The result of the fight was that Yue Yang was knocked to the ground.

Getting knocked down was nothing new for him. If it hadn’t happened ten thousand times it had happened nine thousand. From the Purple-Gold Marquis onward, every strong enemy on Yue Yang’s road had been trouble, and every fight had been a hard one. Usually a hard fight ended with the unkillable transmigrator scraping out an ugly win by the skin of his teeth, and his body was never in one piece afterward. If it weren’t for the purification of Nirvana Flames and its perfect self-healing, he would have more scars on him than there are stars in the sky.

So being outmatched and put flat on his back by a heavy technique was a thing Yue Yang had done a great many times.

But.

Never like today.

One blow from the mysterious man had put him down, and after it he could not struggle at all. He hadn’t blacked out; his mind was unusually clear. He simply could not make his own body stand up again, let alone fight. Yue Yang was certain this was some law ability of the man’s, or else he was being held down by the sheer weight of the man’s divine rank. As someone who had glimpsed divine tier, and had resonated over and over with the realm of the Sacred Sovereign through Empress Vivienne and through ancient inheritances, the transmigrator understood exactly what the gap between them was.

It was the gap between a quasi-divine-tier martial cultivator and a Sacred Sovereign — a chasm that no amount of force and no strength of will could fill in or erase.

It was also the difference between a mortal and a true god.

The mysterious man was a Sacred Sovereign.

Short of another Sacred Sovereign, no mortal alive could beat him. Not even a Yue Yang who was still mortal but had come infinitely close.

Against laws and divine rank — powers that can make a world with one thought and unmake one with the next — the fact that Yue Yang could protect himself at all, and was still lying there in one piece under that pressure, was already a miracle.

And before he went down, Yue Yang had produced another miracle, one considerably harder to believe.

Which was this.

A mortal.

He had wounded a Sacred Sovereign who held supreme divine rank and supreme power over law — and wounded him badly.

The mysterious man stood in midair, working his fingers painfully into the burned socket of his left eye to force out the black stone lodged in it. His arm was covered in burns from the destroying light, the flesh ruined, white bone showing through in places. His divine rank was closing the injuries at a speed the eye could follow — but that did nothing to erase what he had just been through. His cloak was half destroyed and half his body was charred, and there was a sword driven deep into his right side: the Orange Vast Radiance Yue Yang had condensed.

That sword.

Not even his sacred will could destroy it easily.

Having dug the black stone out of the socket, the mysterious man, furious past bearing, started to crush it — then thought better of it, in case the thing detonated and made his injuries worse. In the end he flung it away into the sky in anger and frustration, far past the ninth heaven.

Then he took hold of the Orange Vast Radiance.

With the sword bucking savagely against him.

By main force.

He drew that innate sword-qi out of his ribs an inch at a time.

He wrapped it in supreme divine power, gathered divine light across the whole sky, and drove the wrapping force forward, meaning to nail the Orange Vast Radiance back into a Yue Yang who was lying on the ground unable to move — to turn the weapon on its owner, and settle his own score that way.

God-Slayer had been blasted twenty kilometers off.

Lihen had kept his body intact, but his eyes were stabbing with pain and his sight had not come back.

Further out than him, Zhaoxi was shielding a weakened Shuanghan behind the Zhenmiao Divine Mirror. Several arrows of destroying light were pinned through his own arm, and it was running with blood. Shuanghan had both hands over his eyes and was asking, over and over, “How is it going? What’s happening out there? Why has it gone quiet? No — that divine power is still moving. The old ghost isn’t dead. He still isn’t dead!”

Zhaoxi did not need his eyes to follow the fight, and he could not bring himself to tell Shuanghan the truth: the mysterious man was basically fine. He had taken the death-light, the black stone, the stellar force and that sword-light — four separate strikes — and carried all of it on nothing but his own body.

The young man who had challenged him, on the other hand, was down and not getting up.

With nothing left to hit back with.

About to die.

“Boy. In thirty thousand years, nobody has ever hurt me this badly. You really are an infuriating creature. But let me tell you something: mortals are mortals and gods are gods. A mortal can never challenge a god, and he certainly can never beat one.” The mysterious man’s ruined cloak snapped and flew in the swell of his divine power, and even so there was no making out his face. A divine majesty came off him that made a man want to raise his eyes to it, and Divine Sovereigns as strong as God-Slayer and Zhaoxi felt the immediate urge to put down their weapons, kneel, and beg his forgiveness. What his body gave off simply by being there was enough to flatten the whole field. And with his combat strength climbing and doubling inside that brightening divine light, he spoke slowly down at the Yue Yang who could not move, in the voice of a man delivering a sentence. “Now — in honor of your having defied heaven itself and wounded my supreme divine body, I grant you death by your own sword.”

Having said it, he doubled the compression on the divine power wrapping the Orange Vast Radiance.

Which set the sword surging back against him.

Then he hung it above Yue Yang’s head. The moment he let his divine power go, a sword compressed that far would blow outward, and nothing its edge reached would survive.

God-Slayer’s eyes were ruined and running two lines of bloody tears, and his grip on Lihen was white-knuckled.

Zhaoxi picked up the weakened Shuanghan and rushed over to God-Slayer.

“God-Slayer, don’t. We’d only make it worse!”

At some point God-Slayer had bitten through his own lip, and a thread of blood had come out of it. He drew a long breath, erupted with every scrap of divine power he had, and brought the sword up in front of him. “I know. I know what our strength is worth against his. It’s an ant shaking a tree. But I am not going to stand here and watch a rising talent who may be one of my own people die in front of me. Useful or not, I’m going. Aside from fighting, I don’t know what else there is for me to do. Maybe I will only make it worse. But I cannot watch one of my own kinsmen killed and feel nothing about it.”

“It’s no use. Haah.” Zhaoxi let out a hopeless sigh.

He understood exactly what would happen to God-Slayer. He wasn’t even the man’s target right now, and the pressure alone was nearly putting the whole field on its knees. If the mysterious man so much as put out a hand, would there even be a fight? That supreme Sovereign Intent would kill God-Slayer where he stood. Challenging him now meant nothing at all.

Knowing perfectly well how far outmatched you are, and charging anyway.

Is that stubbornness?

Or stupidity?

Zhaoxi did not try to stop him a second time. He only shut his eyes, unable to watch an East Divine Sovereign he had known for ten thousand years be killed in front of him.

“Hmph.” The mysterious man could not have cared less about God-Slayer’s attack. He waved a hand, an idle brush of a sleeve, and his divine power blasted God-Slayer ten thousand meters back and locked him there — suffocating, in pain without end, and unable to struggle out of it.

If the man hadn’t still hoped to get something out of God-Slayer about the ancient secrets and about the two gods Taiyan and Bingli, he would have burned him and Zhaoxi to ash long ago. And while he was pinning them down, over on the other side the divine power around the Orange Vast Radiance hanging above Yue Yang’s head was compressed tenfold, forcing the sword-qi to rebound and extend a hundred times over.

The mysterious man was extremely careful, and he did not release the divine power he had wrapped the sword in.

He suspected that particular sword-qi could not harm its own master.

But he had already said it out loud, and he didn’t care to take it back.

So he quietly swapped one thing for another. The Orange Vast Radiance was still there, and the divine power around it was still there too, and by riding the sword’s rebound he would end Yue Yang’s life with his own divine power instead. Which would still, near enough, count as the sword devouring its master.

Yue Yang lay on the ground, bound head to foot by the mysterious man’s unnamed law, with no way to struggle at all.

All he could do was watch his own Orange Vast Radiance swell along its rebound.

And come down at his face.

“Die.” The sight of a Yue Yang with nothing left to fight with made the mysterious man feel a good deal better, and half the fury of being wounded by the boy went out of him. Grind this one to powder and scatter it, and in time he’d forget the little brat who had given him such a jolt. He had killed more geniuses than he could count.

“Hey!“

An angry shout went off behind him.

He had no time to turn before he felt a divine power that destroyed everything break his law-binding open, force its way through his body-guarding divine qi, shatter the resistance of his Sovereign Intent, and slam into the middle of his back.

For the first time in ten thousand years, the mysterious man felt as though he were about to bring up blood.

As though his heart had been smashed, and the blood and the torn flesh all wanted to come up his throat at once.

His spine and his ribs felt like they were snapping one at a time. His body flew a hundred meters with nothing he could do about it, and only after he had regathered his divine power, killed the impact, forced the foreign power out of himself and steadied the injury did he swallow the blood in his mouth back down. Who had hit him? Who in Mountain Beyond the Mountain could hit him?

Who could get in behind him without his noticing?

Had Tianyu come?

Impossible.

The mysterious man, badly startled, looked back.

And found it was the little serpent-demon girl he had never once bothered to consider.

She was nothing like the girl of a few moments ago. Her divine power could have frozen the whole of heaven and earth solid, and a golden serpent-demon divine image a thousand meters tall stood behind her, looking down on the land. That heavy blow had plainly come from a serpent-demon divine rank in the middle of coming together.

It was lucky this little serpent-demon hadn’t finished growing. If she had, this would have been genuinely dangerous.

That young, and she had already condensed a supreme divine rank a thousand meters tall?

The thought had barely formed before the killing intent came up behind it.

Remove her now, before she was fully grown, or the trouble later would have no end to it. Kill her. This little serpent-demon had to be dealt with immediately.

“Leave this one to me. I’ve been enjoying the best of everything the master gives out for as long as I can remember, and I’ve done the least work of anybody. Even Gray Wolf, who only gets my leftovers, goes out and fights to the death for the master over and over — and I’m always asleep in the Grimoire World, always finding some excuse about deepening my comprehension so I can idle around in the rear. Today I finally get a turn, so let me have this one, Xiao Wenli. Besides, the moment you start fighting, heaven falls in and the earth splits open. You might break all of Mountain Beyond the Mountain. So today’s fight had better be mine.”

The voice was extraordinarily soft.

There was a natural, guileless sweetness in it, and anyone who heard it, however angry, however far gone, would have felt like a man in high summer drinking cold water. There would have been no anger left in him anywhere, only ease.

The voice carried a divine majesty in it too, of course. One nobody would question.

It wasn’t deliberate.

But the Sovereign Intent underneath it was as immovable as a mountain, and there was no ignoring it.

The mysterious man turned back and found the Orange Vast Radiance he had wrapped in divine power now held as lightly as a leaf between one small girl’s fingers. Those fingers were soft and dewy and rose-colored, fit to compare with the slender hands of the legendary Goddess of Dawn. The sword, which had rebounded a thousand feet, had gone completely docile — a well-behaved kitten with no intention of rebounding or extending anywhere, shrinking back down instead, inch by inch. And the divine power he had wrapped around it had lost its connection to him at some point he hadn’t noticed. In this strange girl’s hand it was turning into sweet-smelling flower petals and scattering on the wind.

“You’re a Sacred Sovereign too?” Something in the mysterious man went cold. This strange girl was stronger than the ferocious little serpent-demon behind him. Where had she come from? Could she be this boy’s life-guardian war beast as well? Did the boy have two?

A matched pair of life-guardian war beasts?

But they were nothing alike. This one looked like a plant type, and the one behind him was a serpent-demon.

None of it made sense, and the mysterious man was thoroughly confused. Never mind two life-guardian war beasts — two of them at divine tier, and one of them already a Sacred Sovereign. If this boy really was their master, why wasn’t he divine tier? Why wasn’t he a Sacred Sovereign? Something somewhere had to be wrong. Otherwise nothing this absurd could be happening.

“What I am doesn’t matter. What matters is that you used a trick to hurt my master. You made a show of being above fighting a junior, and behind that you used a war beast to ambush him. In a battle to the death that’s fair enough, of course, and I’m not going to lecture you about being a senior who used a shameless method. But whoever you are, and whatever contemptible thing you did — if you have hurt my master, then there is only one ending waiting for you.” Petals were coming off her without stopping, and her divine power and her will were turning the whole of the earth into a sea of flowers. Duoduo raised one slender finger and pointed it at the mysterious man, and her voice came out with a firmness and an anger nobody had ever heard in it before, one word at a time.

“And. That. Is. Death.”

(End of Chapter 1198)