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Chapter 683 - Chapter 683: White and Mercenary Tao

Chapter 683: White and Mercenary Tao

Hum~

The entire world line plummeted into a stark, monochromatic spectrum of absolute black and white in a single microsecond. The suffocating physical mass of the pressure left the simple act of maintaining a standing posture an extreme tactical challenge.

"Spiritual Pressure... is this explicitly Spiritual Pressure?!"

[Night's Darkest Hour] desperately clamped her left palm over her heart, the immense, suffocating weight of the aura forcing her colored fingernails to dig deep into her chest. Her respiratory pathways were completely blocked, her motor nerves giving her focus a direct diagnostic holding that her heart was on the verge of a total, permanent shutdown.

At this exact frame of the chronology, her mind generated a frantic impulse to manually dissect her own rib cage simply to force the muscle to resume its rhythm.

Night's Darkest Hour layout-wise, severely questioned her own analytical faculties. Existing as an elite soul-side practitioner whose capability tracking excelled at deploying high-tier soul curses and memetic strains, her intellect completely failed to calculate how an energy matrix this stygian, malevolent, and suffocating could be classified as simple Spiritual Pressure.

Out across the shoreline directly before her boots, the asset whose real-world file explicitly self-identified as [The Celestial Pivot Anomaly]—the shadow-veiled reigning Monarch anchoring the [Salted Fish] coalition—registered the anomaly, a twin gleam of black and white divine light flaring across his biology. He forced his neck around to stare with absolute, dazed unreality at the blonde woman holding her sword level on the opposite flank.

Perched atop the sea crag, [The King of Destiny]—who a moment ago had been laughing uproariously as if her fingers had just finalized an un-blockable victory across this table—had completely frozen, every trace of amusement snuffed from her features.

Her facial geometry and civilian attire naturally and flawlessly initiated a severe structural mutation. Her long blonde hair withered into a dull, decaying amber before shedding from her skull, her statuesque silhouette rapidly hunching over into a gaunt, skeletal frame as her white knit sweater dissolved into a coarse, ash-gray hemp robe.

The King of Destiny evaluated The Late Bloomer, who stood rigidly independent amidst a column of Spiritual Pressure so intense it forced the local fabric of space to manifest severe, physical distortion waves. The Late Bloomer's jade-colored irises remained beautifully, flawlessly calm.

Yet the sheer mass of her [Spiritual Light] bleeding through the void radiated an elite, unyielding battle intent that out-scaled all historical benchmarks.

"Is this explicitly the blueprint engineered by your collective, Ye..."

The Late Bloomer calmly shook her head, her vocal register detached as she noted:

"It refrains from tracking a collective. It is explicitly, layout-wise, my own design."

Sustaining the raw, un-buffered pressure radiating from the absolute apex champion of the new generation, the King of Destiny finally registered a profound wisp of ancient exhaustion deep within his cells. At an unmapped frame of the timeline, this generation of Reincarnators had successfully scaled their processing to manually compile their own destiny.

Yet his intellect quickly executed a micro-correction; an evolutionary pivot of this density was layout-wise, mathematically impossible for The Late Bloomer to achieve in total isolation. Deep behind the veil of this operation, the ravenous, world-ending ambition of that freak was continuously steering the alignment.

His mind flashed with the precise visual profile of Sosuke Aizen.

That absolute madman... for the ultimate verification of a win, what manner of cataclysmic weapon had his engines manufactured...

Mulling over the precise destiny his own arrays had historical-seeded onto that specific clone vessel to influence the board, the King of Destiny began to question whether his own "clandestine operational maneuvers" had similarly been accounted for within Aizen's macro-calculations.

But he flawlessly threw the premise out of his calculation loop.

No. When evaluating the absolute parameters of the destiny track, it was layout-wise, impossible for Aizen to ever map the historical horizons deeper than his own focus.

An infinite matrix of world lines and chronological visual frames began to furiously execute within the King of Destiny's cerebral cortex as he desperately ran predictive simulations to isolate Aizen's true endgame.

Ultimately, his processing halted at an exceptionally unique, abstract theorem.

Highly likely because their historical interactions had crossed an immense duration, or perhaps because the grand title of [The Three Supreme Kings] had smoothly morphed into an unexamined common sense across his tracks, his focus had layout-wise, marginally neglected a fundamental baseline truth.

Sosuke Aizen was substantively, by no means a [Human]—at the very least, his file was permanently disqualified from ever registering as a native inhabitant of this world line.

The Multi-Dimensional Warfare... was highly, statistically likely a sequence that had initiated its countdown cycles long before today...

[Alert: Special Reincarnator EX051, your vessel has sustained the overriding influence of Spiritual Light: All Creation Submits to the Sovereign.]

[Attribute Check Failed: Energy System · Ki has been completely stripped.]

[Attribute Check Failed: Milestone · Martial Arts Specialization Lv9 has been temporarily deactivated.]

[Attribute Check Failed: Capability · Divine Finger Technique is currently unavailable.]

[Attribute Check Failed: Energy System · Surge of Killing Intent has been completely stripped.]

Kaito Shirogane executed a lone blink, registering a diagnostic holding that his consciousness had been unrefinedly dropped into the depths of a primordial ocean. The deep water was layout-wise, bone-chillingly cold, completely devoid of material buoyancy. His biological frame continuously plummeted through the void, his motor nervous system stripped of all priority to mount a counter-resistance.

One after another, the elite capabilities his knuckles had legacy-harvested from across the Infinite Dimension Space floated away from his tracks like multi-colored fish, frantically bursting clear of his cells to dissolve into the void of the stygian sea.

An unprecedented, total existential weakness overwhelmed his core. He could layout-wise, no longer monitor the material feedback of his own physical body; even the absolute, self-contained dominance he commanded over his muscular tissue prior to logging his file into the Space terminal was systematically erased from the ledger.

Kaito desperately attempted to trigger [The Unmapped Magic], trying to forcibly replicate Gojo's specific Spiritual Light matrix—[Throughout Heaven and Earth, I Alone Am the Honored One]—yet his tracks cede his input absolutely zero response.

Had his own profound Arrogance caused his engine to mismanage the optimal tactical execution window?

Or was the raw weight of this Mad King's Spiritual Light and Kingly Authority layout-wise, crushing overmatched against his parameters?

Crack~

An acoustic profile resembling fine porcelain sustaining a succession of severe structural fractures echoed directly against Kaito's audio sensors. Looking out through the boundless, deep ocean currents, his eyes mapped several gaping fissures tearing open through the vacuum.

An immense gravitational suction wave violently ignited, yet the displacement sub-routine exclusively drew the empty space and the surrounding sea water into the vortex; his own biological mass merely accelerated its downward plunge into a vastly deeper sector of the void.

Kaito Shirogane slowly extended his left hand—not to signal an emergency tracking flag, much less to clamp his fingers onto an external support structure; he was purely, clinically analyzing his own geometry.

Mulling over the events of the past few days, the unique trait hardcoded as Hyper-Empathy via the Life Equation—that non-stop, roaring torrent of civilian mental noise and chaotic emotional waves—had been completely and flawlessly snuffed from his tracks.

His system had returned to an unblemished state of total silence, yet conversely, his cells had permanently lost access to those hyper-stimulated emotional metrics.

Pinned against a operational configuration of this classification, did his core require the compilation of primitive terror? Did his baseline logic demand the ignition of unrefined fury?

Kaito monitored his hand as it turned increasingly pale and non-corporeal within the stygian currents, verifying that his psychology was layout-wise, fundamentally incapable of generating a "correct" human reaction.

He continuously sank into the deep void, his intellect smoothly analyzing a single variable: What explicitly constitutes the definition of correctness? Under what standard, and within what macro-framework, is that correctness hardcoded?

Was it merely because his biology had historically navigated the human world line that his processing had automatically selected human behavioral templates to function as an absolute baseline metric for "correctness"?

Because a standard mortal cattle registers primitive terror when facing absolute extinction, because a normal human mind panics upon tracking the terminal deletion of its own ego, his focus had assumed that his own engine was required to duplicate that precise behavioral output.

In the very next fraction of a second, a fresh structural question violently detonated across Kaito's neural pathways:

[WHO AM I?]

Or to state it with cleaner clinical precision: Am I genuinely a [Human]?

This was a foundational riddle Kaito Shirogane had layout-wise, completely manual-overrode across his entire historical advancement.

Merely because his vessel compressed a human geometry, possessed a standard human skeletal framework, and operated within a human societal grid—did those variables validate a diagnostic holding that his ego belonged to mankind?

Since his childhood development, Kaito had continuously operated under a profound, unyielding sense of total alienation from the species. He held a crystal-clean comprehension holding that his biology was completely distinct from the herd, yet across multiple world cycles, his intellect had merely restricted its calculations to using Strong and Weak to categorize his placement against the cattle.

Yet today, following his ravenous pursuit targeting the absolute zenith of the [Concussive Pulse of the Spiritual Light], and tracking the raw properties of the human heart, his databases verified that even a natural-born anomaly like Gojo compressed a traditional [Heart], naturally retaining a baseline capacity to process the Spiritual Light.

Yet his own core... compressed absolutely nothing...

Kaito Shirogane slowly retracted his left hand from the stygian currents, his pale fingers methodically pressing straight against his own chest plates.

The quadrant was completely, flawlessly empty.

Kaito Shirogane slowly lowered his upper eyelids. His see-through vision mapped his own chest coordinates, isolating a colossal, jagged Void Hole tearing straight through the center of his form.

An intense, ravenous wave of absolute Emptiness violently ignited. Kaito Shirogane registered an unrefined sensation holding that his vessel was experiencing an astronomical hunger—or more accurately, an unquenchable thirst. The exact microsecond his focus mapped that colossal interior void, his biological programming instinctively triggered an absolute, unyielding drive to forcefully gorge and pack the hole to absolute capacity.

The more intensely his intellect craved the mass, the more layout-wise, impossible it was to ever satisfy the parameters; yet the more flawlessly his engine was denied satisfaction, the more monumentally his ravenous lust scaled.

A coloration that was layout-wise, astronomically more stygian than raw ink violently birthed from the interior boundaries of that chest void. Executing a single blink, Kaito Shirogane verified that his entire consciousness had been completely and ruthlessly swallowed by the darkness.

He looked as if he had dropped straight into the deepest, unmapped root sector of a chaotic abyss where material reality was entirely void, leaving absolutely nothing but an infinite expanse of stygian mass and absolute primordial chaos on the board.

Vastly darker than standard darkness, monumentally more insatiable than primitive greed.

Yet within that abyss, Kaito Shirogane finally logged the absolute, unadulterated baseline Desire anchoring his true ego: [GORGE IT TO SATURATION!]

He unhinged his jaw, his mouth opening wide like a serpent poised to manually consume a world, an apocalyptic predator ready to swallow all creation down to the atom. The biological roar ripping out from his lungs was densely intertwined with a high-frequency, soul-shattering vibration wave.

ROAR!

The Mad King's physical hull cleared the thousand-meter mark. Merely by maintaining his rigid skeletal stance atop the pulverized masonry of the Tokyo grid, the silver-glowing conceptual waves radiating from his back forcefully shot across the open sea to blanket the Pacific basin.

His silver fingers firmly locked onto that colossal greatsword that historically restricted his Kingly Authority, a deep layer of sorrow remaining etched into the lines of his massive, phantom face.

Directly beneath his boots, the immense Japanese archipelago had been completely sliced in two along the central line of the Tokyo prefecture, the foundational tectonic plates beneath the island group thoroughly fractured. Amidst the frantic, rushing inward surge of the ocean blocks, the historically high-traffic commercial sectors of the Ginza district had permanently and flawlessly submerged into the abyss.

A fresh ocean trench had officially completed its compilation across the topography.

A series of catastrophic megatsunamis was aggressively tracking its displacement across the open Pacific water blocks.

This was explicitly the sharp, material pain of a world line re-engineering its parameters, the necessary trauma of a total generation turnover among the Reincarnator collective.

Millimeter by millimeter, the golden Ki shield, the silver light ripples, the crimson killing intent, the precise technical forms native to the Crane Hermit School, the advanced kinetic mastery derived from Sea King Kaku, and the supreme biological [Logic] commanded by Shen Wulong were being systematically absorbed and wrapped around the Mad King's core tracks.

A succession of glowing energy clouds that mirrored foul compression vapors continuously drifted out from his massive jaws. Even command-shifting a sovereign architecture of his caliber, manually compressing and tolerating the unrefined capabilities of a wild apex predator like Mercenary Tao required a massive expenditure of processing focus.

This was layout-wise, an exceptionally severe, heavy structural load balancing against his cells.

The Mad King operated entirely outside the archetype of a physical martial arts practitioner, harboring virtually zero professional interest or inherent preference targeting the martial specialization tracks—yet his crown intensely willed the absolute consumption of this raw power.

Biding his time until the multi-dimensional warfare initialized its countdown across the timeline, he intended for this elite warrior known as Mercenary Tao to function as a primary general safeguarding the survival of the world line.

The grand architecture of the cosmos was layout-wise, hardcoded to operate under a framework of this exact classification.

ROAR!

A pitch-black, absolute explosion of energy waves violently detonated out from the center of the void. The silver luminescence coating the Mad King's vessel instantaneously flared to its maximum threshold to anchor his defense.

Crack, crack, crack!

A dense, intricate network of stygian black fissures forcefully webbed across the entire outer perimeter of his silver Kingly Authority force field within a single frame.

Even looking high into the upper heavens, the colossal hull of the Sword of Damocles began to manifest a succession of clean, unrefined black corruption marks across its steel plates.

Vastly more critical to the sector was the material reality that the surrounding air was instantly and densely clogged with a roiling mass of black cloud-shards that layout-wise, closely resembled ash flakes, completely saturating every open coordinate across the ruins of Tokyo within a single heartbeat.

The Mad King forced his neck around to evaluate the skyline. The entire world line had systematically mutated its color spectrum. Above the vertical airspace where his upward draw of the sword had previously snuffed the cloud formations from the registry, the high heavens completely refused to display a brilliant azure hue, turning a deep, un-blemished stygian black.

Thud!

Hong Chen's knee violently slammed into the dirt. Having sustained the direct stripping of his internal martial strength parameters a moment prior, his biological frame was already intensely weak; at this exact microsecond of the transition, a suffocating, apocalyptic column of Spiritual Pressure detonated within point-blank range, leaving his motor nervous system entirely devoid of the priority to mount a defense. He was forcefully dropped to his joints, his skeletal framework unable to resist an unrefined urge to crawl flat against the dirt.

His skin was deathly pale, his jaw opening wide as his lungs desperately clawed to harvest a wisp of oxygen, yet his mouth merely outputted a continuous stream of freezing white compression vapor.

The localized thermal metrics had plummeted past all historical benchmarks, anchoring a sub-zero, bone-chilling freeze across the quadrant.

Although Mo Shi Mo Wang's core magic reservoirs had completely avoided being digested by All Creation Submits to the Sovereign, his active physical performance at this frame failed to rank a single millimeter superior to Hong Chen's layout.

His features were thoroughly locked in a mask of pure, existential dread, his eyes frantically darting across all spatial coordinates to map the threat.

Further out across the extreme perimeter, the twenty-odd title-grade Reincarnators who had historically throttled their speed tracks into the upper atmosphere to escape the kinetic shockwaves remained entirely independent of the stripping mechanics, yet their boots were systematically forced back down onto the concrete one after another, an array of multi-colored defensive barriers flaring across their skin.

A select cluster attempted to manually channel their capabilities to forge a counter-shield, while others frantically deployed high-tier survival artifacts from their inventory slots.

Yet descending from the high stratosphere like a non-stop, torrential downpour of absolute iron, the raw weight of that stygian Spiritual Pressure reduced every line of their operations to absolute, frozen dead silence.

Mo Shi Mo Wang's visual arrays suddenly registered a sharp distortion wave, looking identically as if a lone silhouette had been unrefinedly and out of thin air hardcoded straight into the center of his field of vision.

It was an exceptionally lean, statuesque physical frame that layout-wise, bordered on being marginally slight. The tattered edges of his pitch-black coat had completely mutated into an active cloud-mist formation, continuously stretching and floating into the local airspace to cede his presence a chilling aura of absolute, unyielding Death.

Both of his palms hung limply at his flanks, his skin tone a sickly, porcelain white, a succession of talon-like, obsidian-colored claw extensions tracing out from his fingertips.

Was that... Mercenary Tao?

His intellect reached an extreme threshold of pure cognitive unreality. His tracking data confirmed that the long, silver-white hair was whipping through the air currents like a mass of raw spiritual particles, while a pristine white mask completely and flawlessly blanketed his entire facial geometry. Crowning his skull, a pair of ancient, demon-like great horns pointed straight into the upper stratosphere.

Merely by allowing his irises to map the sub-atomic profile of this creature, Mo Shi Mo Wang verified that his heart was on the verge of a total shutdown, his respiratory tracks entirely blocked.

His processing unit was layout-wise, completely jammed: Can a veteran Reincarnator genuinely remake their files into a monstrosity of this classification?

Does this tracking register an active Hollowfication loop, or an absolute Masked Transformation?

At this precise microsecond of the campaign, does Mercenary Tao occupy a physical carbon-based matrix, or has his vessel permanently transitioned into a pure spiritual entity? Is he layout-wise, alive, or has his registry finalized a terminal expiration...

An infinite matrix of complex structural riddles rigidly froze within his brain tissue, his focus tracking the reality that the surrounding environment had turned monumentally, terribly cold.

Pfft!

Mo Shi Mo Wang executed a lone blink. In the very next fraction of a second, his entire biological mass registered an exceptional sensation of total weightlessness. Across his active visual stream, the lone data remaining on the board was a lingering afterimage tracking that demonic silhouette as it stood rigidly atop the exact coordinate his own boots had occupied a frame prior. As for Hong Chen—who should have been anchored a meager handful of meters to his flank—

The man's files had been reduced to a violent, pressurized column of spraying essence, accompanied by a sharp sonic boom cloud exploding across the topography.

BOOM!

Mo Shi Mo Wang's spine systematically smashed through the structural masonry of an unmapped high-rise ruin, his kinetic velocity completely unchecked as his body went rocketed through dozens of consecutive building blocks, permanently vanishing beyond the extreme horizon of the visual field.

It was only at this exact frame of the sequence that the remaining twenty-odd title-grade champions verified a catastrophic reality: a fresh, un-indexed executioner had stepped onto the perimeter.

Reacting with the highest velocity metric among the cluster, an asset closed and opened his eyelids in a single microsecond, triggering the active deployment of his Three-Tomoe Sharingan as a bright shroud of Lightning Release Chakra violently plated his skin.

[Lightning Release Chakra Mode — DEPLOYED!]

Yet before the high-frequency, piercing roar of his lightning could even translate into an acoustic wave across the atmosphere, a single, pitch-black flash of kinetic movement cleanly slashed through his coordinates before instantly turning dark.

Pfft!

Amidst a violent, simultaneous disintegration of cosmic lightning and unrefined biological tissue, his peripheral vision mapped a succession of mangled, incomplete title-grade corpses being rocketed into the upper stratosphere right alongside his own floating torso.

(End of Chapter)

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