Uchiha Puppet Master, Starting from One Piece.

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 pair of eyes somewhere between 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 its left arm, and the armor on it met 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's body made a movement, shifting 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 nick 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 within that sphere.

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 kaleidoscope pattern.

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

In the center of his palm, the crack opened again, but this time what poured out was not black matter, but something purer, without any attributes, color, or form.

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

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 never-satisfied 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 something 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 chest.

The tip of the thread touched the robe on Im's chest, and the point 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, where the invisible protective layer was being peeled away bit by bit by the rotating black dot at a speed visible to the naked eye, at the spot touched by the tip of the thread.

Chapter 243 Desperate

The protective layer on Im's chest skin, which had existed for seven hundred years, was being peeled away in an irreversible way.

It wasn't tearing, it wasn't piercing, but rather as if someone used a scalpel with molecular-level precision to sever all the connections between that force and Im's body, one by one.

The moment each connection point broke, Im could feel a faint tremor, like a snapping string, spreading from his chest throughout his body.

That kind of tremor has never occurred in seven hundred years.

Im's body was sending him a signal, a signal he had almost forgotten how to interpret over the past seven hundred years.

That's a precursor to pain.

That was a harbinger of harm.

His body was telling him that he couldn't withstand this attack.

Im raised his right hand from his side, fingers spread, palm facing Bai Yu. His fingers drew an arc in the air, and where the arc passed, the space softened like a piece of heated glass, then melted, finally forming a void less than half a meter in diameter in front of his palm.

The other side of the void is not any known physical space, but an independent dimension that Im has created on his own over the past seven hundred years. It is a void realm that does not belong to this world, does not follow any of the physical laws of this world, and is entirely defined by Im's will.

He tried to suck the white feather in, but the other party remained motionless.

Im's spatial void appeared to Bai Yu like a child trying to suck up a mountain with a straw.

The white feather didn't even produce any surface ripples, as if it had existed there since the beginning of the universe and would continue to exist until the heat death of the universe—an eternal singularity.

Im's brow twitched again.

He removed the spatial void, clenched his right fist, and the black substance on the surface of his fist, which resembled both flame and smoke, was compressed by Im to an unprecedented density. It was no longer a thin layer covering the surface of his fist, but condensed into a black crystal less than 0.1 millimeters thick and dense enough to create a gravitational lensing effect on the surrounding space.

The punch came out from the waist.

The target was not Bai Yu, but the black substance that appeared in Bai Yu's hand.

This is also known as the Jade of Seeking the Dao.

In less than 0.01 seconds, Im deduced that it was impossible to destroy Uchiha Shiraha himself through this strange thing, because the existence of that black substance did not depend on any of the laws of this world. It was more like a direct extension of Shiraha's will. As long as Shiraha was still alive, that black substance would be extremely difficult to break through.

Im's fist struck the Truth-Seeking Ball.

The instant the fist made contact with the Truth-Seeking Ball, an unseen force instantly emptied the atmosphere within a 500-meter radius, forming an absolute vacuum sphere with a diameter of 500 meters.