Disclaimer: Naruto and all of its character belong to Masashi Kishimoto. I own nothing but the original characters I make.
Chapter 173: Madara Peak
Raiken tossed the pill toward Madara, and he caught it cleanly with his right hand, closing his fingers around it slowly before lifting it to examine it properly.
Even just looking at it, he could tell the pill was something extraordinary. The way it sat in his palm and the faint pulse of something dense and concentrated emanating from something so small; it was not the kind of thing that could be faked or replicated through ordinary means. But no matter how extraordinary it looked, Madara wasn't going to believe Raiken right away.
He had survived long enough to know not to accept anything from strangers easily.
'This could be a trap,' he thought, his eyes moving from the pill to the man standing across from him.
Raiken, apparently reading the hesitation on his face, did not wait for Madara to voice his suspicion.
"Do not insult us both by thinking that is poison," said Raiken and as he said it, he stopped holding back entirely Chakra, Haki and Magic on his body. Raiken released his chakra outward without any filter or restriction for just a moment, letting its full weight fill the cave like a tide on a shoreline.
[DING! 3000 Stars Donated by Audience D]
[Message: HE JUST RELEASED THE FULL CHAKRA IN A CLOSED CAVE]
[DING! 1000 Stars Donated by Audience Leo]
[Message: Don't forget that wasn't just chakra; he had bought haki and magic too]
[DING! 2000 Stars Donated by Audience Z]
[Message: Madara is about to have the worst and best day of his entire life simultaneously]
Madara felt it land against him like a physical force, and for a moment even he, who had stood against Hashirama more times than most people could count, found himself reassessing the distance between what he had assumed and what was actually in front of him.
Rather than panic, his smile grew wider.
He had seen hunger before, hunger and craving for a strong opponent. He had felt it in himself for most of his life, that particular craving for a fight against someone who could actually push back. Whatever Raiken's intentions were, the look in his eyes was not the look of someone setting a trap. It was the look of someone who had waited a long time for a worthy opponent and had finally found one.
That look, Madara trusted.
"Fine," said Madara and swallowed the pill.
The effect was not gradual; his body erupted with heat from the inside out, chakra bursting through every pore and spilling into the air around him as the pill worked through his system at a speed that left no part of him unchanged. The old scars that had marked his skin for decades repaired themselves in seconds, tissue regenerating visibly as though time itself was running backward through his body. Bones that had grown brittle with age thickened and densified; his chakra coils, long worn and narrowed from decades of strain, widened and strengthened until the volume of chakra moving through them dwarfed what he had been capable of producing only moments before.
[DING! 5000 Stars Donated by Audience D]
[Message: THE TRANSFORMATION IS HAPPENING LIVE I CANNOT HANDLE THIS]
[DING! 2000 Stars Donated by Audience F]
[Message: His hair is turning black. His hair is actually turning black. I am watching this with my own eyes]
[DING! 1000 Stars Donated by Audience G]
[Message: Host gave Madara a second youth, and now he is standing there watching it happen with his arms folded like this is completely normal behavior]
White Zetsu and Black Zetsu watched from the side in complete silence as Madara's white hair darkened strand by strand until it was the deep black of someone decades younger, and the deep lines of his face smoothed out until the man standing in the center of the cave looked nothing like the aged figure who had been occupying it moments before.
The chakra pouring off him was no longer the output of an old body running on the memory of its former strength. It was the real thing, unfiltered and undiminished, filling the cave with pressure that made the stone walls vibrate.
A minute passed and then the transformation was complete.
Madara stood still for a long moment, breathing slowly, feeling every part of himself as though reacquainting with something he had resigned himself to never experiencing again. Then his Sharingan shifted, the red fading as the purple rings of his Rinegan took their place, and the laugh that had been building since the first moment he felt the pill take hold finally escaped him without restraint.
"HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA."
Raiken waited for his psycho laugh to end.
The laugh echoed through the cave, then faded, and Raiken looked at Madara with the expression of someone who had budgeted time for exactly this.
"Are you finished?" asked Raiken.
"I should say thank you," replied Madara, and there was no sarcasm in it, only the genuine acknowledgment of someone who had just been given back something they had mourned the loss of. "I had forgotten what this felt like, to have every part of me working as it should."
"Good," said Raiken. "Every bone in my body has been waiting for this conversation to be over so we can get to the part that actually matters."
[DING! 2000 Stars Donated by Audience Z]
[Message: Host is literally telling Madara to hurry up so they can fight]
[DING! 1000 Stars Donated by Audience D]
[Message: The disrespect is unreal and somehow Madara is just taking it]
"But before we begin," continued Raiken, his tone shifting slightly, "I want to tell you something about the Eye of the Moon Plan."
Everyone in the cave went silent upon hearing Raiken casually reveal what he knows about them.
Black Zetsu, who had watched the exchange silently, panicked because the Eye of the Moon Plan was something they never told anyone outside.
So the man who had never stepped inside this cave knows about this; does that mean he also knows about his mother, Kaguya?
"How do you know about that?" asked Madara, his voice quieter now and more serious.
"That part is not important," said Raiken. "What I want to tell you is more important than how I found out."
Madara studied him for a moment.
"Our fight might lose some of its satisfaction if you spend part of it looking for an opportunity to go back to that plan," said Raiken. "So before we start, I am going to tell you about the Otsutsuki Clan, and then you can decide what you actually want to do with the time you have just been given back."
[DING! 3000 Stars Donated by Audience F]
[Message: He is about to tell Madara everything. He is going to break the entire plot in one conversation in a cave]
[DING! 1000 Stars Donated by Audience G]
[Message: Black Zetsu is going to have a complete breakdown and I am here for every second of it]
Madara was quiet for a moment, then gave a slow nod. "Tell me everything you know about Otsutsuki."
He had read enough in the Naka Shrine to know the name Otsutsuki Hagoromo and what it represented, and he was not a man who pretended not to be curious when he was. Even Madara wanted to know more about Hagoromo however, the text was so short.
Black Zetsu, meanwhile, had reached a state of internal panic that it was working very hard not to let show on the outside, because in all the centuries of careful planning and manipulation it had devoted to bringing this moment about, it had never once considered the possibility that someone would walk into the cave and tell Madara the truth before the plan had a chance to reach its next stage.
....
There is 30 advanced chapter on my patreon.
Chapter 200: Itsuki The Curious
Chapter 201: Secret Kekkei Genkai
Chapter 202: Clan Reaction
Chapter 203: Madara Found Out About Sealing VRMMO
-patreon.com/zorojurown