The air in the room was so heavy it felt like even the oxygen had frozen in place.
Councilor Yukinoshita's eyes, full of pleading and reverence, and the terrified, curious, or stunned gazes behind him, all converged on Natsume.
He did not answer right away. He simply walked forward two steps and stopped about three meters from the bed.
"Everyone, step back a little," he said quietly.
The words were not loud, but they carried a calm, unquestionable authority.
Almost instinctively, everyone retreated, leaving the center of the room as a stage for him... and for the thing that was still howling madly in Yukino's body.
Natsume slowly closed his eyes.
When he opened them again, deep within those pale blue irises, it was as if countless stars were being born and dying in a silent, endless cycle. In his sight, the entire world was deconstructed and rebuilt in an instant. The essence of all things... the flow of cursed energy, the shape of souls, the trajectories of power... all unfolded before him in the clearest, most precise detail.
Six Eyes, fully open.
Under that insight, Yukino's beautiful body turned into a half-transparent container made up of countless particles of cursed energy. At the heart of that container, two completely different soul-bodies were tangled together in a chaotic dance that still followed some strange, twisted rule.
One of them emanated a cold, pure aura. That was Yukino's own soul. Right now, it was squeezed into a corner of her body, its light dim and feeble, like a star buried behind heavy storm clouds.
The other was the cat-shaped cursed spirit coiled within her.
What truly sharpened Natsume's gaze was what connected the two.
They were bound by tens of thousands of threads of cursed energy, each one hundreds of times thinner than a strand of hair, each one glowing with an ominous black sheen. They formed a web like the work of a mad artist splashing ink upon the void. One end of every thread was buried deep into the origin of Yukino's soul, the other tightly wrapped around the cat-shaped cursed spirit, forming a sick, distorted symbiotic loop.
With every heartbeat, every breath, faint life force flowed along those threads, siphoned away from Yukino's soul to sustain the cat spirit's existence. At the same time, the spirit's grudge and feral malice, born of death, traveled back through those same threads, polluting Yukino's soul bit by bit.
"So that is how it is... it has already started nesting," Natsume murmured.
He understood. This was no longer a simple case of possession or occupation. It was a deeper, more insidious erosion of the soul itself.
"Master Natsume...?" Councilor Yukinoshita could not help whispering nervously when he saw Natsume standing motionless.
Natsume did not respond. Under the horrified eyes of everyone present, he slowly raised his right hand.
He did not form hand seals. He did not chant an incantation. He did not even move closer to the bed.
He simply extended his index finger and pointed at the violently struggling figure on the mattress from afar.
"Cursed Technique: Limitless."
At the moment the words fell, nothing seemed to happen.
There was no world-shattering explosion, no blinding light. The only sound in the room was still Yukino's crazed, beast-like roaring.
However, among everyone present, only Yashiro's pupils shrank to pinpoints.
Her spiritual sensitivity, far beyond that of any normal person, allowed her to "see" a miracle that others could not even begin to imagine.
In the space between Natsume and Yukino, in a microscopic world pushed to the extreme, countless infinites were being created and controlled. Space itself had become an invisible, razor-sharp scalpel, precise down to the atomic level.
"Hiisss... meowaaah...!"
On the bed, Yukino's cries suddenly turned shrill, filled with agony and a terror greater than ever before.
In everyone else's eyes, all they could see was her body going into violent convulsions, something under her skin writhing and racing around in a frenzy.
Yet in the world seen through Six Eyes, Natsume was manipulating the power of Limitless with a precision surpassing that of any god, using it to sever, one by one, the countless cursed energy threads binding the two souls together.
This was a procedure more complex than the most intricate surgery by billions of times. Every "cut" had to be executed without a hair's breadth of error. He had to completely sever the connection between the cat spirit and Yukino's soul, while not harming Yukino herself in the slightest.
When the last thread was cut...
Pop.
A faint sound rang out.
From Yukino's chest, a fist-sized clump of cursed energy, black and thick as ink, was forcibly torn free by an unseen power and flung out of her body.
In midair, the black mass twisted and warped, reshaping itself into a cat-shaped shadow, its form brimming with resentment. It let out a silent scream and tried to dart toward the window, fleeing into the outside world.
Natsume's left hand was already open, palm facing the shadow, five fingers slightly curled.
"Cursed Technique Lapse, micro... Blue."
A weak yet irresistible suction burst forth. The fleeing cat spirit let out a miserable wail, dragged helplessly into his grasp. In the end, it was compressed into a marble-sized black sphere that hovered quietly above his palm, unable to move.
Almost at the same time, on the bed, Yukino's body, which had been thrashing like mad, suddenly stiffened. Her eyes rolled back, and she slumped down limply, falling completely unconscious.
The entire sequence, from start to finish, had taken only a dozen seconds.
The room fell into absolute silence.
Councilor Yukinoshita, Haruno, and the others were already stunned beyond speech, their minds blank before a scene that shattered all common sense.
Hiratsuka stood there with her mouth hanging open, staring dully at Natsume and the ominous black sphere hovering above his palm. It felt as if the scientific worldview she had built up over thirty years had just been pulverized into dust.
Only Hōzuki remained fixated on Natsume. For the first time, a blazing light flared in her pitch-black eyes, normally as still as a deep well. It was the shock of glimpsing a higher dimension, a greater power... and a fierce, primal longing from the depths of her soul to learn this divine art.
She finally understood. Her so-called "ghost keeping" techniques were nothing but child's play compared to the godlike control over cursed energy displayed by the man in front of her.
"Yukino!" Haruno was the first to recover. She cried out and rushed to the bedside, hurriedly checking her sister's breathing.
"Do not worry, she just fainted." Natsume casually squeezed the black sphere in his hand. It crumbled without a sound, the cursed energy within completely annihilated. "But this is not over yet."
He turned to the anxious councilor and continued, "Just now, I removed only the 'fruit' that had taken over her body. If we do not deal with the 'cause', the same thing will happen again."
"This cursed spirit nested inside Yukino for too long. It has already caused a slight contamination of her soul. If we do not treat it right away, that taint will spread like a virus and eventually cause irreversible damage. That is why I had to tear it free first."
Natsume's gaze sharpened. "And besides, do you not think something feels off? This cursed spirit itself... is too weak."
"Weak?" Everyone was puzzled. After everything they had just witnessed, that thing still counted as weak?
"For a cursed spirit capable of triggering a rare phenomenon like Spirit Collision, its strength is pitiful," Natsume explained. "There is only one logical conclusion: the source of its birth, the original cat whose soul switched with Yukino's, is already on the brink of death."
"Precisely because it was dying, it acted on the most primitive survival instinct, searching desperately for a temporary vessel to prolong its existence."
His words rang in all their minds like a bolt of thunder.
"A cat... on the verge of death..." Haruno's face went pale. "Yukino loves cats so much. She must have... she must have found an injured stray somewhere and secretly brought it home without telling us."
Suddenly, something clicked in her memory. "The backyard. The old storage annex back there. That was her favorite place when she was little. If she hid it anywhere, it would be there."
There was no time to waste. Everyone followed Haruno through the garden to a small detached annex at the back of the estate.
The door was unlocked. When they pushed it open, a faint mix of blood and medicine drifted out.
The annex was dim and cluttered with all sorts of odds and ends. In one corner, a clean old blanket had been spread out on the floor. Beside it sat a bowl of water that had long since dried up, some opened rolls of gauze, and cotton balls stained with dried blood.
All the signs pointed to one thing. A wounded creature had once been here, carefully cared for by its gentle owner.
"Yukino..." Haruno's eyes went red at once. She instinctively opened her mouth to call out.
"Do not make a sound."
Natsume stopped her immediately. He opened Six Eyes once more, pale blue pupils sweeping every corner of the annex.
In his vision, faint remnants of cursed energy lingered in the air, bearing Yukino's imprint. That faint trace was like a fragile thread, beginning at the corner where the blanket lay, extending through the gap in the window and disappearing into the darkness outside.
Natsume's expression grew more serious than ever.
"We are almost out of time."
He pointed toward the invisible trail and spoke in a low, steady voice, "The cat carrying Yukino's soul has pushed its body to the limit. Relying on nothing but its last instinct, it left this place to find somewhere quiet... to die."
"I have to warn you," he said, letting his gaze sweep over each of them in turn. "Once that cat's body dies completely, Yukino's soul will lose its only vessel. In this world... it will simply vanish."
In that instant, the search turned into a desperate race against time.