Yuanji, once the First Heavenly King of Heaven Beyond the Heaven, stepped forward.

And put himself in front of his master.

He was the life-guardian war beast Ji Wuri had raised with the most care, and the strongest of all his war beasts. More to the point, he didn’t just bring ten thousand years of combat experience with him. He was a thing that could not die and could not be destroyed, so there was nothing that could go wrong.

Liuguang, Jingbu and Ji Wuri formed an inverted triangle behind him.

The Sacred Codex blazed with light.

And another war beast was summoned out of it.

This one was a lurker, the kind that likes to hide inside a smokescreen and pick people off. It came out holding a great scythe, and the moment it appeared, thick black smoke came boiling off its body, spread fast, and turned the whole battlefield pitch dark. The wind across the field could not move that ink-black smoke at all — the smoke was the Smokescreen Lurker‘s special ability and could not be dispersed. Yue Yang casually stabbed out with Tunlong and sent a flare of spear-light shaped like a dragon’s head into it; the flare sank into the smoke and vanished without a trace, like a clay ox walking into the sea.

The only place on that battlefield with no smoke in it was Yue Yang’s body and about a meter of ground around him.

So long as Nirvana Flames are burning.

Everything gets purified.

Nothing is exempt.

However thick and however black that smoke got, it was never going to hide a Yue Yang who carried Nirvana Flames on him.

Through the Heavenly Eye of Wisdom, Yue Yang could see straight through the sunless dark of the smoke. He watched Ji Wuri, Liuguang and Jingbu bring out the true bodies of the ancient relics and lay down a temporary divine domain — the special law domain that Mountain Beyond the Mountain calls the Shenmie domain.

Compared with the relic body that had been used against Chiqiu, these three were far larger, and the one in Ji Wuri’s hand was the size of a fist.

Driven by the power in that thing, the law of Shenmie and the prohibition domain it produced came out at a strength that was frankly hard to imagine.

In an instant, the whole surface of the battlefield.

It was a match for the God-Slaying Mystic Realm itself.

Anyone at all, any living thing at all, would be weakened inside it to one degree or another.

To bring down a serious enemy like Yue Yang, Ji Wuri was not going to spare anything. On top of laying the Shenmie domain, he summoned several more war beasts one after another, adding weight, adding certainty. Two of them changed shape on the spot and matched themselves to the terrain, turning into ordinary-looking rock and sand. A third was a plant-type beast that split into countless copies of itself, each disguised as some kind of vegetation, all of them lying low in the smoke and waiting for an opening. A fourth flew straight up into the sky and became a wind you couldn’t see, blending perfectly with the Smokescreen Lurker’s smoke. But the one that caught Yue Yang’s attention was the fifth.

That one was an extremely unusual and very powerful war beast, and it looked like a cave. Instead of setting an ambush outside with the others, it went into the World of Terror inside Jingbu’s twisted halo and disguised itself as part of the scenery in there.

If Yue Yang failed to notice it and went into the World of Terror to get Shuanghan and the others out and use them as support, there was every chance that this vicious thing would swallow him whole.

That mouth was very likely a passage into some other dimension.

The beast was that strong.

For the moment Yue Yang could only suspect it, and could not see through it completely.

“A hundredfold empowerment!” With everything in place, Ji Wuri saw Yue Yang standing where he was without moving, and assumed the Smokescreen Lurker’s smoke had made him wary enough to hold still and see what happened. He was privately delighted. While Yue Yang was doing nothing to stop him, Ji Wuri summoned one last thing — a huge ball of light, blazing like the sun, ten thousand rays across — and poured every bit of that beast’s support into Yuanji.

“Rrraaah!” Yuanji threw his head back and roared. A pair of golden wings unfolded from his back, and divine power that had already been ferocious went up a hundredfold.

One side rose as the other fell.

Yue Yang’s strength was reduced inside the Shenmie domain.

Yuanji had a hundredfold empowerment and the full advantages of a second beast on top of it. His strength had gone through the roof, and against Yue Yang now, the gap was so wide it hardly seemed fair.

“My Execution — it’s time for a decisive battle again. I need that bloodthirsty blade of yours to take an enemy’s head.” Yuanji summoned a divine axe, and the moment his hand closed on the haft, heaven and earth both felt as if they were cracking apart under the axe-force. Yuanji, whose body had been nothing but a golden shadow, gathered himself together and became real flesh and blood.

He had a human body again, and he raised the Execution Divine Axe he had always used.

In that instant.

There was nothing in existence that could beat him.

Never mind a man’s head; heaven, earth, time and space might come apart under that axe.

Kill!

Yuanji felt his power climb as high as it would go, and with complete confidence he threw himself at the enemy still standing there without moving. The axe-force arrived before he did, and there was no stopping it.

At the instant the Execution Divine Axe came down, Yue Yang’s Sacred Codex appeared and hung in the air in front of him. Nothing in the world can destroy that codex, and it turned aside the world-ending axe-force and the blade behind it without trouble. In the moment Yuanji was thrown by that, Yue Yang had Taotie in hand and hit back at once. Taotie became a blade, went over the top of the Execution Divine Axe, and came around at Yuanji’s neck in the shape of One-Slash Mountains and Rivers.

Clang!

Yuanji blocked with the haft. The collision sent the Execution Divine Axe spinning all the way around his body and, by some trick Yue Yang couldn’t follow, out of his right hand and back into his left.

The axe knocked Taotie’s edge away and never lost any of its momentum.

It simply came down on Yue Yang’s head again.

The only difference was that it was his left hand doing the attacking now, not his right.

Yue Yang did not use that spinning-axe trick himself. He had more weapons than he knew what to do with, and no need for that kind of cleverness. The Prison Emperor Divine Staff came up and flicked the Execution Divine Axe aside; and in the moment the two artifacts crashed and bounced apart, the Starfield Sky Scorpion in Yue Yang’s hand shifted fast into an ornate gauntlet, and a heavy punch went out like lightning at a Yuanji who was still waiting on his axe to come back around. The Execution Divine Axe made it back in time, but not in time to attack — all Yuanji could do was turn the broad face of it into a shield.

Yue Yang had the advantage and no intention of being generous with it. He gave Yuanji no room to breathe: his right hand already held the Heaven-Piercing War Blade the little metal beast had turned into, and he drove it at the point between Yuanji’s brows.

Yuanji had no choice but to give ground.

Taotie went back to its beast shape and pinned down the returning Execution Divine Axe.

The Starfield Sky Scorpion shot out on its own and swung its tail-hook at Yuanji’s left hand. And just as Yuanji caught the tail-hook with his left and trapped the Heaven-Piercing War Blade between the fingers of his right, a Waning Crescent Moon flashed into being in the sky.

Yue Yang took the blade in both hands.

And brought the Waning Crescent Moon down on Yuanji’s forehead in the shape of Two-Slash Heaven and Earth Collapse.

The golden wings on Yuanji’s back blazed, extended on their own, folded forward and crossed in front of him, and took the beheading cut for him in the instant it landed.

Dozens of golden feathers scattered into the sky. Yuanji threw the Starfield Sky Scorpion off, blasted the Heaven-Piercing War Blade away with divine power, and there was a bloodthirsty coldness in those murderous eyes of his now. He took hold of the Execution Divine Axe again, kicked away the Taotie beast that had its teeth in the haft, and gathered himself to put everything into one stroke — meaning to cut down under that axe a Yue Yang who was attacking with everything and defending with nothing.

But what he saw in front of him was not Yue Yang backing away in a panic.

It was one empowerment after another.

Every time another one landed, the young man’s strength shot up again, and by the tenth, Yuanji found himself looking at Yue Yang with the strange sensation of a man standing at the foot of a mountain. When it comes to empowerment, how many war beasts in this world can match the giant shadow that Yue Yang’s first life-guardian war beast, Phantom, gathers itself into? Yue Yang had been planning to kill Ji Wuri for a long time, and the giant shadow had given him at least ten — which completely buried the hundredfold empowerment Ji Wuri had just scraped together with everything he had.

The Creation Domain came out for the first time, and Yuanji was instantly standing in what felt like the Gate of Life and Death.

Before he could attack.

Xiao Wenli, the little serpent-demon girl who was Yue Yang’s greatest support in a fight, had already flashed into place behind Yuanji. Her two beautiful eyes locked onto this dangerous enemy, and her Binding talent went off.

“What?” Yuanji knew at once that this was bad, but he could not get a sound out, let alone run.

The binding may not have lasted a full second. It was more than long enough for Yue Yang to open up on him like a rainstorm.

The Prison Emperor Divine Seal, raised in one hand.

And brought down hard on the crown of Yuanji’s skull.

The sound of the skull cracking hadn’t even arrived yet before something faster than sound did: the Zhuye pearl in Yue Yang’s other hand came up from below and slammed into Yuanji’s jaw. Blood and broken teeth sprayed into the air. Yuanji fought to keep his divine sense from blacking out under the pain — but before he could clear his head, a Companion Wing Sword, the human-god weapon the dragon girl sisters turn into, went through his chest like a knife through paper. Not only his heart. His soul took the same piercing.

Yuanji could not have dreamed the young man in front of him carried this many weapons.

Or that every last one of them was lethal.

By the time he had struggled free of the Binding talent and his divine sense had come back up out of the blackout, he found his skull broken, his teeth gone, a hole punched through his chest where his heart should be, and his organs in ruins. And none of that was the worst of it. A spear of Nirvana Flames had gone in through his lower belly and pinned him to the ground.

Nirvana Flames are the fire that purifies everything in the world.

Not even the body of a god can hold out against the burning.

Yuanji swung the Execution Divine Axe faster than he had ever swung anything in his life, and cut his own body in half at the waist.

Run.

All he wanted now was to make it back to his master. And as he came flying back out of the smoke and pulled up in front of a Ji Wuri who was staring at him open-mouthed, before he could get a single word out, three lines of sword-qi came after him from behind, fired from the Companion Wing Bow, and went into him one after another.

Three lines of sword-qi. One black, one white, one scarlet.

Black Returning Burial.

White Frost Bloom.

And last, Scarlet Heaven Tempering.

As that last Scarlet Heaven Tempering went in through the back of his skull and out through his forehead, the pain and the fear went out of Yuanji’s face instead, as though something had finally let go of him.

He managed a bitter smile for Ji Wuri. “Yuanji can only fight this far. This is a terrible enemy, and not one you or I can meet head-on. Run, while you can.”

The three lines of sword-qi went off. Yuanji could not hold himself together any longer; his body came apart, and his divine sense turned into a streak of golden light and went back into the Sacred Codex.

As a life-guardian war beast, he was a thing that could not die and could not be destroyed.

But his divine power.

And the divine body he had only just gotten back.

Both were taken apart by three lines of innate formless sword-qi and scattered into nothing. Less than a tenth of what he had been went back into the Sacred Codex with him. Faced with an ending this far outside anything he had imagined, Ji Wuri stood there stunned. He could not make himself believe it. He had been expecting good news any moment — Yuanji reporting the enemy killed. Instead, in the space of a few breaths, his strongest and most reliable life-guardian war beast, the being who had once been the First Heavenly King and the strongest thing in Heaven Beyond the Heaven, had been beaten to pieces in front of him. Divine body destroyed. Divine power scattered.

Even if he was summoned again, there was no telling how long it would take him to get back to the strength he’d had a minute ago.

What kind of blow does it take to beat Yuanji that badly?

Was that even possible?

In all the world, who besides his master could do such a thing? No — it simply wasn’t possible.

Yue Yang gathered a sword of Orange Vast Radiance in both hands, came out of the smoke, and flashed into place in front of Ji Wuri, sword-qi streaming into the sky. The thorn in his side all this time; the cunning enemy he had planned a thousand ways to be rid of; the disciple of that Divine Hall Sovereign in the Central Divine Hall; the holder of a Sacred Codex and a talent without equal in his generation; the Grand Hall Master of the Sacred Hall; the favored son of heaven who had carried himself so magnificently for so long — Ji Ge, Ji Wuri — his life came down to the one sword in Yue Yang’s hands.

“You’re only the beginning. Soon enough your master, and the whole of the Central Divine Hall, will go out under this sword of mine.” Yue Yang raised the Orange Vast Radiance, faced Ji Wuri, and brought it down without a moment’s hesitation.

(End of Chapter 1193)