When I was seven, my older brother had an awful bout of teenage rebellion.
I returned home late that night. A full moon illuminated a deserted Uchiha compound. The streets were strewn with corpses.
I rushed to my house. There I found my thirteen-year-old brother standing over the still bleeding corpses of our parents. Itachi met my eyes coldly and I found myself thrust into a hellish world in which I was forced to witness the massacre in horrifying detail. I saw Itachi's blades cleave through the flesh and bones of my kinsman like a hot knife through butter. I saw blood pouring from dreadful wounds, saw the droplets freeze in midair before raining down into glistening pools. I inhaled the nauseating scent of the crimson liquid. I heard the screams of dying men, women, and children, and at the end, I saw my father and mother executed by their own flesh and blood, except that was not the end; the vision started all over again. My senses were again inundated with terror, madness, and death. I tried to close my eyes, but still I saw. I tried to cover my ears, but still I heard. In desperation, I tried to destroy my sensory organs, but I could not. I tried to end it all. I screamed at Itachi: "Please, please stop it, please kill me," but no, he made me live through it. I don't know how many times he made me live through it. I could not count. I could not think. I could not act. My world was one endless nightmare.
When I returned to consciousness, Itachi was long gone. My clan was gone. I was the sole survivor.
Itachi had used an incredibly powerful genjutsu. The memories of that holocaust are forever branded on my soul, but not only that. In the days following that blood-drenched evening, I found that I was somehow afflicted by strange memories. At first, they appeared to me in my sleep, instead of the expected nightmares. I had dreams of a wonderful world, a world in which the masses were able to enjoy a vast array of incredible luxuries. These included an almost inexhaustible well of knowledge known as the Internet, the ability to easily travel and relocate across entire continents and oceans, and plentiful food in great variety, to name just a few. At first, I welcomed these dreams; they were a welcome change from the misery of my waking hours. But soon a problem arose: after waking up, I would still remember the dreams clearly. I began to see inferiority everywhere I looked. The ostentatious palanquins of the nobles seemed comically inadequate compared to the cheapest automobiles. Having to do research at the library suddenly seemed like an unbearable chore—I can just look it up online, right? No, you can not because the internet does not exist, you lunatic. It is just a figment of your imagination. But was it really? Were these dreams, these memories, really just the delusions of a diseased mind? Perhaps—and how I shuddered at this theory—perhaps they had been planted by my sadistic brother; if they were meant to slowly and surely erode my already fragile sanity, they were fulfilling their purpose perfectly.
On day eight after the massacre, I looked in the mirror and saw two Sharingan staring out at me. At first, I thought it was Itachi, back to finish the job. I smiled. I spread my arms wide and waited for the killing blow. The figure in the mirror smiled and held out his arms as if asking for an embrace. I reached for him and my fingers found cold, solid glass. I blinked slowly. My reflection did the same. Oh. I had gained the use of my Sharingan. My father would have been so proud. Or perhaps not. I would never know. I fell to my knees on the cold bathroom floor and cried. My father would have been so ashamed.
I cursed him. I cursed my father for his cold demeanor and his lofty standards. Where did those standards get him in the end? Six feet under at the hands of his own teenage son, that's where. If my mother could have heard my execrations I would surely be down there with him, but no one heeded my deranged ravings.
Presently, my maledictions turned toward Itachi. Why didn't kill me too? Why did he nurture my love and devotion with his apparent care and affection, only to subject me to endless torture? "Answer me, Itachi!" I cried. Of course, there was no answer.
Then, as I lay there exhausted on the bathroom floor, I realized something: I didn't need answers. The facts were simple: I was in a terrible situation, and I knew exactly who had put me in that situation. I did not need to know more. I had discovered that I was in a great hurry to wreak bloody vengeance on my dear brother.
My life had meaning once more. I now had an end in mind, but my means were ludicrously insufficient. Itachi was evidently capable of single-handedly annihilating dozens of powerful warriors, for that was exactly what my clan had been. He could have killed me a thousand times over and not received so much as a scratch. I was weak, and I didn't even know how to become strong; my ignorance of the world was suddenly obvious and appalling.
Good citizen that I was, I took an indefinite leave of bereavement from school. I've never been much of a mourner, so instead I scoured the library, and then every bookshop I could find. The Transformation Jutsu was wonderfully useful for bypassing age restrictions, which were plenty—perversity and degeneration were shockingly rampant and profitable in those days. I was willing to leave no stone unturned, but despite my industry, I was only human, with inconvenient physical limitations in abundance, a fact which I found most intolerable. Thankfully, before I reached the brink of despair, in a stroke of good fortune, I discovered a book that revolutionized my process.
I encountered the volume in a very adult establishment. It was an illustrated guide to obscene uses of ninjutsu. I will not disclose the exact name of this book, since I do not wish to direct you, my dear reader, to such an unsavory publication. Nevertheless, intrigued, I activated my Sharingan behind my aviators, and in a matter of minutes committed the whole book to memory. As sole heir of the dozens of dead Uchiha, I had plenty of money, but I wasn't about to patronize filth. I tipped the clerk on the way out and briskly made my way home, not neglecting to change my appearance at an opportune moment.
I laid down in my bed—formerly Itachi's bed. Of course, I had burned the sheets and the mattress. The rest of the room had borne almost no trace of Itachi; for as long as I could remember, my brother was rarely home, always the busy shinobi boy, very busy spying and killing. Compared to my old chamber, this room was positioned farther from the living room, the floor of which was forever stained with my parents' blood.
I lay down, closed my eyes, and perused my fresh memories. The dirty book included information on many useful techniques—chakra strings, chakra blocking methods, various genjutsu, etc. There was one ninjutsu, however, which made the rest seem almost tame: the Shadow Clone Jutsu.
In a memorably disgusting passage, the book made it clear that Shadow Clones can record sensations that are transmitted back to the original upon dispelling. The momentous implications of that struck me immediately: Shadow Clones are essentially capable of producing, or at least reproducing, time itself, a feat which was almost inconceivable to me before I learned of such a jutsu. If I were to spend an entire day with one Shadow Clone running around, doing his own thing, at the end of the day, I would have lived two days instead of one, even though for everyone else, as well as for my physical body, only one day would have passed. Combining Shadow Clones with the use of my Sharingan, I could quickly amass a ridiculous amount of knowledge within a reasonably short time, at virtually no cost to myself.
That was my naive delusion. In reality, I was barely able to sustain one Shadow Clone for a few seconds before I lost consciousness entirely. I woke up in a hospital bed, where I endured a long-winded tirade from the Hokage about how very close I had come to death. Ironically, I was rather relieved: it was clear that the ever-benevolent state at least placed considerable value on my continued physical well-being, a fact which boded well for my survival and eventual revenge.
Of course, I went straight back to my reckless ways. My second attempt at the Shadow Clone Jutsu was much more successful; I was able to dispel the clone within two seconds of its creation. It only left me utterly exhausted, nauseous, and nursing a violent headache. But as we all know, insane people tend to do the same thing over and over again, so the next day, and the days after that, I did the same thing over and over again, and over the weeks, I was able to extend my endurance to three seconds, then five seconds, then eight, and so on. My endurance grew exponentially, for reasons I would not discover until much later.
After half a year, I had gained enough endurance to create up to the jutsu's maximum of 2000 Shadow Clones. It was abundantly clear to me, however, that if I attempted to exploit the full cognitive capacities of all those clones, the mental strain would probably cause me to enter a coma, or perhaps even kill me outright. After all my hard work, I again had to start from scratch. That infuriated me. I was also suffering the insipid hell known as the Academy, to which I had been forced to return. In response to these grievous injustices, my volatile emotions triggered further development of my Sharingan, which were soon replete with three tomoe each. This was a curse in disguise: the evolved Sharingan irreversibly acquires a far higher frame rate and resolution. While useful in combat, these characteristics meant that an eidetic memory of the same length now entailed a far greater mental load, and thus made my Shadow Clone scheme all the less realizable.
All these setbacks would surely have disheartened any reasonable person, but I had such a glorious, indelible vision of what I would obtain through the success of my unlikely enterprise; why, I could practically see eternity in the hour and infinity in the palm of my hand! So I persisted with a tenacity and foolhardiness befitting of the Uchihas' nasty reputation; in a bid to improve my endurance, I resolved to keep my Sharingan active throughout the day; it was excruciating: not only did daily exhaustion make my eyeballs feel like they were being violently ripped from their sockets, I was occasionally tempted to gouge them out myself, despairing of the wretched and idiotic behavior I was frequently exposed to within the Academy, and which my eyes readily captured with horrible clarity and permanence. I wore shades so as not to alarm my duller associates when I shed literal tears of blood; I'm sure that the brighter and nosier ones were not fooled. Certainly, the ever-benevolent and watchful state of Konoha knew all about the development of my eyes and must have been very well pleased, the way a farmer would be pleased to own a fat pig.
At long last, after another two years of pure torture, I was finally able to maintain two Shadow Clones throughout the day while utilizing their mental abilities to the utmost. I was on the fast track to becoming a savant of a magnitude that the world had never seen, and things were only getting better from there. Again, my capacity was growing exponentially, and by the time I graduated from the Academy at age twelve, summa cum laude, of course, my mental age, not counting my memories of another world, was somewhere around fifty years. Compound forty or so of those years by the aid of the Sharingan, and you have a till then unprecedented degree of learning.
Furthermore, I had attempted to reverse-engineer some of the technologies from my mysterious memories. Each time had been a complete success. Although I still could not determine the origin of these memories, I knew with certainty that they were invaluable sources of true knowledge.
I had a rather high opinion of myself. Why would I not? I had a systematic and comprehensive understanding of every type of ninjutsu under the sun and had come up with a few of my own. I possessed knowledge from a highly advanced civilization I had a truly formidable amount of chakra at my disposal. I was almost as confident in my abilities as a moron is in his intellect.