After discovering that almost all the graves were empty, the Masked Man fell into a brief daze.
There was definitely a grave robber!
And the Masked Man quickly figured out who it had to be.
—Other than Orochimaru, who knew the Impure World Reincarnation, who else would go out of their way to steal a pile of corpses and bones?
In truth, the Masked Man had long considered the possibility that Orochimaru might steal and stockpile the remains of powerful figures from across the shinobi world.
He had just never imagined that Orochimaru's collection would be this damn comprehensive—even his own utterly unremarkable grandmother had been taken.
And Konoha had been completely unaware of it.
Anyone who didn't know better would have thought White Zetsu had infiltrated Konoha and gathered the remains for Orochimaru himself.
"Could it be that Konoha's Hokage, Tsunade, is secretly colluding with Orochimaru and deliberately sold the corpses from the village cemetery to him?"
After thinking it over for a long time, that was the only possibility the Masked Man could come up with.
But that had nothing to do with him.
He wasn't some champion of justice or loyal supporter of Konoha.
What troubled him was simply that his grandmother's grave had been robbed.
The Masked Man went to the archives, where security had been temporarily reinforced because of Naruto's theft.
After slipping inside like a ghost, he obtained Sasuke's file.
Sure enough, Sasuke's file contained a newly added entry describing his Mangekyō ability.
"Can observe and photograph the target?"
The expression beneath the Masked Man's mask immediately turned grave.
He had never imagined Sasuke's Mangekyō ability would be this terrifying.
Didn't that mean that as long as Sasuke knew he existed, he could see through his identity at any time?
The mask was meaningless in front of Sasuke.
This was bad.
It completely ruined the Masked Man's plans.
And Sasuke having this ability also meant that even if his grandmother's grave had still been intact, and even if he moved her remains somewhere else, they would still eventually be found.
Why not hide them in the Kamui dimension?
Because the Kamui dimension was not a place that could be used as a "private personal storage space."
First of all, it wasn't even truly "private."
Kakashi's Kamui could not only absorb things, but also release them.
If one day Kakashi mastered the trick of ejecting things, then anything stored in the Kamui dimension could be taken back out at any time!
The Masked Man understood this very well.
That was why, let alone anything important, he had never stored anything at all in the Kamui dimension.
He was afraid that one day Kakashi might accidentally pull something out and realize something was wrong.
So even with extremely important items, the Masked Man had only found hidden locations somewhere in the shinobi world and stashed them there.
That included the large number of Sharingan he had taken on the night of the massacre.
And Madara Uchiha's corpse.
Now the problem was this.
The Masked Man had learned Sasuke's Mangekyō ability.
That meant that as long as Sasuke wanted to—or as long as Orochimaru wanted him to—Sasuke could use that ability to pinpoint the exact location where Madara's corpse was hidden.
Of course, the exact location of Madara's corpse wasn't something even the Masked Man himself knew.
Madara's corpse had been taken away and hidden by Black Zetsu, "the embodiment of Madara's will."
The only ones who knew where Madara's corpse was were Black Zetsu and whichever White Zetsu had helped hide it.
Still, the Masked Man believed that if he told Black Zetsu about Sasuke's Mangekyō ability, and if he himself had a way to help safeguard Madara's corpse, then Black Zetsu would probably hand Madara's body over to him.
After all, the two of them broadly shared the same goal.
The only problem was that he had no solution.
If it was hidden somewhere in the shinobi world, Sasuke's Mangekyō ability could discover it at any time.
If it was hidden in the Kamui dimension, Kakashi could discover it at any time.
The Masked Man thought about it for a long time and still couldn't find a good answer.
In the end, he could only pin his hopes on having a White Zetsu act as a gravekeeper and watch over it at all times.
That way, at the very least, if it was stolen, he would know right away instead of being left completely in the dark like an idiot.
The Masked Man was getting an enormous headache.
All kinds of troublesome matters were piling onto him.
Naturally, he was also aware of the current state of the Akatsuki.
The shinobi world had changed so drastically that the Masked Man would have had to gouge out his own eyes and deafen himself not to notice.
According to the explanation given by Black Zetsu and White Zetsu, this was a deliberate strategy by the organization—an act of cunning designed to lull the Five Great Nations into complacency by avoiding direct conflict.
As "Uchiha Madara the Wise," the Masked Man had never been particularly skilled in these kinds of things, so he accepted that explanation quite naturally.
But regardless, the current state of the shinobi world had already gone completely beyond his control.
Originally, he had still been preparing to find an opportunity to appear as Uchiha Madara and somehow adjust the balance of the shinobi world.
But then Sasuke's Mangekyō ability appeared, and his plan died before it could even begin!
The moment he dared to debut as Uchiha Madara, Sasuke could expose him in minutes and reveal the person behind the mask.
On top of that, he had recently discovered that Black Zetsu, the so-called "embodiment of Madara's will," had not contacted him for a very long time.
That had even started to make him wonder whether Black Zetsu might have started over elsewhere and come up with some other plan to revive Madara.
That wasn't impossible!
There was a reason Madara had intended to wait until all the Tailed Beasts were gathered before reviving and reaping the rewards, instead of reviving immediately, crushing the shinobi world by force, and gathering the nine Tailed Beasts himself.
If he were revived directly with the Samsara of Heavenly Life Technique, then the revived Madara would definitely return as old-man Madara.
Without his eyes, and with his body already at the end of its rope, even if the Samsara of Heavenly Life restored some vitality, his strength would still be far inferior to what it once was.
Under those circumstances, trying to gather the Tailed Beasts would very likely end in disaster.
By contrast, if he followed his original plan and waited until all the beasts had been collected before reviving, then even in an old body, he could directly transcend life itself by becoming the Ten-Tails' jinchūriki and turn into a second Sage of Six Paths.
At that point, the old age of his body would no longer matter.
—Even the possibility of being revived through Impure World Reincarnation had been something Madara had considered.
An Impure World Reincarnation Madara would still be in his old age.
Even immortality and infinite chakra would be useless.
The old-man form was already significantly weaker to begin with, and being further weakened by Impure World Reincarnation would make it even less possible for him to gather the Tailed Beasts that way.
What Madara had never anticipated was that, sometime after his death, someone like Orochimaru would appear.
Orochimaru and Kabuto Yakushi had improved Impure World Reincarnation, creating specially prepared reanimation bodies that could directly bring back "prime Madara" in a youthful state.
And if that version were then restored to life through the Samsara of Heavenly Life, the resulting body would also be young.
All one could say was that Madara had been too impatient, and had looked down too much on any power outside the Uchiha.
If he had chosen Orochimaru instead of the Masked Man—chosen science instead of the Sharingan—then he would have swept across the shinobi world long ago.
In any case, this was exactly what the Masked Man was worried about.
It was just that, at present, there were already too many damn things for him to worry about!
"Surely not...?"
After thinking it over, the Masked Man felt Black Zetsu probably wouldn't go so far as to cooperate with Orochimaru to bring Madara back through Impure World Reincarnation.
However...
...
Amegakure.
Now that there was a successful example of resurrection in the form of Nohara Rin, Tobirama Senju proposed to Orochimaru the idea of reviving Madara through Impure World Reincarnation.
Specifically, it was the very method he had thought about many times before—
to reverse-engineer and create a "suitable" body for the reanimation.
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