Chapter 12.4- One Thousand Hands

It had taken them three weeks to clear him to leave the hospital. He hadn’t spent all that time in bed. Even with Tsunade working on his body while he slept in his coma, he still had some physical therapy to do. Not as much as he would have had to do without the world’s premiere medic on his case, but still enough to keep him occupied for a few weeks. Walks along the hospital’s gardens, monitored rounds of physical exercise, even some limited taijutsu sparring had been allowed all for the sake of making sure that everything worked just as it should.

Finished with that, he was finally allowed to return home. Home, for now, was Mito’s place. He didn’t have the will to see his mother for the time being. She hadn’t even been able to rouse herself from her self-imposed isolation to visit him while he’d been comatose, and he could not deny that it hurt. They weren’t close, but she was still his mother. He’d expected at least something along the lines of the very bare minimum. He removed thoughts of her from his mind as he turned to the person who was in the forest with him.

 “Watch me, Shori” She said as she spun in the kaiten. With his byakugan activated, he could see every element of the jutsu. Every part of it.

“What did you see?” She asked the second she deactivated the jutsu.

“Well, you’re releasing chakra from all your tenketsu at the same time and then forcing it to mirror your movements. That’s what creates the kaiten. You release the chakra, and then you begin to spin. It is the act of spinning itself that makes the chakra move in the continuous rotation that we see. And then after the first two or three spins, the chakra begins to spin on its own, used to the movement and then moving even faster because chakra did not have nearly as much mass as you do so it can move faster on its own rotations than you can” I analysed, telling her what I’d seen.

“So it’s true” She said, looking at me with shock on her face.

Around us, some of my trainers stood, but the only one who seemed to matter was Uraume’s own father. Uncle Hiroshi, mother’s brother and the man of the hour, stepped forward at that.

“When they first said you’d activated the Byakugan, I was curious. You were born with eyes of brown. Not the lavender that the clan shares. How could the byakugan appear in such eyes? I’d wondered. It had never happened before. That was what made me ask your trainers monitor you for differences between your byakugan and ours. When they came with their suspicions, I needed a way to test them and that was why I called this particular gathering.” He said.

“And what’s the difference?” I probed, curious as to what he meant.

“What do you see when you activate your byakugan?” He deferred, asking his own question.

“I asked first”, I shot, not in the mood to play this game again. That dream hadn’t repeated itself since then but it still bothered me. That hadn’t been any regular dream.

“Your answer will help me answer your question” he explained, calm in the face of disrespect that had his attendants bristling.

“Fine then. I see chakra. All around us, I see the flow of chakra and everything else I guess.”

“The flow of chakra. How finely do you think you see this flow?”

“If there was any comparison, I’d saw down to the atomic level. I can see each individual mote of chakra”

“Exactly as I suspected. Your eyes are different from ours. I suspect we both perceive the physical world at or close to the same level. But it’s when it comes to the Metaphysical that the differences appear. Your chakra perception is more detailed than ours. I could not say for certainty how stark the difference is without being able to see through your eyes, but I can tell you that when I see the Kaiten, I see a mass of chakra in rotation, and not individual bits of chakra like you do.” He opined, and I nodded at his words, already wondering as to the reason for this.

“Our working theory as to why this is the case is your Uzumaki blood. The Uzumaki have a sensing ability said to be on a level close to that of the byakugan. I suspect that the reason you can perceive chakra at such detail is a result of the combination of both these kekkei genkai” He said, coming closer to me and staring at my byakugan.

I met his gaze and we stared at each other for a few seconds before he walked backwards. “Alright then, I only have one more experiment in mind. Show me the Kaiten, Shorirama” He said.

I tilted my head at him, wondering if I should play along. But in the end, there would be no point in resisting for resistance’s sake.

Just as Uraume had done earlier, I released small bits of chakra from each of my tenketsu before beginning to rotate from left to right. The same direction in which my hair grew. The chakra followed along for the first two spins before taking off on its own and beginning to spin around me even faster than I myself was moving. After keeping the technique active for a minute, I began to slow down and then ceased the flow of chakra before planting my feet on the ground.

There was silence all around me. Awed silence. “I christen it the Kyūkyoku no Byakugan” My Uncle said with a wide smile on his face. I facepalmed.

A/N; More, more, more. Let’s go.