On the luxury airship bound for Windstill Swamp, Yue Yang emerged from his cabin.

He looked around the aft hall. Only the Freedom Queen was there.

The Sky-rank cultivators traveling with them were either off cultivating like Tianzhu, or gathered in the forward hall for a drinking party. Strains of music drifted back, laughter and applause coming in bursts, and Yue Yang was dizzied by the sound. Are we going to lift a curse or are we going to a wedding banquet?

“You look completely different,” the Freedom Queen said. She had been sitting in silent thought, and now, as Yue Yang came out, she suddenly turned and “looked” at him with a note of wonder.

“Different where?” Yue Yang laughed a little to himself. With those eyes, what exactly can you see?

“On the surface, of course you can’t see anything. Even sensing your mind is very faint — you must have been born with an extraordinary talent for disguising yourself. But your soul carries a light that you can’t disguise. It’s simply blazing. In the past I have encountered cultivators whose strength brought them close to a god’s, but even their souls, next to yours, are firefly to full moon… It seems you’ve found a real path to the divine realm.” The Freedom Queen’s remark surprised Yue Yang deeply. Someone capable of seeing through his talent for disguise and directly reading the truth of his soul — he could count on a couple of fingers, over the whole course of his growth, the number of times he had run into that.

“For that, I have to thank you for the guidance.” Yue Yang gave the Freedom Queen a small, entirely sincere bow.

“It was not my guidance. That was your own eruption — a lifetime of endless accumulation, exploding forth after ceaseless exploration. It was a necessity, not a consequence of my appearance or my words.” The Freedom Queen’s smile bloomed on her face.

“Regardless — it came from the trigger of the conversation with you.” Yue Yang saw that the Freedom Queen was unwilling to take credit for it, so he let it drop and changed the subject: “May I ask about you?”

“Me?” The Freedom Queen sounded a little startled by the topic.

“Have you never thought about yourself?” Yue Yang was genuinely curious.

“I have. I too often think — what am I to do next; is there any meaning in what I do. Like you, I too am searching for the meaning of life, trying my best to reach a higher realm. Just now, for instance, I was thinking about a question.” The Freedom Queen nodded, and — for the first time — began to speak of herself to Yue Yang, this “stranger.”

“What were you thinking about just now?” Yue Yang asked.

“I was thinking — how to act, in order to act in the best way. Whether to hold to my original convictions, or to be like you: from a higher vantage, watch the surrounding crowd calmly, see them bustling like ants, and refrain from adding so much as a finger of interference.” The Freedom Queen answered.

“Ha — refusing to add a single finger, isn’t that just cold detachment?” Yue Yang laughed.

“For a low-realm being with only the selfish and worldly in its heart, refusing to save someone dying in front of you is indeed heartlessness — it’s selfish, small, indifferent. But from a higher, further vantage, the question looks different, and that view isn’t one a selfish person can grasp. Suppose an ordinary person interferes in the life of a colony of ants — gives them food, gives them protection. But the ants are still ants. They haven’t been essentially changed. If the ants are suffering, feeding and protecting them merely prolongs the suffering; it doesn’t actually give them lasting joy or release… Life is a very small thing next to the whole of the world. The existence of every life is an expression of some will of the world. One life using its ability to influence another life may itself be an expression of the world’s will. It may equally be a wrong execution — one that can never step outside the world’s will, one that will never understand what’s really true. So no matter what you do, you may be wrong; and the more you do, the more wrong you may become. That is the question I have been working through. What I have discovered is: the greater a life’s power grows, the less it involves itself with lower forms of life. Why do the ancient great gods not release all humble beings from their misery? Why do the ancient great gods not gift the weak with power? If those gods wished it, they need only set down a single principle to do it. And yet none of them ever have…” The Freedom Queen’s words stunned Yue Yang, the time-crosser, all over again.

“If that is so, why would you keep giving unconditionally to others?” This was the question Yue Yang most wanted answered.

“Because I am not an ancient great god. I have not stood on that higher, further vantage to look at things. When I sense the pain of the people around me, my heart, unable to help itself, is moved. I do not have Immovable Will — a heart at this low realm is easily infected by others. When I see how unfortunate they are, how they long for help, I cannot help but reach out to them… Sometimes I know I am acting wrongly, but I have no way around it. Driven by what’s inside me, I still go and do the thing that is perhaps the wrong thing.” The Freedom Queen offered her explanation.

“Even knowing it is wrong, you still do it. You may not have the Immovable Will of a Perfect Innate Sovereign, but you have a kind of good that nobody else has — a mercy that reaches out to those in suffering even after seeing the truth. I don’t know quite how to say it, but — perhaps what you do is also an expression of the will of the world. This world needs every kind of being. It needs a cold existence like mine. It also needs a kind existence like yours.” Yue Yang chewed on that for a long time before he was ready to answer with certainty.

“Is that so? Hearing you console me, my heart feels a warmth I have never felt before.” The Freedom Queen smiled, and from within, from the base of her heart, a beautiful glow poured out across her face.

“Have you ever thought about death?” Yue Yang hesitated, and then decided to ask.

“That question, I have thought about. As long as the divine power in me does not run out, I will not die. But you know that as things stand, my life has a limit. I am not afraid of death. In truth, living is more painful than dying. Death, for me, may well be a rare kind of release.” The Freedom Queen turned the question back on him: “Have you thought about death?”

“No. I’m afraid of death. I try not to think about it. And so long as I can be alive, even a shabby half-life, I’ll insist on staying alive — ha ha!” Yue Yang laughed loudly.

“The moment you laugh like that, what you say stops being what you actually mean.” The Freedom Queen seemed to see straight through him.

“Cough — I’m a common man, aren’t I? Afraid of death is normal…” Yue Yang was, in fact, a little embarrassed. It was uncomfortable to be read like that. With anyone else, Yue Yang would probably have called down a First Quarter Moon and taken their head off. But the Freedom Queen was always so completely open when she spoke — it was impossible to raise a hand against her.

“Maybe in the very beginning of your life you were afraid of death, the way all lives are. But you today, with Immovable Will and undying divine power — you have not had to think about that in a long time. I cannot see the truth of you, but I can faintly sense — you are a being transcending the will of the world itself. In the future, you may well create your own world… What would a being like you have to fear from death? You were only offering me your mercy. My appearance touched the shut-tight heart in you, isn’t that so? Even if you deny it out loud, my heart will still be very glad. Because after all — someone does care about me!” With her jade arms she lifted her suspended body and offered him a small courtesy.

“You have to keep going like this?” Yue Yang decided to ask his final question.

“I don’t know. But someone like me — if I did not do this, what else could I do? You have a clear goal. But me — I’ll say it and you can laugh — I have no life goal of my own. If I don’t do something, I feel lost.” For the first time, the Freedom Queen showed a look like a little girl’s — sweetly, innocently baffled. She did not, in that moment, look like a queen at all. She looked like a slightly muddled girl, natural and vacant.

“I understand. See you later.” Yue Yang smiled. That naturally vacant expression was almost impossibly endearing. He barely managed to suppress the impulse to reach out and gently pinch her cheek. He waved, and strode toward the forward hall.

“A very strange person indeed… his temperament is awkward. But — a person one can trust.”

The Freedom Queen touched the left side of her face lightly with her hand.

Her expression was as though Yue Yang really had reached out and pinched her cheek after all.

Yue Yang made it to the forward hall, poked his head in, and noticed Ming Rihao was nowhere in the party. He extended his senses briefly, discovered the fool was holed up in a cabin asleep, and felt his temper spike. He kicked the door in.

Ming Rihao opened his eyes and looked at Yue Yang half-amused and half-exasperated, at a loss for when exactly he had offended the kid.

Especially with Yue Yang glaring at him — he was already feeling more than a bit guilty: “Whatever it is that happened, believe me, it had nothing to do with me. I’ve just been sleeping!”

Yue Yang gave a cold sniff. “That Lady Zhiguang is a runaway slave of your house — that we don’t even need to discuss. The way you tucked yourself away from her? A blind man could see it. What I want to know right now is: what is she to you? Don’t try to tell me an ordinary runaway slave carries a quasi-divine Prayer Pearl on her forehead. Don’t insult me with the story you’d feed a child. If this were a normal master-servant relationship, would you drop everything and chase her across ten thousand miles for the recapture? And even after you spotted her, you didn’t grab her — you skulked around, playing hide-and-seek with your own eyes shut. What are you playing at?”

Ming Rihao broke out in a cold sweat: “Can’t I just be here for the Divine Codex? And catching a runaway slave on the side?”

Yue Yang shot him a pair of contemptuous middle fingers: “Do you actually think an intelligent adult believes that explanation? At the very least my intelligence is more than double yours, all right?”

Ming Rihao was offended.

Fine, you’re a little bit smarter than me. But double? Come on.

Sure, you’re clever, but neither of us is an idiot. Do you have to gloat about every single win?

He was gearing up to snap back when Yue Yang tossed out a line: “If you won’t answer the question directly, then this young lord will take his crew and go straight back to the Sky Tower. I’ve suddenly remembered there’s another very important matter I haven’t handled. You can clean up this dumpster yourself.”

What can Ming Rihao do? Faced with this brand of shameless behavior, he had no choice but to fold: “Fine, fine, damn it. I’ll talk. So — Lady Zhiguang was one of the important attendants around my little sister. Back during the great war with the Prison Emperor, she was the one sent back to call in reinforcements. And the reinforcements never came. Then some strong bastard we still can’t identify came out of nowhere and sucker-punched the Prison Emperor with a critical hit. In the next round the Prison Emperor sealed us all inside his Divine Hall with three divine artifacts. So — with the very real possibility Lady Zhiguang has been colluding with the Central Divine Hall — you tell me, can I not chase this runaway of ours down?”

Yue Yang clapped: “Beautiful. Beautiful. What a beautiful pile of horseshit! Let me have a guess. My theory is that this Lady Zhiguang was once one of your little bits on the side — otherwise, why would you send a servant you don’t fully trust to call in reinforcements? Setting aside blood ties between parents and children, there’s no bond tighter than adulterer and mistress. You needn’t argue with me. I’m not blind and I’m not stupid. So Zhiguang’s your ex, that’s your business. But the quasi-divine Prayer Pearl on her forehead — that I want. Ah, let’s call it part of Ming Yueguang’s dowry when she marries me!”

“Why don’t you just go and rob someone?” Ming Rihao almost coughed up blood. In all his life he had never seen a person like this. How is this kid this shameless? Why hasn’t heaven struck him down yet?

(End of Chapter 952)