Sword-qi, cutting heaven and earth open.

Faster than Yue Yang, the man they called the first man of Mountain Beyond the Mountain — God-Slayer, with the divine sword Lihen in his hands — held nothing back at all and brought everything he had down on the mysterious man.

Because of the Shenmie domain projected by the ancient relics’ true bodies, ground hundreds of times harder than tempered steel gave way under God-Slayer’s will to kill. The sword-qi had not even reached it before a terrible cut opened across the earth, ten meters deep and something like ten thousand meters long. God-Slayer had staked everything on this and kept nothing in reserve, and the sheer destructive force of it left Hei Zhou — who not long ago had been scheming to take his position — gaping and dizzy. Hei Zhou had never underestimated God-Slayer. It was only now that he understood his highest previous estimate hadn’t come to a tenth of what the man actually had.

If he had known, Hei Zhou would rather have stayed second for ten thousand years than made a play for first of Mountain Beyond the Mountain.

If matters hadn’t twisted the way they had, and if Ji Wuri’s Love-Thread Spider-Demon hadn’t been there to counter him, then however many allies Hei Zhou had gathered, he would have lost, and there was no arguing about it.

Sword-qi and destructive power on that scale is not something a Divine Sovereign can take.

Not even at full strength.

Not even with Zhuye in hand.

There was no taking a sword like that from God-Slayer. None.

The sword-qi tore huge fissures in space, and once the ancient divine sword Lihen had passed, a spatial storm came through behind it and swept the sky bare, grinding everything it touched into powder. Sword-qi like that, divine might like that — Shuanghan, Zhaoxi and Hei Zhou, none of them dared stand under it. For a moment they forgot the mysterious man entirely and ran to get clear of the battlefield, terrified of being cut down by the sword-qi or dragged into that spatial storm and swallowed into some other dimension, with no getting out of it ever again.

“Kill!“

Lihen in God-Slayer’s hands.

Every scrap of strength in his body behind it, everything staked on the one cut.

He wasn’t asking this sword to kill the mysterious man. He only wanted it to do something — at the very least to take some of the arrogance out of a man who looked at every living thing as an insect.

And as Lihen came raging down on him, the mysterious man did something nobody expected. He didn’t dodge a fraction. He simply put out one index finger.

A moment ago it had been that same finger that fired a pillar of light, ignored defenses and space and everything else, and put a hole clean through Ji Wuri.

Now the finger was out again. Was God-Slayer about to go the same way?

God-Slayer had already thrown everything away.

He was fighting to die.

To land anything at all on the man in front of him, he would pay any price there was, his own life included.

What made Yue Yang’s and Ji Wuri’s eyes go round was that no light of death came out of that finger. Instead, like an idiot, the mysterious man pushed the finger up to meet the edge of Lihen as it fell.

If Hei Zhou had tried that, losing the finger would have been the mildest possible outcome; more likely the sword-qi would have gotten into his body and finished him.

Even Ji Wuri wouldn’t have dared put a finger against God-Slayer’s ancient divine sword.

Nobody on that field would have. Only the mysterious man.

Even a Yue Yang in a full berserk state probably wouldn’t have been that insane.

Ding.

One second later.

What left Yue Yang and Ji Wuri standing there with their mouths open was that the mysterious man had caught the sword — God-Slayer’s everything, his whole life staked on it — with one index finger on his left hand, casually, easily, as though it were nothing worth thinking about. Lihen, which can shear through anything in the world, came down hard on that finger carrying every ounce of God-Slayer’s strength and the full weight of his will to destroy, and it could not cut through so much as a single hair.

The finger was completely unharmed. Smooth as it had been.

The skin of it.

Not so much as a mark.

“…” Hei Zhou came close to fainting where he stood. This was too absurd. How does a thing like that happen?

The corner of Ji Wuri’s eye twitched, and only now did it get through to him that in front of this man, nothing anyone did was going to matter.

This old ghost.

He was simply a thing that ignored everything and went past anything a person could imagine.

Except for his own master, who was close to being a martial fanatic, Ji Wuri had never laid eyes on anything this terrifying.

No wonder that even as Divine Hall Sovereign, his master trained without a break. It wasn’t only that he was chasing the highest realm. He had a reason to fear being passed. If Tianyu weren’t grinding away at his cultivation every day and improving without stopping, someone like this mysterious man, who called himself Jiuxiao’s teacher, might genuinely catch up to him.

“Strength is respectable. But the speed is far too slow.” The mysterious man flicked his finger lightly, and God-Slayer, Lihen still in his hands, was sent tumbling away like a bug.

“What about me, then?”

Yue Yang was not Ji Wuri.

Ji Wuri was watching in shock and looking for his chance to run.

The transmigrator was the opposite. It had never crossed his mind to run. What he wanted most in the world was to go at the mysterious man with everything and beat this old ghost into the ground, because until he did he wasn’t going to enjoy a meal or a night’s sleep. If God-Slayer hadn’t jumped in first, Yue Yang would have been in there already. The moment God-Slayer went tumbling back, Yue Yang appeared. He didn’t come at the man from the front the way God-Slayer had. He flashed around behind him instead and struck at his back. Frontal assault or ambush, whichever wins is the good tactic — Yue Yang believed in the black-cat-white-cat theory. The Prison Emperor Divine Staff came down hard. But the real weight of the attack was in the Prison Emperor Divine Seal, which he had been building up to release.

Heaven and earth seemed to stop dead for one second.

A sealing force.

Absolutely pure.

It pressed down every living thing between heaven and earth, and nothing anywhere could move.

Time itself seemed to stop with it. Under the Prison Emperor Divine Seal’s weight, the only person who could still move was Yue Yang.

He swung the Prison Emperor Divine Staff, unstoppable, straight into the back of the mysterious man’s head — and before the man could react to being pinned under the Seal’s pressure, the Seal itself, which by all accounts got used mostly for cracking chestnuts over little girls’ heads, came down on the crown of his skull with everything the transmigrator had behind it.

Crack. Crack.

Two sharp reports.

Practically at the same instant, so close together nobody could separate them.

Ji Wuri, Shuanghan, Zhaoxi and the rest of them stared at the fight like men who had been struck stupid.

He’d caught them again.

Pinned under the pressure of the Prison Emperor Divine Seal, the mysterious man had taken both of Yue Yang’s attacks and stopped them cold. As with God-Slayer’s all-out strike a moment ago, he used exactly one index finger. He even broke free of the little serpent-demon girl Xiao Wenli’s Binding talent, took Yue Yang’s two attacks from behind without turning, and then, at his leisure, reached back with his other hand to block Xiao Wenli’s twin frost blades.

God-Slayer’s pupils shrank to needle points.

Hei Zhou’s eyes were coming out of his head.

This ruthless warlord of Mountain Beyond the Mountain sat down on the ground with no strength left in him. Every part of the ambition that had refused to stand second, that had schemed for the top seat and dreamed of ruling heaven and earth, came out of him as cold sweat through his back, and left him chilled to the bone.

What is a frog at the bottom of a well?

Hei Zhou felt he was one.

God-Slayer, Ji Wuri, and this Yue Titan who was supposedly a genius the Sky Tower produced once in ten thousand years — each one stronger than the last, each one with a mind more monstrous than the last. Ji Wuri and Yue Titan especially could not be regarded as ordinary living things at all; the two of them were freaks. And far above all of them stood a mysterious man who was stronger and stranger and more monstrous still.

Nobody knew how long this old man had been alive.

Nobody knew how strong he actually was.

Men as strong as God-Slayer and Yue Titan had put everything into a single strike and been held off by one finger. He had fought three divine artifacts at once, made nothing of it, and come away without a scratch.

What kind of existence is that? Hei Zhou felt he had never imagined, even in dreams, that anyone in the Heavenly Realm could be strong to this degree. He had of course heard the names of Grand Hall Master Dongfang and the Divine Hall Sovereign Tianyu, and he knew they were powerful — but he had never seen it with his own eyes, and without something to measure it against he had never understood that a real god was unimaginable like this. Even with Zhuye in his hands, Hei Zhou had never once considered that anyone alive could stop three divine artifacts with a single finger.

If it had only been God-Slayer brushed aside that casually, Hei Zhou would not have been so badly shaken.

But now there was Yue Titan, the most monstrous of them all.

A peerless talent who could very nearly seal up time and space themselves had put everything into one strike — and the result was the same. One finger.

Is there any force left in the world that can hurt this mysterious man?

Hei Zhou doubted it.

He absolutely did not believe there was any power anywhere that could injure this old man.

One finger sent the little serpent-demon girl flying. The mysterious man turned slowly and waved Yue Yang forward, inviting the transmigrator to put a bit more into it. “Your speed is quite good. Though the strength is a little weak.”

“Again, then!” Yue Yang was so angry that smoke came out of every opening in his head. Born to be hit, is that it? You enjoy being knocked around? Then let’s see you satisfied.

The Taotie Blade, the Starfield Sky Scorpion, the Waning Crescent Moon, the Assassin’s Dagger, the Dragon-Slaying Spear, a comet, Zhuye, the Heaven-Piercing War Blade — he grabbed treasures at random and threw every one of them at the mysterious man in a single mad barrage. And however Yue Yang came at him, the mysterious man stayed unhurried through the whole storm, perfectly at ease, blocking all of it with one finger. In the end it got Yue Yang’s temper up, and he brought out the human-god weapons the dragon girl sisters Yao and Yu turn into: the Companion Wing Sword and the Companion Wing Bow, loosed together on Yue Yang’s Sovereign Intent. That finally put a trace of seriousness into the mysterious man’s movements. It still did not make him use a second finger.

Shuanghan and the others couldn’t follow any of it.

Never mind blocking any of it. Just watching was enough to make a man dizzy.

The expression on Ji Wuri’s face was pure envious hatred. He had been the number one tall, rich and handsome man in the Heavenly Realm — and next to a Yue Yang with treasures and sacred artifacts and divine artifacts flying everywhere, did he even rate a mention?

The human-god weapons didn’t work either?

That did it. Yue Yang set his feet on the Eternal Wheel, brought his hands together, and cut down with the Wheel of Apocalypse.

At first the mysterious man went on blocking with one finger, unhurried as ever. By the time he realized what Yue Yang was using was the Wheel of Apocalypse, it was too late — the Eternal Wheel had stalled his reaction for a moment, and by the time he pulled free of it the Wheel of Apocalypse had already taken the finger off and reached his face. A split opened across the top of the cloak’s hood.

The mysterious man finally moved fast. Both hands came up and caught the Wheel of Apocalypse between his palms.

And a foot came off the ground and kicked Yue Yang away.

The shame of a severed finger.

It had been at least ten thousand years since he’d had to taste it, and having a junior like Yue Yang take a finger off him in public sent the mysterious man’s fury up in flames. There would be no more carelessness now, and no more holding back.

“I’m going to fuck you to death!” Yue Yang took the kick without giving ground, gathered Nirvana Flames into a blade, and cut back across the mysterious man’s thigh with it. In the same instant he took the hit, Yue Yang brought out the green of the Five-Color Divine Radiance — something he almost never used in a fight — and drove it hard into the face of a man with both palms full of the Wheel of Apocalypse.

“Oh?” The mysterious man took it, genuinely startled.

“Pfah!” Yue Yang coughed blood.

And swore he would not fall back.

He pulled the green light away the instant it landed.

The mysterious man let go of the Wheel of Apocalypse with one hand and snatched at the green of the Five-Color Divine Radiance — and Yue Yang had already withdrawn it, so the grab closed on nothing. Yue Yang seemed to have known the man would free a hand to try, because he used the opening: with the Creation Divine Pearl in his fist he punched through the divine power guarding the man’s body and landed one on his face. The punch connected, and it felt to Yue Yang like punching into an endless starry sky. With any other divine artifact the punch would have done nothing at all. But the Creation Divine Pearl carries chaos-origin energy and a creation divine rank above everything else, and that field of stars was destroyed in an instant by Yue Yang’s Sovereign Intent.

The mysterious man let out a roar of pain.

For the first time.

He felt pain.

Under Yue Yang’s blows the mysterious man was finally injured — barely, so slightly it hardly counted — and he felt it, and he felt an unbearable humiliation with it.

Punched hard in the face, the mysterious man could not stay calm any longer.

He brought his other leg up and drove it into Yue Yang’s chest at tremendous speed.

Directly over the heart.

Boom!

The kick broke three of Yue Yang’s ribs on the spot. He set his teeth and did not fall back. He pushed forward instead, and the Black Returning Burial and White Frost Bloom blades erupted out of his left and right hands, crossed, and drove into the mysterious man’s ears from both sides. Half an inch in, and no further. The man’s ears were like endless whirlpools of stars; two swords that could ruin heaven and annihilate earth could not advance another fraction.

The mysterious man gave a great shout, and divine power came screaming out of his mouth and shot into Yue Yang’s shattered chest like an arrow, close to going through his heart.

Yue Yang, gravely wounded, roared right back at him.

Scarlet Heaven Tempering came out of his mouth.

Straight up against the current of the man’s divine power.

It broke through his defense and went into the throat of an old ghost who was supposed to be able to ignore any attack at all. The mysterious man’s will was far above Yue Yang’s, and Yue Yang had known perfectly well the black and white blades were not going to get in. He had exposed his chest on purpose, and paid for it, to buy one Scarlet Heaven Tempering back through the throat.

“You — you want to die!” The mysterious man’s hair very nearly stood on end with rage, and the injury left his voice a hateful rasp. It was the first time in his life anybody had given him a “deep throat” like that.

“Raaah!” Yue Yang, whose own temper was well up by now, threw his head back and howled, and his Creation Domain went wild.

Countless points of starlight came on.

One after another, they wove themselves into constellations across the sky, and every constellation gave birth to a different stellar force, all of it feeding back into Yue Yang’s own body. The constellations of the Zodiac Palace were the clearest of all — Aries, Taurus, Gemini. Their particular stellar forces came out of nothing without limit, and as long as Yue Yang was still standing and his will hadn’t broken, there was energy there to keep fighting on.

This was the first level of creation, which Yue Yang had built by modeling the Night Empress’s Starry Sky Domain.

Space by the acre twisted and deformed and finally condensed, in Yue Yang’s hand, into one tiny black stone. The dim, unnoticeable specks of light scattered across the sky turned, without anyone seeing it happen, into black stones of the same kind, each one able to destroy anything. And the bright constellations blazed like the sun at its fiercest, hotter and hotter, until the whole field became an ocean of light that nobody could look at with open eyes.

This was the second level of creation, which Yue Yang had built by modeling the Supreme’s law of the worlds inside and out.

Black stone in the left hand. Orange Vast Radiance in the right.

The stellar force of heaven and earth, without end.

And out of the heart of that destroying light, like a man coming out of the middle of the sun, Yue Yang came in furious at the mysterious man.

(End of Chapter 1197)