Ming Rihao drank for a while, then set down his enormous cup and said, for what felt like the fifth time: “You genuinely don’t know?”

He was looking at Yue Yang with the expression of a man encountering something that violated his understanding of how the world was organized.

“If I knew,” Yue Yang said, with considerable restraint, “I wouldn’t be sitting here listening to you ramble. I have better ways to spend my time.”

That got about seventy percent belief. The remaining thirty percent was Ming Rihao trying to work out how Yue Yang had ended up in Greenvalley City of all places if he didn’t have a lead. Someone must have pointed him here, or some thread had led him here — it couldn’t be coincidence. People didn’t stumble into Tianhua Domain’s deep rear and start impersonating wealthy merchants by accident.

“Then why Greenvalley City? The western celestial realm is vast. Why specifically wade into this particular mess?”

“I was in the Conquest City area over in the Eight Wastes Domain, about to enter the Trial Grounds, when I happened to rescue a snake-haired sorcerer — says he’s from the Dugu family, one of the Four Great Clans. He invited me to meet him in White River City. I came.”

“White River City.” Ming Rihao processed this. “You should have gone straight through the Windstill Swamp. What are you doing in Greenvalley?”

“Because Tianhua Domain is a soup of conflicting elemental energies and fractured cultivation laws, and I’m not going to blunder into White River City blind and end up getting sold without knowing the price.” Yue Yang waved it off. “Intelligence gathering. Nothing complicated. Now — your turn. Why are you here?”

Ming Rihao picked up his cup again. The cup was the size of a small barrel. He drained a significant portion of it.

“It’s… somewhat involved.”

“Talk.”

“Fine. Let me start with why I’m playing a tier-three mercenary.” Ming Rihao laughed suddenly, a big sound that he was clearly keeping suppressed with effort. “Concealing your true strength — I learned that from your crowd, actually. Before the war with the Prison Emperor, I thought displaying everything you had was the definition of presence. Then I paid for that thinking repeatedly, and eventually the lesson stuck. Don’t look at me like that — I fought him for two solid years, dozens of engagements of all sizes. If I hadn’t picked up how to hide my depth by then, I’d deserve to be dead. And suppressing your cultivation level has a secondary benefit at my tier: the pressure drops, and cultivation actually becomes easier. Anyway — you’re better at this than I am. I don’t need to explain it to you.”

He set the cup down.

“After we broke free of the Prison Emperor’s divine palace seal and returned to the western celestial realm, I found things had changed considerably. Six thousand years of imprisonment will do that. My strength wasn’t fully recovered, so announcing myself as Ming Rihao was out of the question — I went to ground, worked at recovery, only started moving again once I had enough back to defend it.”

“Ming Yueguang is in better shape than I am, but Jiuxiao and Xukong came back and immediately went to the Central Divine Hall. The Hall has been running probes ever since — testing whether the Three Great Powers of the western realm are actually as strong as their reputations, looking for an opening.”

He exhaled.

“Being one of the three powers at the top doesn’t mean you stop watching your back. If anything it gets worse. The players get more capable and the consequences of losing get more permanent.”

“Jiuxiao and Xukong causing trouble was expected — Ming Yueguang had anticipated that. What was harder to account for was the Central Hall’s master moving at the same time, the three of them coordinating to hit Ming Yueguang while she was still weakened from the seal. And the Hall had been busy during those six thousand years. They’d cultivated and promoted several near-powers — figures who weren’t quite at the Great Power tier but were close enough to serve as their public instruments, running provocations and formal challenges.”

“The Night Empress of the Nine Brilliance clan was one of them.”

Yue Yang nodded slowly. He’d killed her. He was starting to see the shape of things.

“The Central Hall won’t have seen that coming. Six thousand years of investment in that particular piece, and a rapidly ascending newcomer eliminated her during what should have been a simple resource seizure at the Sky Tower. And they definitely won’t have predicted what the Sky Tower itself has become — the Supreme, you, the chain reaction of growth you two triggered. People are breaking through to the Perfect Innate Sovereign realm in succession. The trajectory has completely inverted.”

“The Sky Tower’s rise is unstoppable now.”

“How is she?” Yue Yang asked. “Ming Yueguang.”

“Still recovering. Safe — I’m confident of that much. As for where exactly she’s cultivating, I genuinely don’t know. I’ve learned not to ask about her affairs.” A wry pause. “As for what I came home to find: our clan’s descendants — nearly all gone. The Hall and their proxies worked through them methodically during the seal period. My loyal commanders — either killed or fled. The ones who stayed stayed long enough to betray us, then fled. What’s left is a wreckage that gives me a headache every time I think about it.”

“Recover from what?” Yue Yang said. “You’re sitting here feeling sorry about followers who betrayed you after six thousand years. Why? Manage yourself and let the rest sort out. The moment you have strength, followers appear. Why are you complicating this?”

Ming Rihao stared at him. “No followers at all? For one of the Three Great Powers?”

“If the strength is there, you say the word and followers materialize. One sentence.”

“But loyalty—”

“You had the loyal ones. Then there was a six-thousand-year seal and they all turned. So what does loyalty actually buy you?” Yue Yang met his eyes without blinking. “Strength is the variable that matters. With enough of it, nobody dares betray you or challenge you. Their courage simply isn’t equal to the thought. Don’t worry about loyalty — worry about being powerful enough that loyalty becomes the only sensible option.”

This was the celestial realm. Strength determined everything. Follower loyalty was a function of perceived benefit and perceived risk. Maximize the risk of betrayal, and loyalty followed automatically.

Ming Rihao sat with this for a moment, then laughed despite himself. The laugh had some real feeling in it.

“And for the actually loyal ones,” Yue Yang added, “you don’t need to do anything. They’re loyal because they choose to be. Your job is just to recognize them when they appear.”

Ming Rihao found, to his mild irritation, that this was making him feel better. He set down his internal inventory of grievances and let his face settle into something more relaxed.

“You know,” he said, “I just figured out why you came to Greenvalley.”

Yue Yang looked at him. “Go on.”

“Tell me I’m right first.”

“Say it and I’ll tell you.”

Ming Rihao grinned. “Someone wronged you, took something, or killed someone important to you — and they ran here, into Tianhua Domain, near the Windstill Swamp territory. So you came as a disguised merchant to clear the debt quietly.”

“Not bad.” Yue Yang raised an eyebrow. “Though you’ve got some details backwards. What I will say is — your read isn’t entirely wrong.”

Ming Rihao slapped the table with satisfaction, then pointed at him. “That brain of yours. And your face — I won’t say I admire many things, but your brain and your absolute nerve, I admire completely.”

“Is that a compliment or an insult?”

“It’s a compliment! A genuine one!” Ming Rihao was starting to lose the battle against his own laughter. “The entire celestial realm — east, west, north, south, upper and lower — there is exactly one person who had the audacity to write love letters to my little sister. One. You. The sheer nerve required—”

“You read my letters?”

Yue Yang’s expression had gone flat.

“No. But her friends did. And according to them, nothing like those letters has been written anywhere in the celestial realm in living memory.”

“…”

Yue Yang spent a moment cataloguing which of Ming Yueguang’s friends had read his correspondence and filed them under future grievances. Then he noted, with a flicker of relief, that he’d had the presence of mind not to write anything genuinely explicit — nothing approaching the legendary disaster of that one prince who had written to his beloved expressing a desire to spend his entire life residing in a very specific location within her garments. He had not done that. He had been, relatively speaking, tasteful.

Small mercies.

Ming Rihao’s laughter faded into something more serious. When he spoke again, his voice had changed registers entirely.

“People who betray me — depending on the circumstances, I can let certain things go. History, shared hardship, whatever. But I will not tolerate anyone who moves against my sister. She isn’t just one of the Three Great Powers. She’s the thing I’m most proud of in my existence. Anyone who challenges or betrays her gets my full and undivided attention until they no longer exist as a problem.” He set down his cup. “The reason I’m here specifically — there’s a former official of the Moon Radiance Crystal Palace. A female administrator who served in Ming Yueguang’s household. While her mistress was sealed, this woman stole from the palace and fled.”

“And she ended up near here.”

“That’s the intelligence I have. She was spotted in this region — near the Windstill Swamp territory. I came to follow it up, traveling as a hired fighter so no one runs before I find her.” A slight grimace. “Instead of finding her, I found you.”

Yue Yang considered briefly, then laid out his terms. “The runaway is your business — I’m not involved in household matters. But what’s actually happening in Tianhua Domain — what it’s hiding, what the real mechanism behind this war is — I want that. No dancing around it. If you were just chasing a runaway servant, you’d have sent someone. You came yourself, which means there’s more. Tell me the truth and I’ll cut you in for thirty percent of whatever Greenvalley City yields.”

“Thirty percent of this ruin?” Ming Rihao looked offended. “Do I look like a beggar? I’m not one of those starving wretches in the street. You think a share of this backwater is going to move me?”

Yue Yang spread his hands. “Then don’t take it.”

“…” Ming Rihao paused. “Actually—”

He thought about Yue Yang’s reputation for financial generosity, which was essentially nonexistent. The man hoarded with the conviction of someone who had studied the subject philosophically and concluded that giving things away was for people with poor judgment. For this person to be voluntarily offering thirty percent — that was either a significant departure from character, or the thirty percent was going to be substantial enough to justify it.

Passing it up purely on principle would be the kind of decision he’d regret.

“Fine. Thirty percent.”

Yue Yang looked at him with open contempt and extended his middle finger. “Could you fall any lower?”

“For a chance to profit off you? My standards can go as low as needed.” Ming Rihao waved this off with a grin. “And this secret of mine is large enough that you genuinely can’t swallow it alone — thirty percent is fair. Have you heard of the Divine Codex?”

“The Divine Codex?” Yue Yang very nearly said I happen to have one, and caught himself. “No. Is there one in Tianhua Domain?”

“Not the Codex itself. But Tianhua Domain contains all the secrets pointing to where one is.” Ming Rihao leaned forward slightly. “Many thousands of years ago, a cultivator from Tianhua Domain — not powerful at the time, genuinely quite weak — stumbled into the location of a Divine Codex through pure chance. Within it, he obtained a fragment of divinity. Incomplete, but real. He came back to Tianhua Domain as a half-god, intending to use that power to raise his people and establish a presence in the western celestial realm.”

“Where is this half-god now?”

“Dead.”

Yue Yang stared. “A half-god died?”

“Yes. And his death is precisely what triggered everything that came after.”

Yue Yang absorbed this. After the half-god’s fall, the fragmented divinity would have become an object of competition — and more importantly, his trail back to the Divine Codex’s location would have become something every major power wanted to follow. With a Divine Codex as the prize, and the Central Divine Hall stoking the fire from behind the scenes — of course Tianhua Domain had been burning for three thousand years. Of course tens of millions of soldiers had been deployed. The scale of the slaughter suddenly made a different kind of sense.

Ming Rihao watched him work through it, then smiled. “There’s actually a more detailed version of all this. The real truth — the part that will genuinely surprise you.” He leaned back. “If you agree to stand with me against the Central Divine Hall, I’ll tell you everything. Otherwise — you do your merchant performance, I find my runaway, and we go our separate ways.”

Yue Yang’s temper flickered.

He hated being leveraged. It was his least favorite experience, and the list of things he disliked was not short.

But — alliance against the Central Divine Hall was not an unreasonable ask. It was essentially just a firm commitment stated aloud. And refusing on principle would mean walking away from whatever the real truth was, which his curiosity would not permit.

He mentally added the entire situation to his running account with Ming Yueguang, to be settled at a future date through means he was already beginning to roughly sketch out, and looked Ming Rihao in the eye.

“Fine. Not just the Central Hall — Xukong and Jiuxiao included. I fight to the end. But if you back out midway, don’t expect me to be sentimental about your sister when it comes to consequences. As for you specifically — Perfect Innate Sovereign tier eight or not, I have methods.”

This landed. Ming Rihao felt it, and believed it, which was the more impressive part.

Don’t make enemies of this one, his instincts said. Firmly, clearly, don’t.

“Agreed,” he said. “The real truth is—”

And he began to tell it.