Time slipped away, bit by bit, in lonely and grueling cultivation.
Before anyone knew it, a hundred years had gone by.
Yue Yang could see that in all those hundred years, she had hardly ever left the Valley of Life, where she comprehended and cultivated. Her stubborn little sister never came back. Even her aunt, the only family she had left, had taken over the affairs of their sect and had no time to spare; she seldom came to see her. It went on like that: cultivating alone, with only the bright moon in the sky for company and only her own lonely shadow following her, cultivating all by herself, lost to everything else. Only when she was tired and about to fall asleep would she look up at the starry night sky and remember her mother as she had been, and her little auntie, who had raised her like her first teacher… She swept through the Innate realm at great speed. Under her Divine Sight talent, she gradually comprehended the power of domain. Her Sovereign Intent was born without any teacher, and she kept perfecting it.
In one breakthrough, as though heaven had put it into her heart, she brought forth the Sword of Life.
The space-shattering “Black Stone.”
The Rainbow Chord Trio, the Eternal Extinction Seal, and Sunlight Over All, which lit up the whole world and shattered and annihilated everything… one world-shaking move after another, she comprehended and made real in lonely, solitary training.
By the time her aunt came to see her on the hundredth anniversary of her mother’s death, she had no need for the aunt to give her a Battle God Attendant. She already had a unique Human Divine Soldier of her own!
“With your Sovereign Intent, you are already one of the few top powers in the Sky Tower.” Her aunt told her to go out and travel around the Sky Tower to gain experience. There was no longer any need to worry that she might not make it through the Gate of Life and Death. If she wished, her aunt could even let her go off to the Heavenly Realm to travel and temper herself without a worry. In just a hundred years, she had grown to a realm so high that even her aunt could no longer look at her as an equal.
“But I’m not yet the greatest person in the Sky Tower.” She chose to keep cultivating. She chose the lonely road to becoming a Supreme.
“For a girl, it’s very hard…” Her aunt sighed. She did not want to discourage her, but there was a cruel fact: the Sky Tower had never once had a woman as its foremost Supreme.
Even the Conquest Queen Vivienne, the most powerful of them all, had only kept growing, and risen to the peak in the Heavenly Realm, after she left the Sky Tower.
In her Sky Tower days, Her Majesty the Serpent-Demon Empress had not in fact been the greatest person in the Sky Tower.
She knew that, of course.
But there was no little brother. Her mother’s and her little auntie’s last wish could only be carried by her.
And she had more than enough confidence that she would surely become the greatest person in the Sky Tower — a Supreme who looked down on the whole world!
“I don’t lack talent, and I don’t lack diligence. One day, I’ll succeed.” She raised her eyes to the sky. The confidence and resolve in those beautiful eyes, with their Divine Sight, could have made the bright moon itself grow pale. Yue Yang felt it as though it were his own, and in that instant he was seized by the urge to hold her tight. At some point, without noticing when, he had started cultivating just as hard as she did. He too carried the Sword Spirit Imperial Lady’s hopes, the hopes of a mother he had never met and of Fourth Mother and the others, and the weight of keeping his little sisters and the women he loved alive. For the future, for happiness, he too trained this hard every day… No one knew, and no one could understand, how grueling and how lonely it was behind all that effort.
Yue Yang had a feeling that she and he were really the same.
At the very least they were uncannily alike. Apart from being a man and a woman, apart from how they thought, in every other way they were almost cut from the same cloth.
Cultivation was too bitter. It was a bitterness no one else could understand or dilute even a little. It was stamped deep, deepest of all, into the soul — the pain of having your confidence crushed by pressure countless times and rebuilt countless times — and in the end, through sweat and awakening, it turned into strength, and bit by bit it forged her, and forged him.
There was no goal and no way to know when it would end. You had to feel your own way forward, drifting endlessly between success and failure. Only the tiny bit of essence that was reborn into eternity out of destruction and rebirth was the sweetness of success, the birth of power, the taste of happiness!
It was too hard…
It was too bitter, far too bitter…
Yue Yang could understand that bitterness, and he could fully understand growing up alone like that. He even felt she had suffered more than he had, and had it harder, because behind him there was still the Sword Spirit Imperial Lady, and the little sword-qi loli! Even when he cultivated alone, he still had them with him. It was nothing like her being entirely alone, training in solitude for a hundred years!
Feeling it as if it were his own, he watched her from within the void, and watched her spend another hundred years in this Valley of Life, sweat pouring off her like rain.
A Sacred Codex!
When her summoning grimoire ascended into a unique Sacred Codex, she had no time to be happy. A sword attendant she did not know brought her terrible news.
The last of her aunts had fallen as well.
The Bright Moon line no longer had a single elder left. The sect, now leaderless, had no choice but to send someone to ask her — this “martial fanatic” of an heir — whether she would be willing to leave the Valley of Life to inherit and take up the post of sect master of the North Moon Immortal Pavilion. Because everyone already knew her temperament very well, neither the Immortal Pavilion’s elders nor her aunt before she fell had really believed that a martial fanatic like her would agree to take on a worldly post.
Perhaps just to give it a try, the Immortal Pavilion sent its most eloquent speaker, the sword attendant “Flying Star,” to ask what she wanted and what she intended.
“And my sister?” She did not quite understand. Apart from her, wasn’t there also her little sister, just as much an heir?
“The little princess, she… she has entered the Heaven Devil Hall now, and become its youngest and most gifted little Heaven Devil — ‘Tianfa’… We — we went to find the little princess before this… In fact, it was the little princess who told me to come to you!” Flying Star had the finest tongue in the world, and was praised for it throughout the Sky Tower. But in front of her, under the majesty of that Sovereign Intent that looked down on all living things, the sword attendant could not even get out a whole sentence.
“I understand.” She nodded gently.
Three days later, the North Moon Immortal Pavilion had a new sect master, famed across the world for her Divine Sight talent, known to outsiders as the “Clear-Heart Sect Master.”
For the next ten years after she took over the North Moon Immortal Pavilion, she never once left the sect. She trained the female disciples she had chosen from all over the Longteng Continent with her Divine Sight talent, along with the sect’s hand-picked sword attendants, sword guards and sword slaves. She never formally took any disciple of her own, but anyone in the whole sect she deigned to give a word of guidance to — from the strongest elder to an outer disciple only provisionally on the rolls — made an enormous breakthrough. The North Moon Immortal Pavilion had been the closest of the four great sects to falling into decline. All at once it came back to life, caught up with and surpassed the other three, left its rivals far behind, and rose to an entirely new level that no one in the sect, high or low, could believe.
All of it was because she had come!
Many powers of the Southern Ridge Misty Sect, the Western Prison Lion Tower and the East Sea Crystal Palace — even their sect masters — wrote to ask for marriage alliances.
Some proposed matches with her disciples, but far more were proposals to her, the sect master with the Divine Sight talent… She chose to ignore the rumors flying around outside, and ignored all the requests for marriage alliances the same way.
Not until one noon, when the three sects and many powers of the Longteng Continent turned up uninvited, did she give a formal reply:
“The phoenix has her ambitions. She beats her wings across ten thousand li and soars through all the heavens, and she will alight on nothing but the parasol tree.”
That answer enraged every power on the Longteng Continent on the spot. The suitors who had come hoping to carry off a beauty, and the warriors who had only come to watch the fun, alike flew into a fury at a reply that was all but a slap in the face. The Longteng Continent had always held men above women. Even though it had produced countless female powers, no one had ever dared to challenge men’s place at the top — let alone to treat every man on the whole Longteng Continent as beneath notice!
A mere woman — what gave her the right to be so arrogant?
The main reason everyone had come asking for marriage was to get a wife or a concubine with the Divine Sight talent, and at the same time to swallow the North Moon Immortal Pavilion and make their own sects stronger.
Never mind the refusal — she had dared to spout nonsense about “the phoenix has her ambitions… she will alight on nothing but the parasol tree.” It was nothing less than a challenge and an insult to every man on the Longteng Continent! Was she saying there wasn’t one man on the whole Longteng Continent worthy of her?
“From this day on, within the Longteng Continent — whatever the sect, whatever the school, whatever the name — all shall hold me as the foremost Supreme. Whoever defies this shall be put to death. Whoever slanders it shall have his clan wiped out!” With her face veiled, she appeared before the powers of the Longteng Continent for the first time in her life, and for the first time declared her claim to be the greatest person under heaven. The moment those thunderous words rang out, everyone present was stunned speechless!
“Have you lost your mind?” Sect Master Baihe of the Southern Ridge Misty Sect threw back his head and laughed. Even he, the strongest of them all at the time, would never have said anything so wild.
“A worthless little piece of a woman, fit only to spread herself under a man and beg for his favor — and she dares to be this arrogant?” The sect master of the Western Prison Lion Tower was furious. He felt that hearing such words was the greatest humiliation of his life. As a man, and as a power, he had never imagined that one day a woman would insult him like this!
“Strength is what rules!” She ignored the fury of every warrior present.
“Fine! Then let me—” The sect master of the Western Prison Lion Tower leaped out like an enraged lion, impatient to challenge her.
“There’s no need to tell me your name. A small fry like you, bound to vanish in the long river of history, isn’t worth my trouble to remember.” With one casual stroke of her sword, she cut off the head of the sect master of the Western Prison Lion Tower, who had been called the strongest power on the Longteng Continent.
Under her Sovereign Intent, which ruled over the world and looked down on all living things, Sect Master Baihe of the Southern Ridge Misty Sect — who had been named alongside the freshly slain Lion Tower master as one of the “Two Heroes of Longteng” — bowed his ever-noble, ever-arrogant head deep, deep, deep.
Before absolute strength, he had no choice but to bow his head, and to acknowledge a woman as supreme!
Every proud power on the field, trembling without end, paid her their respects.
And this was only the beginning of her rise to become the greatest under heaven and a true Supreme! A hundred years later, Yue Yang saw that of the Sky Tower’s five strongest emperors of that time, three were dead and two wounded. The strongest of them — the Dazzling Light Sky Emperor, the Mighty Sea Emperor, and the Heaven-Devouring Devil Emperor, who had been called the strongest in the Demon Abyss in the ten thousand years since the Conquest Queen — all fell at her feet, and the Dragon Emperor and the Underworld Emperor, badly wounded and coughing blood, raised their hands in heartfelt submission and saluted her.
Before Elder Nangong, the witness of history, the road to supremacy she had sought was formally opened…
“I did it!” She returned to the Valley of Life, and before the graves of her mother and her little auntie, beneath the Divine Wish Flower Tree, she made her second wish: “All of you who have always watched over me from behind — you must have seen it. Please, grant me a little brother again. I’m so lonely!”
(End of Chapter 1275)