After the communication ended, Konan shifted her gaze to Nagato lying on the medical bed, her brows tightly furrowed.
"Can his promise be trusted?"
Nagato's body sank into the bedding, so emaciated that he was little more than a skeleton. Tubes connected him to bottles of nutrients of all sizes, barely keeping him alive.
His legs had been blown apart while saving Konan. Even with the Rinnegan and immense chakra, he could not regrow a single bit of flesh.
Nagato shook his head, his voice quiet.
"I don't know."
After a pause, he added,
"But he hit the heart of it—reforming the ninja villages alone will never bring lasting peace."
"Once all nine Tailed Beasts are gathered, the forbidden technique forged through the Demonic Statue of the Outer Path can erase an entire ninja village from the map with a single strike."
"Only after the ninja villages of those great nations have tasted the suffering we endured will there be true peace."
"He has treated all of Konoha as Akatsuki's base. What would it hurt to trust him once?"
There was no hesitation in Nagato's tone.
He added one more sentence.
"You went to see the situation in the Land of Fields."
That place was where the Tailed Beast Bomb Rasenshuriken, slightly deflected at the cost of Hashirama Senju's life by a Susanoo Blade, had landed.
Everything within dozens of miles had been ground into ash. Even countless civilians in the Land of Fields and as far as the Land of Fire had been killed or injured, and that was only the lingering force.
Hashirama Senju's destruction spread like a flood, completely unlike Madara Uchiha's method of driving everything into one fixed point.
If that attack had landed directly on Amegakure, the entire village likely would not have left behind