And just like that, several days passed.
Obito lived up to being a shinobi who awakened Kamui.
The eye reflecting the heart mirrored his true nature. After exposing the glaring weakness in his psyche, he chose to escape reality.
What did escaping reality mean? It meant choosing nothing.
Whether he chose to resist, find a loophole to undo the Heavenly Prison, and proceed with his plan to become the Ten-Tails' jinchūriki, or whether he surrendered, he still had to face the cruel reality: Rin knew he is dickless.
So he chose the simplest escape route.
He played dead.
Since he couldn't formulate a plan to break the deadlock right now, he figured he might as well give up.
Whenever someone approached, he lowered his breathing and heartbeat, dropped his body temperature, and lay motionless on the stone slab.
Obito's current condition mirrored Uchiha Madara's nerfed zombie vessel.
Madara possessed almost no chakra, rendering his sensory abilities useless.
Obito had his chakra locked down by the Heavenly Prison. Even with inherent sensory abilities, he couldn't flare his network to use them.
As long as the people swapping his IV bags or washing him stayed quiet, he couldn't even identify who they were.
These past few days, his dreams warped into unbearable nightmares, convincing him that the Infinite Tsukuyomi might fail to satisfy his requirements.
As Makoto and Konan pointed out, if he became the Ten-Tails' jinchūriki, the Infinite Tsukuyomi would cast its illusion on everyone else.
At best, every other person would receive their own Rin.
The jutsu wouldn't generate one for the caster.
'Why? Why didn't I notice these glaring plot holes before?'
Was it because Konoha's ninja files marked his intelligence rating as a pathetic two?
But that was his score as a naive child lacking knowledge and combat experience.
Was he still an Intelligence Two even now?
'Impossible. Impossible!'
To prove he was better than an Intelligence Two, Obito scraped together enough motivation to keep living and began analyzing his situation.
Something about this cell felt wrong.
Even if his comatose disguise held up, days had passed.
Did Konan and the others really fail to notice he was awake?
Taking a step back, even if he was in a genuine coma, wouldn't they deploy special medical techniques to forcefully stimulate him awake by now?
"Uchiha Obito, I know you woke up two days ago. Since you want to play dead, I won't disturb you. However, some people will be coming to see you shortly. I won't interfere with your reunion."
Just as Obito's paranoia peaked, Konan's icy voice drifted from the hallway.
Without another word, Konan left.
The sound of her footsteps faded into the distance.
Inside the cell, Obito sat up and snapped his eyes open.
His suspicion ended before it even took root.
His fake coma was compromised from the start!
No wonder the guards stayed quiet at the entrance over the past few days.
'Wait. What did that vicious woman just say? Someone is coming to see me?'
What did that mean? Did Konan plan to arrange a face-to-face meeting with Rin to humiliate him?
No, Konan said "they".
Did that include Kakashi?
Or maybe all the Konoha shinobi who knew him back in the day?
Did she want everyone to witness his miserable state?
Obito felt his own body.
'Crap!'
Because he spent the past few days feigning a coma—and an unconscious patient couldn't get up to use the bathroom—he played the part and relieved himself on the slab.
His ruined clothes were stripped away, either sent to the wash or tossed out.
He lacked a single scrap of fabric to cover his dignity.
The second he pictured his childhood companions—especially Kakashi and Rin—seeing him naked and soiled, Obito broke out in a cold sweat.
'That woman is more venomous than Sasori. It wasn't enough to use Rin to break me. She wants to parade me like this...'
Obito scrambled to calm down and restore his shattered mentality.
But no matter how he chanted inwardly—'This is a false world. Rin is false. Kakashi is false. My classmates from Konoha are false. I will create a new world with them in it.'—the mantra failed him.
In the past, that belief held firm because the final sentence—'create a new world'—placed the Infinite Tsukuyomi at the core of his ideology, anchoring his sanity.
Now, his faith in the Infinite Tsukuyomi wavered.
Those "false" realities became rootless duckweed, exposed as empty stubbornness.
However, Obito worried about the wrong reunion.
Konan wasn't kind enough to contact his old classmates and host a Konoha reunion party.
The "they" she mentioned referred to the founding members of Akatsuki.
Specifically, the original Akatsuki members who uncovered Hanzō of the Salamander's conspiracy and tried to warn their leaders, only for Obito to intercept and slaughter them.
Ever since Konan learned the masked man orchestrated that massacre, she looked down on Obito's philosophy with open contempt.
Obito championed the Infinite Tsukuyomi because he believed the shinobi world was dark and the chaotic era ruined everyone.
How did he reach that conclusion? It was the equivalent of Obito acting as a bandit, slaughtering an entire village, and then telling the survivors, "I didn't harm them. This dark shinobi world harmed them!"
Did he possess no self-awareness about why the shinobi world was dark?
Wasn't it because bastards like him existed that the world bled in the first place?
The first-generation Akatsuki members lacked overwhelming strength.
But to grant their final wishes and heal the lingering regrets of Konan and Nagato, the group asked Orochimaru to resurrect them via Edo Tensei.
These original members toured the newly transformed Amegakure, marveling at the changing times and feeling their sacrifices bore fruit.
But they were no saints.
Toward the masked man who orchestrated their deaths, they harbored unfiltered hatred!
Konan told them they could visit a specific cell after their tour.
That cell held the man who murdered them.
She left them with that single sentence. Whether they wanted revenge—and how they extracted it—was theirs to decide.
...
Meanwhile.
Uchiha Madara, who returned to Amegakure with Ōnoki a few days earlier, appeared in the forest just outside the village.
His hands gripped the wheels of his wheelchair, pushing himself through the thick woods.
Before stepping away, Konan deliberately deactivated the Paper Person of God Technique masking Obito's cell.
As for Uchiha Madara, after enduring days of silent recovery, he managed to scrape together a sliver of chakra—just enough to ping his sensory abilities once.
Relying on the curse tag buried inside Obito's body, Madara tracked the coordinates.
He rolled toward the location.
Madara didn't know if the genjutsu caster from the desert was Obito, but he knew Amegakure captured and imprisoned the brat.
He planned to siphon power from Obito to shed this crippled state and gain room to maneuver.
As for Obito himself? He blew his cover and got captured.
What else was there to say? He could only fend for himself!