Date: Five months twenty four days after awakening
Subject: Byakugan examination
After peeling back the skin around the eyes of both bodies I began to examine the chakra network and compare them. They appear to be exactly the same in gross structure, a large coil passing under the orbital socket and entering behind the retina.
The blood vessels of the Hyuuga were very different, with engorged veins flowing to the muscles of the eye socket. It seems that the intended function of the increased blood flow is to freeze the eyes in place, to remove the micro-fluctuations and allow for the all-seeing aspects to function correctly. That would also explain the issue of eye strain from prolonged use, as the eyes are really not meant to stay still for any length of time, nor the muscles that tense. This also explains the enlarged blood vessels in the iris, as that area of the eye also traditionally has to move in order to refocus.
Aside from that, there weren't a lot of obvious differences. Even under a microscope the back of the Hyuuga's retina had no real differences from the Medic's.
Oh! It's been about an hour after the cessation of heart beat, the chakra in the body seems to be decreasing steadily. The odd thing is that the byakugan eyes seem to be changing as well.
Well fuck.
I know, I know. They always call them dojutsu, "eye techniques" but I never really thought about what that meant before. It seems that it really
is a technique that is being used with the eyes as a medium. A technique that is inherited and perfectly instinctual to the user, habitual to the bits of chakra coil in the eye, one that is likely impossible to imitate with handseals due to the nature of bloodline limits.
…That changes things considerably.
It really helps explain how things like the sharingan can have apparently
moving holes in their iris. It makes sense if the eyes are just an instinctual application of a jutsu.
Taking a look at the chakra coils around the eyes now. Looks like the Caged Bird seal poisons the coils, so that the eyes can't be transplanted and no children can be created from artificial insemination. But that doesn't stop the eyes themselves from working when chakra is externally applied.
Yup. A slight flow of chakra into the coils around the eyes cause passive activation of the byakugan, enough to cause them to show up as pale and seemingly covered in cataracts. In the show a handseal was often used to aid in activating the eyes, not sure which one that would have been but I'm guessing it was related to either concentration or trying to pulse the chakra to the eyes to cause the hyper-awareness.
Huh, it was the concentration, I was betting on it being a chakra pulse.
I'm… not sure what would happen to me if I tried attaching these to a puppet as is. Technically they do have chakra networks, but they aren't alive, and those networks are all connected together into the greater whole. So it's possible that whatever chakra poison is in the eyes could infect the entire network.
I'm just going to store them until I can figure out from examination of coils themselves exactly how a jutsu is formed.
I do have that Medic, and the knowledge of the jutsu from his head. If I use what I know and what I know he knew, then I could compare the two to see how the individual jutsu got transformed.
Date: Five months twenty five days after awakening
Subject: Medic's jutsu
I had to start by practicing the jutsu myself a bit. Both the Mystical Palm and Chakra Scalpels get expelled as chakra out of the hands. There are twenty three tenketsu in each hand, which means that the degree of variation which the chakra can have is quite large.
Never mind, that doesn't seem to have any impact on how the jutsu get made. I can make a scalpel off of my pinky, or my index finger, or my thumb, there's no difference but practical utility.
Looking more closely at the coils in the Medic's hands, it seems that when chakra with the correct yin structure, the right idea behind it, passes through them they instinctively attempt to mold the justu.
Troubling. It means that the point at issue is the chakra coils themselves. No one has any idea how to make artificial coils, or how to transplant them. I only have a few theories about what coils even are.
Sure I can watch how the molding of the chakra takes place and try to copy it, but that might not be enough for bloodline traits, where their physiology and souls are aiding the process of the jutsu itself.
That doesn't mean I have nowhere to progress however. If I can figure out how the byakugan actually perceives chakra then that might allow me to create a knockoff that does not rely on biology or chakra coils at all.
Date: Five months twenty nine days after awakening
Subject: Visual chakra sensing
The way that the byakugan presents reality to its users has always seemed peculiar to me. They see a solid sphere, but beyond their specific range they can't see anything. Then there's the infamous blindspot, and the way they can see chakra through mundane objects but see the world in a largely distorted way.
The only way that this makes sense is if they are
only seeing the chakra. The blindspot would be where the chakra coil enters the eye and would appear to be a giant bright blob of solid chakra.
I've looked at the functioning eyes as much as possible, which wasn't easy given I couldn't implant them, and as best as I can figure the eyes act as a way to represent chakra senses visually. Most likely, and I'm guessing here, they use the ambient nature chakra as a passive medium and then detect all the non-nature chakra within that ether. Otherwise the hard edge of the visual range makes little sense.
Byakugan users would never take in any nature chakra, they would just exploit its existence. Giving them something akin to a sage's sensing ability and then filtering that in through the eyes for easier cognitive processing.
Certainly a viable explanation for something that originated from Kaguya herself.
From what I can remember, regular chakra sensing comes in a couple different varieties. The person either pings out with their chakra like sonar, or they feel for ambient changes similar to what a sense of smell does with particulates. Regular sage mode senses probably work by the former method, probably. Which would make the byakugan a third approach, and one of the more complicated.
Not sure if Karin's method is all that unique as well of if it's just another derivation of the same handful of methods.
Date: Six months three days after awakening
Subject: Attack on Mist
Konoha may be having issues with trying to patch up non-existent security issues, but in the Kiri camp Chukichi pretty much immediately started trying to figure out if there was a mole. I don't know exactly what he told every one of his chunin, but he definitely told them all different things about the coming plans.
Regardless, when he tells one of them to circle around the island to hit a trade ship from Wind, then it's obvious that that's where the chunin is going to lead his team.
Date: Six months five days after awakening
Subject: Sooo fucked
I told Kaga about my information and he set up a strike team to take them out before they could sink our ships. Only, he wanted me to send along some puppets as well.
I figured it couldn't hurt, they were just recently refitted with traps and equipment so it would be a good test run.
The Suna team caught up with the ships before they could enter the combat area and hid inside them, then when the Kiri squad came out from under the water the Suna teams reciprocated.
That's when things got shot to shit. Chukichi followed the Kiri team to see if the mission had been reported to the enemy. He killed fucking everybody. The Kiri nin, the Suna nin, the god damned sailors, all dead. I tried to hold him off for a while, throwing dozens of disposable bodies at him, trying out every new trick I had learned, but he filled the area up with mist and started slaughtering indiscriminately, it was like trying to fight an angry god.
This is what an elite jounin is like. What a mess.
Kiri can probably afford to lose a couple of guys in an effort to ensure they've purged any traitors, but Suna can't. Those teams were important to this front, my puppet squads took time and resources to make, that ship carried food and weapons necessary for our fight.
How did I not figure out what he was going to do? It was obvious he was going to check up on those he suspected.
It's all my fault. I didn't double check my information before sending it out. Fuck!
Oh, and worse still, he took all the bodies of both the Suna and Kiri nin back with him, so I can't even scavenge up anything from the losses.
Konoha is getting a pass for the moment, I can't let this kind of shit stand.
Date: Six months seven days after awakening
Subject: Reneg
I
just said a couple of days ago that I was going to focus everything on the Kiri camp *sigh*, but this has been in the works for a while, so whatever.
I've got all these nice octopod puppets filled with shards of broken kunai and explosive tags. Like face-huggers meet claymore mines. The plan is to use them in random bursts against Konoha's beach patrol, make them fear the water.
Date: Six months eight days after awakening
Subject: After action report
I started off by trying to get a baker's dozen of my little octobombs over to Demon Island, that took a while. Without a central torso to squirt water behind them, they needed to actually use their tentacles to walk along the ocean floor. Really slow.
I'll need to fix that once I get the water jets worked out.
Anyway. After that it was mostly a matter of waiting for patrols to pass. There was a flaw in my plan, in that there aren't all that many shinobi on patrol at once, only two really two teams. But the ideal situation was never to kill a lot of people, rather it was to make the most ubiquitous aspect of the current environment seems threatening.
Launching half of my puppets at each team resulted in most of the puppet being destroyed before they could get near. However one of them did latch onto a chunin's legs and pretty much blew him in half, while another did some serious shrapnel damage.
I'm not sure if suicidal puppets and mobile bombs are really worth the effort. Just designing these things takes a while, they're pretty specialized. Then I have to learn to move them, and there generally isn't any room for extra weapons. It's probably more effort than it's worth.
I think I need to find someone that's skilled at kenjutsu or taijutsu, something so that I can dramatically increase the close quarters effectiveness of all of my puppets at once.
AN: I spent quite a while trying to rationalize how the byakugan worked, this is what I came up with. You can read the naruto wiki page on it, but the main supporting evidence is that people have to activate their byakugan, it's just that it normally happens as soon as they have chakra flowing. One guy awakened only one of his eyes as a byakugan, Kishimoto said that if the Hyuuga and an Uchiha had children then he would have one doujutsu in each eye, and similar stuff. It also helps explain why they're even called doujutsu.
This
Is a fairly good image of the chakra network, you can see what I was talking about by looking at the head region.
Life's not too easy for Shuzaku, he has to struggle a bit to achieve what he wants out of life. I hate those stories where the protagonist gets everything he tries for right off the bat. Most conflicts result in less than ideal outcomes, most research ends in failure. He's mostly angry at himself for not thinking ahead a bunch, not outsmarting an internationally renouned professional killer. That and he's really goal orientated, so failure causes psychological self flagellation. 
