The rain gradually eased, but the sky remained leaden and overcast. A deathly stillness hung over the Abandoned Temple in the storm's wake. Only the sound of water dripping from the ruined walls broke the silence, each drop striking at their anxious hearts.
Hawk had not gone far. Sasuke chose a more secluded underground storeroom with a relatively sound structure as their temporary base. He sat cross-legged in a corner, his eyes closed, his entire focus submerged within himself as he waged a silent but perilous tug-of-war with the lurking darkness. Ling's Senjutsu intervention had reinforced his crumbling dam, but the cracks at its core remained. He had to use this respite to familiarize himself with those two powers, understand them as thoroughly as possible, and find a more effective means of control, even if only temporarily. Karin stayed beside him, not daring to disturb him, relying on the Mind's Eye of the Kagura to watch constantly for any troubling changes. Guren stood guard outside, while Jugo sat silently at the entrance. The restlessness within him seemed to have subsided for the moment, suppressed by the deeper darkness emanating from Sasuke.
Sasuke's consciousness hovered at the boundary between violet lightning and the black tide. He tried to reach out and "touch" the Sacred Lord's power. It was cold and viscous, filled with a hunger to destroy and devour, yet it also contained a kind of twisted "knowledge" that bordered on the laws of reality themselves. Broken, chaotic fragments of information about spatial structures and the nature of energy battered his consciousness, accompanied by intense mental contamination. He endured the discomfort, as though dancing on a knife's edge, trying to extract something useful-how to wield it more effectively, or... how to escape it.
Meanwhile, Itachi's words echoed endlessly in his mind-"for