Divine-tier.

For consumable medicines and herbs, a divine-tier classification was essentially beyond the framework of normal imagination. The word existed in reference texts and ancient accounts. Objects that actually deserved it were another matter entirely.

“Guard this position. Half an hour — don’t let anyone disturb me. And do not — under any circumstances — allow anyone to direct energy at the Ground-origin Yin Flame. If someone breaks its equilibrium and it erupts, this entire space becomes an incinerator.” Yueyang looked at her with an attention that was completely serious.

“I’ll die before anything gets past me.”

The blood was already running hot in her veins. Leiqie and Blood-Fang were capable fighters, but they couldn’t hold the Black-Flame Lord indefinitely. Half an hour was optimistic. If Simba couldn’t contain the Lord once he broke away, the Lord would come back immediately — and he would find an intruder in the middle of extracting the most important thing in his territory. A Lord willing to sit in a burning canyon for thousands of years rather than leave a single herb unguarded was a Lord who would not respond reasonably to discovering it gone. Cornered and desperate, he might do the worst possible thing and attack the Yin Flame directly — taking everyone down with him rather than let them have it.

She breathed out slowly.

Don’t tense. Full power. No one gets through.

She drew the Golden Dragon-Slaying Spear Yueyang had given her, closed her eyes, and extended her awareness outward into every corner of the space.

Time moved.

It moved the way time moves when you are waiting for something to go wrong and cannot stop it from going wrong — each second dragging out to the length of a year, each moment dense with the feeling that the next one would be the one.

Stones fell from the ceiling.

Just stones, loosened by the heat and the vibrations of the fight above. They hit the ground several meters from the edge of the silent black fire.

She almost stopped her own heart.

She stabilized, drew the awareness back in, and then — in the private interior of her mind, where she could allow herself to mean something without having to defend it — she made a kind of prayer to the ancestors of the Hundred Flowers Clan: if this passes safely, I will stop hesitating. I will stop hiding behind every reason I’ve invented. I will let him in, completely, and I will put cultivation first, and I will stop pretending I haven’t already decided.

The ground transmitted a deep rolling impact from somewhere above.

She caught the energy displacement instantly — a cascade of small disturbances beginning to destabilize the air — and her response was immediate. Spear-qi in precise needle-points, she burst the falling debris into powder before it landed, then coaxed the disturbed air into a controlled spiral that dissipated the pressure wave without reaching the Yin Flame’s surface.

She was soaked through with sweat. One controlled technique, and she felt it like three days of sustained combat.

A mind under this much pressure will consume itself.

“Relax,” Yueyang’s intent reached her through the faintest thread of awareness. I’m watching. You’re doing it right. Let the tension go.

The tight coil of her attention loosened by a fraction, and something unexpected happened in that fraction — she slipped through it into a state she hadn’t been able to reach through deliberate effort since the World Tree, when she and Yueyang and the others had glimpsed the threshold of the divine realm together for a brief, impossible moment. A state of heightened clarity where perception expanded far beyond its normal reach.

She felt herself ascending.

The energy that had accumulated through years of careful cultivation began to flow and transform — some outward, some deeper inward, some drawn by the Energy-Draining Bracelet into the Golden Dragon-Slaying Spear, which brightened in her grip as it absorbed what came to it.

She would have been content to remain in this state for ten days. For a month.

The disturbance at the top of the largest vent ended that.

Someone was descending. Not committed — testing, retreating, testing again. Trying to determine whether the space below was safe. The pattern of a creature that had come home and found the smell wrong.

Her concentration broke on the word Black-Flame Lord.

The thought, fully formed, scattered everything she’d built. She felt the energy in her shift — a tremor caused by nothing but the interruption of mental stillness.

The roar from above answered it.

He had felt the disturbance from below and made his decision. Coming down, fast, committed now. The洞穴narrowed the approach, but it wouldn’t slow him by much. Yueyang was in full concentration, completely absorbed in the extraction — if the Lord reached him before it was done, with the Yin Flame directly below—

She didn’t finish the thought.

Eyes still closed, she raised the spear, gathered everything that remained of the elevated state and everything she’d cultivated before it, concentrated it at the tip, and drove it upward toward the descending weight of him.

One thrust. No reserves held back. No second strike prepared.

The Black-Flame Lord — Sky-rank tier five — felt a spear punch through his protective fire-mantle as though it were nothing, and found the tip buried in his chest before he registered it had entered.

He felt the indignity of it more than the pain.

A Gold-rank weapon had punctured him. His chest. While he was still five hundred meters from the floor. An ambush he hadn’t detected in his own territory.

“Get off me!” He closed his fire-hand around the spear shaft and detonated the force in it — shockwave force, the kind that collapsed mountains.

The Gold Dragon-Slaying Spear didn’t bend. Didn’t crack. It erupted in the power of something above Sacred rank, slipped his grip, and drove through him completely — chest to spine — and kept going.

The Imperial Lady, moving with the spear, riding the momentum upward, carried him with her — impaled and airborne, a thousand meters up through the vent toward the surface in seconds, his fire-claws scrabbling at the stone walls and leaving deep gouges but failing to stop the ascent.

When he understood he couldn’t brake the momentum, he stopped trying and shifted modes. Fire-claws crossed and descended toward the Imperial Lady’s neck — fast, targeting, intent on ending her before she could do anything more.

Simba arrived behind him.

The Gold-Body Blazing Lion King, battered and bleeding from his own fight, came in from the back. Heavy paws on the skull. The kind of hit that cracked it.

“Ah. The cat.” The Lord, leaking black-red magma from his split skull, recognized the connection immediately. The lion that had harassed him after Leiqie left — this woman’s war beast.

He laughed with the contempt of someone who has just confirmed that the situation is, despite appearances, manageable: “You think this can kill me? I completed the pure elemental body transition years ago. Weapons and physical force don’t create lasting harm. Whatever little display this was — it ends now.”

The Imperial Lady threw a full-force strike.

He absorbed it with one fire-hand, pulled the Dragon-Slaying Spear out of his own chest with the other, and drove it into the tunnel wall beside him like something he was done with. The hole in his chest poured magma, then closed. He looked at her the way something large looks at something very small that has briefly managed to be annoying.

“Human insect. Watch me crush your hand.”

“Do you remember what freezing feels like?” she said.

Her voice had changed. The fear had gone out of it.

He stopped.

Then looked at her wrist.

The Energy-Draining Bracelet.

The instrument known in celestial-realm circles as the Elemental Calamity Bracelet — the one that elemental war beasts and pure-elemental cultivators both learned to fear on principle. She had one of those.

Simba clamped his jaws on the Lord’s tail and began pulling.

The arm that had been advancing on the Imperial Lady was already icing at the forearm. The chest wound that had been flowing magma was now flowing steam — cold meeting the internal heat and converting. The body that had sustained serious damage without consequence for years — pure elemental form, supposedly unaffected by physical weapons — was cracking along the chest cavity. Freezing outward from a wound that hadn’t been supposed to matter.

The Lord made a very fast decision.

He exhaled a blade of concentrated flame — shaped it into a scythe — grabbed it with his free hand, and cut himself in half at the waist.

He kicked the icing lower half into Simba’s face, used the momentum to slip the Imperial Lady’s second thrust, and collapsed himself into a stream of fire heading for the chamber below.

She went after him immediately.

The thought was simple: Yueyang is down there.

Then she saw what the Lord released ahead of his own descent — a ball of black flame, separated from the main body, tumbling toward the silent pool of Ground-origin Yin Flame far below.

She screamed his name and went faster.

If this is my fault — if I’d been stronger, if I’d iced him completely, this wouldn’t be happening—

She didn’t think about herself. She thought about him. She pushed through the Lord’s remaining fire-claw as it raked across her back — felt the wound open, felt the blood — didn’t stop.

Just let me reach him first. Let me get in front of him. Whatever happens after, let it happen to me first.

She had never said it in words. Probably never would. But in the last second of a drop she was sure would end in both of them burning — she knew what the feeling in her chest was, had known it for a while, and stopped pretending otherwise.

I’m not dying separately from him. That’s the only rule.

She came down through the last stretch of tunnel with her arms already spreading—

She hit something solid and warm.

Both of them went flying.

A hundred meters. Two broken stalactites. A very firm wall.

“My nose.“

Yueyang was on the floor with his hand over his face, the picture of someone who has just been hit by a projectile he did not see coming. He looked up at her with an expression of genuine aggrieved bewilderment. “Cat-cat, what are you doing?“

“I—” She stared at him.

He was fine.

She had hit him with her chest, at full speed, mid-flight, and he was fine, and his main concern was his nose.

She looked at the Ground-origin Yin Flame.

It was completely undisturbed. The black fire sat in its small circle, still, silent, radiating its patient ancient energy at exactly the same temperature and intensity it had maintained for ten thousand years.

She looked at where the Lord’s black fire ball had impacted the edge of the pool.

Nothing. Not a ripple.

“But—” She started, and stopped.

“Hm?” Yueyang lowered his hand from his nose, looked at the pool, understood what she was looking at, and held up a small object that glowed faintly in his palm. “Ground-origin Yin Flame can only be triggered by another Ground-origin Yin Flame source. Normal fire — even the Lord’s — does nothing to it. The Lord knew that. He was bluffing.” He paused. “…Did you actually think it was going to explode?”

She looked at him.

She looked at her own outstretched arms — the position she’d been in when she hit him, still half-extended in front of her.

She had run through a fire-claw strike across her back, bleeding freely, at maximum speed, to throw herself in front of a man who had been in no danger whatsoever, from a threat that had never existed.

“…Does this count as a mistake?” she asked, in a very small voice.

Yueyang looked at her for a long moment.

Then he looked at the two broken stalactites. The scorch marks from the crash. Her bleeding back. His nose.

“What it counts as,” he said carefully, “is very much open to interpretation.”