When time resumed, Ganesh's enormous body seemed to have been shoved into an invisible, gigantic meat grinder. Hundreds upon thousands of slashing wounds burst open simultaneously across every inch of his body!
Immediately afterward, countless blasts of incomparably fierce, penetrating force from the World's punches erupted from within him!
All the flesh that had already been sliced away but remained attached because time had stopped tore free and flew outward!
A gruesome display of flesh-and-blood fireworks, confined to the bounds of his body, bloomed above the golden ocean of concepts.
Only the head, deliberately spared, remained intact. It tumbled through the blast and flying debris in an arc, landing precisely in Dio's outstretched hand.
The newly formed domain, Sea of All-Phenomena Wisdom, which had enveloped their surroundings, disintegrated and collapsed in an instant like a temple stripped of its foundations.
The golden ocean and torrents of concepts broke apart into swirling fragments of cursed energy that rapidly dimmed, falling in a brief shower of light.
The sensations of reality closed around them again: damp, chilly air thick with the stench of blood and decay; sticky ground underfoot piled with fresh and old rat corpses; and that vast, filthy, dim underground cavern where daylight never reached.
"How... is that possible..." Ganesh uttered his final words.
Dio raised his right hand, and the purple-black vortex unleashed a powerful suction.
The Elephant God's head mingled with the vast mass of flesh fragments that had yet to dissipate, spinning into the vortex like stretched dough.
Then Dio did something no one had expected-he briskly fed Ganesh into Cursed Spirit Manipulation-Maximum: Uzumaki, extracted his cursed technique, and fired him off as a cannon blast of pure cursed energy!
A special grade cursed spirit in good condition and at normal strength possessed as much cursed energy as over ten thousand low-level cursed spirits.
Dio compressed it, loaded it, then released it. An enormous pillar of cursed energy erupted from his palm, engulfing the entire underground space in an instant.
The rats, the Gnawing Rat Duke, the throne of bones, the centipede's remains-everything was swallowed by that pure light and heat.
Suguru Geto, still suffering from partial amnesia, had just finished recalling the cursed spirits he had released.
Although he was not in the beam's direct path, the shock of its aftermath was already sweeping toward him like a tsunami.
The walls melted in the intense heat, the ground cracked under the tremors, and the ionized air took on the pungent smell of ozone.
Almost the instant the beam erupted, Suguru Geto's muscle memory kicked in.
His body reacted faster than his mind.
He pushed off hard with his toes and leaped backward, curling up as tightly as he could to reduce the area exposed to the blast.
The explosion and shock wave surged skyward, blasting straight through twenty meters of earth. The ground shook violently, and the entire slum could feel the earthquake-like rumbling.
The cavern caved in, buildings collapsed, and dust rose into Mumbai's night sky like a mushroom cloud.
Carried by the shock wave, Suguru Geto was hurled far through the air. He adjusted his posture with a flip and landed. Looking up, he saw the light ahead gradually fading.
As the dust slowly settled, moonlight shone underground through the newly blasted opening. All that remained was an enormous hemispherical crater more than a hundred meters in radius, its surface as smooth as glass.
At the center of the crater's floor, Dio stood alone, holding the half-charred Gnawing Rat Duke in one hand and turning him into a small cursed spirit orb.
He looked up at Suguru Geto, who was peering over the rim, and asked, "Have your memories returned?"
Geto rubbed his temples and gave a wry smile. "Most of them...
What just happened?
I know you can deal terrifying damage in an instant, but why did you suddenly fire the Elephant God off as a cannonball?
He was a special grade cursed spirit who had mastered Domain Expansion!"
"No need to mourn the loss. The Elephant God's cursed technique was more valuable than he was.
So even if we hadn't run into this situation today, sooner or later I would have used the Maximum Technique to extract his cursed technique. It was only a matter of time."
Dio raised a hand and pointed around them.
The scalp-prickling tide of rats that had surged around them earlier had vanished completely. With their mainstay gone, they had scattered.
"Didn't you notice there was no end to the rats? Hundreds of thousands of rats from all over Mumbai were heading here.
I figured the Rat King's mechanism wasn't based on his own body, but used every rat nearby as a 'spare-parts bank.'
We had to wipe out all the rats around him in one go to stop him from breaking apart and regenerating.
Turns out I was right. And now the job's done, so we can go back and sleep."
Suguru Geto fell silent for a moment before he finished digesting that simple, brutal tactical logic.
Dio lightly hopped up to the crater's rim and tossed the "spoils" to Geto.
"Here, take it.
Before absolute power, even the most intricate tactics and teamwork are only fleeting flowers.
I'm starting to look forward to meeting the 'strongest of the modern age.'"
Then Dio immersed his mind in his newly acquired innate cursed technique.
Just as Geto had said, Ganesh could use Domain Expansion, and his development of his cursed technique had reached the pinnacle achievable by a special grade cursed spirit.
Even though the precision of a cursed technique extracted through Cursed Spirit Manipulation-Maximum: Uzumaki had an inherent ceiling, leaving no room to further optimize its structure, it was enough for Dio.
If he developed this cursed technique himself, at best he could only make minor adjustments within its existing framework, polishing it from ninety-nine percent to one hundred percent.
What he had acquired now, however, was a "finished product" already honed to perfection. He could even perform Cursed Technique Reversal simply by feeding it the positive energy of Reverse Cursed Technique.
The cursed technique, Concept Bestowal, could confer a new "concept" upon any target-an object, a living being, the effect of a cursed technique, or even a "phenomenon." For its duration, that concept would ignore physical laws and forcibly rewrite the underlying logic of the target's existence, temporarily restructuring it at an essential level.
Its cursed energy consumption was proportional to the strength of the concept, the scale of the target, and the depth of the rewrite.
This cursed technique had three basic modes of application:
Property alteration: adding a new concept to the target.
For example, bestowing the concept of "intense heat" upon a weapon would make it generate vast amounts of heat from nothing, automatically melting through anything it touched.
Magnitude enhancement: bestowing a concept of altered magnitude upon the target, increasing or decreasing the value of one of its attributes within certain limits.
Multiplying speed could enable ultra-high-speed movement, while multiplying strength could enhance physical strikes, but the body would have to withstand the corresponding strain.
Concept deepening: pushing one of the target's existing traits to its theoretical extreme, achieving interference on the level of rules.
For instance, bestowing the concept of "severing cursed techniques" upon a "sharp" blade-wherever its edge reached, the effects produced by a cursed technique would be disconnected from the sorcerer. It was particularly effective against summoned entities.
Cursed Technique Reversal, Concept Stripping, was the opposite of "bestowal." It aimed to strip away or weaken the target's existing concepts, reducing or removing one of its essential attributes so that it temporarily "lost" that trait.
For example, stripping armor of the concept of "hardness" would leave it as fragile as cardboard;
Stripping a weapon of the concept of "toughness" would make it snap and fall apart after a single collision;
Stripping a cursed technique attack of the concept of "directionality" would cause it to scatter chaotically after release, losing its focused destructive power.
As for the most crucial part, Domain Expansion-the Elephant God's mental landscape did not suit Dio's tastes. He planned to come up with a new one himself when he had time.
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