I still believe we're projecting too much onto it. I'm on board with trying contact etc. but we're at "establishing sapience" where "establishing life" hasn't been done, and we may be setting ourselves up for disappointment. Now I'm kinda hoping for life and even psychologically interesting life with others, but... yeah.
We know there's energy and chakra effects, for all we know that's more of an automated flow that routinely happens at chakra anomalies (just a theory I just made up, but "chakra does weird things pretty well on its own" is an observed fact).
Chakra golems are a known risk, so we know chakra alone can create life out of underground elements, but apparently chakra golems are something like the apex of generation from natural chakra concentrate and even those are just chakra beasts. Rampaging, hyper-potent chakra beasts, sure, but chakra beasts nonetheless. We only know them to be violent, just as with any other monster.
We're ascribing emotions, goals, potential rational thought, the glimmer of personality even, to something that hasn't displayed any of that.
This isn't the first time we "hear stone speak", Earthshaping just does that:
And then he turned his attention back to the stone.
I am the heart of the world, torn from my rest.
It wasn't words, it wasn't consciousness, it was simply the nature of being, the way it was the nature of water to be wet. Still, Hazō reached out to that nature, suggesting and leading instead of demanding.
Categorical denial such as the one encountered could be ascribed to the chakra in place pushing Hazō's back, and chakra itself having a "will" of sorts it prompted development of some sort of defence/"managing the event" system, perhaps humanoid only because of Hazō's chakra signature. This makes me reconsider the "not part of the world you know" thing. It now seems to me there's a good chance for it to just be blanket "no" feedback when Hazō said things to the effect of "yo, you're world amirite". Perhaps someone with tremendous chakra capacity dumping it all in Earthshaping would have simply succeeded, thinking "damn, it was hard, just like wallwalking around here".
Frankly, this is my working theory. If whatever chakra's in the crystal works like ours - that is to say, as a primal force, has "intent" and randomly got the intent of "staying here/defending its staying here", then it explains what happened. Chakra beasts are drawn/appear near the beacon that it is, it co-opts them because their signature enters the thing/its energy enters them and it has stronger "intent" (more chakra and sole goal). Humans enter and push it out of the stone it seeped it: it copies humans out of stone and reshapes the stone around itself "protectively", copying the jutsu, in a likely (or at least possibly) automated pattern aimed at "defending its staying here").
Any source of chakra that does not disperse despite chakra tending to do this naturally (which is why we can't have super long range ninjutsu, amongst other things) would need to have a
reason not to disperse, so some primal intent to affix itself to something makes it one of the only reasons it would, by mere survivorship. If it
is alive and learns and has goals, it is difficult to conceive why it would have stayed under the form of completely immobile life, and profoundly reactive rather than proactive in pursuing its goals. Unless its goals are something like... planetary parasitism on a very large scale, which it might be if we consider the "co-opting monsters, pushing chakra through stone, growing veins in it, and making this merry little complex eat things". If it is, then smashing it would be grand, though.
