Black Zetsu had not been expelled.
This was, from where he sat, an excellent outcome. The last visit had ended with Finn waving him out the door in the same tone one uses to dismiss a salesman who has presented a reasonable but ultimately unnecessary product. This time, Finn had made his arrangement, received Black Zetsu's offer of a contribution, and then simply... not indicated that the conversation was over.
So Black Zetsu stayed.
He was not going to volunteer to leave while the option of remaining existed.
The rain fell. Finn sat with his pipe. The Wood Release was still retreating — visibly, now, the process in its final stages, roots drawing back from beneath his feet in slow contracting loops. Black Zetsu talked, and Finn talked, and the conversation had a quality that surprised Black Zetsu slightly: the man was genuinely interesting to speak with. Not in the way powerful people are often interesting — through status, through implication, through the awareness that everything they say has weight — but in the way of someone who had thought about things from angles that most people had never bothered to approach.
There was something in it, too, that Black Zetsu couldn't quite locate. Finn spoke about certain things — about long purposes, about endurance, about the strange relationship between goals and the cost of pursuing them over lifetimes — and the words landed in a way that felt, occasionally, like they were addressed to him specifically. Not as manipulation. As recognition.
He found, to his mild confusion, that he was slightly moved.
This was not a sensation he had much experience with.
It was somewhere in this register of unexpected rapport that Black Zetsu looked at Finn's feet and noticed the last of the roots retracting, and then looked at his arms and noticed the skin smooth and normal, and then looked at the whole of him and said: "You've been practicing the Wood Release, haven't you."
"Figured that out, did you?" Finn smiled. He didn't confirm it in words, but the expression was confirmation enough.
"Madara-sama did some research on Wood Release over the years," Black Zetsu said. "I have some familiarity with it."
Finn appeared to register this as pleasant conversation filler and nodded vaguely. "Is that so."
"In that research," Black Zetsu continued, "he accumulated a number of techniques. Powerful ones, as you might expect. Tree World Descent. The Wood Dragon. Multiple Wood Clone. And the Wooden Shield — the ranking technique." He paused. "I wondered if these might be of interest to you, given your recent... development."
Finn went still in the way that careful people go still when something has arrived that requires immediate re-evaluation of the situation.
Madara's Wood Release techniques.
He had been working from the assumption that Konoha held the only meaningful archive of Wood Release ninjutsu — and even that was uncertain, since Orochimaru's information about the advanced techniques being in the Scroll of Seals was educated conjecture rather than verified fact. The techniques Orochimaru could provide were the ones from his sanctioned research period: functional, but modest. Sea of Trees Birth. Tree Binding Eternal Burial. The basics.
What Black Zetsu was describing was categorically different.
Tree World Descent required no elaboration — a technique that could reshape a battlefield's entire geography. The Wood Dragon was a weapon of legendary scale. The Multiple Wood Clone technique multiplied combat presence in ways that were difficult to counter.
And the ranking technique.
Wood Release: Hobi Technique — the wooden shield derived from the imagery of Thousand-Armed Guanyin, a name that gestured toward its purpose. Hashirama had used it to block Madara's armored Susanoo in full activation, and had walked away undamaged. There was no meaningful rubric for quantifying defensive capability that placed that outcome anywhere except at the absolute top of the chart.
All of it — every technique Madara had used — had originated with Hashirama Senju. Madara had copied it through the Sharingan, studied it, made it his own, and built it into his combat repertoire. That meant the scrolls existed. That meant Black Zetsu had them, or had access to them.
"I'm interested," Finn said. "Name your terms."
"Friendship," Black Zetsu said simply. "The Yorozuya's goodwill. That's what we need from you more than anything else."
Finn looked at him. "I expected you to circle back to the Rinnegan."
"I considered it," Black Zetsu said, with a candor that was itself a kind of flattery. "But I believe you'll come to the right conclusion on your own timeline. I have no concerns about leaving those items in your hands in the interim. When the time comes, we'll be aligned." He met Finn's gaze with the steadiness of someone who is either sincere or has decided that sincerity is the optimal performance. "I'm patient."
"You are very confident," Finn said.
"It's been earned over a long time," Black Zetsu said.
The last root beneath Finn's feet pulled back into his skin.
He felt the completion of it — the Wood Release settling into its final integrated state, no longer pressing outward, no longer uncontrolled, simply present the way any part of him was present, available when he reached for it. It was a clean feeling. He closed his eyes briefly to register it, then opened them.
He reached to his left. A door of darkness materialized in the air, a rectangular absence that absorbed the rain-grey light around its edges. He reached into it, arm disappearing to the elbow, and drew out his hakama. He shook it once, put it on. Reached back in for the Shindokutō, which he settled at his waist. Then the pipe — already loaded, already packed — which he placed between his teeth. The tobacco caught without any visible source of flame.
He exhaled a slow curl of smoke into the rain.
Black Zetsu watched all of this. He had been close enough to observe the dark space door in detail, and he had spent the observation time arriving at the conclusion that he had no framework for what he was looking at. He had lived for thousands of years. He had seen most of what this world contained. This power was not from it.
He filed this under unfathomable and moved on.
"A question," Finn said. "The Outer Path Demon Statue. Can you control it without the Rinnegan?"
Black Zetsu looked at him with a flicker of surprise that he managed to contain fairly quickly. "Yes. The Rinnegan is the optimal interface, but it's not the only one. Over the years, we developed alternative methods. It takes more effort, but it can be done."
Finn nodded, as if this confirmed something he had already suspected.
He had been thinking about this since shortly after sealing the Gedo Mazo. The statue had been critical infrastructure for the Moon Eye Project — Madara needed it, Obito needed it — but Finn's strategic logic for holding it was thin. The Rinnegan was the actual key; as long as that stayed in his possession, the core of the project's final mechanism remained in his hands. The statue itself, without the Rinnegan, was a tool without its primary operator. Holding it created storage complexity and no additional leverage.
Returning it, however, accomplished several things at once.
It gave Black Zetsu a concrete reason to feel that progress was being made. It established a pattern — Finn as someone who, when appropriately cultivated, would release things — without establishing a pattern that included the Rinnegan. And it created a sense of investment in Black Zetsu's mind, the particular investment that comes from having received something unexpected and significant from someone you were hoping would eventually come around.
Finn raised his hand and snapped his fingers.
A fist-sized black sphere appeared in front of Black Zetsu, hovering without support in the space between them. The rain curved slightly away from its surface. The darkness inside it was the compressed darkness of the Darkness-Darkness Fruit's containment — something immense, held in a form that had no visible seam.
Black Zetsu reached out and caught it. He held it carefully, feeling the weight of it, the aura of something that should not be this small pressing outward through its containment.
"The Outer Path Demon Statue," Finn said. "Standard unsealing technique will open it. Try not to do anything too dramatic in the courtyard."
"Thank you," Black Zetsu said, and the gratitude was entirely genuine. "Truly. Thank you."
"Don't disappoint me," Finn said, smoke rising past his eyes.
"You have my word," Black Zetsu said, and then caught himself. "I came without the Wood Release scrolls — I didn't know this would come up. I'll bring them on my next visit."
"That's fine." Finn waved. "No rush. Take it back, get organized, come again."
Black Zetsu inclined slightly. "I won't impose further tonight."
"You're not imposing," Finn said. "But I've been a tree for three days and I'd like to sleep in a bed. So."
"Of course." Black Zetsu stepped back, then paused. "May I say — this has been a more productive visit than I anticipated."
"Good for both of us," Finn said.
He watched Black Zetsu leave through the courtyard gate, carrying the black sphere with the careful attention of someone who has received something fragile and irreplaceable. The gate closed. The rain continued.
Finn drew on the pipe and exhaled slowly.
The calculation was straightforward. The more he showed Black Zetsu reliable, magnanimous, large-minded behavior — the more Finn established himself as the kind of person worth orienting toward — the more clearly Black Zetsu's internal comparison would run. On one side: Finn, who had returned the Gedo Mazo without being asked, who had offered to create cover in Konoha of his own accord, who spoke about difficult things in ways that felt like understanding. On the other side: Obito, whose strategic decisions had the quality of a man who had committed to a plan he could no longer fully believe in, who would — when the critical moment arrived — almost certainly let his emotions detonate the plan rather than execute it.
Black Zetsu was not stupid. He would run that comparison eventually.
Finn was making sure the result was obvious before that day came.
He stood, stretched — three days of sitting cross-legged in tree form had opinions about his back — and looked up at the building's overhang.
"Yui," he called. "Make my bed."
A pause. Then, from somewhere near the door: "It's already done."
Finn walked inside out of the rain.