Chapter 190 - 188: Storytime

After Ishin left, Azula headed for the one part of the Hokage mansion the destruction hadn't reached: the basement. She had someone to meet.

The drawback was obvious: Tsunade's Water Severing Wave had cut the building clean in half. The ANBU stationed nearby and most of Ishin's workers could see exactly where she was going. Azula noted the audience and didn't care.

It didn't bother her. The basement was the most heavily warded location in the entire village, layers upon layers of seals, some of them Tobirama's original work, some of them hers, all of them active. Even she had to move carefully through them.

Maybe that was why it had survived since Tobirama's era. Hiruzen had been too afraid to touch it. The idea amused her more than it should have.

Getting inside meant deactivating half a dozen seals, each one older and more paranoid than the last. Tobirama had built this place to keep people out, she'd rebuilt it so that he could no longer come and go without her permission.

She activated his mark. Three full minutes passed before Tobirama materialized in the chamber, long enough that she was starting to wonder if he'd ignore the summons entirely.

"Old man, have you started slacking off?" The words were teasing, but Azula knew Tobirama definitely must have a reason for his lateness.

Tobirama pulled off his ANBU mask and rolled his eyes. "Do you know what it's like, being pulled off patrol without warning? I can't just vanish whenever you feel like summoning me."

"If not for that new Commander of yours." Tobirama's tone was tired. "The man notices everything, I nearly had to vanish in front of him."

He wanted to be released from the Edo Tensei. Even so, he'd still slipped away from Sakumo instead of vanishing in front of him.

He hadn't wanted anyone to know the village had a second Flying Raijin user besides Azula because a secret like that could change everything in the right situation.

Azula, for her part, didn't seem interested in his patrol complaints. She'd been teasing from the start, and the teasing hadn't stopped.

"I don't know why you called me here." Tobirama's voice was even. "I have something to say to you."

He'd made up his mind before, he wasn't going to back down.

"I've watched you these past few days: the summit, the Hyūga, Danzō." He stopped there. "The village will thrive under you, more than it ever did under me, more than it ever did under Hiruzen. You resolved the external threats, crushed the internal ones and your allies are strong and they trust you."

"My presence here is redundant. I'm asking you to release the Edo Tensei." He'd spent enough time around her now to understand the kind of person she was.

Efficient, cold and unforgiving. All the things he'd expected from an Uchiha who'd climbed to the top.

But she'd also shown something he hadn't anticipated: an understanding of others that went beyond manipulation.

He was counting on her understanding. It was the only card he had left to play.

Azula froze for three full seconds. Whatever she'd expected when she summoned him, it wasn't this.

"Hmm." Azula gestured toward a chair. "Let's sit."

Tobirama's role is crucial against what was coming, releasing him now would be inconvenient, so the truth would have to do the convincing his own resolve couldn't.

She settled into her own seat, and by the time she spoke again, the freeze was gone. "Why do you truly want me to release you? Don't tell me you have no attachments. If that were true, your soul would have returned to the Pure Land on its own."

She hadn't accepted, but she hadn't refused either. For Azula, that was practically an invitation to keep talking.

'Whatever she says next, hold the line. She can't change your mind if you don't let her.'

"It would be a lie to say I have no attachments." Tobirama sat. "But life is never complete, that's the nature of it. If I stay, I'll only find more reasons not to leave. Eventually, I'll become one of those creatures who clings to existence at any cost."

His voice was steady. "I won't let that happen to me."

Azula caught that his tone had shifted. He wasn't speaking to an Uchiha anymore but to an actual Hokage he respected.

Azula nodded. Stare into the abyss, the abyss would stare at you, basically the same idea.

Then she smirked. Tobirama recognized that smirk that never preceded anything good.

"I understand." Azula's voice was light, too light. "Mito-sensei said the same thing, basically. She forbade me from extending her life. Told me not to even think about summoning her with Edo Tensei after she's gone."

She sighed, like this whole conversation was weighing on her. It wasn't, but the performance helped.

"But there's a reason I summoned you." She paused just long enough to be annoying.

"The survival of the entire shinobi world, for a start." She waited long enough that Tobirama almost spoke. "How much do you know about the Sage of Six Paths?"

Tobirama stared at her. 'She's not about to tell me the Sage of Six Paths truly existed and wants to destroy the Ninja World, right?'

"According to the oldest Senju scrolls, the Sage of Six Paths was real." Tobirama's voice was even, scholarly. "His Rinnegan was the strongest of the three dōjutsu. As the founder of ninshu, he mastered all chakra natures, including Yin-Yang Release. The origin of everything, according to the legends."

Azula studied him as he spoke. He wasn't dismissing the idea outright. Curious, maybe. Skeptical, definitely. But not dismissive, and that was more than she'd expected.

"I studied Yin-Yang Release myself and tried to combine the two." His Shadow Clones had been one result of that research, imperfect, but useful. "At its highest level, I believe Yin-Yang can create life, the legends about the Sage claim he did exactly that."

It wasn't a bad theory. The Uchiha's Izanagi already turned imagination into reality, briefly, at a cost. A full mastery of Yin-Yang would be the next logical step, Tobirama had gotten closer than most.

"Then let me tell you a story." Azula's voice shifted into something almost theatrical. She hadn't done this in a while, but it was still kind of fun to spoil others. "Once upon a time, a woman appeared in this world. She didn't look like anyone else with two horns and pale skin. The locals called her a goddess."

Tobirama frowned. A horned goddess from the sky, it sounded like a folk tale, the kind old women told children to keep them inside at night. He opened his mouth to say so.

Azula kept talking before he could.

"She was always watching the sky, especially at night, like she was waiting for something." A beat of silence, just for drama. "She could perform miracles. The people called her the Rabbit Goddess."

Tobirama's frown deepened. The Rabbit Goddess was a very old legend, older than the village, older than the Warring States.

She was supposed to be the first being to bring peace to the world. Most scholars dismissed her as myth.

"But humans are greedy." Azula shrugged. "They didn't want to be ruled, not even by a goddess who'd given them peace, so when she was pregnant, they turned on her, the very people who'd worshipped her."

"During all of this, she gave birth to her two children, Hagoromo and Hamura."

Tobirama searched his memory and came up empty. The Rabbit Goddess legends he knew didn't mention a pregnancy, didn't mention sons, and didn't mention any of this.

"After that, she stopped seeing humans as people. They were insects, no, it should be tools." Azula's voice was matter-of-fact. "She planted the Divine Tree, drained their energy and twisted them into soldiers."

"The process took years. Her sons grew up during it, made friends among the humans, learned what their mother was doing, inherited pieces of her power. And in the end, they turned against her." Azula paused. "They sealed her away, created a prison for her in the sky. A prison you look at every night."

Tobirama opened his mouth, then closed it. His first instinct was tactical: how had two sons defeated a goddess using power they'd inherited from her? His second thought was quieter, the moon? She was talking about the moon?

Azula watched him process with a slight smile. She kept going, because she wasn't done yet.

"One son took his family to the moon, leaving only two branches in the world." Azula was filling in gaps now, but it sounded good. "The other stayed, taught humans how to use chakra, what he called ninshu because he wanted peace."

She looked at him, eyebrows raised, waiting. "Guess."

"The Sage of Six Paths." Tobirama's voice was flat. The pieces fit, and he didn't like the picture they made.

"Bingo." Azula nodded. "The Sage of Six Paths. I'd tell you the rest, but Mito-sensei is also good at the long version. She'll give you the full history later if you ask."

"You remember how she was always watching the sky?" Azula went to the important point. "That wasn't longing. That was fear. She was waiting for her clan to come find her."

"Her clan has a particular hobby." Azula searched for the right way to put it. "They travel from world to world, plant a tree and have it absorb all the energy from every living thing on the planet: animals, people, the world itself. Then it produces a fruit, eat the fruit, gain godlike power."

"But there's a small problem. To make the tree bear fruit, the clan has to sacrifice one of their own to it. That woman, the ancestor of all chakra, was the one they chose because she was a low-ranked expendable." Azula shrugged. "She disagreed, ambushed her partner, fed him to the tree instead and ate the fruit herself."

"Then she spent the rest of her existence watching the sky, waiting for the rest of her clan to come looking for what she stole."