The tunnels bored by the drilling earthworms twisted and wound through the earth in great looping curves. In many places, anomalous energy concentrations had forced the passages into enormous detours, and navigating them felt like being lost inside a labyrinth. Under other circumstances, Yueyang would have been fascinated — pausing at each energy anomaly, feeling his way through the distortions, trying to piece together some fragment of what had happened here long ago. Right now he had no attention to spare. He moved like an arrow from a drawn bow, streaking inward.

“What’s wrong? What happened?” Xiahou Weijie — the Eagle-Eye, standing watch at the far end of the passage — stared as Yueyang came at him with an urgency he had never seen on that face before.

“Where’s Gray Wolf?” Yueyang took in the surroundings in an instant. The energy across the entire central zone had shifted — warped and wrong — and at the center of it all churned a terrifying energy vortex. No Gray Wolf in sight. Which meant it had gone inside.

Xiahou Weijie knew perfectly well that Gray Wolf had entered. Just yesterday they’d been gnawing on roasted chicken legs together while the wolf went about its exploration. He hadn’t been concerned — a Divine Beast of Gray Wolf’s caliber poking around a ruin that had been dead for ten thousand years should have been well within its capabilities. And yet here was Yueyang, one day later, moving like something was on fire.

He had never seen Yueyang look like this. Every muscle in his body went taut. “I’ll go in and clear the way.”

“It’s dangerous in there — you could die,” Yueyang said quickly. “Stay back.”

Xiahou Weijie drew his sword with a clear ring of metal, his expression grave, and stepped directly into Yueyang’s path. “The Longteng continent can manage without one Xiahou Weijie. It cannot manage without the Third Young Master of the Yue Clan. If you won’t let me go first — I’ll die right here in front of you.”

Yueyang looked at him. The man wasn’t bluffing.

“Fine. Be careful.”

The moment Xiahou Weijie turned toward the vortex, Yueyang’s hand moved.

A precise strike to the back of the neck.

Xiahou Weijie’s entire focus was on the churning energy ahead — he had left himself completely open to the person behind him. And even if he hadn’t, the gap between their cultivation levels meant the outcome wouldn’t have changed. Yueyang could have knocked him out by force without pretending otherwise; he’d chosen this way because he didn’t want to hit him hard enough to cause real damage.

There was a soft sound.

Xiahou Weijie’s body seized, then crumpled. Yueyang sent a measured gust of palm energy after him, precisely enough to carry the unconscious man a hundred meters back down the tunnel, safely out of range.

Then Yueyang drew a long breath, settled the worry down into a corner of his mind, and brought himself fully into the stillness of the Perfect Innate Sovereign Realm. Best condition. Clear mind.

He stepped into the vortex.

The energy vortex had punched completely through the normal limitations of space, chaotically linking several pocket dimensions together. There was no way to choose the destination — Yueyang entered the first one at speed.

The space inside was not large, and the entire environment had been warped by energies he couldn’t immediately identify — packed tight with instability, like a room full of gunpowder waiting for a spark. The slightest disruption would trigger catastrophic detonation.

The second pocket dimension was shattered — fragments of space tumbling over each other in cascading ruin, almost certainly the remnants of what had once been the sky above Buried Sword Valley. Yueyang got out as quickly as he’d gone in. His clothes didn’t survive the exit. The fragmenting space and the vortex energies shredded them to ash between one breath and the next.

He probed six warped spaces in succession and found nothing but ruins.

In several of them, traces of ancient architecture survived — foundations and walls half-buried in collapsed earth, most likely what remained of Buried Sword Manor itself. He didn’t stop to examine any of it. He knew his intrusions were probably disturbing whatever delicate equilibrium was holding these spaces together, that everything he passed through might collapse completely in his wake. He didn’t care.

Nothing was worth more than Gray Wolf.

It was a strange thing to feel, given how Yueyang usually treated the wolf — the casual insults, the casual kicks, the shouting that served as a substitute for most forms of affection. But somewhere beneath all of that was a truth he’d never put into words. Gray Wolf was not a guard dog. In some way he’d never fully examined, the two of them were alike. The desperate, grinding drive to survive and rise — that hunger was identical in both of them. Yueyang’s own efforts, the relentless work he’d done in secret since the moment he arrived in this world, were known fully to almost no one. Even Jun Wuyou and the old fox, who understood that he worked hard, still tended to see him primarily as an incomprehensible genius — someone who improved at a mad pace without needing to grind the way other people did. They weren’t entirely wrong about the talent. But talent alone had never explained what Yueyang had become.

The real reason was the work.

He was lazy on the surface. Underneath, he had outworked every peer he’d ever had, and he knew it.

Gray Wolf was the same.

To any observer, Gray Wolf was the laziest war beast in existence. It slept. It flattered. It performed elaborate calculations of self-interest with the energy it was too lethargic to spend on anything else. And yet it had been, among all Yueyang’s war beasts, second only to Xiao Wenli in development, and the first to reach Divine Beast rank.

The effort Gray Wolf had poured into its own growth — the battles it had ground through, the discipline it had exercised when no one was looking — were things no ordinary war beast could have managed.

It felt the same constant fear that drove Yueyang: the nagging, never-quite-silenced terror that what you had right now could be taken away if you stopped pushing. Even as a Divine Beast, Gray Wolf hadn’t rested in satisfaction. It had never allowed itself to think of itself as something elevated and apart. Not the great Doom Wolf that devoured the heavens. Just a guard dog that would lose everything if its master disappeared.

That was the edge it never let itself step back from.

Between them — no formal bond, no contract — there was something else. A resonance. A mutual reliance that didn’t need a name.

When Yueyang looked at Gray Wolf, he was looking at another version of himself.

And Gray Wolf, looking at its master, saw something it could only call the future — the direction everything was supposed to go in. Without that presence, without that model ahead of it to chase, the whole world would become a different and lesser place.

It was because the Third Young Master of the Yue Clan stood above all men that the Doom Wolf could look down on all beasts.

While Yueyang searched, Gray Wolf was thinking about its master.

The sound that filled the dimension was continuous thunder.

Gray Wolf had a creature roughly five thousand meters long, eight hundred meters wide, and three hundred meters tall wedged lengthwise in its mouth — a Volcanic Whale, an entity of almost impossible scale. Even with its Doom Wolf’s full devouring capacity, swallowing something this large was beyond ordinary operation. The Volcanic Whale was Sky-rank tier six, and within this sea of fire it was performing at something substantially beyond that. If it managed to fall back into the flames, everything Gray Wolf had done would unravel immediately.

Already badly wounded, Gray Wolf had no alternatives. It had only one option: lean into the innate power it was born for, the ability that let it exceed its own limits when pushed to the wall. All-Consuming Obliteration.

One bite — the front portion of the Volcanic Whale’s enormous head swallowed down — and Gray Wolf used the leverage of its neck and throat to hoist the creature vertical, lifting thousands of meters of writhing, enraged whale straight up and holding it there, denying it any path back to the fire.

This was the only thing that worked. Let it fall back, and it would turn around and devour Gray Wolf instead.

The Volcanic Whale struggled continuously. Gray Wolf didn’t move.

If there were only the two of them, Gray Wolf had enough patience to simply outlast it. Digest it slowly. Decades, centuries, a thousand years if necessary — it would eventually succeed.

The laughter was what made that impossible.

“Ha ha ha ha ha!”

It echoed through the entire fire-sea dimension, over and over, each burst sending thousand-meter waves of flame surging outward.

The source of the laughter was a giant — nearly a thousand meters tall — composed entirely of ultimate flame, towering even above the titans Gray Wolf had seen before. This was the Volcanic Whale’s master.

The Inferno Sovereign.

The human body had been destroyed long ago. But the Inferno Sovereign’s soul was formidable, and the ultimate flame it had spent a lifetime cultivating had proved sufficient to reconstruct a form. The entire fire sea was not merely its innate ability — it was its domain. Within these flames, it and every war beast it summoned were effectively invincible. The only reason it had bothered with a single Volcanic Whale was that its actual goal was to bring Gray Wolf to heel. If it had simply wanted to win, the scale of the response would have been very different.

“Struggling is pointless. Submit to me.” Even stripped of its human form, the Inferno Sovereign retained the full power of a Perfect Innate Sovereign tier eight. In certain respects, that residual strength matched or exceeded the Nine-Luster Clan Celestial Empress who had once come to destroy the Sky Stairway.

“…” Gray Wolf’s mouth, throat, and stomach were packed with Volcanic Whale. The pressure of the oversized swallow made it completely impossible to make any sound.

“I understand your stubbornness. I understand what you’re telling me. And I won’t pretend otherwise — I admire you enormously.” The Inferno Sovereign’s voice rolled through the dimension with the unhurried patience of a being that had waited ten thousand years and considered that nothing. “Think about it. Truly think about it. You and I are the perfect combination. You are the Doom Wolf — fire is your primary nature. I am the Inferno Sovereign, one thread away from godhood at my peak. When I eventually ascend as the God of Fire, you will be the mount of a god. The greatest fire-attribute war beast in existence, second to none. Your will and your intelligence astonish me — they fill me with a joy I haven’t felt in centuries. To devise a counter to the Volcanic Whale so quickly, and then to execute it boldly, in full view of your captor — that is extraordinary. Contract with me. Become my war beast. I will give you the best of everything this world contains. Whatever you need, I will provide. I say with certainty: you are the beast of destiny that was born for my rebirth through flame. You are the key to my ascension.”

All the while it spoke, it continued pressing the contract seal patiently against Gray Wolf’s forehead.

“…” Gray Wolf had only one defense: hold with its will, and refuse. There was no second option.

“Perhaps you’re unaccustomed to serving beneath another. Perhaps you’re testing how serious I am.” Another rolling laugh. “Let me tell you something — after I escaped the seal, I spent ten thousand years in this place without a single moment of boredom. My patience is not something ordinary beings can measure. And you know as well as I do: a person who possesses Sovereign intent does not change their resolve lightly. Come. Let us form the contract. We are genuinely the perfect combination — the best in the world.”

The Inferno Sovereign spoke. Again and again and again.

Gray Wolf refused. Again and again and again. When the Inferno Sovereign sent waves of powerful spiritual force crashing against its mind, Gray Wolf raised a shield made of a single thing: the image of Yueyang. It held that image at the front of its mind and let the Sovereign intent break against it.

If only the master were here.

Even just a flying kick from across the room would help. A little energy, even contemptuous energy, would be welcome right now.

This creature is insufferable. Talking endlessly, like a toothless old woman who has forgotten how to stop. The master was better — when he wanted to shout, he shouted; when he wanted to hit, he hit; direct and clean, no dragging things out, no endless speeches. If the master were here…

Would he be angry? Gray Wolf had, admittedly, caused a problem again. If it had known this thing was this powerful, it would have run far sooner.

Gray Wolf knew perfectly well that its master was in the middle of wedding preparations and wasn’t coming anytime soon. And yet the wanting wouldn’t quiet down. That irrational, completely unjustified hope that the next moment would bring a familiar figure crashing through from somewhere unexpected.

Even as a Divine Beast. Even capable of standing alone.

The habit of dependence.

Still there.