara Uchiha in exasperation. "As his older brother, shouldn't you have found him a woman so he could have children?
"Even if you weren't interested in women, shouldn't you have had children with strong bloodlines for the sake of the Uchiha Clan?
"You must know that the descendants of Uchiha who awakened the Mangekyō Sharingan are often far more gifted than ordinary Uchiha.
"They're even much more likely to awaken the Mangekyō Sharingan themselves."
Madara fell silent, stunned. He had never imagined Yi would say something like that.
It had never occurred to him that he should have found his younger brother plenty of beautiful women to bear Izuna's children. Then, after Madara was gone, one of Izuna's descendants could have inherited the position of Uchiha Clan Head.
But Madara soon shook his head. "You don't understand what things were like back then. Even our clan grounds weren't completely safe. I lost count of how many assassination attempts I survived growing up.
"We were attacked several times even on clan grounds. My three younger brothers died in one such attack.
"In those days, having children wasn't necessarily a good thing. If you never had them, you couldn't lose them."
"If you never had them, you couldn't lose them?" Yi hardly knew what to say.
Madara's mind worked in strange ways, to put it mildly.
Then again, for an Uchiha already half out of his mind, perhaps it wasn't so hard to understand.
"Uchiha care too deeply. You can't understand what we went through unless you lived through it.
"Once the village was founded, children were safe. But by then, Izuna was already gone."