Uchiha Puppet Master, Starting from One Piece.

"You weren't asleep."

His voice carried a genuine surprise.

"The last person to survive this attack was that guy next to you named Shanks."

His body moved in that instant.

It's not moving, it's sliding.

His body slid across the ground at an incredible speed, so fast that the air couldn't even make way for him. So fast that the ground was scorched by the high temperature of his feet, leaving a glassy mark. So fast that Mirajane's eyes couldn't pinpoint his exact location for a moment, and could only see a blurry, indistinct shadow, like an old photograph soaked in water.

But Mirajane's Observation Haki detected him.

For a mage of her caliber, learning Observation Haki and Armament Haki is far too easy.

Mirajane, an S-class mage from Fairy Tail, the face of Fairy Tail, and a demon, her combat experience wouldn't allow an enemy who had just nearly hypnotized her to disappear from her perception.

Her claws slashed out the instant the Qilin Gom Saint appeared beside her.

The sound of claws tearing through the air was so sharp that people instinctively covered their ears. It was not a sound that any living being should make; it was the mournful cry of air being forcibly torn apart in front of you, a warning from space telling you that its structure was being destroyed.

Qilin Gom Saint's trident met Mirajane's claws.

The tip of the trident collided with the fingertips of Mirajane's claws in the air. No sound was made at the point of impact, not because the sound was absorbed, but because the air around the point of impact was completely expelled at that moment, leaving no medium for the sound to travel.

Qilin Gom Saint's body slid backward three meters after the collision.

Mirajane's body remained motionless.

The difference in strength was not apparent in this attack, because Qilin Gom Saint was not forced back, but chose to retreat on his own.

His retreat was not to dissipate force or adjust his posture, but to release something during the retreat.

His ribbons all stood up in that instant.

It wasn't lifted up by the wind, nor by the aura of dominance, but rather his will was released through those ribbons in a way that his body couldn't bear.

The ribbons drew one intricate pattern after another in the air.

"Go to sleep."

"When you're asleep, your fears become real."

Mirajane's consciousness trembled violently for a moment, like a tree being torn apart by a storm. The trunk groaned in pain in the wind, and the roots struggled to stay connected to the earth. But the power of the storm was too great, so great that she felt she could be uprooted from the earth at any moment.

Images appeared in her mind.

It wasn't the scene she was experiencing, nor the scene she had experienced before, but the scene she feared most.

She saw Lisanna standing there.

Her sister Lisanna, the sister who was taken from this world by her out-of-control magic when she was twelve years old, the sister who made her never dare to use receiving magic again in all the years that followed, the sister who turned her from "Majin Mirajane" into "Fairy Tail's receptionist", the sister who is her eternal scar, her eternal nightmare, and the wound that time can never heal.

Lisanna looked at her.

Not looking at her angrily, not looking at her sadly, not looking at her blamingly, but rather—

I looked at her with a smile.

That smile was exactly the same as Lisanna's smile in her memory, a smile she hadn't seen for a very, very long time since the day she brought Lisanna back from the continent of Asia.

"elder sister."

Lisanna's voice was very soft.

Why aren't you asleep yet?

Mirajane's claws loosened their grip in that instant.

Her demon form fluctuated violently for a moment. It didn't weaken or disappear, but rather oscillated violently between "maintaining" and "disengaging," as if it were switching between the two states dozens of times per second using a switch.

Qilin Gom Saint saw this opportunity.

His trident shot out in that instant, aiming for Mirajane's chest.

As the trident tip thrust out, it was completely covered by a layer of black Armament Haki. That black Haki was not ordinary black, but the kind of black that would give your eyes a feeling of "something is wrong" when you saw it. It was an extreme black, so black that its reflectivity was close to zero, like a black hole opening its mouth in front of you.

Mirajane's body instinctively shifted three inches to the side at the last moment.

The tip of the trident did not pierce her heart, but instead grazed her left shoulder, leaving a deep wound. The blood in the wound was evaporated by some kind of power from the black aura the moment it gushed out. It was not evaporated by high temperature, but by some more bizarre power that extracted something from the blood. After losing that thing, the blood changed from liquid to solid to powder to dust to nothingness.

Mirajane lost feeling in her left shoulder.

Her left arm dropped down in that instant, like a broken rope.

But she did not collapse.

Because she regained consciousness the instant Lisanna's smile disappeared.

Chapter 241 Rinnegan

"Well?"

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. Instead, 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 in his seven hundred years of life—a pattern that 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" were 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, 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 nick, the size of a pinhead, healed visibly under his gaze, returning to its original state in less than a tenth of a second, as if the nick 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.