Uchiha Madara stood alone in an endless field of white.
Snow howled across the crater—Raizen's last known battleground.
Madara's Mangekyō spun open, the iris sharpening like a blade. A faint residue of chakra shimmered in the air, but it wasn't Raizen's. It felt older, heavier, unnatural… like a hand reaching down from outside the world.
"So you're alive, Raizen," Madara murmured, voice carried by the wind. "And you hid all this for someone else?"
He crouched, fingertips brushing the edge of the crater.
A pulse of Senjutsu mixed with something far more alien vibrated under the snow.
"…This isn't human power."
His breathing slowed, steady. The conclusion felt absurd, yet the chakra trail told the same story again and again:
Someone who shouldn't exist had walked this field after the battle.
Madara rose, his cloak snapping like wings.
Blue chakra flared around him.
Susanoo erupted to full height.
"Show me what you left behind."
He swung.
The blade carved a colossal trench through the snow, ice exploding upward—but nothing appeared. Madara didn't stop. He kept slicing, carving the landscape open stroke after stroke.
Until the earth finally cracked.
Stone. Pillars.
A structure buried beneath the frozen wasteland.
A temple.
Madara's lips twitched.
"…Found you."
He dispersed Susanoo and descended into the exposed ruin, slipping between broken stone columns and dust older than any clan. Despite the collapse, the walls were intact—like the place refused to die.
Frescoes crawled across the interior: titanic figures clashing, chakra storms sculpted in ancient ink.
Madara's gaze sharpened.
"This is beyond shinobi power…"
On the far wall, a depiction of six rippled eyes glowed faintly beneath the frost.
"Rinnegan."
Madara reached out, brushing the carving with his palm. He moved deeper until he reached an altar—cracked, its light long gone. But the air around it pulsed with the exact same foreign chakra he'd sensed in the crater.
"So the one using that Senjutsu… came from here?"
He circled the altar, studying every inch.
Whatever emerged from this place had fought Raizen—and neither of them had walked away normally.
Madara pieced together the story with cold logic:
Raizen discovered the ruins.
The outsider emerged.
They fought.
Both vanished.
The snow told the rest.
The raw power was nothing like any shinobi Madara had ever faced. Not Hashirama. Not even in legends.
This wasn't someone from their world at all.
"Chakra from another plane…" Madara whispered. "If that mural is real… these beings stood above us long before clans existed."
He suddenly felt small—and that infuriated him.
He stormed out of the ruins in a blur of snow and chakra.
There was only one place left to confirm the truth.
The Uchiha Stone Tablet.
Left behind by the Sage of Six Paths.
If there was any hidden law linking Mangekyō, Rinnegan, Senjutsu, and Raizen's disappearance…
It would be written there.
Madara ran through forests and plains at a pace that tore the air behind him. By the next dawn, he reached Konoha's outskirts.
Shocked Uchiha guards parted as he strode into the ancestral hall.
He opened his Eternal Mangekyō.
The tablet's characters twisted under the upgraded sight, revealing lines he had never been able to read before.
"The lone god divides yin and yang, achieving stability. Opposing poles intertwine to create the sacred."
Madara's heart thudded.
Yin and Yang.
Union.
Divine phenomenon.
He kept reading.
"The two forces complete one another. Their harmony births creation."
Everything clicked.
Raizen.
His Rinnegan.
The Wood Release.
His Sharingan.
His impossible growth.
Madara's breath left him in a single exhale.
"…Sharingan is yin.
Wood Release—the Sage's body—is yang."
The pieces fell into place with horrifying clarity.
"Raizen awakened Rinnegan because he possessed both halves."
Madara's fingers curled.
"I already have the yin. Mangekyō… and beyond."
He closed his eyes.
"To awaken Rinnegan… I need Hashirama's yang."
The revelation sent heat surging through his veins.
For the first time, he saw a path above Raizen, above Hashirama, above every shinobi who ever lived.
Rinnegan.
A power to reshape the world.
"How to obtain Hashirama's cells…" he muttered. It wouldn't even be difficult. If he asked for them as a brother-in-arms, Hashirama would agree without suspicion.
A final line on the tablet glowed faintly under his gaze:
"When yin and yang unite, the world itself moves toward peace."
Madara's breath trembled.
Peace.
Real peace—born not from treaties or villages, but from absolute unity of power.
"That's it…"
He stepped back from the tablet, eyes burning with a new, feverish purpose.
"I'll create it."
The world Raizen dreamed of.
The one Hashirama talked about.
The one no clan had ever achieved.
A world shaped by the union of opposites.
Madara's silhouette vanished into the shadows.
...
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