Chapter 837: Ten Thousand Years Later — The Blade Falls Again
Everything became clear to the Lion Heart King in an instant.
The reason Tiangui was so absurdly powerful — beyond the Ripple Talent and Shockwave Domain — was that there were two of them.
If not for the Third Young Master revealing it, this secret would have stayed buried beneath the bodies of the defeated, exactly as it always had. But even knowing the truth — how was the Third Young Master supposed to defeat Tiangui and Tianyao working in concert? Twin brothers, identical in appearance, possessing the same Ripple Talent and Shockwave Domain, combined with their Energy-Draining Parasite war beasts — completely nullifying Lieyan and Tianzhu’s attacks, and his own Sun strike that had done nothing at all.
What would it actually take to defeat Tiangui and Tianyao?
The Lion Heart King hadn’t even had time to form the question before the shadow of death swept over him.
A fist drove into his back.
At the exact same moment, another fist struck from the front — directly over his heart.
Both at once. Tiangui and Tianyao, these twin brothers, had chosen him as their first target rather than the Third Young Master. The Lion Heart King was stunned. The Sovereign intent he had just comprehended wavered for an instant. He chose not to retaliate. He absorbed both blows with his body, swallowed the blood rising in his throat, and moved away from the spot as fast as he could.
Coming the other way, a shadow passed him going in the opposite direction — the Lion Heart King caught it clearly. Tianzhu. The same Tianzhu who had just been sent flying by one of Tiangui’s punches was heading straight back. With two of them now — was he trying to get himself killed?
“Returning what you gave me.”
Tianzhu, trailing arcs of lightning across the sky, his fist carrying the force of thunder and ten thousand kilograms of momentum, moved at a speed a hundred times faster than sound — threading past the Lion Heart King with perfect precision and driving into the first crimson-haired figure’s left ear.
The blow was identical in every way to the one before — the technique, the target, the element of surprise. The only difference was the power behind it and the speed of delivery. This was clearly the full-force strike Tianzhu had been building toward all along.
The hit connected. For a moment, rings of energy began to ripple outward from the struck ear.
And then — they stopped. Dead.
The Lion Heart King turned sharply and saw it — pinpoints of starlight spreading outward from Yueyang’s body, filling the entire space until it resembled a night sky, settling everything in the most absolute stillness. Even energy vibrations could not propagate within it.
He understood at once. Tiangui’s Shockwave Domain had collided with the Third Young Master’s starfield-shaped domain — and the verdict was clear. The Third Young Master’s domain had shattered Tiangui’s.
With the Shockwave Domain gone, the previously invincible Tiangui flew from Tianzhu’s punch like a stone from a sling, driving deep into the ground.
Tiangui wasn’t invincible after all — break the Shockwave Domain, and he was just a person.
In an instant, everything the Lion Heart King had felt extinguished in him blazed back to life a thousandfold.
The other figure — Tianyao, looking precisely like Tiangui — went cold with fury. He drove a devastating kick into Tianzhu’s midsection. As Tianzhu coughed blood and was sent stumbling, Tianyao closed instantly, raising both fists, erupting with everything he had — ready to crush Tianzhu’s skull.
The Lion Heart King cursed inwardly. He had been too absorbed watching the Third Young Master and Tiangui’s domain clash, and missed the window to intervene. If Tianzhu — who had been doing significant damage — died here, the entire battle would shift against them.
He pushed himself to move at maximum speed, but the distance was too great, already too late to help —
He could only watch helplessly as Tianyao’s fist came hammering down.
Clang.
Something hard deflected the blow.
A figure had burst out from among the rubble, Dragon Shield blazing in hand, planting itself between Tianyao and Tianzhu — catching the lethal strike.
The Dragon Emperor.
The force of Tianyao’s blow sent both of the Dragon Emperor’s arms numb to the bone. His organs lurched. A mouthful of blood sprayed forward.
Tianyao’s second fist was already rising — and the Lion Heart King arrived, Sun blazing white-hot in hand. Without the Shockwave Domain’s protection, Tianyao no longer dared absorb this one head-on with the old arrogance. He faded back like smoke. The Lion Heart King’s strike missed — but he threw back his head and let out a roar of pure, released elation, because every drop of his confidence had returned.
“Golden Feathers.”
A pair of enormous griffin wings grew from the Lion Heart King’s back, folding closed into a sphere.
They wrapped protectively around the Dragon Emperor and Tianzhu, then exploded outward — blasting the ambushing crimson-haired figure back three full steps. Millions of golden feathers erupted like a storm, driving Tiangui back and forming a field of ten million razor-edged golden feathers as a protective domain. The Lion Heart King leveled his gaze at the crimson-haired Tiangui, challenge burning in his voice: “I have a domain too. Let’s settle this.”
Tiangui nodded. “As you wish.”
But in the very instant those words left his mouth, Tianyao appeared silently behind the Lion Heart King and drove a heavy punch into his ribs. As the Lion Heart King winced and shifted involuntarily, Tiangui’s fist slammed into his jaw.
Boom.
Tianzhu, both hands condensing a crackling ball of thunder, drove it through the gap at the other side of the Lion Heart King’s waist, punching it straight into Tiangui’s armpit. The Dragon Emperor’s shield came crashing down on Tianyao’s right kneecap — pain shot through Tianyao’s body with enough force to make him tremble. With both brothers momentarily occupied, the Lion Heart King narrowly avoided the most lethal of the hits. And this time he didn’t try to pull back — he retaliated in furious counter-attack.
Now he understood: if he fought alongside Tianzhu and the Dragon Emperor, covering each other’s gaps, there was a chance against Tiangui and Tianyao’s synchronized assault. Alone, even without the Shockwave Domain, fighting two opponents simultaneously was not something any of them could manage solo.
The Lion Heart King’s energy erupted. His Golden Feather Domain blazed like solar wind at full force, driving both brothers back.
He pressed a hand against his jaw and the burning pain in his ribs and quietly counted himself lucky — without Tianzhu and Long Xuan’s timely intervention, he would have been badly beaten.
Meanwhile, the brothers themselves — despite the relentless pounding from the Lion Heart King, Tianzhu, and the Dragon Emperor — showed not a trace of pain on their faces. The energy damage from Tianzhu’s punch through Tiangui’s left ear rippled across his muscles and was immediately absorbed and dispersed. The residual force of Tianzhu’s power that had lodged in the ear canal was sucked clean by the Energy-Draining Parasite war beast, until not a thread of it remained. The parasite even fed some of that absorbed energy back to Tiangui, partially restoring him.
“Everyone together,” the Lion Heart King said.
He hadn’t said those words to anyone in nearly a thousand years.
But against the Tiangui-Tianyao brothers — going in one at a time was pure stupidity.
After all, the brothers had always fought two against one. That was their way.
The starlight around Yueyang grew denser.
Constellation after constellation took shape, each one giving rise to new energies, new enhancements, new effects flowing outward across the field.
Everyone present — including the Lion Heart King and the Tiangui brothers — assumed Yueyang was using a Starfield Domain. Only Tianzhu and the Dragon Emperor knew the truth: Yueyang’s domain was Creation. He was simulating Night Empress’s Starfield Domain, generating a star-filled sky through the power of Creation.
The Lion Heart King’s confidence had become something explosive. The Third Young Master’s starfield domain — the longer it held, the stronger its enhancements grew. With support like that, who needed to fear Tiangui?
The Tiangui brothers, feeling their domain steadily suppressed and their power continuously sapped, privately knew things were turning against them.
They needed to end this quickly — or face defeat.
Both sides abandoned all restraint and hurled everything at each other. Fists rained down on vital points. And in the rubble of Stargazing Fortress, the combined ferocity of five supreme-level fighters triggered an explosion unlike any seen before — four suns, two thunder balls, and a dragon flame sphere colliding simultaneously with eight blood-red energy spheres, detonating in an earth-shattering, sky-breaking cataclysm.
City Lord Qianhu came back to consciousness amid the aftershocks and found himself not dead — though he had been thrown ten kilometers away, landing on a burning warship. His steward — whose survival instinct put cockroaches to shame — had also survived, body embedded vertically in the deck. Better off, at least, than the Minotaur Lima, who was dangling upside-down from a mast, drenched in blood, more out than in. The steward was at least snoring.
Qianhu labored upright, ignoring the blood running down his face, and forced his eyes toward where the Stargazing Fortress had stood.
The Stargazing Fortress no longer existed.
In its place was an enormous concave crater — five kilometers across in every direction.
The Tairen Queen and the others were scattered in crumpled heaps seven or eight kilometers out, spread across the ground, uncertain whether any of them still breathed.
Three people still stood in the entirety of what remained.
Yueyang.
The Tiangui-Tianyao brothers.
The brothers were injured — but considerably better off than the Lion Heart King, Tianzhu, and the others.
The Lion Heart King looked like a plucked peacock, his wings bare and stripped. He was fighting with every ounce of remaining will to get back to his feet, but the ribs jutting from his chest and the ringing in his skull kept dragging him back down. A short distance away, Tianzhu had actually managed to sit cross-legged on the ground and was trying to recover — seemingly intent on fighting another round the moment he could. The Dragon Emperor leaned on his shield, his expression grim and composed as he wiped blood from the corner of his mouth.
Yueyang floated in the air, one hand holding the stunned Bi Lv. She still had her arms wrapped around a chest that gleamed with treasure — unconscious, yet apparently still following his instructions.
From high in the sky above, descending like a celestial figure drifting down from the heavens, came Luohua.
The moment she appeared, a fragrance filled the air. Flower petals fell like snow in every direction.
The brutal devastation of the battlefield seemed to transform at once into a scented garden just by her presence.
“Thank goodness I ran fast enough — that was a close call!” Luohua patted her chest with evident relief. Even the sheer veil across her face hadn’t been disturbed — in fact, not a speck of dust clung to her. Since successfully fusing the Swift Fang Aurora, Spiral Polar Aurora, and Light Dragon Spirit, and then breaking through in Yueyang’s energy field to glimpse the divine realm, her strength had been advancing at a pace that left everything behind.
“Die.” The blood-soaked, no-longer-so-invincible Tiangui pointed a finger. A fierce blood-red beam shot forward at devastating speed, aimed directly at the center of Luohua’s brow.
“Too slow.” Luohua raised one hand.
Eight dragon-headed aurora streams spiraled together into a curved ring, circling a ninth and largest dragon-headed stream at the center.
It moved a thousand times faster than the blood beam, swallowing the red light entirely before continuing straight into Tiangui’s face. The speed and force of it made the Lion Heart King’s eye twitch visibly. Because what Luohua had launched with that casual raise of her hand — the Death Aurora — had sent Tiangui flying ten thousand meters away with a single strike.
For the first time, Tiangui screamed in pain.
Not even Tianzhu’s earlier thunder-fist through his ear, force ringing through his skull, had made him cry out.
The Dragon Emperor smiled quietly. “That’s what you can do when Sovereign intent is channeled into attack.”
The Lion Heart King snapped his head around. “What?”
The answer hit him a second later. The veiled woman’s attack wasn’t stronger than his own Sun — so why had it hurt Tiangui? Because her energy column was saturated through and through with her killing intent. Her will and her attack energy were a single unified thing. Tiangui’s Ripple Talent couldn’t neutralize this kind of damage — every bit of the force had landed, nothing absorbed, nothing dispersed, and that was why the pain had been real.
As the Lion Heart King worked through this, it felt as though a much larger window had opened in front of him. Something became luminously clear.
True unshakeable Sovereign intent was pervasive — inseparable from state of mind or action, always present as a unified whole.
He himself had only just barely touched the threshold of it.
Tianyao appeared behind Luohua. His ambush technique had caught the Lion Heart King, Tianzhu, and the others off guard repeatedly — there should have been no defending against it.
Luohua didn’t turn around. Her fragrance intensified. A Snow Fox Girl manifested, sweeping out a fragrance-drunk energy vortex that enveloped Tianyao completely. The vortex flickered and disappeared — and three seconds later, the powerful Tianyao was teleported ten thousand meters away, crashing into the ground in complete disarray.
“An attack with no force behind it?” The Lion Heart King stared, dumbfounded. This approach to combat had obliterated everything he had ever understood about fighting.
“Sacred Beast intent, a unique talent, and teleportation — combined,” the Dragon Emperor said with a quiet laugh.
“Just a Sacred Beast achieving that — if it were a Divine Beast, that would mean—” The Lion Heart King felt a very genuine need to update his understanding of the world.
“Divine Beast intent when fully unleashed represents death itself,” the Dragon Emperor said with certainty.
As though confirming those exact words, Tiangui condensed two blood-red energy spheres and prepared to finish Luohua from a distance. He had identified the pattern — this opponent’s cultivation base wasn’t truly formidable. Her realm was high, her attack speed fast — but her actual power hadn’t grown into her realm yet. Just like that Third Young Master. Below Sky-rank Level 3, no matter how fast the attack, when fully released energy at Sky-rank Level 6 and above created a shockwave of that magnitude, anything below that threshold would simply be erased.
In the instant Tiangui released the spheres —
A crack split the sky.
As though some invisible blade had traveled through time and space and divided the heavens in two.
Tianyao’s wild cry rang out. Tiangui spun around in shock — and found behind him a hundred-meter-tall golden serpent demon, swinging a colossal golden blade, cleaving from sky to earth in a direct downward strike aimed at his skull.
The scene was achingly familiar.
As though ten thousand years had dissolved, and the strike from that ancient battlefield had traveled through time itself to reappear before him.
As the Lion Heart King, Dragon Emperor, City Lord Qianhu, and the others watched — a small serpent demon loli materialized from nowhere.
She raised her blade, and with a motion that would not be stopped, cut Tiangui diagonally from shoulder to waist.
No talent mattered. No domain mattered. No war beast or artifact had any effect.
Just as it had been then — a six-armed serpent demon war god’s image appearing, a single stroke that split the heavens and the earth.
The only difference was that in the original battle, the blood-soaked serpent demon war god had been utterly exhausted — one stroke that had instantly killed dozens of Tiangui’s companions, but by the time the force reached Tiangui himself, it had diminished just enough to stop short of death, letting the critically wounded Tiangui escape with his life.
Today the strike returned — at full power, at absolute peak, reproducing that ancient killing blow with nothing held back.
This time, there would be no luck like last time.
In the crimson-haired Tiangui’s eyes — boundless despair, and terror.
It was over.