"To confirm whether you warrant the entire Main Family mobilizing."
The curve of Shengu Xuan's lips reached its highest point in nearly four months in the vacuum. Golden ripples in his chaos-colored eyes almost merged into one, reflecting the waves of power radiating from the white figure before him who claimed to hold divine rank.
"The entire family?" He spat the grass stem from the corner of his mouth. Wrapped in a conceptual field, the slender green stem floated in the vacuum without disintegrating. "How many people are in your Main Family?"
"Enough to keep you occupied." Shibai gave no specific number. The six-pointed star patterns in his deep purple pupils had spun to some critical threshold. The way those eyes watched Shengu Xuan differed from every Otsutsuki before him. It was neither contempt nor fear, but measurement carried out with absolute calm.
"Then stop just confirming." Shengu Xuan took a step forward, the sound of his boot striking the void carried through the conceptual field. "Get on with it. Once we're done fighting, I'll deliver your message."
Shibai moved.
There was no warning, no gathering of power. His white robe trailed an afterimage along his path as a palm struck toward Shengu Xuan's face. The power released by the deep purple six-pointed star in the center of that palm was neither a physical impact nor an eruption of energy, but a rewriting of rules that acted directly upon existence itself.
It was the innate technique of a divine-rank Otsutsuki: Existence Erasure.
Anything touched by that palm would be erased completely from the universe's information records. Not death, not dissolution-it would never have existed.
His palm was one centimeter from Shengu Xuan's forehead.
Shibai's hand stopped.
It had not been blocked by a barrier. He had stopped it himself, because