The fastest one in the city lord’s retinue was not the self-important middle-aged man whose shoulder Yueyang had been casually resting his foot on — it was the bat-shaped, owl-voiced figure with the unsettling eyes.

He extended his hand.

A bizarre little eddy of wind curled around him, and several fallen leaves snapped to attention like summoned war beasts, accelerating in an instant and shooting straight for Yueyang. But this time, for the first time in recent memory, the Hand of Manipulation came up empty. It was as though the strings of a puppet had been cleanly severed mid-motion — every last leaf went limp simultaneously, releasing into the breeze and drifting away on the wind with all the threat of confetti.

The expression on the owl-voiced man’s face looked like someone had just driven a fist into it without warning. Pure shock.

And under that shock, something else — the particular burning fury that only surfaces when a man has been publicly humiliated at what he is supposed to be best at.

He stared at Yueyang with murderous eyes.

The self-proclaimed city lord on the golden throne was no less incensed. His fist ignited with furious intent and rocketed toward Yueyang.

“Welcome to my game!” Yueyang said cheerfully, sidestepping. “I promise you’re going to have a wonderful time!”

Naturally, getting hit wasn’t on his agenda. He was capable of finishing both of these men in the time it took them to blink — but that would have been a waste. No, Yueyang had something far more satisfying in mind for a man who liked to use human lives as playthings. He had a surprise planned.

If you were to rank Yueyang’s particular gifts in life, his legendary talent for attracting women probably wouldn’t even crack the top spot. There was one skill, though, that would comfortably sit at number two — and nothing else would come close.

That was the art of making an enemy suffer.

He wasn’t the magnanimous sort. He had the skin of a rhinoceros and the mind of a chess grandmaster, paired with a rather peculiar philosophy about justice. The result, forged across countless battles and honed to a razor’s edge, was a fighting style uniquely his own.

Yueyang’s style: an eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth.

Many great men, when slapped on the left cheek, could offer up the right — repaying cruelty with grace, hoping to transform enemies through virtue. Many merely decent men, when bitten by a dog, would simply walk the other way rather than bite back. These were admirable qualities.

Yueyang understood them perfectly.

Understanding something and doing it are two entirely different things.

If someone slapped him on the left cheek, his response was to slap them ten times in return — and if they still had opinions about this, he’d take the offending hand off at the wrist. If a dog bit him, he wouldn’t bite the dog back. He’d simply remove the dog’s head. He was not, after all, a dog. There was a distinction to be maintained.

The city lord who had been so thoroughly enjoying himself a few moments ago had no idea how fortunate he was. Yueyang had decided to play along. He was going to give this lover of games a game to remember.

After all — who couldn’t play games?

Yueyang flickered out of the way of the punch with the casual grace of a man sidestepping a slow cart, reappearing in midair with perfect composure, then drifted back down to perch on the spine of the golden throne as though he’d never left.

“Now, I personally find roasted heart and liver a bit overdone,” he remarked, settling in. “And sweetened brain matter is honestly only so-so. But when in Rome. I suppose I’ll have to try it. Don’t worry — if I enjoy it, I’ll spread the word to my companions. And if they want to sample, I’ll be sure to introduce them to your family and friends. I imagine they’re every bit as hospitable as you are.”

The city lord’s second punch missed air. His rage escalated from a boil to something approaching a volcanic event. He let out a roar that shook the canopy and threw himself skyward, pulling every scrap of power within him into a single descending strike.

The shockwave alone was enough to make the Crimson Wolf Forest shudder. His oppressive aura fell like a physical weight. The refugees below nearly suffocated — only by pressing together in a mass, lending each other their collective resistance, did they avoid being crushed flat by the pressure alone. He plummeted from several hundred meters overhead, his fist a hammer aimed at the earth itself, and before he’d even landed, every one of the starving civilians below was already vomiting blood. Were it not for Princess Qianqian flickering left and right among the crowd, her domain rising like a shield around the weakest of them, not one of those people — not the refugees, not the mercenaries — would have survived the shockwave.

The golden throne cratered into the earth.

The seventeen slaves who had been carrying it had every bone in their bodies shattered simultaneously. They screamed once — then seven orifices bleeding, they detonated from within, dissolving into dispersing clouds of red mist. The quick-reflexed female slave had just barely scrambled free of the impact zone, throwing herself clear and landing face-first in the mud, utterly exposed.

Yueyang sat on the chair back throughout all of this, perfectly relaxed, as though the apocalypse descending toward his head was something happening to someone else entirely.

Xiao Wenli stepped out of the air.

Her beautiful large eyes turned toward the city lord.

One glance.

The crushing fist — less than a meter from the top of Yueyang’s head — stopped. The city lord stopped with it, frozen at full extension in midair, suspended like an insect in amber.

The owl-voiced man watched this happen with his mouth open, blinking as though he’d lost confidence in his own vision. He knew his partner’s strength better than anyone. He wasn’t modest — with his own Hand of Manipulation, he wasn’t certain he could claim an edge over this man in a direct contest. And a single look stopped him? A look from a young girl who was barely — wait. Not a young girl. Not a serpent demon. No. That was — that was a Divine Beast.

The owl-voiced man had gone pale.

A Divine Beast. You didn’t fight a Divine Beast. You didn’t argue with a Divine Beast. You left, as quickly as your legs could carry you, and you didn’t look back.

He turned to run.

He spun on his heel, called every last thread of his speed, and bolted — and found himself staring directly into the cold eyes of an ice-white serpent demon who had not been there a heartbeat ago, a war blade resting in her hands with the patient readiness of a woman who had nowhere else to be.

He turned the other way.

A Thunder Naga blocked that direction, crackling with barely-contained electricity.

He spun around to check the remaining angles. A Storm Mermaid on one side. A Stone Medusa on the other. Four of them, surrounding him in a loose circle, all looking at him with the detached interest of cats who had just cornered a mouse.

He had not heard them arrive. He had not sensed them. He, whose Hand of Manipulation perceived and controlled the threads of life and death on the battlefield, had been encircled without detecting so much as a footstep.

Run or die.

He knew what a joint strike from four beings like this would do to him, and “survive it intact” was not among the possibilities.

Go. Now. Up.

He threw everything he had into a vertical burst, rocketing straight upward, abandoning dignity, abandoning his partner, abandoning everything except the single imperative of escape. If you were going to get out of a circle like that, you went over the top. He didn’t spare a thought for the city lord. Let the man who had started this by opening his arrogant mouth deal with the consequences — if he’d had any sense of who he was provoking, none of them would be in this position.

CRACK.

A column of lightning, as thick around as a barrel, descended from the open sky and hit him directly on the top of his head.

He fell like a comet, trailing smoke, and hit the ground with a sound that briefly silenced the forest.

The thunderbolt had nearly caved in his skull. The electricity that followed had charred him black from head to toe, leaving him twitching in the dirt with the rhythmic misery of a man whose nervous system had temporarily become someone else’s problem.

“Aaaaahh…”

The owl-voiced man managed to twitch one finger. A breath-soft breeze stirred near his body — almost imperceptible, inaudible — and then something like an invisible rope, flung from somewhere in the trees, looped around him and yanked him off the ground.

Thwip.

An arrow buried itself through the back of that twitching hand, pinning it in place. Stone Medusa’s work. In an instant, the hand went ashen and grey, a tide of petrification spreading from the point of impact up toward his wrist, his elbow, his arm.

And in that moment, for the first time in anyone’s memory, the Hand of Manipulation became visible.

Five thin lines ran from the owl-voiced man’s hand and disappeared into the trees in five different directions — the threads that had always been there, invisible and absolute, now rendered in stone. The power that had controlled the life and death of untold victims, exposed at last, turned to grey rock in the afternoon light.

As for the city lord — he was still frozen mid-punch, exactly where Xiao Wenli had left him. Xiao Wenli, who had held the divine-bodied Chitian River for a full second, found restraining a city lord of unknown rank roughly as taxing as eating a handful of soybeans. If she wanted to keep him there until tomorrow morning, it was an option.

Yueyang didn’t look up at the suspended man. He turned his attention to the charred, twitching heap on the ground and clicked his tongue with what sounded almost like disappointment.

“You’ve let me down,” he said. “Really. How could you? If you wanted to run, you should have said so. You don’t sneak off — that’s just rude.”

Everyone in earshot went very still.

Were they… supposed to announce it? Attention, I am now fleeing, please take note?

The owl-voiced man, who had resigned himself entirely to his fate a few moments ago, felt the faintest flicker of something. Was he being — let go?

Yueyang’s expression was very serious. He raised one finger with great ceremony.

“Running, in and of itself, is not prohibited. I actively encourage it.” He turned his head. “Fengji — count. Start from one, go to one hundred. Don’t rush it. Count properly. If either of you can get outside my line of sight before you reach one hundred, you’re free to go.”

He said this pleasantly, then snapped his fingers.

The city lord — who had been suspended in place overhead for the last several minutes — dropped. He hit the ground with a sound like a collapsing building, the impact wave tearing through the surrounding forest in a ring of destruction.

No one flinched. No one even looked.

Because they had all, in the past thirty seconds, worked out what was coming. The game that these two men had devised to torment the innocent and helpless was about to be turned around and applied to them, with full force and complete precision, by a man who had already made it abundantly clear that he was better at this than they were. The cruelty was being returned to sender. And the return postage included interest.

“Boss — me? I’m counting? Is that — am I allowed to?” Fengji was equal parts delighted and alarmed. If he made a mess of this, what then?

“If you can’t count to a hundred, you’re fired.”

“No, no, I can count! I’ll count right now — you want me to actually start?” He glanced toward Princess Qianqian, because anyone with eyes could see that the Titan Lord treated this woman with a deference that exceeded anything he’d witnessed from other men of power toward their wives by a significant margin.

“Stop stalling,” Qianqian said. She bickered with Yueyang constantly in private — but in public, questioning him was simply not something she permitted.

“Run,” Yueyang said pleasantly, addressing the city lord and the owl-voiced man. “If you don’t, I’ll be adding your teeth and skin to my collection. Young master here is giving you this opportunity out of the pure generosity of his heart. Oh — and I should mention, I find myself in complete agreement with everything you said earlier. Pitiful creatures. Tormenting things weaker than myself is my greatest joy. Watching the helpless writhe beneath my feet gives me a profound sense of achievement. You’ll never understand — it’s a feeling unique to the strong. And what is strength? The ability to dispose of other people’s fates as you see fit.”

He delivered the city lord’s earlier speech back to him word for word, without inflection, without editorializing.

Word. For. Word.

There is no cruelty quite like hearing your own rhetoric used against you when you are no longer the one holding power.

The city lord and the owl-voiced man had no counter-argument. Just as the refugees had been utterly powerless before them, these two were utterly powerless before Yueyang — Sky-rank or not, their strength relative to his was the gap between ants and mountains, and whatever he wanted to do to them, they could only wait for it.

“…” The owl-voiced man’s legs gave out. He sank to his knees in the dirt. The city lord had gone the color of ash, trembling from somewhere deep in his core, and for the first time he understood — truly understood, from the inside — the despair he had spent decades inflicting on others. He understood the terror of a fate entirely in someone else’s hands. If he could go back, he told himself, he would never have chased these refugees. He would never have committed any of the acts that had led to this moment. He would have undone everything—

But the world didn’t offer second chances.

“Uggk—” The city lord’s stomach rebelled. He thought of what he’d done to his victims — the teeth, the skin, the liver, the brain — and then he thought about the fact that he was now in their position, and vomited.

“One — two — three —” Fengji had already started counting, quickly, in case the boss reconsidered his employment status.

Besides, honestly? These two had it coming. Thoroughly. People like this ran into people like the Titan Lord maybe once in a lifetime — call it the universe catching up on a debt. Fengji had no sympathy whatsoever.

The owl-voiced man shuddered once, and then — in a sudden motion — raised his hand toward his own throat.

Leaves flashed from the ground, reshaping into blades in midair.

But at the instant before they reached his neck, Yueyang snapped his fingers. Every leaf-blade ignited, burned cleanly to nothing in less than a second, and vanished. The owl-voiced man’s skin was unmarked. Not a scratch.

He wanted to die. The decision was no longer his.

“Did you think,” Yueyang said, sounding genuinely entertained, “that you could kill yourself without my permission? Did you think the name ‘Titan Lord’ was just for decoration?” He planted his fists on his hips with magnificent self-satisfaction and delivered the owl-voiced man’s own words back to him in the man’s own cadence. “My Titan’s Hand controls not just the lives of my enemies — it controls their deaths as well.”

To face-slap at this level was something close to an art form.

And this, the narrator should note, was only the beginning. Yueyang would not stop at making enemies vomit. He wouldn’t rest until he’d made them cry.