Uchiha Puppet Master, Starting from One Piece.

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.

"Now, I'm going to get serious."

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 attention."

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, did not fold space, and did not 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 even made that move. It was so simple that Bai Yu's body had already reacted by dodging before he even saw Im's movement.

But in the instant that Bai Yu's body reacted by avoiding the attack, it realized 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 prepared 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, up, and down.

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 Bai Yu's body moved about half a meter, a light flashed in the pupil of his Rinnegan.

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 did not even know he could use.

His body stopped moving.

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

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 Rinnegan eyes.

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.

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, there was no folding of space, no rewriting of the definition of space. Instead, a crack appeared directly in his palm. What flowed out of the crack was not blood, nor light, but a completely black substance that had no reflection and resembled those regions in the universe where even light could not 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 hair, but when it cut 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 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.

"Although I don't know what it is, 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.