The desert of the Land of Wind should have been bitterly cold after nightfall, yet now, the sand for a hundred miles around was hot enough to scorch bare feet.
Most of the once-flowing golden grains had fused into crystalline slabs of glass, reflecting an eerie sheen beneath the moonlight.
Gaara lay on a vitrified dune, his eyes shut and his brow tightly furrowed. His chest rose and fell so faintly it was barely visible. The huge gourd he always carried on his back had long since shattered, its fragments scattered across the ground.
Chiya stood beside him, a faint halo of ocher chakra still lingering in his hand after the extraction.
It was the essence of Shukaku, the One-Tail.
The tanuki might have had a foul mouth and a noisy temperament, but the quality of his chakra was undeniable, carrying the heavy, savage presence of wind and sand.
"Whew..."
Chiya slowly exhaled a stale breath. The moment it left his body, it became a cloud of white mist, then instantly evaporated.
The reiatsu inside him was undergoing a cataclysmic upheaval.
If his body was a massive furnace, then the Eight-Tails, Two-Tails, Four-Tails, and Five-Tails he had fed into it earlier, along with Shukaku now, were like five enormous barrels of high-purity fuel poured into the fire all at once.
Flames surged through his chakra pathways.
Every cell greedily devoured that immense energy, converting and compressing it before finally channeling it into the Zanpakuto named Ryūjin Jakka deep within his soul.
"This feeling..."
Chiya clenched his fists, his knuckles crackling like popping beans.
The power filling him to the point of overflowing gave him the illusion that a casual wave of his hand could punch a hole through the sky overhead.
But then an inexplicable sense of resistance followed.
It