In the darkness underground, Black Zetsu felt unprecedented unease and distress.
After a thousand years of planning, dawn was at hand. This was the closest it had ever come to success—to freeing its mother, Kaguya Otsutsuki, from her seal within the moon.
Its most successful and powerful chess piece—Uchiha Madara—had successfully awakened the Rinnegan! According to the plan, as long as Akatsuki gathered all the Tailed Beasts step by step, combined them into the Ten-Tails, and Madara became the Ten-Tails' Jinchuriki before casting the Infinite Tsukuyomi... the path to Mother's resurrection would be unobstructed.
It no longer needed to painstakingly provoke and guide the reincarnations of Indra's Chakra and Asura's Chakra into fighting each other, generation after generation, as it had over the past millennium.
But—what exactly was going on with this generation's reincarnation of Asura's Chakra?!
Although, over the past thousand years, not a single reincarnation of Indra had ever defeated a reincarnation of Asura.
This time, however, the reincarnation of Asura had become so powerful that he had completely exceeded the bounds of "balance."
After all, in the long years following the Sage of Six Paths' death, Hashirama Senju had been the strongest ninja Black Zetsu had ever seen. Yet at the same age, Uzumaki Naruto had already made Hashirama Senju's brilliance pale in comparison.
Therefore, not long after Orochimaru's Konoha Crush Plan had failed, when Black Zetsu first learned of Naruto's terrifying strength through White Zetsu's intelligence network, it had immediately raised its guard. It secretly arranged for a large number of White Zetsu to lie in wait around Konoha, keeping watch around the clock in an attempt to uncover the truth behind this variable.
Yet everything it witnessed today still far exceeded Black Zetsu's expectations, leaving it at a complete loss.
Why had two reincarnations of