Sasuke stood before the enormous Stone Tablet, head lowered, his scarlet Three-Tomoe Sharingan fixed without blinking on the strange characters across its surface, as if they possessed lives of their own.
The instant his gaze touched the Stone Tablet, it was as if an invisible current had followed his line of sight and pierced straight through his soul!
"!?"
Sasuke's body jolted hard. As though a heavy hammer had struck his chest, he let out a muffled groan, and his feet staggered back half a step beyond his control!
His face went pale in an instant. Fine cold sweat seeped across his forehead, and in his wildly spinning Three-Tomoe Sharingan lay utter shock, bewilderment, and the sense that he had glimpsed a heavy shadow from the ancient past.
The Stone Tablet—
had come "alive."
Under the special visual power of his Three-Tomoe Sharingan, the lifeless characters that had originally been merely carved into hard stone seemed to be infused with some ancient and mysterious force, beginning to writhe, reassemble, and take shape!
They turned into line after line of twisted ancient text and images, as if they had gained life, forcefully pouring into his mind and battering his understanding!
Yet this flood of information was not clear or complete.
It was more like an ancient mural shrouded in dense fog, its focus blurred, or like a recording tape with an extremely poor signal, full of static and breaks.
He could "see" certain fragments, could "feel" the vast information and heavy history contained within, but the great majority of it, because his visual power was insufficient, appeared indistinct and unclear, as if separated from him by a thick pane of frosted glass. He could only see blurred shadows and hear distant echoes.
But these blurry fragments alone were enough to shake