Smack.
The masked man slapped himself hard across the face.
"It doesn't hurt? Looks like I'm still dreaming." He let out a heavy sigh.
The idiot had completely forgotten that half his body was literally grafted from White Zetsu and Hashirama cells, which completely nerfed his sense of pain.
"Obito, what's wrong? What dream?" White Zetsu stared at him, looking genuinely concerned.
"It's nothing. Since you're back, that means you must have new intel again, right?" The masked man shot White Zetsu a tired look.
He'd spent the whole day stressing over absurd shit, so naturally, his brain was feeding him absurd dreams.
After sitting through so many ridiculous soap operas earlier, it was perfectly normal for his subconscious to build on them.
Just like that unhinged wedding nightmare a minute ago.
No matter what garbage White Zetsu spewed now, his heart wouldn't waver in the slightest.
"That's right, Obito! Do you know what happened? Yesterday I tracked down the other White Zetsu clones to gather intel, and guess what I found out? Rin! Nohara Rin has been revived!
"One of the clones literally saw her walking normally down the streets of Amegakure. There were no Edo Tensei cracks on her skin, and her eyes looked totally normal too..."
"All right. Save it." The masked man ruthlessly cut White Zetsu off. "It's Rin again. Can't you write some new material? What's next? Are you about to say Rin was strolling around with some guy, and they looked super cozy together?"
He wasn't surprised in the slightest that White Zetsu dragged Rin into this again.
In his heart, Rin sat at the absolute top of the pedestal.
That was an undeniable fact. Dreaming about her was totally par for the course.
"No, that's not it. Nohara Rin was actually walking around with the Edo Tensei Uzumaki Kushina, but..." White Zetsu trailed off, suddenly hesitating.
"But what? Spit it out! The punchline is coming up, right?" The masked man crossed his arms over his chest, rocking the posture of a guy who had already seen through all the cheap tricks.
"But I tailed them and eavesdropped for a bit. Turns out Nohara Rin was able to revive entirely because of some man's help. And he saw everything. He might have even groped her..."
"Obito, I originally didn't want to tell you this, but I couldn't stand watching you get kept in the dark! So I spilled it. You have to stay calm!" White Zetsu pleaded, trying to keep him from blowing up.
In the end, the masked man didn't show a single ounce of emotional turbulence.
Instead, he just flatly replied, "That's it?"
White Zetsu was stunned.
He seriously started wondering if yesterday's trauma had completely fried Obito's brain and awakened some freaky new kink.
'This... This actually isn't impossible,' the plant reasoned.
"But isn't the pacing of your plot a little backward?" The masked man suddenly changed his tone, looking deep in thought.
Reversed? White Zetsu had no clue what the masked man was rambling about.
What the masked man meant was this: Rin getting revived and getting tangled up with another guy, compared to his earlier nightmare where Rin literally threw a wedding—hadn't the timeline of events gotten totally scrambled?
Shouldn't this current plotline happen first, leading up to the wedding?
'As expected of a dream,' he thought. 'Chaotic, absurd, and completely lacking any logic.'
But that was fine.
He could just use this lucid dream to beta-test his plans for when he actually woke up.
First, he needed an attitude adjustment.
He absolutely could not afford to harbor any unnecessary feelings anymore.
Even if Rin, or even if his freaking grandmother truly came back to life, it was still a fake reality.
Only the versions of them inside the Infinite Tsukuyomi were the real deal!
Besides, in the waking world, they hadn't truly been revived anyway. At best, they'd just been yanked back as Edo Tensei zombies.
So first on the agenda: handling the Kakashi situation.
He fully intended to jack Sasuke's Rinnegan, but after securing the prize, he was only going to transplant one eye.
He had to keep his own eye's Kamui ability intact to maintain his invincibility cheat code.
That meant he had to target Kakashi.
What kind of guy was Kakashi? Even though the masked man found him pretty damn hard to read lately, the old Kakashi was deeply responsible.
He was the classic shinobi archetype—icy on the outside, but soft and fiercely protective on the inside.
The second the masked man made a move on Sasuke, Kakashi would absolutely drop his weird crusade to court Obito's grandmother and rally with the others to shut him down.
Kakashi held the other Kamui Sharingan.
That wild card would severely screw with the masked man's ability to spam intangibility.
So, he had to make Kakashi temporarily lose the ability to fight.
Then how exactly should he pull it off?
If this were the real world, maybe he'd sit down and draft a careful, tactical plan.
But since this was just a dream, there was absolutely no need for that.
This dreamscape was already weird as hell.
He'd literally just attended a bizarre double-wedding.
What was wrong with letting loose and indulging himself a little?
And so, completely ignoring White Zetsu shouting after him, the masked man marched right out of the cave.
In truth, he had always kept a very close eye on Kakashi.
Otherwise, back in the day, he never would have "coincidentally" scooped up highly classified intel just by listening to Kakashi mutter to himself at the Memorial Stone.
Right now, Kakashi's body was running on a tiny fraction of low-purity Hashirama cells that Obito had arranged for him.
Those cells mitigated the Mangekyō Sharingan's nasty side effects, but the buff was pretty limited.
After all, half of Obito's entire body was grafted from the stuff. That was the sole reason he could spam Kamui like a madman without going blind.
Kakashi fundamentally couldn't pull that off.
And right there lay the perfect method to cripple Kakashi's combat ability.
In order to protect the people he cared about—the ones who were actually still breathing, anyway—Kakashi had been relentlessly grinding his Kamui proficiency.
Before, Kakashi was terrified that overusing it would blind him, treating Kamui like a desperate ultimate move with a strict cooldown.
But after waking up that one time and realizing his vision had barely degraded, Kakashi completely flipped his playstyle.
The actual casting speed of Kamui couldn't be buffed unless both eyes were reunited.
That was a hard-coded fixed value; it was just the underlying logic of the jutsu.
However, Kakashi had already mastered most of the technique's finer micro-skills.
He'd perfected sniping both near and distant targets.
Now, he had started training down a totally different skill tree: dropping a target into the Kamui dimension without snapping its neck, and then pulling it back out.
Eventually, he planned on physically warping himself into the dimension.
Of course, that was the ultimate final step. He needed to practice throwing all sorts of random junk in and out first before risking his own body.
Otherwise, if he warped in and couldn't warp back out, he'd be the biggest joke in ninja history.
And don't even ask why he didn't just use Shadow Clones to test it.
Popping a Shadow Clone chopped a guy's chakra straight in half.
Kakashi's chakra reserves were famously bottlenecked by his non-native Sharingan.
The Hashirama cells had patched out the Mangekyō's blindness penalty and slightly buffed his chakra, but it still wasn't nearly enough to spam clones and Kamui.
The masked man didn't give a damn about the technical details.
He just knew Kakashi could now toss things into the Kamui dimension and yank them back out.
That meant Kamui's dimension was no longer his exclusive, private vault.
It had officially been downgraded into a shared team inventory!
The things he stored inside were no longer safe.
But on the flip side, this also meant he could finally enact his petty revenge on Kakashi.
Even if this was just a lucid dream, he was absolutely going to test it out.
'Bring it on, Kakashi!'
...
Somewhere in the bowels of Amegakure, standing inside a massive sewer pipeline, the masked man cranked open a heavy valve.
As the metal groaned and released, a literal tsunami of foul, yellow waves surged out from the pipe ahead.
"Kakashi, don't think you're the only one who knows how to play dirty!"
Kamui!
Space violently twisted.
Countless gallons of yellow sewage began pouring straight into the masked man's eye dimension.
Unfortunately, thanks to the Sharingan's extraordinary high-definition vision, the masked man caught every single disgusting detail with absolute, crystal-clear perfection.
At that exact moment, a horrifying realization hit him.
This... this might not actually be a dream after all.
What kind of dream rendered sewage with such hyper-realistic clarity?
Wait!
If this wasn't a dream, then the intel about his grandmother?
No—
'GRANDMAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!'