At the moment the Phase Sword pierced Orochimaru's chest, time seemed to stretch into a stagnant piece of amber.
There was no sensation of flesh being torn, no resistance of metal piercing bone.
The bizarrely shaped energy scimitar seemed not to exist in this material world. Like moonlight passing through glass, it sank straight into Orochimaru's body. Orochimaru lowered his head, and an incomprehensible sight reflected in his golden snake eyes: his chest, along with the organs and bones within it, had become like translucent glass, voidlike where the scimitar had passed through.
The next instant, a sudden change erupted!
A deathly, sickly green flame that seemed capable of devouring light exploded from the transparent wound in his chest!
The flame had no heat, no glow. It did not burn flesh or vaporize moisture. What it burned was the soul. Orochimaru felt no searing pain; what he felt was something far more terrifying than pain... "dissolution"—the green flames were erasing his existence.
"Ah—!!!"
An inhuman scream, mixed with the shriek of a soul being torn apart, burst from the depths of Orochimaru's throat.
The instinct to survive overwhelmed all reason and calculation.
Orochimaru made the most humiliating yet decisive response without hesitation. He violently opened his mouth, his jaw completely dislocating at an inhuman angle. A brand-new, smooth-skinned, flawless Orochimaru slid out of the old shell being consumed by green fire like a shedding snake, wrapped in nauseating slime!
Orochimaru Style: Substitution Technique.
Yet when his reborn body landed upon the murky water, he discovered in utter horror that a thin but stubborn wisp of green soul fire was still quietly burning on the chest of that fresh body, like a maggot clinging to bone.
It had followed his soul and transferred with it.
"Th-this... what... is this?!"
Orochimaru's already