Red Torii Gates descended from the sky!
Before the real Black Zetsu could react, one Torii Gate after another slammed down on him with heavy thuds!
They pinned Black Zetsu firmly to the ground, sealing his chakra and ability to move.
The Senju Clan and the Uchiha Clan were both stunned by the sight.
The Uchiha who had rushed over to save his comrade reached the base of the torii, only to see the face and body of a familiar Uchiha clansman twisting out of shape.
It was not just his form that was changing. His color was gradually fading as well.
Like a lump of white mud, he let out strange growls as he twisted and writhed, until he finally became a monster that was neither human nor anything else, then stopped moving altogether.
Black Zetsu was forced to separate from White Zetsu.
Infused with Senjutsu, White Zetsu's body once again gave off a chilling series of creaks.
In less than a moment, the white, humanoid non-living entity transformed into a strangely shaped tree.
Black Zetsu was cunning enough to realize he had lost his advantage, and immediately tried to use the Mayfly Technique to escape underground.
But...
Think about it. Who here hated Black Zetsu the most?
It was not Team Minato or Team Kakashi, who knew the truth.
Nor was it the First Hokage or the Second Hokage.
And it certainly was not the Senju and Uchiha ninjas nearby, who still had no idea what was going on.
It was Madara Uchiha, the man Black Zetsu had used until he lost everything.
He had learned the entire truth.
Whether it was the secret of the Ōtsutsuki Clan or the lie behind the Moon's Eye Plan.
All of it was because Black Zetsu had set his sights on the Uchiha Clan over a thousand years ago.
With a single Stone Monument, he had toyed with generations of the Uchiha Clan's strongest warriors, forcing them to endure unbearable suffering and awaken ever more powerful Sharingan step by step.
He forced them to waver between blindness and their own blood relatives.
After being resurrected from the Pure Land and learning the truth, Madara Uchiha left Konoha alone.
Hashirama wanted to follow him, but Tobirama stopped him and told him to let Madara Uchiha calm down on his own.
After all, he was a man, and more than that, a powerful man like Madara Uchiha. When he learned that his entire life had been nothing but a joke in Black Zetsu's eyes, that everything he had done had only served someone else's ends, how could his pride possibly bear it?
After leaving Konoha, Madara Uchiha went to the Uchiha Clan territory to confirm that the Stone Monument had already been destroyed.
He went to that underground tunnel caught between hell and heaven, remembering how he had clung to life there for decades and awakened the Rinnegan in despair.
He went to the Valley of the End and looked at the statues of himself and Hashirama forming the Seal of Confrontation, remembering how he had felt when he told Hashirama that he had it backward.
At this moment...
The rage, sorrow, and desolation in Madara's heart only grew stronger.
It was like the strange, suffocating calm before a storm.
Black Zetsu had deceived him and turned him against Hashirama.
He had exploited the weakness in Madara's heart, treating him as a pawn, a puppet to toy with and drive forward.
Madara had struggled to survive in that pitch-black underground tunnel, hearing of Hashirama's death, then Tobirama's death. In the despair of his final years, he awakened the Rinnegan, just as Black Zetsu had wanted. Even on the verge of death, he left Obito Uchiha behind to continue carrying out the Eye of the Moon Plan for him.
Madara Uchiha changed back from Indra's appearance into his own.
His dark eyes shifted into the Sharingan, then the Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan, and finally into the pale purple concentric rings of the Rinnegan.
Without warning, his lips parted slightly.
"Chibaku Tensei!"
Sealing Kaguya Ōtsutsuki did indeed require Six Paths: Chibaku Tensei.
But to seal Black Zetsu, the Chibaku Tensei of Madara's Rinnegan was enough.
The black "core" stuck to Black Zetsu just as he was about to flee underground.
Immediately after, the earth and stones around him began to change. With sharp cracks, they broke apart piece by piece and flew toward his body.
The sight left the ninjas of the Warring States Period dumbstruck.
The surrounding ground shifted like an earthquake, rumbling as it split, cracked, and shattered. Freed from the pull of gravity, the fragments rose into the sky along with the thing called Black Zetsu.
"What's happening?"
"How can this be? The ground is breaking apart."
The Sengoku-era ninjas of the Uchiha Clan and the Senju Clan stood frozen in place, completely unable to understand what was happening. Too much of what they were seeing had gone far beyond anything they knew.
"In any case, everyone, we should get out of this area first!" Minato Namikaze called out to the ninjas of both clans.
But the ninjas of the two clans did not listen to him.
Only after Butsuma Senju and Tajima Uchiha judged the situation to be dangerous and ordered a retreat did the Senju Clan, the Uchiha Clan, along with Izuna, Tobirama, Team Kakashi, and Team Minato from the mission scroll world, flee away from the area.
The ropes binding the young Madara and the young Hashirama had been tied with slipknots to begin with. A single tug was enough to loosen them.
Each of them grabbed a younger brother beside him, hoisted him onto his back, and then withdrew at top speed.
Naruto created more than twenty Shadow Clones to help the younger or severely injured ninjas leave the area.
Only Hashirama Senju remained, standing beside Madara Uchiha.
Together, he bore Madara's anger, as well as the pain and desolation in his heart.
Along with those who had fled to a safe area, they looked up at the sky and watched the screaming Black Zetsu gradually vanish beneath the rubble, while the sphere created by Chibaku Tensei grew larger and larger.
"Damn it! My plan, the plan I spent over a thousand years preparing! Who the hell are you people?!"
No one answered Black Zetsu's question.
Black Zetsu was furious and desperate.
"You are definitely not the true Ōtsutsuki Clan!"
"Only Mother is. Only Mother is the true progenitor of chakra!"
"I created the entire history of the ninja world! All I had to do was wait for those two brats to grow up, make their loved ones, friends, and brothers die right before their eyes! Make them endure even more suffering as they lived longer, and Mother would definitely be revived!"
In his final moments, Black Zetsu had already begun to speak incoherently.
Under his malicious stare, the young Hashirama Senju and the young Madara Uchiha both looked grim.
And just as this world's Black Zetsu had said, the Madara Uchiha and Hashirama Senju from the mission scroll world, who had lost their loved ones, friends, and brothers, now looked beyond grim.
At this point, they could no longer say how many of their loved ones, friends, and brothers had died because of Black Zetsu back then.
If they had not learned of Black Zetsu's thousand-year scheme, they never would have imagined that something called White Zetsu could transform into anyone, mimic their chakra, and leave even the Sharingan and Byakugan unable to detect a flaw.
Nor would they have imagined what Black Zetsu had secretly done while hiding between the two clans in this way.
The stones drawn in by Chibaku Tensei had already covered every part of Black Zetsu except his face.
Black Zetsu's curses grew more and more hysterical.
He glared at Madara Uchiha and Hashirama Senju, who stood there with dark expressions, and from the corner of his eye, he saw the young Hashirama and young Madara looking equally grave.
In that instant, a possibility flashed through Black Zetsu's mind.
"Could you be..."
"It's you! I know it! It's you! Hashirama Senju! Madara Uchiha!"
The sound of "Madara" was cut off by a massive boulder.
After that, no one could hear Black Zetsu's curses anymore.
Having absorbed almost all the rubble in the area into itself, the sphere floated into the sky like a hydrogen balloon, slowly rising higher and higher.
Immortal and indestructible.
Black Zetsu would remain in darkness for another thousand years, countless thousands of years, tens of thousands of years, hundreds of thousands of years, millions of years, until endless time made him forget his hatred, forget his purpose, forget who he was, forget that he wanted to save his mother, forget...
Who Kaguya Ōtsutsuki was.
The ninjas of the Uchiha Clan and the Senju Clan were still lost in shock and confusion.
There were too many questions in their minds.
What was that pitch-black thing?
What did it mean when it said it had created the history of the ninja world?
The technique called Chibaku Tensei that sealed Black Zetsu.
The people who had suddenly appeared on their battlefield.
All of it left the two clans of the Warring States Period completely bewildered.
And...
They had heard it clearly.
That thing called Black Zetsu, who had it said those two people standing in the middle were?
Hashirama Senju and Madara Uchiha?
The people of both clans looked toward their respective young clan heirs, who had appeared on the battlefield earlier as prisoners.
But when everyone scattered and fled, they had seen both of them, along with their younger brothers, untie themselves with ease.
The blond boy who had first transformed into "Black Zetsu" had also suddenly created dozens of solid shadow clones. Not only had he helped the children he had first captured escape the battlefield, he had even carried the fallen Senju and Uchiha clan members out of the fighting area.
The clan members who were still alive, whether Senju or Uchiha, were now receiving emergency treatment from the pink-haired girl and the brown-haired girl.
Because the ninjas of the Warring States Period were not used to being touched by anyone outside their clan, they could not suppress their reflexive counterattacks. Whenever that happened, the two Uchiha boys standing beside the two girls, Young Obito and Sasuke, along with the silver-haired boy, Young Kakashi, and the blond boy, Naruto, would deflect their attacks for them.
In the Warring States Period, such saintly behavior was rare.
It left the ninjas of the Uchiha and Senju Clans unsure whether they should refuse the other side's kindness.
But after one, then two severely wounded ninjas received basic first aid and survived, the Clan Heads of both clans turned their heads away and silently allowed it. The injured ninjas' relatives and friends even quietly thanked them.
"It looks like we'll have to stop fighting for now."
"Hmph. We may be enemies, but there are many times when we do think alike."
Butsuma Senju.
Tajima Uchiha.
The two Clan Heads gave the signal to cease fighting.
The ninjas on both sides watched their sworn enemies carefully as they retreated step by step.
In the center of the former battlefield, Black Zetsu had become a star in broad daylight, flying into the sky, leaving the atmosphere, and entering the vast cosmos, where it would exist like a satellite under the laws of gravity and repulsion.
But Madara Uchiha clearly could not calm down so easily.
"Hashirama..."
He spoke.
"You cannot understand what it is like."
"To spend years alone in a dark underground tunnel, clinging to the Eye of the Moon Plan."
"To hear of one familiar person's death after another, and to have only that plan to comfort yourself."
"Everything I endured all these years..."