Uchiha Puppet Master, Starting from One Piece

Chapter 241 Rinnegan

"Hmm?"

Im's curious voice came from behind.

His voice wasn't loud, but it covered the entire battlefield the moment it was uttered.

"Your eyes look really nice—"

Bai Yu raised his head and looked at Im. At this moment, his eyes were a bright, almost blinding red. In the center of his red iris was a black pattern composed of three concentric circles. Inside the three concentric circles were three magatama, each of which was slowly rotating. The rotation was so slow that you could clearly see the trajectory of each magatama, yet so fast that your eyes could not establish any stable frame of reference between them.

The Sharingan with tomoe.

This is not an ordinary Sharingan, nor is it the Sharingan that any known member of the Uchiha clan has ever awakened. Rather, it is the Rinnegan with tomoe, similar to that of Kaguya Otsutsuki.

The tomoe in the Rinnegan began to spin at high speed, faster than the naked eye could perceive, faster than Observation Haki could detect, so fast that in Im's vision the three tomoe were no longer three separate tomoe, but had become a complete, continuous, high-speed rotating ring.

In the center of the circle, a brand new pattern emerged.

It wasn't any known pattern of the Mangekyou Sharingan; it was a pattern that Im had never seen before in his seven hundred years of life. The pattern was a personification of an infinite cycle in which three tomoe devoured each other, merged with each other, and constantly gave birth to new tomoe in the gaps between devouring and merging.

Im's eyes met those eyes.

His expression remained unchanged, but his eyes did.

The change in his eyes was so subtle that only someone who had followed him for hundreds of years and learned to read every micro-expression of Im through countless life-and-death experiences could have noticed it.

That change is called alertness.

Im raised his right hand.

His movements were so slow that any ordinary person would find them harmless; so slow that a turtle could crawl across his wrist while he raised his right hand; so slow that everyone on the battlefield could see every minute angle change in the movement of each of his finger joints.

But his right hand disappeared halfway up.

It didn't disappear from sight, nor was it blocked by something; rather, his right hand, which had been raised halfway, appeared directly five centimeters in front of Bai Yu's chest.

The space was folded.

It wasn't compressed, nor was it distorted; rather, it was folded in a way that Im couldn't comprehend at all, as if the space in front of him had been folded in half.

The states of "raising the right hand" and "the right hand appearing in front of Bai Yu's chest" are folded into the same point in time.

Bai Yu's body shifted half an inch to the right in that instant.

Half an inch.

Im's right hand swept across Bai Yu's chest, his fingertips brushing against the fabric of Bai Yu's clothes. The fabric disappeared the moment it was brushed against, not because it was torn or burned, but because it went from being to not being being, as if it had never been woven into cloth, never been sewn into clothes, and never existed in this world.

But at the same instant that Im's right hand swept across his chest, Bai Yu's left index finger touched Im's right wrist.

It was not an attack.

It is contact.

For a fleeting moment, Bai Yu's index finger and Im's right wrist made contact with each other over a fraction of a square centimeter.

The contact surface produced a strange visual effect the moment it appeared.

Centered on the point of contact, an extremely fine ripple appeared in the surrounding space, like the ripples created when you throw a pebble into a completely still body of water.

Im's body froze for a moment.

It wasn't that he was frozen or controlled, but rather that his brain received a piece of information that he couldn't process immediately.

On his right wrist, where Bai Yu's index finger touched, the invisible, unseen force that had protected him from all harm for the past seven hundred years—a force he himself was unaware of—that had covered his skin, now had a pinhead-sized notch at the spot where Bai Yu's index finger touched.

gap.

Im looked down at his wrist.

The tiny, pinhead-sized gap healed visibly under his gaze, returning to its original state in less than a tenth of a second, as if the gap had never existed.

But Im saw it.

"interesting."

Im's voice rang out again.

This time, his voice lacked the casual curiosity of before, and contained something more solemn and closer to acceptance.

That thing wasn't anger, nor was it murderous intent; it was an emotion that hadn't appeared in Im's dictionary for a long time.

That is, interest in the true sense.

What did you just do?

Bai Yu did not answer.

His Rinnegan began its second transformation the moment Im asked that question. The eerie kaleidoscope pattern in his red iris began to spin, its speed decreasing from so fast as to be imperceptible to the naked eye, to so slow that you could barely feel it spinning. But the visual effect of that slow spin was far more unsettling than seeing any rapidly spinning object, because your brain would automatically fill in the gaps in information that your eyes hadn't caught. And each piece of information your brain filled in was more insane, more distorted, and more incompatible with anyone's perception than the last.

Im's consciousness received a series of images in that instant.

It wasn't that he was attacked, nor that his senses were disturbed, but rather that a set of images suddenly appeared in his consciousness that he had never experienced before, yet were so real that he couldn't deny them.

In the image, his body is cleaved in two from the top of his head by a huge black blade, cleanly splitting him in two from his left shoulder to his right waist.

The two halves of his body remained suspended in the air for less than a fraction of a second. Then, starting from the cut, his body, like a shattered mirror, began to crack outwards from the line of the split. Before he could react, the cracks had spread all over his body. In that instant, his entire body shattered into countless fragments, each reflecting his expressionless face.

Im's pupils contracted slightly for a moment.

Then the black blade slashed down from his right side, the edge grazing his clothes and leaving a crack more than a hundred meters deep in the ground behind him, as if the earth had been torn open by an invisible giant hand.

On both sides of the crack, all the rocks, permafrost, and even the rock layers hundreds of meters below the permafrost that were grazed by that blade turned into a gray, powdery substance the moment the blade touched them.

They weren't cut apart, nor were they pulverized; rather, their existence was erased from that coordinate in this world.

Im stared at the crack.

His gaze lingered on the crack for a full second before turning to Bai Yu.

"That's really impressive."

His voice carried an emotion he hadn't experienced in centuries.

That feeling is called confusion.

For seven hundred years, no attack has been able to touch his body.

For seven hundred years, no power has been able to penetrate that layer of strength that he himself has forgotten exists, yet which has indeed been protecting his skin.

But what he saw in that future was that when the black blade cleaved through his body, the protective force against him did nothing.

It wasn't that it was broken or penetrated; rather, that layer of power vanished the instant it came into contact with the blade, as if it had never existed in the first place.

What surprised the Knights of God even more was that the white feather they had sensed earlier was a powerful creature whose presence could still be detected using Observation Haki.

The white feather they perceived at this moment was something that did not exist in their Observation Haki perception at all, but was definitely standing there in their field of vision, like a ghost.

"Your abilities deserve my serious attention."

As Bai Yu spoke, he drew his Zanpakuto.

"Then I'm going to get serious now."

Im nodded in agreement.

It wasn't that he acknowledged Bai Yu's strength or ability, but rather that he recognized Bai Yu as "an opponent worthy of his serious consideration."

This recognition has been given to only three people in the past seven hundred years.

Im raised his right hand again.

This time, his right hand did not disappear, nor did it fold space, nor did it appear in front of Bai Yu in any strange way.

This time, he simply raised his right hand and gently pushed it towards Bai Yu.

The pushing motion was extremely simple, so simple that any ordinary person who didn't know anything about combat could imitate it exactly. It was so simple that Bai Yu's Observation Haki had already predicted Im's entire trajectory before Im made that move. It was so simple that Bai Yu's body had already reacted to avoid Im before he even saw his movement.

But in the instant Bai Yu's body reacted, it discovered something.

It's not that his body can't move.

It wasn't that his body was being controlled by something.

Instead, the entire space he was in transformed into a place he didn't recognize the moment he was about to move.

It wasn't that the space was changed, nor that he was moved to another place, but rather that the definition of this space was rewritten in that instant.

The previous space was a space where you could move left, right, forward, backward, and upward.

The space for downward movement.

Now, after Im made that "push" motion, this space has become a space where all directions point towards Im's palm.

Bai Yu's body began to move toward Im's palm in that instant.

It was not attracted there, nor was it pulled there, nor was it acted upon by any known gravitational, magnetic, or other physical forces.

Rather, it's because in this redefined space, the action of moving towards Im's palm is equivalent to remaining still in the previous space.

In other words, if Bai Yu wanted to remain still in this space, he would need to move away from Im's palm. However, the concept of "away from Im's palm" does not exist in this space.

Because in the definition of this space, all directions, after complex mathematical transformations, ultimately point to the same point: Im's palm.

After moving about half a meter, a light flashed in Bai Yu's Rinnegan pupils.

This is because his Rinnegan displayed a higher level of ability, closer to the level of the Sage of Six Paths, that he had never used since he activated the Rinnegan and was unaware that he could use it.

His body stopped moving.

It wasn't that he was blocked by some force, nor that he released some ability to negate Im's ability; rather, his body, in his own definition, became an absolutely static existence.

Absolute stillness means that his body's position in the universe is fixed at that coordinate, unaffected by any force, unaffected by any spatial definition, and unaffected by any rewriting of rules. Even if the universe itself is expanding, contracting, being destroyed, or being reborn, his body will remain motionless at that coordinate.

Im's push continues.

The absolute stillness of the white feathers remained.

A brief stalemate ensued between the two.

The stalemate lasted for about three seconds.

Three seconds later, a very subtle curve appeared at the corner of Im's mouth.

"Amazing eyes, amazing power —"

"Is that so?"

Bai Yu's body suddenly stood three meters behind Im, and the "Bai Yu" that was fixed in space turned into a cloud of white smoke as soon as Bai Yu said those words. The smoke dissipated in the air at an extremely fast speed, so fast that the shape of the smoke did not have time to form any recognizable pattern before it completely merged into the surrounding air.

Substitute technique.

It is a kind of ninjutsu that evolved from the most basic ninjutsu in the Naruto world, but in Bai Yu's hands it has evolved to the point that even Im's Observation Haki cannot distinguish it.

Im did not turn around.

At this moment, Bai Yu's Rinnegan was finally fully activated.

This was created after his Rinnegan completely fused with the Mangekyou Sharingan, which evolved from the Sharingan; all his abilities resided in those two Rinnegan.

The Rinnegan pattern in his eyes changed.

The previous Rinnegan was the purple-tinged Rinnegan of the Sage of Six Paths.

The color of his eyes is no longer the light purple of the Rinnegan, but a color unique to Uchiha Hakuba.

It's not red, not gold, but a color between red and gold, like the sun just before dawn, half-hidden by the horizon, with only a sliver of light showing at its edge.

The moment Im saw those eyes, his body made a movement he had never made in seven hundred years.

His right foot moved back half a step.

He felt threatened.