The Vacuum Divine Detonation landed.

For one fraction of a second, everything went silent. The world paused as though time had forgotten what it was doing.

Then space itself shattered.

Not the ice, not the air — space, the fabric of the interval between Chitian River and Yueyang, torn and blown outward in an expanding sphere of annihilation. Everything within that sphere ceased to be. The shockwave that followed hit thirty kilometers in every direction and still hadn’t finished. The frozen ground became ice-powder and joined the churning wall of debris that blotted out the sky in every direction.

Chitian River himself had to cover his face and take several steps back. He had a divine body — permanent, indestructible, immune to mortal harm — but even he didn’t absorb a technique of this magnitude without feeling it.

He didn’t worry. He had the divine body. The mortal didn’t.

Qianqian, already far back, brought the Prison Emperor’s divine sword up to shield herself and Xiao Nu from the pressure wave and still couldn’t hold ground — the two of them were pushed backward another full kilometer before it passed. Storm Valkyrie, who had been moving forward to rejoin the fight, was thrown into a distant ice peak, which then collapsed on top of her, burying her completely somewhere in the white.

Three full minutes passed.

The broken space still hadn’t healed.

Ice-powder and snow-mist had turned the sky the color of nothing for a hundred kilometers in every direction.

“Irritating insect,” Chitian River said, with a satisfaction he was trying to make sound like annoyance. Winning felt less satisfying than it should have. Using a forbidden technique against a mortal was, if he was honest, humiliating — the victory was the wrong shape. Like swatting a gnat with a siege weapon.

Still. A victory.

He considered his next steps: find the two women, deal with them in whatever manner seemed fitting, absorb the divine power from the small one’s body, acquire the divine artifacts—

The broken space began slowly healing, the edges drawing back together.

A hand reached through.

It fumbled around for a moment — feeling for something, like a person searching for a door handle in the dark. A six-pointed star formation appeared in the space where the hand was, faint but definitely present. The hand found whatever it was looking for. A door opened in space.

Yueyang stepped through it.

His hair looked like something had exploded in it, which was accurate. His face was comprehensively blackened with soot. He was not, as far as Chitian River could determine, injured in any way that mattered.

He reached back and carefully closed the spatial door behind him.

Chitian River’s jaw performed an action that it had not performed in tens of thousands of years.

Yueyang looked at him with the expression of one old acquaintance greeting another across a crowded room, gave a small nod, and then checked that the door was properly shut.

“You’re not dead.” The words came out before Chitian River had processed that he was saying them.

“Seems not,” Yueyang confirmed. He considered this for a moment. “The primordial chaos energy in the infinite void is fairly impressive, I’ll give you that. Fortunately my teacher is an expert in spatial transit, so I had some foundation to work from. Took me a bit to feel out the exit.” He tilted his head. “I can see this is upsetting for you. Please allow me to offer my sincere condolences — and my thanks.”

“Your thanks.”

“Yes. Here’s the thing.” Yueyang straightened up, looking genuinely pleased with the universe. “The Vacuum Divine Detonation and the Divine Flame Burial — without those two, I’m not sure I could have finished absorbing the primordial rune formation in any reasonable timeframe. This is an extremely difficult process under normal circumstances. But your techniques applied such precise external pressure to my body, and then the infinite void provided exactly the right concentration of primordial cosmic source-energy, and everything resonated together, and—” He spread his hands. “Complete absorption. Perfect integration. You shortened what might have taken six months to something that happened in a few minutes. In the void. I am genuinely grateful. I was going to have someone make a commemorative banner for you, but I wasn’t sure how to spell ‘mighty contribution’ correctly and I didn’t want to get the characters wrong—”

Chitian River was beyond language.

A mortal. A mortal. He had thrown this human into the infinite void inside a divine flame sphere, and the human had used it as a cultivation aid and come back thanking him. He had fired a technique capable of threatening gods, and it had made this person stronger.

Was the final forbidden technique actually required here? He had hoped to avoid it — there was a cost to it that he preferred not to pay. But could he actually kill this person without it?

He was still working through this question when Yueyang moved.

Yueyang had been absorbing one punch at a time for an extended period, and each one had, in fact, contributed incrementally to the primordial rune formation’s integration. But they had also been punches. Hitting him. One for one was not the arrangement he planned to maintain going forward.

One for ten. One for a hundred. Starting immediately.

He was already crossing the distance when Chitian River began his response.

Between them, the Eternal Wheel appeared.

The Eternal Wheel, now carrying the primordial rune formation’s amplification within it.

Chitian River had a divine body. It did not matter. The augmented Eternal Wheel’s power reached through the divine body’s immunity as though it weren’t there, and Chitian River stopped — completely, instantly, without any ability to move or respond or think about moving or responding. His divine power sat inside him and did nothing. Every function ceased. He was present and aware and entirely stopped.

This was the Eternal Wheel with the primordial rune formation behind it, and Yueyang had not yet fused the two into a unified technique.

If he had — if the primordial formation and the Eternal Wheel became one — then Chitian River would not stop for a moment or a minute. He would stop until Yueyang chose to release him, and not one instant before, and no power in this world or any other would change that.

Eternity, as the name suggested, did not negotiate.