Chapter 865: The Inverted World, Arrancar Gojo
[You have successfully smelted Material: Fractured World]
[You have acquired Trait — The World · Inverted (World's Rarity)]
[The World · Inverted (World's Rarity) — Bestows bonus resistance against time-stop effects, granting temporary immunity while under time-stop conditions. The duration of this immunity scales with the disparity between respective attribute ratings. Furthermore, actively triggering this trait grants a single special displacement classified as time-stop movement, with distance scaling directly with your personal attributes.]
As the residual luminescence faded, another completed smelting etched itself into Kaito Shirogane's arm. Having advanced into the Fierce Step, he had unlocked an additional smelting slot along the Divine Stairway.
Rather than smelting the wings of Deathwing Neltharion, he had prioritized the material Yoko had traded to him from the West District.
This trait carried immense practical utility. Having deduced that the King of Rats had intentionally taken Dongjin—the Old King—under his wing, Kaito might be supremely arrogant, but he was never negligent.
Resistance against time-stop authorities was an asset that could only be stumbled upon by providence.
Within the Infinite Dimensional Space, while time-manipulation abilities were exceptionally scarce, they were far from entirely unobtainable.
Time-stop was an anomalous, rule-bending category. Although Kaito wielded Ki—a foundational architecture that, given sufficient volume, could brute-force immunities against the vast majority of exotic status ailments—time-stop operated on an entirely different plane from ordinary afflictions.
It was an authority capable of executing an instant kill upon first contact, or inverting a lost battle at the final threshold.
If a time-stop was initiated before Kaito registered the deployment, even he would struggle to mount a synchronized biological response within frozen time.
Temporal authorities inherently commanded a far higher ceiling than spatial manipulation.
Furthermore, this Inverted World granted him a displacement mechanism functionally identical to moving within stopped time. Given his current baseline mobility, a single burst of zero-time movement allowed him to cross distances that defied ordinary comprehension.
It was an evolution beyond conventional teleportation. Shorter than an instant, faster than displacement—an authentic, zero-interval stride through reality.
Stepping out from the Step Appraisal Pavilion, Kaito spotted masses of Reincarnators surging toward what had once been the shantytowns, now designated as the central trading plaza.
A faint smile touched his lips as he made his way toward his personal stall.
Before long, angry, shouting voices reached his ears. A mob of operatives was aggressively interrogating Black Butler and Jin Yue'an regarding the Paradise's passive policy toward the planetary Spiritual Calamity.
Even coalitions notorious for their bloodthirsty reputation were venting fierce objections.
Even murderous Reincarnators only wished to indulge in violence on their own terms; no one wanted to live in an environment where spectral monstrosities materialized on every street corner without warning.
Above all, the incursions of these spectral abominations were entirely unpredictable. No matter how vicious an operative might be, nearly all maintained personal roots, families, or mundane connections in the physical world.
No one was willing to sit back and watch their relatives slaughtered without cause.
Consequently, across the four major global districts, virtually every active Reincarnator faction was currently mobilized to repel the outbreak.
It was an existential disaster. The crisis lay not in the individual combat ratings of the entities—even the terrifying Menos Grande Adjuchas that had breached the Western Hemisphere could be put down by top-tier operatives or Sovereign Monarchs, and well-coordinated Third and Fourth Step strike teams could dismantle them with proper intelligence and specialized armaments.
The true terror was that these abominations seemed entirely inexhaustible. They erupted erratically from fault lines, urban centers, and wilderness alike, completely overwhelming the defensive bandwidth of the surviving operatives.
When measured against the vast geography of the earth and a mortal population exceeding eight billion souls, the sheer headcount of Reincarnators was hopelessly deficient.
Ordinary operatives could only pin their hopes on the true titans at the apex. They desperately pleaded for Lord Mercenary Tao or the other Sovereign Monarchs to step forward and excise the rot at its root.
Observing the clamor, Kaito found the spectacle thoroughly amusing.
Operatives who had previously strutted with unearned supremacy over ordinary mortals were now, in the face of this disaster, hurriedly grouping themselves back into the mortal collective.
Even when challenging his authority, they huddled together to amplify their grievances, hoping collective noise might sway his sovereign will.
Was this the so-called social instinct of humanity?
"Does Mercenary Tao think that just because the spirits can't scratch him, he can leave everyone else to burn?!"
"Not everyone in this Space is an isolated monster without friends or family!"
Finally, an operative shrouded in rolling black smoke bellowed the quiet thoughts of the crowd. He had clearly manifested a temporary avatar to mask his spiritual signature, ensuring he could criticize Mercenary Tao without being tracked down and executed.
The moment someone broke the silence, the crowd surged in sympathetic fury. Countless operatives harbored deep resentment toward Mercenary Tao, having kept their tongues clamped between their teeth solely out of terror, dreading being singled out for execution.
Yet the illusion of safety in numbers took root. With so many operatives raising their voices in unison, could Mercenary Tao genuinely butcher every last one of them?
"He's right! Lord Mercenary Tao's indifference is completely inhumane!"
"Yoko of the West personally led the top-tier members of the Round Table to cleanse her sectors, and she put down an Adjuchas with her own hands!"
The murmurs swelled into an uproar as more operatives joined the chorus. Behind the stall, the Paradise's attendants wore stormy expressions.
Black Butler maintained a mask of rigid composure, but Jin Yue'an's face had darkened to the color of bruised iron. Her eyes swept through the gathered crowd, searching out identifiable features, intending to have Thread of Thought hunt them down and slit their throats later.
The operatives caught beneath her icy glare felt a twinge of panic, but buoyed by the mob, none stepped back.
Suddenly, Jin Yue'an froze.
Threading his way leisurely through the back of the shouting crowd was a tall figure, watching the theatrics with an easy, mocking smile.
"M-My Lord!"
Jin Yue'an gasped. The operatives standing directly before Kaito turned their heads. In the span of a single microsecond, their souls practically evacuated their bodies.
The operative cloaked in black smoke vanished from the public plaza in a flash of white light, fleeing the sector instantly.
Hum... Hum... Hum...
The rapid chimes of emergency spatial teleportation rang out in unbroken succession. In an eye-blink, an immense clearing opened around Kaito's boots.
Operatives lingering along the outer edges fought to maintain a veneer of defiance, telling themselves that with so many voices raised, even Mercenary Tao had to weigh the political fallout.
At the end of the day, they were completely out of options against this calamity.
Kaito understood their helplessness down to the marrow. He strolled smoothly toward his stall, reflecting on the sheer scale of the board Aizen had laid bare.
The display far surpassed the power Ryo had historically projected through the authority of Miracles. Ryo had undeniably outstripped every Sovereign Monarch of his era.
Had Kaito not fused with the three-headed dragon Azi Dahaka in that anomalous realm, he would have stood zero chance against him.
Ryo had walked reality like an authentic Child of Destiny, naturally showered in the world's blessings—a grace Kaito had experienced firsthand during his deployment into the Fate cosmos.
In Ryo's hands, the concept and authority of Miracles had been an unconstrained, all-encompassing force that bent reality to his whim.
Yet Ryo's supremacy had remained fundamentally confined to individual martial output. Formidable as he was, he had never truly surpassed the baseline of an authentic three-digit entity within the Little Garden.
What had Aizen unveiled this time? He had challenged the entire assembly of Reincarnators across the Infinite Dimensional Space simultaneously, unleashing a planetary Spiritual Calamity that pushed the collective meta to the brink of collapse.
And knowing Aizen's meticulous temperament, a calamity of this scale was far from his operational limit, let alone his final trump card.
While the crisis was exacerbated by apex champions like Kaito and Yoko refusing to invest their bandwidth in mundane cleanup...
To balance the board against an entire world purely through summoning mechanics elevated the stature of the Supreme Three Kings to an entirely new echelon.
Kaito lifted his chin, gazing toward the dark vault above the plaza. Across the metaphysical currents, it felt as though his eyes locked directly onto that arrogant architect who fancied himself his Creator.
Deep within the monochromatic expanse of the Void Throne, Aizen sat upon his elevated dais, resting his cheek against a single palm. The shifting sphere of white soul-matter before him mirrored Kaito gazing up through the public plaza.
Aizen's smile broadened.
He parsed the intent with crystalline clarity: the peerless masterpiece he had forged was looking up, measuring his Creator. Those bottomless eyes held not an ounce of reverence or intellectual inquiry, but a feral, restless hunger.
The look of a predator preparing to butcher his Creator.
Aizen was thoroughly delighted by the sight. Sweeping his gaze across the huddled throngs in the plaza, he saw only swarming insects.
These creatures could never perceive the true architecture of reality, let alone gaze toward a distant horizon.
Falling into hysteria over the trivial casualties of common mortals proved that his masterpiece's calculus was correct:
These mediocre masses had occupied the Space's evolutionary slots for far too long. The hour to accelerate the natural selection of the Reincarnators had arrived.
"Tyrant. Transmit orders to the Silver Vanguard and the Golden Battle Groups. Engage open hunting protocols. There are far too many weaklings cluttering this Space."
Aizen's posture did not shift an inch, yet with a casual murmur, he mobilized the most colossal, terrifying syndicate lurking within the shadows of the Infinite Dimensional Space.
A systemic purge against any Reincarnator crossing paths with the Throne of Virtual Reality was set in motion.
The Tyrant bowed in disciplined acknowledgment. Inheriting the raw combat capabilities of Espada No. 2 alongside the stoic temperament of Espada No. 4, he was Aizen's most reliable instrument.
Merely an instrument, nothing more.
Aizen paid zero mind to the subordinate's inner thoughts, keeping his eyes glued to Kaito's movements within the soul sphere.
"Go on. I'm listening~"
Kaito stepped behind his stall. Breathing collective sighs of relief, Black Butler and Jin Yue'an cleared a wide path. Settling comfortably onto the bench, Kaito casually drew a stack of cards from the neat rows of Crimson Drop Cards laid out before him.
[You have opened a Crimson Drop Card]
[...]
[You selected Option C: Attribute Extraction]
[Your Agility attribute +1. Current: 78]
[You have opened a Crimson Drop Card]
[...]
[You selected Option C: Attribute Extraction]
[Your Agility attribute +2. Current: 80]
Kaito crushed the Crimson Drop Cards one by one. Searing crimson radiance coiled around his palms; before the light from one card could dissipate, the next had already shattered into particles to feed the glow.
Beneath the paralyzed gaze of the surrounding operatives, Mercenary Tao crushed dozens of Crimson Drop Cards in a single sitting without breaking rhythm.
For an elite caste whose total numbers were remarkably scarce, dozens of Reincarnators represented the entire fighting strength of a mid-sized guild.
In remote regions or smaller municipalities, an entire district might boast barely a handful of operatives.
Yet right here, the final traces of their existence were being pulverized into raw numbers between his knuckles.
Kaito lifted another thick stack of cards. These assets were liquid currency across the Space; no operative could refuse the allure of an unsealed blind box.
Especially when it virtually guaranteed flat attribute gains—the universal baseline of all power.
Crushing them raw like this was technically an appalling waste of economic value, but as his foundation steadily approached the summit of the Space, the transactional worth of ordinary operatives had depreciated to zero.
Having tasted the absolute pinnacle of combat, low-tier bartering held no appeal for him.
Even raw attribute points were rapidly losing their luster.
"Hm?"
"Why did everyone go quiet?"
Kaito's cadence was placid, yet framed by the dense crimson glow wrapping his forearms, not a single operative dared to open their mouth.
They understood: a monster like Mercenary Tao did not give a damn about collective numbers.
This was a butcher who, long before scaling to his current nightmare tier, had casually fractured the continental shelf beneath Neon during an unconstrained brawl.
A demon who had processed over a hundred Reincarnators into Crimson Drop Cards in a single afternoon.
The operatives who had hidden behind the shield of collective safety shrank into themselves.
The Spiritual Calamity was terrifying, and families were precious, but before the immediate certainty of absolute execution... perhaps those concerns could take a back seat?
Kaito was thoroughly accustomed to this brand of human cowardice. A mocking sneer touched his lips.
The so-called brilliance of human virtue was, in the end...
"My Lord, culling localized spiritual incursions should yield Paradise credits, should it not?"
Among the frozen crowd, Skylark's face burned with fury. Shrugging off the desperate restraint of his companions, he moved to shout, only to be interrupted by a steady voice rising from the ranks.
Turning his head, he saw a short-haired young man stepping calmly out from the crowd, looking directly at the tyrant Mercenary Tao to pose his question with unruffled focus.
Trailing several paces behind him, a girl with long hair was desperately burying her face in the crowd, trying to vanish from sight.
Kaito studied this so-called Old King. The young man carried an unmistakable presence—the breed of individual an observer picked out from a crowd with a single glance.
Rather than leaping forward like a self-righteous idealist to denounce his cruelty, he had used Paradise credits as a lever to demonstrate to the gathered operatives that this calamity was an abundant resource.
He was actively steering the incentives of his peers.
Had he accepted the reality that Mercenary Tao would never lift a finger to sanitize the root of the outbreak, choosing instead to focus entirely on mitigating the fallout?
It was an undeniably pragmatic operational framework.
Rather than posturing like an idiot against an immovable wall to achieve zero tangible results, mobilizing available resources to curb civilian casualties was far more rational.
Kaito nodded slowly.
"Naturally. Not merely culling incursions; establishing permanent civilian preservation sectors and erecting structural municipal barriers will all be rewarded with credits."
"Go ahead and remodel the world. Heh... if you truly cherish that reality and its mortals as deeply as you claim~"
Kaito waved an indifferent hand, tossing Deathwing's harvested materials to Black Butler. Ordering him to compile an updated ledger of high-tier trade items, he turned on his heel and vacated the public plaza.
Returning to his personal quarters, a single pulse of Kaito's will summoned a spiritual entity from the depths of his consciousness.
Following the minor mastery of his constitution, summoning spirits was no longer an uncontrolled gamble; he commanded the authority to manifest specific entities at will.
Materializing before him was the white-robed spirit of Satoru Gojo. Yet this time, resting at a rakish tilt across Gojo's brow was an exquisite, bone-white mask.
"Oh?"
"An Arrancar transformation?"
Gojo opened his eyes, the vast cerulean brilliance of the Six Eyes flaring to life. Reconstituting behind his back were countless chains—their former crimson hue bleached into immaculate bone-white, each link studded with opening Six Eyes pupils.
A snow-white zanpakuto rested against his hip. Catching his host's probing gaze, Gojo drew the blade an inch from its scabbard, revealing steel as blue as a cloudless sky.
A suffocating, catastrophic spiritual pressure detonated into the room.