The battlefield held its breath. The Axiom Armature, Indra's shimmering constellation of spatial-temporal law, hummed in the air, its geometric forms subtly shifting and realigning the very fabric of reality around the clearing. Hashirama Senju knelt, his spirit broken by the weight of history's horrors. Tobirama stood rigid, his foundational logic shattered. Minato Namikaze hovered between grief and a dawning, awful understanding. And Uchiha Madara, encased within his majestic, blue Humanoid Susanoo, seethed with a rage that was now tinged with something unfamiliar: a gnawing, intellectual disbelief.
His Rinnegan and Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan whirled within the Susanoo's helm, analyzing the impossible field Indra had created. He had seen the boy deflect, negate, and rewrite their attacks with a casual precision that spoke of a power operating on a different stratum entirely. But it was the nature of that power that now clawed at Madara's certainty. It wasn't just stronger; it was different. It lacked the raw, passionate signature of Uchiha wrath or the deep, natural pulse of Senju vitality. It was clean, precise, and terrifyingly… intentional.
His gaze, sharpened by a lifetime of obsession with ocular power, finally pierced past the overwhelming aura and focused on Indra's eyes.
The boy stood calmly at the center of his own distortion field. And his eyes…
They were not the simple, if powerful, Eternal Mangekyō pattern Madara had seen in his brother Izuna, or the one he himself possessed. Within the deep purple of the Rinnegan's concentric circles, three distinct, smaller sigils traced silent, perpetual orbits around the pupil. One was a silver, angular mark that hurt to look at, suggesting folded dimensions. Another was an azure, flowing symbol that seemed to drip with the essence of duration. A third was a stark, black emblem that whispered of anti-matter and void. And underpinning it all, visible only to Madara's own supreme ocular perception, was the stable, geometric kaleidoscope of an Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan, perfectly integrated, its degenerative curse utterly absent.
This was impossible. A fusion that defied the very laws of the eye's evolution as Madara understood them.
A scoff, born of defensive fury, erupted from Madara's Susanoo. "Clever illusions! You weave space and time like a novice seamstress with stolen thread! But do not think trinkets and tricks can match true divinity!" His voice boomed across the field. "You speak of a new world, but you are still a child playing with the toys of my bloodline! The Sharingan's true potential, its evolution, is a path of sacrifice and transcendence you could never comprehend! Behold the power you mock!"
With a surge of immense chakra, Madara's Susanoo began to change. The blue armor intensified, gaining more detail, a helmet forming with a flowing, samurai-like crest. It was the Perfect Susanoo, a towering, mountain-sized warrior of chakra that dwarfed his previous form, its sheer presence causing the ice plains for miles to crack and shudder. In its hand, a sword of light formed, capable of cleaving valleys.
"This!" Madara's voice thundered from within the colossal construct, "is the power of the Uchiha, refined through battle, loss, and sacrifice! And this—" He willed his own eyes to their fullest display. The Rinnegan's purple rings blazed with arrogant light. "—is the pinnacle! The Rinnegan! The eye of the Six Paths, awakened through the fusion of Uchiha and Senju, through decades of planning and the harnessing of the Gedo Statue! The power to command life and death, to control all things! A power you, for all your 'building,' will never possess!"
He posed there, within his god-like Susanoo, the Rinnegan shining, the embodiment of his life's painful, arduous journey to godhood. It was a display meant to crush hope, to assert the absolute superiority of his hard-won, suffering-born power.
Indra looked up at the towering Susanoo, at the blazing Rinnegan. There was no fear. No awe. Only a faint, weary disappointment, as if a child had just proudly presented a mud pie as a masterpiece of cuisine.
He didn't speak. He simply… relaxed his control.
The orbiting sigils within his own Rinnegan—Palkia, Dialga, Giratina—flared brighter, their orbits widening. The deep purple rings of the Rinnegan itself glowed with an inner light that was both ancient and utterly novel. There was no burst of overwhelming chakra. Instead, a profound, silent authority settled over the battlefield, an authority that made Madara's Perfect Susanoo seem suddenly… loud, and crude, like a roar next to a whispered decree.
Indra's Rinnegan was now unmistakable. And it was different from Madara's. It was not just a tool of planetary control and gravity. It was a lens focused on the underlying codes of reality: space, time, and distortion.
A gasp, sharp and utterly uncharacteristic, came from within Madara's Susanoo. The arrogant light in his own Rinnegan flickered. "No… That is… a Rinnegan? But… the pattern… the chakra signature… it's not… it lacks the Gedo Statue's taint… How…?"
The other founders stared, their own conflicts momentarily forgotten in the face of this new impossibility.
Hashirama, from his knees, whispered, "Two… Rinnegan? But… only the Sage…"
Tobirama's analytical mind, reeling from the moral shock, latched onto the technical impossibility. "The ocular chakra pathways… they're stable. No sign of the cellular rejection or chakra conflict that should occur from forcibly integrating Senju and Uchiha DNA. It's as if… as if the eyes naturally evolved that way."
Minato just stared, the mathematician in him recognizing a equation that had been solved by a method he'd never conceived.
Madara's fury curdled into a desperate, confused denial. "ILLUSION! A trick of the light! No one can awaken the Rinnegan without the fusion of our bloodlines! Without the power of the Gedo Statue! Without… without my cells!" The last part was a near snarl, the core of his identity under threat.
Indra finally spoke, his voice cutting through Madara's bluster with the quiet clarity of a scientist stating a proven fact. "Your epistemology is flawed, Uchiha Madara. You believe power is a finite resource, seized through theft, betrayal, and pain. You believe the Rinnegan is a trophy, the final prize in a bloody race between two clans. You are a caveman who found a lighter and thinks he discovered fire."
He took a step forward, his own form still dwarfed by the Perfect Susanoo, yet his presence now seemed to fill the sky. "You ask 'how'? The answer is not 'who did I kill' or 'what did I steal.' The answer is 'what did I learn.'"
He pointed a finger, not at Madara, but at his own temple. "The Mangekyō Sharingan's degeneration is not a mystical 'curse of hatred.' It is a genetic flaw. A catastrophic failure in the chakra-producing cells of the retina and optic nerve under the strain of unique, high-energy chakra patterns. The body cannot sustain the output. It's a simple problem of cellular burnout and spiritual feedback loops."
Madara was silent, listening despite himself, his Perfect Susanoo frozen mid-gesture.
Indra: "I sequenced my own DNA. I mapped the Uchiha and Uzumaki genetic markers. I identified the faulty regulators, the overactive chakra channels. Then, using synthesized proteins, targeted chakra infusion, and a proprietary cellular regeneration serum developed from my own hybrid cells and cloned Hashirama cells—obtained ethically from a White Zetsu sample, not from a corpse—I repaired the flaw. I edited my own genome. I cured the 'curse.' The Eternal Mangekyō Sharingan was not taken. It was engineered."
The word hung in the air. Engineered.
Tobirama sucked in a breath. "Genetic… editing? On a living, complex chakra system? The stability… the precision required…"
Hashirama looked lost. "You can… fix the eyes? Just… fix them?"
Madara's voice was a strangled whisper from the giant Susanoo. "No… that's… that's not the way. The power… it must be earned… through loss…"
Indra continued, relentless. "As for the Rinnegan. You believe it requires the 'combination of Indra and Asura's chakra.' A poetic myth. In reality, the Rinnegan is the ocular manifestation of a chakra system that has fully harmonized Yin and Yang release at a fundamental, sub-atomic level. It's not about having two types of chakra; it's about unifying them into a cohesive whole. The so-called 'chakra of the Six Paths' is simply chakra in its most complete, un-aspected form."
He gestured, and a tiny, complex model of orbiting chakra particles—a visual representation only possible with his level of perception—appeared in the air before him. "The Uchiha provide a potent Yin template. The Senju provide a potent Yang template. Forcing them together crudely, as you did via Hashirama's flesh, creates a violent, unstable reaction that, over decades of conflict, may brute-force a fusion. It is agonizing, inefficient, and destructive. It is the method of a barbarian trying to build a radio by smashing two rocks together."
He closed his hand, dismissing the model. "I studied the quantum harmonies of chakra. I used the stabilized platform of my cured Eternal Mangekyō as a base. I then used advanced meditative techniques and environmental energy manipulation to gently, consciously guide the fusion of my own innate Yin and Yang energies—inherited from both clans—into a perfect, stable synergy. I didn't awaken the Rinnegan through conflict. I designed its awakening through understanding. I reached the destination you stumbled towards, but I took a paved highway while you crawled through a minefield."
The silence was absolute. The hum of the Axiom Armature was the only sound.
Madara's Perfect Susanoo began to flicker. Not from lack of chakra, but from the wielder's catastrophic loss of focus. The towering god of chakra wavered like a mirage.
"All… all of it?" Madara's voice was small, stripped of its thunder, coming from the base of the Susanoo where his real body stood, exposed in his shock. "The pain… the betrayal of Hashirama… the decades waiting in the dark… grafting his flesh to my wounds… the constant, agonizing rejection… the planning… the sacrifice of Obito… of Nagato… all of it… it was all… unnecessary?"
The raw, undisguised horror in that question was more terrifying than any of his roars. The great Uchiha Madara, the master planner, the immortal ghost, was realizing he had chosen the most painful, most difficult, most morally bankrupt path to a goal that could have been achieved in a clean, well-lit lab by a teenager with a better mind.
Indra nodded, a single, slow, devastating motion. "Unnecessary. Like using a plague to cure a headache. Your suffering was not a noble price for power. It was the product of your own ignorance, pride, and refusal to seek any path but the one of maximum violence and personal sacrifice."
Madara's Susanoo shattered. It didn't explode; it dissipated like smoke, revealing the man himself standing on the cracked ice. He looked… old. And empty. His Rinnegan still glowed, but the light in them was the dead light of a star that had just realized it was obsolete.
"I… I carved out my own heart…" Madara murmured, staring at his hands, the hands that had grafted Hashirama's flesh. "I lived in hell for decades… for a power that could be… researched?"
Hashirama looked at his old friend, and for the first time, his sorrow was not for the victims, but for the perpetrator. He saw not the proud rival, but a man who had tortured himself for nothing. "Madara…"
Tobirama was muttering, almost to himself, a litany of shock. "The implications… if ocular power is not zero-sum… if the Rinnegan is a state of chakra harmony achievable through knowledge and self-mastery… then every foundational principle of clan secrecy, of bloodline limitation… it's all a primitive construct. A shackle."
Minato found his voice, filled with a hope that was agonizing in its timing. "Then… the future you're building… it's one where no one has to suffer like that again? Where power isn't born from loss?"
Indra looked at Minato, his gaze softening a fraction. "Correct. Power, in the world I am forging, is a tool for protection and creation, acquired through study, collaboration, and ethical innovation. The strongest shinobi will not be the one who has lost the most, but the one who understands the most."
He then returned his gaze to Madara, who stood broken amidst the ruins of his ideology. "You sought to become a god through theft and pain. I am becoming something else entirely through knowledge and will. You are a relic of a painful, ignorant age. And your era," Indra said, the Axiom Armature behind him pulsing with definitive, final light, "ends not with a bang of Bijuudama, but with the quiet click of a solved equation."
Madara Uchiha did not respond. He simply stood there, the wind whipping at his hair, the living proof of his own Rinnegan staring back at him from Indra's face—a testament not to superior suffering, but to superior thought. The foundation of his century-long struggle had just been rationally, politely, and utterly disproven. The science of godhood had rendered the religion of pain obsolete.
End of Chapter – 115.