Yue Yang sat over the board, deep in thought and saying nothing.

Holding the piece and not putting it down.

The middle-aged scholar waited quietly, looking patient enough for anything. There was no reason for him to feel restless over a game whose ending was already decided in his favor. Only a man about to lose gets his temper up, cannot sit still, and finds everything in the world going against him — the way Yue Yang was now, thoroughly out of sorts, slapping a piece down and starting to swear out loud. “What kind of crap pieces are these? There’s no feel to them at all. Would it kill you to use a slightly better grade of jade? Garbage pieces like this — I could hold one all day and not get a single idea out of it!”

Everybody knows that how a man plays has nothing to do with the pieces, and that what a piece is made of has no bearing whatsoever on the result.

The people who think it does are all one kind of person.

The kind that is about to lose.

Yue Yang looked exactly like that kind… The middle-aged scholar watched him and turned it around: suppose he were this third son of the Yue family, and suppose he were suddenly facing the Divine Hall Supreme Tianyu, Peerless Emperor Wushuang, the Demon Emperor, the Golden Emperor, the Immovable Supreme and the rest of that crowd of supreme powers all at once. His head would swell like a bucket and split with the ache of it. Never mind the ones at the top of that list — even the five great powers of the East, West and South Heavenly Realms who ranked below them were nobody a man could safely provoke.

In his day, the Prison Emperor had sacrificed himself to seal the three great powers of the West Heavenly Realm.

And now Yue Yang had not only five Heavenly Realm powers to face at once, but on top of them five more at the very summit — Tianyu, Wushuang, the Demon Emperor, the Golden Emperor and the Immovable Supreme. Ten men, and every one of them a mountain. Any one of those mountains would press a man until he could not breathe, and here were all ten arriving together. How could a man’s insides not knot up, how could his face not fall, how could the gloom not settle over him?

The middle-aged scholar put himself in the position and concluded that if he were Yue Titan, holding the hand Yue Titan held, with ten powerful enemies bearing down on him, there was only one road and it ended in death.

He could not win.

Wanting to win this particular game was harder than climbing into heaven.

Thinking as this third son of the Yue family, he could not come up with a single way to win. Thinking as himself, he could not come up with a single reason he might lose.

Given that, the middle-aged scholar felt he could set down, for a little while, the ten thousand years of bitterness and the ten thousand years of scheming, and simply wait quietly for the fruit he had planted ten thousand years ago and tended ever since to ripen and drop… This was the hour for enjoying it. This was the hour for admiring an enemy’s pain and an enemy’s helpless rage. This was the hour for taking back everything the disappointment of ten thousand years ago had cost him. The middle-aged scholar lifted his face to the sky, and a thread of cold amusement curled at the corner of his mouth. Those fools who had looked straight at him and seen nothing, who had refused to raise him to the highest seat in the Sky Tower — if your souls are still anywhere nearby, open the eyes that would not close in death and look at this. Because of your stubbornness and your mistake, you threw away the finest heir you would ever have. Because of you, the Sky Tower falls and is destroyed, and the supreme glory it once held will cease to exist and turn instead into a shame no age will ever wash out, a stink that lasts ten thousand years.

This is what you chose!

It is because of you — because you would not choose me — that the Sky Tower has come to this. Every part of the fault is yours!

The Sky Tower. If I cannot have it, then nobody will have it! If I cannot have it, I will destroy it with my own hands! I will turn this beautiful home that refused me into a true hell. I will turn it into an abyss of despair where every living thing is trampled into the mud. I will make a hundred million of its people bleed rivers for it. I will bury thousands upon thousands of the unfortunate inside it, and let them send up one last wail of pain!

The middle-aged scholar slowly closed his fist, exactly as though he were closing it on the Sky Tower’s fate and on the throat of every living soul in it.

“Crack!“

Yue Yang slammed a piece down on the stone table in sudden fury.

It made an extraordinarily loud noise. His expression had not quite gone to pieces with rage, but it was very far from the look of a man who has just thought of something.

Seeing the move, a kindly smile came over the middle-aged scholar’s face, and he offered his advice. “Little friend, you must not play a game on impulse. You should understand that one move can sometimes decide which way an entire position goes. Patience and observation matter enormously. Are you certain you want to play that? Are you truly certain? Here, let us do this instead — since you are a junior from my own home ground, I will let you take that one back. Think it through properly first. There is no hurry about playing it.”

“No need. Being a junior of yours is a disgrace, and I’d rather it was never brought up again.” Yue Yang glared at the middle-aged scholar with eyes like swords — and if a look had really been a sword, the middle-aged scholar would have had a few hundred transparent holes in him by now. “When this young master plays, he plays however he likes. If you don’t care for it, you’re welcome to kill yourself.”

“The man who wins the game does not kill himself. As a rule that is done by the man who loses it.” The middle-aged scholar laughed as soon as he heard it.

“I haven’t lost!” Yue Yang snorted, hard.

“Not yet. Though I imagine it will not be long.” The middle-aged scholar did not believe the boy had any possibility or any opening to pull it back. He looked at the board, then suddenly reached out and tapped the white piece on the stone table, smiling at Yue Yang. “This piece of mine is Peerless Emperor Wushuang — a great piece that can eat every other piece on the board. Can that piece you just played hold him?”

“Mine is a great piece too!” Yue Yang signaled him to keep his hands off it.

“And how great is this great piece of yours, exactly?” However the middle-aged scholar looked at it, he could not see how a move so full of hard masculine force and so short on anything yielding was going to hold his Peerless Emperor Wushuang.

To hold Peerless Emperor Wushuang, it would have to be Empress Vivienne the Conquest Queen.

Unfortunately, this was not her.

And even if she were the one holding this move, what about the Divine Hall Supreme Tianyu behind it, and the Demon Emperor, and the Golden Emperor, and the Immovable Supreme? Who was going to hold them?

Yue Yang pushed the black piece back into its original position, the one the middle-aged scholar had been preparing to sweep off the board, and gave him a serious warning. “Keep your hands off this young master’s pieces! I played it this way and of course I have my reasons. Your piece is Peerless Emperor Wushuang. Is he so very great? My piece happens to be the Demon Dragon, who swept the whole Heavenly Realm in his day. Holding off your Peerless Emperor Wushuang is nothing to him at all!”

“The Demon Dragon?” The middle-aged scholar was startled. He could not understand how this Yue Titan would come to know a monster of that order. His brows drew together and he stared Yue Yang down, refuting it one word at a time. “You. Do. Not. Know. The. Demon. Dragon.”

“I don’t know the Demon Dragon? I’m the one who let him out. How would I not know him?” Yue Yang laughed coldly and hit back. “In all the world, who besides me could have broken his seal? Who besides this young master has ever had him clinging to a leg, crying and yelling to be made a relation? If he hadn’t been crying so pitifully, he could have dreamed on about being my big brother!”

“Even if the Demon Dragon is your big brother, he cannot possibly come to the Sky Tower, and he certainly cannot make an enemy of Peerless Emperor Wushuang!” The middle-aged scholar suddenly burst out laughing.

“Why not?” Now it was Yue Yang’s turn not to understand.

“Because it has not been long since he came out of his seal, and he has not recovered his peak condition.” The middle-aged scholar shook his head, still laughing. “He is certainly in hiding right now, healing himself somewhere extremely well concealed. Even if you wanted to find him, you could not.”

“You don’t think I can send him word? Through a grimoire message!” Yue Yang indicated that sending a message was a simple thing.

“Impossible.” The middle-aged scholar went on shaking his head. “Only a man holding the Sky Tower Key can make the Sky Tower’s grimoires carry a message to a chosen target inside a short space of time — issuing a Call to Arms, for instance, or sending a message straight to you. Outside of that method there is no other. Which is to say: the Demon Dragon is not a man of the Sky Tower, and he can never receive anything from you. A directed message will not flow to him either, because the person the entire Sky Tower is looking for is you, this third son of the Yue family, and not a Demon Dragon nobody there knows. And the last thing I have to tell you is that the Sky Tower Key was contributed by me — because once it has been used, the entire Sky Tower cannot possibly send out a second Call to Arms or a second directed message for a full year. The Sky Tower’s summoning grimoires will fall silent for a year while they rebuild the energy that connects them… Don’t look at me that way, third son of the Yue family. Perhaps you think I am not a clever man. In point of fact I am no more stupid than you are and no slower to react. I simply never had that uniquely blessed fate of yours, the one heaven itself dotes on.”

The middle-aged scholar picked up the black piece Yue Yang had slapped onto the board and tossed it aside without a second thought.

That was his judgment.

It was a wasted move.

But just at that moment a hand came reaching in from where heaven and earth meet, reached across ten thousand miles, caught that piece with the greatest of ease, and tossed it lightly back into the very place Yue Yang had played it.

And in the instant the middle-aged scholar’s face changed, a voice came — lazy and overbearing at once. “I’m honestly not a man who likes meddling in other people’s business. But when somebody comes to the door pushing people around and frightening the children of the house into tears, then as a big brother there’s no reason for me not to step out and say a word or two. I’ve been sealed a hundred thousand years, granted — but let’s not go acting like your old man doesn’t exist, shall we? Pushing people around has always been your old man’s job, never the other way about. And here we are a hundred thousand years later and somebody has come pushing his way up to your old man’s own door. If the Dragon God Supreme got wind of this, he’d probably break my legs over it!”

“The Demon Dragon!” The middle-aged scholar roared it. “So it really is you!”

“Terribly sorry to have spoiled your arithmetic. Clever as you are, it must never once have crossed your mind that your old man would hole up inside the Sky Tower to recover. This is small-time squabbling — children wanting to play house — and by rights a senior isn’t supposed to stick his hands in. But damn it all, you don’t get to act like your old man isn’t here. If you want to push your old man around, how about you wait until your old man is actually dead and then stand on his grave and brag?” That lazy, overbearing voice scolded the middle-aged scholar exactly the way a man scolds a child — and standing in front of it, sorry to say, a middle-aged scholar who had been alive some ten or fifteen thousand years barely qualified as a brat still playing in the mud. He wanted to be treated as an equal? Live another hundred thousand years and then let’s discuss it.

The middle-aged scholar’s face changed again, but he stayed perfectly composed.

One Demon Dragon, nowhere near recovered to his peak, did not count for much. Whether he could hold Peerless Emperor Wushuang was an open question — and even if he could, the Divine Hall Supreme Tianyu, the Demon Emperor, the Golden Emperor and the Immovable Supreme were hardly going to stand by with their hands behind their backs.

A chance to gang up and kill off a Heavenly Realm Demon Dragon while he was weakened was the kind of opportunity that does not come around in a thousand years or ten thousand. Anybody who heard of it would feel his heart move.

Perhaps this one battle would not only settle accounts with the third son of the Yue family. Perhaps it could take the Demon Dragon in the same net.

“Kid, I’m your big brother. There may have been a bit of leg-clinging about it at the start, but there was absolutely no crying. Did your old man cry? That was emotion!” The lazy, overbearing voice snorted. “Your old man has been very good to you. Remember to put in a few kind words for me in front of the Dragon God Supreme in future — ideally get him to marry one of his prettier daughters off to your old man. At the outside, once your old man has a daughter of his own, he’ll consider whether to marry her to your son. Tie the two families together twice over!”

“Oh, get out of here!” Yue Yang swore at him with his temper right up. “Look at the state of you — and you want to marry somebody’s dragon princess? You didn’t go lovesick from spending too long in jail, did you? Now clear off. I needed you here to bail me out, and instead you’re putting on airs. Would it actually kill you to brag a little less?”

“Well, damn. Wasted my concern on you, kid!” Given a faceful like that, the Demon Dragon had nothing to say.

“Who wants your concern? If you’re so capable, go and finish off Tianyu!” Outside of beautiful women, Yue Yang did not need concern from anybody.

“If your old man could finish off a creature like Tianyu right now, would he be standing here yapping? He’d have run off to grab territory at the Central Divine Hall long ago. Even that boy Wushuang would be a stretch. Don’t go expecting an old man fresh out of prison to be so magnificent he can take on ten at once. That one I honestly can’t brag about.” The Demon Dragon, plainly afraid Yue Yang was about to assign him more work, had let his presence vanish before the words were finished, and slipped neatly away.

“That was the first move. Now this young master plays the second. Who says I’ve lost?” Yue Yang looked back at the middle-aged scholar and slapped another black piece down on the stone table.

(End of Chapter 1253)