The truth was that they all believed Yue Yang — Yue Yu, her little brother’s staunchest defender, most of all.
They had only questioned him on purpose, to knock him down a peg and stop him getting too pleased with himself. The sight of him standing there so thoroughly cornered even set Princess Qianqian laughing out loud.
The Tunlong spear had spirit in it.
Given the right stroke of luck later on, evolving into a divine artifact wasn’t out of the question. Yue Yang already had Taotie, Waning Crescent Moon and the Dragon Sisters’ Human Divine Soldier in hand, and for once he was generous with it: he offered the spear up to see who wanted it most, and whoever the weapon then acknowledged would contract with Tunlong.
“I already have Dawn Angel.” Yue Yu waved it off with a smile. She knew perfectly well what an advantage a divine artifact in hand was, but Tunlong didn’t suit her.
“Swords are the true path.” That was Princess Qianqian’s position.
“That barbaric, bloodthirsty hacking and stabbing at close quarters is not this Empress’s preference.” Fengxian Meiren liked blasting people with heavenly thunder from a distance. Melee held no interest for her whatsoever — short of a true god, who would bet everything on surviving her Divine Punishment lightning?
The Southern Wilderness Demon King, jade pipa cradled in her arms, was as fanatical a treasure-hoarder as Yue Yang, but this time she mastered the collecting urge. A spear like Tunlong shouldn’t be casually shelved as an ornament; better that it go out and fight, especially now, with the Divine War breaking open and every extra advantage worth having.
Sick Beauty rarely went into battle, and neither did Xiao Nu. Neither was in consideration.
Luohua had Death Aurora and the Nirvana Sun Flower.
Yi Nan had the Spirit Mirror.
Liuye had the Crescent Moon Necklace and no need of Tunlong.
She simply wasn’t yet strong enough to bring out the true might of the Crescent Moon Necklace, top-grade divine artifact that it was. Besides, spears were not her strength; her way of fighting was the fused teleportation and soul-purification she achieved together with the Barrier-Piercing Deer.
Xiayi and Hailan were weaker still in a fight, and they had the Sky Dragon Dagger and the Sea Emperor Halberd besides.
They shook their heads and declined before Yue Yang had so much as looked their way.
Not needed.
Corps Commander Lieyan pretended not to have noticed. Except at night — when she shrank down to something like a twin sister of Emerald Lord Bi Lv, the two of them quietly waiting on a certain wolf — she was a giantess, considerably taller than A-Man had been in her earliest days. Ordinary weapons were simply no use to her. Even the Black Prison King’s Cloud-Bursting Thunder Hammer looked as ridiculous in her hand as a single fat chopstick in a normal person’s, and handled no better…
If she absolutely had to carry a weapon, she was better off with the colossal rod Yue Yang had made out of God-Slaying Mystic Metal — nine point nine metres long, over a hundred tonnes. The Sky-Facing Rod.
When he first made that giant thing, Yue Yang had meant to call it the Golden-Hooped Rod.
Then he thought about it a moment longer.
Suppose he one day ended up on some Eastern Immortal Clan’s turf and ran into a certain hairy-faced, thunder-god-jawed monkey, and Brother Monkey hauled him into court over the patent — what then? Knocking something off was fine, but there was no sense being blatant about it. So he changed the name on the spot: not the Golden-Hooped Rod, but the Heaven-Equalling Rod.
The thing couldn’t change size at will like the genuine article anyway, much less shrink to an embroidery needle to be tucked behind an ear. It had come out enormous and stayed that way, fixed forever after.
And Sky-Facing Rod wasn’t a bad name either. A certain wildly stream-of-consciousness master had written a whole series about heroes, with a gentle blade and a stunning spear and a sky-facing rod running through it, and it was impressive as hell.
As the saying goes, one measure of raw strength beats ten of technique. With Corps Commander Lieyan’s kind of power, holding a hundred-tonne Sky-Facing Rod —
one swing straight down —
and even if it didn’t quite match Brother Monkey’s, the result wouldn’t be far off.
Tunlong was no fit for Corps Commander Lieyan at all… Bing’er picked it up and spun a flourish with it, and just as everyone assumed the girl meant to keep it, she turned her hand and passed it to the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady, who was holding the panda girl Niuniu.
“Haven’t you been learning spear technique from your brother lately?” The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady was taken aback.
“I have the Energy-Draining Bracelet and the extreme-speed sub-divine artifact ring. I don’t need Tunlong. And my techniques are built around leg work — I only trained with the spear to get familiar with it and learn to break it.” Yue Bing waved both hands. She had always cultivated strictly to Yue Yang’s requirements and plans, and she fought the same way. Never mind a quasi-divine artifact like Tunlong; even for a top-grade divine artifact, she would never have asked without Yue Yang’s approval.
“The truth is, there’s nobody among us better suited to the Tunlong spear than you.” Princess Qianqian settled it in one sentence. “The spear you’ve been fighting with is good enough, but it isn’t Tunlong. And if it evolves into a divine artifact, we’ll never have to go hunting for a divine spear again.”
“Even with Tunlong, I’m afraid I still won’t be much help.” There was a note of shame in the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady’s voice.
But the moment she caught the words coming through from Yue Yang’s mind — which is exactly why you’ll have to work twice as hard at dual cultivation — her jade face went scarlet and she shot him a glare, terrified that Princess Qianqian and the others would catch it.
Because of the mind-ribbon link, minds touched easily even when nobody was trying.
Especially when a certain wolf had something wicked going on in his head.
Everyone tended to pick that up without difficulty.
Fortunately, with Bing’er, Bao’er and Tianzai around, Yue Yang was for once playing the “proper gentleman” — thoughts pure, not a crooked notion anywhere — and the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady escaped disaster.
Next came the communion and the contract. The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady came nowhere near Chiqiu for strength, but her potential was beyond anything Chiqiu could match. As heir of the Night Clan, she was a junior Her Majesty valued highly, personally selected as one of Yue Yang’s brides — proof enough of her quality. Enormous potential; a summoning grimoire already evolved to platinum grade; the little panda girl Niuniu, who would be a Sacred Beast at minimum and might one day evolve into a divine beast; and, under Yue Yang’s guidance, comprehension of Sovereign Intent along with several glimpses of the true divine realm… A master like that was not one a weapon whose spirit had only just been born could refuse.
Ten million rays of light flashed, and the whole Grimoire World sank into a sea of radiance.
With Yue Yang’s help, the Taiyan Divine Power held inside Tunlong
did not disperse with the change of master.
On the contrary, he sealed it more securely into the spear, binding it tightly to three ancient rune-diagram formations — “Stillness,” “Eruption” and “Guidance” — so that the moment the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady entered a combat state, she could open that Taiyan Divine Power at will and kill with it.
What delighted her most was that her war beast Iris could be raised again.
Iris had begun as a Blazing Divine Eagle at heaven rank three.
Yue Yang had used Ground-origin Yin Flame to lift her to the peak of heaven rank four, infinitely close to heaven rank five.
Dozens of great battles later she had long since crossed into heaven rank five… but without sufficient intelligence, an ordinary war beast’s ceiling was heaven rank five, and that was the whole of its life.
There were rare exceptions, war beasts pushed higher by special means — Ji Wuri’s heaven-rank-eight Black Sun, for one. But the success rate was poor. A beast that couldn’t bear it would burst all too easily, or come out deformed, or suffer some other irreversible failure instead.
Where Iris was concerned, the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady had largely given up hope of any higher realm.
Her focus had gone into raising the little panda girl Niuniu.
Not every war beast got the chance little sister Death Reaper Mantis had, of passing through the Rebirth Gate — and not every beast that passed through it came out grown for the better.
Yue Yang had plenty of divine bodies and divine blood and treasures of every kind, but the attributes didn’t match and none of them produced the needed effect.
For a Blazing Divine Eagle that had already fused with Ground-origin Yin Flame, this was all the more true.
Until the Taiyan Divine Power appeared.
Only then did Yue Yang finally have a divine power suited to remaking the Blazing Divine Eagle Iris’s body a second time…
Princess Qianqian understood perfectly well what the process would involve — the coordination of husband-and-wife dual cultivation was an unavoidable foundation of it — so she pointedly hauled Bing’er off to train, sparing her brother’s good fortune the interference of a curious girl. Luohua dragged Bao’er away, Fengxian Meiren seized Tianzai, and the rest, the Southern Wilderness Demon King among them, pulled grinning faces at the scarlet-cheeked Drunken Cat Imperial Lady and filed out one after another.
Yue Yu meant to go too, but Sick Beauty held her back.
Anyone else could leave. The one elder sister who possessed the water-gentle power — the only person who could wake Yue Yang and settle him when his reason slipped — could not. With Xue Wuxia absent, nobody but Yue Yu could call him back out of that deep sleep, and nobody else could neutralise his overweening yang with water-gentle force.
Nothing to be done about it. Who told her to get saddled with a little brother like this? Yue Yu simply turned her back and declined to watch the parts that needed censoring.
Though with the mind-ribbon link, watching or not made no difference at all; she witnessed it as though with her own eyes and felt it as though it were happening to her.
Turning away.
Was only a matter of the honourable big sister’s face.
The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady set her embarrassment aside and gave herself to the dual cultivation.
At the moment their minds became one.
She summoned the Blazing Divine Eagle Iris.
Violet-blue flame of an absolute stillness burned without a sound. The eagle rose, climbed to a great height, then stooped and dived at the point of the Tunlong spear that Yue Yang and the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady were holding up together.
Taiyan Divine Power burst out of it like a volcano.
Straight into the Blazing Divine Eagle.
Without Yue Yang’s Sovereign Intent shielding her, the eagle would have been annihilated inside that divine power within seconds, leaving nothing but a burning knot of Ground-origin Yin Flame.
Violet-blue Iris let out a cry of agony, and at the instant her will and body were about to give out, Yue Yang threw a thread of Nirvana Flame into her soul, let her fuse with that thread of nirvana force, then sent a pillar of nirvana fire roaring up to burn her body into rebirth.
With that thread of Nirvana Flame in her, the soul of the Blazing Divine Eagle Iris held under the crushing weight of the Taiyan Divine Power — guttering, but never in danger of going out.
Her body, a wingspan of more than twenty metres, burst apart under the Taiyan Divine Power. Before the Ground-origin Yin Flame could erupt in full it was wrapped in the supreme Nirvana Flame, and the two, together with part of the Taiyan Divine Power, fused perfectly into something newborn that had never existed in the world before: the Supreme-origin Yin Flame.
The ruined body was reborn and remade inside the gathered pillar of nirvana fire.
Her flame plumage turned light and nimble.
Longer, glittering without pause.
The old eagle’s head was born anew in the Nirvana Flame into something like a woman’s head crowned in eagle form, and the vast body began, gradually, to move toward a human one. Countless fire-feathers hung motionless in the air, stretching out long, forming four pairs of fire wings.
Apart from the eagle’s feet, even the pair of hands came close to human arms — except that the nails were extremely long, sharp and hooked.
“A Sacred Beast? My Iris will have her day as a Sacred Beast too?” A ripple went through the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady’s mind before she could stop it. The joy was simply too much for her.
“Agh!” Deep in total concentration, Yue Yang lost her coordination and took the mental backlash at once. His head felt ready to split open.
“Quickly — still your thoughts and match him…” Seeing the accident, Yue Yu forgot everything else and turned back, wrapped her arms around Yue Yang, sank herself wholly into the sea of his consciousness, took a share of his pain, and eased into him the water-gentle yin force that brought him more calm and quiet than anything else could.
All at once he steadied, returning to that fully concentrated dual-cultivation state, and fixed the Blazing Divine Eagle Iris in the finest condition she had reached, locking the rebirth and the remaking into place.
When it was all done, Yue Yang couldn’t hold out a moment longer. He collapsed into Yue Yu’s arms and fell into a dead, snoring sleep.
There is nothing more exhausting than the rebirth and remaking of a life.
Given the choice, Yue Yang would sooner have fought three Shafengs at once than remake a life with Nirvana Flame. The stronger the life being reworked and the higher the target, the more of his heart’s strength it burned. And this was for the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady’s Iris — not A-Man, not one of his own war beasts, and certainly not a life-guardian war beast that could never die and where failure wouldn’t have mattered… He had gritted his teeth and seen it through because he wanted her to have a powerful support before the panda girl Niuniu grew up, so that she would stop feeling she was holding everyone back.
Apart from young Yue Bing, the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady was probably the most diligent cultivator among them — harder-working even than that training maniac Princess Qianqian.
She didn’t want to hold Yue Yang back, and she had been drilling herself to the bone over it.
But training, however bitter and however exhausting, still takes time. Nobody climbs to heaven in a single step… Yue Yang saw it, and it hurt him. He wouldn’t try to talk her out of it, because he understood what she was reaching for — so when a chance like today’s came along, however hard and however draining, he would take Iris the rest of the way on her behalf.
A Sacred Beast, though, wasn’t likely yet.
Iris’s shift toward human form had only just begun; she needed far, far more learning and growth. Look at Sea Fatty’s Wind-Breath Seabird — clever as it was, cultivated as long as it had been, it still couldn’t reach a complete human form and still hadn’t fully risen to Sacred Beast. Rising to Sacred Beast was no simple process at all. It was nothing less than a rebirth in its own right.
The Blazing Divine Eagle Iris couldn’t hold the human shape for long. The moment her master’s mental link slackened, she reverted to the eagle’s body.
Spread her wings and climbed.
And soared, wheeling in excitement, circle after circle, and did not stop for a long while.
Still sitting in Yue Yang’s lap, drenched in sweat herself, the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady thanked Yue Yu with a trace of embarrassment and a great deal of gratitude. “Sister Yu. Thank goodness you were here.”
Yue Yu smiled slightly.
She took the handkerchief Sick Beauty passed her and wiped the fine sweat from the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady’s face. “It’s nothing. As long as the two of you are all right, I’m satisfied.”
Moved past speech, the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady opened her arms and, across Yue Yang, gathered Yue Yu and Sick Beauty both into an embrace.
She could not get out another word.
And the tears fell like pearls off a broken string, and would not stop…
Deep in sleep, Yue Yang’s consciousness had already entered the dream world, and the first thing he did was find the Great-Loli-of-Sword-Qi and ask about the dragon pearl. “So here’s the thing. I threw one stroke with Yellow Dragon Abyss, and not only did Shafeng die, it refined his divine power and his knowledge into a dragon pearl. Before that, Yellow Dragon Abyss refined the Tiger-Prison Divine Sword for my tiger girl, and the time after that it refined ten million dragon scales out of the God-Slaying Mystic Realm to build the Yinglong. What secret power does this Yellow Dragon Abyss sword actually have? Why does it keep running so far past what I expect? The more I fight, the more confused I get. I know you know the real secret — out with it.”
(End of Chapter 1174)