Beaten to the move, the middle-aged scholar held his piece and said nothing.

A long while.

Then a slow sigh. “All I want is to take back what belongs to me. What is wrong with that?”

Yue Yang came back at him hard, giving no ground. “Who cares about your right and wrong? All I want to say is that as long as I am here, not one thing in the Sky Tower — not one grain of sand — is leaving with you. Because nothing here belongs to you!”

The middle-aged scholar shook his head gently and clicked his tongue. “Young man, perhaps you have shed a little blood and sweat for the Sky Tower. But set against me? I paid a thousand times what you paid, and more. I paid, and at the end of it I had nothing. Is that fair? It is not fair! I gave that much, so I ought to have a harvest. I ought to receive something — at the very least, the share that belongs to me should not be short. And that is what I have come back for, to take back my share… Before that, I think nobody, for any reason at all, is qualified to question me. I am the one who bled himself dry for the Sky Tower. I am family.”

“Give, and you get. That much is certain.”

Yue Yang nodded, agreeing.

Then he shook his head immediately after. “But if you gave and got nothing, you should go looking for the reason in yourself instead of blaming heaven and everyone under it. If you feel you gave everything and came away with nothing in the end, that proves exactly one thing: you never really gave. And so you never really got.”

That denial was the end of the middle-aged scholar’s composure and his manners.

Yue Yang’s conclusion drove him to the edge of raving, as though the most sacred, most untouchable thing inside him had been insulted, and insulted cheaply.

If Yue Yang had said anything else — anything, however far it went, however harsh, however sharp — it would not have reached him and could not possibly have pricked his heart. But this denial made even a heart at the Supreme level unable to hold its anger down. It took everything he had to force the blaze in his chest back, and everything he had not to put a fist into this glib little junior.

The middle-aged scholar swept one wide sleeve, and the whole space changed in an instant.

As though time had run backward in the space of a breath.

The scenery flew away behind them.

Blue seas into mulberry fields.

They flashed past in front of his eyes, one after another.

A young man came into Yue Yang’s view, as young as the transmigrator was now. He and his companions were in a bloody fight against an invasion out of the Demon Abyss, and on that battlefield he was the most forward of all of them, fighting drenched in blood, and the light coming off his effort burned like a star nobody could look away from.

This young man was not only brave and fearless. He was also enormously intelligent.

Because he was there, wise and brave together, the Longteng Continent’s allied army — losing until then — came back from the dead again and again under his direction, and in the end reversed the whole campaign, turning an unwinnable defeat into a sweeping victory that turned heaven and earth over. In the middle of all that cheering, his companion carried him back one step at a time, gravely wounded and unconscious… Everyone could enjoy the sweetness of the win. He alone was out cold in the pain of his wounds, and could not so much as attend the ceremony where the honors were handed out.

The young man cared nothing for fame or gain, and did not envy his companion, even though he was the better of the two by a wide margin.

And still this young man put everything he had into supporting that companion.

When the companion rose to the post of supreme commander.

The young man, as his adviser, drew up a perfect plan.

The companion in command would not take advice, pushed greedily forward after credit, and died horribly at the enemy’s hands. With the campaign hanging by a thread, it was this young man who turned the tide, and with a command as flawless as a work of art he pulled a vast victory out of a powerful enemy’s hands — the kind of victory men sigh over for a hundred generations.

For that victory, the young man baited the enemy with his own body.

Again and again he put himself in danger and in a trap, and paid out blood and sweat past reckoning, and paid out a grinding hardship nobody else ever knew about.

After that epic victory the young man did not swell with his own merit. Instead, he humbly helped his dead friend’s young son into the seat. For a single dying instruction from his companion, and for his own promise, he gave up the supreme command and went willingly back into the shadows, handing the high office of commander of all three armies to his companion’s son, and went on working himself to the bone with a hundred times the drive for the whole of the cause and for victory. For that promise he stayed faithful, no matter what his own supporters said about him, and no matter what strangers who knew nothing about any of it said either.

All that care and effort was for victory, and for the Longteng Continent.

In any fight he was in, the Longteng Continent never lost.

But small men were sometimes jealous of this young man, and spoke evil of him, and smeared his name, and even used every cheap trick they had to stage one appalling atrocity after another and hang them around his neck.

The young man had no choice but to leave the legion he had built up with such care, and no choice but to swallow the humiliation and go home and live with the contempt of the whole world.

Battlefields without the young man lost far more than they won. Lured in over and over by a powerful enemy, the honorary commander — a rookie — was beaten with no trouble at all by the Demon Abyss host, and the Demon King tore the coward apart where he stood, the commander of all three armies torn open like a worm. The Longteng Continent’s allied army lost its nerve and its lines, and was routed… And at the bottom of that despair it was the young man, the one still living under the whole world’s contempt, who stepped forward. He came down onto that battlefield like a god, led the personal guard that had fallen back without breaking, fought a desperate, bloody eight days and eight nights, and turned the campaign around in the end, breaking the demon legions in front of their own formation.

Feats like that one, over several hundred years, played out more times than anyone could count.

The young man became a middle-aged one.

But not his heart.

His heart never changed at all, and neither did his wisdom or his courage.

The fighting climbed steadily upward, from the Longteng Continent against the Demon Abyss, and when that small battlefield could no longer hold him he began fighting above the Sky Tower’s sixth floor. A few hundred years further on he set foot in the Heavenly Realm, and led the Sky Tower’s armies through hundreds upon hundreds of battles. If you had collected all the blood he shed over those years you could probably have filled a pool deep enough to drown a hundred men in.

Fighting for the Longteng Continent, he was always soaked in blood, forever the killing star of the battlefield. For the Sky Tower, that good home of his, he was soaked in blood the same way, and his maddened presence and the wisdom he held in his hand like a pearl put fear into Heavenly Realm powers by the million.

He was that strong and that wise.

That indifferent to fame and gain.

That outstanding.

And what he got back for it was always disappointing, and sometimes shameful — a little scrap, as though he had been born a beggar you could wave off with whatever came to hand.

Never mind his family and his friends. Even the enemies who went pale at his name, even the Heavenly Realm powers he slaughtered, thought it unfair.

Why? Why did a man that outstanding, who worked that hard, never get what he had earned, while the shameless ones stole the fruit of his fighting again and again? Took what was his by trickery and by force, over and over… And in the end even the Sky Tower had no room left for the young man who loved his home and poured out his blood for it. He had bled himself dry and wept himself dry, and with family and friends hunting him he had no choice but to throw himself on the enemy camp for shelter, so as not to die at the hands of the men he had once fought shoulder to shoulder with…

When all of it had run backward and stopped.

Yue Yang was silent.

The transmigrator had never imagined that the enemy in front of him had a past like that.

“That is the kind of man I, Dongfang, am.” The middle-aged scholar smiled with a trace of self-mockery. “However much I did, whatever I did, nobody ever gave me credit for it, as though all of it were simply my job. The blood and sweat I poured out ran like spring water. No — it was not worth as much as a mouthful of spring water! Everything I did was wasted. The whole of it, wasted! All these years I have known I can never go back to the man I was. I only feel it was unfair. That is all — unfair! I want nothing else. I want fairness, and I want the things that belong to me. And if the things that belong to me are gone, then at the very least I want that much acknowledgment.”

“…” Yue Yang said nothing.

“You think I’m lying to you? That everything you just saw was faked?” The middle-aged scholar found Yue Yang’s silence strange.

“It was real.” Yue Yang shook his head slightly. “I don’t have the Six Senses talent, but I have decent battlefield instincts. What I just saw was real. You didn’t stage a false version.”

“Then you be the judge. Does it seem right to you that everything I gave over all those years bought me a result like that?” The middle-aged scholar watched Yue Yang with a face gone perfectly flat. Whatever Yue Yang said, fair or not, it seemed unlikely to raise one ripple in him. His heart had been broken through a long time ago, and unfairness had gone on numbing it ever since.

Putting himself in the other man’s place.

Yue Yang thought that if he had built up merit like that, and poured out that much blood and sweat, and then been brushed aside by everyone, the odds were good he would jump straight up and start cutting people down right there. Son of a gun, fighting and dying year after year, never once making commander of the three armies, not one pretty girl to show for it, and on top of that suspected by his own side and scorned by the world — where the heck is the justice in that?

Of course, Yue Yang, for his part, was not that noble.

Do it himself, the same way?

Not a chance!

Hiding in the Grimoire World all day every day, chasing girls and enjoying a happy sex life — those were Yue Yang’s interests and hobbies. Affairs of state and all that fighting and killing could get in line somewhere else.

If the Heavenly Realm legions had not set fire to his hometown this time, and very nearly set fire to his harem, Yue Yang would not have been too unsettled to chase girls, his happy days would not have been disrupted, and the kid would never have come rushing back with his hair on fire… As for a wretched life story like the middle-aged scholar’s, the transmigrator, who had no heart and no conscience, had nothing to offer beyond some enthusiastic spectating.

“That’s a sad case. Actually, from the sound of it, that’s a whole crate of sad cases — you want me to send over a shelf so you’ve got somewhere to stack them?” Cut Yue Yang open and you would probably find him black all the way through. That one sentence nearly made the middle-aged scholar cough up three basins of old blood.

“You—!” In a whole lifetime the middle-aged scholar had never imagined the world contained a black-hearted creature like Yue Yang.

The man treated somebody else’s ruined life like a party game!

Why did lightning never come down and kill somebody like this?

Not sympathizing is one thing. But kicking a man while he’s down the well? Where the heck is the justice in that?

Facing the middle-aged scholar’s fury, Yue Yang, for his part, was perfectly relaxed about it. He lounged back against the stone as if he owned it, crossed one leg over the other, took wine and something sweet out of his storage space, and sat there tasting it and watching the other man with keen interest, as though what he really wanted was for the whole catalogue of life tragedies to be staged a second time so he could enjoy watching it properly.

And he tossed out one more line, offhand, that nearly finished the middle-aged scholar off on the spot. “If you’re planning to keep playing the poor victim to work on my sympathy, don’t bother. Whatever you say and whatever you do, I won’t feel sorry for you. On the contrary — the more miserable and the unluckier and the more pain you’re in, the happier I get. Because you’re my enemy! Invader — no, traitor to the Sky Tower, ‘Dongfang’ — go ahead and start pouring out your sorrows. Say whatever you like. Three days and three nights, I don’t care. Only I won’t believe a single word of it.”

(End of Chapter 1244)