"Urgh!"
Boruto groaned in pain. Something had wrapped tightly around his body and was squeezing him.
He struggled with all his might, tearing at the tough, strangely patterned material around him. It felt like bark.
At last, Boruto ripped open a gap and fought to poke his head out.
The sight before him froze his blood!
He was inside a cocoon of wood. Beneath his feet ran rough, tangled veins like the roots of an enormous tree.
And before him stood a colossal tree that stretched from earth to sky, vast beyond imagination!
Its trunk was a tangle of dark red and black, its surface covered in raised patterns resembling blood vessels and nerves.
Most horrifying of all, countless "human cocoons" hung densely from its innumerable branches, which reached in every direction like demonic claws!
The figures were encased in a translucent substance like resin or cocoon shell. Their human forms were barely visible: men and women, young and old, their expressions peaceful, pained, or blank. They hung there without a sound, like fruit put away in storage.
Boruto looked up in terror. A gigantic Nine-Tomoe Moon filled the sky, casting an ominous blood-red light over the land.
Then his gaze followed the trunk upward to the very top of its crown. Several indistinct figures struck him like lightning, nearly stopping his breath!
Naruto Uzumaki, Sasuke Uchiha, Haruno Sakura, and Kakashi Hatake hung from the top of the God Tree.
"Dad?! Uncle Sasuke?! Aunt Sakura?! Grandpa Kakashi?!" Boruto screamed.
"Is this the legendary Infinite Tsukuyomi?! Have I really been living in a world of illusion all along?"
"Were the past dozen years of my life—everything I experienced, everything I felt—all fake? Was it all a prewritten program?!"
Bone-deep cold and despair seized him.
If even his parents, teachers, and friends