Chapter 391: The Infinite Tsukuyomi Arrives Without Warning
"Hahahaha..."
Yasushi's laughter rang out across the dead silence of the battlefield, sharp and utterly unbothered.
"You see that? Peace is actually this simple.
"All that fighting, all that killing — pathetic. Weak.
"You drop one of these things and suddenly nobody wants war anymore!"
His voice echoed back from the scorched earth and the meteor's black flank. Nobody dared respond. The alliance's last ember of resistance had already been crushed by the spectacle in front of them, and now there was nothing left but hollow survivors standing at a distance they hoped was safe.
Yasushi was turning to signal his people to begin terms of surrender when it hit him.
A feeling. Instinctive and wrong.
He looked up.
The sky — already dimming toward evening — went completely dark. Not gradually. All at once.
Then the moon appeared where the sun had been. It swelled and shifted color with visible speed until it blazed blood-red across the entire horizon — and then its surface broke apart and reformed into something else entirely.
Nine tomoe. The Rinne Sharingan.
Infinite Tsukuyomi had descended on the world. Without warning. Without announcement.
"What the —"
Yasushi's complete Susanoo was out before the thought finished, erupting from his body in a single explosive motion. The massive chakra wings spread wide, sweeping everyone nearby underneath their cover in the same breath.
"Kaguya?!" He stared at the moon, something caught between alarm and fierce excitement lighting up his face. "Kaguya's actually coming back right now?!"
Then he burst out laughing.
"Black Zetsu, you absolute madman. You revived your own mother. I'll give you credit for the nerve."
But a hundred miles away, Black Zetsu wasn't celebrating.
He was staring at the moon with an expression that could only be described as stunned stupid.
"Infinite Tsukuyomi?"
His mind rejected the obvious answer immediately, then arrived at the only one that remained.
"This wasn't Yasushi. So it had to be... Obito?"
"But the Infinite Tsukuyomi is a lie. We told him that ourselves. Does he still not know what he's holding?"
"Maybe he just wants to use it to destroy the world," White Zetsu offered pleasantly from beside him.
Black Zetsu went rigid.
Then it clicked.
After Yasushi had exposed the Moon's Eye Plan for the hollow fantasy it was, Black Zetsu had abandoned the whole concept — moved on, found other angles, never looked back. But as a method of pure, indiscriminate world-ending destruction completely divorced from its original purpose?
It was actually efficient.
"Every Uchiha is out of their damn mind," Black Zetsu snarled, and dove into the earth.
He was already underground and moving when the moon's Rinne Sharingan detonated.
White light. Absolute and total. It poured down across the entire shinobi world like a second sun — not burning, but penetrating. There was nowhere to hide from it. Not in buildings, not in caves, not behind any barrier human hands had ever made. Against a technique operating at the Six Paths level, geography was irrelevant.
The only shelter was a Susanoo's chakra shell, thick enough to block the light at the source.
Every living thing that wasn't covered went still.
The shinobi on the battlefield — enemies and surrendered allies alike — stopped mid-motion. Their eyes went empty. The Rinne Sharingan's reflection bloomed in their pupils and faded, leaving nothing behind but that hollow, satisfied smile. The expression of someone receiving exactly the dream they had always wanted.
"Just like in the show," Yasushi said, tilting his head back to study the blood moon with genuine interest. Almost nostalgic.
"Next comes the Divine Tree."
He was right.
The ground lurched. Not the sharp jolt of an explosion — something deeper, broader. A tremor moving through the planet's bones. Something ancient and enormous stirring beneath everything.
The earth cracked open.
Crack after crack spread across the surface in every direction at once, bottomless dark gaps exhaling dust and low, continuous rumbling. Then the roots came. Massive coiling bodies of blue-green growth, each thicker than buildings, forcing upward through solid rock as though stone were loose soil.
The Divine Tree had no interest in terrain. Wherever the Infinite Tsukuyomi's light had found a living body, the roots followed — plains, valleys, city ruins, border fortifications. They reached toward the moon with the focused urgency of something fulfilling its entire reason for existence.
From the roots, tendrils branched outward. They wrapped themselves around every body the genjutsu had claimed — methodical, thorough, head to foot — until nothing remained exposed but a vague human outline beneath white organic casing.
One by one the cocoons lifted from the ground and hung beneath the root networks like fruit.
One. Ten. A hundred. Thousands. Millions.
Across the entire visible world, the same image repeated without end — an endless forest of blue-green roots, and beneath every branch, white human-shaped cocoons swaying in the red moonlight. Quietly dreaming. Slowly drained.
The survivors sheltered under Yasushi's Susanoo wings pressed against each other and stared out through the gaps in the chakra barrier.
Nobody spoke for a moment.
"What — what is that?"
"Hokage-sama, stop it! Do something!"
Yasushi ignored them. He turned to Neji and Hiruko.
"That's the Infinite Tsukuyomi." He studied them both with clinical interest. "Now the question is whether either of you can stand up to it without my wings over you."
He looked at Neji first.
"You're fine. Use the reverse summoning to get back to the moon, retrieve the giant Tenseigan, and wait for my signal. You'll need it for the final battle against Kaguya."
"Understood, Hokage-sama." Neji didn't hesitate. He formed seals and vanished.
Yasushi shifted his gaze to Hiruko.
"You're a different case. You have the all-encompassing power inside you now and you're technically Otsutsuki by fusion. But whether that actually holds up against a Six Paths mass genjutsu is a question that needs a real answer."
Hiruko's response was to step directly out of the Susanoo's protection without a word. He looked up at the blood moon for three seconds.
Then he looked back at Yasushi with a smirk.
Yasushi laughed.
Orochimaru, watching this exchange, made the mistake of deciding he also wanted an answer. He stepped outside the barrier with the expression of a man conducting a scientific experiment.
His eyes immediately spiraled into perfect pinwheels.
"Hahahaha —"
Yasushi didn't move to help him. He just laughed, loud enough to carry across the eerie silence of the cocooned battlefield.
"Not everyone has the standing to look the Infinite Tsukuyomi in the face! Orochimaru, you have the Reincarnation Eyes — but they were never yours to begin with. You can't generate the all-encompassing power from within your own body. Your grade is simply too low for this level."
He watched the roots begin winding up toward Orochimaru's ankles, still grinning.
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