Rain fell without rhythm.
Not a downpour—just the kind that soaked everything without warning. The Uchiha compound's stone walkways shone slick, reflecting the lantern glow like smudged mirrors.
Sōgen didn't notice the rain. His mind was elsewhere.
A spiral of thoughts curled like incense smoke in his consciousness. Synthetic trauma. A concept both forbidden and… obvious.
If trauma triggered the evolution of the Sharingan, then what defined trauma?
Memory? Emotion? The sudden fracturing of identity?
He had the tools.
He had the memories.
He had the Network.
---
The Trigger Simulation
He began small.
First, he extracted 18 threads of memory from various Network users. All moments of deep emotional fracture:
A mother losing a child to fever
A man watching his crops burn during a border raid
A girl holding her dog's collar after a thunderclap silenced everything
He encrypted them.
Then restructured.
He stripped away names. Places. Faces. Left only the raw emotional architecture: the spike, the dread, the slow hollowing after the event.
Then he injected them into his own seal—not to his memory, but his subconscious trauma bank.
A pulse.
Then stillness.
The first attempt left him breathless. Not sad. Just… cold.
"Not enough," he whispered.
---
Spiritual Loop Induction
That night, he entered a meditative seal chamber—a room beneath the western annex, lined with chakra-absorbing minerals.
He wove a recursive genjutsu with a twist: it cycled a set of false memories like a revolving stage play. Each iteration sharpened the detail.
He lived through three deaths.
None of them were real.
But the pain was almost authentic.
Almost.
On the fourth cycle, his eye twitched.
His left tomoe rotated—once, twice—then shimmered red-hot.
He winced. The seal on his wrist cracked open from the chakra surge. Blood dripped to the floor like punctuation.
He almost had it.
---
Danger in the Details
But the problem with false trauma… is that the brain eventually knows.
After the sixth cycle, he woke up vomiting. His neural threads rebelled. Chakra nodes flared in rejection, and the Sharingan deactivated itself for twelve hours as a safeguard.
He lay on the tatami floor, drenched in cold sweat, staring at the ceiling.
He whispered to himself:
> "Sorrow alone isn't enough. It has to matter to the soul."
And then the idea came.
He wouldn't simulate his loss.
He would borrow the grief of those who never let go.
---
Harvest of the Damned
The next day, he put out a private call in the Chat:
> [Echo]: "If you've ever lost someone and still see them in dreams, I have a way to let you speak to them. Once. Private test. No cost."
Seven users responded.
Two passed the screening.
He called them Echo Seeds.
They volunteered memories willingly, for a chance to say goodbye one more time.
What they didn't know was that Sōgen wouldn't simulate conversation.
He'd take their longing, their guilt, their unfinished sentences—and wear them like a cloak.
By nightfall, he had enough.
---
The Mirror Ritual
At moonrise, Sōgen performed the Mirror Ritual—an Uchiha practice of introspection before key awakenings.
He stood before the obsidian shard embedded in the courtyard stone.
The echo-sealed grief memories had been filtered, encrypted, and translated into emotional impressions.
As he stared into the mirror, he fed them into his chakra stream—slowed his breath, kept his pulse steady.
And then—
> A flash of a funeral. A hand slipping away. A laugh silenced by war drums.
His own name whispered in someone else's dying breath.
A child running down a hall—then nothing.
His breath caught. For a moment, his mind believed it.
> That he had lost everything.
And in that moment—
His vision cracked.
---
Mangekyō
No screams. No blood.
Just soundless awakening.
His left eye ignited first: the tomoe spun, merged, formed a blackened pinwheel of interlocked arcs.
His right followed, slower, as if resisting the lie it had been told.
But it came anyway.
His Sharingan was gone.
And in its place—
The Mangekyō bloomed.
He fell to his knees.
Not from exhaustion.
From weight.
It felt like a truth had embedded itself behind his eyes.
Like something ancient now stared back with him.
---
And Then the Vision
He didn't blackout.
He traveled.
The seal behind his ear pulsed—and the entire Network blurred.
His Mangekyō gave him a vision:
> Dozens of eyes.
Endless threads.
A spiritual net, webbed like a divine construct across time and memory.
Each user a node.
Each thought a ripple.
And in the center—him.
But not just him.
Another presence.
Unformed. Watching.
Waiting.
---