Night had fallen deep, and Naruto lay resting in his own courtyard.
"Pain actually sent four Akatsuki members over—does he not trust me?"
Naruto seemed to be talking to himself.
"No wonder. You claim to be Madara Uchiha, while the one backing Obito also bears Madara's name. One of you has to be a fake. It's not strange that he trusts Obito's side more."
A figure slowly emerged from the shadows beside the house. Black Zetsu bowed deeply to Naruto, his voice respectful to the extreme. "Father."
"Little Black, there's no need for such courtesy. Your mother and I are the ones who wronged you, making you toil and wander all these years."
Naruto looked at Black Zetsu with a trace of kindness in his expression.
Black Zetsu's heart warmed, feeling that all his labor over the past thousand years had not been in vain.
"This is only what I should do, Father!"
As he spoke, he pulled a mask and a scroll from his body and handed them to Naruto.
"I found these in the ancestral shrine of the Uzumaki Clan in the Land of Whirlpools. Just as you said, Father. With this, we can fish the Nine-Tails out of the Death God's stomach and bring the God Tree back to life."
Naruto's eyes lit up.
When it came to gathering intelligence, even Orochimaru had to rank behind Black Zetsu.
With a hundred thousand White Zetsu spreading out, turning the Land of Whirlpools upside down was nothing.
Not to mention that he had such detailed location clues. Black Zetsu had not needed much effort to obtain the counterspell for the Reaper Death Seal.
Naruto took the scroll and unfolded it. Sure enough, it contained a set of shaman-like movements, along with a method for extracting souls from the Death