The flicker of relief that had just surfaced in the laboratory was snuffed out by Tobirama's words: "Concentrating its power." Ling slumped in his chair, wrapped in the green glow of Medical Ninjutsu, but the chill seeping from deep within his bones still made his teeth chatter.
"Concentrating... what is it trying to do?" Tsunade's voice was tight, her hands clenched into fists.
The reincarnated Tobirama stared at the data scroll, his gaze icy. "It's adjusting. Not retreating." He jabbed a fingertip at several abnormally writhing energy markers along the edge of the star chart. "Look at the energy flow through these wreckage nodes. Before, the corruption spread diffusely. Now... it looks more like the energy is being forcibly drawn out and concentrated at a few specific 'convergence points.'"
Hashirama stepped forward, his brow deeply furrowed. "Convergence points? Like rivers flowing into the sea?"
"More like a hundred rivers returning to their nest." Tobirama raised his eyes, the lingering cold light of the barrier reflected in his red irises. "And the structural parameters of reality near these convergence points... the anomalies are skyrocketing. Spatial stability is dropping, and natural energy is becoming inert, even showing signs of 'necrosis.' This isn't simple energy accumulation. This is... some kind of 'conversion' process we don't yet understand."
He brought up several comparative images-energy scans of the same heavily contaminated area taken at different times. The once-diffuse purple-black energy field was now visibly contracting inward, leaving vast stretches that seemed to have been "sucked" clean, gray and deathly still. At the center of the contraction, the energy readings were absurdly high, accompanied by powerful signals of spatial distortion.
"Is it 'refining' the contamination?" Minato's expression darkened. "Drawing its dispersed power back in to distill something even more... dangerous?"
"Or it's creating some kind of