Chapter 029: Your Tsukuyomi Is Quite Impressive, But You Should Enjoy It Yourself

“Mangekyō Sharingan!”
Itachi felt a surge of confidence, his blood-red eyes fixed intently on Naruto.
The very instant Naruto met those eyes, he sensed a tremendous force pressing into his mind, as if some invisible power was trying to cloud his senses.
“Mental assault? Hallucination? Intriguing,” Naruto remarked.
In the next moment, he found himself nailed to a cross.
Looking up, he saw that the sky had turned crimson.
Looking down, the earth below was pitch black.
Between heaven and earth, countless steel towers rose like cold yet burning gravestones.
At the base of the cross was a heap of firewood.
He, the cross, and the wood were all placed atop a high platform of rammed earth.
Beneath the platform, a faceless multitude stood, fists raised, chanting indistinct slogans.
Their movements and words, even their forms, were crude and rough.
Yet it was this very crudity that proved an excellent source of psychic contamination—monotonous, dull, and terrifying.
“So, you intend to burn me at the stake in this mental realm?”
Naruto analyzed in a low voice:
“You wish to conjure the illusion of fire, to trick my subconscious—then my body would show real burns?”
“These hallucinations serve to pollute my mind, disrupting me, weakening my resistance?”
“If the illusion is convincing enough, perhaps the heat and smoke will suffocate me, and my heart and lungs will fail even in reality.”
“A rather impressive mental assault.”
Naruto clicked his tongue in admiration.
Before his words had faded, Itachi’s voice sounded at his ear.
“A sharp analysis, but I have no such plan.”
Itachi appeared abruptly beside the cross. His appearance had changed—he now wore a long black sackcloth robe, a tall black pointed hat perched upon his head, looking every part the executioner.
No, in this realm, he was the executioner.
“This is the Tsukuyomi realm, an illusion space shaped entirely by my will.”
He gripped a knife and drove it hard into Naruto’s body.
Naruto let out a wild yell.
Itachi couldn’t help but feel something was off—Naruto’s scream sounded almost excited, almost as though he were acting.

Could something be wrong with this Jinchūriki?
But there was no time to ponder.
Here, in Tsukuyomi, what could possibly escape his control?
If you didn’t want to suffer, you simply had to avoid being caught in the technique from the start.
“Time, pain, perception—everything here is mine to command.”
As he stabbed Naruto again and again, Itachi’s voice was cool and detached:
“You will spend an unforgettable seventy-two hours here. For those seventy-two hours, I shall crucify you without pause.”
Dozens of stabs later, Naruto was pierced and torn apart on the cross. Then, before him, another scene identical as a mirror appeared.
“Now, the first second has just passed,” Itachi said. “In the next second, your pain will double. And in the following second, it will double again.”
As he spoke, two Itachis drove their blades into Naruto together.
Seconds ticked by. Across the endless black earth, among the steel towers, countless Narutos were being executed, each with an Itachi as executioner.
Itachi felt exhausted beyond belief.
He could barely sustain the illusion any longer.
He had intended to subject Naruto to seventy-two hours of torment, but not even a minute had passed, and his chakra and mental energy were almost depleted.
At this point, it was more a mutual suffering than an execution.
As he kept stabbing, Itachi could not ignore the strangeness of the scene.
The sensation against his hand was real, Naruto’s screams were real, and yet—why did it all feel staged?
Moreover, why did every Naruto scream and grimace in precisely the same way?
Most crucially, Itachi realized he had seen Naruto’s screams and wounds countless times already.
It was as if, with every passing second, Naruto’s reactions never changed—they were exactly the same, over and over.
Wait—what was going on?
This wasn’t what he’d intended!
He had meant to craft a simple illusion: just the cross, the suffering Naruto, and himself as executioner.
There shouldn’t have been a black earth, a red sky, or those endless steel towers.
Even his black robe and the firewood at the foot of the cross had never been part of his design!
At some point, the indistinct crowd beneath the platform had gained clarity.
Now, every face was vivid, twisted and expressive, down to the minute details—Itachi could see a blade of chive wedged in the teeth of the man closest to him!

Even their slogans were now all different, each tone unique!
But he had never intended to create these people, let alone give them such lifelike detail!
“This is bad! A genjutsu attack! I’ve been caught!”
Cold sweat broke out all over him.
“Well, you finally noticed.”
From within the pile of firewood, a log twisted and writhed until it took on Naruto’s shape.
Naruto climbed out with a leisurely air, strolling up to Itachi as if nothing were amiss.
The same scene unfolded at every execution scaffold all around.
When the wood began to twist, Itachi felt the world spin, his eyes burning and swollen, his temples pounding in agony.
At last, his vision went black and he collapsed onto the platform.
When consciousness returned, he was the one nailed to the cross.
Now, Naruto stood below as the executioner.
Countless scaffolds still surrounded them, with endless onlookers pressing close.
“You have quite the talent for illusions. Is it those eyes of yours?”
Naruto asked.
Itachi lowered his head and sighed. “Yes, it’s the Mangekyō Sharingan’s innate power. The technique is called Tsukuyomi.”
“Oh—Tsukuyomi, the god who governs the moon and the night.” Naruto nodded in appraisal. “See the moon, think of night, and men drift into dreams. An illusion themed on sleep. Fascinating.”
As a killing machine with little patience for philosophy, Itachi brushed this aside and asked,
“How did I lose?”
“Your failure was simple: a lack of information.”
Naruto shrugged. “You didn’t know the strength of my mind, nor that my mastery of spiritual control surpassed your own. So you rushed into a mental assault, and it’s only natural you were countered.”
“When did it start?” Itachi asked, eyes wide.
“I countered you from the very beginning,” Naruto replied. “Remember what I said at the start? That was me fighting back.”
Cold sweat beaded on Itachi’s brow.
Naruto went on,
“You thought those words were meaningless? I was deliberately misleading you, making you believe you intended to burn me at the stake. If you had, I would have conjured even more vivid details—made you watch every inch of flesh blacken and char, all with your own energy, of course.”
“Too bad you didn’t fall for it and switched to stabbing instead. So I had to improvise, for instance, by perfecting the faces of the crowd below.” Naruto waved a hand, inviting Itachi to admire his work.