The black core had no Ten-Tails form.
It had only a heart that kept contracting.
Hundreds of White Zetsu crawled up from the underground roots, merging into its outer layer one after another.
Each carried old orders it had once received.
Capture the Tailed Beasts.
Activate the Demonic Statue.
Find the Rinnegan.
Protect the Moon's Eye Plan.
These orders had originally belonged to different stages.
Black Zetsu compressed them all into the same core.
He no longer verified their sources.
Nor did he wait for Kaguya's approval.
The first thing to emerge aboveground was a white tree without leaves.
Hundreds of featureless faces grew on its trunk.
They all spoke in Black Zetsu's voice.
"Unification."
The tree stood outside every Shinobi Village.
It grew where three abandoned underground transport routes intersected.
Black Zetsu had deliberately chosen open ground on a border with no clear jurisdiction.
If the Five Nations sent armies toward it, they would first fight over their operational boundaries.
Neither the Land of Rain nor Konoha could claim an inherent right to handle it.
The Land of Rivers issued danger coordinates based only on the roots' vibrations, without defining a battlefield for any side.
The Demonic Statue of the Outer Path shook in the Land of Rain.
The Aggregation Bus had already broken, and none of the nine Tailed Beast interfaces had opened.
The black core could not truly become the Ten-Tails.
So it simulated the structure using the old permissions Black Zetsu controlled.
The White Zetsu Network replaced the God Tree's root system.
Fragments of the Backup Stone Cocoon replaced the Otsutsuki vessel.
The Demonic Statue's fourth permission replaced the connection to the Ten-Tails itself.
Together, the three formed an incomplete pseudo-Ten-Tails.
It had no Tailed Beast chakra.
Yet it could identify every point of entry in