Coming out of Empress Vivienne’s world of ice and snow, Yue Yang, for his part, meant to go straight back to the Grimoire World to see that snow girl whose changes he had not yet had time to look at properly. He was worried that if he did not hurry back and offer some comfort, the snow girl might drink three large bowls of vinegar and ignore him for a good ten days or half a month.

But a mysterious power welled up out of nowhere.

And he could not resist it at all.

In an instant.

The power had already crossed time and space, too fast for Yue Yang to think or react.

That mysterious power was like an enormous invisible hand. It lifted him bodily, wrapped him entirely inside itself, sealed him off from every law and every constraint, and carried Yue Yang straight out of the world of ice and snow into a peculiar space he had never been to before.

Inside this particular space, Yue Yang felt the place was full of a constant power.

But there was something he had not expected.

There was nothing here at all — not heaven, not earth, not one of the ten thousand things, and not even time.

In this particular space time did not pass at all, and there was none of the concept or the structure of space either. No day and no night. No up and down, no left and right. Nothing whatsoever. Apart from a constant energy so vast that it could not be imagined or measured, there was not one thing in this place. Yue Yang had the odd feeling that he was trapped inside an egg. There was nothing here but chaos — except that unlike chaos, the energy here was not chaotic. It was a peculiar, constant energy that felt as though it could create the ten thousand things.

“Sending me here — this isn’t so I can split heaven and earth apart like the great god Pangu, is it?” Yue Yang, for his part, broke out in a sweat. “This young master may be a super-genius, but honestly, I have no idea how to do the whole splitting-heaven-and-earth business. That’s work only the great god Pangu could handle. Getting me to do it is a bit much on the difficulty setting, isn’t it?”

Had he found all the ancient relics?

If he had not found them all, was this a punishment? Or a reward?

That mysterious consciousness — as mysterious as a thing can be — said not one word and granted not one condition. How was a man supposed to guess? Could this be the final test? Was there a special reward for completing it?

Yue Yang genuinely could not figure it out for the life of his sister.

Since guessing got him nowhere, he could only try doing something and see whether a blind cat might stumble over a dead mouse.

The moment he tried, what Yue Yang found extremely difficult was that the constant energy here really was far too constant.

Without a Sovereign Intent that could surpass that constancy, it was flatly impossible to move the smallest fraction of this place, still less to use the constant energy here to split heaven and earth apart or casually create a world or anything of the kind… here, even creating a single grain of sand was impossible. It was harder than creating a whole world outside.

In this peculiar space there was no time, and Yue Yang did not know how long he stayed.

The feeling of it was not real either.

Sometimes it felt as though he had been there ten or fifteen thousand years. Sometimes it felt as though only ten days or half a month had passed. Worst of all, sometimes it felt like a little while — perhaps no more than ten minutes. Splitting a heaven, opening an earth — Yue Yang, for his part, could not do it. Even the great god Pangu had needed an axe to manage it, and a Yue Yang with two empty hands could only stand there and stare. Pinch a man out of clay the way the goddess Nüwa did? That was not very likely either. Yue Yang, for his part, did not have anything like that much ability. Never mind creating a life like a human being — creating a war beast would be a stretch. Making a puppet battle doll was closer to his level. To this day he still could not work out how the spirit-consciousness of the Taotie and his other war beasts had been born in the first place.

They were his creations, all right, but the process of creating them had been a confused business and could not be repeated.

“Or maybe I really will create a grain of sand.” Yue Yang, for his part, had stood there for who knew how long and found that nobody was paying him any attention at all, so he simply tried using the vast energy here to create something for amusement and pass a little time.

Strictly speaking, no time passed here.

Space and time stayed exactly as they were, forever.

He simply did not want his mind to get too bored, and decided to make something with his hands.

The idea was a good one, but carrying it out was extremely difficult, because the constant energy here ran far past the range Yue Yang’s will could control. He wanted to take a little energy at random and create, and found that his attempt to create sand was harder than an ant moving a mountain… failing again and again dealt the transmigrator a considerable blow, but after enough blows he simply treated them as though they were not happening — and at the same time a certain stubbornness came up in him.

So he could not use this constant energy? Then this young master would create something out of exactly this energy and nothing else.

Never mind sand.

Anything at all would do.

Whatever happened, he was not going to be pushed around by this damned energy.

Perhaps ten million years went by. Perhaps a hundred years. Perhaps only ten seconds.

Yue Yang, for his part, with no time and no sense of time, failed who knew how many tens of thousands of times — and finally, after cursing himself for an idiot ten thousand times over, he calmed down and thought of a method.

The method was to use his own energy first to create an existence the constant space would acknowledge, and then to fuse a thread of the constant energy into it. That still counted as using the constant energy. It was exploiting a loophole, admittedly, but however little constant energy went into it, that energy belonged to this place. Yue Yang drew a drop of blood out of the True Dragon Heart, poured various energies into it, wrapped the very smallest amount of constant energy around it, and tried to make this peculiar space acknowledge its existence — acknowledge that it was a created thing, the first created thing.

“Damn it, who created this maddening space and this energy in the first place? How is there no divine will in it, and why won’t it answer to me?” He came very close, and then at the last step failed another thousand times, and Yue Yang, for his part, had tears streaming down his face. He swore that if this was a test, then it was absolutely the hardest of every test he had met in his life.

This was not something power could decide at all.

It needed will.

An endless, supreme Sovereign Intent that governs everything.

After failing again who knew how many more times, in the stillest, calmest, most concentrated state of mind he had ever been in, Yue Yang used the purest will and the purest Nirvana Flame to fuse a thread of that mysterious energy into the refined drop of golden blood, and then used the Eternal Wheel to fix it firmly in place. As though he were adding divinity and a divine nature to it, Yue Yang conceived for it a possibility of growth and of a life extending outward, so that it could use growth and life to hold on to the quality of constancy the place required for acknowledgment… Yue Yang felt that creating a god would not have been this hard. In any case, he poured the best of his wisdom and the strongest of his will into that drop of blood.

He no longer demanded that it be any particular kind of existence. It was enough that it succeed — that it exist in this peculiar space and gain the acknowledgment of the place.

Then he would be perfectly satisfied.

All of it came down to one hope: that it would exist successfully, and exist eternally.

As to whether he was creating a life, whether he was splitting heaven and earth and creating an independent existence, Yue Yang had forgotten all of it. He no longer cared about any of those wavering thoughts. With his whole mind on one thing, he only hoped that this new creature could be born into this space according to his will.

Perhaps he had used the right method. Perhaps there was some other reason.

In any case, at a moment when Yue Yang himself could not work out exactly what the cause was, that drop of blood suddenly gave off a pulse like a living thing’s… from a thing with no life, no spirit-consciousness and no will, it independently formed all of those at a stroke — and then it shed its form of its own accord, or rather it was born, born directly into this peculiar space, and became the first living existence in this peculiar space apart from Yue Yang himself.

“…” Yue Yang had no time to be pleased.

And he had no time to react in any way at all.

That mysterious power like an enormous invisible hand welled up again and seized him outright and carried him off toward some world he could not name.

Unlike before, as he left Yue Yang could sense the existence of the peculiar constant space he had just been in. He did not know what method would get him back there, but at the very least the sense in his mind was there. And before he left, he dimly saw that first sweet living thing that had been born seeming to change, seeming to turn into the shape of a sword, and then something like the shape of a dragon — and in the blur it also looked like a thumb loli, so small that she was smaller than a finger, dancing through the sky in shifting colors. Yue Yang could not sense it clearly, and had no time to put out a hand and touch it, before he was seized and taken away.

Perhaps he had crossed hundreds of millions of years of time and space. Perhaps he had never left at all.

Then Yue Yang opened his eyes.

He found the three little lolis of the endless world standing in front of him.

The little round face was as sweet as ever, and gave him a sugary smile. The spirited little loli looked slightly doubtful. “Unbelievable. A blockhead like you actually comprehended it. I thought a hundred million years would be wasted effort, and it turns out you worked it out by pure luck.”

“Congratulations. The test is over.” The gentle, refined little loli standing in the middle held out the silver grimoire in her hands to Yue Yang. “You’ve passed.”

“What does that mean?” Yue Yang, for his part, was thoroughly muddled and could not make out what was going on at all.

“Even when you die, you’ll probably die a muddled ghost.” The spirited little loli gave him a dissatisfied look — and then very quickly could not help laughing, and covered her mouth and laughed behind it.

“You once comprehended creation, destruction and eternity inside nothingness… but that comprehension is not the highest. Only if you can comprehend it inside eternity is it real creation, real destruction, real eternity. Of course, you have only taken the first step, and you are a long way from real world-creation — but so long as you comprehended it, it counts as your success. To us, that also counts as a kind of acknowledgment…” Having handed the silver grimoire to Yue Yang, the little loli in the middle smiled gently. “The Divine Codex is yours to guard now. But it hasn’t acknowledged you yet. You can keep working at it.”

“This thing is the Divine Codex?” Yue Yang was appalled.

Everyone had been fighting to the death over it, and all along the Divine Codex had been in these three little lolis’ hands. They had cheated the lot of them badly.

Only, this seemed slightly wrong, didn’t it? How could the Divine Codex look like this? Shouldn’t there be ten thousand fathoms of divine light and a supreme divine majesty shining across ten heavens and nine earths? This thing looked about like a silver-tier grimoire, and had even less glow to it than one.

Yue Yang opened the silver grimoire casually.

He turned a page lightly.

And he stood there stiff as a wooden chicken.

He found that the first page of the silver grimoire was the first gate of the Trial Grounds. The second page was the second gate… everything about the Trial Grounds, every last particular of it, whether Beast Valley or Demon Valley or Human Valley, even Tower Beyond the Tower and Mountain Beyond the Mountain and Heaven Beyond the Heaven, any place, any space, any location, any person, any life, any event, even past and future — so long as he probed with his consciousness, there was nothing it would not show and nothing it would not reveal.

Everything, seen through at a glance. Everything, held in his hand.

“You mean you’re giving it to me? This is amazing. This young master is a GM now. If I want to play somebody to death it’s a matter of putting out a hand.” Yue Yang, for his part, threw his head back and let out a sinister, wicked laugh. It was fortunate Ji Wuri had run fast, or he would certainly have cried himself half to death — though Zhonghua, still scheming against people inside Human Valley, was presumably about to have very bad luck indeed.

“Could you not laugh so revoltingly?” The spirited little loli could not stand Yue Yang’s strange cackling, and deflated him with a reminder. “You don’t have the Divine Codex’s acknowledgment yet. It’s only been handed to you to guard. You aren’t its sovereign. So you don’t have the right of disposal and you don’t have the right of rule. You only have the same right of viewing and guarding that we have.” The little loli’s point was that Yue Yang should not be pleased too early — he did not yet have the right to alter the laws and rules inside each gate of the Trial Grounds.

“It doesn’t matter. Having the Divine Codex in hand is enough.”

Yue Yang, for his part, smiled with unmatched malice. “So long as this thing is in my hands, then everybody keep on breaking through the gates. I support you a hundred percent. Go on working hard to obtain the Divine Codex. I would absolutely never lightly dampen the pointless enthusiasm of you gate-breakers… hahaha.”

At this, even the little round face, who had always taken Yue Yang’s side, gave him a sweet little look of disgust.

Could you try not to be quite so shameless!

And if it had stopped there, that would have been the end of it.

Holding the silver grimoire, Yue Yang, for his part, suddenly rolled his eyes and turned on the three little lolis — who were frightened enough to very nearly huddle together — with a Gray Wolf sort of smile. “The three of you have guarded this thing for so many years, and now the job is finally done. Aren’t you pleased? And you’ve got nothing to do now, have you? How about coming home with uncle to look at the goldfish?”

(End of Chapter 1239)