Chapter 175 - 173: Kurama Explains It All (Reluctantly)

After Kurama finished speaking, eight of the nine Bijuu looked like cats who'd just had their tails stepped on by a very large, very unexpected boot.

"Ten-Tails? Rinnegan? Impossible!" Gyūki, who had been the calmest among them by a margin roughly the width of the ocean, immediately lost his composure.

Normally, someone would have teased him about that. Shukaku, especially, lived for those moments, but no one was in the mood. Even the raccoon stayed silent, which was perhaps the most alarming sign of all.

Gyūki, to his credit, recovered quickly and started analyzing. "It should be simply impossible for a human to awaken the old man's eyes. Even more impossible for anyone to know about the Ten-Tails, let alone attempt to revive it."

The others nodded rapidly. Whether out of trust in his analysis, or belief in Gyūki himself, or a simple unwillingness to accept what Kurama had said as reality, it was hard to tell. Probably all three, stacked on top of each other like a very unstable house of cards.

"Not only that," Matatabi added, her tails twitching with barely contained agitation. "The old man, along with Hamura, personally sealed the Gedō Mazō. Hamura built his entire bloodline on the foundation of guarding it, along with... that woman just in case. How could someone bypass all of that?"

Kurama shook his head slowly, like a teacher disappointed in a classroom full of students who had failed a very simple pop quiz. "I didn't expect you all to become so weak that basic information makes you unable to think straight. What I said is someone is trying. Do you understand? Trying. If there weren't so many conditions in the way, he wouldn't be trying. He'd already be doing."

He was taking visible pleasure in this. Mito could see it radiating off him like heat from a campfire. She twitched.

'Yup. This fox is absolutely unreliable in serious situations, I knew it.' Decades together and he still can't resist being dramatic.

Still, Kurama's words did their job. The panic receded, replaced by the grim understanding that while this wasn't an immediate crisis, it was absolutely a crisis nonetheless. The culprit, according to Kurama, already had the Rinnegan. The clock was ticking, even if it wasn't about to strike midnight just yet.

"But how exactly do you know all of this?" Kokuō asked, and despite his gentle nature, the look he fixed on Kurama suggested he was approximately three seconds away from screaming at the fox to stop being mysterious and just spill everything in one go.

Kurama, for his part, was still clearly enjoying the feeling.

'So this is how Azula felt when she was talking to us back then.' He was recalling his first true contact with the Uchiha girl, the way she'd drip-fed information just to watch him and Mito squirm. He finally understood the appeal, and it was indeed addictive.

Mito, who could not bear his punchable temperament for one more second, cleared her throat. "Ahem. Kurama..."

She didn't say anything else. Decades of forced cohabitation had created a tacit understanding between them, and after another decade of trusting each other, Kurama knew exactly what that throat-clearing meant: Stop being insufferable or I will tell my student, who will find a way to make you regret it.

"Alright," he said, relenting with only minimal grumbling. "Let me start from the beginning. The last battle between Hashirama and Madara."

And this time, he actually shared everything.

"During that battle, Hashirama killed Madara. But Madara wasn't actually dead. He'd used the forbidden jutsu Izanagi before the fight even started, setting it to activate on a delay after his death. So although he was killed, the death didn't stick."

The implications landed immediately. One: Madara had survived. Two: the Rinnegan almost certainly had something to do with him.

"He'd read the Uchiha stone tablet left by the old man," Kurama continued, and for just a moment, his voice lost its smug edge and tipped into something almost melancholic. "The tablet had been modified by someone. According to what was written, the union of Uchiha and Senju power would create the ultimate dojutsu. The Rinnegan."

He paused, letting that settle.

"Madara, being Madara, took a literal bite out of Hashirama during their fight and walked away with a piece of his flesh. After his resurrection, he used it to combine the power of Indra and Asura, which eventually awakened the Rinnegan."

He stopped there, giving them time to digest. Judging by their expressions, this was wise.

"So that's how it happened," Saiken said quietly, their usual cheerfulness entirely absent. The others didn't speak, but their silence was agreement enough.

Even Isobu, who had been the first to contact Kurama and thought he understood the gravity of the situation, realized now that things were far more serious than he'd assumed.

Madara Uchiha, alive, with the Rinnegan in his skull, only needed the Gedō Mazō to truly begin the process of reviving the Ten-Tails. His expression, already solemn, became grave enough to sink a ship.

"Fortunately," Gyūki said, and every head turned toward him. "Madara should already be very old by now. If he's even still alive."

It was a fair point. Apart from the Bijuu themselves and a handful of notable exceptions, even the Sage of Six Paths had eventually died of old age, even if that death had arguably been voluntary. Madara, for all his power, was still human. Time shouldn't make exceptions for legends.

Kurama nodded, confirming Gyūki's reasoning. "Indeed. Age is the biggest problem for him right now. But he has a solution. He plans to transplant his Rinnegan into someone else, and then have that person use the Outer Path: Samsara of Heavenly Life Technique. It's a Rinnegan ability that can resurrect the dead."

He paused, then made an expression like someone who'd just remembered a mildly interesting piece of trivia. "Oh, by the way. The Rinnegan has another technique. The Outer Path: Heretical Demon Statue Summoning. Care to guess what it does?"

He didn't wait for an answer. "It allows the user to summon the Gedō Mazō. And the bad news? Madara has almost certainly already done it."

Akiko, who had been doing her absolute best to gather intelligence like a proper ninja, had gathered so much intelligence in the past five minutes that she was now doubting her entire existence.

In the ninja world, there were three great dojutsu. The Byakugan, the White Eye of the Hyūga clan, the Sharingan, the Red Eye of the Uchiha clan and then the Rinnegan, the supreme eye, the thing from legends that most people assumed was exactly that—a legend.

Every shinobi outside of Konoha was required to study the Sharingan and the Byakugan. If you dug deeper into the history, you'd eventually stumble across references to the Rinnegan, the eye of the Sage of Six Paths himself.

Akiko, who had made a particular study of all things related to Azula Uchiha, had done that digging. She'd read every scroll she could get her hands on about dojutsu.

According to those scrolls, these eyes were responsible for the creation of the ninja world and all ninjutsu. At the time, she'd scoffed at the claim as it was the kind of story clans told to make themselves seem more important.

But now, according to these Bijuu, whose existences stretched back thousands of years, who had personally known the Sage, it was all real. The Rinnegan had existed, it could be awakened, and someone had done it.

The requirements alone were staggering. The combination of Hashirama, the God of Shinobi, and Madara, the Ninja Shura, the two men recognized as the absolute strongest of their era, reaching peaks no one else had ever touched, just to maybe awaken these eyes. Akiko couldn't even begin to guess at the abilities such a dojutsu would grant.

And then Kurama had casually mentioned it could resurrect the dead which fried her brain.

'What exactly is the Ten-Tails? How have I never heard of it? And what is the Gedō Mazō supposed to be?' Her head was spinning, and she desperately wanted to ask both questions, but the solemnity of the eight other Bijuu, who looked like they were collectively attending a funeral for their own futures, made her keep her mouth shut.

Fortunately for her, there was one of the wisest people in the room present. Mito Uzumaki, as if reading Akiko's thoughts directly from her skull, began speaking out of nowhere.

"The Ten-Tails is the ultimate weapon," she explained, her voice calm and steady, like a teacher walking a student through a difficult equation. "Capable of draining all the energy from the ninja world. It's also the sum of all nine Bijuu combined, as for the Gedō Mazō, it's the Ten-Tails' shell, the body without the chakra."

Case closed. Akiko nodded mechanically, her brain still struggling to process. The combination of all nine Bijuu? Then who in the world could possibly resist it?

As a Jinchuriki, Akiko understood very clearly the power and potential of the Three-Tails. And there were six more Bijuu theoretically stronger than him, with the Nine-Tails at the top, whose chakra felt so vast she couldn't even find the edges of it.

If Isobu's Tailed Beast Ball hit the village, it would completely destroy it, she has no doubt about it. So what about a Tailed Beast Ball from this... Ten-Tails? Would it destroy the entire ninja world?

She didn't have the answer, and she didn't want the answer. The answer would only lead to more questions, and she already had far too many of those.

When Mito spoke, none of the Bijuu were surprised. Kurama had brought her here. That meant he trusted her.

And if Kurama, the most aggressively antisocial of all of them, trusted a human enough to share secrets that only the Bijuu were supposed to know, then that human was clearly exceptional. Or Kurama had finally lost his mind.

"It's no wonder you called all of us here," Matatabi sighed, her tail-tips drooping. "Before the Rinnegan, Madara's strength alone was already beyond nearly everyone. Only Indra and Asura could have stopped him. If not for Hashirama, who was even more ridiculous, no one would have been able to prevent him from dominating the entire ninja world."

She paused, and her voice grew heavier. "And now, if he's resurrected at his peak, with the Rinnegan added on top, there may truly be no one who can stop him. Probably not even Hashirama."