The Grimoire World.

Yue Yang, dozing in a deck chair, sat bolt upright. Xiao Nu, off to one side carefully weaving a garland of flowers, stopped what she was doing and looked at him with curiosity, her big eyes blinking, the whole small sweet look of her almost unbearable.

“Who is it that keeps calling me?” Yue Yang found he had been having that nightmare again.

The strangest part of it was that the dream was perfectly clear while he was inside it, and the instant he woke it went out of him completely.

What was causing it? Was it some power getting in, or was someone really calling him? Fourth Mother? Somebody else?

He reached out and stroked Xiao Nu’s head, and decided to go outside and walk around a little, to work off some of the pressure coming from the evil god Weiguang. The battle with Weiguang had not begun yet, but the pressure of it, formless as it was, sat right on top of him. After the fight with the mysterious man, Yue Yang understood better than before how hard the Weiguang fight was going to be. The one piece of luck was that Weiguang’s true body was still sealed in Human Valley and his summoning grimoire was sealed away in Tower Beyond the Tower, so he could not bring his full fighting power to bear. Otherwise Yue Yang felt he might as well not fight at all. He would lose, without question.

He thought back to the supreme divine power Weiguang had let loose in Tower Beyond the Tower.

And then to that terrifying avatar, so enormous he had never seen the whole of the body — a thing on the scale of a planet.

Only a finger.

And the finger matched the high mountain ranges of the world.

If Weiguang had his true body and his grimoire both, Yue Yang suspected he might well be able to kill the mysterious man in a single stroke… what he did not know was who had sealed a monster like that in the first place. A great god on the order of the Dragon God Supreme, perhaps. Perhaps some ancient god more powerful still. The higher his own realm climbed, the smaller he felt.

Yue Yang came out into Mountain Beyond the Mountain and flew idly across the sky, letting his thoughts run wherever they wanted.

At some point Xiao Wenli had fallen in behind him.

Without a sound.

She kept him company the whole way.

When Yue Yang came back out of his own head and found her still following him, he turned and smiled at her. “How about we go see Mother in a little while?”

The mother he meant was Xiao Wenli’s “mother,” Empress Vivienne, of course. During the fight with the mysterious man he had had the strange feeling that Empress Vivienne was about to step in and help. Then for some reason she had changed her mind, and he had turned the battle around himself. For this fight against the evil god Weiguang he was fairly sure she would come out and fight, and they ought to work out how to coordinate so they got the most out of it. However proud Yue Yang was, however much of a man’s man he thought himself, there was no way to insist on taking Weiguang one-on-one when powerful help was standing right there. Doing that would not make him a hero. It would make him an idiot.

Empress Vivienne had fully recovered by now, and she had improved besides, in the course of converting the black hole seal into an ice-and-snow world.

There had been the Conquest Queen at her peak, in the old days.

The Empress Vivienne of today was stronger.

If it took her going into the field for him to have a chance of beating the evil god Weiguang, Yue Yang was absolutely not going to refuse.

He even had one small regret — he did not know whether that snow girl, awake now and gone off to who knew where, would make it back in time for this fight against Weiguang.

A few more days.

Maybe that snow girl would be back with him soon.

Thinking it, Yue Yang found he could hardly wait to see Xue Wuxia.

Xiao Wenli suddenly cut ahead of him, her whole body tight, and pulled out her twin blades and pointed them at the horizon, her small face gone grave.

“What is it?” Yue Yang trusted that combat instinct of hers, which was a shade better than his own. He stopped at once, gathered up the Waning Crescent Moon, and extended his divine mind carefully to search for the unknown enemy. At first he assumed it was Ji Wuri, who had gotten away that day, or some helper the mysterious man had left behind in Mountain Beyond the Mountain. Then his divine mind touched the target, and a curse came out of him before he could stop it. “Damn it — Weiguang has broken out of the seal?”

He had thought he still had a few days to rest and get himself into the best possible condition.

Instead Weiguang, without a sound, had already torn free.

And he had come all the way to the door.

Damn it all, this was one hell of a surprise attack. Were ancient laws something you could just break through now?

Exactly as in the fight at Tower Beyond the Tower, Yue Yang could not see where Weiguang was at all. The moment his divine mind made contact, a supreme divine pressure came down over everything, blotting out the sky, a hundred thousand times heavier than a mountain. Strong as Yue Yang was, and far off as he was, there was a suffocating weight to it and he could barely get a breath.

On the horizon, a black shadow was blocking out the sky.

There was no working out how enormous the body actually was. If it could be put at all, this body amounted to a planet. It was more absurd than the sky-dog swallowing the sun. The entire sky was going dark, as though some primordial beast out of the old chaos had bitten a great piece straight out of it. Only with the True Sight pupil, the strongest of his Heavenly Eye of Wisdom, could Yue Yang just barely make out, at some unknowable distance of kilometers, an existence so large it defied imagining, slowly “crawling” toward him.

The “crawl” looked painfully slow. In fact the speed of it was terrifying — perhaps dozens of kilometers a second, perhaps close to a hundred.

“…”

Yue Yang, for his part, had nothing to say.

Who was supposed to push a boss like this? This was flat-out a raid boss designed to wipe the party. Never mind having no meat shield to tank it — with a million meat shields, or ten million, or a hundred million, you were not surviving one slap from this thing.

He had thought that terrifying rock avatar at Tower Beyond the Tower was already grotesque enough. It turned out to have been child’s play.

Weiguang’s rock avatar now was maybe ten times the size of the one at Tower Beyond the Tower. More than ten.

Back then a single finger matched a mountain peak.

Now Yue Yang could barely take in one finger. This whole body of Weiguang’s was, at the lowest estimate, the size of a planet. And you’re supposed to fight that. One finger comes down and everybody gets ground to powder like ants. A casual punch throws up an ocean. A breath is a hurricane. A sneeze probably blows a man a hundred thousand miles. A boss this vicious — this was abusing the players. There is a way to be cruel to people and this is not it. What was that complaints line number again…

Yue Yang, for his part, sighed, and reflected that a monster on this scale was not something he could handle, and not something a GM could handle either.

He had counted on the “Yinglong.”

He had thought it would just about hold the line.

It turned out otherwise.

Set against Weiguang’s planet avatar, a hundred and eight kilometers of Yinglong was one pitiful little mud loach.

Weiguang had been sealed at Tower Beyond the Tower in Human Valley, where the martial prohibition and the seal had cut his power down to its lowest.

Now he had come to Mountain Beyond the Mountain, in Earth Valley, and there were no restrictions here.

His power had naturally shot up tenfold.

Yue Yang wanted to bring the mysterious man back to life so he could kill him a second time. Turning Weiguang loose was a filthy move. Without Human Valley’s restrictions, was Weiguang something human strength could stand against at all?

“What’s happening?” Princess Qianqian and Luohua and the others had felt it through the heart-summons and come out, and one look at the whole sky slowly darkening like the sky-dog swallowing the sun left them at a complete loss. It was not that they had never killed enormous enemies — but with an enemy on this scale nobody had any idea where to begin. Next to this planet-sized avatar of the evil god, an Island Whale or a Sea-Coiling Great Serpent was pathetic. Weiguang’s avatar was simply as big as a planet. Never mind fighting it, you could not so much as look at the whole of it.

“Get back inside, now. Nobody comes out without my say-so.” Yue Yang drove them straight back.

Not a chance.

This evil god Weiguang was absolutely not something they could stand against. One move and they were gone.

The gap was too wide in every direction. Short of possessing divine power on Weiguang’s own level, standing against this planet avatar was impossible.

“Xiao — Xiao San, be careful, don’t try to take it head-on…” Yue Yu was so frightened the color had gone out of her lovely face, and she could not get the words out cleanly. Her eyes were red and there were tears in her voice as she pressed the instruction on her little brother. If the fight had been avoidable at all, she would have dragged him back into the Grimoire World by force and never let him out again.

“Don’t worry. I’m coming back, and the final victory is going to be ours.” Yue Yang gave her a hard hug and had Xiao Wenli take her back.

“I’m not going to say anything.” Princess Qianqian used Sovereign Intent to force her own nerves quiet. She was the last to return to the Grimoire World. After everyone else had held him, she opened her arms too, and for the first time she was the one who moved first, taking hold of him before he could reach for her and holding on hard. The strength of it made him understand that her toughness only went as deep as the surface — inside, she was every bit as fragile as the rest of them.

Her lips were trembling when they came to his.

And he kissed her deeply.

And as he comforted a frightened heart, she bit down on his lip and would not let go, and in the end her teeth broke it and blood welled out, and only then did she let him go, unwillingly.

Four eyes met.

No sound.

But the feeling had already passed between the two hearts a million times over.

There was no last word of instruction, and no swing of her fist at him the way there usually was. She only looked at him with those rouge tiger eyes until they had filled with tears.

At the instant the first tear was about to fall out of a brimming eye, she turned and left, and Xiao Wenli guided her back into the Grimoire World. Yue Yang put out his hand and caught a warm pearl, and the pearl broke apart in his palm and scattered, and in a moment it was gone into nothing in the hurricane sweeping past them. But the warmth of that tear, and the feeling in it that could not be said and could only be understood between two hearts, went through Yue Yang like Nirvana Flame and burned across the whole of him in an instant, and settled in the deepest part of his soul, and turned into a permanent memory.

Yue Yang had never seen her like that — those brave, flashing tiger eyes brimming over with tears.

One look at her.

And his heart hurt past bearing.

He would not have the woman he loved shedding tears for him. Not one.

“Hyah!”

Yue Yang’s heart caught fire. His fighting fury went straight up into the sky. So the evil god Weiguang had a planet avatar blotting out the sun — what of it? Whoever dared block his sky, whoever dared put his power over Yue Yang’s head, had to get out of the way. Otherwise he would break through this heaven and break through this earth and destroy everything in front of him.

Above or below, anyone who dared stand in his way died.

Destruction is creation, and it is eternity.

It is his own creation.

Inside his own world, everything belongs to his will — destruction, creation, eternity alike.

“Yinglong!” Yue Yang let out a roar that shook heaven and earth, and his supreme will rode on the sound of it and shook the ten directions of the world in that instant. In the ice-and-snow world, the dormant Empress Vivienne opened her eyes at once, and the light in them was fierce as lightning. And the Yinglong, hanging in the sky above the ice-and-snow world, went from perfect stillness to perfect motion in one instant, all hundred and eight kilometers of it. It let out a dragon’s cry in answer to its master’s call, and broke through the spacetime barrier of the ice-and-snow world, and came out through the black hole seal space with a rolling crash, and shot out of the sky over Mountain Beyond the Mountain.

It danced in the air.

One toss of the dragon’s head.

First it climbed to the very top of the highest heaven.

Then it dove back down toward Yue Yang, lowered its head, took its master inside — and in that instant the two wills fused into one, and the dragon’s head came up high and pulled the dragon’s body after it, and as the shout of it shattered heaven and earth, it flew up hard and shot straight at that planet avatar of the evil god Weiguang coming toward them out of the horizon.

(End of Chapter 1226)