Three days later.

Yue Yang had spent a full three days inside the Grimoire World before returning to the Emerald Isle of the Human Valley world. On the surface he looked no different, as though Duoduo’s inspiration had never once sunk him into deep contemplation. But strangely, the three white-clad maidens sitting in meditation inside the tent took one look at Yue Yang and immediately stood up in astonishment — with the same stunned look as someone in the celestial empire spotting a South China tiger on the street. They stared for a good long while, and at last the leading maiden spoke: “Just three days apart, and you look completely different!”

“Different how?” Yue Yang asked with a smile.

“You certainly won’t be stuck a full million years in the small heaven-and-earth now — I’d wager on it.” The sweet round-faced one seemed happiest of all about the change in Yue Yang.

“There’s a great change, yes — but the trial of the boundless world is another matter entirely.” The valiant white-clad maiden nodded in affirmation, then offered Yue Yang a word of caution.

“While I’ve still got the confidence, let me try it right now!” Yue Yang felt that if he showed a shred of hesitation, he might well talk himself into backing out.

The “small heaven-and-earth” inside the silver grimoire — that boundless world. It was surely more difficult than the trial of the Gate of Life and Death. Once he failed to comprehend his way through, he’d be trapped inside a full million years, just like Molong.

Even with Xiao Wenli and the others forever at his side, there were times when merely being away from Princess Qianqian and the rest for ten days or half a month left him consumed with longing beyond his own control. When Xue Wuxia had been at his side he hadn’t felt the ache of missing her — but since she’d fallen into slumber, he truly couldn’t count how many times he’d yearned for her swift return to him.

To enter the boundless world was to part utterly with everyone, to set out on the road in total solitude. If he stayed inside a month, he might not be able to bear it; if he stayed several months, or a year, Yue Yang couldn’t imagine what would become of him. And if he were truly so unlucky as to be trapped a hundred years, a thousand years inside… never mind a million years like Molong — even a hundred years, and Yue Yang reckoned he’d go mad from the loneliness!

He didn’t worry about his own comprehension, nor about the trial itself — only about time. He feared being trapped in the boundless world too long, far too long, until his very mind broke.

Long as he might stay in the boundless world, outside it was still only a single second, and by rights Qianqian and the others wouldn’t feel any span of time at all. Yet even so, Yue Yang worried that their souls might resonate with his, and give rise to boundless heartache!

“Are you certain you want to go in and take the trial?” the maiden holding the silver grimoire asked, her face solemn.

“Certain.” Yue Yang nodded heavily.

“Good luck to you!” The valiant white-clad maiden nodded, a rare gesture, wishing him a swift return.

“You absolutely must succeed grandly!” The sweet round-faced one raised a soft fist to cheer Yue Yang on; she was the one closest to Yue Yang and the kindest of them all.

As the silver grimoire opened, countless radiances brimmed and spread, and in the instant of being transported inside, Yue Yang flashed the sweet round-faced one a sunny, brilliant smile, by way of answering her encouragement.

One second earlier, what met his eyes was still the sweet round-faced one’s pure, smiling face.

The next second it had become a face ugly in the extreme — belonging to a man Yue Yang had never imagined he’d ever see again. This man was “Rock,” the first person Yue Yang had killed in White Stone City. This fellow — so weak by comparison, a mere second-tier warrior whom any random innate-tier powerhouse could crush as easily as squashing an ant — now glared viciously at Yue Yang, seized his collar in a hand broad as a palm-leaf fan, and burst into a wild peal of laughter: “Kid — you, you’ve got a day like this coming too!”

Yue Yang was dumbstruck. “Didn’t you die, you idiot?”

Rock nodded in affirmation. “That’s right, I died — and became food in the mouth of that thorn-flower of yours, ending up as pitiful flower fertilizer!”

Yue Yang expressed his bafflement at this answer: “Since you turned into flower fertilizer, you idiot, how is it you can still talk to me now? From the fierce, murderous look of you, it seems you even mean to hit me?”

Wham!

Before Yue Yang had finished speaking, Rock’s heavy fist had already landed a savage blow across his face.

Blood spattered. Droplet by droplet, it flew and scattered across the ground, forming a shocking flower of blood!

Yue Yang discovered that his present body truly was fragile beyond measure. A careless punch like that had actually beaten him into spitting blood?

Rock, with an air of utter arrogance, roared right into Yue Yang’s ear in a voice of insufferable insolence: “Kid, this is another world — no longer the Sky Tower where you can throw your weight around, understand? In this world you’re just a mortal, not worth so much as a fart. If I felt like it, I could tear you into eighteen pieces any time I pleased, then reassemble you into thirty-six different poses, and make your death as pretty a sight as you could wish!”

His voice was like a thunderclap, setting Yue Yang’s eardrums buzzing.

Then another voice rose up, dark and sinister: “Wait — don’t be in such a hurry to finish him off. Let me have a good play with him first. He actually dared send a whore and drugged, poisoned wine to do me in by stealth, and in the end left me to die a wronged man’s death. If I don’t avenge this, I’m no Iron Madman!”

The second fellow Yue Yang had killed and turned into flower fertilizer appeared — “Iron Madman,” of third-tier hero strength.

By rights, ant-sized fellows like him and Rock could pound away for a million years and not so much as harm a single hair of Yue Yang’s — but now it was entirely different… Iron Madman gave a leap, spun in midair, and drove his toe-cap savagely into Yue Yang’s neck. Yue Yang felt as if his neck were about to snap, a pain that bored into bone and heart, countless streams of blood erupting uncontrollably from his throat.

Iron Madman and Rock gave the fallen Yue Yang a thorough, savage beating, thrashing and pummeling him while they laughed like madmen, howling their vows to avenge having been stuffed into flower fertilizer by Yue Yang back in the day…

When they’d found rope from somewhere and were preparing to strangle Yue Yang alive, Yue Yang suddenly spoke up with a suggestion: “Strangling me with rope has no creativity at all. You ought to prepare proper tools — an axe, two saws, and a full set of a master chef’s knives.”

“What?” Rock and Iron Madman were stunned to hear it.

“Don’t you think strangling me alive lets me off too cheap? You ought to first flay me, then chop me into four big pieces — boil the bones for soup, fry the fatty meat down for oil, dice the lean meat and mix it with flour to make steamed cakes, eat them down into your bellies, and once you’re stuffed full, out it comes to feed the fish; then hook the fish up and hang it alive with rope. Now that would satisfy the grudge!” Yue Yang suggested most sincerely.

“Why hang the fish?” Rock asked, a little puzzled.

“If you don’t hang the fish, you could also hold it down under the water and drown it alive!” Yue Yang felt drowning was quite a fine idea too.

“Fish? Drown?” Iron Madman suddenly went dumb, seemingly unable to make sense of the suggestion, and stood there in a blank daze… He and Rock both burst apart with a boom, their whole bodies shattering into ten million points of space-fragments and dispersing before Yue Yang’s eyes.

Yue Yang scrambled up from the ground, wiped at the blood still smeared on his face, and murmured to himself: “More real than the Gate of Life and Death!”

A hand reached out from behind him, offering him a handkerchief.

When Yue Yang had thanked him and taken it to wipe the blood from his face, the hand’s owner slowly emerged behind Yue Yang — none other than the Purple-Gold Marquis, the first formidable rival of Yue Yang’s life. He looked as arrogant as ever, as disdainful of all the world as ever, as though he’d never once been defeated by Yue Yang, never once been surpassed by him — still in the posture of total suppression from the very first time he’d encountered Yue Yang.

He looked down at Yue Yang from on high: “I knew all along that dolts like Rock and Iron Madman could never disturb your mind. But you still lack confidence in yourself — otherwise you wouldn’t have been wounded and bled… Here, if there is a single flaw in your heart, it will be magnified ten million times over. And here, you are the weakest of mortals, without any power at all, able to do nothing, able only to perish beneath the flaws within your own heart. See your blood? That is where your flaw lies. Everything you see is real, including the wounds you take — in this boundless world, there is no such thing as anything false. So — are you ready to die?”

Yue Yang folded that blood-stained handkerchief up with great care. Had he never in the past had any habit of collecting handkerchiefs, one might truly have taken him for a pervert with a fetish!

When the Purple-Gold Marquis had finished, Yue Yang mused a moment, then suddenly broke into a smile: “I’m human — of course there are flaws in my heart. If I were a god, would I still need to come running into this cursed place to take a trial? There’s nothing to fear about having flaws in one’s heart. I met Rock and Iron Madman coming in here because my heart holds memories of the first time I killed and the first time I plotted someone’s murder. Back then I was a mortal with no way to command my own fate, struggling bitterly to survive, using what limited ability and circumstance I had to strike down my enemies, and then climbing upward atop their corpses. I killed my opponents, but I also had a basic moral bottom line, and felt that killing was in truth wrong. But I had no choice. At that time, if I didn’t strive to grow stronger, I couldn’t have everything that came after, couldn’t have the happiness of the future. So in the end I thought it through: a person must walk forward, and must look forward. Whether what one did before was right or wrong, there’s no need to keep it forever engraved in the heart; if you did wrong, there’s no need to regret it — just strive to do well from now on. So long as you don’t commit the same mistake a second time, that is the greatest progress and the greatest success!”

“What you say may be some hard-won insight of your life, may be a thing of great value.” The Purple-Gold Marquis threw back his head and laughed. “But none of it is any use — none of it can help you! Here, you can do nothing; you can only die wretchedly beneath the flaw in your heart… Don’t be in a hurry to deny it. So long as Rock, Iron Madman, and I appear, it proves there’s still a flaw in your heart — and however tiny it may be, you cannot deceive the Law!”

“I never meant to deny it!” Yue Yang drew out his very neatly folded handkerchief, shook his head, and laughed: “I simply don’t care.”

“What?” The Purple-Gold Marquis’s expression flickered with surprise.

“The reason a human is human is precisely that he has weaknesses; the mind is bound to have its flaws. What of it? I don’t care that I have weaknesses, and I don’t care that my mind has flaws! No one is perfect. A few little problems — so what?” Yue Yang gave a shrug of his shoulders, signaling that he could wholly accept himself as he was.

He handed the folded, blood-stained handkerchief back to the Purple-Gold Marquis, who had raised his hand ready to strike Yue Yang dead.

Again and again the Purple-Gold Marquis raised his hand, meaning to shatter Yue Yang’s skull.

In the end, he lowered his hand and took back that blood-stained handkerchief, sighing: “The boundless world is real, but I am illusory. An illusory me cannot exploit your mind’s weakness to take my revenge. I once believed that in this moment I was real, that I could do anything at all — including fulfilling the wish of my life, sending you, this rival of mine, to your death. But sadly, I was wrong. Illusion is illusion. When you refuse to acknowledge it, then I was never resurrected at all — heavens, have I truly never existed?”

The Purple-Gold Marquis looked at his own two hands. Those hands, together with the handkerchief they held, were dissolving into a wisp of smoke, drifting and fading away into the void…

“You did exist — at the very least you were once resurrected, once existed, within the weakness of my heart. Perhaps one day this weakness of mine will vanish, but you did, after all, exist; of that there’s no doubt.” The expression on Yue Yang’s face was like that of a man seeing off an old friend long unseen.

“Real or illusion, I can no longer tell them apart. But to have existed like this — even as a mere image within the weakness of your heart — is already enough to content me. My life was not wholly without meaning; at the very least I exist as a memory of an enemy in another’s growth, as one force that pushed him onward! Think of it — though I, the Purple-Gold Marquis, could achieve nothing in my own life, to have shaped another is not to have passed through this world in vain. Hahahaha!” Amid open, unburdened laughter, the Purple-Gold Marquis’s whole body dissolved into mist and vanished without a trace, leaving no mark behind, as if he’d never appeared at all — and Yue Yang’s own sense of things was likewise as if he’d only just entered, and had never seen Rock, Iron Madman, or the Purple-Gold Marquis at all.

He touched his face — the bloodstains were entirely gone. The mouth Rock had beaten swollen had never been disfigured, had never bled at all.

Everything seemed real, and everything seemed illusion as well… Yue Yang lifted his head and found before him a lovely little girl, standing on a wobbling chair, reaching out with chopsticks to pinch a piece of smoked fish off the table — one hand braced on the table and the other stretched forward, her little bottom stuck up in the air, waist bent low as she leaned out, her small hand clumsily gripping the chopsticks, trying to snag the biggest piece of smoked fish of all.

Yue Yang remembered that she’d succeeded in pinching up the smoked fish, but the fourth mother had given her a light smack and admonished her to sit properly, that she mustn’t be without manners. Instead it had startled her into toppling over.

And from that very day — from the day he’d flung himself over to catch her in his arms — this little girl had become a truly indispensable part of his life, become the darling of his very heart!

There was no fourth mother here, and this was not that room in White Stone City of years past.

In the instant the little girl pinched up the smoked fish from the plate, the boundless world turned into an abyss of unfathomable depth.

Yue Yang saw the little girl, just as she had back then, flash him a triumphant, delighted smile — but before she could steady herself, she went tumbling headfirst into the abyss… This time, there was no more time, as there had been back then, to catch her in a single leap and protect her little head and little bottom before she fell and hurt herself!

What to do?

With the body and frailty of a mortal, was he to watch, helpless, as the little girl fell?

Was he truly, powerlessly, to let this scene become real? Or else — rush over and plunge together with her into that boundless abyss?

“Shuang’er, don’t be afraid — Big Brother’s here!” Yue Yang did not rush out as he had in the past. Instead he slowly closed his eyes, and let both his hands unfurl to their fullest.

(End of Chapter)