Board Thread:Naruto Discussions/@comment-27660682-20160128215222/@comment-26773508-20160130040743

MlGshinobi wrote: Edo hiruzen didnt have unlimited chakra. If he did he would make inifnite shadow clones. I dont get where people got the concept edo tensi have infinite chakra because minato said he was too exhausted to use jutsu at one point, tobirama could onky use 2 shadow clones while holding the barrier, and muu couldnt make multiple copies of himself. I never claimed hiruzen can beat hashirama but I wanted to be clear that hiruzen is as a very capable hokage and does deserve the hype he gets. Unlimited chakra in the sense that the Edo Zombie's maximum chakra pool is refilled almost immediately. NOT in the sense that the Edo Zombie has access to infinite amount of chakra at a given instant. This means that the maximum amount of chakra a Zombie could use at a given instant will be somewhere near the maximum amount they could use shortly before their deaths. However, Edo shinobis have infinite chakra in the sense that they can't get exhausted, since their chakra is refilled immediately after they exhaust them.

A good demonstration is Edo Hiruzen using 5 kage bunshins to counter Guruguru Tobi's Wooden Statue Elemental Attacks. During his fight with Orochimaru, Hiruzen could create only 2 clones safely. But in Edo form he effortlessly created 5. The difference is that in his Edo form, his chakra got refilled immediately, so there was no need for worrying about death from chakra absorption.

Lastly, Tobirama being able to create only 2 shadow clones doesn't necessarily contradict the version of "infinite chakra" I just described. Remember that Tobirama and the other Hokages were focused on confining the Juubi within the Red Barrier.

So now let's say Edo Tobirama's total chakra capacity at any instant is X. Let the amount of chakra required to maintain the Red Barrier be A. Then, the remaining chakra available to Tobirama that can be used for any purposes other than maintaining the barrier will be (X-A). Let us call this Y i.e. (Y = X-A).

The reason Tobirama couldn't make more than two clones is because he only had access to Y, not X. That's because a good proportion of his chakra was already devoted to maintaining the barrier. Tobirama could have created more clones if he wanted to, but then the barrier would have collapsed.

In normal circumstances, Tobirama would have been extremely exhausted after creating the clones. But as Edo Tensei, he was not exhausted. That's because the moment he spent his remaining amount of chakra (Y=X-A), that chakra got replenished immediately. Same thing applies to the chakra he continuously used to maintain the barrier.

TL;DR: Edo Zombies have infinite chakra only in the sense that the chakra expended can be refilled again and again and again until the jutsu is cancelled out. It doesn't mean access to godlike amounts of chakra at any given time. That gave Hiruzen quite an advantage, and he could have defeated Guruguru eventually. Sadly, Kishi didn't go that way.