After taking Gaara along, Hinata did not return to the Hidden Leaf Village. Instead, she wandered through the skies above the Shinobi World.
She was not really wandering aimlessly. She was searching for something.
She was searching for Uchiha Obito's corpse.
The other corpses did not matter, but Obito's Mangekyō Sharingan could not be left out in the open.
Finally, an hour and a half later, she found Obito's corpse on a small island in the Land of Water.
After putting Obito's corpse away, she returned to the Hidden Leaf Village.
In a hidden cave somewhere in the Land of Earth, which Hinata had not searched—
Black Zetsu was there.
Although he wanted to remain inside the Demonic Statue of the Outer Path, the abnormal Chakra absorption during the days he had spent recuperating had already alerted Nagato.
If he continued staying inside the Demonic Statue of the Outer Path, Nagato might discover him. After all, Nagato possessed the Rinnegan!
Besides, he could not stay inside the Demonic Statue of the Outer Path forever. Did he still intend to carry out his plan to split the moon and save his mother or not?
This trip to the Land of Earth had been to find the Land of Earth's Jinchuriki.
But he had never expected an accident to occur while extracting the One-Tail!
The Demonic Statue of the Outer Path had disappeared, and his first thought was that Nagato had summoned it away.
Not long afterward, he saw the person he never wanted to see again.
He had immediately released the Phantasmal Body Technique, but... it was already too late.
Had anyone been there, they would have seen a strange person whose body was half black and half white. The black half of his body condensed into a mass like liquid.