A silver-white bird claw pressed down on the final one percent.
The system interface abruptly collapsed.
[Sealing Jutsu analysis complete]
The instant the prompt appeared, forty-eight main locks, tens of thousands of branching lines, the metal rings within the city, and the blockade nodes outside it all flooded into Bai Zhu's mind.
Where each line should connect, how the power should circulate, which nodes had already been damaged, and which ones still held Chimera creatures trapped beneath them—it all tangled together.
Bai Zhu stared blankly, bracing himself against the low platform as he dry-heaved several times. He had no time to think about the bird claw that had suddenly appeared, because his pig brain was overloaded.
"Damn it..."
"Couldn't Zhang Ye have left behind a simplified manual?"
The system continued displaying prompts.
[Maintainer authority established] [Calculating energy required to activate main locks] [Minimum requirement: 100,000 Reiatsu]
Bai Zhu stared at that string of zeroes, and his face immediately fell.
He only had single-digit Reiatsu left that he could call upon.
Even at his peak, with Ryūmon Hōzukimaru's support, he could not fill that hole. Pouring one hundred thousand Reiatsu into it would not activate the seal—it would turn him into ash first.
"Retreat!"
Bai Zhu pulled his hand from the groove and turned to run.
What did the state of the world have to do with him?
Whoever wanted to maintain it could maintain it.
He would retrieve Ging first, find a maintenance passage, and crawl out. If the port could not be held, he would switch cities. If he could not stay in the Caspian Sea, he would go to Hunter Association headquarters. Netero was still alive; even if the sky fell, it would not be this wage slave's job to hold it up.
He