Yue Yang had meant to go back to the Tianra Imperial Palace first and see Fourth Mother.
Because there were two people he worried about above all others.
Her, and the little one.
The clan leaders were marching their columns into the Sky Tower’s teleport point, getting ready to meet the Heavenly Realm’s invading legions, when a will came out of a thousand li away — a strange one, strange past describing, with a taunt riding in it — aimed precisely at him, running in through his summoning grimoire and driving down into the sea of his consciousness. Yue Yang felt it and was startled for a moment, then understood. This had to be a message from the man behind all of it… Jun Wuyou and Elder Yuehai saw his face change and asked at once what was wrong.
Princess Qianqian was standing right beside him.
She and he had a certain link of the mind — not a perfectly clear one, but enough to make out the shape of a thing.
And it was not only Princess Qianqian with her Six Senses talent. City Lord Luohua and Fengxian Meiren felt that distant, taunting will as well.
“I’ve got a feeling I can’t put a name to. Something may be about to happen, and I have to go there and deal with it. Go on ahead to the Light Continent. Don’t wait for me. Until I’m back, Wuxia commands on the battlefield; if Wuxia isn’t there, then Qianqian and Divine Punishment together…” Yue Yang tested the feeling against his battle instinct, and then, grim-faced, released every last person out of the Grimoire World — Sick Beauty and Yue Yu, who almost never fought, and even Xiayi and Bao’er, whose combat strength was nothing worth mentioning.
In the end Yue Yang held back only Xiao Wenli.
Even Taotie and the Starfield Sky Scorpion were ordered to follow Princess Qianqian’s group into the fight.
In a real sense, it was the first time. For the first time Yue Yang laid out nearly every card he had. For the first time he emptied his whole fighting strength with nothing held back, and threw all of it into one battle.
“Are we going straight to the decisive battle, right from the start?” Elder Yuehai watched what Yue Yang was doing and it shook him.
“I understand!” It was Jun Wuyou who saw it first, and he was an emperor of this world for a reason. One look and he had the whole of it, and he was hard enough to act on it. He spent the last thread of tenderness in him on his precious daughter, and his hand shook as it went out toward the top of her head. A second later he put the affection and the worry away, every bit of it, and the hand he had reached out closed into a fist and gripped hard as steel. His presence went up like a sheet of flame. Nothing was left of the elegant, unhurried, charming gentleman of the mortal world. He had turned all the way through into a fighter, like a tiger.
He pulled back the right hand he had reached toward his daughter and drew the sword at his waist.
Together with Elder Yuehai, who had said his own silent goodbye to his grandson, shoulder to shoulder, he started toward the teleport point on the Sky Tower’s first floor.
Whether as an emperor of the mortal world or as a fighter guarding his home, he understood now: this was a life-and-death war that would be settled from the opening move, without half a breath of rest in it. The enemy’s attack was not a great army bearing down on them months from now. The decisive fight would start at the first moment there was one.
A minute ago he had still believed the Sky Tower had time to regroup.
But the way Yue Yang was emptying everything out.
Made him understand it all at once.
The real enemy would begin its general assault, would begin the decisive battle, in the instant Yue Yang came back to the Sky Tower… The enemy’s target was the kid standing in front of him. The enemy had calculated all of it in advance, his return included.
You did not need to think about it to know the ending. If this kid Yue Yang lost, the Sky Tower would sink further than it had in the Prison Emperor’s day.
It might be wiped out entirely, with not one living thing left in it ever again.
So from this moment, Jun Wuyou, now that he understood, was no longer an emperor of the mortal world. He was a fighter guarding his home. He was a father guarding his precious daughter.
“Brother Hai, do you remember how it looked the first time we went to war?” Jun Wuyou lifted his head and found the morning sun coming up and the whole sky full of dawn.
“Today is the same as that day — good weather!” Elder Yuehai looked up at the sky too, and suddenly laughed.
He started off laughing quietly.
But the laugh got louder and louder, and in the end it was an enormous laugh with the whole of his spirit behind it.
Under the rising sun, bathed in that brilliant early light, Jun Wuyou and Elder Yuehai laughed, and the sound went straight up past the clouds and would not stop.
Yue Yang embraced Princess Qianqian and the others one at a time to say goodbye, Bao’er included. The one small regret was that Xue Wuxia had reportedly gone to Bingyin’s fairyland world to find Yi Nan and Bing’er and had not made it back in time… He was not worried about Yi Nan and Bing’er. Under the Qilin Girl Bingyin’s care they would certainly be safe. But Xue Wuxia being away before a great battle, without one warm, jade-smooth embrace from her, left a small empty place in him.
He knew she would not miss this fight. He just had no idea when she would be back.
He put the stray thoughts away.
Yue Yang gave Princess Qianqian and the others that one-of-a-kind, sunlit smile of his, doing what he could to ease the tension in them. “Maybe I’ll only be gone a little while and come back with the whole thing settled. Wait for me. I won’t let you down.”
“I believe you. I’ll be waiting up ahead!” For once Princess Qianqian kissed him without being prompted.
Even Yue Yu could not hold back, and opened her arms and gave him a hug.
Liuye, though, hung back shyly and hid.
She did not come until Princess Qianqian was leading everybody away and they had already gone some distance — and then she flashed back in an instant, jumped down off her Barrier-Piercing Deer, hugged her master with enormous courage and buried her face in the chest she had always leaned on. But before Yue Yang’s big hand could stroke her lovely back she flashed away again, back to the column, looking so flustered about it you would think Yue Yang was going to bite her.
Bao’er, who got into trouble constantly and whose mouth kept letting lucky information slip without meaning to, turned back from a long way off and waved at him. “Don’t be scared! If you can’t beat him I’ll come rescue you. This time I’m definitely going to do a good job and make you look at me twice, you big pervert!”
“…” Yue Yang, for his part, had nothing to say to that. You little brat. It would be doing well if you managed not to cause everyone trouble and not to need rescuing yourself, and here you are planning to rescue other people.
If it had not been for a premonition in him he could not get hold of.
Yue Yang really would not have wanted to let everybody out of the Grimoire World to fight outside.
But in his mind, battle instinct said plainly that he could not keep them at his side. For their own safety, Yue Yang decided to trust himself for once and take the risk of sending Sick Beauty and Yue Yu and the rest onto a battlefield, instead of keeping them inside the Grimoire World for protection the way he always had. Was it possible that in this fight even the Grimoire World was no longer safe?
If there had been time, he really did want to go back and ask Fourth Mother, or Her Majesty.
Maybe they would have a better answer.
And there were the Supreme and the Night Empress, cultivating inside the Sky Stairway. Had they gotten word that a powerful enemy was invading?
The Sky Tower’s grimoires had never been able to send messages to one another before. So who had supplied a method — and what was it — that let Elder Nangong and the others get word to him across the whole width of the Heavenly Realm?
Yue Yang drew a deep breath.
A powerful enemy in front of him.
And a terrifying one, who had calculated every part of it — his own return, in all likelihood, already in the arithmetic.
Facing an enemy like that, Yue Yang felt for the first time in his life that things were not looking good. He could face a strong enemy without fear, at any level you cared to name; as long as he threw everything he had into it, the win would be his in the end. But facing this kind of creature, so cunning he was near-demonic, who calculated him at every turn and held the whole board — wanting to beat an opponent that frightening left him a little faint of heart.
“Sovereign Intent. Immovable as diamond.” Yue Yang scoured every stray thought and every feeling out of himself by main force and drove himself into total focus.
One thought.
And Yue Yang went through the barrier between spaces without effort.
Like a traveler on a ten-thousand-li road over mountains and across rivers, casually taking one more step. Like an unhurried man of refined taste strolling wherever he pleased in his own back garden. Following the direction of that taunting thought and the coordinates it gave him, Yue Yang crossed a thousand li in an instant and came out at the foot of a rock face completely unfamiliar to him and yet exactly like something you might see anywhere.
On one side of the rock face was a waterfall, a white sash like a rainbow.
Not the astonishing kind that drops three thousand feet straight down — the quiet kind, a thin stream slipping over stone among the trees.
On the other side was a pine, big as a canopy, ancient in the trunk and coiled in the branches, its two naturally outspread green arms like a warm host welcoming an honored guest who has come a long way.
Under the pine.
One stone, one game.
Scattered carelessly across an old stone faintly traced with green moss were pieces beyond counting.
Speckled like a reflected night sky, they shone with their own warm luster in the light of the morning.
Two fingers that might have been carved from jade picked one of them up lightly. The middle-aged scholar leaning against the stone under the pine, holding the piece, smiling, smiled at the transmigrator who had come in such a hurry — at this completely unfamiliar third young master of the Yue family — the way a man smiles at meeting the one friend who understands him, and his particularly bright, deep-set eyes put his own distinct charm on display. “You’re here. Sit down. You came faster than I thought you would…”
That one sentence, and Yue Yang had the feeling he had lost already.
If he did not turn guest into host this second, was the man in front of him going to become the Sky Tower’s master?
“The Sky Tower is mine. If anyone’s saying welcome, it should be me!” Yue Yang stated his position and left no crack in it.
“Is that so? What a confident young man! But the Sky Tower isn’t yours. You understand? At least, not yet!” The middle-aged scholar was not annoyed in the least, and smiled mildly.
“Not yet — so it’s mine in the future, and I’m its master! And since I’m its master, even if I’m its future master, I have the right to rule and to decide everything inside it, and above all its future!” Yue Yang looked hard at this middle-aged scholar and said, one word at a time, in complete earnest, “I am the Sky Tower’s master, and you are not. Past, present, future — it does not belong to you.”
“Whether it does or it doesn’t, we’ll have to finish this game before anyone can say.” The middle-aged scholar laughed out loud. “Maybe once this game is finished, some change will happen to the future.”
“However many games you play, the future won’t change!” Yue Yang said, a hundred percent sure of it.
“How would you know without trying?” The middle-aged scholar lightly set the piece in his fingers down on the stone surface, putting it back among the disordered pieces.
“Because it’s fixed by fate.” Yue Yang sat down suddenly, down in front of the stone, grabbed a handful of pieces without looking and scattered them around the one the middle-aged scholar had just set down, picking that unremarkable piece out of the mess and surrounding it on every side. Under the middle-aged scholar’s eyes, Yue Yang lifted it out, tossed it away, and said in a cold voice with no mercy in it, “What belongs to me I’ll have without any effort. What doesn’t belong to me, I never force.”
“Young man, don’t you believe effort can overturn heaven? Why do you believe so much in fate?” The middle-aged scholar, exactly like an old friend making conversation, sat down across from Yue Yang on the other side of the stone table. He picked up another piece between his fingers, meaning to set it down somewhere casual on the stone.
“Whether I believe it is no business of yours. But here, let me give certain people a warning: if it isn’t in his fate, no amount of forcing will do him any good.”
Yue Yang was extremely fast.
He snatched up a piece and set it on the stone a step ahead of the middle-aged scholar.
On exactly the spot the middle-aged scholar was going to take… When he heard Yue Yang say if it isn’t in his fate, no amount of forcing will do any good, the middle-aged scholar’s expression finally shifted, just slightly, and his movement slowed enough to let Yue Yang put a piece down first. His wrist hung there in the air. His eyes were not on Yue Yang at all; they were fixed on that one piece Yue Yang had gotten onto the board ahead of him, as though it were a treasure he had dreamed of all his life and never once been able to have.
(End of Chapter 1243)