Faced with the choice between dying and living, Obito chose life.
He returned to his physical body in the cell.
He knew perfectly well that with his body this horribly mangled by the localized explosion, returning was his absolutely only chance to receive emergency treatment and survive.
But at the same time, the moment he returned, his attempted prison break would inevitably be discovered by the guards.
The hope he had only just gained would once again be mercilessly crushed by Amegakure.
Obito simply did not care.
He had already been on the verge of giving up, only for heaven to suddenly favor him.
Kakashi had finally learned senjutsu, inadvertently allowing potent senjutsu chakra to seep into Obito through their shared Kamui link.
He had merely been cosmically unlucky that Kakashi transferred a massive pile of live Explosive Clay into the dimension at that exact second.
Had his luck been just slightly better, and Kakashi teleported literal garbage instead, Obito might have successfully escaped.
Now that one failed opportunity had miraculously appeared, Obito firmly believed there might eventually be another.
That was exactly why he chose to keep living.
He even abandoned what tiny shred remained of his Uchiha dignity and used his final, ragged breath to scream for the guards.
Since the maximum-security cells were under constant surveillance, a specialized medical squad arrived almost immediately.
They performed emergency, life-saving surgery on the unconscious Obito right there on the stone floor and began stabilizing his shattered body.
Hearing the chaotic commotion, Uchiha Madara immediately realized something was horribly wrong.
If Obito had merely suffered another bout of isolation-induced insanity, there was absolutely no way it would have attracted this many elite personnel.
So had Obito genuinely discovered a loophole to escape?
Madara hurried to the barred window and peered toward Obito's cell.
He saw Obito lying on the floor looking exactly like a charred corpse, his body torn and bloodied completely beyond recognition.
Madara had absolutely no idea what could have happened to him.
There was nothing strategically useful he could deduce from Obito's earlier crazed shouting either.
The only meaningful word had been "Kakashi."
Whatever catastrophic event just occurred was somehow directly connected to him.
Beyond that, there was no other evidence.
Since he lacked enough intelligence to reason it out, Madara stopped trying and carefully pressed his ear to the stone, listening to the medical ninja instead.
Perhaps they would analyze the situation aloud for him.
...
After an unknown amount of time, Obito finally regained consciousness.
He did not open his eyes immediately.
Just as before, he pretended to remain deeply unconscious so he could secretly gather tactical information from his captors.
Exactly as Obito expected, the medical ninja finished treating his burns, and another high-level group arrived in his cell shortly afterward.
They had completely analyzed the anomaly and discovered that Kakashi's senjutsu chakra could passively seep through the Kamui dimension and enter Obito's physical body.
Although Obito had already prepared himself mentally for this exact possibility, he still felt a trace of bitter regret.
If he had not been so eager and had simply waited for the Explosive Clay inside the Kamui dimension to finish detonating before crossing over, he might already be a free man.
Unfortunately, there were no second chances in war.
...
"Space-time ninjutsu is truly fascinating. Even without access to his own chakra and without the physical ability to activate his Mangekyō Sharingan, Kamui's shared spatial dimension still allowed Kakashi's ambient senjutsu chakra to pass into him."
Orochimaru stood beside the cot, holding a pen and clipboard, clinically recording the situation and his analysis aloud.
According to him, the passive transfer between Obito and Kakashi stemmed from the inherent biological connection between the two eyes of the same Sharingan pair.
It was not merely that both Mangekyō eyes served as twin entrances to the exact same dimension once activated.
Furthermore, according to Amegakure's classified intelligence, Obito awakened his Mangekyō Sharingan only after witnessing Kakashi pierce Rin's heart.
That meant Obito still only possessed a two-tomoe Sharingan when the massive boulder crushed him during the Third Shinobi World War.
Yet, Uchiha Madara had previously claimed that half of Obito's body magically passed through the solid rock.
The evidence supported that impossible claim.
The half of Obito's body containing his Sharingan eye had remained relatively "intact."
The other half had been completely pulverized and later replaced with White Zetsu tissue and Hashirama cells.
"If his unevolved two-tomoe Sharingan could already display highly unusual spatial properties during a life-or-death crisis, then a small amount of ambient energy seeping through even when he cannot actively mold chakra is hardly surprising," Orochimaru hypothesized.
"However, that means neither Fire Release: Heavenly Prison nor Scorch Release: Heavenly Prison can completely and permanently restrain him anymore.
Unless, of course, you track down Kakashi and strictly order him never to use Sage Mode again. Alternatively..."
Orochimaru smiled faintly, a cold, reptilian gleam in his eyes.
"You could simply remove Obito's remaining eye. Then there would be nothing left to worry about."
That was Orochimaru's final conclusion and coldly proposed solution.
In truth, he had noticed something else entirely during his analysis.
This long-distance spatial transfer of chakra perfectly resembled the mental connection between the Tailed Beasts.
By placing tiny fragments of all nine Tailed Beasts inside Naruto and using him as a biological relay station, they could theoretically channel the combined chakra of every single Tailed Beast through any one of them across the continent.
Did that mean the Tailed Beasts possessed some kind of innate "quantum passage" mathematically similar to the Kamui dimension?
Could Kaguya's Time-Space actually be that shared, underlying passage?
Orochimaru did not know.
He simply recorded the massive scientific question without saying a single word aloud.
His medical instruments had already shown him that Uchiha Obito was wide awake.
Orochimaru would only voice information he deliberately wanted Obito to hear.
Everything else, no matter how seemingly insignificant, remained strictly confidential.
...
Obito had absolutely no idea his little act had already been exposed by a heart monitor.
When he heard Orochimaru casually suggest gouging out his only eye, he silently cursed the snake bastard several times over!
"Removing his eye really would be the simplest, most efficient method," Makoto agreed from the doorway.
Just as Obito thought, 'They can't seriously be planning to do it,' Makoto changed his tone and handed him a sliver of hope.
"But he happens to be a perfectly suitable, highly resilient test subject for that other project. We can modify the system slightly and use it to permanently restrain him at the same time."
"That other project? You mean..." Orochimaru did not understand immediately.
"Tsukuyomi," Makoto said, offering the key code word.
"Oh. I understand. That would certainly work beautifully." Orochimaru instantly realized what Makoto meant.
He was explicitly referring to the massive project led by Uchiha Hikari: a virtual-reality video game built around her Engraved Tsukuyomi, specifically designed to passively absorb excess chakra from civilian players across the entire shinobi world.
The earlier movies asking the viewing audience to "lend me your energy" or "share your light" had all been advance propaganda, slowly preparing the public consciousness for this exact project.
The plan required almost no technical or biological assistance from Orochimaru, so he had paid very little attention to its development.
Ultimately, whether the global project succeeded depended entirely on whether Uchiha Hikari's immense dōjutsu could support the server load.
The physical VR equipment and the actual game content were merely an elaborate, highly polished surface layer to hide the chakra drain.
If creating a massive, full-scale open-world MMORPG proved impossible, they could simply make a cheap Naruto mobile gacha game instead.
A simple pixel-art Bleach vs. Naruto fighting game would work just as well for their purposes.
All that truly mattered was getting the population voluntarily connected.
Orochimaru did not even know what stage the game's development had currently reached.
"Alright. I'll have someone bring the server equipment over right now." Makoto stopped one of the departing medical ninja and told her to notify Uchiha Hikari's engineering team.
They would use Obito as their very first closed-beta player to test whether the Engraved Tsukuyomi VR game contained any ldangers, feedback loops, or bugs.
At the same time, Engraved Tsukuyomi's Yachihoko mark would continuously, relentlessly drain Obito's ambient power.
The retail version intended for ordinary citizens could be activated or deactivated voluntarily whenever the player wanted to log out.
But Makoto had already ordered them to modify Obito's specific configuration code.
Uchiha Obito would be completely unable to log out of the game on his own!
Yachihoko would constantly absorb his power—not merely his standard chakra, but any senjutsu chakra or natural energy he managed to siphon from Kakashi as well.