The following half month, Yueyang lived like an immortal.
Xue Wuxia and Princess Qianqian were deep in their own training and had little time to spare for him — but Luohua and Phoenix Fairy, who hadn’t been by his side for a while, stayed close, and together with the others formed something of a beautiful-girl strike team that took turns thoroughly wearing out this so-called Demon King of theirs. Yueyang spent those two weeks in a state of blissful contentment he had no desire to escape.
Of them all, City Lord Luohua threw herself into it with the most dedication. Part of it was simply that she had missed him — but she had also been waiting for the right moment to finally complete the fusion she hadn’t had time for before. With the advantage of her recent breakthrough still fresh, and Yueyang’s Innate True Qi to support her, she spent the entire two weeks fusing together her Swift Fang Aurora, her Spiral Polar Aurora, and the Light Dragon Spirit Yueyang had obtained from Bi Lv, daughter of the former Jade Domain Lord of the Southern Heavenly Realm — and succeeded in transforming them into an entirely new entity: the Nine-Turn Dragon’s Death Aurora.
Where once the Aurora had capped at three spiraling streams, it now turned nine.
And with the Light Dragon Spirit to guide it.
While it couldn’t claim the rank of a divine artifact, the Death Aurora’s destructive power now stood toe-to-toe with even the finest Sacred Artifacts. Combined with the fact that Luohua’s Snow Fox war beast had already advanced to near-Sacred Beast status, her overall strength had grown by leaps and bounds — enough to make Yueyang look at her with entirely new eyes.
It was this fusion that reminded him he still owed Bi Lv a favor.
He had promised her back then to help reclaim several border cities and work together toward taking the Jade Domain. The plan had since evolved considerably with changing circumstances, but Yueyang felt that taking the Light Dragon Spirit without doing anything in return was a little hard to justify.
Cultivation could wait — it was never truly finished anyway. And who knew how long it would take to clear all ten Trials.
So he decided to carve out some time to head to the Southern Heavenly Realm and have a talk with Bi Lv. Even if she had no plans left to seize the Jade Domain, he could at least help her with something else.
“Back to the Southern Heavenly Realm?” Captain Lieyan had seemed to have something on her mind lately. When Yueyang brought it up, she went quiet. In the old days, a battle-hungry Lieyan would have jumped at the chance to volunteer, eager to ride alongside him and cut through anything in their way.
“You can stay if you want, or head back for a visit — up to you.” Yueyang, for his part, was perfectly happy if she didn’t come along.
“I’ll… decide closer to the time. There are still a few days.” Lieyan shook her head, turned on her heel, and strode off to throw herself at the Sky Stairway again.
“What’s gotten into her?” Yueyang asked, mildly puzzled.
“No idea!” Everyone shook their heads with a small smile. Everyone had their own secrets — Lieyan was no different.
Before heading to the Southern Heavenly Realm, Yueyang naturally had to make his rounds and deal with everything that had piled up.
Being the boss wasn’t easy.
His first stop was the fifth floor of the Sky Stairway, where he found that Red Crane and Scarlet Peak had been well and truly beaten into submission by Tianzhu and the others.
Armed with superior recovery abilities and raw strength, the two of them had fought against the mob — but it hadn’t lasted a single day. It had lasted a month and a half. If Yueyang hadn’t come back, they would have kept going indefinitely. In that long war of attrition, numbers had ultimately decided the outcome. Tianzhu’s side had leveraged their advantage in headcount to keep an unrelenting press on Red Crane and Scarlet Peak, never giving them a window to recover. By now, the fighting force had swelled well beyond the Sky Demon Palace and the Demon Abyss faction — the Underworld Emperor’s and Dragon Emperor’s subordinates were there, along with warriors from every clan in the Sky-Reaching Tower, members of the Innate Alliance, the Four Great Families of Dragon Rise Continent, and even recently-ascended Innate-realm human warriors like Wan Guku the Wind Madman and the sharp-eyed Xiahou Weijie.
Their individual strength was utterly negligible against Temple Elders of Red Crane and Scarlet Peak’s caliber — little more than ants. But sheer numbers had a weight of their own. Every time Red Crane and Scarlet Peak fought Tianzhu’s group to mutual exhaustion and desperately needed time to recover, this second wave would flood in with a coordinated assault.
Led by the old fox and the various Guardian War Gods, they had come very close to finishing the two Temple Elders off entirely.
The only reason Red Crane and Scarlet Peak were still breathing was because Tianzhu’s group refused to lose the best training dummies they had ever had.
When Yueyang appeared, Yue Su — who had been anchoring the human warriors’ formation — and Yonghui, who had been standing to the side watching, both got a shock. Yue Su immediately flew over to clarify: “I’ve already reached a peace agreement with them. I’m under their employ now — and so is Yonghui.”
Yonghui, whose power had taken a significant hit after losing his war beast, watched Yueyang with barely concealed nerves.
He was afraid Yueyang wouldn’t honor the arrangement. He knew full well that the one who actually called the shots in the Sky-Reaching Tower wasn’t Tianzhu — it was the Yue family’s third young master.
“Carry on,” Yueyang said breezily. “I’ll bring a few more training dummies in a few days.”
“Don’t you dare — these two Temple Elders are already more than enough to deal with!” Demon King Barut roared, on the verge of losing his mind.
“Hopefully whatever he brings back isn’t a Hall Master this time,” the Dragon Emperor said, too exhausted to even muster a proper protest.
“…”
Red Crane and Scarlet Peak had been clinging to a thread of resolve — after all, as long as they weren’t dead, there was hope. Given the chance to recover to full Sky-rank Level 5 strength, they could sweep through this ant colony in seconds and make it back to the Heavenly Realm. Apart from Tianzhu, who was admittedly a nuisance, none of the others struck them as a particularly serious threat. But the moment they caught sight of Yueyang strolling in again, their hearts sank straight to the floor.
The most demoralizing part: the kid had only been gone a little over a month — and he’d broken through again.
If they had once thought they could look down on him from above —
Now?
They stared at him, and the horrifying realization crept over them that they would have to look up to meet his gaze — in cultivation and in raw strength both. What kind of absurd luck did this person have, to grow at this speed? At this rate, strolling up to the Heavenly Realm and dragging a Hall Master back down was only ever going to be a matter of time.
“Alright, we give up — we surrender.” Red Crane had decided continuing was pointless. Better to do what Yue Su and Yonghui had done and just submit — even if it had seemed beneath him before, survival came first. This wasn’t the Heavenly Realm. This was the Sky-Reaching Tower. This was the Sky Stairway. This was Yueyang’s territory. Pressing on led nowhere, and if they accidentally killed one of Yueyang’s loved ones in the chaos, he’d snap — and a dead Temple Elder was a far worse outcome than a humiliated one.
“Who gave you permission to talk?” Tianzhu’s cold smile didn’t waver. “Keep fighting.”
The Sky-Reaching Tower’s new rules — rewritten by Yueyang — were clear: even if an enemy surrendered, you kept going until they were completely and utterly broken.
Yue Su and Yonghui were the model for that.
Surrender the moment it got hard — not a chance.
Besides, where else were they going to find training dummies this good?
Demon King Barut, who had come within a hair of being one-shotted by Red Crane several times, had plenty of pent-up fury of his own: “You are not surrendering! Tianzhu broke through, Dragon Emperor and Underworld Emperor both advanced too — I haven’t yet! We keep fighting and you don’t get to quit!”
Red Crane and Scarlet Peak exchanged a look of pure, wordless despair.
What kind of people did this Sky-Reaching Tower produce?
Who in the world forbade an enemy from surrendering?
The Heavenly Realm always said the Central Divine Temple was the arrogant and overbearing one — but compared to these savages, the Central Divine Temple’s people were paragons of civility and restraint.
Yueyang watched Tianzhu and the others advancing in leaps and bounds under that relentless life-or-death pressure and felt a private swell of satisfaction. His methods were more effective than anything — left to conventional training, who knew how many years it would have taken them to get here.
He turned the Three Realms Compass and returned to the Trial Grounds — only to find every single Heavenly Realm warrior from the Snow Plains, Eight Wastelands, and War Song teams lying dead outside the Trial zone.
Their severed heads hung like a chain of grotesque ornaments, strung together with rope, dense and grim.
Even the commanders who had withdrawn hadn’t been spared. All of them — dead.
The Central Divine Temple’s reach was something else entirely. One move, and they had wiped out the three elite squads assembled from the finest warriors across the Western Heavenly Realm, just like that.
Six survivors remained: the Lingyun Kingdom Lord and his companions.
Everyone else — gone.
“What?” The Lingyun Kingdom Lord, sheltering in the ruins of the Earth Demon Divine Temple, went white with shock when Yueyang delivered the news.
“The Central Divine Temple’s death squads…” Tiewan and the others ground their teeth in helpless fury. Those warriors who had left — they had been friends. Some, family by marriage.
“I’m planning to bring Ye Kong and the others to Conquest City to train,” Yueyang said. There was nothing he could say to soften the blow, so he moved to what he could actually offer. “You should come along. The late Empress Vivienne’s will still protects that city, and what remains of the veteran garrison holds the line. The Central Divine Temple won’t throw everything they have at it anytime soon — right now, it’s the safest place left in the entire Western Heavenly Realm.”
Ye Kong, the Fatty of the Sea, and Xue Tanglang had spent a little over a month grinding down the Evil Tree-Face — immovable but Sky-rank Level 5 — and had finally toppled it.
They’d been so spent afterward that none of them could move for days — but the gains had been enormous.
Xue Tanglang especially, who had shouldered the heaviest load, had jumped two full ranks.
His strength was now approaching Sky-rank.
Of course, between Sky-rank and the Innate Sovereign realm lay a vast and formidable gulf — even Xue Wuxia and Princess Qianqian hadn’t crossed it yet. And even a Level 5 Sky-rank cultivator was little more than a footnote in the presence of a true Innate Sovereign. Xue Tanglang and the others had a long road still ahead of them — but they were young, and there was no need to rush.
Yueyang figured the time was about right to toss them into Conquest City and let the veterans put them through their paces. More than anything, it was safe there — and the veterans’ hard-won battlefield experience, forged in blood and fire, would be invaluable on the path toward the Innate Sovereign realm.
Xue Tanglang and the others had no objections whatsoever. When the Lingyun Kingdom Lord offered them Sky-rank war beasts as a parting gift, they politely declined.
They didn’t want to rely too heavily on war beasts. Important as they were, personal growth was the most critical thing for them right now — and that meant relying on themselves.
Without Mermaid Tears, he couldn’t fulfill Grandma Sha’s wish — so Yueyang didn’t go to see her. He simply delivered the Fatty of the Sea and the others to Conquest City and turned straight back toward the Sky-Reaching Tower. The Fatty’s Wind-Breath Seabird had already reached near-Sacred Beast status and was teetering on the edge of a full breakthrough — Yueyang could see it clearly, though he said nothing. He filed it quietly away and kept an eye out for any treasure that might give it the push it needed. If the Wind-Breath Seabird made it to Sacred Beast rank, the girl-obsessed Fatty of the Sea would absolutely explode with happiness.
The Sky-Reaching Tower. Dragon Rise Continent. Heaven’s Web Imperial Palace.
Yueyang’s sudden return caught Fourth Elder Sister completely off guard. Shuang’er, that little rascal, flung herself into her brother’s arms with tears already threatening to spill.
“San’er, weren’t you training in the Sky Stairway? What brings you back?” Fourth Elder Sister hadn’t yet heard about Yueyang’s joint cultivation session with Supreme, Night Empress, and the others beneath the World Tree. But she could see the change in him — and one look made her clap a hand over her mouth in surprise. “Something’s very different about you. It’s almost as if… a Divine Aspect has begun to crystallize. What happened to you recently?”
“It went something like this—” Yueyang walked her through it, leaving out only the part about Supreme waiting for him at the one-million-step mark. That Supreme understood what it meant for a Divine Aspect to first take form no longer surprised him at all — and he had long since stopped trying to figure out how she knew the things she knew. She had her secrets. He understood that, and he wasn’t going to push.
“Good. Very good.” Fourth Elder Sister sounded genuinely relieved. “With everyone working together like that, I can rest a little easier.” Looking at San’er now, she thought — he had finally grown up.
“Actually, the main reason I came back was to ask you about the Sacred Grimoire,” Yueyang said.
The moment the words were out, Fourth Elder Sister’s expression flickered — just slightly — and she waved both hands quickly. “I don’t know anything about the Sacred Grimoire. Who told you to ask me?”
“You don’t know?”
Yueyang was fairly certain she did. She was keeping something back — some secret she wasn’t ready to share. Night Empress wouldn’t have lied about this.
“How would I possibly know anything about the Sacred Grimoire? That’s a supreme and exalted existence beyond anything I could speak to.” Fourth Elder Sister clearly had no intention of going further down this road.
She watched Yueyang tease and play with Shuang’er, then slipped cheerfully into the kitchen and cooked him a full meal with her own hands.
As Yueyang ate with wholehearted gusto, Fourth Elder Sister fell quiet for a moment, biting her lip lightly — and then, as though arriving at a decision: “San’er… regarding the Sacred Grimoire that His Majesty and Night Empress mentioned — go take a look yourself first. If you still can’t make it work after that, then think about other approaches.”
Yueyang could tell she had no intention of accompanying him there, and he didn’t press her.
He nodded.
And went back to eating with enthusiasm, engaging in a two-handed chicken leg competition with the grease-covered Shuang’er to see who could finish first.
Fourth Elder Sister clearly had difficulties he didn’t fully understand. He didn’t know what they were — but he understood enough to know they were real, and that was precisely why he wasn’t going to push her. The Sacred Grimoire mattered — but Fourth Elder Sister mattered more.
Besides, a Grimoire of that caliber had its own spirit. If it recognized someone as its master, outside interference wouldn’t change that.
Then a thought struck him — a quiet, sudden shock.
Was the reason Fourth Elder Sister refused to go anywhere near the Sacred Grimoire… because she was afraid it might recognize her as its master instead?
The thought surfaced, and refused to leave. It floated there in the back of his mind, impossible to fully dismiss — even when it seemed unlikely. Even so, he couldn’t rule it out.
Just how many secrets was Fourth Elder Sister still keeping?
The more Yueyang thought about it, the more it felt like trying to see clearly through deep, still water — and finding the bottom just kept getting further away.