A few days later, while Ryusei and Katsuyu continued refining their new technique, he performed his usual sensory sweep of the surrounding region.
It had become routine by now, expanding his perception across valleys, rivers, and ridges to ensure no hidden observers were near his current operation site.
But this time, something was off.
His brow furrowed as he investigated more deeply in a particular direction immediately.
There could be faint chakra signatures… thin, strange, and irregular, pulsing from deep below the ground. "Underground, really? What is that?" he murmured to himself quietly.
Without hesitation, Ryusei activated Lightning Body Flicker, his chakra bursting through his coils initially. He could now use it way more as well due to his Creation Rebirth.
Then the first three gates also opened, the Yin Seal flared, and Creation Rebirth wrapped him in a regenerative glow, his speed multiplying beyond normal comprehension.
Before he moved, he sent a brief thought through the link to a Katsuyu fragment nearest to the intruder, for it to try and summon him there as they had practiced recently.
Then he vanished. It worked to an extent.
The forest barely had time to react before the air ripped with static
Ryusei blurred across the terrain, then dove straight underground, using Earth Release displacements and summoned micro-slug fragments to part the soil ahead of him.
Those fragments pulsed with the faint green chakra of the tailed beasts, amplifying his motion and stabilizing the collapsing tunnels behind.
The deeper he went, the clearer the chakra traces became.
And then his Byakugan saw them directly nearby.
Pale shapes moving just below the roots, slick and inhumanly white, their faces molded but vacant.
As soon as they realized they'd been found, the creatures began to scatter in all directions through the earth.
"Could it really be… them?" he thought, eyes narrowing.
His next burst shattered the ground around him.
He weaved through the tunnels faster than most eyes could follow, lightning trailing in every direction, catching up to one of the fleeing figures.
The thing tried to melt back into the soil, but Ryusei's hand shot out, grabbing its neck and yanking it free.
It writhed violently, its half-human features twisting, but Ryusei didn't flinch.
He slammed it against the ground and pressed his palm forward, activating a golden sealing pattern.
The scroll unfurled beside him, one of his custom Yang-based containment seals, designed to preserve living specimens.
The creature screeched, its chakra flickering like distorted static before it was pulled inside the scroll, sealed tight.
Ryusei stood there for a moment, dust settling around him, eyes glinting faintly.
The pale clone had a faint, plant-like, almost milky texture to its skin and the same spore-like scent he remembered from the story of his past life.
A slow grin tugged at his mouth.
"White Zetsu clones…" he muttered. "So the earth really does have eyes."
As he emerged back to the surface, Ryusei exhaled slowly, brushing soil off his arm.
The air was still, heavy with the faint hum of chakra discharge.
He was thankful for his discipline, that daily sensory ritual he had perfected to the point of instinct.
Without it, he would have never caught them, even with his current level of sensory mode.
Those things had been buried so deep, their chakra almost blended into the earth itself.
If he hadn't been constantly mapping every inch of this terrain day after day, learning the rhythm of its natural chakra flow, he wouldn't have noticed the faint irregularity that betrayed them.
And that was what unsettled him the most.
They weren't far, maybe a few hundred meters from his base, but they had been watching him closely.
Observing him without him automatically noticing.
Which meant that their sensory skills weren't weak either.
Whoever could maintain awareness from that range while remaining invisible to his field wasn't ordinary.
He looked down at the sealed scroll in his hand, lips tightening slightly. "So you were hiding right under me this whole time…"
Of course, he knew this wasn't the real one.
These were only White Zetsu clones, lesser versions of the main one.
Still, even the weak ones had enough craft to make it this far.
The main body, the true White Zetsu that Madara had enhanced more directly with Hashirama's cells, was said to be far more intelligent and powerful.
The clones retained only fragments of that, camouflage, underground movement, merging with terrain or living matter, and sensory communication, but lacked the true one's individuality, strength, and intellect.
They were probably very inferior even to that second variant, the one known as Tobi, or Guruguru, the strange, sentient shell that once fused with Obito in the original timeline, Ryusei remembered.
Still, what they did retain was already formidable.
Ryusei thought back to what he'd just seen underground.
The moment they realized they were caught, their bodies had liquefied into the soil and vanished almost instantly.
That technique, Mayfly.
He remembered its nature from his old world's knowledge.
Mayfly allowed them to merge completely with the ground and vegetation, traveling through the network of roots, minerals, and underground water veins.
It wasn't as fast as true space–time jutsu like Kamui, but it was close, fast enough to outpace almost anyone in a chase.
The white creature's skin, almost like plant fiber, had been laced with its own chakra, enabling total assimilation with its environment.
Once merged, its presence became nearly undetectable, even to the most powerful sensor types like Karin in the original world's history.
Yet Ryusei had sensed it, barely. Which meant that his own sensory prowess had surpassed even that benchmark.
"This one was sloppy," he muttered, glancing toward the scroll, "but the rest… they won't be."
If a White Zetsu didn't want to move, it could connect to nearby root networks and transmit information to others instantly.
That thought made Ryusei's eyes narrow.
They weren't random. They had purpose.
Madara must have scattered a handful of them across the war fronts, his personal network of spies still crawling through the world while his true body withered beneath the Gedo Statue, half-alive, half-root.
It made sense. Word of Ryusei's growing reputation and string of victories would have eventually reached that ancient monster's ears.
Then this batch would be dispatched to confirm the rumors firsthand.
And to them, finding him soon wouldn't have been difficult.
The amount of chakra he and Katsuyu had been throwing around here lately would've been impossible to miss.
The training alone bled energy into the earth like a beacon.
Even Katsuyu, for all her sensory gifts as well, couldn't fully suppress her own chakra during those sessions; it was simply too vast.
So the White Zetsu easily came. They watched. And now one of them was in his hand.
A pity it wasn't the main one. That one was far too important to be wandering this front.
Even so, Ryusei doubted he could have caught the original, not yet, not with his current speed and sensory refinement.
That thought didn't frustrate him; it only reminded him how high the ladder went.
Still, this clone was far from useless.
It wasn't one of Obito's later mass-produced clones, diluted versions impromptu churned out in the tens of thousands during the Fourth War.
No, this was from Madara's personal batch, his first-generation careful prototypes, crafted deliberately, over a longer term, for espionage and infiltration back for when the old man's real body was still entangled with the God Tree.
These early ones were different.
They were his eyes and ears beneath the soil, his last living defenses.
Through them, Madara had likely watched the world reshape itself, located before and Obito after his "death," and then set into motion the chain of events that had twisted nations for decades.
There weren't many, perhaps a few hundred, maybe a thousand at most, but each perhaps carried a purer strain of Hashirama's cells, more stable and more potent than anything that came after.
Ryusei's grin returned as he looked down at the sealed scroll, the faint pulse of life still trapped inside.
"Even if you're just a fragment," he murmured, "you'll be worth every drop of trouble. I'll make sure of it. I should almost thank Madara."
He straightened, eyes glinting faintly in the dim light.
It was entirely possible that Madara himself, still lurking in the shadows and orchestrating his final preparations before binding his body to the roots of the God Tree, had taken note of him. The thought didn't unsettle Ryusei; it intrigued him.
To be noticed by that caliber of monster was confirmation enough of his own progress.
Strangely enough, he even felt a flicker of pride. Madara Uchiha, the man who once stood alongside Hashirama at the very peak of the shinobi world, now had reason to look his way.
But fear? No.
Ryusei knew the old man's current state.
Madara was already half gone, half sealed away, leaving Obito and Nagato as his 'pawns' to crawl toward his long-planned resurrection.
That meant, for now, Ryusei was safe from his direct hand, yet not from his interest.
Ryusei's grin lingered as his thoughts deepened.
He wasn't thankful to Madara out of admiration, but because the old ghost had unknowingly handed him a priceless gift he needed soon.
A gift that could truly change everything.
The reason he valued it so much was simple: he knew exactly what it was.
They were remnants of the souls once trapped in Kaguya Ōtsutsuki's Infinite Tsukuyomi, victims who had been fused to the God Tree for countless years, their bodies rewritten until they became something entirely new.
Their husks had been inadvertently stored within the Demonic Statue of the Outer Path, forgotten, but never entirely gone.
When Madara later summoned that statue and injected it with Hashirama's cells to activate it, it gave rise to a flowering abomination, half divine, half human.
From within that living prison, Black Zetsu had eventually secretly torn out the cocooned remains and presented them to Madara as "creations," born from the union of the statue's chakra and Hashirama's DNA.
Clones of the First Hokage, he led him to believe.
But Ryusei knew better.
They weren't artificial humans; they were ancient vessels, already transformed long before Madara's meddling, perfectly compatible with Hashirama's cells because their essence had been long reshaped by the God Tree itself.
They didn't need perfect Wood Release to prove their worth.
Their entire biology had become a bridge between mortal and divine, their chakra a diluted echo of the primordial energy that birthed shinobi in the first place.
"Cannon fodder material, maybe," he said quietly, "but refined from the best stock there is."
And that only confirmed what he'd been suspecting for a long time.
Hashirama Senju hadn't been a genetic anomaly; he was an atavism, a resurgence of the God Tree's original chakra lineage buried deep within humanity.
"How else," Ryusei thought, "could those tree-born shells resonate with his cells so perfectly? No science. No calculation. Just… instinctive harmony."
His gaze hardened, the faint thrill of discovery glinting in his eyes.
If he could isolate that principle, if he could reproduce that synergy safely, without rejection or mutation, then he could shatter every limitation that ordinary flesh imposed on chakra.
"Pakura, Kiyomi," he murmured. "Let's see how far you can go if there was the right push."
He thought quietly to himself.
Those two would be the main ones to gain from this line of research later on, if he managed to uncover something worthwhile.
His own path, however, was entirely different. What he planned for him and Kanae had nothing to do with this branch of study.
Hashirama Senju's cells wouldn't produce the highest return in their particular cases.
That path instead led toward the Hyūga, their Byakugan dojutsu, toward Hamura's lineage, the silent half of that ancient inheritance buried under centuries of secrecy, that not even he, at present, nor anyone before or even after him, had ever truly understood. It was something buried, something still waiting to be uncovered, and Ryusei intended to be the first to grasp.