While advising the original Akatsuki squad, Madara's initial idea was dead simple: use them, target Obito, harvest the Hashirama cells for himself, and recover his lost strength.
But to disguise his argument as righteous and friendly, Madara was forced to actually think from a righteous and friendly perspective.
Once he started doing that, he remembered a piece of bullshit Hashirama used to preach.
There was no need to micromanage and control every little thing.
A true leader could nurture people willing to stand behind them.
Uchiha Madara, Uchiha Sasuke, and even Indra all started with the exact same belief: "The strong are always alone."
The Sage of Six Paths once claimed that Indra possessed god-tier strength far beyond his younger brother Asura, which made him an unsociable prick.
Meanwhile, Asura lacked raw power, so he chose to combine everyone's strength and walk the path of unity.
Looking at that logic, anyone could see the Sage of Six Paths had some serious brain damage.
He was pulling the same "replace the eldest with the younger son" crap you see in every ugly succession dispute: bypass the rightful heir, hand everything to the favored younger child, then pretend it was for the greater good.
The Sage of Six Paths didn't just do it, either. He genuinely believed his own bullshit was righteous.
Why didn't Indra force the villagers to work with him?
For example, suppose the Sage of Six Paths tasked Indra and Asura to help the peasants dig wells and destroy the remnants of the Divine Tree, so the locals would stop drinking that toxic Divine Tree juice.
Indra was a powerhouse.
He obliterated the Divine Tree remains, drilled the well solo, and hit water on day one.
Why the hell would he make the villagers waste their own damn labor digging alongside him?
Couldn't they use that saved time and energy to farm and feed themselves?
Was he supposed to put on some bullshit theatrical show just for the sake of "unity," that stupid concept handed down by his old man?
And what about Asura?
He drilled the well alongside the villagers, and it took them an entire year to hit water.
It wasn't that he genuinely wanted to drag the peasants into the mud with him.
He had no choice since he was too weak to do it alone.
That was a whole year of backbreaking labor.
The villagers under his protection had to drink toxic Divine Tree juice for another full year before they finally got a drop of clean well water.
If Asura was truly kind-hearted, he would not force the villagers to suffer just to flex some fake unity.
Asura just lacked the strength and had to rely on the power of friendship.
That was it.
The flaw in the logic was glaring.
Then came the aftermath.
The villagers on Asura's side united as one and lived happily ever after.
The villagers on Indra's side fought over the water, butchered each other, and went extinct.
The conclusion the Sage of Six Paths reached? Asura: very strong! Indra: very weak!
What kind of mental gymnastics led him to that conclusion?! The Sage of Six Paths didn't even understand the concept of a control group, yet he was out here playing scientist?
Why couldn't it be that the villagers Indra managed were just the naturally evil ancestors of the Konoha villagers?
This was shooting the arrow first, then painting the bullseye around it.
That generation ended.
Then came Senju Hashirama's generation.
Clearly, the one with god-tier, overwhelming strength was Hashirama, Asura's reincarnation.
Yet Hashirama still preached unity and loved making everyone hold hands and work together.
That was basically backhanding the Sage of Six Paths across the face on repeat.
But one had to admit, when people were weak, they were forced to unite.
It was a sufficient but unnecessary condition.
The current Madara found himself in that exact boat.
He felt a strange shift in perspective, something different from how he treated Obito like a disposable pawn.
In truth, the original author Kishimoto was a sly bastard.
Before Makoto hijacked the timeline, the shinobi world never had a real "clash of ideals" or any genuine "ideological conflict."
All those deep, philosophical conflicts were eventually given a brain-dead, black-and-white answer that ignored the actual nuance of the problem.
Take the Infinite Tsukuyomi.
On the surface, it pitched a choice between "cruel reality" and a "perfect dream."
But there was no choice at all.
It was just a rigged Ōtsutsuki conspiracy.
Or look at a certain villain from the light novels after the Fourth Shinobi World War—the one who used Talk no Jutsu to brainwash Sai and the others.
It looked like a gritty class war between commoners and the corrupt daimyo.
The villain asked the hard question: "Are kings and nobles born inherently better than the rest of us?"
But in the end, the author made the villain expose his own scheme, revealing he was just a petty crook with no grand ideals at all.
To put it in modern terms: imagine two people online arguing whether tofu pudding should be sweet or salty.
Kishimoto decides that salty tofu pudding is the righteous protagonist and must win.
So how does Kishimoto win the debate? He doesn't argue about the flavor profile of salty tofu pudding.
Instead, he writes a plot twist proving the guy who likes sweet tofu pudding is a foreign spy, a traitor, and a terrorist with a half-million ryo bounty on his head.
So, while Madara caught feelings in this cave and Obito got tortured with a fucking yam, the two Uchiha who championed the Infinite Tsukuyomi were both ready to dump the project in the trash.
So what was Makoto doing? What was his grand master plan?
The answer was—The Infinite Tsukuyomi.
That's right.
Makoto and his crew spent massive amounts of time and pulled every dirty trick in the book to make these villains abandon the Infinite Tsukuyomi, yet Makoto's endgame was the Infinite Tsukuyomi all along.
It sounded ironic as hell.
But this new "Infinite Tsukuyomi" was built different.
You could even call it by a different name.
Right now, inside the massive film studios of the Land of Snow, several blockbuster movies were in production.
One was the sequel to the epic saga of Ka—Ōtsutsuki Kaguya, the alien who descended from outer space to Earth and rebelled against her own species to protect the planet.
Part Two: Lend Me Your Energy!
There was also a brand-new IP: Uchiha Hikari, Giant of Light.
Facing the dark Ōtsutsuki God, she begged the people of the world to lend her their light, morphed into her Shining Form, and vaporized the enemy!
Exactly.
The original Infinite Tsukuyomi hijacked everyone's chakra without consent and sucked them dry until they died.
It was a cartoonish villain's method.
But as righteous heroes, before draining a population's chakra, they needed to ask for consent and practice sustainable farming instead of sucking them to death!
They also needed to provide fair compensation.
That was the line separating the heroes from the villains.
As for engineering a controllable Infinite Tsukuyomi? It wasn't hard at all.
Uchiha Hikari could already weave Yachihoko and Tsukuyomi together to render a massive virtual game world, siphoning trace amounts of chakra from players globally.
She could throttle the drain rate so nobody died.
The only bottleneck was storage capacity.
An individual shinobi could not hold that ocean of chakra for long, and they lacked a suitable external hard drive.
Even if they used a perfect Susanoo as a battery, the sheer pressure would blow it to pieces.
So the chakra had to be extracted and burned immediately.
But now, Amegakure had an idle Demonic Statue of the Outer Path sitting around.
The Gedo Statue served as the ultimate external battery pack.
In fact, once they clapped Isshiki, they could strip the Ten-Tails on Isshiki's side into another Demonic Statue, creating Battery Number Two.
And once they secured Battery Number Two, what about the old one?
They'd just keep using the old one as usual.
What, were they supposed to shove it up someone's ass?
...
Konoha.
Jiraiya and Sarutobi Hiruzen returned to the village.
The two old men booked a room at a hot spring inn and started their top-secret debriefing.
Watching Jiraiya gorge on expensive food and soak in the steaming water, Sarutobi Hiruzen felt a sharp pang of envy.
Of course, he didn't envy the food or the bath.
Once he got his hands on that Edo Tensei sensory formula, he could experience those physical comforts again.
He envied something else entirely.
And that exact matter served as the core agenda for this secret meeting!
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