The Steel Gate.
Old Iron Anchor had now grasped a hard truth: this young man who looked like nothing more than a pretty-faced boy was, in fact, no pretty boy at all — he was an extraordinarily dangerous, supreme-tier powerhouse. He, who’d always judged by appearances, was like the old hunter who’d spent a lifetime shooting geese only to have his eye pecked out by one at the very end.
One misjudgment, just this single misstep, and the entire situation had already collapsed into an irreversible, unbearable defeat.
He looked at the smiling Yue Yang, and his heart ached fiercely.
If giving his own life could undo this, Old Iron Anchor wouldn’t have hesitated for an instant.
But there was no turning back now… No wonder Fuping had fallen for him. So he really was a man worth giving up everything to follow. Fuping hadn’t misjudged him at all — her eye for people had always been sharp, her intelligence always exceptional.
“What’s your name?” Old Iron Anchor forced himself to stay calm, doing his best to ignore the hundreds of elite guard corpses scattered before the Steel Gate.
“My name? Don’t you already know it?” Yue Yang seemed just as composed, nothing at all like someone who’d just cut down hundreds of guards moments ago.
“Then who are you?” Old Iron Anchor asked after his identity.
“If you’re asking about my identity, then I can tell you loudly and proudly — I am the Sky Tower’s new generation Prison Emperor.” Yue Yang smiled, the kind of smile a little fox might wear.
“Im—poss—ible.” Old Iron Anchor rejected it syllable by syllable. He felt this young man in front of him could be anyone — a hidden clan member from the Heavenly Realm, the most outstanding genius hunter among the Sky Tower’s scattered remnants, or someone else entirely. But there was one thing he could not possibly be: the Sky Tower’s new generation Prison Emperor. When the previous Prison Emperor had died in battle, the Sky Tower had already sunk into ruin, and its passage to the Heavenly Realm had gone from half-sealed to completely sealed. For several thousand years, no one had been able to pass freely between the two. So no matter how exceptional, how powerful this young man standing before him might be, he simply could not be the Sky Tower’s new Prison Emperor.
“Old Iron Anchor does manual labor at the eastern dock of White River City by day and turns into the Marshal of the Heavenly Realm’s exiled clan by night — so why couldn’t I be the Sky Tower’s new generation Prison Emperor?” Yue Yang shot back, sounding faintly amused.
“What proof do you have?” Old Iron Anchor sneered.
By now, he was ninety percent certain this young man was the strongest hunter the Heavenly Realm’s scattered remnants had poured everything into cultivating.
It wasn’t impossible — the Heavenly Realm’s remnant clans might well be grooming this young man as a new-generation Prison Emperor, hoping to use him to restore their clan and the Sky Tower’s former glory. But these remnant clansmen, and this young man standing before him, could never truly imagine just how powerful the real Prison Emperor had been, just how commanding his presence had been.
A Prison Emperor approaching divinity possessed no fewer than three divine artifacts.
By himself.
He alone could shake the entire Western Heavenly Realm to its foundations.
Even when besieged by the Central Divine Hall’s Master and the three great titans of the Western Heavenly Realm taking turns against him, he had stood unbroken.
Only that man — the one who had once shaken the entire Heavenly Realm to its core — deserved to be called Prison Emperor. So what right did this young upstart have to inherit his title, to call himself Prison Emperor too?
Old Iron Anchor had never fought the Prison Emperor himself, but he had witnessed his battles from afar.
Even now, the fear that battle had instilled in him had never fully faded.
A man like that — that was what true strength looked like. Only he had the right to be called the Sky Tower’s number one powerhouse, the Prison Emperor!
Yue Yang kept his eyes on Old Iron Anchor.
Smiling.
Slowly, he drew the Prison Emperor’s Divine Seal — fully bonded and recognized as his own — out from his storage ring and let it rest in his open palm.
The moment that divine artifact appeared, never mind the sheer brilliance of its light — the pressure it radiated alone far surpassed every other divine artifact in the world. Even someone as formidable as Old Iron Anchor, Marshal of the Heavenly Realm’s exiled remnants, felt an involuntary, fearful urge to drop to his knees before it. The ancient curse sealed deep within the very core of his soul shuddered violently the instant that peerless, world-shaking Prison Emperor’s Seal appeared, as if straining to answer its call — even with Old Iron Anchor suppressing it with every ounce of his strength, he could feel it threatening to wake regardless.
Yue Yang was merely holding the seal in his palm. He hadn’t even launched an attack.
And already its power was this overwhelming.
A storm of shock crashed through Old Iron Anchor’s mind, and the cry that tore from his throat carried an uncontrollable tremor: “The Prison Emperor’s Divine Seal!”
“Honestly, I never really wanted to be some new-generation Prison Emperor. I’d much rather just be myself.” Yue Yang kept that smile on his face, talking as casually as if catching up with an old friend he hadn’t seen in ages. “But people in the Heavenly Realm are stubborn as hell — all they remember is the Prison Emperor, or the Conquest Queen, leaving us younger folks zero room to make a name for ourselves. Seems like unless I cause some heaven-shaking ruckus the way the Prison Emperor and the Conquest Queen did, nobody’s ever going to know the name Yue Yang, young master of House Titan.”
“Don’t tell me you’ve already broken open the passage between the Sky Tower and the Heavenly Realm?” Old Iron Anchor couldn’t even fathom how powerful this young man must be, to carve open a path through the shattered void itself, Divine Seal in hand, and arrive in the Heavenly Realm.
“Nope. But I don’t need to break any seal. Could it be that I’m the Conquest Queen’s successor across generations, holding her treasured Three Realms Compass, free to travel between the Sky Tower and the Heavenly Realm at will — and I just happened to pop back to the Sky Tower for a bath in the Falling Star Sea earlier? Would I really just tell you something like that so casually?” Yue Yang’s words sent Old Iron Anchor spiraling into utter despair.
Heir to the Prison Emperor’s Divine Seal, and a disciple of the Conquest Queen besides.
Already incalculably powerful in his own right, and on top of that, wielding the Conquest Queen’s own Three Realms Compass, free to move between the three realms at will.
How could anyone possibly stand against an enemy like this?
Old Iron Anchor’s heart filled with bitter regret.
If only he’d had enough time to fully revive the ancestor. Even a newly revived ancestor, still weak from the seal, wouldn’t be able to match this young man called Yue Yang, House Titan’s young master — but there would still have been a chance. They could have gone into hiding, recovered slowly, and only resurfaced once at peak strength, ready to restore the cursed clan’s glory. Now, with this new-generation Prison Emperor’s sudden appearance, the entire plan to revive the ancestor had been swept away to nothing.
If only he’d had a few more days.
Old Iron Anchor’s heart filled with such despair he wanted to die on the spot.
“Kill me.” Old Iron Anchor abandoned all resistance. Whether or not this young man before him was truly the Sky Tower’s new Prison Emperor, as long as he held the Prison Emperor’s Divine Seal, there was no way to match him.
The instant that seal so much as stirred, even if he wasn’t struck down on the spot, it would awaken the ancient curse and cause his body to detonate.
A divine artifact — especially the mightiest of them all, the Prison Emperor’s Divine Seal.
Was simply not something mortal strength could resist.
Even the three great titans who had once fought the Prison Emperor had been forced to concede before such an artifact…
“What if I told you I could grant you a few more days to revive that ancestor of yours?” Yue Yang said, smiling now like a little fox that had just stolen a chick to eat.
“Wh—what?” Even Old Iron Anchor, whose will was forged like steel, couldn’t help crying out in shock at that.
“If I’d truly intended to interfere with your ancestor-revival plans, I could have stopped you days ago, when you tried searching for me in your replica steel fortress.” At those words, realization dawned on Old Iron Anchor — so his instincts that day hadn’t been wrong after all. There really had been an enemy slipped inside, just one whose strength was so overwhelming that even his own suspicions had turned up nothing in the search.
“If you’ll just give us ten more days — no, eight days — we can revive the ancestor…” Old Iron Anchor knew full well the other side wasn’t going to be so easily reasoned with, but he clung to that last sliver of hope anyway.
Maybe, since this young man possessed the finest things this world had to offer, there was some pride in him that wouldn’t be bothered to stop something so beneath his notice. Maybe he had no interest in halting the revival, set instead on confronting the ancestor directly once awakened.
That wasn’t impossible!
And if that were true, the cursed clan still had hope!
Once the ancestor was revived, there’d be no need to fight this new-generation Prison Emperor at all — they could simply hide, recover to peak strength, then gather the scattered factions of the cursed clan throughout the Heavenly Realm, consolidate their full strength, and surely stand a chance against this young master of House Titan.
In short: as long as the ancestor could be revived, there was hope.
Old Iron Anchor resolved that whatever conditions this young man demanded of him, he would agree to all of them, so long as he was given the chance to revive the ancestor.
But just as that hope in Old Iron Anchor’s heart was soaring to its peak, one casual remark from Yue Yang sent him plunging from the clouds straight into a bottomless abyss. Because what Yue Yang said was: “Forget eight days — give you eight months, even eight years, and you still wouldn’t be able to revive any ancestor. An old relic whose very soul was annihilated long ago — how could that possibly come back to life? And besides, those inscriptions inside were never about reviving anyone in the first place. They’re about unlocking the gate to an ancient treasure vault.”
Old Iron Anchor felt as though an invisible bolt of lightning had crashed down on him from above, shattering his very soul in an instant.
The blood-red pillar meant to revive the ancestor — it had just been an energy column to unlock a hidden door all along?
His first instinct was to deny it.
But the absolute certainty on Yue Yang’s face left Old Iron Anchor heartbroken, utterly despairing… this young man wasn’t lying. He had no reason to lie.
This brat had told him the truth on purpose, just to inflict the greatest possible blow on him!
“Why didn’t you just kill me earlier?” Old Iron Anchor roared in agony.
He simply could not accept an ending like this.
How much effort, how much time had the cursed clan’s descendants poured into reviving an ancestor who could never be revived? Thousands of years had passed, and who knew how many generations before him had thrown themselves into that effort, one after another. He himself had struggled here for hundreds of years. And after all of that — all that sacrifice, all that devotion — not the slightest scrap of it had ever been going to pay off. The truth was that cruel.
If he’d had the choice, Old Iron Anchor would rather never have known this truth at all.
He would rather have died still clinging to his regret.
He would rather have been struck down by this young man’s Divine Seal the instant he arrived at the Steel Gate — at least then, his heart wouldn’t be drowning in despair like this.
“What I want to remind you is this: as the Sky Tower’s new generation Prison Emperor, I hold both the right and the duty to pass judgment on you Sky Tower defectors. Everything proceeds according to my will. If I say one of you is pardoned, then that one lives, granted a fresh start. If I say another must be judged, then he pays the price for the sins he committed back then.” Yue Yang smiled faintly. “Old Iron Anchor — whether as the dockhand who schemed against me at the eastern pier, or as the Marshal who’s led this defector clan for thousands of years — there is no pardon coming for you. Now, you may speak your last words. Keep it brief — I don’t have much patience.”
“……” What was there left for Old Iron Anchor to say now?
Old Iron Anchor raised his hand, preparing to bring it down with crushing force on his own skull.
He had no wish to die at this young man’s hand, and even less wish to endure the agony of the ancient curse detonating. Before Yue Yang could act, he meant to end himself.
The instant the thought of the ancient curse erupting crossed his mind, a small face suddenly flashed through Old Iron Anchor’s thoughts. He himself had broken her free of that ancient curse with his own hands — would she, perhaps, find pardon and a new life at this young master of House Titan’s hands? If she lived on, maybe, every now and then, she’d still think of him — her stern father.
Bless you, my daughter.
With that one precious, redeeming thought as his last, Old Iron Anchor brought his hand down with crushing force upon his own skull, ending, by his own hand, a life steeped in sin.
He had spent his entire life committing every evil imaginable, taking pleasure in killing, pursuing the harvesting of human blood as sacrifice for his ancestor as his ultimate goal. If there was one thing in his whole life that could grudgingly be called a good deed, it was raising a disciple who had been like a daughter to him.
(End of Chapter)