Liuyu hovered in midair as the Hōgyoku Fragment in his chest suddenly erupted with a dazzling deep-blue light too brilliant to look at directly.
The light no longer flowed gently as it had before. It burst forth violently, brimming with aggression.
Wherever it passed, the air cried out and space rippled. Even the falling snowflakes vanished into nothingness the instant they touched the blue light.
"This is..." Orochimaru's eyes widened in the distance, the growing mass of blue light reflected in his golden, serpentine eyes.
"The Hōgyoku's resonance?! No... something deeper... fusion!"
"Is this what His Majesty gained from that training session?"
Within the blue light, Liuyu's body began to change visibly.
His black hair grew and spread at an astonishing speed, reaching his waist in the blink of an eye. Its ends stirred without wind in the surging reiatsu.
A pale layer of bone, resembling an exoskeleton, emerged across his skin.
The bone rapidly grew, spread, and interlocked, finally covering his entire body to form a suit of pure-white armor, simple yet ferocious.
The armor's contours were sleek, its joints bristling with sharp bone spikes.
At the center of his chest, the Hōgyoku Fragment had embedded itself deep within the bone armor. It pulsed like a heartbeat, each beat releasing terrifying fluctuations that shook space itself.
Most chilling of all was the reiatsu radiating from his body-
It no longer carried that restrained sense of an abyss.
Instead, it was a fully unleashed, tangible torrent of purple-black energy, sweeping across heaven and earth like a storm.
His reiatsu formed a visible vortex, spinning wildly around him.
Wherever the vortex passed, the ground split and buildings shattered. Even light was warped and devoured.
Just the shock waves of his transformation-
Boom!!!
The purple-black reiatsu storm exploded outward, sweeping through the