Uchiha Puppet Master, Starting from One Piece.

It's not that it got stronger.

They're serious.

The black dragon's head slowly turned, its eye sockets, devoid of pupils but containing only two pulsating dark red orbs, sweeping from Mihawk to Jabba, from Jabba to Shanks, and finally settling on Bai Yu.

Bai Yu stood at the very front of everyone.

His hands hung naturally at his sides, his body stood straight, and his Rinnegan calmly gazed back at the light in those dark red eye sockets.

A man and a dragon staring at each other.

This scene captivated those observing the battlefield from dozens of miles away.

Dozens of miles away.

On the highest watchtower at the border of the Giant Kingdom, two figures stood side by side.

Their height was particularly striking in the land of giants, where the average height was over twenty meters, because they were not giants; they were human, members of the Knights of God from the Holy Land of Mary Geoise.

The person on the left was wearing a well-tailored long black coat. The collar and cuffs of the coat were embroidered with intricate and outrageous heraldic patterns in gold thread. These heraldic patterns were not decorations; each herald represented a kingdom destroyed by the Knights of God or a criminal executed by them. There were so many heraldry patterns that they stretched from the collar of the coat all the way to the hem.

He wore a pure white mask on his face. The mask had no openings for facial features, only an extremely smooth white curved surface. The white was not the white of paint or pigment.

These two people were observers sent by the Knights of God.

They observed the battlefield situation in real time and transmitted all intelligence back to the Flower Garden in Mary Geoise via special video Den Den Mushi (snail telephones).

Did you see that?

Sylvie's voice came from behind the mask, a voice as calm as if she were asking about the weather, but her grey-blue eyes betrayed her. Her pupils trembled slightly for a moment, a physiological reaction that cannot be controlled by will when faced with a scene beyond the scope of human cognition.

"I saw it."

Cassius's voice was flat, but his hand had unconsciously gripped the hilt of the knife at his waist. The moment his fingers touched the hilt, he felt something long-lost, something he hadn't felt for many years.

That kind of thing is called uncertainty.

He didn't know how long he could last if he stood opposite that guy, facing that repulsive field.

It'll probably be used as a speed bump.

"Among the flowers."

"A terrifying dragon has been confirmed to have appeared in the land of giants, Elbaf."

Cassius's voice remained flat and monotone, as if he were reading an official document.

"Its state is active, not dormant, not semi-active, but fully active with complete combat capabilities."

The Den Den Mushi's eyes flashed, and the interwoven dark red and gold light caused a brief signal interruption during the flash. The interruption lasted only a fraction of a second, but this fraction of a second was an anomaly that had never occurred in the highest priority signal channel.

The signal was restored after a fraction of a second.

"Continue." The neutral voice came from the Den Den Mushi, its tone unchanged from before, but Cassius gleaned some information from that fraction of a second of interruption.

The people at the Flower Pavilion are still processing this news.

Even the Five Elders needed time to process this news.

As the image appeared, the Den Den Mushi's eyes lit up instantly, not because of a signal problem, but because Hanama had actively increased the power output of the signal channel after hearing those words, in order to obtain a higher resolution image.

Chapter 237 Im, Attack

A few seconds later, a voice came from the Den Den Mushi. Cassius heard a male voice with an indescribable, heavy quality.

That was the voice of one of the Five Elders.

"Zoom in on the boy's image, make sure you don't miss a single frame."

Cassius's fingers touched multiple texture nodes on the Den Den Mushi's shell in succession. Each touch triggered the Den Den Mushi to re-encode and re-transmit the stored image. The encoding precision was higher and higher each time, and the amount of data transmitted was larger and larger each time.

After the images were transmitted at the highest resolution, silence fell over the other side of the flower room once again.

This silence lasted longer than the last.

So long that Cassius began to wonder if he should say something to break the silence.

But his intuition told him not to speak.

While those at the pinnacle of world power are pondering, any extra syllable is irresponsible towards one's own life.

After an unknown period of silence, a voice came from the Den Den Mushi.

This time, it wasn't one of the Five Elders who spoke, but one that Vader Cassius had never heard before through a Den Den Mushi, yet he recognized the voice from just one syllable. Although the voice changed, the tone remained the same.

The voice was neither old nor young, neither strong nor weak; it had no descriptive features whatsoever. It was simply a voice, a pure, attribute-free voice that seemed to emanate from the world itself.

"Send the video again."

"Ok."

Cassius barely realized he had uttered those two words, because his body had already manipulated the Den Den Mushi before his brain gave the order, and the speed and accuracy of that manipulation felt unfamiliar even to himself.

The image was transmitted again with higher precision, slower speed, and a more complete color space.

This time, the scene was played repeatedly among the flowers countless times.

Each time it was played, Cassius could sense an invisible and intangible change in the air on the other side of the flower field through the feedback signal of the Den Den Mushi. That change was not a change in temperature, not a change in air pressure, not a change in any physical quantity, but a more fundamental change that existed at the conceptual level.

It's as if something has been awakened in the most hidden corner of this world.

Mary Geoise.

Among the flowers.

The room with the most concentrated power in the world.

The room was astonishingly large, with an incredibly high ceiling. The floor was covered with a carpet woven from the hair of some extinct giant creature, looted from a kingdom that had been erased from the map by the World Government. The carpet was a deep purple color that had no counterpart in nature, and under the light, it would shimmer with a flowing, liquid-metal-like luster.

Five huge portraits hung on the walls of the room.

Deep within the flowers, behind the five enormous portraits, lies a plain white wall devoid of any decoration.

The wall was an unnaturally white color, so white that it made it impossible for the eyes to focus. Anyone who stared at that wall for more than three seconds would experience a strong sense of dizziness, feeling as if they were gazing at a boundless, empty void.

At this moment, all five elders were present.

The five of them stood in the center of the flowers, forming a semi-circle, with all eyes focused on a spot below the white wall.

There is a throne in that position.

The throne's design is unlike any other piece of furniture in the room. It is not made of gold, nor is it inlaid with gemstones. It could not have been designed and manufactured by any craftsman or artist, because the materials and methods used to make this throne do not exist in any records of this world.

The throne is entirely black, not painted with black paint, but the material itself is pure black, absorbing all light and reflecting no wavelength of light.

A person sat on the throne.

No, it's not a person sitting there; it's an entity that appears on the throne in a sitting posture, because whether that entity is actually human is itself an unanswerable question.

Im.

The most secretive and supreme being in this world, a being that even the Five Elders must kneel before.

Among the five elders, the one standing in front was a tall old man with a white beard, wearing a white suit.

He took a step forward, his steps were light, but as he did, visible wrinkles appeared on the deep purple carpet of the ground among the flowers. The wrinkles spread out in all directions from his toes, like ripples created by a pebble thrown into a calm lake.

Jaigolusia Satan, the holder of the identity of the God of Scientific Defense among the Five Elders, has power so great that he can mobilize all the military forces under the World Government with just a thought. However, the way he is behaving in front of Im is like a child instinctively retreating when facing a being he cannot understand, who is both awe-inspiring and fearful of.

"Lord Im."

Satan's voice carried a tension he tried to conceal but could not. It was not because he had done anything wrong, but because he sensed a rare emotion in Im's silence.

"Your strength towards this young man..."

"It's not that boy."

Im's voice came from under the hood.

The sound wasn't loud, but each word landed on the ground between the flowers like a lead ball hitting glass, creating a shattering, numbing sensation in the eardrums.

Satan frowned slightly, a very small frown, but the other four Elders present noticed it, as their attention was entirely focused on the conversation between Satan and Im, and no detail could escape their notice.

"It's not that boy."

Im repeated it.

“It’s his eyes, those special eyes, he seems to come from somewhere else.”

Satan's pupils contracted sharply at that moment.

He saw Bai Yu's eyes in the images that had just been played, but he didn't connect those eyes with any known existence because his brain selectively ignored some details he considered unimportant in that moment of overwhelming information.

But Im did not overlook it.

Im will never ignore those eyes.

"Just as the Lulusia people came from other places, people with such special eyes should also be the same."

The five elders reacted almost simultaneously. Satan's body trembled slightly, and the long-haired old man in a black robe next to him unconsciously clenched his fists. The force of his clenching was so great that his knuckles made a series of clearly audible cracking sounds. The old man's name was Shepard X. Pitt, the holder of the status of Environmental War God among the five elders.

"That's..."

"Ah."

Im didn't let Pitt finish speaking, because there was no need for him to finish; everyone present knew what the unspoken words were.

The atmosphere among the flowers changed completely at that moment.

Im stood up from the throne.

The action itself was nothing special; it was simply a state of being changing from sitting to standing. But the instant Im completed the action, the room itself, the Flower Room, underwent a certain change.

The ceiling of the room seemed higher, the walls seemed farther away, and the floor area seemed larger.

It wasn't because the room had actually gotten bigger, but because Im's presence occupied such a large proportion of the space that the room's sense of space was distorted in the face of Im's will, and the room was forced to make room more for Im.

Im stood before the throne, its height seemingly unchanged from when it was seated, but the oppressive feeling it exerted on the Five Elders was entirely different now. It was as if the entire sky was slowly falling, and although you knew the sky couldn't actually fall, your body was telling you to run.

run.

Run as far as possible.

But the Five Elders stood still, not because they didn't want to move, but because in the face of Im's will, their bodies no longer belonged to themselves.

"Nighogd".