The night air was cool as water. A slender crescent moon hung like a hook in the dark sky.
The quiet of the Tianra Imperial Palace was shattered without warning by a tremendous explosion.
The soldiers on night watch nearly jumped out of their armor. The two duty generals were on their feet immediately, moving at a run toward the source, ready to deal with an enemy assault — when a shadowy figure flashed briefly into view and they moved to intercept. Before they could, the Guardian War God appeared from nowhere, stepping between them and the figure with calm authority: no attack, just the Third Young Master running experiments. Stand down.
The Third Young Master was a grandmaster of puppet war beast construction — second only to the eccentric genius Yue Gong himself, and widely recognized as such across the Longteng continent.
Whatever research he was running now, it had to be extraordinary. An explosion of that magnitude, and working through the night — success or failure, it was clearly no small project.
The two duty generals had no desire to ask further questions. They withdrew as instructed and went to reassure the two companies of sentries who were still trying to figure out whether they needed to be alarmed.
Into the Tianra Emperor Hua Xuri’s private chambers came Yueyang at a dead sprint, his robes in tatters.
The duty attendant outside stared at him, completely frozen between instincts that were actively contradicting each other.
He blew past her before she could decide what to do. The chamber door opened, then closed. The moment for intervention had passed.
She turned carefully back the other way and proceeded to have seen nothing at all.
“What do you think you’re doing? I was already in bed.” His Majesty’s voice carried the full weight of Imperial outrage. The boy had run up to his bedside. This was genuinely too much.
“Don’t sleep yet — get up, look at this. It didn’t succeed, but I found the right approach. I can feel it, this line of thinking is going somewhere — here, take a look, tell me what you think!” Yueyang, incandescent with excitement, thrust a blackened, vaguely spherical object through the bed curtains as though presenting a rare treasure. His Majesty, presented with the choice of taking it or not taking it, settled on neither, let out a furious sound, swept one hand out from behind the curtain, and gathered the object into a coil of clean white energy. A second, gentler motion pushed Yueyang back a few steps, and the canopy settled around the bed in a veil of soft mist.
“This is unacceptable behavior. Who gave you permission to invade the Imperial bedchamber? If this ever happens again, the consequences will be severe.”
“I was too excited — I simply forgot myself—”
“By that logic, if I’m feeling pleased with myself, may I beat you? That is the same argument, and it is a terrible one.” His Majesty was nearly suffering internal injury from the audacity. Still — he knew what Yueyang was. In daily life, a complete disaster. When focused on something that genuinely mattered to him, completely serious and utterly absorbed. A man who charged into an Imperial bedchamber in the middle of the night because he was too happy to remember protocol was exactly the kind of person Yueyang was, and being surprised by it would be foolish. He’d also been doing this, in fairness, at least partly for His Majesty’s sake.
If not for this project, he’d have found himself some pretty companion and been asleep hours ago, instead of standing here getting scolded with blast residue all over his face.
His Majesty wanted to stay angry. He found he couldn’t manage it.
He caught the scent of something — unusual, and unmistakable — and coughed deliberately, redirecting attention before it became a problem. “The matter of the unauthorized intrusion is set aside. Once, and only once. It does not happen again.”
“Gratitude, Your Majesty.”
His Majesty’s anger defused, Yueyang launched straight into it.
“Creating something that genuinely is a Summoning Grimoire — even if I threw the entire Sky Stairway and the heavenly realms into the effort, I don’t believe it’s achievable. That’s a domain even divine beings couldn’t touch. So I started asking a different question: why are we trying to build a tower in the clouds from the beginning? We don’t have the technology. We can’t build in the sky. So build on the ground.” He paused. “That’s a metaphor, obviously. What I mean is — use the capabilities we actually have to build something we can actually make.”
His Majesty felt the pull of this. Yes. The goal was too elevated. Shift it downward. The idea rang with a clarity that had been missing from the research for a very long time.
Yueyang dragged over a stool and positioned himself at the bedside.
He talked.
He also, in passing, called to the duty attendant outside to bring in some tea.
The attendant, hearing what she assumed was the Emperor’s voice, walked in with a tray — and found the Third Young Master sitting cross-legged at His Majesty’s bedside as though he owned both the chair and the room. Her eyes went wide enough to qualify as a medical event.
Yueyang accepted a cup of tea, took a sip, looked vaguely dissatisfied with the service quality, and then the attendant escaped at a pace that made further complaint impossible.
His Majesty watched this sequence of events and very nearly did not recover.
He thinks he’s in his own home.
The absolute nerve of this boy.
But His Majesty’s curiosity had been caught, and sending Yueyang out now would mean losing the thread. He turned the half-finished object over in his hands and listened.
Yueyang hit his stride, gesturing with the enthusiasm of a man who had once watched a president deliver an inaugural address and found the format inspiring: “Building an actual Grimoire, or anything capable of multiple war beast bonds — that’s dreaming. The Summoning Grimoire, created by the ancient gods themselves, permits only one life-guardian war beast per person. We shouldn’t be chasing that ceiling when we don’t have a fraction of the power it would require. But here’s the insight — the fact that life-guardian war beasts exist, and that each one has a completely different nature and attributes, tells us something. It tells us that every person’s potential and fundamental nature is different — at the soul level, at minimum. The body can be trained. Acquired knowledge is the same for everyone. But none of that changes a certain underlying fact.”
His Majesty felt something shift. A flash of intuition, not quite formed. Close. Almost there.
“What fact?” he said, leaning in despite himself.
Yueyang brought his fist down. “I can’t say I’m a hundred percent certain. But I’d put nine in ten odds on it: every person’s soul carries the potential to bond with a Summoning Grimoire. Not every single person without exception — but the overwhelming majority.”
“That’s — that can’t be right,” His Majesty said, genuinely startled. “How would you prove that?”
Yueyang smiled with absolute confidence.
His face was still thoroughly blackened from the blast. It didn’t help. He looked at best eccentric and at worst like a coal miner who had wandered into the wrong palace. And yet something was shining out of his eyes — a self-assurance so complete and luminous it came across as starlight.
He stood up, brought his fist down again for emphasis. “Start here: why can some people bond with a Grimoire, and others can’t? A lot of warriors will tell you it’s bloodline — and that’s part of it. But most thoughtful people recognize the more fundamental answer is potential. And potential connects to everything: bloodline is just one thread. Which means anyone who can bond a Grimoire must be relatively exceptional across multiple dimensions.” A beat. “Now step back even further. Assume every soul is capable of bonding a Grimoire — but only a tiny fraction actually express that potential—”
His Majesty understood instantly.
Eight thousand years of fog dissolved in a single moment.
It was like a window thrown open. Everything that had been blocked, every wall in the research that had seemed permanent and immovable — the path was suddenly, simply clear.
“You’re saying the human body is what limits the soul’s contact with the Grimoire. The physical form is what cuts off soul communication. The body’s insufficient potential is why the vast majority of people can’t form a bond.”
“Exactly.” Yueyang clapped once. “And follow-up question: why can only people under twenty bond with a Grimoire? Setting aside the heavenly realms and other races — Gold Elves can still bond at hundreds of years old — why is the human threshold so young?”
“The influence of acquired experience,” His Majesty said immediately, the answer coming before he’d finished thinking it through.
“Correct.” Yueyang lit up. “Here’s an analogy: as infants, nearly everyone has the potential to bond a Grimoire. But as time passes and the self develops, potential that goes unexcavated is consumed, buried, slowly smothered by accumulated knowledge and the weight of formed thought. Why do children from great families have better odds? First: superior bloodline, more potential to draw on. Second: proper cultivation from early childhood. Third: confidence.” He paused for weight. “Confidence. An ordinary person simply never develops the belief that bonding a Grimoire is something they could do. Unshakeable conviction is the foundation of the Perfect Innate Sovereign Realm — anyone who lacks genuine self-belief cannot bond a Grimoire. And even if confidence is there, without potential, or when acquired greed or desire or attachment buries the innate nature and severs the soul’s channel — that’s why most people fail. The final element is wisdom, in two forms: knowledge and raw intelligence. Knowledge can be learned — the same way war beasts advance to Sacred Beast or Divine Beast rank. Lack of innate intelligence, though — that’s a structural deficit. Soul communication becomes impossible.”
“I understand now,” His Majesty said softly, something like wonder in his voice, “why the senior figures placed ‘innate’ on the cultivation rankings. Warriors who achieve awakening are called Innate warriors. The realm above is the Perfect Innate Sovereign. They were always pointing in this direction. The word was the instruction the whole time.”
“The principle is clear,” Yueyang said, sliding the stool forward another inch. “In theory, most people are capable of bonding a Grimoire — but due to acquired influences, accumulated throughout growth, the vast majority end up tragic and mediocre. Now that we understand the problem, we can approach the research. My idea is exactly what you described — something that simultaneously bridges soul communication and lets ordinary warriors use it. But strictly speaking, it isn’t a Summoning Grimoire. It’s a summoning instrument — more like a summoning crystal — except with one crucial difference: it’s connected to the soul. The bond it creates is similar to a life-guardian war beast bond. And the beast it produces is the one most naturally aligned with the user’s own fundamental nature — the one most suited to growing as a single unit with the user.”
“Is this blackened metal sphere the substitute you’re describing?” His Majesty turned it over, examining it from multiple angles. Nothing visible distinguished it from a lump of scorched debris.
“That is not a sphere. It just hasn’t succeeded yet,” Yueyang said, with a slightly wounded air. Then he launched back in: “The function is this: it’s a device worn at the wrist. For ordinary warriors — or young people who’ve never been able to bond a Grimoire — direct soul communication is beyond them. We don’t need them to do it. The wrist device handles that. The soul communication component is seeded into the device itself — we embed our own intent into it, so the device essentially functions as a puppet war beast of ours. Its purpose is simple: it awakens the user’s summoned beast from within their own body.”
“You’re describing a mechanism,” His Majesty said. He had grasped the architecture at once.
“Exactly.” The stool moved forward another inch. “Think of the device as a wrist-mounted crossbow. The summoned beast is the bolt. The user only needs to learn how to pull the trigger. They don’t need to understand how the crossbow is built. They don’t need to know how the bolt was made. They don’t need to know anything at all. Just: pull the trigger.”
“Following that logic… it might actually be possible.” His Majesty paused, and something warmer crept into his voice. “But if that’s how it works, this would be an enormous burden on you. Everything flows from you. The effort would be immense, and the benefit to yourself minimal.”
“I thought you were going to tell me I was trying to seize control of every warrior on the Longteng continent,” Yueyang admitted, discreetly wiping a bead of cold sweat.
“A man whose mind is perpetually occupied with other matters — you have ambitions?” His Majesty had intended to maintain a serious tone. He found he couldn’t.
“I am a man of upright character and pure heart,” Yueyang said, with great dignity. The deepest aspiration of his life was to achieve the pose of a man of legendary virtue who somehow always had a beautiful woman asleep in his arms.
“You. Of course you are.” His Majesty paused. “But truly — you don’t want anything in return?”
He was developing a headache. If this genuinely worked — if this actually became the thing that changed the Longteng continent — what could possibly be given to this boy as a reward? He lacked for nothing.
“Building the puppet war beast is simple enough,” Yueyang said, waving a hand. “The troublesome parts are assessing the user’s potential and embedding the soul-communication rune imprint. Those take real effort. My suggestion: for efficiency, we restrict the service to beautiful women.” He leaned forward with the expression of a man sharing a deeply sensible business proposal. “Think about it, Your Majesty — we split the beautiful women fifty-fifty. If you’re feeling generous, sixty-forty in your favor. Picture it: an endless sea of beautiful women surrounding you, pulling you under in a wave of—”
“What did you just say?” His Majesty’s voice had gone very cold.
“Your Majesty, you spend your days in the inner palace — don’t tell me beautiful women don’t interest you. Come now, we’re both men here, I understand perfectly, there’s no need for embarrassment between us. I’m only saying this because I consider you a kindred spirit. I wouldn’t bother telling Jun Wuyou something like this — we’re not that close. And frankly, from what I can observe, you might be the type who prefers to indulge privately and quietly — which is fine, but completely unhealthy long-term. Suppressing these things tends to cause psychological complications. You should open up more. Express yourself—”
“GET OUT.“
His Majesty burst from behind the bed curtains, and one foot connected with Yueyang with considerable Imperial authority, launching him cleanly through the chamber doors and out into the corridor beyond.
Quiet type who indulges secretly. The absolute audacity of this boy.