The dense explosions, like a string of firecrackers, instantly filled the entire ancestral hall! Blue palm shadows clashed madly with a dark-blue water dragon and an earth-yellow giant dragon, annihilating each other! Chakra turbulence became like an out-of-control meat grinder, shredding the ground around the two of them and sending gravel flying as dust filled the air!
Pfft! Pfft! Pfft!
The water dragon held out for fewer than twenty palms before collapsing with a roar! Under the rainstorm-like barrage, the earth-yellow giant dragon shook violently, its scales peeling away one after another! Neji was like a small boat in a raging storm. Every penetrating palm strike made his body convulse, blood constantly spilling from his nose and mouth as his breastbone groaned under the unbearable strain! Yet his feet seemed rooted to the ground, nailed firmly in place without retreating even half a step!
"Break!" Yuumu Hyuga roared. His final dozen or so palms merged into one, becoming an utterly condensed palm strike that slammed viciously into the tottering earth-yellow dragon phantom!
Boom—crack!
The earth-yellow giant dragon let out a mournful cry and exploded! The remaining palm force struck Neji's crossed arms without mercy!
Pfft—!
A huge mouthful of blood sprayed out! Neji flew backward like a kite with its string cut, the sound of his breastbone shattering clearly audible! His body crashed heavily into a hard pillar of the ancestral hall before rolling onto the ground, leaving behind a glaring trail of blood.
The ancestral hall fell completely silent. Only Neji's suppressed, pained breathing and the soft sound of blood dripping onto the floor remained.
He had actually... forcibly withstood the ultimate technique of a Jonin's Eight Trigrams One Hundred Twenty-Eight Palms! Though gravely wounded and on the verge of death, he was still alive!
"Impossible..." Even the Jonin of the Main House and the clan head's faction who had been fighting instinctively stopped, staring in shock at the slender figure struggling to rise shakily from the pool of blood. He was drenched in blood, his breastbone sunken and both arms twisted unnaturally, yet his spine remained straight! Those bloodstained Byakugan stared fixedly at Yuumu Hyuga, blazing with unyielding fire!
"Bastard... you're asking to die!" Yuumu Hyuga was utterly enraged by that gaze, and the unprecedented humiliation ignited a crazed killing intent within him. No longer caring about any consequences, he spread the fingers of his right hand toward the tottering Neji several yards away. Chakra compressed and rotated at high speed in his palm, letting out a piercing shriek!
"Gentle Fist Ultimate Technique: Eight Trigrams Vacuum Palm!"
A terrifying chakra shockwave, condensed to near-solid form and powerful enough to pierce refined steel, tore through the air and shot toward Neji's heart at a speed too fast for the naked eye to follow! It was a killing blow! Unstoppable!
"Neji—!" Countless Branch House members cried out, closing their eyes in despair.
Death! An unprecedented shadow of death instantly seized Neji's heart! His Inner Qi was nearly depleted, and his body was on the verge of collapse! He could not block it! He absolutely could not block it!
At that one ten-thousandth of a second, in the depths of despair!
"Heavenly Mirror Reversal!!!"
A hoarse roar erupted from Neji's throat at the last moment of his life! It was not chakra! It was Inner Qi fueled by burning his life source! Within his Sea of Consciousness, the Primordial Bagua Diagram suddenly bloomed with an unprecedentedly blazing azure light!
Hummm—!
A pale azure chakra sphere far larger than normal and condensed almost into substance erupted around Neji! The surface of the sphere was no longer made of indistinct currents of air, but countless clearly visible Primordial Bagua runes spinning at high speed! The sphere was not perfectly round; instead, it possessed a strange, mirror-like texture, as if it could reflect everything!
Boom!!!
The condensed Eight Trigrams Vacuum Palm slammed fiercely into the pale azure "mirror" sphere!
There was no earth-shaking explosion!
The terrifying shockwave capable of piercing steel, the instant it touched the mirror surface of the sphere, vanished like a clay ox entering the sea, instantly absorbed and broken apart by a mysterious force! The next moment, light flared from the mirrored surface, and a chakra shockwave almost identical to the incoming Vacuum Palm reflected back along its original path at an even faster speed and with even greater ferocity!
"What?!" The cruel smile on Yuumu Hyuga's face froze, turning into boundless horror and disbelief! He had no time to react at all!
Splat—!
The reflected Vacuum Palm struck his right shoulder squarely! Blood and shattered bone fragments exploded outward! Yuumu Hyuga let out a shrill scream and was blasted away like a broken sack, smashing heavily into the ancestral hall wall before sliding limply down. His right arm twisted at a grotesque angle, utterly ruined!
Silence!
A hundred, a thousand times deeper than before! The entire ancestral hall seemed to have been frozen in time!
Everyone stood petrified, staring fixedly at the boy in the center, who was swaying on his feet yet still standing within the pale azure sphere, at the glaring blood beneath his feet, and at Yuumu Hyuga in the distance, whose fate was unknown.
Ro... Rotation?!
And it had... reflected the Eight Trigrams Vacuum Palm? A Rotation that had never appeared in the clan's history?!
The secret among the Main House's secret techniques! The ultimate defensive technique that even many Main House elites had failed to master! Yet a Branch House boy had actually learned it and developed it into something new?!
A genius, a genius! The eyes of the clan head's faction lit up.
"You wretch! You wretch!" The Great Elder trembled with rage, his aged face twisting grotesquely. His withered finger shook as he pointed at Neji, his voice shrill as a Night Owl's. "You stole the Main House's forbidden secret! Your crime deserves death! You cannot be allowed to live!"
Those final four words were like the icy chill of the deepest underworld, carrying killing intent that could not be washed away even by emptying three rivers and five seas! His shriveled body erupted with terrifying chakra utterly disproportionate to his age. At the tip of his snake-headed staff, a blinding white light condensed! It was a highly compressed chakra sphere, radiating destructive fluctuations! He intended to strike personally and erase this Branch House monster, who had completely slipped beyond control and threatened the foundation of the Great Elder's faction, from the world. No—he would leave Neji alive long enough to force the secret of this mutated Rotation out of him!
The snake-headed staff descended toward Neji, who had collapsed from exhaustion and no longer had the strength to resist, carrying a force that could crush everything! The white light was blinding as the shadow of death completely enveloped him!
"Stop!" Hiashi roared. Restrained by others, he could only watch helplessly as Neji was about to die. The other elders of the clan head's faction could do nothing but shout in fury. It seemed today's events had been planned long in advance.
Neji lay in the cold pool of blood, his shattered breastbone piercing his lungs and organs. Every breath came with bloody foam. He watched the destructive white light rapidly grow larger in his pupils. His Inner Qi was exhausted, his body ruined; even moving a finger had become an impossible wish.
Was this the end?
Unwillingness! An intense unwillingness surged through his veins like magma! He had been reborn, broken free of the original story's fate, and gained the hope of changing everything. Was he really going to die so miserably in this filthy ancestral hall, at the hands of these rotten Main House members?
"Who dares lay a hand on my disciple—!!!"
Rumble—!!!
A world-shaking roar, like furious thunder from the ninth heaven, shattered the silent vault of the ancestral hall! Along with that roar came a terrifying, peerlessly domineering aura, like an ancient beast awakening, descending from above!
The heavy, solid blackstone dome of the ancestral hall exploded as if it were made of paper! Countless chunks of rubble, swept up in violent gale force, rained down like meteors!
Dust shot into the sky!
A figure descended before Neji with the force to crush everything, landing heavily like a god come down to earth! The hard blackstone floor beneath her feet cracked instantly like a brittle biscuit, collapsing into a deep pit several yards wide!
The shockwave swept outward like a tsunami! The nearby Main House elders were violently flung away like fallen leaves in the wind! The Great Elder's killing strike was forcibly knocked off course by the violent impact!
The dust gradually settled.
A tall figure stood proudly in the center of the crater. Her golden hair danced wildly in the turbulent air like a burning sun. One hand rested on her hip, while the other hung casually at her side. The sleeve of her green robe bore the character for "Gamble," though it was now stained with dust and stone chips.
She tilted her head slightly, revealing a beautifully shaped jaw and firmly pressed lips that carried unquestionable authority even in silence. Her amber eyes burned with rage enough to incinerate the eight wildernesses as they slowly swept across the hall, like a queen surveying her enraged domain.
The entire Hyuga Clan ancestral hall trembled beneath that aura of supreme dominance.
Tsunade had arrived!
A sharp-edged piece of dome rubble as large as a millstone had been given terrifying momentum by the violent impact. Like a cannonball fired from its barrel, it tore through the air with a piercing shriek and flew straight toward the Great Elder, who had just been blasted back and had yet to recover from his fright!
"Great Elder, watch out!" a Main House elder cried out in horror.
The Great Elder's pupils contracted sharply! He was, after all, a veteran powerhouse. In his haste, he gathered chakra to protect his chest and raised his snake-headed staff across his body!
Crack—!!!
The bone-cracking sound was painfully clear!
The force contained in that boulder far exceeded expectations! The Great Elder's protective chakra shattered like an eggshell, and the snake-headed staff blocking before him bent and warped from the impact! The boulder slammed brutally into the arms he had crossed before his chest!
"Urgh—!"
The Great Elder let out a miserable, pained groan. Like someone struck by a battering ram, he was sent flying with both feet off the ground! His body crashed hard into the heavy stone altar holding the memorial tablets of past clan heads! With a thunderous crash, the altar shattered into pieces! The tablets clattered across the floor!
He lay sprawled amid the broken stones, his arms twisted at grotesque angles, his chest heaving violently as blood continuously spilled from the corners of his mouth. His face was as pale as gilded paper, and the way he looked at the golden figure in the center was filled with terror beyond words!
The entire ancestral hall was silent enough to hear a needle drop. Only the rustling sound of falling stones and the Great Elder's suppressed, pained groans could be heard.
Tsunade slowly withdrew her gaze, as though she had merely tossed aside an annoying stone. She bent slightly and looked at Neji, who lay in the pool of blood, barely breathing yet stubbornly keeping his eyes open. When she saw the horrifying depression in the boy's chest and the glaring bloodstains covering his body, the fury in her eyes that could burn the heavens abruptly turned into a chill cold enough to freeze souls.
"You bunch of old fossils," Tsunade said. Her voice was not loud, yet it rang clearly in everyone's ears. Every word carried crushing weight, terrifying people to their cores. "Bullying a junior and nearly beating him to death? Have you Hyuga Main House bastards smeared your faces on an outhouse plank?!"
She slowly straightened, her gaze like tangible blades sweeping over the pale-faced Hyuga Hiashi, then over the still-shaken Main House elders, before finally settling on the Great Elder struggling amid the ruins. A chilling, razor-sharp curve rose at the corner of her lips.
"Today, if you don't give me a satisfactory explanation..."
She raised her foot and seemingly casually took a step forward.
Boom—!!!
Centered beneath her foot, the incomparably hard blackstone floor seemed to be struck by an invisible giant hammer, instantly exploding into an even larger spiderweb-shaped crater! Violent airwaves swept out once more!
"...I'll tear down this shitty ancestral hall of yours!"
Before you continue