“I will definitely kill you!” — that was what the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord said in the first minute after Yue Yang stepped on his back and humiliated him, said through clenched teeth as fury poured off him.
“I will definitely kill you!” — that was what he said after an unbroken hour of attacks failed to put Yue Yang down for good.
“I will definitely kill you!” — that was what he said one full day later.
The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord had never imagined this.
Fighting Yue Yang was not the one-strike battle he’d originally envisioned, cutting him down in a single move. It wasn’t the ten-strike battle of a cat toying with a mouse. It wasn’t even the hundred-strike battle of an enraged, humiliated predator determined to destroy his prey. It wasn’t even the thousand-strike battle of relentless, storm-like assault with every technique exhausted while the other side somehow refused to fall.
This was a sustained war that even he — with the gift of precognition — couldn’t foresee the end of.
A full day had already passed.
And the other side was still standing, with no telling how much longer this would go on.
The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord’s mind had emptied of everything except one thought: kill this young man who kept overturning every estimate of his limits, kill him by any means necessary. Unfortunately for him, even with the power to completely overwhelm his opponent, after an entire day of attacking he still hadn’t achieved that goal.
Countless times, the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord had been certain this boy was finally going to fail and go down for good.
Part of him had actually been hoping for it.
And yet the young man who showed no expression through any attack, no matter how close to death it pushed him, kept disappointing him.
The boy got up time after time. Early in the fight, after going down, the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord still had enough mental bandwidth left to mock him. Later, the interval between being knocked down and standing back up again had shortened until it was nearly instantaneous.
Sometimes the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord felt a helplessness he couldn’t explain. Why was it like this?
He couldn’t figure it out.
What kind of existence was this unkillable young man, and why couldn’t he be finished off — how was it possible to withstand blow after blow of what should have been certain death?
All of it was a mystery. The one certainty was those clear, cold eyes after each fall — blood dripping from his brow, and yet his gaze fixed ahead with pitiless steadiness, never once showing a ripple of anything unusual, like stars that never fell from the sky, as though mirroring some eternal, unextinguishable life burning within.
One continuous day of attacks. Every technique exhausted. Thousands approaching ten thousand distinct killing blows.
Even a divine being, most would believe, would have fallen.
And yet.
The other side remained standing.
Just what would it take to kill this young man? At times, the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord wondered whether some ancient deity had used the power of law to remake this boy’s body into one that could never truly die — because otherwise, how was it possible to survive ten thousand strikes from him? What terrified him most of all was this: no matter how much he battered him, the young man hadn’t once summoned a life-guardian war beast, hadn’t once used his Grimoire, hadn’t even used any actual combat techniques of his own. The only things he’d used were techniques he’d stolen in the heat of battle, improvised on the spot.
In this fight, the boy was absorbing his combat methods the way a sponge soaked up water.
Every time he went down, he came back having learned a little more.
If this young man was allowed to leave alive, to disappear and absorb everything he’d gained from this battlefield — the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord genuinely couldn’t imagine what heights this person might reach.
A training dummy.
Sometimes the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord felt exactly like a training dummy, everything he was doing nothing more than providing this boy with growth experience.
RUMBLE RUMBLE RUMBLE! A massive section of the ceiling suddenly caved in, unexpectedly exposing a stretch of open sky. The Dark Sky Nest underground city ruins, buried dozens to nearly a hundred kilometers beneath the earth’s surface, had been struck open by the sheer violence of their battle, the ceiling collapsing to reveal the sky above. The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord looked up at that sky, momentarily startled, then drew a long, deep breath, pressing down the anger and every other negative emotion churning within him.
He decided to stop being angry.
Because anger served no purpose. Anger was absolutely not going to kill the young man standing before him.
Killing the other side required eliminating every negative emotion entirely. There was only one approach that would work: attrition.
This boy was completely impossible to one-shot. His displayed maximum strength was only Supreme tier five, and yet the foundation beneath him was like a fortress wall — any pressure brought to bear on his will or his Sovereign Realm simply had no effect. If he had to find an analogy, the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord felt like an army of a hundred thousand ironclad cavalry, destroying everything in their path — and this young man was a fortress garrisoned by only a thousand, yet impossibly solid, impossible to break no matter how many assaults he launched.
If he wanted to conquer him. To destroy him.
Overwhelming force, sheer crushing power — neither would ever succeed.
Only indefinite, sustained attrition, pouring out maximum strength and grinding away the very last thread of his opponent’s life force, could bring him down at his feet.
“You are the greatest opponent of my lifetime.” The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord didn’t want to admit it, but it was simply the truth. The person who had sealed him went without saying — that wasn’t even a being the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord could envision, let alone challenge. The person who truly earned the title of greatest opponent was not any of the old rivals he’d fought for dominance in the Heavenly Realm across the ages — it was this unkillable “junior” standing in front of him right now.
“You’re not the greatest opponent of my lifetime…” Yue Yang didn’t see it the same way. The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord was genuinely formidable, but the one Yue Yang found most headache-inducing was further ahead — the Central Divine Hall’s supremely powerful Divine Hall Supreme. That figure was the truly terrifying one. Compared to the Divine Hall Supreme, both the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord and Ji Wuri were mid-tier bosses at best, nowhere near the final boss category. Yue Yang said this without intending to be dismissive, and after a pause, he added with genuine seriousness, “If your divine sense weren’t sealed in the Demon God Hall and you’d stayed at your absolute peak for tens of thousands of years, you might actually have been the greatest opponent of my lifetime. Unfortunately, the sealing took a heavy toll and the world has moved past you, bit by bit, without you noticing.”
“Even without my peak, you will still fall at my feet.” The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord swore it — no matter how much time it took, no matter what means were necessary, this young man was going to die.
He absolutely could not be allowed to grow any further.
If this boy grew to his full potential, he would surpass every figure that came before him and become something beyond anyone’s capacity to look up at.
Setting everything else aside, the sheer speed of in-battle learning and growth he was displaying was terrifying enough on its own. The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord had never once, in all his years, seen anyone absorb and improve like this.
“You’ve been attacking me for a solid day. Now it’s my turn to fight back!” Yue Yang had spent the entire day enduring the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord’s relentless assault with almost no capacity to counter — not because he hadn’t wanted to, but because he hadn’t been able to. The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord’s strength could completely overwhelm anyone below Supreme tier nine, and matching such an opponent made even his previous battle with the Solar King look, by comparison, like something easier than eating soft tofu. And that battle against the Solar King had still been hours of bloody combat with dozens of near-death moments.
But fighting the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord meant death was possible at any single moment. Every attack was potentially lethal — especially when the Demon Lord’s rage erupted, unleashing thousands upon tens of thousands of different ancient killing techniques, bizarre and unexpected in every direction, leaving Yue Yang unable to keep up with defenses.
Anyone else would have been dead long ago.
Yue Yang gritted his teeth and held on.
Until a full day later.
When the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord finally paused his attacks, that was the moment Yue Yang had genuinely been waiting for.
“You still want to counter?” The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord was beyond astonished — any other time, he’d have sneered and mocked, but not now. He felt the other side might actually still have real counterattacking force remaining, and no small amount of it.
“Of course. I’m going to hit you so hard your own mother won’t recognize you.” Yue Yang wasn’t the type to let things pass — absolutely not the type to allow being beaten and then simply move on. Being pummeled for an entire day by the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord had left him in an extraordinarily foul mood, and if he didn’t pay it back tenfold, it wouldn’t be him. Yue Yang stripped off every shattered, unidentifiable remnant of his battle armor and stood bare-chested, using the Nirvana Flames to condense the most powerful Nirvana Armor he could form. Left hand holding the Divine Seal, right hand raising the Prison Emperor’s Divine Staff — still missing its dragon head.
His Sacred Codex-ascended Grimoire of Summoning, for the first time in this entire battle, manifested.
Ten thousand rays of radiance.
A golden column of energy shot straight toward the heavens.
Within a hundred-meter radius, the shattered heaven and earth suddenly gave birth to countless stars — Yue Yang’s Creation Domain mimicking the Night Empress’s signature star-sky power, countless stars condensing into constellations, displaying an inexhaustible starforce.
A golden giant rose up — not the “Fate Giant” that emerged when Yue Yang lost consciousness or pushed past his absolute limit, but a “Destruction Giant” that Yue Yang had created directly himself through the Creation Domain, infinite starforce, and the power of Calamity God-Force combined. The Destruction Giant’s power was of course incomparable to the Fate Giant, which commanded the power of destiny — that one strike from the Fate Giant, not even at full power, had dealt serious injuries to the Solar King who’d fought Yue Yang to a standstill over several hours. But the Destruction Giant that Yue Yang had spent enormous effort forging through his own will was nothing to dismiss either — any enemy who underestimated it would die beneath its fists.
For someone as supremely arrogant as the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord, the sight of the Destruction Giant’s birth caused a subtle shift in his expression.
Law-force. He sensed law-force being used by his opponent.
Directly creating a living energy giant.
Though this law-force was still extremely thin — nowhere near genuine, developed law-force — being able to reach this point at all was terrifying enough. At a minimum, figures like Ren Tiange or Ghost King Phantom with their Supreme tier eight power could not use this kind of rudimentary law-force, let alone with this kind of proficiency.
“Amplify!”
Yue Yang let out a roar equal in volume to ten thousand charging soldiers, equal in force to a thunderbolt splitting the sky, shaking heaven and earth.
He gave the Prison Emperor’s Divine Staff a light wave. At his direction, the Sacred Codex opened, turning past one page — a special giant shadow rose rapidly and poured into the hundred-meter Destruction Giant. In an instant, the Destruction Giant’s power surged upward by dozens of times, approaching a hundredfold.
The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord had never anticipated that this boy’s life-guardian war beast could amplify with such incredible power, and his expression changed immediately.
A hundredfold amplification?
That was completely absurd.
Especially starting from the already massive base power of the Destruction Giant — being amplified a hundredfold further was the kind of thing that felt like cheating.
“One slash — the mountains crack!” Yue Yang raised the Prison Emperor’s Divine Seal high. The Destruction Giant mirrored the gesture exactly, but what it held in its massive hand was not the Divine Seal — it was a colossal slashing blade condensed from Calamity God-Force: the Calamity Waning Crescent.
“Hmph!” The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord very much wanted to take it head-on, but watching this destructive force sweeping down, he made the rational choice to dodge.
Take that strike directly?
That would be an idiotic display of bravado. Showing off wasn’t worth doing it that way.
The moment the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord dodged that terrifyingly powerful slash, he suddenly felt himself locked by the other side’s spiritual sense — a jolt of surprise — as a jet-black divine sword rose without warning from beneath his feet, slicing upward at his legs. He didn’t know this was Yue Yang’s Black Returning Burial — but he recognized the danger and retreated sharply, every trace of the contempt he’d held completely gone.
BOOM!
The Black Returning Burial Yue Yang unleashed now was not something that could be dodged, especially not when the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord’s attention had been divided between the decision of whether to take or dodge the Destruction Giant’s crushing slash, costing him his optimal reaction window.
One strike landed.
Yue Yang pressed the advantage without mercy — White Frost Bloom, then Crimson Dawn Tempering, erupting in rapid succession.
Shock and fury in equal measure crossed the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord’s face. If not for his absolutely overwhelming raw advantage in strength, this young man might actually have finished him… He wiped the thin trickle of blood from the corner of his mouth, drew a deep breath, and pressed down the near-madness of his rage, recovering his composure. “Truly beyond my expectations. Young man, you are far more exceptional than I imagined. If I can kill someone like you, it will be something I savor for the rest of my existence — or perhaps, destroying a junior of this caliber carries the same meaning as conquering the entire Heavenly Realm… I swear, whether it takes one day, two days, ten days, twenty, a month, or even a year — it makes no difference to me. Even if it takes a hundred years or a thousand years, killing you will be worth it.”
“I will definitely kill you!” — that was the oath the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord swore in iron-clad terms after Yue Yang’s counterattack landed.
“Keep dreaming.” That was Yue Yang’s answer.
(End of Chapter)