They can regenerate their physical selves if damaged pretty quickly so it wouldn't be too far a jump to assume they can regenerate their chakra the same way.
In my opinion they can't have more chakra than the sacrifice provides. Where would anything beyond that come from? Surely not from Kabuto running a hundred zombies at the same time. And certainly not from the mockery of dead spirits the zombies represent. I bet if you kept destroying the body countless times, the regeneration alone would cause the thing to run out of juice and disappear into thin air.
Otherwise the fricking jutsu would be a perpetual motion machine in addition to everything else haxored.
The zombies take critical hits like getting their limbs chopped off yet as soon as they regenerate they show no signs of fatigue or slowing down. Now their chakra whilst being spiritual energy has to have some sort of relationship with their physical being, it can't exist as an abstract. So if you for arguments sake completely destroyed an Edo Tensei zombie there would be nothing left of him until he regenerates. If his chakra is seperate and detached from the physical body then where is it now stored whilst the body comes back together again?
It can't be dependent on the hosts chakra either, as the people being summoned back are some of the biggest bad asses in history and thus capable of using jutsu that use huge amounts of chakra (like Kinkakku and Ginkakku). They would have used up the hosts chakra in an instant if that was the source, especially with their special weapons. It can't be Kabuto's chakra either, as then the Edo Tensei would be like a Kage Bunshin type jutsu where the user splits his chakra up amongst his clones. As we have seen only Naruto is able to make mass clones due to his huge chakra reserves. Even then he is making copies of himself, not Kage level ninja's with magical weapons etc.
The only place the chakra could be coming from is the zombies themselves and like their physical bodies it must be constantly regenerating. As for the perpetual motion machine problem - this is Naruto, normal physics stopped applying a long time ago.
I think I said it in an earlier thread already, but for now I will believe the chakra indeed comes from the sacrifice - but with a twist. I reckon burning the soul and body like that might allow the zombie to use far more chakra than a living human could pump out of his system in a limited time. Naturally it annihilates the victim in the process. Think of it like using a lifetime's worth of chakra in a moment.
Completely destroying the zombie should be very detrimental since these guys have that control kunai embedded into them. One would think removing it (or removing the body from around it) would equal to removing a system disk from a computer... So, I think the question of what would happen with the spirit/body in that case is not relevant.
This has been argued before and frankly it can't possibly be the case. There's no way characters like Zeku and Rin possessed the chakra reserves to be using the kinds of techniques the 1st and 2nd Hokages were using against the 3rd.
Seems to me the spirits themselves provide the chakra. Chakra is essentially spiritual energy, and Edo Tensei is binding their actual spirits to physical forms.
The closest thing the series has to ghosts so far(Naruto's mother and father) were made by implanting him with chakra.
So I believe that as long as the spirit is in a body, it will produce chakra, which is what powers the zombie's techniques just as it did when they were alive. So they'd have the exact same chakra levels as they did when they were still alive.
I don't see why that has to be the case. It's not like any of these battles are lasting a super long time where they should be running out already.
But if the bodies regenerate to inifinity, why can`t chakra, theorically speaking do the exact same thing?
You cannot hope to build a better world without improving the individuals. To that end each of us must work for his own improvement, and at the same time share a general responsibility for all humanity, our particular duty being to aid those to whom we think we can be most useful. -Marie Curie
There's no reason they can't. There's just nothing that suggests that they do.
Chakra is created through a combination of physical energy and spiritual energy. We know their bodies regenerate, but we don't know that their spirits do, so there's no reason to assume that they have any more chakra now then they did when they were alive.
If the zombie body could generate chakra, in addition to the uber regeneration, Orochimaru would have turned himself into a zombie, just without external control, a long time ago. Because it would mean simple immortality without the hassle of a body transfer.
Yeah but he would need someone to summon him, which isn't exactly free control is it.
As for chakra, I'm sure waaay back at the start of Naruto Kakashi explained that chakra once depleted is replenished by rest/sleep and eating - both which are needs of the physical body. If you are undead you don't need rest/sleep or food which means their chakra would just be there.
Rest does not always mean sleeping though.
I know there's been several times in the series where a character claimed to be "completely out of chakra", yet the fight continued for awhile, and then, later on, the character would use another jutsu anyway. Which gives the impression that chakra will recover on it's own if you just stop using it for awhile.
Basically what it comes down to is, while I agree zombies probably have unlimited physical energy, chakra also requires spiritual energy as well. So until the give some indication that that is also constantly regenerating, I'm not willing to assume the zombies have unlimited chakra.
Summon another zombie first, remove it's free will, teach them Edo Tensei, and give them very specific commands to bring you back and leave you with your own free will, then dismiss the original zombie so it can't be used to undo the technique.
Last edited by DarthEnderX; Mon, 07-09-2012 at 03:28 PM.