It was even darker inside the clouds than he had imagined.
Not the kind of darkness at night where you could still make out shadows, but a darkness that swallowed even light, so stifling he could barely breathe, as though he had been stuffed into an airtight black bag.
The instant Shuo plunged inside, his heart lurched-something was wrong.
It was so dark he could not see his hand in front of his face. He pushed Lightspeed Thinking to its limit, but all the information coming back was jumbled. It felt like falling into thick glue. The chakra density was absurdly high, making it impossible to tell which way was which.
"Pain?" he called. The darkness swallowed his voice the moment it left his mouth, without even an echo.
Those two had probably been flung elsewhere by the air currents rushing into the clouds.
Shuo stopped in midair, with nothing beneath his feet and nowhere to brace himself, yet he could clearly feel something vibrating, like a beating heart.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
Each beat sent piercing pain through the wound in his chest, and blood began seeping out again.
"Fuck," he muttered, instinctively reaching into his pocket-empty.
Only then did he remember that he had long since finished chewing the last piece of candy Pain had given him.
He took a deep breath and gritted his teeth. Golden light surged from his body, slowly driving back the surrounding darkness.
Then he saw it.
An eye, even larger than the Ten-Tails' eye last time, hung in the center of the darkness, glowing with the eerie purple light of the Rinnegan. But it was not looking at Shuo. It was staring fixedly elsewhere.
Shuo followed its gaze, and his heart clenched-Pain and Konan were suspended in midair, their bodies wrapped in densely