Hearing Naruto's answer, Teuchi smiled with relief.
Then he turned to Jigen, who was still struggling to maintain the faintest sense of his own existence within the torrent of information.
Teuchi casually waved the sleeve of his flour-dusted ramen chef's uniform.
The sleeve seemed to become a tiny black hole that swallowed everything, or perhaps a pocket connected to some unknowable dimension.
An irresistible force seized Jigen. His rigid body, along with the eerie aura surrounding him, shrank and twisted as though caught by an invisible hand. At last, he became a nearly imperceptible streak of light and vanished into that ordinary sleeve with a whoosh!
Teuchi lowered his sleeve and gave it a pat, as if he were merely dusting it off.
Then he gently pressed both hands downward.
"Domain release."
The blue sky, the endless void, and the drifting motes of information receded and dissolved like a tide.
The scene before them blurred and reformed.
In the blink of an eye, they were back in the forest clearing on the border of the Land of Fire.
The moonlight was unchanged, and the night breeze was cool. Everything they had just experienced seemed like a dream.
Only Jiraiya, unconscious and bloodstained on the ground, proved that the brutal battle had been real.
Teuchi walked over to Jiraiya and crouched beside him. From inside his robe, he took out a palm-sized hexagonal talisman.
Ancient, intricate black lines formed an abstract horse on its surface, a design that seemed to pulse with life.
He gently placed the Horse Talisman in the center of Jiraiya's blood-soaked chest.
Hum.
The moment the talisman touched him, it gave a faint chime like a heartbeat in resonance. A soft white glow appeared.
Something miraculous happened. The terrible wounds where Black Receivers had pierced Jiraiya—wounds that