Backtracking the way they’d come.

Liuye treasured this moment more than ever now, because the treasure hunt would be ending soon. The two of them would soon return to the way things had been before — no longer able to walk hand in hand like this, free and unburdened. This moment, fingers interlaced and hearts aligned as they explored together, would probably stand as one of the most unforgettable memories of her entire life… She didn’t want it to end so soon, but she wanted even less for him to run into danger. Before now, Liuye had never once seen Yue Yang back down from a challenge — he simply wasn’t the type to give up easily. And yet here he was, choosing to abandon the treasure hunt rather than push forward.

Why?

It certainly wasn’t out of fear of the trials testing human weakness.

If anything, it had to be the opposite — he was worried about himself, afraid he might fail the test posed by his own human flaws and get cast out of the ancient treasure space entirely.

As the two of them made their way back through the twisting black-and-white passage, returning to the blazing region of pure light, then back into that region of permanent darkness, Yue Yang’s steps faltered slightly. But before Liuye could even voice a question, he was already leading her onward again.

“Is something wrong?” Liuye, sharp-eyed as ever, had already noticed the change.

“I don’t know. Just a feeling.” Yue Yang couldn’t say for certain.

“I’ll be careful.” Liuye knew Yue Yang possessed an exceptional intuition, particularly sharp when it came to combat — not quite the innate, flawless sixth sense Princess Qianqian had been born with, but rarely wrong all the same. If he sensed something was off, something genuinely was. Could agents of the Central Divine Hall have shown up outside the ancient entrance? Or some other powerhouse?

It wasn’t impossible.

The sky-spanning formation had already been visible for three full days now. If the Central Divine Hall had any pieces planted near White River City, they should have noticed by now and reported word of this colossal phenomenon back up the chain.

It was also possible some other reclusive powerhouse, one who’d stayed hidden away until now, had caught sight of the sky-formation and come rushing over. Not knowing the full situation, they might be lying in wait at the ancient entrance, content to let others do the work and then seize the greatest advantage for themselves. That wasn’t impossible either.

Yue Yang nodded, reassuring Liuye. “Don’t worry. I’ll take you on a long-range transfer — just keep your mind calm and follow my lead.”

With the Three Realms Compass in his possession, he had no fear whatsoever of being cornered.

As long as he could still transfer, no one could ever hope to box him in.

“Mm-hm.” Liuye summoned the Barrier-Piercing Deer as well, ready to lend a hand the instant Yue Yang needed it most. If the enemy possessed some restraining treasure or ability capable of interfering with the Three Realms Compass during transfer, she could pull Yue Yang clear of the enemy’s containment range first, then leave together with him afterward. She’d drilled this exact combat scenario ten thousand times over — all in preparation for a day exactly like this one, should it ever come.

“Let’s go!” The moment Yue Yang led Liuye out of the ancient entrance, he unleashed his full power, raising the Creation Domain to shield them both, then transferred instantly, fleeing at top speed from this place that had left an uneasy feeling lodged in his chest.

The transfer succeeded.

No one intercepted or restrained them.

The transfer went off without a hitch — Yue Yang and Liuye vanished from the ancient entrance and reappeared, in an instant, atop a stretch of rolling sand dunes.

The moment his feet touched the yellow sand, Yue Yang’s expression changed. And it wasn’t just him — Liuye sensed immediately that something was deeply wrong. White River City sat surrounded entirely by water — where could sand dunes possibly come from? And looking out across the landscape, this wasn’t simply one patch of dunes either — it stretched on for a thousand li in every direction, not a hint of green or living color anywhere, nothing but an endless world of sand as far as the eye could see.

Yue Yang’s transfer had only ever been meant to carry them a dozen or so kilometers.

Even allowing for some margin of error, even if it had carried them off by several hundred kilometers, they’d still be well within the vast expanse of White River’s waters. So where had this world of sand come from? A landscape like this had no business existing anywhere within the water-defined Tianhua Domain at all.

“Did we get pulled into some enemy’s Grimoire World?” Liuye wondered whether some enemy had set a trap for them in advance, sealing both her and Yue Yang inside it together. Only something like that, she figured, could explain how an endless desert had appeared in the middle of a region as vast as an ocean.

“No, this isn’t a Grimoire World.” Yue Yang shook his head. Even at his most careless, he’d never get pulled into an enemy’s Grimoire World without realizing it — and besides, with his Heaven’s Eye, not even the Solar King himself could have deceived him on something like that. When it came to sensing grimoires and pocket dimensions, who in this world was more precise than Yue Yang? If there were truly one being in existence capable of fooling his senses and trapping him inside a Grimoire World, it certainly wouldn’t be the Central Divine Hall’s strongest figure, the Divine Hall Supreme — it would have to be a genuine ancient deity.

“So what do we do now?” Liuye realized she and Yue Yang were both still completely bare, with no way to summon back the Moon Battle Armor either.

“We must still be inside the ancient trial… Even backtracking the way we came, we never actually left its range.” The thing Yue Yang had feared most had come to pass. He’d had a feeling all along that this ancient trial wouldn’t end so simply, that it wasn’t something you could just walk away from by choosing to.

“In that case, let’s keep going forward!” A flicker of happiness rose in Liuye’s heart at that.

Another chance to adventure alongside him.

Nothing could please her more. Whether they ever claimed the ancient treasure or not didn’t matter to her in the slightest — as long as he stayed by her side, that was enough.

How could Yue Yang fail to understand what this girl was feeling? He smiled, warmed by it. With a heart this pure standing beside him, surely he stood a real chance of pushing through whatever test of human nature lay ahead.

The world of sand stretched out, endless in every direction.

After half an hour of transferring and flying, Yue Yang brought Liuye to a fortress built entirely of sand.

It sat within an enormous valley, carved and built up from countless dunes of yellow sand. Most remarkable of all, a small river ran burbling past the settlement’s edge. In all the hundreds, nearly a thousand kilometers of desert they’d flown over, this was the very first water source they’d come across — proof enough of just how precious this little river truly was. Along its banks, countless men and women, all completely naked, moved busily about their work.

Looking closer, what struck Liuye with genuine horror was this: the strongest, most physically powerful men here held no status whatsoever. If anything, the men with the greatest strength and the sturdiest builds occupied the lowest, most degraded rank of all.

These men handled every task needed for daily survival — tilling soil, planting, gathering, harvesting, brewing, raising livestock, slaughtering, fishing, roasting meat, every kind of labor fell to them. And yet their status was lower than dirt. At the slightest displeasure, the women would whip them at will, the men working with heads bowed like a herd of slaves, not daring to let out so much as a whimper when the lash fell.

These men lay prone against the ground, faces to the earth and backs to the sky, their scarred and battered bodies the very foundation propping up this entire sand fortress’s continued existence.

What struck Liuye as most unbelievable of all was that the women freely whipping these men didn’t hold the highest rank here either.

In this sand fortress, the highest status of all belonged to dogs.

Every dog here lounged upon comfortable thrones woven from human skin, human bone, and human hair, sprawled lazily, basking in the sun. Each dog had at least ten children assigned to it, dragging that heavy bone throne along on ropes braided from human skin and hair. The instant their pace slowed even slightly, the dog would leap down in irritation and bite viciously, leaving the children bleeding and writhing on the ground… The dogs barked with smug satisfaction, while the women roared with laughter, cursing the children as worthless wretches for daring to upset their beloved pets.

Liuye rarely grew angry. She was a kind-hearted girl by nature, able to treat others with generosity even when wronged unfairly, never one to hold a grudge.

But that didn’t mean she couldn’t be angered.

And someone as gentle as Liuye, once truly angered, became something genuinely terrifying.

Watching the shameless, degraded behavior of these women, Liuye felt fury threatening to burst her chest wide open. Never in her life had she felt rage like this. How could anyone exist who valued a dog’s life above a human one? What she found most unbearable of all was that these women treated the children like livestock, like dogs themselves, while treating those vicious, worthless dogs as their own beloved sons, the very treasures of their hearts.

How twisted did a person’s soul have to be, to do something like this?

“Sweetheart, don’t lick that worthless brat’s blood, don’t do that, that filthy blood will make you sick! Good boy, that’s it, come back to mommy’s arms!” One woman, watching her dog gnaw on a child lying in a pool of blood, paid the child himself no mind whatsoever — her only concern was that her precious dog might fall ill from drinking human blood.

“Aah!” The suffering child let out an involuntary cry of pain.

Crack, crack, crack, crack, crack!

At the sound of his pained cry, the woman immediately raised her whip — woven from human skin, hair, and finger bones — and brought it down viciously across the child’s body, screaming curses all the while. “Worthless trash, garbage like you doesn’t deserve to live in this world at all. Why haven’t you died yet? This world has no need for filth like you — all it needs is my precious dog. It’s scum like you, too greedy to know your place, that’s left us short on resources, leaving my baby without anything decent to eat most days of the month!”

Once she’d whipped the child unconscious, she turned her lash on his companions as well, punishing them collectively for his crime.

The children buried their faces in the sand, not daring to let out a single cry of pain.

Terrified of being struck even harder.

If they angered these vicious women any further, there was only one possible outcome waiting for them: beaten to death, their flesh and bones turned into dog food, their skin and hair stripped away to braid into more whips.

Liuye’s fury nearly knocked her unconscious. She’d encountered plenty of cruel women in her life, but never anything like this.

Compared to the women standing before her now, every cruel woman she’d ever met before could practically be called kind and good.

“Kill them. Scum like this doesn’t deserve to live!” For the first time in her life, true killing intent stirred within Liuye. Compared to a poisonous woman like Water Spider, these vicious wretches before her were even more shameless, even more grotesque. Liuye felt she might be able to forgive Water Spider someday — but these women, never. No — a group of women who treated dogs as sons and humans as slaves didn’t deserve to be called human at all.

“……” Yue Yang, by contrast, wasn’t nearly as angry. Women like this didn’t exist on the Sky Tower, and they were rare even in the Heavenly Realm — but back on Earth, they did exist. Before crossing over, he’d often seen news stories about people blocking highways to steal dogs, plenty of women in those stories who valued dogs above human lives. In plenty of households back home, dogs held status equal to children — sometimes higher, sometimes outranking the entire rest of the family. He’d seen it before: society ladies cradling lapdogs while treating the laborers on the street — the shoe-shiners, the egg-sellers, the milk-deliverers — as immeasurably beneath them.

For people who treated dogs as their whole world, a dog wasn’t a guard animal or a loyal companion — it was a son. Or even a husband.

Society ladies kept dogs to flaunt their supposed compassion, while showing extreme cruelty toward every other living creature, humans very much included.

People ranked lower than dogs — back on Earth, that was an all-too-common sight.

Of course, it existed elsewhere too. He remembered reading a story once called The Chameleon, a sharp piece of satire — though that one used a dog merely as a device for the theme; it didn’t come close to matching the genuine devotion society ladies showed their lapdogs. That had been about currying favor with power, sycophantic posturing — not a fundamentally twisted psyche, not a corruption of human nature itself like this.

“Looks like that little wretch finally died, hah, didn’t last long, did he! You lot, come strip his skin off — my whip needs fresh hide, it’s getting a bit worn out. Oh, and make sure his meat’s cooked through properly, my precious boy can’t stomach raw meat, and if his stomach gets upset because of it, every single one of you will pay for it with your lives!” The words from the woman below, cradling her dog, were what finally lit Liuye’s fury beyond containing.

“You dare feed people to your dogs?” Liuye felt as though she might explode from rage, killing intent erupting like a volcano. “I’ll kill every last one of you soulless dog-worshipping scum!”

“No need for you to lift a hand. I’ll handle this.” Yue Yang quickly stopped her.

He already understood what this sand world was testing.

Wrath.

In the face of ugliness and injustice, Yue Yang’s will was steady enough, his unshakable Sovereign Intent letting him view it all with cold clarity. But Liuye couldn’t do the same — her pure heart had no room for even a trace of malice, let alone something this monstrous, this universally condemnable…

If he let Liuye lose control and act on her fury, she’d fail the trial outright. He had to be the one to act.

A person could kill without anger clouding their heart, after all. Couldn’t they?

(End of Chapter)