Xiao's hands froze abruptly in front of his chest, midway through forming seals.
Only a finger-width of azure light web remained before the passage completely closed, and it was trembling violently. The chakra fluctuations drilling out from the vortex's crack carried the chill of something that had not seen daylight for years, slithering up the walls of the pit like a slick venomous snake and licking across Xiao's bare ankles.
Cold.
Not the physical cold of ice and snow, but a sense of rejection that arose from deep within his bloodline.
Xiao narrowed his eyes. In the Tenseigan's vision, that chakra appeared a sickly pale white, mixed with an intense arrogance.
The other side had no intention of concealing its movements.
In the half-breath that Xiao paused, the deep-purple spatial vortex suddenly churned like boiling water. The inward-pulling suction abruptly reversed, becoming a violent outward thrust.
Bang!
A withered wooden hand forcibly squeezed out through that finger-width crack.
It was an extremely crudely made puppet hand. Its surface was covered in cracks, and rusty metal gears could even be seen at its joints. The instant it emerged from the vortex, the raging azure Spatial Turbulence around it pounced like sharks scenting blood, slicing at it frantically.
Wood chips flew everywhere.
A large chunk of the puppet's hand was instantly shaved away, exposing a core covered in densely packed runes.
But it did not retreat.
Or rather, the entity controlling this puppet did not care about the shell's damage at all.
Amid harsh scraping sounds, the vortex's gap was brutally forced open by that wooden arm. Immediately afterward, more than half of a battered puppet body squeezed through from the other end of the Starry Sky Ancient Road.
The puppet had no head. There was a large hole in its chest,