The mysterious man said nothing at all to Duoduo’s declaration of war.

He raised a hand.

And the terrible pillar of light that had opened a hole front to back through Ji Wuri — the one that ignored defenses and ignored distance alike — came shooting out. His answer was the action itself. For a life-guardian war beast like Duoduo he had nothing but contempt, and then more contempt.

To his mind, however strong a life-guardian war beast is, and however perfect its human shape, it is a war beast.

Never mind that Duoduo was this young.

A war beast that hadn’t had time to finish growing.

Even if the life-guardian war beast of Tianyu himself, the strongest man in the Central Divine Hall, had come down to Mountain Beyond the Mountain in person, the mysterious man would not have given it a second look. A war beast never catches up to its master. That is iron law in the Heavenly Realm. No war beast has ever risen far past its owner; every beast’s growth and every beast’s ability is bounded by the growth and the potential of the man it belongs to. There are times and stages when a particular beast may outstrip its master in some particular respect — but the ceiling it finally reaches is tied to its master’s realm, and there are no exceptions to that.

A coward, or a weakling, whatever else falls into his lap, cannot raise a divine beast. It is not possible.

By the same reasoning.

If the master isn’t strong, the beast can only get so strong. This Yue Titan had thrown in everything he had and was still just a brat whose attacks did nothing and who couldn’t so much as struggle now. How strong was a life-guardian war beast of his going to be?

She had reached the divine realm, yes. But without ten thousand years, or several thousand at the very least, to condense a divine rank.

Where was the power supposed to come from?

And on the strength of one life-guardian war beast, she meant to kill him?

Wouldn’t that be the biggest joke in the history of the Heavenly Realm? Did this brat and his beast really think he had lived tens of thousands of years for nothing?

When he first saw Duoduo the mysterious man had been faintly surprised. But he had since worked out that her realm was unusually high while she did not appear to be any good at fighting — a purely supportive or special-purpose plant-type life-guardian war beast — and his confidence came back. He had a reasonable explanation to go with it, too. If this plant divine beast were genuinely that strong in a fight, why hadn’t she been summoned into the battle earlier?

Which was proof enough. The plant divine beast had a high realm and nothing else; her actual combat strength had to be below the little serpent-demon’s.

A beast that had reached the divine realm but was no use in a fight. What was there to be afraid of?

“…” Duoduo said nothing, and raised her hand as well.

Jade fingers opening like an orchid.

Reaching for that lethal ray of light.

How was skin that soft supposed to take a pillar of light that ignored defenses and had crippled Ji Wuri without effort? Never mind Shuanghan, whose sight had only just come back — even God-Slayer, whose will did not move if a mountain came down, shut his eyes again.

He couldn’t stand to watch the pillar go through Duoduo’s palm.

Up the arm. Out through the shoulder.

But.

That was not what happened.

When God-Slayer, Zhaoxi and Shuanghan opened their eyes again, they found to their astonishment that the terrible pillar of light had turned, at some point none of them had seen, into a soft ball of light held in Duoduo’s small hand. The three of them stared, unable to believe it, as her five fingers slowly closed and crushed that appalling ball of divine power.

A ball of divine power whose spread could have ruined heaven and annihilated earth burst apart — and did not do a bit of damage to anything around it.

Not so much as a ripple.

It all became bright petals in seven colors, scattering on the wind.

Even the mysterious man was thrown by that. A Divine Power Piercing Wave that could one-shot the strongest pseudo-god alive, wiped out just like that? Never mind the divine power inside it. The Sovereign Intent carried along with it should not have been changeable at all, let alone turned into plant petals.

She had simply erased a Sovereign Intent that was one body with the wave?

How had she done that?

“You’re a poor excuse for a senior who’s lived tens of thousands of years. Not content with holding us down by force of law, you dress the whole thing up in respectability while striking from hiding. You are shameless past belief — do you even know how the word is written?” Duoduo put out a finger and pointed, and Yue Yang, on the ground, shuddered faintly, as though invisible ropes were coming loose.

“The winner is king.” The mysterious man sneered. “If you don’t understand even that much, then all I can tell you is that you’re too green.”

Duoduo trying to free Yue Yang from the binding.

He treated the whole idea with total contempt.

If divine power could have taken it off, that insufferable brat would have been up on his feet long ago. Why would he be waiting for her to do it?

He had bound the boy using the most singular method in existence, with his own unshakable Sovereign Intent wrapped up inside it. Except for himself, there was not a second person in the world who could undo it.

Duoduo did not do what the mysterious man had expected and keep throwing divine power at the invisible binding. She raised a hand with the air of someone who already knew the answer, and across the whole earth the sea of flowers began to sway, the fragrance thickening until it came at you in waves. At the very center of that sea, behind Duoduo, a petal giant stood up, a thousand meters tall, assembled out of flower petals.

She was beautiful past describing. Anyone who looked at her felt his throat close, and there was nothing to be done about it.

If they hadn’t known she was made of petals, Shuanghan and the others might have believed there really was a female Titan in the world that beautiful and that tall. The mysterious man watched coldly, arms folded, waiting the way a man waits out a joke. However huge the petal giant was and however fearsome its power, it was no use whatsoever for undoing the binding. That binding was not something force could remove. Apart from its owner, there was nobody in the world who could.

The petal giant danced in the sea of flowers, like a girl born to it.

Rising with the wind.

Her movements lovely and natural, her expression alive.

Shuanghan, Zhaoxi and God-Slayer stared. She was like a person. She was plainly made of petals — how did she have an expression, and how was there anything in her eyes? And what did the dance actually mean?

“When my divine rank begins to dance — she who stands for the birth and the growth of life across this earth — nobody can stop her. Because nobody can stand against the Life Law that was laid down in ancient times. And nobody can interfere with my Sovereign Intent.” A rainbow in seven colors spread out behind Duoduo, and while she was explaining her divine rank and her law aloud, an invisible force spread out of the petal giant’s body and filled the field in an instant. Without even God-Slayer noticing it happen, the space and the ground that had been covered by the Shenmie law generated by the ancient relic’s true body were silently and completely replaced by the Life Law Duoduo had just named.

“Oh?” The mysterious man did catch that one, and it startled him badly.

“In heaven and on earth, I alone am sovereign.” Duoduo was declaring that at this moment every living thing between heaven and earth would take her as its sovereign.

Shuanghan and God-Slayer and the rest all felt the urge to lower their heads. A sense of their own smallness rose in them, and they did not dare look up at Duoduo or at the petal giant behind her. The mysterious man, hostile and resisting with everything he had, gave a muffled grunt, and endless divine power erupted out of his body as he forced himself to stand against the weight of one sentence.

He had been floating in midair. He began to sink, and he did not stop sinking.

As though ten thousand tons of stone were pressing down on his head.

He fought it, and fought it again.

And in the end he had to put his feet on the ground before he could truly steady himself, straighten his spine, and lift his head.

“This is only the beginning.” Duoduo’s cold eyes rested on him without a trace of pity. She pointed upward, and the petal giant suddenly drew herself up tall, reached out, and grabbed at the sky. Somewhere in the void, at a height nobody could judge, something seemed to be hidden — and under the giant’s grip it let out a shrill, panicked scream like an animal’s.

The thing was transparent.

Formless.

If the petals hadn’t been wrapped around it, not even North Divine Sovereign Zhaoxi with the Zhenmiao Divine Mirror could have detected that it existed at all.

Once the petal giant had hauled it down out of the top of the sky, God-Slayer and the others could see it was a strange war beast, something between a cloud and an animal, transparent throughout and effectively formless. No eye sharp enough and no sense quick enough could have picked it up. It hid itself very deep to begin with, and on top of that it had been covered over by its master’s divine power. If Duoduo hadn’t taken control of the entire field with the Life Law and pulled it down out of the high sky, nobody would ever have known it was there.

The petal giant was like a woman who has been kept waiting and is tearing her lover’s roses apart over it.

She pulled the transparent, formless war beast to pieces, a piece at a time.

The larger limbs.

Those she threw down to the demon flowers under the sea of blossom, which ate them. The smaller fragments she rubbed slowly into powder between her hands. The mysterious man, enraged, fired dozens of Divine Power Piercing Waves and then a golden thunderbolt that burst over the petal giant’s head.

None of it did anything.

The Divine Power Piercing Waves could not get through so much as one petal. They refracted in the dew sitting on the petals, skipped, spread out, and ended as rainbows filling the sky. And the golden thunderbolt, which could have destroyed a mountain range and wiped a city off the earth, met one pointed finger from Duoduo and turned into several hundred golden bees and butterflies and other small flying things, buzzing about at random, chasing each other and playing.

Watching it, Shuanghan and the others swallowed hard.

They had never seen a fight like this one.

And there was no denying it — a fight like this was more dangerous and more outrageous than any amount of splitting the heavens and cracking the earth. This wasn’t a fight between people at all. This was a war of gods. This was what a war of gods actually looked like.

“What?” The mysterious man’s temper went as well. Several attacks, all of them wasted, and instead of gaining anything he was being pushed back a step at a time and losing the initiative over and over. It was outrageous.

“I already told you. This is only the beginning. Your pain and your suffering are just now getting started.” There was no warmth anywhere in Duoduo’s eyes. She looked straight at him and said it one word at a time. “I am going to leave you with nothing. Until you are wiped out entirely.”

She had not finished before the petal giant moved again on her will.

This time she did not reach for the sky.

She drove a hand deep into the ground instead.

And dug a strange black rock out of the soil, something that looked like a great drum and like a boulder at once.

The color went out of the mysterious man’s face. Before he could get a word out, Duoduo was already sneering at him. “You borrowed the magnetic force of the Ancient Magnetic Drum Monster, and just now the Void Heaven-Binding Worm, and put them together with your will and your power over law so you could strike from hiding while pretending to be the most arrogant thing in creation. You can fool other people with that. Can you fool me, who am also of the divine realm? Ji Wuri, a moment ago — if you hadn’t ambushed him, would one light wave of yours have gone through him and killed him? And even with an ambush that shameless coming off, my master still put a serious wound on you. And you stand in front of us pretending to be an invincible god? Pah.“

Hearing her say it.

God-Slayer and the others understood all at once.

The old man had laid his traps long before any of this started. No wonder he had the first move everywhere, tied everyone down, and ran the whole field with nobody able to stand half a move against him.

The huge Ancient Magnetic Drum Monster was smashed apart by a single punch from the petal giant, and the fragments were eaten by the various demon flowers in the sea of blossom before any of them could hit the ground. If those fragments had made it back to the earth, the Ancient Magnetic Drum Monster could have re-gathered itself immediately, whole as it had been, and drawn on the power of the ground to be reborn.

But in front of Duoduo’s Life Law and a sea of flowers that devoured everything, it could only become one tragic thing.

Fertilizer.

“You — you’ve killed two of my great war beasts, one after the other!” The mysterious man was burning with rage, and he stared with hatred at Duoduo and at the Yue Yang who was slowly getting to his feet. “If you think I need to lean on war beasts, you are badly mistaken. I simply had no wish to raise a hand against ants like you. But now you have managed to make me angry. Ants — your time has come.”

He hadn’t finished when a golden dragon came surging up out of Yue Yang’s body, spiraled straight into the ninth heaven, and came down at him with its fangs bared and its claws out, swallowing as it came.

This was Yue Yang’s fifth sword.

The Yellow Dragon Abyss sword.

(End of Chapter 1199)