After that heavenly-song voice finished speaking, a cold wind blew up between heaven and earth from somewhere nobody could name.

Wherever it passed, everything froze.

Every living thing that moved became an ice sculpture.

That included the giant big loli struggling back to her feet, and the black shadow and Duoduo trading divine power in the sky. Even the Yinglong lifting its head to rise, and the divine statue golden body of Weiguang with its right hand raised to cut, froze solid in an instant. The whole world looked as though even time had been iced over, and nothing in it could move at that moment.

There was no telling how long it lasted.

Only then did Weiguang’s divine statue golden body shudder in one violent tremor, and the body began, very slightly, to creep again.

Duoduo was next, turning the frost around her into ice-flowers and clearing the ice force off herself. The black shadow hung motionless in midair, and not until the Yinglong under Yue Yang had begun to swim slowly forward did she let out a shriek and shatter the ice off her body.

“Who is that?” Anger rose in Weiguang.

And at the same time, to his own bewilderment, he found something.

He had an inborn hatred and fear of this terrible ice force… had he taken a blow from ice like this before?

He had not found the enemy. He knew only that it was a woman — but this ice force gave him a strange feeling, at once familiar and unfamiliar. It had many differences from the freezing he had fought and endured before, and many things in common with it. The difference was that this ice force was certainly a wholly new divine power, unlike the freezing power of any enemy he had faced. What it had in common was that this ice force worked just as well as several terrible freezings he had memory of, and carried a law of sealing besides, so that it canceled and weakened his own divine power and will at a mad rate.

The sky above went up to a height there was no measuring, higher than the ninth heaven.

There was a bolt of purple lightning.

It came down at an unbelievable speed.

If it had been anyone else attacking — even a god — striking Weiguang’s divine statue golden body with lightning would hardly have been possible.

But this bolt of purple lightning behaved like a law that could not be questioned or overruled. It ignored every evasion of body technique and every resistance of will, and detonated directly on the crown of the divine statue golden body, and drove down into Weiguang’s soul, and struck through and burst there.

An expression of disbelief surfaced in the golden pupils of the divine statue golden body.

Then the lightning froze that expression in place.

And the expression still had not changed by the time the whole two-thousand-meter divine statue golden body came crashing down.

For ten thousand years no enemy had ever knocked Weiguang down. He got his divine statue golden body up again at once, but the fact remained that his body had gone out of control and hit the ground, and there was no arguing with it. On his face, along with more confusion and more astonishment and more rage, there was shock. There was no denying it. He could no longer hide the shock inside him.

He had not even found the enemy, and he had been knocked down.

And in two moves.

One of ice, one of lightning.

It was enough to break his divine mind and scatter his divine power and put the divine statue golden body flat on the ground… what kind of enemy was this?

“Snow girl. I’ve missed you so much.” At that moment the owner of the two moves that had knocked Weiguang down was in Yue Yang’s arms being taken advantage of, and he was holding her so tightly she could barely breathe. Any other time she would certainly have rewarded him with a punch. Not now. She had slept far too long, all that time at his side with no way to say what was in her heart, and she wanted his arms around her too. If the will in that strange world had not ordered her into further cultivation, she would not have waited even one second — she would have gone straight back to the Grimoire World to see him and hold him tight.

“I… I, I missed you too.” A thousand words and ten thousand words, and she did not know where to start telling him. Held deep in his arms, she found she could not get out a single sentence. She only wanted to stay like this with him, forever.

Ever since she woke, she had badly wanted to open her eyes and see him.

And tell him she had missed him.

Then there were all the days of that sleep.

There had not been one day she did not miss him, not one day she did not hope to get back to his side as soon as she could.

In the old days, that small face of hers could never let go of its pride. She wanted to be close to him and did not want to be too close to him, and she was forever competing with that tiger girl, which left him pulled two ways at once and thoroughly wretched. During that long sleep she had made a thousand decisions and ten thousand decisions: if only she could wake soon and see him again, then nothing else would matter. No more minding what anyone else thought. No more competing with that tiger girl. No more leaving him stamping his feet with no way out of it. Even his wandering hands would get a little mercy…

So long as she could be with him.

Then none of it mattered.

Especially since that was what he liked best.

It was not until she was asleep in the chaos, her thoughts drifting through it with no direction, alone and beyond help, that she understood what happiness it had been to have him beside her laughing and making trouble — and how precious that happiness was.

“I was so afraid I’d lost you. I can’t be without you. Snow girl, you nearly frightened me to death.” The transmigrator thought back to her disappearance, and at the time it really had very nearly knocked his soul out of his body. Her lying quietly asleep beside him was one thing. It tore at him, but at least there was someone there to watch over her. When she woke and vanished without a trace, he had come close to going out of his mind.

“I won’t. I’ll never go again. I was willful once, and I’ll never go again, and I’ll never make you worry again.” She lifted a jade hand and stroked the ends of the hair by his ear more gently than she ever had in her life, and stroked his cheek, and stroked his brow, feeling that she could not look at him enough — even though this face had been printed into the deepest part of her soul long ago and could never be erased, she still could not look at him enough now. This fellow was the one person her whole life’s happiness was tied to. This scoundrel was the one she had lived with in the past and lived with now and would live with in the future, the one she was fated to share every joy and every sorrow with, through sweetness and through bitterness alike.

She looked at him, and he looked at her.

In that moment.

Everything in the world was forgotten.

In their eyes there was nothing but each other.

She had lost count of how many times she had kissed him, but this time she felt she had never missed him like this and never wanted to kiss him like this.

She could hardly wait. She kissed his lips, and in the instant of contact she opened the whole sky inside her to him. In the moment of that kiss she felt that her longing for him, and the happiness of having it eased at last, had filled her entire soul — and like someone drunk she felt a warm, swimming loss of herself, at sea in the singing of life and the happiness brimming over, and knew nothing except that she was holding him and kissing him hard.

It felt to her that he was her sky, and that with him there the whole sky was bright.

In this moment of reunion, she was not thinking about any fight.

And she paid no attention to the enemy standing beside them.

She.

She only wanted to kiss him.

With Yue Yang and Xue Wuxia locked together like that, the whole field went silent, and stayed silent a long while.

Duoduo was envious, and watched with her whole face lit up. The giant big loli Xiao Xiao’en was astonished. She had been taught by everyone in the Grimoire World and had cultivated without a break, but in daily life the sheer size of her body meant she was rarely able to take part in anything from beginning to end — so watching Yue Yang kiss anyone was a rare event, and a long, warm kiss like this one opened the pure Titan big loli’s eyes considerably. As far as her understanding went, this was an entirely new lesson: so kissing can be done like that. It looks like a lot of fun.

The Titan big loli also imagined a day when she might become the same height as her big brother, or he the same height as her.

Then they could live together freely.

And do the things everybody else got to do.

Kissing, for instance.

Over on the other side, the black shadow had torn her way out of the ice. Her face was black and could not be made out, but the eyes flickering with green light held neither envy nor astonishment. They held hatred — a jealous hatred close to madness, a loathing of beautiful things and of the wellspring of happiness, a destroying frenzy directed at everything she did not have.

The black shadow fixed those green eyes on Yue Yang and Xue Wuxia and cursed their kiss with a viciousness past all reason.

If Xue Wuxia’s Peerless Ice Seal and Soul-Striking Purple Lightning had not left her deeply wary.

Then the black shadow would very likely have thrown herself at them long ago and started killing.

High above, Weiguang looked down on everything below.

Watching Yue Yang and Xue Wuxia in each other’s arms, he felt no envy and no astonishment, still less jealousy. His face held nothing at all. Having stepped into the divine tier and ascended to godhood, he had nothing but contempt for human love. To Weiguang, every human feeling was a weakness — family, love, friendship alike, all of them inborn defects, all of them fatal openings.

Anyone who holds any human feeling at all is certainly not going to be the last one standing.

In all his long life he had never once seen a powerful opponent who held human feelings. Not once… and about Yue Yang and Xue Wuxia, who still held them, and who loved each other to the death and past all sense, there was only one thing in his mind. Victory.

Since the enemy had a weakness this enormous, the fight to come was already decided.

However strong the enemy was.

So long as he was still a human being with the weakness of feeling.

Then victory in the fight belonged to the one who had ascended to godhood and had no weakness at all: himself.

What is a god? A god is a life with no human feeling and no human weakness, a life entirely beyond all things — without the beast’s thirst for blood, without the demon’s evil slaughter, and without humanity’s disordering emotions…

“Pitiful humans, ruled by your passions. Your lives will always come to the same end. You spend yourselves down to nothing between crying and laughing. Those burning lives of yours are like your human candles — they give out light for a short time, and heat, and then they turn to ash and to nothing… in the long river of life, everything about you is beneath mentioning. Eternity belongs to us of the divine tier alone.” Weiguang lifted a foot, cold and without feeling, mocking them idly as he did it, and brought it down hard, meaning to grind the Yue Yang and Xue Wuxia rejoicing in their reunion into powder on the ground.

On the ground.

Standing on the crown of the Yinglong’s head.

Yue Yang and Xue Wuxia seemed to notice nothing at all, and went on kissing, sweetly, unwilling to let go.

In a kiss where two hearts had run together, the two of them had long since forgotten heaven falling and earth cracking, forgotten the danger of life and death, forgotten past and future, forgotten everything in the world, all of it.

(End of Chapter 1231)