The students’ quarters.
Keeping watch at the bedside, Yue Yang had drifted off without realizing it. After a brutal battle by day, then forcing down his exhaustion to pour energy into healing the gravely wounded Young Lord Mingzhu, even a man of iron like Yue Yang could hold out no longer. Above all, once the battle was behind him and he was in a safe, comfortable place, his spirit had slackened; there was no keeping it wound as taut as it had to stay in the thick of a fight.
At some point, Young Lord Mingzhu woke.
His eyes opened slowly.
Through the haze he took in his surroundings, and only when he registered that this was a bedchamber in the students’ quarters—and saw that the figure slumped asleep at the bedside was Yue Yang—did he let out a breath from the very bottom of his heart.
The battle was over. He and Yue Yang had both come back safe.
He had no wish at all just now to work out how they’d made it back. To have escaped danger with their lives was more than enough.
Then Young Lord Mingzhu raised both hands, seeming to examine his own palms, and felt at the clothes on his body.
Everything was intact.
His garments were torn, but the secret armor beneath still clung close to his skin.
And certain unique concealment arts he kept upon himself had suffered no damage from the divine power, no adverse effect at all. If anything, Young Lord Mingzhu felt his body was in even better condition than before the fight—the ruinous wounds the divine power had dealt him had melted away without a trace, like a dream. Were it not for being inside Human Valley, where he couldn’t use his true strength, Mingzhu would truly have liked to test just how far his now fully restored self had advanced past where he’d been… Then, looking again at the soundly sleeping Yue Yang, Young Lord Mingzhu was filled with curiosity: how had he done it?
Never mind that he had healed the wounds the god’s ambush had left.
There were old injuries, hidden hurts from before—
—brutally slow to mend.
Buried terribly deep.
How had he healed those completely too?
What kind of power had he used? And what had he combined with it to help? Divine Dew? Divine blood? Or some treasure even Mingzhu himself didn’t know of?
Because of certain circumstances, Mingzhu—carrying those hidden hurts—had long been unable to return to peak condition. Yet now Young Lord Mingzhu felt his body had not merely fully recovered, but had grown stronger than he’d ever expected. That unlooked-for happy surprise, he guessed, was the realm-breakthrough that came from a full recovery after a devastating battle.
“A fellow whose head is stuffed full of lust and women from dawn to dusk—and asleep, he looks like a little child!”
Watching Yue Yang sleep so soundly, Young Lord Mingzhu felt something he couldn’t quite name stir in his chest.
He couldn’t say why, but he always sensed that this fellow was, in truth, terribly lonely.
The kind of lonely that tugged at your heart.
Of course, his mouth would never let Yue Yang off so easily.
Young Lord Mingzhu watched a while, then a mischievous impulse seized him: he badly wanted to brush a strand of hair against Yue Yang’s nose and see how he reacted—or to take a pen and scribble all over that infuriating face of his, just to see the look on it tomorrow when he woke and preened in front of the mirror…
But just as Mingzhu was about to carry it out, his hand suddenly stilled.
Because Yue Yang had murmured something in his sleep, very faintly.
Terribly soft. Terribly indistinct.
It sounded like he was calling for his mama.
Or perhaps it was Mother—or sister… Though Mingzhu was close, he couldn’t make it out.
The tears fell all at once, like pearls off a broken string. Before he knew what he was doing, Mingzhu had pulled the sleeping Yue Yang tight into his arms.
This fellow—with no one to love him—really was pitiable.
The next day.
When Yue Yang woke and opened his eyes, the sight that met them was Young Lord Mingzhu, life and vigor restored, radiating good health and spirits. It gave Yue Yang a real start. First he snatched up a mirror to check whether Mingzhu had painted his face into a calico cat—and finding it clean, he blinked, puzzled. Something wasn’t right! He rushed to the window to see whether the sun had risen in the west.
Young Lord Mingzhu caught all this, and biting back his laughter, put on a stern face and gave a cold snort. “Oi, oi—am I really that childish? What a nasty little imagination. Just who do you take me for?”
“You seem a bit strange today!” Yue Yang felt Mingzhu was somehow different today, but the odd part was that, for the life of him, he couldn’t put his finger on what was off.
“Oh? I’m in a good mood today, so I won’t hold it against you.” On the surface Mingzhu was all disdain, but inside he was thoroughly delighted.
“I’m not still dreaming, am I?” Yue Yang scratched and scratched at the back of his head.
“What’s that supposed to mean? I’m in a good mood and haven’t hauled out the big hammer to help sharpen your memory—so your skin’s gotten itchy for a beating, has it?” Mingzhu put on a ferocious act. But somehow, no matter how Mingzhu feigned anger today, there wasn’t the slightest bite to it—far from scaring Yue Yang, the threat came off as almost… cute.
Over breakfast, Yue Yang suddenly remembered something.
He glanced left and right. No one around.
So he leaned in close to Young Lord Mingzhu’s ear and asked, “Yesterday, in the Tower Beyond the Tower—that secret you were going to tell me. What was it?”
At those words, Young Lord Mingzhu’s expression turned marvelously complicated. He gazed into Yue Yang’s eyes for a long, long moment—then, for no reason Yue Yang could see, broke into laughter, red lips and white teeth, and shot back, “You don’t know?”
Yue Yang was speechless and rolled his eyes hard. “If I knew, would I be asking you?”
Hearing that, Mingzhu was more delighted still, his smile sweet enough to melt the heart. “You really don’t know?”
Yue Yang, for his part, exasperated, stuffed a big steamed bun into Mingzhu’s little mouth. “You just want to mess with me, don’t you?”
Any other day, a move like that would have sent Mingzhu chasing Yue Yang ten thousand miles with the golden hammer, no question. But today Mingzhu was in far too fine a mood; even with a big bun jammed in his mouth by Yue Yang, he wasn’t the least bit angry. Instead he smugly took a small bite of the bun, then held it in hand and waggled it at Yue Yang—left, then right. “I’ve decided.”
Utterly bewildered, Yue Yang gaped. “Decided what?”
Mingzhu fixed his eyes on him and tittered. “I’ve decided I’m not going to tell you that secret, you dopey goose!”
“But you were the one who wanted to tell me in the first place! Now that you’ve gone and stirred up my curiosity, you clam up? What kind of nonsense is that?” Yue Yang bristled with sudden fury.
“That was then, this is now.” Mingzhu smiled, thoroughly content, his whole face wearing the smug look of I just won’t tell you, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
“Tch. As if I even care.” Yue Yang, for his part, converted grief and indignation into appetite, and put away three more big steamed buns than usual—as though the thing between his teeth were Young Lord Mingzhu himself. At the sight of the sulking Yue Yang carrying on like this, Mingzhu was tickled beyond words. He laughed and laughed—laughed the whole day, in fact. Now and then he’d stop, but one look at Yue Yang and he couldn’t hold it in, as if he’d just remembered some especially funny little joke and simply had to crack up all over again.
Laugh as he might, though, when it came to the problem of the evil god waking and launching its counterattack—
—Mingzhu had no good answer either.
After all, this was Human Valley.
There was no fighting the thing head-on; a man might have all the power in the world and still nowhere to use it.
As for that ancient relic Yue Yang had brought back from the seabed, neither of them could puzzle out just what sort of thing it was. On the surface it was plain and unremarkable, yet within it was stored an unfathomable sealing power. It didn’t much resemble a mighty ancient sacred relic or divine artifact—rather, it put one in mind of the black jade necklace that had sealed Empress Vivienne. Yue Yang couldn’t be certain, but he guessed it was of a similar or related kind… Could it be that the evil god was meant to be sealed inside this ancient relic, the way Empress Vivienne had been sealed?
Whether it could seal the god was one question; leave that aside for now.
The immediate question was whether either of them even knew how to perform such a sealing.
Yue Yang put it to Young Lord Mingzhu—and found it was indeed a serious problem, because Mingzhu didn’t know how to seal anything either.
Sealing, in itself, wasn’t hard. Yue Yang, for one, sealed away evil, fallen warriors from the Heavens all the time: beat them half to death and toss them into the Demon-Suppressing Tower. Of course, that sort couldn’t be counted as true sealing—it did well enough against Heaven-tier warriors, but against Supreme-tier powerhouses it already grew extremely difficult, all but impossible.
And to try to seal a genuine god by that method?
However confident he was, even Yue Yang wouldn’t dare claim success.
Or suppose Yue Yang somehow, against all odds, comprehended the ancient art of sealing a god within a short span—how would he ever have the power to seal an evil god far mightier than himself inside the ancient relic?
And what if the ancient relic’s purpose wasn’t to seal the evil god at all, but something else entirely? Wouldn’t he then be wandering down the wrong path, wasting his efforts for nothing?
In short, Yue Yang, for his part, had a splitting headache.
Young Lord Mingzhu sighed along with him.
The two of them thought on it for a whole day, all but wracking their brains to pieces, and in the end still couldn’t come up with any good plan.
Finally it was Mingzhu who consoled Yue Yang. “Take it slow, don’t rush. If the nine great Sealing Pillars are properly protected, we’ve got at least a year left.”
Hearing this, Yue Yang first nodded.
Then, at once, he shook his head.
Even the finest defense was, and forever would be, passive.
And more than that—under a countdown of a year at most, how many people could steel their hearts and stand united to mount that defense?
Worst of all, most likely, would be this: to save their own skins, or to secure their own futures, many who’d never been the evil god’s followers would join the followers’ ranks, turning from defenders into destroyers!
In a blink, two days went by. Though the assessment had left the students grievously killed and wounded, the Heavenly Pride Academy soon put the matter in order, and the newcomers’ Life Assessment Ceremony in Human Valley finally, successfully raised its curtain after all. Ren Tiange, Hauge, and the rest found this rather odd, and came to talk it over with Yue Yang; Mingzhu answered on his behalf.
“Set against an evil god waking, on the verge of descending, and Human Valley destroyed, the deaths of a few students hardly rate a mention. However grave the fallout from students dying in droves, is it graver than the whole Human Valley world about to be wrecked by an evil god? Barring surprises, by now the major powers of Human Valley have all learned this news and are busy scheming for their own futures—who has attention to spare for a handful of students?”
“That’s true enough. But we can’t just sit here and wait for death.” Ren Tiange felt a little dizzy; going on waiting like this was surely no answer.
“You two do the thinking. If there’s some action to take, something that needs doing, just put us to work—don’t stand on ceremony.” Hauge, too, felt that when it came to using his head, the spirit was willing but the mind was weak; better to listen to Yue Yang and Mingzhu. If the two of them worked out some countermeasure, he’d carry it through without a backward glance.
“Relax. If I can shave off one of his fingers, I can shave off his head too.” To keep everyone from sinking into despair, Yue Yang hurried to offer a couple of reassuring words.
“Late last night, I saw Ji Wuri pass through the transport gate into the Tower Beyond the Tower again.” The Silver-Eyed Great Sage delivered a very ominous piece of bad news.
“Ah!”
“What…”
“And that’s not even the worst of it.” Qingmo suddenly gave a cold, icy snort. “After Ji Wuri left, several more people went into the Tower Beyond the Tower, one after another. Ji Wuri and the others gave nothing away in their faces—but among them, the last man to come out wore the most insufferably smug expression, an idiot look that said I’ll be the overlord of the world, I’ll be the king of Human Valley. One glimpse of that mug, even from nine streets away, and you’d bring up last night’s dinner… I suspect that every one of them who strolled out of the Tower Beyond the Tower unharmed struck some kind of bargain with the evil god!”
“Who was the last one out, then?” Young Lord Mingzhu asked—though he hardly needed to; he’d already half guessed the answer.
“Golden Dirt-Clod?” Yue Yang guessed it in one, and Qingmo nodded in confirmation.
“Then there’s no mistaking it!” Even Hauge, who wanted nothing to do with thinking, smacked his forehead, certain Qingmo’s “bargain with the evil god” was ninety percent right.
“If the evil god’s struck a bargain with Jinji and that lot, how should we deal with it? Jinji’s no real threat—but Ji Wuri, and those others, we can’t afford not to guard against. Ji Wuri especially: if he’s made some great bargain with the evil god, the death toll in Human Valley from here on will run high!” Ren Tiange recalled how Ji Wuri, in the Demon Valley, had once pulled off a scheme that nearly wiped out the entire Angel Alliance camp of challengers to the last man. With Ji Wuri’s ruthlessness, on top of the evil god’s overwhelming divine power, the dead in Human Valley might well number a hundredfold, a thousandfold more than in the Demon Valley!
“All right—don’t dwell on the rest for now. Let’s wait until the newcomers’ assessment ceremony is over before we talk further!” Yue Yang was out of ideas for the moment too. Still, fortunately, the Xue girl in the Grimoire World was already showing signs of waking; if all else failed, he could go back and consult with her.
Perhaps, pooling everyone’s wisdom, they’d think of some good countermeasure.
Yue Yang, right now, truly could hardly wait—he was itching to go back and look in on Xue Wuxia, who during the great battle with the evil god in the Tower Beyond the Tower had forced herself awake to support him with the power of her heart!
(End of Chapter)