Chapter 476: Black Zetsu, Your Mother Was Nothing But a Worthless Servant
After seeing Jiraiya out, Yasushi stood and went to deal with Sanba Taro. He had barely cleared the hall when he stopped completely, his gaze turning toward the far corner of the courtyard, his pupils tightening.
Under his eyes, a figure that was half black and half white crawled out from the shadows at the base of the wall.
Zetsu. They had come to him.
"Finally! You were hidden so deep it took me forever to track you down!"
White Zetsu complained in that distinctive voice of his, carrying a strange quality that landed somewhere between grievance and pouting rather than any actual irritation.
He twisted back and forth as he spoke, expression entirely serious, then asked out of nowhere:
"As compensation, could you describe what defecating actually feels like?"
The Black Zetsu half erupted immediately.
"Shut your mouth, you absolute idiot! This is serious business! It is not time for your nonsense!"
White Zetsu just grinned his usual grin, dumb and utterly unbothered.
Jun had encountered these two on the western front battlefield before. She had also just watched Yasushi sell their intelligence to Jiraiya not thirty minutes ago. Finding them at the door right afterward snapped every instinct she had into place: she pulled her blade and stepped in front of Yasushi in one motion.
"Who are you? How dare you intrude into the daimyo's palace?"
Black Zetsu paid her no attention whatsoever. His focus was entirely on Yasushi, those flat black eyes carrying a shifting light, his tone strange.
"Uchiha Yasushi. You really are a transmigrator. You knew the location of our base."
"But there's no need to be defensive. We didn't come here as enemies."
"We're interested in the future intelligence you referenced before. Specifically, we want to know the identities of the two individuals who disrupted our plans."
"If you're willing to cooperate, we can help you take complete control of this country without complications. Whatever you want to be, daimyo or otherwise, that has nothing to do with our goals."
"Tch." Yasushi's expression went flat with annoyance. "Once you found this place, it stopped being useful as a base. And honestly, being a daimyo has already stopped interesting me."
He rested a light hand on Jun's shoulder. She hesitated, then sheathed her blade, staying close at his side with her hand still near the hilt.
Yasushi stepped past her and faced Black Zetsu directly, his expression carrying the particular disregard of someone looking at an insect that has been buzzing around for too long.
"You've heard the rumors going around outside."
"I'm going to unify the entire shinobi world. Build the Uchiha Divine Nation."
"River Country is not where that ends."
"If you think you can hold that over me as leverage, you have the wrong idea."
Black Zetsu felt a deep satisfaction at this. He loved ambitious people. Desire was the only tool he ever needed.
"Yasushi. You know the future intelligence, so you understand: our goal is only to free Mother. That doesn't conflict with you unifying the shinobi world and building your empire."
"Work with us. Tell us who was responsible for sealing Mother a second time, and we will support your ambitions."
"Heh." Yasushi let a cold smile onto his face. "You know I understand everything, and you're still running this kind of test on me."
"Saving Kaguya requires replanting the Divine Tree. It requires gathering all the chakra of the shinobi world into a single body."
"And you're standing in front of me claiming that your plans don't conflict with mine?"
Black Zetsu went quiet.
After a beat, he offered a promise.
"I can guarantee you: once Mother is revived, we will end the Infinite Tsukuyomi. The shinobi world returns to normal."
"Guarantee." Yasushi laughed at the word, letting the mockery sit openly on his face. "What exactly are you guaranteeing with?"
"Do you actually think you get to decide what your mother does?"
"You believe that if you rescue her, she will listen to you?"
"Without the Infinite Tsukuyomi's immortality to sustain her, what does she have to fight the Otsutsuki clan's hunting parties with?"
"Her combat experience? The kind that barely qualifies for the word?"
"Or the Bloodline Encompassing she stole from the Chakra Fruit?"
"Hunting parties?"
Black Zetsu stopped. The word had not landed the way he expected. "What are you talking about?"
"Oh. Right. You don't know about that."
"Consider it a gift. No charge."
Yasushi smiled and took two steps forward, stopping in front of Zetsu, looking down at the creature who had just tried to manipulate him, with the particular pleasure of someone who has been waiting to say something for a very long time.
"You don't actually believe your mother was some kind of Otsutsuki princess, do you?"
"She wasn't."
"She was an ordinary servant. Among the lowest rank of the clan."
"The kind that exists specifically to be sacrificed when necessary."
"Kaguya was sent to the shinobi world to plant the Divine Tree. But for the tree to mature properly, it required the sacrifice of one Otsutsuki clan member. That member was your mother."
"Kaguya was afraid to die. So she ambushed the clan member who had come with her, Isshiki Otsutsuki, and used his body as the sacrifice instead."
"After the tree matured, she also ate the fruit herself. The one that was supposed to be returned to the clan."
"That level of violation does not go unpunished in the Otsutsuki clan. The sentence is death."
With each sentence, Black Zetsu's body, which was composed entirely of pure energy, shuddered once. When Yasushi reached the word death, the shudder became a full stagger, as if something invisible had struck him hard enough to move him.
His lips trembled. Nothing came out.
Yasushi saw the expression and kept going.
"So before too long, the Otsutsuki clan's enforcers will arrive in the shinobi world to collect what they're owed."
"That fear is exactly why Kaguya had to gather all the shinobi world's chakra into herself no matter the cost. She was building toward something strong enough to protect her from them."
"Do you follow?"
"You cannot save her."
"Even without the Six Paths Sage's countermeasures. Even if she broke free of the seal on the moon on her own terms. She would still die. Momoshiki Otsutsuki or Kinshiki Otsutsuki would come to the shinobi world eventually, and she would not survive that."
"What?"
Black Zetsu went rigid.
His eyes lost their focus, staring at nothing, his body shaking in a way that was no longer controlled, his very form beginning to waver at the edges.
A thousand years.
He had spent a thousand years on this. He had started laying his foundations in the era of the Six Paths Sage himself, working across generations, stirring the conflict between Indra and Ashura, threading his influence through the Uchiha clan's entire history, engineering war after war throughout the shinobi world.
Everything. All of it. For one purpose.
And now Yasushi was telling him it was all wasted effort.
That the only thing his thousand years of work could produce was watching his mother die again.
Yasushi did not leave room for him to process it. He added the final piece with a smile that looked genuinely warm.
"The Otsutsuki clan also has a specific method for consuming a clan member completely. Nothing left behind."
"No resurrection possible. Not even in principle."
The smile was radiant. The words were something else entirely.
He watched Black Zetsu's face come apart and felt something rise in his chest that had no clean name attached to it.
You miserable creature. You finally got to experience this, didn't you.
"So, Zetsu. Still want to keep saving your mother?"
He looked at Black Zetsu's utterly hollow expression and could not contain it anymore. He bent forward, grabbed his stomach, and laughed out loud.
"Bwahahaha!"
"Zetsu, that face you're making right now! It's incredible!"
"A thousand years of causing trouble in the shinobi world, more damage than anyone could count. Did you ever once think it might end like this?"
He laughed until he was swaying, until there were tears at the corners of his eyes. That young face carried a happiness that was unrestrained and, in the specific way it was directed, almost cruel.
Jun stood to the side watching this and felt something was not quite right.
The intensity of his reaction was too much. What she was seeing was not ordinary contempt or satisfaction. It had the quality of something much older and much more specific. The quality of a genuine debt being settled.
But he was seven years old. What debt could he possibly have with Black Zetsu?
Yasushi laughed on without noticing what was happening at the back of his neck. The Karma Seal's chakra, which had always been cold and saturated with something like hatred, was shifting. Something was working through it, dissolving the edges of what had been frozen there. The anger and bitterness contained in that energy were slowly, steadily easing.
Six Paths Yasushi's life had been, in significant part, destroyed by Black Zetsu. His hatred for Black Zetsu ranked second only to his hatred for Uchiha Itachi. Killing Black Zetsu's mother, sealing Black Zetsu away: even that had not been enough to fully satisfy the accumulated weight of it. Any blow delivered to Black Zetsu reduced something in Six Paths Yasushi's chakra, released some fraction of what had been locked in there.
And naturally, each such action also moved young Yasushi one step closer to becoming the person that chakra had belonged to.
Young Yasushi knew nothing of this.
He only knew that he felt good. Better than he had felt in recent memory. The feeling of something that had been compressed for years finding somewhere to go.
He did not know Six Paths Yasushi's emotions were coloring his own. He only felt, in the most direct possible way, that watching Black Zetsu in this state was deeply satisfying.
As a transmigrator from another world who had not personally lived through any great tragedy, his values were fairly ordinary. He had naturally placed himself on the side of order and justice. In his framework, Black Zetsu was the villain, the primary cause of the shinobi world's accumulated suffering. Striking at the villain was simply correct.
He did not look further than that and did not want to.
He just stood there, watching Black Zetsu's hollowed-out expression, and laughed like a child.
That young face held a simple, nearly ruthless joy.
He kept going, goading with every sentence.
"Black Zetsu. Do you understand now?"
"Compared to you, your brother Hagoromo Otsutsuki was the truly devoted one."
"He couldn't bear to watch his mother be completely consumed by the clan. So he made himself seal her away, so she could pass her remaining time in peace inside the seal."
"Stop causing chaos in the shinobi world. Give up the fantasy that was never going to work out, and follow your brother's example. Maintain the seal and leave everything else alone."
"That's impossible!"
"It's impossible!"
Black Zetsu screamed it with the specific fury of someone who has nothing left but the scream, something in him cracking toward the edge of total collapse.
He howled several more times, then drove himself headfirst into the ground.
Gone.
"Tch. Already leaving?"
"That psychological fortitude really is disappointing."
Yasushi shook his head, looking at the spot where Zetsu had vanished. He walked over and pressed his foot against the ground once, confirming the creature was actually gone. Then he let out a slightly regretful exhale.
"I was going to ask him for specific intelligence on the Uchiha Divine Nation too."
"Ah well. What's not said isn't said."
"I already have the general direction. Everything else is just operational details."
He shrugged, turned around, and found Jun standing behind him with her mouth wide open and the expression of someone looking at something she cannot quite categorize as real.
She had heard the Uchiha Divine Nation rumors before. She had written them off as Sand Village's retaliation for the Kazekage's death, deliberate fabrication with no basis in fact.
But standing there listening to Yasushi's conversation with the black-and-white creature, something in her understanding shifted, late and reluctant.
Those rumors might not be rumors at all.
Her head was not working properly.
Transmigrator. Otsutsuki. Kaguya. A thousand years. She understood every word individually. She had no idea what any of them meant together.
She looked at Yasushi and felt a sudden unfamiliarity with the person she had trained beside, fought beside, and defected with.
Yasushi laughed, reached out, and ruffled her hair without ceremony.
"Jun. Don't worry about any of what we were just talking about. None of it concerns you."
"How does it not concern me?" Her face had gone red. She stumbled over the words. "You grew up in the village, didn't you? How are you a transmigrator? And what's an Otsutsuki, what's Kaguya, what is any of this?"
"Well." He scratched the side of his head, thought it over, and decided that sharing some of this with her was not actually a problem.
He gave her an overview. The background of the shinobi world, the story of the Rabbit Goddess, the thousand-year project that had just been collapsed into rubble in the space of a single conversation.
By the time he was done, Jun's mouth would not close.
She stood there for a long time. Then she sucked in a sharp breath, like someone who had been underwater.
"So... that black-and-white thing. It's the son of some Rabbit Goddess called Otsutsuki Kaguya?"
"He's been alive for over a thousand years?"
"Manipulating the shinobi world's entire history from the shadows?!"
Her voice was unsteady. Something in her worldview was taking direct hits from multiple directions at once.
"How did you even get this kind of information? The village wouldn't have known any of this, would they?"
"Didn't Black Zetsu just tell you? I'm a transmigrator."
Yasushi grinned and winked at her, the one sentence covering everything.
But even as he said it, he kept certain things back. He told her he was a transmigrator. He did not tell her this world was a manga. Several key details he mentioned only briefly and moved past.
Not because he did not trust her. Mainly because this world had too many techniques designed to pull information out of someone's mind, and he had no interest in putting Jun in danger because of what she knew.
He looked at her nearly overloaded face and felt a small measure of guilt, though underneath it something settled that he had not known was unsettled. These things had been sitting in him for too long with nowhere to go. Sharing even part of it with someone was a relief.
He put a hand on her shoulder. His voice shifted, going quieter.
"Don't overthink it. I'm still me. Still Uchiha Yasushi. Nothing has changed."
But too much had been fed into Jun's brain in too short a time, and it had reached its processing limit.
"I think... I need a moment."
She pressed a hand to her forehead, found the wall with the other, and made her way unsteadily out of the courtyard, walking the way people walk when they've had too much to drink.
Yasushi watched her go without disturbing her, then turned and went to find Sanba Taro.
Chapter 477: Companions of Justice
"No no no no no no!"
"That's not true!"
"That cannot be true!"
"Mother is an Otsutsuki princess. That's what she is!"
"Uchiha Yasushi is lying!"
"He has to be lying!"
"He just wants me to give up!"
"He just doesn't want me to save Mother!"
"How could all my effort be wasted?"
"How could Mother come out of her seal only to walk into danger?"
"This is not how my story was supposed to go!"
After fleeing the city, Black Zetsu screamed himself raw in the open wilderness, his body burning through one technique after another with the specific frenzy of someone who has lost all restraint. The pain and madness in his voice would have made anyone who heard it take several large steps backward.
White Zetsu watched without comment, letting Black Zetsu direct their shared form however he wanted, and simply observed as Wood Release techniques fired off in every direction without apparent purpose. Trees exploded upward out of empty ground. Massive vines spread in all directions. Enormous wooden dragons coiled and smashed through the air, slamming into nothing. White Zetsu blew slow bubbles and watched the barren wilderness transform into a dense forest at enormous expense of chakra, the new growth dense enough to block the sky.
It took a long time for Black Zetsu to slow down.
When he finally stopped, he stood in the middle of what had been an open field and breathed hard. His body was still shaking slightly, but the madness was retreating from his eyes, replaced by something cold and close to hopeless. Still. Quiet in the way that things are quiet when they have gone very bad.
He knew, when he was being honest with himself, that what Yasushi had told him was very likely true.
White Zetsu yawned, took note of the changed atmosphere, and offered his contribution.
"So I guess we're giving up on the Moon's Eye Plan?"
"Or we could start a different project. Research into the sensation of defecation. I think there's a lot of potential there."
His voice carried the particular cheerfulness of someone who has entirely failed to read the room.
"Shut up!" Black Zetsu snapped. "I am not giving up. Not this easily."
"What Yasushi said cannot be accepted at face value. I need to find someone else to verify it."
"The one from Sand Village who knew anything about this, that Akakaze, is already dead," White Zetsu pointed out, tilting their shared head. "How exactly are you going to verify it?"
Once the immediate emotional turbulence had passed, Black Zetsu's mind worked as sharply as it always had. He thought for a short time and arrived at an answer.
"Sasori mentioned something. That Akakaze was being chased by someone called Arato when the Dragon Vein explosion happened. When Akakaze triggered it, he wasn't alone. Besides his own companions, this Arato was caught in it as well."
"Everyone drawn into the Dragon Vein's turbulence. The question is whether they emerged in this era too."
"If they survived and arrived here, they carry the same intelligence."
He worked through the implications quickly, one plan forming behind the previous one.
He turned to White Zetsu directly.
"Activate the White Zetsu network in every village. Watch for any ninja who returns home with unusual intelligence, the way Akakaze did. The wandering ninja population too. Use the bounty stations as a secondary channel."
"And consider mobilizing the major villages to conduct their own investigations. Let them do the search. We collect the results."
"Yeah okay," White Zetsu said in the drawn-out voice of someone agreeing to something they find deeply inconvenient.
He had been about to ask whether the defecation research project might run simultaneously, but something in Black Zetsu's expression made the question seem unwise. He let it go and gradually sank into the earth, dissolving into the soil until nothing remained but a shallow ring of disturbance in the ground.
Black Zetsu stood alone.
He lifted his head and looked at the moon hanging low in the sky above the trees he had just created, his eyes empty and unfocused, his mind somewhere that was not quite present.
After a long time he lowered his head.
When he spoke, his voice had the specific quality of something that has made a decision it cannot take back.
"I don't care about the Six Paths Sage."
"I don't care about the Otsutsuki clan."
"Anyone who tries to stop me saving Mother dies."
Every word squeezed out between clenched teeth.
Those flat black eyes burned.
"Momoshiki Otsutsuki and Kinshiki Otsutsuki."
"Fine."
"I'll put the Moon's Eye Plan aside for now and deal with them first. Once every enemy who intends harm to Mother has been removed, freeing her will be safe."
"I've already endured a thousand years. Another century or two means nothing to me."
"Time is irrelevant to what I am."
He paused.
"But this means Madara becomes temporarily useless. And Nagato probably won't live long enough to see the end of this revised timeline."
"I have no idea when the Otsutsuki pair will arrive. Preparation needs to start now."
He worked through the full calculation for some time before the shape of it settled into something he could commit to. He looked up once more at the moon, then drove himself into the earth and vanished, leaving behind nothing but the forest that had not been there an hour ago.
Black Zetsu moved at his fastest speed back to the cave base. But he did not go to see Madara. He went directly to where Nagato was recovering.
They had cooperated once during the battle, the two of them, and the combination had exceeded what either could have managed independently. But the moment the fighting was over, the alliance collapsed completely.
When Nagato fully processed what had been done with his life, what had been used and what had been stolen, the grief and fury that came from that understanding had no outlet except rage at the ones responsible. He refused all cooperation with Black Zetsu outright.
Black Zetsu had put him under confinement.
Because of what Nagato had heard from Yasushi, Black Zetsu dared not allow a meeting between Nagato and Madara. He kept them separated, Nagato hidden in a different location from the main base.
Without White Zetsu providing reports, Madara's understanding of the outside world was essentially nothing. He could be told whatever Black Zetsu felt like telling him.
The battle had done severe damage to Nagato. Multiple bone fractures throughout his body, large-scale damage to his internal organs. He had nearly died on the spot.
White Zetsu tissue had filled the damaged areas, allowing him to survive the worst of it. His life was no longer in immediate danger. But the situation this had created was considerably more awkward than death would have been.
His body was not entirely his own anymore.
Nagato now carried White Zetsu cells throughout his body, in the same way Obito would later. Bones, muscles, organs: all of it seeded with White Zetsu material. These cells kept him alive. They also served as an extraordinarily effective means of control. He could move freely in appearance, but if White Zetsu chose to exert influence, his body would simply refuse the orders his mind gave it. Escape was not available to him.
Equally, White Zetsu could not fully take command of the body and force a death-and-revival cycle, the way that would be needed to turn Nagato into a fully compliant instrument. The mind inside was still Nagato's, and the resistance it provided was enough.
The two existed in mutual constraint, neither able to fully dominate the other.
Nagato mattered as a Rinnegan cultivator. But the Uzumaki bloodline was not rare, and if it came to it, a replacement could be found and developed. The process would take years, but the process was not impossible.
For Black Zetsu, Nagato was important. He was not irreplaceable.
The person who genuinely, urgently needed Nagato to remain functional and available was Madara, whose remaining lifespan was measured in months if not weeks.
Since learning the truth of his circumstances, Nagato had represented a liability in Black Zetsu's calculations: someone who knew too much and had good reason to be hostile. His usefulness had been declining.
Then came River Country. Yasushi's revelation. And everything about those calculations reversed.
In the new situation Black Zetsu was now working with, Nagato's importance had climbed back up past Madara's.
Black Zetsu had made his decision before he reached the cave. He was going to use Nagato properly.
He came down through the cave ceiling without a sound. The moment he materialized, those purple eyes were already on him.
In the dim light of the underground chamber, the Rinnegan's gaze carried nothing but fury and the intent to kill.
"You have failed, you filth! I will not submit to you. Not ever!"
"You want this body? Try your luck in the next life."
Black Zetsu moved to Nagato's position without responding. Then he stopped, dropped onto his knees, and pressed his forehead against the cold stone floor.
The posture he held was one of complete submission. There was nothing in it that resembled the creature who had been running events in the shinobi world for a thousand years.
"Nagato-sama. I have recognized my own errors."
"I wish to offer you a sincere apology. I only ask for the chance to explain."
Nagato had not anticipated this. The fury on his face froze in place, unable to decide where to go.
"What trick is this?"
"I'm not falling for your deceptions again."
"There is no deception." Black Zetsu raised his head, lifting his right hand above his head in the traditional oath posture. "I swear on the Six Paths Sage that every word I say will be the truth."
"Nagato-sama. You must have spent these days confused."
"How the Third Kazekage came to know what you were. Why he chose to use you. What his real intentions were. Don't you want the answers to all of that?"
"Let the two of us have a real conversation. Open and honest."
"What is there between people that cannot be resolved through genuine understanding?"
Black Zetsu's voice was steady and solemn. His eyes, those flat black eyes, held something that looked for all the world like sincerity. Combined with the posture he was maintaining, something in it reached through even the well-established suspicion.
Nagato had grown up with Jiraiya and Yahiko's philosophy inside him: the belief that understanding between people was achievable, that pain could be acknowledged across the distance between enemies. Even now, knowing that the Third Kazekage's noble principles had been performed rather than lived, the framework of values that had been with him since childhood did not simply disappear. He was young, and not as experienced as he thought he was.
Black Zetsu was one thousand years old and had been studying how people worked for the entirety of that time.
The fury on Nagato's face did not vanish. But it dimmed. He still did not trust what he was hearing. But somewhere in those Rinnegan eyes, beneath the anger, something had shifted.
Black Zetsu felt the opening and moved into it.
"Since we're attempting genuine understanding, it's only right that I speak first. I'll tell you my story. Then Nagato-sama can decide whether to forgive me."
He lowered himself further, until he was nearly flat against the floor, the posture of someone requesting a grace they are not certain they will receive.
He took a long breath and began.
"My name is Black Zetsu. My mother is the Rabbit Goddess, Otsutsuki Kaguya. My brother is the Six Paths Sage, Otsutsuki Hagoromo. Both of them are members of the Otsutsuki clan."
He kept his voice slow and low, giving every word the weight of something that had been carried for a very long time. The quality in it made you lean in to hear more.
He had not intended to reveal his identity. But Yasushi's exposure in River Country had already seeded some of this in Nagato's awareness. If Black Zetsu wanted any credibility at all in this conversation, he had to address what Nagato already knew. You cannot hide what someone has already seen.
So he would say it all. But in a different shape.
Nine truths carrying one lie, nine lies built around one truth, the mixture calibrated so that everything verifiable was accurate and everything that could not be checked was quietly adjusted. This was the craft of a thousand years.
In Black Zetsu's version, his mother and his brother had suffered because they chose to protect the shinobi world.
And who had caused that suffering?
He took what Yasushi had handed him and installed the Otsutsuki clan as the villain of the piece.
The Otsutsuki clan: an evil force that wanted to consume the shinobi world.
His mother and his brother: rebels from within, people who betrayed their own clan out of love and justice, who chose the shinobi world's survival over their clan's demands.
Black Zetsu's talent for constructing a narrative had no equal in the shinobi world. Real information woven through fabrication, false premises built on accurate foundations, every thread pulling in the direction he wanted without leaving visible seams. Even Hiruzen Sarutobi would have had difficulty locating the joints in this construction. For someone with Nagato's years and experience, it was simply not possible.
"Though we fought off the Otsutsuki clan's assault, Mother was sealed away in the process, and my brother, after founding the shinobi tradition and leaving behind the framework for ninjutsu cultivation, passed from the world."
"And I lost my physical body in that ancient conflict, surviving only in this form of concentrated energy, dormant in the shinobi world for ages."
"I awakened not long ago. And I looked at what the shinobi world had become during the years I had been absent."
Black Zetsu flooded his body with Yin Release chakra and turned his performance to maximum, one hand pressed to his chest, conveying the specific weight of grief over something loved and ruined. He struck exactly the right notes: not theatrical, not unconvincing, but the restrained pain of someone who has processed a loss so many times that what remains is the hollow shape of it.
"This endless warfare. This killing across generations. It has betrayed everything my brother intended when he shared ninjutsu with the world."
"So I made a decision. I would end this chaotic age. I would restore peace to the shinobi world."
"And at the same time, I would build toward the strength needed to resist the Otsutsuki invaders who will inevitably come to collect what they believe they are owed."
He drew on years of watching the shinobi world's hidden history, selecting events where his actual involvement had been instrumental, and reframing each one as a failed attempt at genuine peacemaking. The tone he gave them was of someone doing their best against enormous opposition, falling short through circumstance rather than through malice.
Told this way, the history of the last century sounded like a tragedy. Righteous intention after righteous intention, ruined by the world's stubborn refusal to allow peace.
"Later, I encountered Uchiha Madara. He also wanted to bring the world under one order and end the wars. He proposed the Moon's Eye Plan, and I saw within it a path that, with certain adjustments, could bring about Mother's release from her seal."
"If Mother returned to the world, her presence alone would overawe every nation. No more war. Permanent peace."
"And with Mother restored, the Otsutsuki invaders who come eventually would face something capable of meeting them."
"That was our thinking. That was the direction we worked toward."
"But then the Dragon Vein time-traveler appeared, and everything changed. And in the aftermath, I came to understand the mistakes I had made."
He told the full story of Akakaze from there: the chase that ended in the Dragon Vein, the jump backward in time, the return to Sand Village to deliver his intelligence, the death at Sasori's hands before the full picture could be transmitted, the Third Kazekage's actions on the fragmentary information he received, the recruitment of Nagato, the death of Yahiko. He laid all of it out in careful sequence.
He did not say that Nagato had always been his and Madara's cultivated instrument from the beginning, that the Rinnegan itself had its origins in something other than Nagato's own bloodline. He framed it as a recent incorporation: Nagato drawn into the plan after the intelligence arrived.
He did not say that Yahiko's death had been quietly engineered through Madara and himself, the Third Kazekage merely the mechanism through which they worked. He only presented the surface of it: how the Third Kazekage used the Fire Country's connections and Hanzo the Salamander to arrange Yahiko's death.
Everything that could not be verified was laid at someone else's door. Everything indefensible was framed as the error of another party.
Black Zetsu had made mistakes, yes. Many of them. But at the core of everything he had done was a person who wanted to end the age of war, a person trying to honor what his brother had built, a person working under impossible conditions toward something genuinely good.
That was the story he was telling.
And he was very, very good at telling it.
Chapter 478: Nagato-sama, Please Become the Savior!
Nagato listened without moving, and the light in the Rinnegan gradually became something more difficult to read.
He heard familiar names. He heard stories that echoed against his own past, against the specific grief he knew from the inside. He heard how Black Zetsu had moved through events he recognized, attempting peace, falling short by margins that were not his fault.
The stories had a quality of truth to them. They built images in Nagato's mind without him choosing to build them.
If Black Zetsu had succeeded back then. How many people might have lived. How many families might have stayed whole.
His fist, which had been clenched throughout, opened without him noticing. His breathing settled.
Black Zetsu tracked every shift in Nagato's expression with total attention. He had been doing this for a thousand years. He read the opening the moment it appeared.
He threw himself to the ground in a full prostration, both arms raised above his head, and when he lifted his face it was burning with something that looked exactly like joy.
"Nagato-sama. I am now completely certain: you are this world's future Savior!"
"Savior." Nagato repeated it. "Me?"
"Yes. You, Nagato-sama." Black Zetsu's eyes were full of reverence. "This comes directly from the intelligence the Dragon Vein time-traveler brought back from the future. It is completely verified. Not one word of fabrication."
"And more than that: it is the final result, tested by time itself."
"The Third Kazekage knew this in advance. That is why he worked so hard, used every method available, to bring you to Sand Village and keep you under his control."
"But his plan to hold you required eliminating Yahiko-sama first. That murder was the seed of everything that followed. It triggered the war. And eventually it brought him exactly what he had earned: Uchiha Yasushi killed him."
"I had spent everything on one goal: rescue Mother, and use her power to overawe the shinobi world and end the wars."
"But Yasushi told me plainly. My plan failed completely. Even after Mother was freed, she was sealed again by the Otsutsuki clan's agents."
"Which means: what the Rabbit Goddess cannot accomplish must be accomplished by someone else."
"What the Rabbit Goddess could not do, the Six Paths Sage can complete."
"Nagato-sama. Please become the new Six Paths Sage."
"Lead us. Unite the power of the Five Great Nations. Bring genuine peace to this land. And build what we need to resist the Otsutsuki clan when they come."
"For that purpose, I am willing to abandon everything I planned with Uchiha Madara. Every element of the Moon's Eye Plan. I will devote myself fully to your leadership, and work toward a world where people can actually trust each other."
Nagato had grown up in war, in hiding, in the shadow of Yahiko's determination and confidence. Whatever Yahiko decided, Nagato followed. It had always been that simple.
In the original flow of events, Yahiko's death had forced a change. With Yahiko gone and the remaining group in danger, Nagato had been pushed into a position he did not choose, required to carry something he did not feel ready to carry. That necessity had been what shaped him.
In this timeline, Yahiko was gone but the situation around Nagato was different. The remaining Akatsuki members had been absorbed into Sand Village's structure. There was no immediate crisis, no group of people depending on him to hold things together. No pressure demanding growth.
The Third Kazekage had arranged everything too carefully. Every responsibility that should have been Nagato's had been taken over. Every difficulty that should have forced maturity had been managed from above, kept from reaching him. He had sunk deeper into the structure without developing the strength to function outside it, becoming more accustomed to being arranged for, more reliant on decisions that came from somewhere else.
Then the Dragon Vein's effects compounded this: Yahiko's death came too early in this version of events, and Nagato himself was younger than he had been in the original, his thinking not yet formed into something that could hold its shape under pressure.
What Yahiko's death, and the exposure of the truth, and the pain of having been used had produced was not strength. It had produced confusion. A mind that had been pulled apart and hadn't found a way to put itself back together.
He needed an answer. He needed a direction. He needed someone to tell him what to do.
When Black Zetsu knelt before him and spoke in that tone, with that specific weight of sincerity, Nagato reached for it the way a drowning person reaches for whatever is closest. Some part of him may have understood it wasn't solid ground. He reached for it anyway.
The fury that had been on his face was entirely gone. What replaced it was three parts confusion, three parts hope, three parts fear, and something small and cautious at the center that might have been resolve.
"Me. Become the Six Paths Sage."
"You have to believe in yourself!" Black Zetsu's energy form actually managed to radiate something like passion when he swung his fist. He pointed directly at Nagato's eyes. Those purple pupils caught the dim light in the underground chamber and held it.
"Look at them."
"That is the proof."
"Those are eyes that only the Six Paths Sage has ever possessed."
"You were always meant to be the Savior."
"Think about what you felt when you and White Zetsu combined. Does that combination mean nothing to you?"
"Limitless chakra. A body that cannot be put down in any conventional sense. Rinnegan techniques of the highest order. Can you honestly look at what you are and still doubt yourself?"
"But." Even with all of Black Zetsu's words pouring into him, the self-doubt that Nagato had carried his whole life pushed back. "When we fought together that day. We still lost to Uchiha Yasushi."
"Because on that day, you and White Zetsu were working together for the first time. Simple cooperation, not true integration. Next time will be different."
"And there is one critical element still missing before you can truly be called the new Six Paths Sage: you must become the Ten-Tails Jinchuriki."
"That is the one gap remaining. When it is filled, you are complete. Only then can you truly claim the title of Savior and do what this world needs done."
"Believe in yourself, Nagato-sama!"
"If someone with your strength and your eyes cannot become the Savior, then who can? What hope does this world have at all?"
Black Zetsu came up from the floor in one motion, crossed to Nagato, and placed both hands on his shoulders. The black eyes were inches from Nagato's face, and what burned in them was heat.
"Think about them."
"The ones who died in the wars. The children who had nowhere to go. The families that were destroyed."
"They are waiting for you."
"Waiting for the Savior. Waiting to be saved."
"Can you really disappoint them? Can you stand and watch this world keep sinking?"
By the time Black Zetsu finished, Nagato's expression had gone somewhere different. Something in the line of his jaw had settled. His hand closed into a fist.
"You're right."
His voice came out steadily.
"If the Six Paths Sage himself cannot save this world, then the world is finished. I understand that."
"I don't know exactly how I reach that point in the future. But for shinobi world peace, I will stake everything I have. Without hesitation."
His voice was still strengthening as he reached the last of it, until the words had the quality of an oath.
He held the fist against his chest. In those Rinnegan eyes, something burned that had not been there before. The light of idealism. The light of someone who has just committed everything to something they believe in.
He had found his direction. He had found his reason to keep going.
"Wonderful, Nagato-sama."
Black Zetsu descended into the most submissive bow he had produced yet, his forehead pressed to the cold stone until he was almost flat. If anyone had been watching closely, they might have caught, for the fraction of a second before the expression was composed back into reverence, what was actually in those flat black eyes.
The quiet satisfaction of a hunter. The specific pleasure of watching something that has been run down finally stop running.
Then the expression was gone, and what looked back from those eyes was devotion.
"I believe that under your leadership, we will make the shinobi world understand what peace actually feels like."
"But our enemies are strong. We need more people who share this purpose."
"Konan-sama has been worried about you in Sand Village. Perhaps you could give me a letter, something in your handwriting, so I can bring her here?"
The calculation behind this request was simple. Nagato was cooperative right now, but holding a second point of leverage was more secure. With Konan present, Nagato would not be willing to act against the people around him. He would stay compliant indefinitely.
This move had not failed in a thousand years.
Nagato, completely captured by the persona Black Zetsu had constructed, trusted him without reservation and had no awareness of the mechanism being used on him. He agreed immediately.
He took the pen and paper without hesitation and began to write, and the words that went onto the page carried a warmth and a longing that had nothing calculated in them at all.
Black Zetsu received the letter carefully, stored it, and continued.
"With only Konan-sama added, our strength is still limited. We need additional people."
"I believe Jiraiya-sama would be an excellent candidate. He is one of Konoha's Three Sannin, powerful, and connected across the shinobi world. His involvement would significantly increase what we can accomplish."
"He is on his way here at this moment. I hope Nagato-sama can speak with him honestly, help him understand what we are working toward, and bring him into our cause."
"Jiraiya-sensei."
The name brought something to Nagato's face: a warmth, a specific kind of longing, the expression of someone thinking about a person they have genuinely missed.
"He would be an excellent choice."
"With his values, I can't imagine him refusing when the cause is genuine peace."
"Wonderful. In that case, I'll have White Zetsu go bring him here."
With Nagato's agreement confirmed, Black Zetsu withdrew from the chamber and sent a White Zetsu to retrieve Jiraiya.
Jiraiya was wandering through the general area using Yasushi's map, making repeated passes without finding anything useful, when White Zetsu materialized directly in front of him.
He flinched. His hands came up.
Before he could act, White Zetsu spoke.
"Jiraiya-sama. Nagato-sama would like to see you."
"Nagato?" The tension left Jiraiya's body all at once, replaced by relief. "Where is he? Is he alright?"
White Zetsu did not answer. It simply turned and ran.
Jiraiya frowned, thought about it for half a second, decided that his own capabilities were sufficient security, and followed.
After a series of turns through unremarkable terrain, they arrived. Nagato was already there on the surface, waiting.
Black Zetsu's "allegiance" to Nagato had now been established, which meant the imprisonment had to end. White Zetsu now responded fully to Nagato's directions. Nagato, who had not seen daylight in several days and was eagerly anticipating the reunion with a teacher he hadn't seen in years, had simply come up to the surface to wait.
When he saw Jiraiya approaching from a distance, he could not stay still. He moved quickly to close the gap.
"Jiraiya-sensei!"
Jiraiya saw him and covered the remaining distance in three bounding strides, pulling him into a full embrace.
Since Yahiko's death, Nagato had been carrying more than he let anyone see. The stress of it, the confusion, the pain of discovering what had been done to his life: all of it had been packed down under the surface with nowhere to go. Standing now in front of someone who had genuinely worried about him, genuinely cared what happened to him, something in him gave way.
He did not mean to cry. He cried anyway.
Jiraiya had his own feelings running, complicated ones, but his nature was fundamentally open-handed about these things. He produced a grin and slapped Nagato's back.
"Hahaha! Little Nagato, you are exactly the same as when you were a child. Still a crybaby!"
"I am not a crybaby! It's been years since I cried about anything!"
The red went into Nagato's face immediately, the reflexive denial overriding the emotion, and in the process the sadness was knocked sideways.
They talked for a while, and then Nagato brought Jiraiya into the base.
Jiraiya followed with the specific manner of someone who is performing casual observation while actually cataloguing everything in his peripheral vision: his eyes wandered, his posture was relaxed, his expression managed to suggest he was simply interested in the architecture. Inwardly every detail was being processed and filed.
But Black Zetsu had prepared for this. The base had been carefully divided, and everything that mattered, the Demonic Statue of the Outer Path, the White Zetsu masses, all of it was completely out of view. What Jiraiya's wandering gaze found was a series of ordinary passages and ordinary stone rooms, nothing unusual in any of it.
They were shown to a comfortable room. White Zetsu poured tea with practiced efficiency and withdrew, leaving them alone.
Jiraiya let the last of his visible tension go. He looked at the bandages covering Nagato, the dark stains in them, and exhaled.
"After you disappeared, I was sick with worry. Afraid every day that something had gone wrong."
"Seeing you here, actually alive, I can finally stop holding my breath."
Nagato was touched, and walked Jiraiya through everything that had happened. In complete detail, without omitting anything he knew.
When he finished, Jiraiya sat with it for a while.
He had come with information of his own. When the two sides were placed next to each other, piece against piece, a number of things that had not made sense before became clear immediately.
"I spent a long time assuming that your Rinnegan had been identified somehow, that the Third Kazekage saw it and decided to move on it, and that was the origin of everything that followed. I never stopped feeling guilty for not bringing you back to the village when I had the chance."
He let out a long, slow breath.
"Now I know the Dragon Vein time-traveler is where all of this actually started."
The expression that had settled on his face was complicated, with several different feelings competing for space in it.
"And Uchiha Yasushi. Is he a Dragon Vein time-traveler as well?"
"But he was born in the village. He grew up there. How could he be..."
"He is. I heard him speaking directly with Black Zetsu. At no point did he deny being a transmigrator. He actually assumed at one point that Black Zetsu was one too."
"As for his age, I asked Black Zetsu about it. Apparently his physical body was destroyed during the transmigration. Only his soul came through."
"A soul transmigration. And the Dragon Vein can carry that."
Jiraiya turned this over.
"No wonder he's what he is at seven years old."
He exhaled again, this one more like a groan.
His teacher had talked to him, at various points, about various difficult situations. He thought about what the old man would say now about a situation like this one.
If the person you were dealing with was a seven-year-old genius, the village's response was simple. You kept him, trained him, made him yours.
But if the person behind that seven-year-old's face was not a child at all, was something older with its own history and its own calculations that you could not trace, and that person was also an Uchiha: his teacher's response would not be simple. It would not be warmth and open arms.
Being suspicious and keeping pressure on such a person was the best case. Expecting trust, or ever really using him fully, was simply not how his teacher worked.
Chapter 479: Black Zetsu: Actually, Senju Hashirama Is My Child
After they had talked through the past and caught up on what each of them had missed, Nagato raised the subject of the Savior.
Jiraiya's composure went somewhere else entirely.
"What?"
"You are the future Six Paths Sage?"
"You are the Savior?"
"Rabbit Goddess?"
"Six Paths Sage?"
"Black and White Zetsu?"
"Uchiha Madara?"
One staggering revelation after another came out of Nagato's mouth and hit Jiraiya's ears in rapid succession, the combined weight of them leaving him spinning, his head full of a low buzzing sound.
"Hold on."
"Let me breathe."
He pulled a sake gourd from his robe, yanked out the stopper, tilted his head back, and drank several large swallows. The liquid ran from the corners of his mouth and soaked into his collar. He didn't notice. He was drinking too fast and it caught in his throat; he erupted into a violent coughing fit, face going red all the way to the ears.
He kept drinking anyway. As though the burning alcohol was the only available tool for cooling down a brain that was running too hot.
Because of the Great Toad Sage's prophecy, Jiraiya had always carried a higher-than-average readiness to accept the idea that Nagato might be the Savior. When Nagato confirmed it, something in him actually exhaled, a feeling close to relief: I have been looking for so long, and now I know.
The information that followed immediately erased that small relief.
Compared to what came after, even Uchiha Madara still being alive somewhere was a trivially small piece of news.
Alien invasion. A being from outside the world entirely, with the power to destroy everything in it. Compared to that kind of threat, what were ninja wars? You could fit the entire history of shinobi conflict into something manageable and put it on a shelf beside what he had just been told.
His hand around the sake gourd was trembling slightly.
He sat with it for a while. Then he looked at Nagato.
"I have too many questions about all of this to simply accept it. I need to speak with the Black and White Zetsu directly."
"Understandable." Nagato nodded. "With intelligence like this, anyone's first reaction would be disbelief. It took me a long time to accept it myself."
He stood, went to the door, and brought Black and White Zetsu in.
Once they were seated, Jiraiya's eyes changed quality. He had a specific job to do: determine whether the creature in front of him was actually the sincere ally Nagato believed it to be, or a different kind of threat wearing a different kind of face.
What Jiraiya did not account for was the difference between someone who has played with human desires for a few decades and someone who has been doing it for a thousand years. For Black Zetsu, finding the leverage point in a person's heart was not a skill. It was reflex.
Before Jiraiya could begin his questioning, Black Zetsu leaned forward and spoke first, his tone warm and familiar.
"You know, when it comes down to it, there is actually quite a connection between me and Konoha."
"After losing my physical body, I could not intervene directly in the shinobi world's conflicts. To have any influence at all, I had to work through others."
"I watched the shinobi world at war with itself, generation after generation. I found a child with extraordinary natural gifts and fused White Zetsu cells into his body, allowing him to awaken Wood Release."
"That child's name was Senju Hashirama."
"In a certain sense, you could say he was my child."
"Later, he and Uchiha Madara joined forces and built a village together. They named it Konoha."
"What?"
Jiraiya inhaled sharply. The words he had been forming for his interrogation stopped entirely, blocked somewhere in his throat.
His eyes had gone very wide. His mouth was open. He sat absolutely still, like something had struck him from a direction he hadn't been watching.
Senju Hashirama. First Hokage. God of Shinobi. The man Konoha had worshipped for generations, the figure whose shadow was taller than anything the village had built since.
The awakening of Wood Release. The thing that made him what he was.
Because of this creature in front of him?
That cannot be real.
That is insane.
"You are telling me," Jiraiya said slowly, his voice carrying a very particular kind of disbelief, "that the First Hokage-sama's awakening of Wood Release happened because of you?"
No one in Konoha understood what Wood Release meant to the village more than he did. He stared hard at Black Zetsu and searched for the tell, the flinch, the thing that would reveal the claim as false.
Black Zetsu's expression did not shift. It was entirely composed, carrying the specific calm of someone describing something they know to be true and see no particular reason to emphasize.
"Correct. And as a result," he added pleasantly, "no one in the Senju family has ever been able to awaken it again."
Jiraiya felt something drop in his chest.
The puzzle that had occupied Konoha's leadership for decades. The question that had defeated every attempt to answer it. An answer was finally sitting in front of him.
An answer that was more alarming, more strange, than anything anyone had guessed.
He knew what Wood Release meant to the village the way he knew what his own heartbeat meant. After the First Hokage's death, Konoha had never stopped trying to produce another one. The uncomfortable truth no one quite said out loud: if Konoha had another Wood Release user, the entire question of how to manage the Uchiha clan would look completely different. The wary balance that defined so much of the village's internal politics would shift immediately.
The Senju clan's own descendants had spent lifetimes hoping to reclaim what their ancestor had possessed. They tried every approach anyone could think of. They produced remarkable ninja. They did not produce another Wood Release user.
Tsunade, the finest talent the Senju line had shown in generations, had not been able to do it. She had built her reputation on her fists and her healing instead.
And the harder it proved to awaken, the more the village's desire for it grew. It was no longer simply a rare and powerful kekkei genkai. It had become something else, a symbol, a faith, a direction in which hope pointed. As long as Wood Release existed as a possible future thing, Konoha had a version of the God of Shinobi it could still believe in. As long as that belief held, the village had something worth waiting for.
That was part of why Hiruzen had sent him on this specific mission in the first place. The Wood Release that had appeared in the western front battle: Hiruzen had made him repeat back the reminder three times before he left. Don't get so caught up in your student that you forget what else matters. Bring back anything you can find about where that Wood Release came from.
If Black Zetsu was telling the truth, then there was no Wood Release to find. There never would be again.
A deep hopelessness rose in Jiraiya that he was not entirely prepared for.
He breathed slowly and tried to keep his expression from showing what was happening inside him. His hand gave him away. He looked at it and put it flat on the table.
Black Zetsu watched him with the attention of someone checking whether a line cast into water has produced a tug. He had what he needed. He continued.
"If you joined us. If you supported Nagato-sama's cause. In that case, we would all be working toward the same thing."
"And if the occasion called for it, I could help you awaken Wood Release."
The words landed on Jiraiya like something falling from a height.
Awaken Wood Release.
His heart moved without his permission. His mouth went slightly dry.
He was a Konoha shinobi. Of course he had wanted it. Saying he had never looked at Wood Release without at least a small and private desire to possess it would be dishonest. Every Konoha shinobi he had ever known had some version of that same desire.
But.
Was this actually how it worked? Fuse these "White Zetsu cells" into the body and the kekkei genkai follows?
In that case, why look for specific individuals at all? Why not produce dozens of them?
Black Zetsu appeared to notice the direction Jiraiya's thinking had taken.
"White Zetsu cells can't be integrated into just anyone. The person needs to have the necessary baseline talent and potential already in them. Without that foundation, the fusion can't succeed."
"Jiraiya-sama as one of the Three Sannin is, without question, someone who qualifies."
"I see." Jiraiya let out a breath. Something in him that had been resisting relaxed slightly. And with that relaxation, some amount of the doubt he had brought into this conversation about Black Zetsu's story had also eased.
Black Zetsu registered this with satisfaction, without showing it.
He wanted Jiraiya. Not Jiraiya's cooperation specifically, though that had value. He wanted Jiraiya's body, with White Zetsu cells installed in it. Jiraiya functioning under the assumption that he was choosing his own course while Black Zetsu had a mechanism of control already inside him. The Otsutsuki arrivals were not distant speculation. He needed pawns prepared.
What a shame about Yasushi. He knew far too much for that particular gift to be offered.
Jiraiya pulled himself back from where his thoughts had been going. He wiped his face with both hands, breathed deliberately, and put the Wood Release idea back on the shelf long enough to think clearly.
"You told Nagato earlier that he is the Savior. But the intelligence I received from Sand Village says that Uchiha Yasushi established the Uchiha Divine Nation in the future. Those two things can't both be correct."
"They aren't in conflict."
Black Zetsu did not need to think about this answer. It had been prepared.
"Who says the Uchiha Divine Nation is something that saves the shinobi world?"
"Divine Nation. Nation of a god. For that, you first need an actual god."
"Think about who that god might be."
"Well," Jiraiya said, off-balance by the framing, "obviously that would be Uchiha Yasushi."
"Heh." Black Zetsu's smile had contempt in it. "Jiraiya-sama. Would you actually worship an Uchiha as a god? Genuinely?"
"Or do you believe the daimyo of the Five Great Nations, the strongest ninja of the current era, would bow down and worship an Uchiha as a god? Willingly?"
Jiraiya was quiet.
He thought about this honestly, and the honest answer was obvious: the shinobi world's powerful did not submit to other people. They were precisely the people who fought hardest against any force that tried to make them. That was the nature of who they were. That had always been his reason for treating the Uchiha Divine Nation intelligence as something probably exaggerated.
But if he accepted that it was real, the question became worse, not better. What kind of being would have the necessary power to actually force the strongest people in the shinobi world into that position? What was the upper limit of what that would require?
He did not arrive at a comfortable answer.
Black Zetsu kept going, his voice steady and confiding.
"I don't have a transmigrator's foreknowledge. My intelligence isn't perfectly complete. But based on everything I can assess: the god at the center of the Uchiha Divine Nation is very likely one of the Otsutsuki clan."
"Think about the question seriously. What kind of existence could make the entire shinobi world kneel? What kind of force could suppress every powerful ninja from every major nation simultaneously?"
"Humans have limits. Even the strongest human beings have a ceiling."
"Only a being that transcends the human category entirely could achieve this. Only something that comes from beyond the sky."
"Uchiha Yasushi, or the Uchiha clan as a whole, must have aligned themselves with the Otsutsuki clan. That alignment is what makes the Uchiha Divine Nation possible."
"And the person who leads the resistance against the Otsutsuki invaders and the Uchiha clan they have taken under their wing..."
Black Zetsu's voice climbed in register.
"...is Nagato-sama. Without question."
"Look at what the Third Kazekage's actions tell us."
"After he received the future intelligence, his very first move was bringing Nagato-sama to Sand Village. He knew what Nagato would become and he wanted control of it."
"His second move: what was it?"
Black Zetsu fixed his eyes on Jiraiya's face, slowing each word down.
"He sent operatives into Konoha Village. He risked open war with Konoha. He burned operatives who had been embedded in Konoha for years and had never been exposed. He paid whatever the cost demanded. Because killing Uchiha Yasushi was worth all of it."
Each statement had the quality of something being driven into place.
"And I've also heard that he worked together with Konoha's own Root Elder Danzo to accomplish this. Two villages, one target."
"Unfortunately, neither attempt succeeded."
"Elder Danzo met his end. Died heroically in the effort."
"What does all of this tell us?"
Black Zetsu spread his arms, his voice carrying the weight of a conclusion being delivered.
"It tells us that Uchiha Yasushi represents the most serious future threat there is. The kind that has to be removed no matter what it takes."
"The Third Kazekage moved against him. An elder from within Konoha's own walls moved against him."
"And still he survived, and Elder Danzo died instead."
A brief pause.
"Perhaps because Yasushi is a transmigrator and knows what the future holds, he made the decision early: surrender to the Otsutsuki clan, preserve the Uchiha clan's survival by becoming their instrument."
"Elder Danzo lived with great purpose. And died for that purpose."
Jiraiya had known Danzo for a long time. He knew precisely what Danzo was. Having someone praise Danzo to his face with apparent sincerity was producing a specific uncomfortable warmth in his cheeks that had nothing to do with admiration.
But the logic of what Black Zetsu was constructing was uncomfortably hard to find flaws in.
He sat with it and tried.
Danzo had hated the Uchiha for decades. That was not a secret to anyone in Konoha. But this specific action, setting a trap to kill a village member inside Root's own facility, was not Danzo's normal pattern. Danzo operated in the shadows, built deniability into everything he did, never exposed himself to this kind of direct accountability.
What would have made him accept that level of risk?
What intelligence could have been serious enough to push someone like Danzo across that particular line?
Could it be that Danzo had received something from the Third Kazekage, some piece of intelligence specific and alarming enough that he calculated the risk was worth it?
That was, if Jiraiya was honest with himself, precisely the kind of decision Danzo would make. He was the person in Konoha who would dare kill anyone, absolutely anyone, if he had convinced himself the village required it.
Cold sweat moved down the back of Jiraiya's neck. The image of Danzo's face formed in his mind: those dark, calculating eyes. That permanent expression of someone who had seen things clearly and found them unpleasant.
Danzo had been terrible in many ways. But had he also, in his own terrible way, been doing what he believed was necessary?
If the answer to that was yes, then the Uchiha Divine Nation was real and serious and coming, and the person at its center was a transmigrator who had arrived in the world already knowing what was going to happen and had been making decisions from that position for years.
The more threads Jiraiya pulled on, the worse the picture looked.
Black Zetsu watched the expression moving across Jiraiya's face and supplied the final pressure.
"I actually understand Yasushi's choice. In a way."
"The Otsutsuki clan is simply that powerful. Every individual among them is at the level of something divine. They are not enemies ordinary human beings can stop."
"Only by uniting every nation's strength into a single force could anyone hope to stand against beings who travel between worlds as a matter of course."
"Yasushi is a transmigrator. He knows what the future looks like. He made his decision based on that knowledge. He chose surrender. He chose to become their instrument."
"It's shameful. But it's also human."
"People fear death. People want to survive. That's simply what people are."
He paused, then his voice shifted, sharpened.
"But we cannot all be like him."
"Someone has to stand up. Someone has to refuse. Someone has to fight for the shinobi world's future, even knowing what they're fighting against."
"And that person, that Savior, is Nagato-sama."
Chapter 480: "Akatsuki" Will Lead the Shinobi World to Peace
Ninja conflict, at its deepest level, is a contest of information.
Whoever holds the most complete picture of events can maneuver every other party into whatever position they want.
Black Zetsu was the only person in the shinobi world who had gathered intelligence from all sides and held it simultaneously. That was why he could weave his lies so smoothly through the truth, with no visible seams, and no one could identify where the fabrication was.
The one condition that had to hold: none of the involved parties could be allowed to compare notes with each other.
Keeping them hostile toward one another was the obvious solution.
And now Uchiha Yasushi had been established as the collaborator, the traitor who chose his clan's survival over the shinobi world. His testimony was already discredited before he opened his mouth.
The most elegant piece of the construction, though, was the one Black Zetsu had made about himself. He had stated, clearly and early, that he was not a transmigrator and did not have direct access to future intelligence. Everything he had offered as opinion was framed as inference and deduction.
That position was untouchable. It could advance or retreat without leaving him exposed. If future events contradicted anything he had said, those contradictions would land as his honest mistakes, not as evidence of deliberate deception.
Until those events arrived, no one could challenge him.
Jiraiya was no exception.
He breathed slowly, thought it through carefully, and in the end could not find the logical flaw he was looking for. His instincts kept telling him something was slightly wrong somewhere. He could not locate it.
The doubt did not disappear entirely. But when he weighed everything, his conclusion was that Nagato, his student whom he had sought for so many years, was genuinely the Savior.
He exhaled, and the relief in it was real. A smile came to his face.
"Nagato. Come back to Konoha with me. I'll persuade Hiruzen-sensei to give you his full support..."
"Konoha." Black Zetsu laughed, short and cold. He cut across Jiraiya's sentence without any effort to be polite about it, and the contempt in his voice was completely unmasked.
"Jiraiya-sama. Please don't say things that aren't serious."
"You know very well what Konoha has become. If you're going to pretend you don't, I won't help you."
"If Konoha was genuinely such a place worth going back to, then why didn't you bring all three of those children back to the village when you had the chance?"
The smile froze on Jiraiya's face.
Black Zetsu had no intention of handing his pieces over to Hiruzen Sarutobi. He pressed immediately.
"Jiraiya-sama. There is only one Savior. A figure who leads the entire shinobi world toward peace is a leader. There is a specific meaning to that word."
"No leader works as someone else's subordinate."
"So tell me: would Sarutobi Hiruzen give up the Hokage's position for Nagato-sama?"
Jiraiya's mouth opened. Nothing came out. Whatever words had formed stopped at his lips.
He knew his teacher. He knew exactly what kind of man Hiruzen Sarutobi was: a genuinely good person, a conscientious leader, someone who took his responsibilities seriously. He also knew what always came first in Hiruzen's calculations.
Konoha. Then the shinobi world. In that order. Without exception.
Hiruzen would not place his village's fate in the hands of an outsider. It would not matter how exceptional the person was. Nagato had not been born in Konoha, had not grown up in Konoha. To the village, he was and would remain an outsider.
Even if he was literally the prophesied Savior, it would not change the category he occupied.
Jiraiya's mouth opened and closed several more times. In the end his head dropped, and he had nothing to offer.
"I see that I don't need to continue. You've understood the problem."
"So now, Jiraiya-sama: make your choice."
"Continue serving Konoha, or commit to Nagato-sama's cause and spend your life working toward the shinobi world's peace."
Black Zetsu did not allow room for postponement. He set the question down in front of Jiraiya and waited.
Jiraiya sat with it. His loyalty to the village, which had been the fixed center of his life for decades, met something that presented itself as larger, as more important, as the thing the village loyalty was supposed to have been in service of all along.
The larger thing won.
"I understand."
He stood, with the gravity of someone making a formal commitment, and bowed to Nagato.
"Nagato-sama. Please accept my loyalty."
"Use everything I have, for the peace and future of the shinobi world."
Nagato was moved immediately. He took Jiraiya's hands in both of his, held them firmly, and spoke with equal solemnity.
"Jiraiya-sensei. Welcome to Akatsuki."
"Let's fight for the shinobi world's better tomorrow together."
"As long as we're together, we can change this world."
Teacher and student looked at each other, both of them lit up from within by the same feeling: purpose, direction, the uncomplicated joy of believing in something completely. The sight of it sent a bloom of satisfaction through Black Zetsu that he made no effort to show.
"Hahaha! Excellent!"
"Welcome, Jiraiya-sama!"
"From here we continue growing, finding more people who share this cause, building Akatsuki into the organization that leads the shinobi world toward light and peace."
"But the most urgent immediate task is making sure every nation understands what crisis they are moving toward. As long as they don't know the truth, they'll keep consuming each other's strength, and when the Otsutsuki clan arrives, those invaders will simply collect what's already been weakened."
His arms moved expressively as his voice found its passion.
"Everyone needs to know the truth!"
"Everyone needs to know who the real enemy actually is!"
"Everyone needs to understand: without unity, all that awaits them is destruction!"
"And Jiraiya-sama, you are the one who carries that truth to them. The hero who saves the shinobi world."
"You're completely right, Black Zetsu!"
Jiraiya slapped his knee, the energy rising through him.
"This situation, nations slaughtering each other for generations, it should have ended long ago!"
"The reason they kept fighting was that they never believed there would be a final reckoning. No one thought the consequences would actually be permanent."
"But now they have no excuse for ignorance."
"The Dragon Vein time-traveler's intelligence has described the outcome precisely. If they still don't understand the lesson, they'll simply be swept up by the Otsutsuki clan and absorbed into Uchiha Yasushi's Divine Nation."
He closed his fist, his gaze carrying the specific hardness of someone who has found their conviction.
"I'll go to each nation immediately. I'll explain what continuing this war leads to. I'll persuade them to stop."
"Wonderful. With Jiraiya-sama presenting the case directly, the skepticism from the nations will be much harder to sustain."
Black Zetsu clapped his hands together, smiling.
"If possible, push them toward forming a united coalition. A joint force prepared to respond to the Otsutsuki clan's eventual arrival."
"Imagine it. All five major nations. Every hidden village united under one banner. The combined power of the entire shinobi world."
"Whether it's Momoshiki Otsutsuki or Kinshiki Otsutsuki who comes, we meet them with everything."
"And once the nations see that kind of unified strength, even someone like Uchiha Yasushi, someone who chose surrender, might reconsider. Might decide to come back to where he belongs."
"If the nations doubt what you tell them, inform them that Akakaze of Sand Village was not the only one swept into the Dragon Vein. Several others were pulled in at the same moment. Some of them may well have arrived in this era. Each nation can investigate independently and verify the intelligence through their own channels."
"Other transmigrators?" Jiraiya straightened. The confidence in his mission increased visibly.
Multiple independent sources corroborating the same intelligence. Even a nation determined to disbelieve could not dismiss every source at once.
"Here is a list of names."
Black Zetsu produced a document he had prepared in advance. While Jiraiya examined it, he added one more item.
"There is also a simpler form of proof available, if needed."
"I can help you awaken Wood Release. Make you the second Wood Release user in the world."
"Nothing I could say would be as persuasive as showing them. The moment they witness you using Wood Release personally, no one will doubt my connection to Senju Hashirama."
"Right now?" Jiraiya's heart rate jumped. Something in him was suddenly uneasy despite the eagerness underneath.
He rubbed his hands together. His expression showed the particular complexity of wanting something while also being afraid of it.
"Should we have some preparations in place first? Medicines, suppressants, something like that?"
"And if timing isn't critical, I could bring Tsunade and Orochimaru here for this. I'm sure both of them would want to witness something like this personally."
"None of that is necessary."
Black Zetsu's smile was confident and unconcerned.
"For most people, fusing with Wood Release cells is practically impossible. Fatal in most cases."
"But for me, the original source of Wood Release itself, it's genuinely simple."
"You open yourself to the process. You allow White Zetsu to integrate a portion of its body into yours. That's all."
"Every rejection response your body produces, White Zetsu will suppress and manage from within."
"It's that simple?"
"It is exactly that simple."
With a definitive answer in hand, Jiraiya felt the last hesitation give way. He wanted this. He had always wanted this, if he was being fully honest. The desire was older than this conversation.
He breathed in deeply and stood straight.
"Let's do it."
The three of them left the underground base and came out into the open countryside.
Jiraiya removed his outer coat, bared his torso, spread his arms wide, tilted his head back, and closed his eyes. Everything in him settled into deliberate stillness, the posture of someone who has decided to accept what is coming.
A White Zetsu climbed onto his body. The pale form began to dissolve, running like melting wax down across his shoulders and chest, across his back and down to his abdomen, enveloping him inch by inch and then gradually seeping deeper, working through the skin.
Jiraiya's body wanted to resist. He felt the impulse and suppressed it, holding still while the pale form disappeared into him.
Black Zetsu stood to one side and watched with no expression on his face.
The original agreement had been to fuse only a portion of White Zetsu's body. When the moment came, Black Zetsu put in the entire thing.
From this point forward, Jiraiya's body would permanently house a resident of Black Zetsu's choosing.
Put generously: Jiraiya would receive more than what was promised. His Wood Release would be stronger.
Put differently: there were certain things it was better not to say out loud.
Jiraiya's unguarded trust had prevented him from registering this detail. He had his eyes closed, his attention turned inward, trying to feel the change that was moving through him.
What he felt was his cells becoming something different. More resilient, more vital, carrying an energy that his own body hadn't produced before. His skin had taken on a toughness. His muscles responded more readily. His breathing had changed in quality, deeper and with a power behind it that surprised him when he noticed it.
The immune responses that had initially fired through every system in his body quieted under the influence of the White Zetsu cells, their resistance easing one by one into a different kind of engagement, the body moving from rejection into something closer to recognition.
As the change moved through him, his exterior responded. A branch emerged briefly from one shoulder. A small sapling pushed through from the top of his head. These appeared and faded rapidly, one after another, as though something inside him was resolving a struggle, settling into its final shape, the unusual growth cycles running their course and ending.
His face moved through pain and relief in alternating waves. Veins stood out at his temples, then softened.
After a long time, he opened his eyes and looked at his hand.
A small green sapling had emerged from the center of his palm. It was full of life. It swayed gently, following the movements of his attention, bending and curling with something that felt like eagerness.
"So this is Wood Release."
Jiraiya's eyes filled with tears without his permission.
He thought about Konoha. About how long the village had been trying to produce this. The effort, the failed attempts, the hope that never quite went away and never quite arrived. And here, in an open field outside a cave, it had taken minutes.
Everything he felt about that was complicated and not simple to put into words. But what it did, among other things, was make it nearly impossible to doubt what Black Zetsu had told him about Hashirama.
He breathed slowly. Closed his fist. The sapling disappeared back into him.
Black Zetsu offered him a prepared scroll.
"I also have a full set of Wood Release techniques for you: Grafting Jutsu, Wood Dragon Technique, Nativity of a World of Trees, Advent of the Great Wooden Buddha. Everything is included. Study them at your pace."
"I am deeply grateful."
Jiraiya accepted the scroll with both hands and genuine deference, treating Black Zetsu with the respect owed to someone who had fought for the shinobi world for a long time.
He was not the same person he had been when he arrived here. He had a purpose now that was larger than anything he had carried before, and the specific restlessness of someone who is impatient to begin.
He tucked the scroll into his robe and looked up with the expression of someone who is already moving in their mind.
"Nagato-sama. Black Zetsu-sama. I'm ready to leave. I'm already looking forward to sitting down with the daimyo and Kage of each nation."
"I'll practice the Wood Release techniques on the road, and when the time comes, I'll put on a demonstration that leaves no room for doubt."
"We're counting on you."
After Jiraiya departed, Black Zetsu turned to Nagato.
"Nagato-sama. You are our leader. Everything we succeed or fail at will rest on your strength. That means your power must keep growing."
"Continue deepening your integration with White Zetsu. At minimum, develop every Rinnegan ability you currently have access to."
Nagato straightened.
"Understood. I'll keep working."
With Nagato's direction confirmed, Black Zetsu took his leave and slipped silently back to Madara's stone cave.
Madara was still sitting cross-legged beneath the Demonic Statue of the Outer Path, in the same position he had been in the last time Black Zetsu was here, as though he had not moved. He looked up when Black Zetsu appeared.
"What is the situation outside?"
"Madara-sama. Everything is under control."
Black Zetsu's voice was level and calm. His posture toward Madara was what it had always been: respectful, humble, the bearing of a reliable and loyal servant.
Internally, the calculation was different.
Black Zetsu's primary objective had shifted. Rescuing his mother was still the destination, but the path to it now required removing the threats that would come for her before she was freed. The work ahead was different from the work he had planned for a thousand years.
Which meant Uchiha Madara's role in that work had contracted.
He was even beginning to consider whether it would be simpler to remove Madara from the equation entirely. If Madara died, the Rinnegan he carried would need an explanation, and the most convincing available explanation was that those eyes had simply always been Nagato's, genuinely born to him. No planted eyes, no inconvenient history to navigate around.
But there was still some reluctance.
Madara was a useful piece. Disposing of a useful piece unnecessarily was poor craft. And when the time came to eventually free his mother, after the Otsutsuki threats had been dealt with, Madara might still have a role to play.
Keep him in place for now. He required minimal resources to maintain. When the moment came that his usefulness ended for good, removing him would take nothing more than disconnecting the apparatus keeping him alive. Madara's trust was absolute. The action would face no resistance.
But that moment had not arrived yet.