The Leo meteor shower had not come crashing down yet.

Weiguang’s planet avatar hurled the ball of meteors in its hand savagely at the ground.

The ball came down at speed.

It had the Yinglong wrapped up inside it.

And it struck the earth with a Yue Yang in there too, unable to struggle at all.

The meteors, driven by Weiguang’s divine power, ground against the air at that velocity and blew millions of forks of lightning out along the way, and a mushroom cloud past any measuring went up into the sky — though the shockwave had already spread out ahead of it and swept across the whole of heaven and earth.

When the impact’s shockwave went far past what the order and law of Mountain Beyond the Mountain could carry, in one instant not only heaven and earth but space itself broke apart. An enormous black hole was born, and it swallowed everything. Never mind the things inside it — even the shockwaves that were tearing heaven and earth down could not escape its absorption. Lightning, meteors, thick smoke, even the sound of the explosion: all of it vanished into that black hole between heaven and earth.

No sound.

But the whole world looked like the end of days.

The black hole raged through everything like some primordial beast that can never be filled, devouring whatever came into its enormous mouth.

Except for one Yinglong. Only a thing that could break through boundaries could fight its way out of a world in complete annihilation… the Yinglong spiraled and forced a path clear, resisting the black hole’s pull with one part of itself and dodging the rocks and mountaintops flung endlessly inward with the other.

Yue Yang’s head was swimming. Without the Yinglong protecting him from outside, his own defenses alone could never have withstood the terrible impact of the planet avatar throwing him down with everything it had. Even with the meteors and the Yinglong outside him absorbing most of the shock, Yue Yang’s mind went blank, and for a long time he could not get back to normal awareness.

Most of that, of course, was the shock of Weiguang’s divine sense.

Weiguang had the will of a divine-tier being.

He bore down on Yue Yang without a moment’s pause.

The black hole appeared fast and it disappeared fast.

The laws of heaven and earth in Mountain Beyond the Mountain were never going to collapse completely from one explosion. The black hole shrank at a speed the eye could follow, and dwindled, and finally disappeared without a trace, as though it had never been there at all.

Except that the piece of land it had devoured in its frenzy left a gap that turned the stomach to look at.

The sky-covering hand, one thumb short of a full set, pressed down. Weiguang fixed Yue Yang and the Yinglong in place with divine power, and his other fist came down with a rolling crash.

At that moment heaven split and earth cracked. The land, already missing nearly a thousand kilometers of mountains and rivers, shattered and collapsed and sank all around that still-smoking gap, and the Yinglong could not struggle free. It could only watch the sky, and the fierce flame filling it, and then that giant fist drove it down into the ground. In the sky, the heavy hand with the missing thumb was still there, its divine pressure holding Yue Yang and the Yinglong down. Mountains and land shattered and spread out as powder — and a second later, under Weiguang’s divine mind, gathered back into shape as new rock and new hills of earth. The planet avatar’s two enormous hands scooped hard around the gap and came up cradling a mountain ten thousand meters high, and set it down on top of the deep pit with Yue Yang under it.

And not only that.

Weiguang kept working his hands, wrenching steadily at the planet avatar’s own head.

His other plan was to give that head up — to smash the head that was drawing the Leo meteor shower down onto that mountain, so the Leo meteor shower would bury and seal the ones who had called it — the Yinglong and Yue Yang, still down underneath — under the consequences of their own doing.

With a rolling crash he twisted the planet avatar’s head off.

And then Weiguang discovered, to his surprise, that the Leo meteor shower was not tracking the planet avatar’s head at all.

It was tracking the enormous body he had pulled back. Which meant that what the Leo meteor shower was actually attacking was Weiguang’s divine sense, and what had been marked was Weiguang’s divine sense — not that unimaginably enormous planet avatar. Caught off guard, Weiguang had no time to look into how that sword-qi had been able to mark his divine sense. He decided on the instant and threw the whole thing down, driving the headless body of a planet avatar of who knew what size down onto a mountain barely ten thousand meters high, which was very small by comparison.

The whole sky over Mountain Beyond the Mountain went dark.

If that planet avatar landed, there was no telling whether Mountain Beyond the Mountain would break apart under it.

Faster than Weiguang was the Yinglong, which had already bored up out of the hill of earth. It threw its head back and howled, and the divine power that had been pressing down on it from above was canceled out to nothing by the counterattack of Yue Yang’s Sovereign Intent.

“What a fine young man. If this old woman had not come, she would never have known the Sky Tower really did have a boy as fine as little Ji Ge says. Young as you are, and you dare to take on Weiguang one-on-one, and he’s a famously vicious one — such nerve. Tsk, tsk, tsk. It would be a shame to kill a child as sweet as you. This old woman really can’t quite bring herself to. Come out and let her have a look at what a handsome thing you are. If she likes what she sees, she might beg the Hall Supreme to spare your life and take you on as a gatekeeper boy.” A consciousness came through Weiguang’s divine-sense blockade and printed itself directly into Yue Yang’s mind, and in a sea of awareness that had been thick and dull it burst like a thunderbolt.

“Who is that?” Yue Yang was appalled. Handling one evil god Weiguang was already more than enough, and now some old ghost had turned up too?

“Get out of that little puppet for this old woman, you rude little squirt. Didn’t the grown-ups in your family teach you any manners?” A black shadow appeared from somewhere, right in the middle of the furious divine-mind battle between Yue Yang and Weiguang, and nobody knew how it had happened. In an instant it had stepped up onto the crown of the Yinglong’s head.

A black light flashed strangely.

Yue Yang, who had been one body with the Yinglong, came flying out of the dragon’s mouth without warning.

Deprived of Yue Yang’s conscious control and of the power he lent it, the Yinglong was no match at all for Weiguang’s terrible pressure — and with that black shadow doing something to it besides, by some means nobody could name, a hundred and eight kilometers of Yinglong crashed down onto the ground and sank deep into the rock and earth and could not fight its way out however hard it struggled.

Yue Yang had no time to strike back before he found an eerie war beast biting at him.

He got clear of it by a hair, and then, appalled, saw what it was.

That strange war beast was a set of false teeth, opening and closing without stopping.

It flew forward at something close to the speed of light, and the meteors falling from the sky and the mountain peaks blocking its path were all bitten away in one open-and-shut — more absurd, frankly, than the black hole a moment ago.

What kind of war beast was this?

How could a war beast be shaped like a set of false teeth?

And how could a war beast like that possibly have been raised to a tier this terrifying?

Yue Yang had not recovered from it before the black shadow threw out a ball of sickening green light, straight at his body.

“Danger.” The warning went off in Yue Yang at once, and he used no power to attack it and no method to defend against it. He used the safest thing available — a straight teleport, cutting space open and getting himself tens of thousands of meters away. The ball of green light gave a hiss, and in the middle of its own forward motion, with an abruptness that broke every normal law and could not be explained at all, it surfaced right in front of Yue Yang.

Behind him a mountain peak collapsed with a crash, as though a divine hand had snapped it off at the middle.

And then it came forward with a rush.

It was as though a divine hand were behind it, shoving.

In the instant when the sickening ball of green light, which could not be dodged, struck Yue Yang, the broken mountain peak traded places with him.

And there in front of Yue Yang, the mountain peak that had traded places with him turned, unbelievably, into a plague rabbit no bigger than an ordinary one… Yue Yang nearly wet himself. If he turned into a plague rabbit too, then either Weiguang would step on him or that black shadow would swat him flat.

What a vicious attack this was.

It was flat-out sorcery.

“You rude little brat, nicely done. You dare play tricks in front of this old woman? Fine. Let me see how many mountain peaks you can snap off with your strength. Children these days — they get the smallest grip on a little star force and look how insufferable they turn out.” The black shadow scattered a handful, and thousands upon thousands of balls of green light appeared between heaven and earth.

“Son of a bitch.” Yue Yang, for his part, feared neither heaven nor earth. He did not fear injury and he did not fear pain; he did not fear a beating and he did not fear a fight to the death; he did not fear threats and he did not fear being schemed against — but this eerie sorcery that turned a man into a rabbit had him wetting himself.

The sickening green lights were blotting out the sky. How was he supposed to dodge them now?

And the worst of it was that Weiguang was piling on while he was down, pressing with everything he had, and the whole of heaven and earth had turned into a sheet of iron under his will. Teleporting freely was not going to be possible any more.

Yue Yang threw out a Star Burst and scattered a sky full of fierce flame.

It did no good.

That damned false-teeth war beast had come flying back at some point, and it swallowed the Star Burst and the sky full of flame down to nothing.

If Yue Yang had not dodged fast enough, that sickening set of false teeth might well have eaten Yue Yang too… everywhere in the sky and everywhere on the ground there were those self-tracking green lights. Yue Yang had never in his life been so afraid of the color green. Wasn’t green supposed to mean the environment? Damn it, how had green turned into plague — and evil, uncanny plague rabbits at that?

Where had this old article crawled out of?

And what was she to Weiguang, and to Ji Wuri?

Just as Yue Yang was working out that he really could not win this one and wondering how to get back into the Grimoire World for shelter, and when he was ever going to break through a blockade like this, somebody appeared whom he had never once considered.

It was Xiao Nu.

No.

To be precise, it was Pandora, the former Goddess of Misfortune, who was completely one with Xiao Nu.

Ordinarily Pandora would not come out and interfere in Yue Yang’s fights. However savage a beating he was taking, she would not put a hand in — she considered it part of the tempering that made him grow. Today, though, she appeared, against everything Yue Yang expected. And she was furious.

“You damned old witch. You have the nerve to steal my sister’s power?” Pandora appeared beside Yue Yang with one hand on her hip and the other pointed at the black shadow, and shouted it at the top of her voice.

“Never mind being angry for a second — how about getting rid of these green lights first… can you get rid of them?” Yue Yang hurried to stop Pandora’s cursing. This was not the moment for it. A few more lines and the two of them might both turn into rabbits, hopping around while people hunted them. The sky full of green lights was closing in and had nearly swallowed the pair of them, and everything they touched on the way turned into a plague rabbit.

“A petty little plague-shifting art. What of it?” Pandora gave a thoroughly contemptuous snort, and Yue Yang was delighted — and then her next sentence nearly made him beat his own head in front of her, because Pandora frowned and scratched the back of her head in confusion. “The way to break a plague-shifting art is very simple. Only I can’t call it to mind just now. In the war that destroyed the gods I lost too much of my memory… it would be so much easier if my sister were here. It’s a wave of the hand to her.”

“Who is your sister?” Yue Yang had nothing to say. Calling your sister to the rescue now was a little late, wasn’t it — better to work something out himself and forget about waving hands.

“My sister?” Pandora’s expression went vaguer still. The cowlick on her head swayed once, then drooped in dejection. “Why can’t I remember having a sister? Haven’t I always been alone?”

“You came out here to make trouble on purpose, didn’t you?” Yue Yang wanted to slap himself. He knew perfectly well this girl’s memory was no good and he had gone and argued with her anyway. What an idiot.

“No, no. Master, Xiao Nu absolutely did not come out to make trouble.” The poor girl heard that and came bursting out of the sea of awareness ahead of anything Pandora could say, declaring the heart of a devoted fan and a loyal handmaid. “Xiao Nu was worried about Master, so she had Pandora come out and help. I’m sorry. Xiao Nu was wrong.”

“Aah.” Yue Yang, for his part, felt the whole thing was a mess. Pandora the amnesiac was no use to him, and now he had to comfort a Xiao Nu who was nearly in tears from guilt. Unbelievable.

Those balls of green light took their direction from the black shadow’s will.

They closed in together over Yue Yang and Xiao Nu.

Thousands upon thousands of them.

Never mind blocking them, there was no getting away either… and in that last moment of despair Yue Yang held on tight to a Xiao Nu shaking with fear and shouted at the top of his lungs, “Here to collect the rent — and I’ll check your water meter while I’m at it!”

(End of Chapter 1228)