I got rid of all the use-flags on xz-utils and I was unable to figure out how to emerge xz-utils because it kept tripping the circular dependency error. It would appear that this dependency issue cannot be resolved without modifying one or the other packages as there are no use-flags which can be turned off to allow xz-utils to install. Also elt-patches has no use flags, and requires xz-utils. Reproducible: Always Actual Results: * Error: circular dependencies: (app-portage/elt-patches-20211104:0/0::gentoo, ebuild scheduled for merge) depends on (app-arch/xz-utils-5.2.6:0/0::gentoo, ebuild scheduled for merge) (buildtime) (app-portage/elt-patches-20211104:0/0::gentoo, ebuild scheduled for merge) (buildtime)
Such circular dependencies often happen when installing a new system. But it's very odd you have neither xz-utils nor elt-patches installed. Did you lose /var/db/pkg or something?