In the original battle, the five-way standoff, Satoru Gojo also faced the combined pincer attack of Sukuna, Mahoraga, and the Chimera Shadow Garden, which was so powerful that even Gojo Satoru found himself at a disadvantage.
Needless to say for the Naraku woman, facing Zen'in Genji, who had mastered the Ten Shadows Technique for decades and wielded another Shikigami with even greater proficiency, the outcome was almost impossible to counter.
This battle had no suspense from the very beginning.
The woman's haori had long been shattered, barely covering her. Her body was covered in silver-white sword marks, scorched burns, and claw and hoof marks so deep the bone was visible. The cracks on her death blade grew more numerous, its light as dim as a candle in the wind.
No matter how divine the technique, it still required cursed energy as a power source. The woman, heavily drained of her cursed energy, wasn't even sure if her next regeneration would work.
Enduring the intense pain from her pierced chest and the weakness of her rapidly draining energy source, the woman's chaotic gray eyes flickered rapidly, thinking of the only remaining glimmer of survival—escape.
There was no chance of winning in a direct confrontation. The enemy's trinity siege was flawless. Continuing to fight would only lead to complete exhaustion and annihilation.
Only by escaping thousands of miles away could she preserve her life and plan for the long term. Just leave this island, leave this damn battlefield...
With this thought, she immediately extended her remaining perception, trying to lock onto spatial coordinates at the island's edge, preparing to activate an ultra-long-distance directional teleportation, even if it damaged her energy source.
However, the moment her perception touched the island's edge—
Buzz!!
A heavy, incomprehensible, and unimaginably tenacious barrier, like the strongest world barrier, rebounded her perception!
It was a "curtain"!
And it was no ordinary curtain set by common sorcerers! Its strength and thickness reached a level that made the woman's heart tremble!
This feeling was not like the work of one or two special-grade sorcerers. More like... dozens of top-tier sorcerers, maintaining a permanent or semi-permanent super-large barrier, supported by some exquisite formation, connected to a vast source of cursed energy!
She sharply looked up, her gray eyes piercing through the smoke and dust of the ruins and the fading energy aftereffects, towards the sky and the coastline around the island.
Then she saw them.
On the edge of the island, in various directions, several kilometers from the battlefield—above the reefs, on the treetops, in the air—all at regular intervals, figures in dark gray soft armor, wearing featureless masks, their eyes glowing with blue light.
Shadow Mages.
There were over fifty of them!
They were not the black shadow ninjas Genji had summoned before, who were experts in close-quarters espionage. These mages had slightly different forms—more slender—with complex, stable cursed seals on their hands and steady cursed energy fluctuations throughout their bodies, which were constantly being fed into the "curtain" enveloping the entire island—invisible to the naked eye, but clearly perceptible to powerful beings.
The cursed energy level radiated by each Shadow Mage stably reached the effectiveness of a Grade 1 sorcerer!
Even more frightening was that they seemed connected to an endless, bottomless source of cursed energy, making their consumption for maintaining the "curtain" virtually negligible, allowing them to operate for an extremely long time.
The woman's heart instantly sank to the bottom, cold and desolate.
At the cost of employing dozens of Shadow Mages with Grade 1 sorcerer effectiveness, and suspected to be backed by a vast source of cursed energy, the strength of this "curtain" had reached an incredible, absolute cage!
Breaking through from the inside or outside would require paying an unimaginable price.
From the very beginning, Zen'in Genji had come here with the determination to kill. The lion uses its full strength to fight a rabbit.
He would not give the woman the slightest chance to escape.
From the moment she appeared before Zen'in Genji, this island was no longer a battlefield, but an execution ground meticulously prepared for her.
Despair, like the coldest ice water, seeped into the woman's limbs and bones. I can't escape. I really can't escape.
And at that moment, the hovering Zen'in Genji before her seemed to have enough "appreciation" for the mixture of shock, anger, and finally despair on her face. He slowly raised his free left hand, his five fingers open, palm up.
No incantation, no hand seal. Just a gesture.
Buzz—!
With his palm as the center, the surrounding light suddenly dimmed and distorted, as if forcibly drawn and swallowed. An immense cursed energy—not only from himself, but also seemingly drawing upon the energy dispersed between heaven and earth, as well as part of the cursed energy gathered in the "curtain" covering the entire island—like a hundred rivers returning to the sea, frantically converged and compressed towards a point on his palm!
It was a furious energy, highly condensed and collapsed!
In an instant—a strange sphere, fist-sized, pitch black, as if even eyes could be sucked in and annihilated, hovered over his palm. Inside, there was a terrifying pulsation that made people's souls freeze, positive and negative energies colliding and annihilating each other, forcibly bound to the extreme!
Just sensing the aura emanating from the pitch-black sphere from afar made the woman begin to tremble and groan uncontrollably!
Absurdly speaking, as a kind of embodiment of the concept of "death," the Naraku woman at this moment very clearly felt the breath of death from the attack condensed by a "human."
Genji lowered his head, glanced at the extremely dangerous pitch-black sphere in his palm, then raised his eyes to the woman, whose pupils had constricted to the extreme. As if making a simple experimental summary, he explained in a flat tone:
"The principle is not complicated. Based on a sufficiently large amount of cursed energy, sufficiently concretely 'imagine the matter of the cursed energy,' then use the power of 'construction' and 'compression' to forcibly bind and compress it into a 'theoretical singularity' with infinite density and internal energy, approaching zero volume and infinite density."
"In this process, positive and negative cursed energies are forced to collide and annihilate each other at extremely high frequencies, releasing the most basic and violent 'energy.' When this limited 'singularity' structure reaches a critical point, or is actively released..."
He paused and named this style:
"—Imaginary Mass: Hollow Star."
Genji's left hand faced the woman, who was moving slowly due to severe injuries and despair, and the island ruins behind her, which had turned into scorched earth—
He gently let it go.
The pitch-black "hollow star," which seemed to contain the birth and death of a miniature universe, descended.
There was no earth-shattering propulsion. The small black ball simply fell slowly towards the ground.
Time seemed to stretch at that moment.
The woman's gray eyes widened, staring at the small ball approaching, symbolizing absolute ending. She used the last of her strength to try to swing her broken death blade, or activate teleportation... but it was too late.
Her severely wounded body, exhausted energy source, and the devastating coercion emanating from the small ball, as if freezing time and space, made it extremely difficult for her to even lift a finger.
The small ball touched the scorched earth.
The moment of contact—
There was no sound.
Or rather, all sound was absorbed and obscured by the pure "light" and "heat" that erupted at that moment, beyond human perception.
First, from that point of contact, an extreme "white," indescribable by any color, burst forth, instantly engulfing the woman's figure, swallowing the charred crater, and consuming everything within a radius of hundreds of meters!
Immediately after, the "white" transformed into an indescribable, destructive energy expansion! It wasn't fire, not a shockwave, but the most basic, violent energy being released, sweeping out and annihilating in all directions at a speed and form beyond imagination!
Rocks, soil, ruins, debris, seawater, air... All matter and energy touched by this expanding energy were instantly decomposed, ionized, and turned into the simplest particles, then swept up in this mad vortex of destruction!
The "curtain," maintained by dozens of Shadow Mages with astonishing strength, lasted less than a fraction of a second against this destructive energy, which seemed like the beginning of heaven and earth, before being shattered, torn, and destroyed from within by this irresistible explosive force!
The figures of the Shadow Mages shook the moment the curtain was broken, then turned into green smoke and dissipated, apparently their summoning duration had expired or they had suffered backlash.
The burst of destruction and the expanding energy ball lasted for several seconds.
When the incredible light gradually dimmed, the energy fluctuations slowly subsided...
The island that had originally housed the Naraku temple was gone.
Not bombed, not crushed. It had literally disappeared.
In its place was a melting, slowly flowing dark red magma lake.
Seawater frantically rushed in from all sides, contacting the high-temperature magma, erupting columns of white steam that rose into the sky, making a deafening hiss, as if heaven and earth were wailing.
The entire structure of the island had been destroyed, outlying areas beginning to collapse and sink on a large scale.
Soon, this isolated island in the South China Sea would be completely erased from the map.
In the sky, Genji hovered quietly, the wings behind him slightly fluttering, easily dispersing the hot steam and residual shockwaves.
He looked down at the scene below, which seemed apocalyptic, his deep indigo eyes reflecting the red light of the magma and the blue hues of the sea.
After a few seconds of silence, he suddenly began to lament in a quiet voice:
"I know it's imitating the principle of the 'Big Bang'... But the energy level and manifestation of this result seem to be a bit different, leading to the effect... It's not much different from washing the ground with a high-yield nuclear bomb."
He shook his head, as if not entirely satisfied with his "artistic" effect.
However, just as he was about to turn and rejoin Shadow Crane and Eriri, an extremely faint, but incomparably distinct, strange feeling of an anomaly swept through his thousand-year spiritual senses, like a subtle undercurrent.
Genji paused slightly.
He focused again on the chaotic scene of destruction below, which seawater was frantically filling, especially the area where the woman had last been.
His perception acted like the best radar, repeatedly scanning the land of death.
No breath of life. No cursed energy.
But... the feeling remained.
Genji's brows furrowed almost inexplicably.
"The woman called Naraku..." He murmured quietly, as if speaking to himself. "Probably not completely dead."
There were too few clues to be certain.
But the sharp intuition for "anomalies" and "inconsistencies," honed countless times on the edge of life and death, warned him.
He cast one last glance at the boiling, slowly sinking island ruins, a cold clarity flashing in his eyes.
"It doesn't matter."
"If you can truly survive this attack... Next time, I will use a more thorough method to completely erase you from the level of 'existence.'"
No longer lingering, the wings behind Genji flapped, turning into a streak of indigo light and rushing towards Shadow Crane and the survivors.
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