The Windstill Swamp.

It was a peculiar place. In every other respect it appeared unremarkable — wide stretches of forest, rivers threading through it, lakes scattered here and there. But one thing set it apart from any other territory in the world: there was no wind. Not a breath. Not at any hour, in any season, under any weather.

And that absence made everything wrong.

The swamp teemed with creatures that existed nowhere outside its borders — mutated things, warped by whatever law governed this place, that attacked anything foreign the moment it crossed in. Without a group of Sky-rank cultivators to force a path, the swamp would simply be a place people went to die.

The luxury airship could only take them to the outer edge.

Without wind, even its propulsion systems slowed to something that would have embarrassed a crawling turtle. The law of windlessness that blanketed the entire region exerted a control over physical matter that was difficult even to describe — anything that entered felt it.

“The air is fine,” Yue Yang observed, looking around with genuine curiosity. “Breathing is normal.” He paused. “Well. Exhaling is like breathing underwater. Harder, actually. But inhaling is almost unnaturally easy — like the air rushes in on its own.”

“Watch,” Ming Rihao said, and tipped a cup of water over.

The water fell in a thin cascade, each droplet tracing its path through the sunlight with slow, dream-like clarity, the splash spreading outward in gradual arcs that lingered long enough to paint a soft rainbow in the air.

On the surface it was almost beautiful.

But Yue Yang and Tianzhu and the others saw through the beauty immediately: the water was falling at a fraction of the speed it should. Like a film being shown at one-tenth its proper pace, every detail visible, every droplet’s motion completely legible.

Tianzhu, the Dragon Emperor, and the Underworld Emperor exchanged a look. Tianzhu extended a finger toward the sky and snapped a current of lightning from his fingertip.

It moved like an electric eel — gliding through the air in long, graceful pulses, each arc and spark evolving slowly, beautifully, and refusing to dissipate.

Yue Yang’s expression grew serious.

The absence of wind hit harder than he’d expected. That lightning strike, at its proper speed, should have been somewhere between five hundred and a thousand times faster. At this pace, a strike like that couldn’t hit anything that didn’t want to be hit. And while water and lightning weren’t directly prohibited by the swamp’s law, the absence of wind touched every element in some way — some more, some less.

The Underworld Emperor threw a rapid series of punches at an imaginary opponent. Even his physical strike speed had dropped by roughly ten percent. Power reduction to match.

The Dragon Emperor tried something different — condensed a sphere of light and hurled it upward. The shockwave and pressure pulse it normally produced simply didn’t form, dissolving before it could build. But the light itself scattered outward faster than expected, rocketing away beyond the reach of perception before anyone could track it.

“I see you’ve already figured it out,” Ming Rihao said, with a slight frown. “Everything except light and darkness takes a hit here. Power falls off significantly. Light and darkness aren’t weakened, but they lose controllability — they exceed the user’s range and become something you can’t reliably direct. If you’re primarily an elemental cultivator, entering the Windstill Swamp is a disaster scenario.”

He was speaking about himself, of course. His true specialty was fire and light. Fire was severely weakened here. Light was uncontrollable. His effective combat power had taken a very unwelcome reduction.

Tianzhu’s jaw tightened. He was not unaffected either.

The Underworld Emperor looked like he was contemplating finding a corner to sit in and quietly despair. His entire power set ran on dark-elemental energy. If that was now uncontrollable, his contribution to any real fight was going to be minimal at best.

Compared to the Underworld Emperor, the Dragon Emperor was better positioned — he did use elemental force, but as an Eastern Demon Clan cultivator, his physical body itself was a significant weapon, and that much the swamp couldn’t touch.

And then there was Yue Yang.

Yue Yang, who was smiling with the unconcerned ease of someone on a nature walk.

The swamp’s restrictions could affect whatever they liked. A cultivator with access to minor laws and a Creation Domain had no reason to worry about self-preservation. Whatever the environment threw at him, he would be fine.

Ming Rihao looked at that smile and felt a profound urge to hit someone. He couldn’t act on it — not against Yue Yang, not practically — so the frustration had nowhere to go. He was beginning to understand why people invented the phrase “death by noodles.”

With Sky-rank cultivators clearing the path ahead and behind, Yue Yang drifted along in the middle of the formation at a pace that could only be described as leisurely.

Everyone else was significantly less comfortable.

Even with Sky-rank protection on all sides, the servants and guards in the party nearly lost people to creatures that erupted without warning from beneath the swamp floor. If not for Blue Wolf, Wanjiao, and Luoluo — the three uninvited national rulers — positioned at the front and rear, reaching the central island without casualties would have been pure fantasy.

No wind. And on top of that, spatial fractures appeared with unnerving regularity — hairline tears in local space that opened onto destructive void-currents. Even national-ruler-tier cultivators had to watch their step.

There was no teleportation. No practical conveyances. Flight was the only option, and after a full day of it they were still less than halfway to the central island.

Fortunately, they’d brought a proper retinue — servants found a patch of ground dry enough for camp, and while Sky-ranks and national rulers settled in, the staff got to work preparing food and drink. The sole difference from the civilized comfort of Greenvalley City was this: one servant who wandered a short distance to a nearby stream to fetch water for washing vegetables was swallowed whole by something that came up from the streambed — in full view of two Sky-rank escorts who were unable to react in time.

The Windstill national ruler, furious, killed the creature immediately — something serpentine and insectoid at the same time, neither one thing nor the other. But it was already far too late. When they cut it open, the stomach acid had reduced the servant to a collection of bones.

Gold-Tooth’s lips were shaking. Steward Ye’s face had gone the color of chalk. Both of them quietly drifted closer to Yue Yang’s position without quite acknowledging that they were doing it. They knew what they knew: wherever the Titan Young Lord was standing was the safest location in the entire Windstill Swamp.

“Is there any evening entertainment?” Yue Yang yawned. “This is dull. I’m going back to the Grimoire World to sleep.”

The assembled group fell silent and looked at him.

You do understand this isn’t a picnic, right?

Right now they’d only encountered a single creature. If the Central Divine Hall’s operatives or the three domain emperors learned of their route and sent people to intercept them under cover of darkness — that would be a different kind of evening entirely.

Blue Wolf’s expression changed the moment the thought crossed his mind. He turned sharply to the Windstill national ruler, who caught his meaning immediately and felt his stomach drop. A nighttime ambush on a party caught unaware in this terrain could be catastrophic.

He went to find Tianzhu.

Tianzhu’s answer to any tactical question was the same: fight. The conversation did not produce useful strategy.

It was the Dragon Emperor who surprised everyone. He laid out a plan — using the swamp’s own peculiarities, exploiting the terrain to set an ambush rather than simply defend. Turning what had been a liability into a trap.

The Windstill national ruler stared at him.

He hadn’t registered this quiet, unremarkable man who’d been standing behind the Titan Young Lord alongside Tianzhu. But the plan being laid before him now was the work of someone who had assessed every person present — their abilities, their limitations, their willingness to extend themselves — with extraordinary precision, and then built something around that assessment with no visible flaw.

“Mr. Long Xuan,” the national ruler said carefully, “you’re actually a battlefield commander, aren’t you?”

The Dragon Emperor laughed and shook his head. “I’m just an ordinary escort in the Titan Young Lord’s service.”

The national ruler smiled, feeling slightly foolish.

Ordinary escort.

His private assessment: if this man entered the three-way war between the domain emperors — on any side — the balance would shift immediately. Whoever gained him would win Tianhua Domain. And yet here he was. An ordinary escort.

Were all the escorts from the upper celestial realm like this?

He gave up trying to make sense of it. He instructed Steward Ye and Gold-Tooth to see to the guests’ comfort, then went to find Blue Wolf, Wanjiao, and Luoluo to present the plan.

Blue Wolf was amenable. Wanjiao and Luoluo were not — something about the plan had bruised their pride, or perhaps being outthought by someone else’s retainer had curdled into resentment. Whatever the cause, they’d been arguing in undertones with the Windstill national ruler for a while now, Blue Wolf doing his best to mediate, none of it working.

“They’re here.”

Tianzhu, who had been sitting in motionless meditation, opened his eyes. The killing intent in them was immediate and complete.

Ming Rihao, playing Sky-rank tier three, had sensed the approach even earlier — but he stayed where he was, stretched out on the ground, affecting ignorance. When he saw Tianzhu and the Dragon Emperor rise, he smiled faintly and kept lying down. No reason to reveal what he actually was. Tianzhu, the Dragon Emperor, and the Underworld Emperor knew perfectly well who he was — Yue Yang had briefed them — and they had no intention of giving him away.

The Wild Bull Brothers slept like the dead.

Dragging them to the middle of the swamp and dropping them there probably wouldn’t have woken them.

They registered nothing. Zhongguan and the escort unit, by contrast, came alert the moment Tianzhu and the Dragon Emperor moved — on their feet in an instant, forming a circular defensive perimeter, closing ranks around the group.

The Windstill national ruler didn’t understand at first. Then he felt it, and the color left his face. “Fast,” he said. “Fast and strong—”

He didn’t finish the sentence.

Because what he had sensed as a star on the horizon — something impossibly distant, a gleam at the edge of the sky — was no longer distant.

Less than two seconds had passed from its appearance to its arrival.

A figure erupted from that speed into being directly in front of him: silver light blazing from every surface, a fist like a falling constellation already in motion, and the Windstill national ruler — a Sky-rank cultivator, someone who could crush almost anything in this world — stared at it coming and could not move.

Even Tianzhu had gone still for an instant. That speed had surprised him.

Ming Rihao, flat on the ground, pretending to sleep, snapped his eyes open.

The fist connected.

BOOM.

A Sky-rank cultivator of the Windstill national ruler’s caliber, struck full in the face before he could mount a single defense.