There was no answering it.

Yue Yang’s position now was rather like a mute eating bitter herbs — all the suffering and no way to speak of it. Going undercover in disguise really was a thankless business.

Proving he was Southwest Divine Sovereign Shafeng was easy. Proving he was not Northeast Divine Sovereign Qingyun was hard. But if he said nothing at all, Hei Zhou and Shuanghan and Zhaoxi would very readily grow suspicious. Shuanghan and Hei Zhou he could manage; but facing Zhaoxi, that North Divine Sovereign with the uncanny and overwhelming powers of perception, even Yue Yang didn’t dare be careless.

In all of Mountain Beyond the Mountain, Yue Yang reckoned two people had a real chance of seeing through him.

One was Ji Wuri.

The second was this North Divine Sovereign Zhaoxi.

If he meant to impersonate Southwest Divine Sovereign Shafeng, he had to get past Zhaoxi.

“Fine. I’m Qingyun. What do you propose to do about it?” Yue Yang smiled coldly and simply went the opposite way, admitting he was Northeast Divine Sovereign Qingyun — thoroughly wrong-footing Hei Zhou and Shuanghan.

“Don’t be angry. Shuanghan didn’t mean to doubt you, he was only having a joke.” Hei Zhou hurried to smooth it over. As he saw it, Shafeng might well be impersonated, but not by Qingyun — given Qingyun’s abilities and temperament, imitating Shafeng was simply beyond him. And besides, taking the argument to its limit: even if Qingyun did intend to impersonate Shafeng, he would hardly walk right up in front of Zhaoxi and himself. Before Zhaoxi’s Zhenmiao Divine Mirror, who could hide anything? The Zhenmiao Divine Mirror, the divine artifact that could reflect every truth in the world.

“Ha. A very funny joke.” The Shafeng that Yue Yang was playing naturally couldn’t be too easy-going about it. Rage and fury were the basic requirements; a courteous, gentlemanly declaration that no harm was done would have blown the performance on the spot, because Shafeng was no gentleman and had no manners worth the name.

“I’ll reserve my opinion.” Shuanghan felt there was something off about Shafeng today, though he couldn’t say what.

“…” Zhaoxi merely smiled faintly and offered no comment at all.

“In that case, I suspect you’re God-Slayer in disguise!” Yue Yang counter-attacked immediately. Turning the accusation back on the accuser was, in fact, his greatest talent.

He didn’t wait for Hei Zhou to play peacemaker.

Yue Yang had already lost his temper and started swinging.

That was the advantage of playing a brute: if something displeased you, you could turn on the spot and hit somebody.

Impersonating an official, or a politician, would have been far too much work — you’d have to do without a conscience entirely, and grow a thick skin besides, and being merely shameless wouldn’t cover it; lying with your eyes wide open is the basic entry requirement of a competent official or politician, and one step up from that, an award-winning capacity for performance is simply groundwork.

Genius as Yue Yang was, gifted at disguise as he was, he could never have impersonated a man like that.

Impersonating a hot-tempered brute like Shafeng, on the other hand, gave him no trouble at all.

He shook out both hands.

Hei Zhou, Shuanghan and Zhaoxi all sensed a flame full of fury erupt across the sky.

This was not the kind of eruption that releases and is done. It was a deliberate, controlled expansion — blossom after blossom of flame transforming into roses of fire in the sky and drifting down through the void… Northeast Divine Sovereign Qingyun’s techniques were strange and exquisitely beautiful, and mostly took the forms of flowers and grasses and trees. He was a god of peace and compassion who disliked conflict, pitying every living thing, and he was the only one of the eight Divine Sovereigns to remain unmarried his whole life and hold to an ascetic path… Among the eight Divine Sovereigns, if one appeared amid sprouting shoots and blossoming flowers and the earth turning green again, it could only be Northeast Divine Sovereign Qingyun arriving.

Northeast Divine Sovereign Qingyun, holder of the quasi-divine artifact Tianxin.

The only being in Mountain Beyond the Mountain who could turn energy into flowers and grass and trees. That was his signature and his alone.

So Yue Yang gathering roses out of flame now, and letting them fall across the whole sky, was a deliberate answer to Shuanghan and Hei Zhou: See? I’m Qingyun.

Impersonating Qingyun was of course impossible for him — flaws everywhere — but doing it this way would dispel the suspicion in Shuanghan’s and Hei Zhou’s minds instead. Sailing against the current while deliberately exposing his own weakness worked immeasurably better than flat denial and strenuous proof.

“Ridiculous,” Shuanghan said. He no longer suspected anything.

Conjuring roses out of fire made a man Northeast Divine Sovereign Qingyun? What a joke. One was the power of life and the other the power of destruction; the two stood at opposite poles. Flame roses only resembled roses in shape — they were fire, and fire condensed entirely out of rage and rancour. In the whole of Mountain Beyond the Mountain, among all eight Divine Sovereigns, he believed there was no second man besides Southwest Divine Sovereign Shafeng who possessed such a violent temper of fire.

Shuanghan had never seriously suspected Yue Yang’s fake Shafeng of being Qingyun. He had simply felt something was off somewhere and opened his mouth to probe.

The moment Yue Yang deployed his Heaven’s Wrath Rose, the variant of Heaven’s Wrath Crimson Lotus —

his suspicions were laid to rest.

This was Shafeng, all right.

Nobody but Shafeng could handle fire this way.

Southeast Divine Sovereign Chiqiu was a master of flame too, of course, but Chiqiu was something else entirely: what he commanded was dragon-flame, an extremely particular fire whose distinctive properties could never be altered at any time, recognisable at a glance. And most important of all, these flame roses held within them a storm-force in a temporarily quiescent state, which would detonate catastrophically the instant anything triggered it.

That was Shafeng’s own particular ability — the perfect union of wind and fire, and no one else could imitate it.

At this Hei Zhou’s last misgivings dissolved too, and he broke into a roar of laughter.

Zhaoxi, by contrast.

Frowned very slightly, as though something did not add up.

“Take this!” Zhaoxi was exactly the one Yue Yang feared would spot the flaw. What he was actually using was not the union of wind and fire but two separate flames — one the variant of Heaven’s Wrath Crimson Lotus, the other Ground-origin Yin Flame held in complete stillness — counterfeiting the union of wind and fire. With his disguise talent and his will directing it, nobody else could tell the difference; but Zhaoxi, holder of the Zhenmiao Divine Mirror, might. So Yue Yang moved fast. Fight was the operative word: making a scene is sometimes far more effective than making an argument.

“Have you lost your mind—” Shuanghan was staggered. What in the world was this lunatic trying to do? Did he intend to blow the entire Jiaoluo Waterfall region into a crater?

The sky full of flame gathered under the storm Yue Yang’s consciousness wound around it.

And transformed into an enormous sword of fire.

Which stabbed down at Shuanghan.

Unstoppable.

This time Yue Yang was impersonating Eastern Divine Sovereign God-Slayer. He had never met God-Slayer and didn’t know his signature techniques, but the intelligence he’d gathered earlier had given him the basics: God-Slayer used a sword, God-Slayer was a sword god, and God-Slayer held Lihen, the mightiest ancient divine sword in Mountain Beyond the Mountain.

For a man already skilled in sword-qi, the impersonation came all the easier.

With the fire sword bearing down out of the sky before him, Shuanghan’s eyes went cold.

He raised a hand.

Ten million frost blossoms opened at once.

And wove themselves into dozens of ice chains that shot through the air, met the descending sword, wound madly about the blade and dragged and twisted it aside.

“Break!” Yue Yang rode the blade down, both fists bursting every chain entangling it, and the fiercest Chitian Divine Blaze erupted off his body, raising the sword’s force a hundredfold, driving it straight down at Shuanghan below.

“Shafeng, you madman!” Shuanghan’s own temper was up now.

They might belong to the same West Camp.

But Shafeng had never been a god-tier expert he thought much of. By Shuanghan’s private ranking, this ally, Southwest Divine Sovereign Shafeng, sat dead last of the eight Divine Sovereigns — below even Southeast Divine Sovereign Chiqiu and Northeast Divine Sovereign Qingyun… As for himself, Northwest Divine Sovereign, his strength was nearly the equal of the South and North Sovereigns, falling short only in that the treasure in his hand was not a true divine artifact, and his rank sat comfortably inside the top five. Where did that leave him any reason to take a man ranked eighth seriously?

Now, seeing Shafeng turn on him, his own anger would not be contained.

Fight, then. Was he afraid of Shafeng?

The thought carried him.

Shuanghan didn’t stand on ceremony either. He shot into the sky.

Ten million blocks of hail fused into a shield ten times larger than the fire sword, thick as a city wall, and smashed back at it.

Against the Black-Ice Wall Shield Shuanghan had made, the fire sword Yue Yang had deliberately condensed at less than his full strength naturally came off worse. But if the two collided, it would still be enough to level the entire Jiaoluo Waterfall region.

Others might not be able to interfere, but as head of the West Camp, Western Divine Sovereign Hei Zhou had no choice but to step into this duel.

As the eldest brother, he also had a mind to make a show of force.

Heaven and earth went black in an instant.

As though some primordial beast had opened a mouth capable of swallowing heaven and earth and gulped the world down whole. Yue Yang and Shuanghan, in the middle of the field, both felt a vertigo that was hard to bear. But after only a second, light returned to the world and everything was as it had been — except that the fire sword and the ice shield, on the very point of colliding into a cataclysmic explosion, had vanished without the faintest trace… Plainly this was Hei Zhou dissolving them in an instant with his own peculiar divine power. To completely devour a fire sword and an ice shield inside one second, soundlessly and without a trace — Western Divine Sovereign Hei Zhou’s strength had indeed reached a level fit to appal.

Yue Yang and Shuanghan stopped, as if by agreement.

And Hei Zhou flickered into place between them in good time, one hand catching Yue Yang’s arm and the other Shuanghan’s, his extraordinary features more majestic than any emperor in the world, his innate heroic bearing layered a thousandfold on top — a presence that compelled anyone at all, god-tier experts included, to submit.

“Brothers, both of you, take your elder brother’s advice: don’t come to blows. It would be a great misfortune for our West Camp. Brother Shafeng is no enemy, and Brother Shuanghan meant no harm — he was only being cautious. I understand both your hearts. Here and now, unqualified elder brother that I am, I offer both of you my apology. Had I been able to break away at the time and join the encirclement, Brother Shafeng would not have been wounded and delayed, and this misunderstanding would never have arisen. Come, come — we’re rarely all together. Let us go down and feast and revel. If you want a contest, we’ll settle it over the wine cups.”

Hei Zhou’s peacemaking came at exactly the right moment, and the force he’d shown had cowed Shuanghan and Yue Yang’s counterfeit Shafeng both.

“Shafeng, it truly won’t do to act on temper alone.” Zhaoxi added a word of persuasion to help.

“…” Yue Yang sweated inwardly. Why did that sound like it had something under it?

Shuanghan snorted.

His attitude softened, and he stopped setting himself against Yue Yang’s “Shafeng.” He was, in fact, rather occupied with the outcome had his shield met that fire sword. He’d have come off slightly ahead, certainly — but for Shafeng to still have that much strength after being crippled by Chiqiu suggested he had underestimated this Southwest Divine Sovereign.

Hei Zhou had been a little worried that a Shafeng damaged now would be a Shafeng of reduced combat value when the time came to swarm God-Slayer.

Now that he’d seen it.

The cannon fodder might be down from where he’d been, but when he threw himself into it he was still respectable.

What none of them knew was that swallowing the ice shield and the fire sword in one gulp had not been comfortable for Hei Zhou either. For the sake of appearances he had dissolved both inside a single second, and the surface of his body was untouched — but his soul had come close to enduring ice and fire at once. He had a good measure of Shuanghan’s freezing divine power and knew it would be unpleasant; what he had not expected was that Shafeng’s fire sword would carry such unlooked-for might, and it had come near to embarrassing him in front of everyone.

The stronger the cannon fodder used to swarm God-Slayer, the higher the odds of success.

Which made Hei Zhou happier still.

On the surface, of course, he was approachable and warm, with no sign whatever of the treachery and calculation involved in shoving Yue Yang’s counterfeit Shafeng and Shuanghan out to die. On the contrary he was ardent as a flame, magnanimous to the skies, all smiles, exactly like a blood brother welcoming his own kin.

“Cautious, careful — what bloody use is it? Four against one, with a hidden piece in hand besides. If we still can’t take God-Slayer with that, we may as well all go home and nurse babies and spare ourselves the humiliation.” Yue Yang made it clear his temper hadn’t entirely subsided, and deliberately let slip a scrap of intelligence out of his anger. Hei Zhou heard it and went tense at once, hurrying to feign a throat-clearing cough to stop him saying more. That hidden piece, Tianchou, absolutely could not be exposed before the final moment. This might be his own ground, but words of that kind must never be spoken aloud. Fortunately nobody but the four of them had heard it — otherwise he would have had to kill every man present to cut off the trouble at the root.

“Hmph. What do you know? God-Slayer is not the enemy you or I imagine him to be.” Shuanghan held God-Slayer in awe at every moment, a thing not to be found even in Hei Zhou.

“Just so. Brother Shuanghan is right. Even with victory in our grasp, we must be careful, and careful again.” Hei Zhou agreed on the surface, and was faintly displeased underneath.

Shuanghan respected him greatly.

But set against that awe of God-Slayer, which came from somewhere deep inside the man, there was a difference.

Of course, this was Shuanghan’s clear-eyed assessment of God-Slayer’s strength, and that was a good thing. Had Shuanghan been like Shafeng and considered the win already banked, matters would have been rather worse. So however jealous Hei Zhou felt, he had to put on a smiling face and agree.

Eastern Divine Sovereign God-Slayer had to be killed, and quickly.

While he lived, that transcendent position — first man of Mountain Beyond the Mountain — would never come to rest on anyone else’s shoulders.

Yue Yang, impersonating Shafeng, had successfully infiltrated the West Camp. Zhaoxi still made him uneasy, but seeing that Hei Zhou and Shuanghan had set their doubts aside, he had scraped through this hurdle — bluffed his way past it, more or less.

Next came finding a way to get God-Slayer a message he would accept and believe.

If God-Slayer still trusted Tianchou and the Chiqiu that Ji Wuri was impersonating, then however strong he was, however formidable, he would go down under the swarm and the ambush. Tianchou and Ji Wuri together were more terrible than Shuanghan and Zhaoxi combined; once their ambush landed, God-Slayer had absolutely no hope of surviving. What Yue Yang had to work out now was how to break through the barriers in this trap, defy heaven, and turn back a battle that was fated to be lost.

Still, breaking into the West Camp counted as the first successful step.

Otherwise there’d have been no point fighting the rest of it.

Yue Yang made a point of studying Zhaoxi and found the North Divine Sovereign calm and unruffled, so he set the thought aside for the moment. Perhaps the man with the Zhenmiao Divine Mirror hadn’t spotted the flaw. Perhaps he had, and wasn’t saying — which would be no problem at all. In fact, if North Divine Sovereign Zhaoxi had seen through him and chose not to speak, it would be an enormous stroke of luck. But Yue Yang couldn’t be sure.

And still less could he be sure whether North Divine Sovereign Zhaoxi would open his mouth at the most important moment of all.

Everything remained to be seen.

Sometimes.

A thing has to reach its final outcome before the truth of it appears. And that was still a long way off.

(End of Chapter 1179)