Uchiha Puppet Master, Starting from One Piece

Chapter 242 Miraculous Power

Im stepped back and his right foot landed firmly on the ground.

That half-step distance was less than thirty centimeters, but for someone who had never retreated in seven hundred years, the significance of those thirty centimeters was far clearer than any words could express.

Bai Yu's eyes, a blend of red and gold, lit up the moment Im retreated.

It's not about emitting light; it's the kind of brightness that comes from gazing at a cloud bathed in the glow of the setting sun. The cloud itself doesn't emit light, but your eyes will tell you that the cloud is brighter than the sun.

Im's body completed the next action before the visual signal reached his brain.

His right hand shot forward from his waist. This time, instead of folding space or rewriting its definition, a crack appeared in his palm. What flowed out of the crack was not blood or light, but a completely black substance, devoid of any reflection, like those regions in the universe where even light cannot escape.

The substance formed a sphere less than ten centimeters in diameter in front of Im's palm.

The instant the sphere exists, everything within a radius of several hundred meters centered on it begins to move toward it.

It wasn't that we were sucked in; it was that space itself was collapsing towards that sphere.

Bai Yu's body disappeared the instant the sphere appeared. It wasn't teleportation or a substitution technique; rather, his body jumped directly out of the collapsed space, like lifting a point on a piece of paper from a two-dimensional plane and placing it on another point in three-dimensional space.

He appeared fifty meters directly above Im's head.

Im looked up.

Bai Yu pointed his right index finger at Im, and a tiny black dot of light, the size of a pinhead, was flashing on the tip of his finger.

The point of light flickered.

A thin black line shot out from Bai Yu's fingertip. The line was thinner than a strand of hair, but when it passed through the air, it left a mark that looked like it had been branded with a hot iron. On either side of the mark, the air itself emitted a sharp, tearing whistling sound.

Im did not dodge.

He pinched his left thumb and forefinger together, and then, just as the thin black line was about to hit his forehead, he gently pinched it as if he were holding a thread.

The thin black line stopped in front of his fingertips, not because it was blocked or bounced off, but because the line was held between Im's two fingers, like a snake being pinched at its vital point. The power of the entire line lost its direction in that instant.

Im gently rubbed his fingers together.

The thin black thread transformed into countless tiny black particles at his fingertips, which floated in the air for less than a tenth of a second before dissipating completely.

"I don't know what it is, but this kind of thing is useless to me."

Im's voice was completely flat, but his eyes, those eyes that had never shown any curiosity towards anyone in the past seven hundred years, were staring at Bai Yu's Rinnegan, which was somewhere between red and gold.

Bai Yu did not respond to Im's words.

Im's Observation Haki caught an extremely strange signal in that instant.

Bai Yu's presence was fragmented in his perception.

It wasn't a white feather, not a clone, not an illusion, but rather the very concept of the white feather's existence was dismantled in his perception into countless unrelated fragments of information. Each white feather pointed to a different location, each white feather possessed the full power of a white feather, and each fragment was simultaneously attacking him.

"Wheel Graveyard - Frontier!"

Im drew a circle around his body with his right hand.

The circled area was like a folded sheet of paper with multiple layers, each layer acting as a wall between Im and the attacks.

But Bai Yu's attack pierced through those multiple layers of space.

It wasn't that they broke through or bypassed the attack; rather, the moment those attacks touched the first layer of space, it was as if, when you fold a piece of paper with an arrow drawn on it, the arrow would appear on every layer of the paper simultaneously. Every attack from Bai Yu appeared simultaneously on every level of the multiple layers of space.

Im's body revealed something he had never shown in seven hundred years.

His body began to grow larger.

It wasn't a transformation like a magic trick where one form changes into another; rather, it was as if his body was being stretched upwards from the top of his head by an invisible giant hand, growing upwards from his height of less than a few meters.

Ten meters, twenty meters, fifty meters, one hundred meters.

His body transformed into a 100-meter-tall giant in less than a second.

His appearance remained unchanged; he was still Im, with the same expressionless face and the same black robe. However, when his body was magnified to a hundred meters, the sense of oppression was no longer that of a person standing there, but rather that of a mountain standing there.

Bai Yu's body also changed at that moment.

Black chakra surged from his body.

That wasn't the ordinary purple of Susanoo, but a color that was deeper and brighter than black, with countless golden patterns flowing on a black background.

The golden patterns outlined the shape of a skeleton around Bai Yu's body.

Muscles grew rapidly from the skeleton, and the surface of the muscles was covered with armor.

A Susanoo 100 meters tall was formed in less than a second.

Im looked down at Susanoo, which was the same height as him.

Beneath the Susanoo's mask, Shiraha's eyes pierced through the Susanoo's defenses, staring directly at Im. His Rinnegan, a blend of red and gold, showed no emotion.

Im clenched his right fist.

His fist was covered with a black substance that resembled both flame and smoke. This substance churned on the surface of his fist, and each churn caused a visible distortion in the surrounding space.

The punch wasn't fast, but along its path, space shattered into countless fragments, like a pane of glass struck by a stone, which then swirled and scattered in the air.

Susanoo raised his left arm, the armor on it meeting Im's fist head-on.

The moment their gauntlets clashed, the ground of the entire battlefield seemed to be slapped by an invisible giant hand, and the ground within a 500-meter radius of the two men sank more than ten meters in an instant.

A massive shockwave spread outwards. Where the shockwave passed, the air was no longer air, but an invisible wall that pushed everything on the ground forward. Rocks, frozen soil, and even huge rocks weighing hundreds of tons were rolled up like pieces of paper by the shockwave.

However, Susanoo's armor did not break.

The moment the black substance on Im's fist came into contact with the Susanoo armor, it emitted a sharp sound, like the simultaneous chirping of countless insects, as if water had met a red-hot iron plate.

The black substance did not penetrate Susanoo's defenses, nor did it leave any mark on the armor surface.

Im's brow twitched.

This was the first time in seven hundred years that he had frowned during a battle.

The Susanoo's right hand gripped the hilt of the sword at its waist the instant Im frowned.

This strike contained pure, compressed chakra, so concentrated that it no longer appeared as black light to the naked eye, but as a black crack.

The blade slashed from Im's left shoulder to his right waist.

As the blade slashed down, Im made a movement, shifting his body less than half a meter to the right. In that short movement, his position underwent a spatial fold, folding his body from directly beneath the blade to the side of it.

But the trajectory of the blade changed the instant Im completed the spatial folding.

It wasn't that the direction changed, but rather that Bai Yu's Rinnegan had already predicted all of Im's possible movements before Im made the spatial folding. The trajectory of this slash was not a straight line, but a probability cloud that existed simultaneously in all possible directions. No matter which direction Im moved in, no matter how many times he folded space, this blade would appear at the end of his movement.

Im's left shoulder was grazed by the blade.

The blade did not touch Im's body or his robes, but rather the invisible protective force on the surface of Im's body.

The moment they made contact, the protective force on Im's shoulder emitted a sound like glass being slowly crushed.

It wasn't a single cut; rather, under the continuous pressure of the blade, the protective force extended countless fine cracks from the point of contact outwards. The cracks spread so slowly within Im's protective force that Im could clearly see the direction in which each crack grew.

But just as the crack was about to penetrate the entire protective layer, the blade's trajectory was exhausted.

Susanoo sheathed his sword.

Im looked down at the cracks on his left shoulder that were slowly healing.

The crack healed more than ten times slower than the pinhead-sized gash on his wrist.

Im knew exactly what this meant.

When faced with a full-force strike from Susanoo, his protective power recovered at a rate of 90%.

Im raised his head and looked at the white feathers under the Susanoo's mask.

"It can also be imbued with Conqueror's Haki?"

The emotion in his eyes was no longer confusion, no longer interest, but a more primal emotion, closer to biological instinct.

It wasn't fear; it was Im's body telling him that the danger level of this opponent had been raised to a level he hadn't set in seven hundred years.

Im clasped his hands together in front of him.

Between the entwined hands, the black sphere that did not reflect any light reappeared.

But this time the sphere is not ten centimeters or one meter, but a huge dark sphere with a diameter of over thirty meters.

Inside the sphere, the rules of space were rewritten by Im.

Within that sphere, not all directions point to Im's palm; rather, all concepts, all definitions, all the fundamental categories you use to understand the world are rewritten into something entirely different.

Susanoo and Shiraha were swallowed by that sphere.

Im watched as the sphere engulfed Susanoo, his hands still in that entwined position.

Inside the sphere, Susanoo vanished into absolute darkness the instant it was swallowed up.

one second.

two seconds.

three seconds.

A slight ripple appeared on the surface of the sphere.

Im's ten intertwined fingers trembled violently the instant the fluctuation appeared.

The ripples on the surface of the sphere are getting bigger and bigger.

At the center of the fluctuation, a ray of light shone through the interior of the sphere.

It's like the color of the sun before dawn, when most of it is obscured by the horizon, with only a thin line of light showing at the edge.

Starting from that point of light, the sphere exploded like a balloon ignited from the inside.

Susanoo stood unharmed at the center of the exploded sphere.

The surface of Susanoo is covered with a layer of light that is exactly the same color as the white feather iris, somewhere between red and gold.

The light seemed alive, flowing across the surface of Susanoo's armor, leaving a pattern on the armor with each flow that was exactly the same as the White Feather Intestine Tube pattern.

Im raised his right hand, his palm aimed at Susanoo's mask.

In the center of his palm, the crack split open again, but this time what flowed out was not black matter, but a purer substance, devoid of any attributes, color, or form.

That was the embodiment of all the negative emotions that Im had accumulated in the process of ruling this world over the past seven hundred years.

That power surged toward Susanoo.

The red-gold light on the surface of Susanoo reacted to that power. The light no longer flowed on the surface of the armor, but instead condensed like a shield in front of Susanoo into a wall made entirely of that red-gold light.

Im's power struck the wall of light.

There was no sound, no shockwave, and no visual impact.

The light wall of Susanoo developed fine cracks under this impact.

But the crack did not continue to widen, because Shiroba under the Susanoo mask closed his eyes for a moment, and when he opened them again, Shiroba stretched out his palm toward Im's power.

The nothingness that Im had existed for seven hundred years, accumulated for seven hundred years, and condensed for seven hundred years was devoured by the power of the Rinnegan in a greedy, hungry, and insatiable way.

The vortex was devouring things faster and faster, so fast that Im could no longer keep up with the speed at which he was releasing his power.

The crack in the center of Im's palm closed automatically shortly after the devouring began.

Im looked down at his clasped hands, then looked up at Uchiha Shiraha.

For the first time, his eyes held that sense of wisdom he thought he had lost seven hundred years ago.

He needs to reassess this opponent.

Im took a step back.

Im's body sensed something in an instant; his Observation Haki was frantically warning him, and all the combat instincts his body had accumulated over the past seven hundred years were telling him the same message.

The moment Im received that message, his body made the biggest evasive maneuver in seven hundred years.

The black dot on Bai Yu's fingertip transformed into a line the instant Im completed all these movements, stopping in front of Im's head.

The tip of the thread touched the robe on Im's chest, and the mark on the robe that the thread touched disappeared instantly, revealing the skin on Im's chest.

Im looked down at the skin on his chest, at the spot where the tip of the thread had touched. The invisible protective layer was being peeled away bit by bit by the black spinning thing at a visible speed.