The silent night sky loomed above, moonlight cold and pale as it bathed Uchiha Gen's profile in an otherworldly glow.
He slowly withdrew his gaze from the heavens—his face calm, untouched by emotion, as if nothing in this world could stir his heart.
"I've sat in on a few clan meetings before," Gen said softly.
His voice, barely more than a whisper, reached Uchiha Obito's ears clearly amid the stillness.There was something unsettling in its quiet confidence.
"But unfortunately," Gen continued, "this world is full of fools… and few who understand anything of worth."
A faint sigh followed, laced with disdain.
"Majority rule? It's just allowing the masses of the ignorant to determine the course of stupidity."
He lifted his gaze once more to the moon, his Mangekyō Sharingan shimmering under its light, casting strange and spectral reflections—an eerie glow that bent and refracted as if communicating directly with the sky.
Obito, still concealed in the shadows, watched silently, unsure of what Gen was doing.
It looked like he was venting emotion through ocular energy—releasing Mangekyō power into the air without focus, letting it dissipate into the void like breath in winter.
Is he simply lamenting the fate of the Uchiha? Wasting his power in despair?
Then, a soft sigh broke the silence. Gen's voice dipped, laced with quiet regret.
"Moonlight… Infinite Tsukuyomi… what a pity."
Obito's heart stopped.
What did he just say?
The phrase Infinite Tsukuyomi sent a jolt through his nerves. It was a secret only a handful knew. Hearing it now—from him—sent chills through his core.
"The so-called 'love' of the Uchiha," Gen murmured, "is nothing but obsession. Possessive. Selfish. None of us can escape it."
"Even Shisui, praised as the gentlest among us, was no exception."
A flicker—mockery mixed with melancholy—passed through Gen's eyes at the mention of Shisui.
"Before his death," he said, "I spoke with him once. A long conversation. I tried to offer him understanding. But he… he believed I was mad. That I was the most deranged of us all."
Hidden in the darkness, Obito frowned. Something stirred within him—curiosity.
What could Gen have said that even Shisui, calm and perceptive as he was, would label madness?
As if reading his mind, Gen gave a quiet chuckle, dark and distant.
"Heh… I simply told him everything. The future. The truth. The fate that awaited us all."
He stopped smiling, his voice flattening into a tone of absolute detachment.
"But that was the point. I never expected him to believe me. I only wanted to plant a seed—a concept. One that would grow over time, taking root in his subconscious."
"...A concept?"
Obito's confusion deepened.
What kind of concept could that be? And why tell it to a dying man?
Gen went on, his voice as still as a frozen lake.
"Only in the final moments of Shisui's life… would those words return to him. Only then would the hollow seed solidify into something unshakable. Into truth."
Concept… solidification?
Obito felt like he was being drawn into a fog—unable to see clearly, yet unable to look away.
Somehow, he sensed all of this tied back to Gen's eyes—to a power he didn't understand.
Gen shook his head slowly. Contempt and pity flickered in his gaze.
"Even if Uchiha Obito were standing right here, listening to everything… he still wouldn't grasp a single word."
A slight twitch pulled at Obito's lips behind the mask.
Thanks for the compliment…
But Gen was already lost in the sky again, staring into the abyss above as if seeking something buried in its endless blackness. Then he spoke:
"The Shinobi World will eventually collapse."
His voice was low, almost inaudible—yet the words echoed like thunder in Obito's chest.
A whisper in the dark. A prophecy carved into the silence.
Each syllable sank into Obito like ice, bypassing thought and piercing something far deeper.
Destruction.
The word alone held a weight, a power—dark, magnetic, real.
Obito's eyes widened. Something was wrong.
Genjutsu.
He immediately gathered chakra to his Sharingan, preparing to dispel it.
But something about it wasn't right. The illusion was subtle. There had been no trigger, no flicker, no sign—only words.
And now, Gen was still standing there, eyes on the sky, continuing his monologue in that same unnerving tone:
"Under cognitive bias… concepts and desires become warped. They diverge from truth. From logic. From balance."
"Cognition is the mind's gateway to reality—how we perceive, interpret, remember, reason. It defines the world we see."
"It is," he said softly, "the root of all delusion."
The words rang like an incantation—measured, clinical, yet laced with a deeper power. Obito tried again to shatter the illusion, but each phrase disrupted his concentration, derailing his thoughts.
The moon above… twisted.
Its pale light bled crimson.
A blood moon rose in the sky—impossibly vivid. Unnatural.
Obito's nerves screamed as his Sharingan flared to counter the genjutsu—but it was like swimming upstream through a current of words. Each syllable Gen spoke carved a deeper groove into the illusion.
And then… the visions began.
He saw the Uchiha compound.
Blood soaked the streets. Bodies littered the ground. Chest wounds gushed like fountains, the crimson pooling and flowing—streams of blood forming rivers, connecting like veins across stone.
The rivers surged beneath the blood moon, a reflection of carnage writ large in the sky.
And at the center of it all stood Gen.
His Mangekyō Sharingan flared like a cursed mirror, pouring forth a dreadful, suffocating power. The ominous aura around him thickened—viscous, malevolent.
Gen's expression never changed.
He stood like a statue amid the massacre, his eyes void of empathy—as if he had foreseen it all and judged it meaningless.
His gaze cut through the illusion, through time and space—through Obito.
Finally, he turned his head, and the slow, deliberate rotation of his Mangekyō resumed.
Then, calmly, he spoke:
"When cognition collapses, so too does reality. In the end, all actions born from delusion are errors—errors on a grand, irreversible scale."
He looked up again.
"Shisui's final wish… was for peace. For the clan and the village to coexist."
A pause. The blood moon pulsed behind him.
"Tonight," Gen said, "that wish will come true."
There was no sarcasm in his tone. No mockery. Only inevitability.
And that was what made it terrifying.
After a long, unbearable silence, a voice finally broke through:
Obito appeared, stepping from the shadows.
Face unreadable beneath the mask, his voice was laced with steel.
"…What did you do?"