[Listening to your somewhat heavy words, Megumi Fushiguro tilted his head up slightly.]
[For him, whose mind was still that of a child, fully understanding the tangled exchanges of interests among the Three Great Families, and the darkness represented by that contract selling him off, was indeed a little too difficult.]
[But under the gaze of those deep eyes, that clever, sensitive boy still picked out the most essential word in what you had said with remarkable precision: "choice."]
[He might not have understood how enormous the Zenin Clan was, but he could roughly understand that the man before him, who had taken the place of his absent father, genuinely hoped he could hold the reins of his own fate in his young hands.]
[So Megumi Fushiguro pressed his lips tightly together and nodded to you with only a partial understanding, yet with the utmost solemnity.]
[Looking at the boy's pure, trusting gaze, you felt an uncontrollable, deeply hidden twinge of pain in the depths of your heart.]
[You silently mocked your own hypocrisy. Rather than saying you had been acting out of great compassion from the start, simply wanting to give Megumi Fushiguro a chance to choose his own life freely, it would have been more honest to admit that beneath those high-sounding words, your cold, self-serving interests actually accounted for an enormous, even dominant, share.]
[The fundamental reason you had gone to such lengths to train him was your urgent need for Megumi Fushiguro, at some crucial point in the future, to display his terrifying potential and the absolute power of the "Ten Shadows Technique" before the Zenin Clan without holding anything back.]
[You intended to use that power as the most destructive bargaining chip to tear apart the Zenin Clan's existing power structure completely, thereby influencing, or