No sooner had Six Paths Madara finished speaking than the entire God Tree began to tremble violently.
Its gnarled grayish-white roots writhed madly, while dark golden patterns across its bark lit up one after another like countless opening eyes.
The crimson moonlight that had originally covered only the Spirit Tamer Great Wall now spread frantically inland across Great Xia, with the God Tree as its origin.
Everywhere the tide of light passed, the Gobi's gravel was dyed an eerie dark red.
The distant mountains looked as though they had been soaked in blood, and even the clouds drifting across the horizon turned pale red.
"What is going on?!" someone on the Spirit Tamer Great Wall cried out.
"This is bad—the moonlight's range is expanding!!" someone pointed into the distance.
"Someone stop Senior Xia Yuan's clone! Otherwise, all of Great Xia will fall into an illusion!"
In just a short while, the moonlight had already swept over three small border cities, shrouding their entire urban areas in still red light.
An old woman soothing a child to sleep felt her eyelids grow heavy. The next second, roots reaching through the window wrapped her into a cocoon and hung her beneath the roots.
A border guard on night watch had barely finished yawning before roots coiled around him, leaving him suspended in midair with a dreamy smile on his face.
The moonlight showed no sign of stopping and continued to spread.
First, it flooded over the Gobi sands, dyeing the rolling dunes blood-red, then crossed vast stretches of farmland.
After that came towns with curling cooking smoke. Pedestrians, shop owners, and office drones working overtime all stopped moving one after another.
Rinnegan-like patterns appeared in their vacant eyes. Then, they smiled blissfully as roots wrapped around them and hung them upside down.