Commission: The Uchiha’s grimoire guide to winning

Sorry for not having posted anything this weekend. I had been out and in the hospital and puking my guts since the beginning of the weekend. Made my birthday that is today even more lame but it is what it is. I had this chapter that was commissioned to me almost a year ago on my phone and I thought to post it kinda like a sorry/entry meal. I'll try to begin posting again rage against the Heavens on Wednesday at most. Sorry again

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I woke to antiseptic, sterile and sharp, stinging my nose like the cold iron scent of blood disguised beneath bleach. The light overhead buzzed with artificial life, flickering faintly in and out of coherence, and for a moment I thought I was back in that last hospital—white walls, loneliness, the rattle of a breath that wasn’t quite mine anymore. But then came the pressure. A hand. Warm. Shaking.

“Ren,” my mother  it had been years since we talked, since she informally disowned me whispered, as though speaking louder would shatter something. A name appeared in my mind as I looked at her. Aya Uchiha, the woman with eyes that laughed before her lips ever caught up. Her hand clutched mine like she could anchor me to a world I wasn’t sure I belonged in anymore. Her cheeks were wet. She had been crying.

All around me, faces—familiar, yet unfamiliar. Eight pairs of onyx eyes, every one a dark mirror. My father, Hiroshi, my father’s name is not Hiroshi paced like a hawk deprived of wings, his movements sharp, frenetic, clawing at the silence. Aunt Fumiko I had many aunts, none of them named such loomed over me, her voice a whip and a bandage.

“You idiot child! You could’ve died!”

And yet, her fingers were careful when they touched my throat, when they measured my pulse like she feared it would vanish beneath her touch.

But I wasn’t listening. Not really. The pain behind my eyes was like a sun trying to be born. A throb that pulsed in harmony with my heart, chaotic and oppressive. Not pain like a wound or a bruise. Not even the kind of ache that follows trauma or fever.

This was something deeper. A war behind the eyes. It felt as if I was fracturing at the seams.

Two rivers crashing, each literally carrying the weight of a lifetime.

On one side, Ren Uchiha. Ten years old. Skipped two grades Academy prodigy. Son of two shinobis. Brother to a little girl who always left her rice to cool too long because she liked the way the steam curled. A boy who had liked to play with paper shuriken and kunai, who had liked reading training scrolls and hearing the laughter of his family members at dusk. A child who had never once thought of his family name as a curse.

And yet, in that same skull, behind those same eyes, someone older. Someone other. I remembered concrete that never slept, skies strangled by cables and light. A man. Older. From a world without chakra, without ninja, without any of this. A world of skyscrapers that scraped the heavens, of machines that could hold all human knowledge in the palm of a hand. A world where my family had been happy—until we weren’t. Until my grandfather died, and the will was read, and suddenly, the people I’d loved turned into vultures, picking at the carcass of his legacy.

I had lived twice. That was the only answer or maybe I was mad which was the most likely answer.

The second me—call him what you will—had lived long enough to die in a hospital where the beeping slowed until silence tasted like morphine. He had read Naruto like scripture, chuckling at absurdities, mourning when he wasn’t supposed to, and loving a world he thought only fiction. He had read on manga pages, watched on TV the Uchiha clan fall.

He had read about the end of the Uchiha Clan—my clan—how we were slaughtered like cattle in the night. Where children were cut down in their beds. Where the only survivors were a traumatized boy, a traitor, and a man who’d orchestrated it all.

That they would die.

That I would die.

Not today. Not like this. But one day soon. In a massacre inked into the pages of a manga he—I—had loved so dearly.

I had seen it, how the village—Konoha—would let it happen. Would sanction it even though the only thing wanted had been the end of discrimination.

Konoha would sanction it when the things demanded had been more than simple, should have things been given, that shouldn’t have needed to be asked

The Uchiha clan had wanted Uchiha participation in the center of the village, the dismantling of the compound, the freedom to choose where they lived, and Uchiha Fugaku named the fifth Hokage.

Ok, maybe the last one was unreasonable but an uchiha was supposed to be Hokage after Hashirama. Madara should have been the second Hokage, not another Senju especially one that hated us like Tobirama and the others were not because the choice of being able to live where we wanted wasn’t something allowed to us, unlike other clans.

Uchihas loved each other in a way that could rightly be called mad but it didn’t change that we didn’t choose, that we were able to choose our homes like other clans.

The compound at the outskirts of the village the Uchiha clan would be forced to relocate to was not our original compound, the one the Ren part of me had lived in.

The thought of having to leave my home, to be isolated even further for something I was suspected of doing simply because of my blood something not proven sounded maddening, heartbreaking.

The Uchiha clan literally buried its members on the soil of the clan estate and we would have to leave all of that.

The Uchiha clan seemed to have some form of repute, power in the village at the surface. After all, the police force was composed of like 90% of members of our clan.

The little hick was that it was not our choice. Tobirama was the one to thrust this role upon us whether we wanted it or not.

It was not something we could not not do because it was the will of our Kage and the will of a Kage was to be respected no matter what by his shinobis even if it was obvious that he despised our existence.

So, we, Uchihas were forced to be the police force of Konoha which means in a shinobi village where Anbus already existed to do the things that would be deemed too lesser or unflattering for the secret elite force and no matter where, one truth that would never change was that Cops were easily disliked.

Now, realize that the police force is mainly made of us and you see the problem. Worse, by giving us this gift, Tobirama decided to ban the clan from having political sway, power because it would not be fair which meant that we were doing an unwanted job, one that made sure that people on principle didn't like our clan and because we had no voices in the political sphere, there were no chances that it would change.

More than that, as if it was not enough, one needed to remember that the Uchiha clan only applied the laws and rules that were to be followed that were created by the Hokage and his advisors and the clans’ council of representatives which of course lacked an Uchiha member.

We may have disagreed with them, hated them as much as the ones we applied them on but in the end, it didn’t change that in the eyes of the civilian majority of Konoha, we were those laws, those applications and the like.

Of course, the Uchihas would want to rebel. Anyone in their place would have rebelled after literally being segregated in the village your own family created.

Itachi could eat shit. I would kill him the moment he is born. A hero? The mind of a Hokage? 

Please don’t make me laugh.

The village had decided that the better way to deal with us was to cleanse us ethnically when the one thing the Uchihas would have planned, highlighted in the Itachi shinden book was to hold the Hokage hostage and we were supposed to be the clan possessed by evil when we weren't the one with a clan’s member who literally was a necromancer.

None of this was fair. All I wanted to do was scream but how do you scream when your soul has been split down the middle?

My fingers twitched against the bed sheet. I could still feel the softness of my baby sister’s hair—my sister, this life—against my chest when she fell asleep on me during the last festival. I could remember her giggle. I could remember my old-world cousin’s jokes about anime tropes, and how she laughed when I said that it would be cool to be reborn in a ninja story.

The pain in my head wasn’t just pain anymore. It was a rupture, a dam breaking, a flood of images and emotions and knowledge that didn’t belong to me but did, all at once.

I could feel it—the exact moment something in my brain twisted.

A pressure behind my eyes, hot and insistent, like a knife slowly pushing through my skull. My vision swam, the world fracturing into jagged pieces.

The pressure continued to build. Words meant nothing. My relatives spoke—comfort, confusion, scolding, relief—but it was all submerged beneath the roar of memory and contradiction. My heartbeat began to fill my ears. My vision blurred, and it wasn’t the tears that stung, but the memories clawing at my skull.

I had died.

I had lived.

I was a child.

I was not.

This world was fiction.

This world was real.

The Uchiha clan would be slaughtered.

The Uchiha clan that had always surrendered me with love.

It was too much.

And then—

Snap.

The world burned.

There is no poetry to it, no elegance. Only pain, raw and bright and alive. As though something behind my eyes had cracked open and bled light. I arched, mouth open but voiceless, not screaming, because screaming could never have contained what I felt.

Colors sharpened, edges too crisp, too real. I could see the individual strands of my mother’s hair, the minute tremors in her hands. The world was different. Sharpened. Defined. Red. I could track the dust motes drifting in the sunlight, the way my father’s breath hitched just before he turned. 

The air grew thick. I heard it. The sharp inhale. The shifting of feet. Murmurs. My mother whispering my name again, but now with awe. Aunt Fumiko gasping—not the gasp of fear, but the awe of a storm breaking open the sky.

And I saw.

I saw them—not just my family’s faces, but their chakra. Faint, rippling waves of warmth and intent, subtle hues I should never have known how to perceive. My mother’s was a steady blue, my father’s a simmering red, Aunt Fumiko’s a calm, medicinal green. It wasn’t just sight. It was knowing. I could feelthe pulse of their chakra.

The room went silent.

Aunt Fumiko’s breath caught.

"Ren… your eyes—"

 My reflection caught in the steel frame of the hospital IV stand—eyes like blood and ink, pupils like scythes.

The Sharingan.

Activated not through technique, nor training—but grief. Horror. Awakened by the crushing realization that the family I loved was doomed.

“He’s awakened it,” someone whispered. A cousin. Maybe Shiro or Takeshi—I couldn’t place the voice. It was trembling, and not out of fear but awe.

The silence stretched after his words , thick and suffocating.

Then—

My mother moved.

She cupped my face in her hands, her thumbs brushing the skin beneath my eyes. Her own Sharingan spun to life, mirroring mine.

“Ren...,” my mother said again, her hand lifted to my cheek, as though the boy she had birthed was now something distant, sacred, changed.

My father stepped forward, his pacing ceased. The lines of worry hadn’t left his face, but his eyes searched mine like a man glimpsing fire for the first time. Not warmth. Not danger.

Power.

I turned away. Blinked. The red faded slowly, but the images, the things I saw with so much clarity stayed, burnt into the forefront of my mind, in a way that I knew without a doubt that nothing I would do would be able to change that, to make me forget. I could still feel it humming. Still feel the world breathing through that lens.

“I... I need to rest,” I croaked. My throat was raw, as though I had swallowed smoke.

“Of course,” Aunt Fumiko murmured, suddenly gentle again. Her earlier scolding vanished beneath a worry that I felt undeserving of. “You’ve been through a lot, little troublemaker.”

They filtered out slowly. My father lingered the longest, standing near the foot of my bed like a statue chiseled from guilt and stone. He didn’t speak, but his gaze was heavy with thoughts he wouldn’t burden me with.

And when they left—when the door hissed closed and I was alone again—I let the silence settle like a shroud.

There is no word in any language for the feeling of mourning a future that hasn’t happened yet. The closest would be grief, I suppose, but this wasn’t death.

This was history. A history etched in ink and shadow, where people I had come to love would die not in war, not in battle, but in cold premeditation. For peace. For balance. For a village that never deserved them.

A village they helped build.

I touched my chest. I was alive. My pulse, weak but present. This was not a hallucination. Not a story. Not a manga panel or fanfiction or dream.

And even if it was...

Even if my brain was rotting in some hospice bed in the real world, and all this was just a fever hallucination before the light dimmed for good—

Then let this dream be better than the waking world ever was.

I would not let them die.

I would not let her—my mother, with her warmth, her tears, her lullabies—be erased. I would not let my sister be another statistic. I would not let my clan become footnotes in a tragedy.

They say knowledge is power. That’s wrong. Knowledge is weight. Power is what you do with it.

And I... I had seen the fire before it began.

So I swore, right there beneath the buzzing light and the scent of antiseptic—

Whether dream or delusion, truth or trickery...

This world would burn differently.

The massacre would not come.

Not while I could still breathe.

Not while my eyes still burned red.

As if fate itself validated my thoughts, I felt it.

Something inside me moved.

No, not moved-awakened.

It was foreign, yet known. Distant, yet achingly intimate. A sensation older than memory, newer than breath. Like a flickering star breaking free from the thick sludge of night, a mote detached itself from whatever conflagration had been lit within my soul.

I felt it.  

I knew it.

It was happening inside me — and yet — it was not truly mine. It was as if a guide had opened a door in the mansion of my mind, and through that threshold, clarity walked in, uninvited yet wholly welcome. Words etched themselves behind my eyelids, not spoken but understood. A whisper across the taut wires of my nerves, singing a truth too large for sound:

The ignition had a name.

The Celestial Grimoire.

Not a book, not a scroll. In essence, it was a “system” fiction device— that had the possibility of giving the wielder points or rolls to acquire powers, items, or companions drawn from countless fictional universes.

In a way, I wasn’t even sure I could say fictional because all of this felt more than real and if this was real, why wouldn’t it be the case with the universes from which it is pulling powers?

One of the things that made it truly exceptional in my eyes was that in a way, just having it made you an outside context problem.

For example, there exist seals able to stop people from using their chakra. Normally, them being used against you would mean you being absolutely fucked but let’s say that you were lucky enough to pull the power of a logia devil fruit from one piece, what should have been game over for you quickly becomes game over for your foes.

More than that, in that same case, with a devil fruit power being from another world and thus following other rules, few things that they could do would be working/threatening well unless one of them is very good at Suiton and them using Suiton on you technically count as being drowning in the sea. 

I saw it — not with my eyes, but with something deeper, a sight that reached across the thresholds of understanding — pages that did not turn, yet revealed themselves; letters that shifted and burned without consuming the paper they were written upon. 

And within that hallowed book, I was granted a gift.

A boon not asked for — but desperately needed.

Dream Monsters.

A quiet shudder ran down my spine at the realization. As if the world, ever blind and cruel, had blinked — and in that infinitesimal lapse, had granted me a weapon. No — more than a weapon. A kingdom within kingdoms.

The ability to reach into the dreams of others. To infest their sanctuaries, to mold their nightscapes like a potter shapes wet clay. In dreams, the soul is naked, shivering before the specter of its own fears. It is there—precisely there— that my power would reign absolute.

And was it not perfect?  

Was it not almost divine?

The Uchiha Clan... our blood had always sung a song of illusions. The Sharingan — eyes that could trap the mind in endless loops of despair, of bliss, of submission. Genjutsu was our art, our sword, our shield. Our pride.

And now, I was given a canvas vaster than any battlefield. Dreams. Where consciousness slept and barriers fell.

Dream Monsters was in every way that mattered more than a simple augmentation of my clan’s innate talents—it was a perk that more than harmonized perfectly with the blood roaring in my veins. It was as if the Grimoire had seen my circumstances and me—truly seen me—and answered my unsung prayer.

With this that I knew was just a beginning…with this, I could without any doubt secure survival.  

Not just mine.  

The Clan's.

No more being leashed like hounds by those who feared our strength. No more dwindling numbers, no more broken futures.

With this power, I would not only ensure the Uchiha survived — I would see them thrive.

It was not ambition that bloomed in my chest. 

It was a necessity.

It was akin to a thorn flower, beautiful and terrible, opening petal by petal.

I could change everything in my favour.

And in thriving, I could would rend the current circumstances apart.

Tobirama Senju and his petty cronies had and would spend their lives branding us dangerous, building walls around our existence. They would have caged us like beasts if they could, binding our pride and power behind smiling masks and false promises.

But now... now, I had the means to offer them a gift far crueler than death.

I would make the dream they feared most come true.

I would become the Third Hokage.

Imagine it — Ren Uchiha, the proud son of a cursed bloodline, crowned with the title meant to chain us, the title that should have been us but who would never be, using it instead to shatter the chains.

Imagine the festival lights, the cheers, the faces painted in smiles brittle with hidden fear. Imagine the Senju, the Council, the civilians — all forced to bow to a truth they could no longer deny.

The Uchiha were not tools, people they could cow anymore.

And all of it — all of it — beginning with a single ember, drifting inside me.

I could almost laugh.  

Almost weep.

Even if for whatever reason, I was never able to access another perk, I could already envision so many ways to use this perk to its full potential, to my advantage. The possibilities twisted and curled in my mind like smoke.

Through dreams, I could reach into the hearts of my enemies. Plant doubts. Foster loyalty. Root out treachery before it could bloom or plant it. 

An elder of the Council, convinced in his dreams that supporting me was his lifelong duty.

A rival Clan Head, crippled by nightmares of going against the interest of my clan 

 leading only to ruin for them.

A generation of civilians nurtured by blissful visions of a village better governed, better to live in under a Uchiha Hokage.

This was the kind of power where to win, no blood needed to be spilled, no blade needed to be drawn.

Control not through fear — but through dreams, hopes and beliefs.

Also, in a way, is that not what true leadership demands? To lead their hearts — not their bodies?

Yeah, I was sure of it.

I will be the Third Hokage.

Not for power alone.  

Not for fucking with Tobirama only, though gods knew the temptation burned bright.

But for the future. For a world where the Uchiha clan, where my family could stand unbowed, their heads unbent beneath any sky.

I didn’t even need to stop at that. This world was one full of bloody tragedies and war, where so many from the weakest to the God-like beings like Ashura and Indra sought an answer that led to peace but failed.

Why shouldn’t I try to succeed where they failed? More than that, I wonder how much more Tobirama would hate someone seen as more influential than his brother than hypothetical Uchiha Hokage.