Xiao Nu watched as Pandora’s divine force scattered away, piece by piece, vanishing before her.

Her heart broke.

She wanted to stop Pandora from leaving — but her struggling was useless. No matter what she did, she couldn’t break through the protective barrier Pandora had placed around her. Faced with Xiao Nu’s pleas, Pandora — who had made her peace with life and death — responded only with a smile.

The immeasurable calamity god-force dissipated. But by then Yueyang’s World had expanded to a range of ten thousand meters — and before the calamity force could fully dissolve, the World consumed it ravenously. Under normal circumstances this would have been impossible. But Pandora was scattering her divine aspect through voluntary dissolution, and her calamity force was spreading as a masterless, chaotic energy surge that the World devoured without resistance.

Pandora’s act was something Yueyang — still focused intently on separating the resentment energy from Desire Valley’s Laws — detected immediately.

He startled — then understood.

Fury erupted in him.

Even if you want to sacrifice yourself for me, you could at least have asked first. Since when did you get to make that decision on your own? Does my life require someone else’s sacrifice to continue?

No.

Absolutely not.

“Stop. You don’t have my permission. Don’t think you can act on your own here. Did I ever say you could take your own life? I didn’t say it — which means you are not allowed to die.” Yueyang’s rage was complete. He abandoned his work of separating the resentment from the Laws and charged toward Pandora at full speed.

“Farewell — I’ve understood now, the meaning of death and sacrifice. Farewell, and please be happy…”

Pandora’s voice and image dissolved in the divine light.

In her final second.

She maintained the most beautiful expression she could manage.

She didn’t want the moment of her departure to feel anything less than perfect to him. It had to be perfect — she had to leave at her most beautiful, give him an eternal image of beauty to hold onto.

Yueyang came at her like a madman.

He plunged into the divine light and threw his arms wide, trying to hold the scattering Pandora within them.

When he realized that his actions were only accelerating the dissolution of her consciousness, he raised his sword to the sky in furious desperation.

Scarlet Heaven Tempering.

He had never unleashed Scarlet Heaven Tempering at this magnitude. The blade shot straight to the highest heavens, cleaving apart heaven and earth — ripping Desire Valley’s Laws and his own World apart in a single instant, attempting to break Pandora free from the valley’s seal. In his single-minded effort to preserve what remained of Pandora’s consciousness, he forgot entirely about his own danger. The ten-thousand-year torrent of resentment energy crashed into him with full force. His soul shuddered. His organs buckled on the edge of rupturing. A mouthful of blood burst from his lips, scattering through the air like scattered flowers.

Watching Yueyang throw himself forward without care, taking the full crushing blow of the resentment force — the dissolving Pandora could no longer hold her smile. A single divine tear slid silently down.

I sacrificed myself for him. And he throws himself into harm’s way for me.

Is this what the ancient god called true love?

Black Returning Burial!

Ignoring the critical damage to his body, Yueyang raised the Black Returning Burial sword.

He drove it into the earth, letting the sword energy reach nine depths below the ground — fully separating his World from Desire Valley.

Had Yueyang used the Three Realms Compass at this moment instead of attempting to save Pandora, he might have escaped Desire Valley’s Laws entirely. With both swords, he had successfully carved out a space belonging purely to his own divine consciousness.

He could have fled. The death prophecy would almost certainly have been broken.

He didn’t.

He stayed, and poured every last drop of his strength into a third sword.

White Frost Bloom.

Countless clean, cold radiances bloomed in his hands. The White Frost Bloom carried no harm toward Pandora’s dissolving consciousness — instead, it wrapped the fading sphere of divine light in a pure embrace. Yueyang’s body ignited with Nirvana Flames. He didn’t know whether he could use Nirvana Flames to bring Pandora back the way he had brought Sky Fire Phantom back — but he had to try.

Even if the chance was one in ten thousand. Even one in a billion. He was not going to watch Pandora die in front of him while he did nothing.

“Come back to me!”

Yueyang roared.

In his desperation to protect Pandora, he forgot everything else.

But the ten-thousand-year torrent of resentment energy overwhelmed him completely, and he was struck down.

Blood poured from his mouth. In the moment before he lost consciousness, he instinctively and desperately called upon the Sacred Grimoire — a Grimoire he had never once successfully summoned.

He didn’t even know why he reached for it in a moment of near-death when no summit of power should have been enough. It had nothing to do with reason. It was pure instinct. The instinct of someone who refused to stop hoping.

Hope.

It will work.

A person must never give up hope. As long as there is hope, success will come.

Let her live. Let her live—

Yueyang fell into deep, lightless darkness.

The entire Desire Valley transformed.

A divine radiance descended — beyond words to describe, its majesty and presence far surpassing the Calamity Goddess Pandora herself, so immense that every living thing in Desire Valley fell unconscious in an instant. The most deeply fallen and corrupt tree-people were simply obliterated by it, their very souls erased without trace. Desire Valley’s Laws collided with this divine force — producing a ripple invisible to any eye, the two forces locked in a confrontation that neither could fully overcome.

Divine light bloomed across Yueyang’s body, more radiant by a hundredfold than the sun, the interior completely impossible to discern.

A phoenix’s perfect, crystalline cry rang through the entire world.

Two columns of Nirvana Fire broke through the divine light and entered Yueyang’s body, restoring his critically damaged form at extraordinary speed.

The explosion of Pandora’s ten-thousand-year resentment energy, combined with the World that had been pushed to its limit by the calamity force, formed a monstrous composite energy — enough to annihilate all of heaven and earth. Then Desire Valley’s Laws triggered a maximum backlash simultaneously.

Had these three forces detonated together, not just Yueyang, Xiao Nu, and Pandora’s remaining consciousness — the entirety of Desire Valley would have been obliterated.

A sword appeared.

A hundred zhang tall. Darkness-black and narrow-edged. Without a single glint of light.

Standing between heaven and earth, absorbing ten thousand forces. There was nothing it could not do. When it rotated, it reversed the Laws of heaven and earth — and against it, nothing in the world had any opening to exploit. This was the true Returning Burial Sword. Yueyang’s own Black Returning Burial carried impressive power — but compared to this, it was the difference between a stone on a hillside and a mountain peak. If Yueyang’s was a river, this was a lake — an ocean.

One stroke halted the calamity force, the ten-thousand-year resentment, and Desire Valley’s operating Laws simultaneously.

One stroke separated all three entirely.

Profound beyond all expression — a stroke of wondrous elegance that split apart three forces already beginning to detonate. What Yueyang might have needed a year to accomplish was achieved in a single motion.

The Returning Burial Sword continued operating. Then Frost Bloom appeared.

A thousand times, a million times more luminous than Yueyang’s own Frost Bloom — the purest, most pristine cold energy in existence, taking the form of the Frost Bloom Sword.

Pandora’s ten-thousand-year resentment was like a clay ox entering the sea — dissolving completely in the pure radiance, gradually, fully converting to attribute-less chaotic energy. The Frost Bloom Sword, which expelled evil, purged corruption, and severed darkness — swept through the air, dissolving ten thousand years of grievance — then drove its point into the fading sphere of Pandora’s divine consciousness. It carried the light-sphere forward, sweeping it through the arc of Yueyang’s bloodstained exhalation in the air — and then gently, precisely, pressed its tip to the center of Xiao Nu’s brow.

Xiao Nu’s body gave a slight tremble.

Then divine light erupted from her.

The Frost Bloom Sword vanished.

Ten thousand years of resentment remained only as a mass of chaos.

And the Returning Burial Sword disappeared the instant the calamity god-force had been fully converted — a second and larger mass of chaotic energy followed the first into Yueyang’s body. The World outside him contracted rapidly — from its ten-thousand-meter span, it drew back down to a hundred meters, merging with his domain.

The Creation World Bead needed no direction from Yueyang’s consciousness — it flew out on its own.

It absorbed both masses of chaotic energy and compressed them to an infinitely small point — like the origin of a universe.

The Desire Valley Law energy, no longer meeting any resistance in the wake of the collision, reclaimed the entire space. Without any opposition, without any residual connection to resentment or fluctuation from Pandora’s will, it moved swiftly back to equilibrium — returning to the state it had held at the very moment Desire Valley was first created.

My head hurts.

When Yueyang came to, he found himself back in the Grimoire World.

Xiao Nu was lying on his chest, deep in happy dreams, a smile curved at the corner of her lips — as though she were dreaming of something wonderful.

Alive. And back in the Grimoire World? He remembered that in the moment before he lost consciousness, he had instinctively called for the Sacred Grimoire. Had it been the Phoenix Sisters who came to his rescue?

Yueyang reached out with his senses — and very nearly lost his jaw.

The Creation World Bead shimmered brilliantly. At some point it had absorbed tens or even a hundred times more chaotic energy than his own body contained. And it had condensed itself to an infinitely small origin point. The World had also contracted — yet it was utterly unlike before. Somehow, while he was unconscious, it had fused with his Creation Domain. The World that had never once accepted his direction now felt inseparable from him — as though it would respond to his will entirely.

Whether it was now war beast or domain, Yueyang couldn’t say. Perhaps this was the very beginning of a personal divine aspect taking form.

But what shocked him most was not the change in himself.

It was Xiao Nu.

She now carried a divine force that Yueyang couldn’t begin to explain — purer than the divine force of a Divine Envoy or Divine General, carrying something that could only be called divinity, wondrous beyond comparison, yet apparently entirely non-combat in nature.

What had happened?

Had Pandora been reborn in Xiao Nu?

And where was Xiao Nu then — her own delicate body and soul, how had they absorbed Pandora’s divine aspect? Had she been erased?

“Master’s awake! Xiao Nu was so scared — everything is all right now!” Yueyang stirred, and the Xiao Nu lying against his chest seemed to sense it and woke. She rubbed her big eyes with an adorable sleepiness — then the moment she saw Yueyang, her entire face lit up, laughing and nearly crying at once, patting her chest in exaggerated relief.

One look at her and the knot in Yueyang’s chest loosened. This little creature was exactly the same as always. Still his same sweet Xiao Nu.

“What happened to your forehead?” Yueyang chose not to bring up Pandora directly, gesturing instead toward the divine mark at Xiao Nu’s brow.

“Hmm?”

Xiao Nu ran to a mirror and let out a startled exclamation. “My forehead is hurt? Oh — it doesn’t look like a wound. Oh no, I can’t rub it off!”

Yueyang was too exhausted to comment.

That mark was the signature of a god. The exclusive symbol of a divine aspect and divine nature. Plenty of people would want something like that and could never have it. While Xiao Nu was scrubbing at it in concentration, a consciousness stirred from somewhere deep in her soul and reached Yueyang’s mind. He understood immediately — Pandora. She hadn’t died. At minimum, her soul hadn’t been completely destroyed. Her divine consciousness was still there, dwelling within Xiao Nu’s body.

How?

Yueyang asked through his mind. Pandora herself wasn’t entirely clear: “I don’t know. I thought I had died too — but when I woke, I found myself fused with Xiao Nu. Maybe this is what the ancient god meant by eternal life.”

Yueyang broke into a slight sweat at the idea. “You’re all right with being fused with Xiao Nu? Should we try to find a way to separate you?”

Pandora seemed genuinely happy. “I don’t mind at all. I fear loneliness — being together with Xiao Nu is the best possible outcome. Besides — the Calamity Goddess no longer exists in this world. There’s only Pandora, a love-stupid girl. Once Xiao Nu’s body adjusts to the divine force, I’ll be able to come out and talk to you properly. When I do — if you don’t mind that I’m a complete fool at this — would you teach me what love actually is?”

She drifted back into sleep with a sweetness that was beyond expression.

Yueyang could feel it, even through her sleep: her heart was full to overflowing with something warm.

Perhaps this was what she had spent ten thousand years searching for without ever finding. She had known confusion, and she had known madness. She had known grief, and she had known hatred. But after coming to understand life and death, she had finally found the thing she had always longed for.

The happiness that even death could not take away.