The violent power originating from the Divine Tree surged through every inch of his meridians like a breached flood, crashing and tearing as it tried to completely assimilate this mortal body into a new tree slave.
Green lightning and blood-colored steam intertwined and rose from Xuan's body. Every breath he took carried the scorching stench of charred flesh.
His bones crackled. The Source-Core Scaffold was forcibly rewriting his neural pathways at an unprecedented speed, inflicting the ultimate agony of placing one's soul upon an anvil and hammering it over and over.
"Seal!" Baba Tesshin's beard and hair flared as he formed hand seals and slammed the last specially made sealing scroll onto the ground.
Complex golden runes instantly spread across the earth, forming a massive circular formation that barely contained the spore storm, powerful enough to corrode all things, within a hundred-meter radius of the stone altar.
Watching the figure at the center of the formation, his robes drenched with sweat, he said in a dry, trembling voice, "Lady Saori, this power is too wicked... If he can't hold on, the entire Land of Lightning—no, the entire world—will become a living forest, and all life will be devoured by it!"
Saori's fingers danced deftly as she controlled the three layers of puppet barriers floating around Xuan.
Each barrier consisted of hundreds of intricate components. They spun at high speed, repeatedly deflecting and weakening the leaking waves of energy.
Her face was equally pale, but her gaze remained extraordinarily firm. "Shut up! He has to endure this, and he will!" This was more than trust—it was a desperate gamble staking everything on him.
In a massive fissure among the distant rocks, Ban Jing tightly clutched the unconscious Senju Orihime in his arms, scarcely daring to breathe.
Peering through the gap, he