"Indra, actually... I'm your uncle."
Black Zetsu looked at Indra before him. At that moment, he first formed hand seals to pause Asura's revival.
He looked at Indra, his soybean-sized eyes filled with sincerity, and spoke to him with profound feeling.
???
Indra, who had assumed Black Zetsu was about to attack when he saw him forming hand seals and had been about to unleash Amaterasu, was briefly dumbfounded.
"What the hell?"
Indra looked at Black Zetsu before him. Even his normally aloof face twitched as he stared at him in disbelief and demanded an answer.
"Ah, it's a long story."
Black Zetsu slowly turned his back, gazed up at the cool-toned light bulb at a forty-five-degree angle, and let out a long sigh.
"Actually, I should have kept this secret until the day the plan was realized in the future."
Black Zetsu's voice was steady, but a trace of sorrow was subtly woven into it.
"Stop! First, what plan? And why should I believe you're my uncle?"
"You aren't even human. How could you be my uncle?"
Black Zetsu's barrage of sob stories had left Indra bewildered, but he was, after all, the leader of a religious order.
This thing before him wasn't even human. How could he possibly be his uncle?
According to that damned old man, he did have a younger brother. Indra had even met him as a child, and he looked nothing like Black Zetsu.
"Don't rush, my dear nephew."
Black Zetsu turned to look at Indra, ignored his battle-ready stance, and slowly spoke.
"This begins with a story from long ago. Do you know about your... grandmother?"
!
Indra's pupils abruptly contracted.
Grandmother.
An utterly unfamiliar word.
In fact, in his memories, the Sage of Six Paths had never even mentioned his grandmother's existence.