Mine, all mine

"Huh?"

Uchiha En narrowed his eyes and took a closer look.

The edges of the cup seemed veiled in a thin gray haze, too blurry to make out clearly.

It was like... like looking at the world without the glasses he had worn for his nearsightedness in his previous life.

He raised a hand and rubbed his eyes, then blinked hard.

Nothing changed.

Uchiha En fell silent for three seconds.

"Fuck."

He couldn't help swearing.

"This Mangekyo Sharingan burns through way too much Eye Power! One night, and I'm already at least half a diopter nearsighted?!"

He stretched out a hand and waved it in front of his eyes.

This was no joke.

"If I use it a few more times, won't I go straight-up blind?"

Uchiha En leaned back in his chair, tipped his head up toward the ceiling, and let out a deep sigh.

"Good thing I had the foresight not to get bogged down fighting Hiruzen Sarutobi and the others. That would've burned through even more Eye Power. I'd probably be a full diopter nearsighted by now."

He closed his eyes, shaken by how close he had come.

He had used Space Flash and Time Acceleration far too many times tonight.

The results had felt amazing—he had torn through the Shimura Clan and the Sarutobi Clan again and again, even putting on a spectacular show in front of the Third Hokage—but the cost was just as obvious.

Permanent vision loss.

And that was from just one night's use.

What if he encountered stronger enemies later and needed to use his Mangekyo Sharingan more often?

He wouldn't be far from blindness then.

"No, I need to find a way to boost my Eye Power."

Uchiha En opened his eyes, his gaze turning serious.

"Otherwise, I'll have to hold back in everything I do. That'd be suffocating."

He remembered that, in the original story, there were two ways to increase the Mangekyō Sharingan's Eye Power:

The first was to transplant Hashirama cells and rely on their powerful regenerative ability to restore his eyesight, just like Obito Uchiha.

The second was to evolve it into the Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan, which required transplanting a close blood relative's Mangekyō Sharingan.

"A close blood relative is out of the question. My parents died ages ago. What close family do I have left?"

"As for Hashirama cells, I'll deal with that later..."

Uchiha En rubbed his brow.

"There's something more urgent right now."

"That old bastard Danzo and that brain-dead idiot Obito will definitely come to collect the bodies once this is over. Those Sharingan... rather than let them reap the benefits, I might as well take them myself."

"They're the Uchiha Clan's legacy, after all. As the strongest Uchiha alive now, I'm the one who should collect them."

He stood up, walked over to his bed, bent down, and pulled a wooden box out from underneath it.

The box wasn't large, roughly forty centimeters long and thirty centimeters wide, and looked perfectly ordinary.

He opened the lid.

Inside, rows of small glass bottles were neatly arranged.

Every bottle was filled with clear liquid—saline solution for preserving eyeballs. Uchiha En had prepared everything long ago, waiting for tonight.

"Good thing I got everything ready in advance."

Uchiha En took a backpack out of the box and loaded the small bottles into it one by one.

Halfway through, he paused to think, then put a few more bottles into the bag.

"Better bring extra so I don't run out."

He zipped up the backpack, slung it over his shoulders, and walked to the door.

He pushed it open.

An overpowering, nauseating stench of blood hit him in the face.

Uchiha En frowned.

He stepped out of his home and onto the streets of the Uchiha Clan Compound.

Moonlight spilled over the stone-paved road.

It illuminated the scene on the ground.

Bodies littered the streets.

A middle-aged man lay on his back in the middle of the road, a gaping hole in his chest. His eyes were still open, staring blankly at the night sky.

Beside him, a woman lay facedown across a doorstep, one hand still reaching forward as though trying to grab something.

A few steps farther on, an old man lay curled up in a corner, his white hair stained dark red with blood.

Their final expressions were frozen on their faces: fear, despair, bewilderment.

Some still clutched kunai, killed before they had a chance to fight back.

Some were curled into balls, as though they had been begging for mercy even as they died.

Some had fallen at their own doorways, just one step away from escape.

As Uchiha En walked down the street, he occasionally stepped on something sticky. He glanced down and saw a severed finger, with no way to tell whose it was.

"Shit..."

He sucked in a sharp breath and couldn't help cursing.

"That son of a bitch... he really fucking did it."

He had known Uchiha Itachi was ruthless, but only when he saw the bodies strewn across the ground did it truly sink in.

Uchiha Itachi had genuinely gone mad.

Exterminating his clan.

It wasn't just talk.

He really had turned his blade on his own clansmen.

Uchiha En walked a little farther and found a young man's body lying beneath a utility pole. His eyes were open, a pair of scarlet Sharingan staring at the sky, unable to rest even in death.

Three-Tomoe Sharingan!

Uchiha En's eyes lit up.

"Brother, you're already dead. Keeping those eyes would just be a waste. Why don't I look after them for you and put them to better use?"

He crouched down, took a glass bottle from his backpack, and unscrewed the lid.

Then he pulled a clean scalpel from his ninja tool pouch.

"Don't worry. I'm good at this. It won't hurt."

The scalpel slipped gently into the eye socket.

He deftly severed the optic nerve.

An intact Sharingan was removed and placed in the saline solution.

The second followed right after.

Uchiha En screwed the lid back on and gently shook the bottle in the moonlight.

Inside the bottle, the Three-Tomoe Sharingan slowly rotated in the liquid, its scarlet glow looking especially eerie beneath the moon.

"Off to a great start."

Uchiha En nodded in satisfaction and put the bottle into his backpack.

Then he continued down the street.

Along the way, he found several more bodies with activated Sharingan.

Some had one tomoe.

Some had two tomoe.

They weren't as valuable as that first three-tomoe eye, but they were still good finds.

Uchiha En didn't leave a single one behind, carefully removing them all and placing them in bottles.

He crouched beside a corpse, deftly working the scalpel in his hand.

"Tsk, tsk. This two-tomoe eye is perfectly preserved."

"Hmm, this one's a little damaged, but it's still usable."

"Oh, this young fellow actually awakened two tomoe. Pretty talented... what a shame."

He talked to himself as he removed the eyes, his tone as casual as if he were picking out vegetables at a market.

While he was busily collecting Sharingan,

"No!!!"

A piercing scream shattered the stillness of the night.

That voice...

It had come from deep within the Uchiha Clan Compound.

Uchiha En's hand paused.

He looked up toward the source of the sound.

"Itachi... did you find out?"

He murmured under his breath.

"Did you finally discover who was under the covers?"

His lips slowly spread into a cruel smile.

"Tsk, tsk, tsk..."

"Your little brother's screams of pain... did you like the sound?"

Just then, lights began coming on, one after another, in the surrounding residential neighborhoods.

That piercing scream had already shattered the stillness of the night.

Konoha's residents had been jolted awake.

Uchiha En raised his head and looked at the lights, then lowered his gaze to the Sharingan in his hand.

"Now... things are getting lively."

He picked up the pace, placed the final Sharingan in a bottle, and stuffed it into his backpack.

Then he stood up and dusted himself off.

"All right, time to go home."

"I need to start putting on my act, too..."