Tianzhu and the Dragon Emperor exchanged one silent look.

Steward Ye, snapping out of his initial paralysis, stepped forward, shaking on his feet: “Master, if you have any last words to leave — please, entrust them to Master Tianzhu. We are men of low station. We could not bear such a burden.”

Steward Ye was frantic, but he had not yet lost his head.

At this critical moment, his first pick was Tianzhu.

The Titan Young Lord was not present. Blue Wolf, Wanjiao, and Luoluo were all watching hungrily; letting any of the three of them intercede meant that not only Greenvalley City but the entire Windstill nation would be carved apart between them like a butchered pig. Far better to entrust affairs to Tianzhu. Once the Titan Young Lord returned, Tianzhu could arrange things properly, and whatever final wishes the Windstill national ruler had left could still be seen through.

“That’s loyalty for you…” The Windstill national ruler managed a pained smile — and then, all at once, stood up.

Light flared around him, and the dying man visibly restored himself. The wound in his back was still bleeding freely, the poisoned dagger still lodged there, but if not for those two details, one would have doubted one’s own eyes.

Steward Ye and the various city lords and Sky-rank warriors let out a great collective cheer.

Whatever else was true, none of them wanted the Windstill national ruler to die.

If Windstill fell, they’d all be changing masters.

And changing masters meant their present fortunes were not guaranteed. Handing things to the Titan Young Lord and Tianzhu was one thing — those two probably had no interest in a country backwater like Greenvalley City, and the odds were high that people would be left in their current posts. But if Blue Wolf, Wanjiao, or Luoluo took Greenvalley, every one of Windstill’s trusted men here would be killed, and every backwater city lord replaced. No one wanted that. So the sight of Windstill back on his feet, apparently restored, was cause for genuine celebration.

Blue Wolf, Wanjiao, and Luoluo were mildly disappointed.

But their eyes were sharp.

They caught details that no ordinary Sky-rank cultivator could catch, and a cold thin smile ghosted across their lips.

This Windstill — restored, yes, but not truly restored. The heart had been pierced. And the poison was the specific kind that Windstill, without an elemental body, had no immunity to. The assassination had, in fact, succeeded.

The Windstill national ruler standing there now was, in truth, running on willpower alone.

But with Tianzhu present, Blue Wolf and the other two did not move. They pretended not to have noticed the weakness at all.

“Master Tianzhu — I have a mountain of apologies I cannot even express. Today’s events are Windstill’s failure alone. To have involved the Titan Young Lord and my other honored guests — I am ashamed to the marrow. What Windstill wants most right now is confirmation of the Titan Young Lord’s safety. All other matters can wait. Might I ask how we can begin tracking his location?” Once Windstill had said this, the hall went quiet again. Windstill was still alive — that anxiety was gone — but the far more exalted Titan Young Lord had been targeted for assassination just now. If anything happened to him, Greenvalley City would be facing an end-of-the-world catastrophe.

“With Gray Wolf guarding him, he should be all right.” The Dragon Emperor stayed in the hall for now. Tianzhu shot off at top speed.

Ten minutes later, Tianzhu returned — bringing with him that dopey-looking dog whose actual divine-beast status had left the entire hall picking their eyeballs up off the floor.

Gray Wolf summoned out its grimoire. The gold flash of the summoning was blinding.

Seeing that this scruffy divine-beast mutt’s summoning grimoire was rated all the way up to platinum — the entire hall, Windstill included, felt privately mortified. In a room of many Sky-rank cultivators, only Windstill and the other three national rulers had summoning grimoires at all. Of those, the highest tier was Windstill’s — silver-tier. Not even gold-tier, much less platinum.

The Tianhua Domain had ground down its talent pool over centuries of war. Sky-rank cultivators capable of contracting a grimoire were rare enough. Then various national rulers, for their own reasons, made a practice of killing off any junior who had contracted a grimoire before they could grow into that power — making grimoire-holders rarer still, until owning one had become the exclusive privilege of national-ruler-tier cultivators.

“A divine beast has descended among us — we’ve been terribly discourteous. Please forgive us.” Steward Ye led Gold-Tooth and the other retainers in a solemn, reverent bow to Gray Wolf.

“Mrew!” Gray Wolf, pleased with itself, threw the YES hand-gesture it had picked up from Yue Yang, and released its master from inside the grimoire world.

Every eye in the hall was tense — please, please let the young lord not be in a rage.

The odds were that a young lord of his station had never in his life been shaken up like this.

Without the divine beast’s protection just now, that young lord from the Upper Heavenly Realm would very likely have been killed — or, at minimum, catastrophically wounded…

Yue Yang emerged and immediately let loose a great laugh: “Now that was seriously exciting. Assassins at a birthday banquet, who’d have thought — actually pretty fun! Speaking of which, did we catch any of them? I want to interrogate them personally. Get me a whip and a red-hot iron — I’ve always wanted to see what a real interrogation looks like!”

The crowd relaxed at once, and privately most of them found themselves fighting a laugh.

As long as the young lord is fine, we’re fine!

Though obviously assassins at a birthday banquet were not, in fact, a fun thing — this kind of incident was the sort you hoped happened once and never again. Otherwise the fallout would be more than any of them could clean up.

The Windstill national ruler exhaled quietly, too. His own attack and injuries were minor by comparison — if anything had happened to the young lord, that would have been the disaster. He stepped forward, offered a small courtesy, apologized, and sighed. “The enemy came here with a plan. Windstill had no power to prevent it. Thank the ancient gods that Brother Titan is unharmed — otherwise a hundred deaths would not have redeemed my failure. The assassins have fled without a trace, and my beloved has been taken with them…”

He walked through the entire chain of events, start to finish.

Naturally, on the subject of who was really behind this — his suspicion that it was the Central Divine Hall, that they had come specifically to kill the Titan Young Lord and frame the Revenge Domain Emperor — he passed over that in silence.

This part had to be said. But not with Blue Wolf and the others in earshot.

Later, he’d find a moment to tell the young lord privately.

We haven’t lost yet.

With the Titan Young Lord on his side, and Tianzhu, Long Xuan, and Ming Feng backing him — he still had a fighting chance.

“So they took the divine blood, they took it. It’s nothing — I’ll send you another drop, don’t be upset. What matters is Lady Zhiguang. She’s suffered this because of us. Titan is genuinely uneasy about it. If there’s any lead at all — if we can find her at this so-called ‘central island’ — she absolutely must be brought back safely. These assassin trash have gotten far too full of themselves, thinking they can lay a plan against this young lord — I’ve decided: this fight goes all the way. Otherwise they’ll go on thinking their Titan Young Lord is somebody easily bullied! Zhongguan — assemble the whole guard. This young lord is going to smash their little central island flat!” Yue Yang, playing the aggrieved young noble to the hilt, waved his hand grandly and announced that the battlefront was moving to the central island of Windstill Swamp. This wasn’t over!

Even a man as stone-hearted as Windstill was moved. This Titan Young Lord is a man of real honor. To have a friend like this — nothing to be said, truly nothing.

Blue Wolf and the others were burning with envy.

What kind of dog-shit luck does this Windstill have? Divine blood, gone — and instead of holding Windstill responsible, this young lord was offering another drop.

If Windstill hadn’t been injured — unable at the moment to safely absorb divine blood — the young lord might have handed him a drop then and there to console him. Windstill’s luck was frankly off the charts. Why hadn’t Fish Tide’s dagger just gone ahead and finished the man?

Blue Wolf traded a look with Wanjiao and Luoluo, and each of them nodded in quiet agreement.

They had already worked out Windstill’s weakness.

It was, without question, the heart.

Fish Tide, as the man closest to Windstill, would have known Windstill’s greatest weak point and had every reason to strike there.

For an ordinary Sky-rank, the heart was not a weakness. For a national-ruler-tier warrior, even a shattered heart was not fatal — Blue Wolf, for instance, could keep fighting with his heart pulverized. But Windstill — despite being of the same tier — was down the moment a dagger reached his heart. Without Tianzhu present, one more solid hit and Windstill would be a corpse.

If they were going to truly kill Windstill, it had to be another strike to the heart.

The Windstill standing before them right now was propping himself up on sheer willpower, refusing to let the wound break loose.

Windstill, meanwhile, gave Blue Wolf and company one cold look, and in full view of the hall leaned close to Yue Yang’s ear and murmured a long stretch of confidential speech. Nobody but Yue Yang could hear a syllable of it. All the onlookers saw was Yue Yang nodding steadily while Windstill’s gaze grew colder and darker. Blue Wolf and the other Sky-rank present felt a small internal chill.

Is Windstill trying to shift the blame onto us? Or has he found a real lead we don’t know about?

None of them knew.

But the Titan Young Lord under all this whispered discussion reacted very quickly. He clenched his fist, the smile dropped clean off his face, and a chilling murderous intent seeped through his eyes — the kind that raises the hair on the back of the neck: “Hmph — interesting. Very well, then, we’ll have to prepare properly for this. It’s been a while since I took anything this seriously. There are plenty of people who want to move against this Titan — but how many of them get to laugh at the end of the story?”

The hall discovered with some surprise that when this pampered young lord got serious, he carried a very real weight of don’t cross me.

His personal strength was not high. Quasi-Sky-rank at a guess — his actual Sky-rank showing had to be treasure-stacked.

But it wasn’t just ordinary Sky-rank cultivators — even Blue Wolf, at national-ruler tier, felt his heart skip a couple of beats under the Titan Young Lord’s killing intent…

In the Upper Heavenly Realm, there is no such thing as a weakling.

That old saying — turned out to be perfectly true.

While Steward Ye and the others prepared a luxury airship for the trip out to Windstill Swamp’s central island —

Ming Rihao, that lazy freeloader who’d been off eating and drinking earlier, chose this moment to emerge. He waited until no one was looking, then landed a sneaky little punch on Yue Yang’s shoulder. “All right, kid — your setup actually worked. What impressed me the most is how obligingly the assassins played along. What logic exactly did you use to piece this whole thing together?”

“My brain.” Yue Yang, for his part, gave Ming Rihao a heavily contemptuous look for the sin of getting paid for a job and not doing any of the actual work.

“If the faction we’re expecting does show up, are your people going to be enough?” Ming Rihao had long since resigned himself to Yue Yang’s contempt and no longer took it personally.

“Your people, what? Our people. Any more skiving off and this young lord is walking out — I’ll hand the entire Divine Codex over to you, and you can crawl through the whole business of taking out the Central Divine Hall bastards yourself, without me around to help.” Yue Yang warned Ming Rihao off any further slacking, on pain of dissolving the whole partnership. Ming Rihao was more afraid of that than anything, and hurried to hold his hands up: “All right, all right — Third Young Master, easy, easy, don’t lose your temper. Before, that wasn’t skiving — I was following your plan. If I’d broken cover with Zhiguang still there, she’d have picked me out inside two seconds and blown the whole thing. As of now — whatever you say. Tell me to go east and I won’t go west; tell me to shut up and not a peep out of me.”

“The Divine Codex is really here?” Dragon Emperor still had his doubts.

“I really hope it isn’t.” Yue Yang preferred the version of events where he didn’t have to duel a psychopath on Ji Wuri’s tier.

“The Divine Codex isn’t interesting to me. But the Hall Master of the Central Divine Hall — that one I want to try.” That was war-addict Tianzhu talking. He knew perfectly well he couldn’t personally contract the Divine Codex — even Yue Yang, monster that he was, was struggling with that puzzle, so Tianzhu didn’t even consider it. What he did want was a chance to challenge the Central Divine Hall’s top brass.

“There’ll be a chance. And if you can bear a little blunt truth from me — probably the lot of you together couldn’t take just one of them.” Ming Rihao knew exactly how strong the Central Divine Hall’s hall masters were.

“You can scare them all you want. It won’t stick. They just knocked over two vice hall masters — they’re feeling pretty good about themselves. They won’t believe you until they hit a wall.” Yue Yang smirked with private delight at what was coming.

“You took out two vice hall masters?” Ming Rihao’s eyeballs were about to fall out of his head.

When exactly had vice hall masters of the Central Divine Hall become common cabbage?

No wonder Tianzhu was already talking about challenging a hall master.

Fengji and Keen-Eye Jinyun — the two newest additions — were quietly weeping. These are the people we’ve hitched ourselves to? Picking a fight with the Central Divine Hall. Their future was looking bleak.

Just as Yue Yang, Tianzhu, Ming Rihao and the others were discussing the next stage of the plan, a heart-cleansing song of the heavens came drifting toward them from a place too far to see — like a spring welling up in the soul. In an instant every heart in the hall was washed clear of every trace of grime.

The two Wild Bulls, mid-feast, both leapt to their feet: “The Freedom Queen!“

(End of Chapter 949)