Real Itachi P.O.V.—- To Itachi, Julian was an enigma just like he himself was an enigma to the other people who lived in Konoha.
The young Uchiha had always stood a little apart from those around him.
Now he found himself watching someone who felt even more distant and strange.
Julian had arrived from a completely different world and yet he had adapted to this new life with surprising ease.
In only a single day, the outsider had learned to walk in an Uchiha body to speak with an Uchiha voice and to plan with an Uchiha mind.
That speed of adjustment was something Itachi could not ignore.
From the memories that Julian carried Itachi had seen the other world in clear detail.
In that place people would have been scared beyond measure at the thought of coming to a land where trained fighters slaughtered one another every other day.
Wars in Julians world were rare and carefully limited.
Countries treated nuclear bombs the same way the shinobi villages treated tailed beasts.
Those weapons existed mainly as deterrents so that no one would dare to start a true all out war.
Here in the shinobi world the tailed beasts were not left sleeping as warnings.
They were pulled out and used as living weapons whenever a village needed more power on the battlefield.
Itachi wished that his own world could follow the quieter rules of Julians home but he knew that wish would never come true.
In the world he had grown up in every grievance between countries or between shinobi villages ended in blood.
If one side disliked another they did not simply stop sending ambassadors or place tariffs on trade or cut off business.
They gathered their forces and began a war.
The cycle of fighting had shaped every generation he knew and it showed no sign of ending.
What surprised Itachi most of all was the training plan that Julian had built in such a short time.
The method was efficient and almost frightening in its cleverness.
Itachi himself had awakened the Mangekyo Sharingan only the day before.
In the hours since Shisuis death he had not found the peace of mind to study the new power.
A person from an entirely different reality had taken control of his body.
Even with all of those shocks Julian had still seen a use for Tsukuyomi that Itachi had never imagined.
The idea of stepping into the illusion on purpose and living through years of training in a handful of real minutes was something Itachi knew he would never have thought of on his own.
Even if the thought had somehow appeared in his mind he was certain he would never have moved forward with it.
He could not imagine living alone for fifteen years without a single real human voice to answer him.
The loneliness of that long stretch of time would have broken him long before the training could finish.
Julian had explained the ability as if Itachi were the slower thinker of the two.
For the first time in his life Itachi found himself in the position of the less gifted one and the feeling made him chuckle quietly inside his own thoughts.
He could almost hear Shisuis voice teasing him for it.
Shisui would have loved to pester Julian with endless questions and jokes if he had still been alive to meet him.
Itachi knew that Julian held no deep motivation to stay in this world and help him or help his family.
The man had said as much in clear words.
Yet Itachi also knew other truths that sat beneath those words.
He had seen the future that lived inside Julians memories.
He had watched the steps he himself would probably have taken to keep Sasuke safe and to stop Konoha from collapsing from the inside.
He had also seen the results of those same steps.
Sasuke had never enjoyed the childhood Itachi had wanted for him.
The younger brother should have been happy with other children at the academy.
He should have smiled when he graduated as the top student.
Instead the memories showed only hate.
Hate aimed at Itachi and a endless drive to train harder so that one day he could kill the older brother who had left him alone.
Itachi accepted the blame for that hate.
He was the one who had told Sasuke to grow his hatred and to use it as fuel.
In the same set of memories Itachi had watched Julian save his own younger brother even when the cost was terrible.
Itachi believed that his own memories of Sasuke and of the village would influence Julian a little whether the man admitted it or not.
The care Itachi felt for his little brother and for Konoha would seep into the shared thoughts and shape some of the choices that lay ahead.
Because of that influence and because of the strange training method the new Itachi Uchiha would become stronger than the original path had ever allowed.
A genius like Julian was about to receive fifteen years of focused training inside half an hour of real time.
Tsukuyomi would serve as the perfect place to experiment with every jutsu.
Inside the illusion the rules could be set to match the real world exactly so that every test would give true results.
Chakra would never run out inside that space and therefore not even a second would be wasted.
If the rest of the Uchiha clan ever learned of such an ability they would have demanded that Itachi use it to train others even if the price was his own eyesight.
Itachi now understood why the man had been called a genius among geniuses in his own world.
The speed of thought the depth of planning and the willingness to accept lonely years of effort all pointed to a mind that stood far above ordinary measure.
Yet Itachi also knew a harder truth that belonged only to the shinobi world.
This world does not take kindly to geniuses.
——-Author Notes——– Thankyou Atticus Chea, villauly and Chris for supporting me!