The thorn-flower giant and the petal giant had joined forces and beaten the demon-formed mysterious man to a pulp.

Yue Yang, for his part, had his own idea of how this ought to finish.

Ideally the demon-formed mysterious man would go down the way Zhen Guanxi did — three punches and the account settled — and then Duoduo would spit out something like “the bastard’s faking it,” turn on her heel and walk away without a backward glance. That would be perfect. Killing a big boss like the mysterious man, and for the first time in his life Yue Yang, for his part, felt no greed at all for the drop. Because somewhere under the surface he was thinking: the fewer treasures this guy has, the fewer divine beasts, the better… Reality, however, was cruel. An old ghost like the mysterious man, tens of thousands of years into his cultivation — how was three punches going to kill him? How was an old piece of work like that not going to have a divine artifact or two in hand? A divine beast or two on him?

And keep in mind: they had been fighting this long, and the mysterious man had never once summoned a divine beast and never once used a divine artifact.

That he hadn’t used one didn’t mean he didn’t have one.

The likeliest reason he hadn’t was that the old piece of work didn’t think he needed to yet.

And now that Duoduo had beaten him senseless, Yue Yang didn’t have to guess. The old man was about to blow.

“Duoduo. Back off.” Yue Yang pulled Xiao Wenli and Duoduo both back in a hurry. If they genuinely couldn’t win, then they’d take to their heels; if they couldn’t outrun him, they’d hide in the Grimoire World, and hiding out for eight or ten years was nothing to be ashamed of.

And even if it was shameful.

It still beat throwing a life away for nothing.

“HAAAGH — have you had enough yet?” The demon-formed mysterious man’s voice came up bitter from under the thorn-flower giant’s fists.

A shaft of divine light burst out of his body. Far off, watching, Shuanghan cried out before he could stop himself: “Don’t tell me this guy has a third form too?”

The words were still ringing in everyone’s ears when the demon-formed mysterious man — beaten bloody a moment before — vanished without a trace. Between heaven and earth there was nothing left but a single blinding shaft of divine light, radiance streaming up and up, straight into the sky. From the very top of the heavens a supreme pressure came down. Shuanghan and Zhaoxi both felt something in their minds bow and submit, a humility they could not argue with. Their bodies gave under that pressure: their feet sank deep into the ground, they were forced down onto their hands, their backs bent like drawn bows, and for a long moment they simply could not fight their way upright.

Even a man as strong as God-Slayer had to prop himself up on the ancient divine sword Lihen.

Only then could he stand straight.

Yue Yang had already recalled the Taotie Blade and the rest of his earth divine soldiers. In the fight that was coming, none of them had grown far enough to do what they were meant to do.

Xiao Wenli guarded Yue Yang’s side, her twin blades raised in a parry, which was the only way she could hold up under the divine majesty coming down on them like a mountain. Duoduo’s face had gone grave — nothing left of the easy calm she’d worn until now. The sea of flowers she had spread across the ground had been crushed to scattered pieces by the pressure of that divine light and was very nearly out of her control.

The thorn-flower giant and the petal giant each put out a hand, arching them together like a bridge, and only that kept her, Xiao Wenli and Yue Yang safe.

High in the sky was a golden divine figure whose body poured out radiance beyond counting.

It came drifting slowly down.

If a man had never seen a god, then one look at this golden figure descending into the world would tell him what a god looked like. He was exactly the image of divinity that lives in men’s minds and in the old stories — holy, solemn, glorious, immense… And not only in Yue Yang’s eyes. God-Slayer and the rest felt it too: that nowhere in all the world was there another being who carried more divine majesty than this mysterious man, or stood higher. They knew perfectly well he was the enemy, and even so, in that instant Shuanghan and the others could not raise a single thought of resistance. The mysterious man’s descent had seized their minds whole.

He had gone back to his original height. But what he had now was a divine body.

That shaft of divine light curved down and wrapped itself around him.

It formed a halo of overwhelming holiness.

Behind the halo a blazing golden divine image began to grow, and it did not stop. In ten seconds it stood two thousand meters tall, so vast that the mountain ridges far off across the land became small clods of dirt.

Yue Yang and the others stood at the golden divine image’s feet and could not see the top of its toes. The thorn-flower giant and the petal giant, both over a thousand meters tall, had become a pair of dwarves in front of it. There was no question what this was: the divine rank the mysterious man had condensed, with tens of thousands of years of work behind it. Xiao Wenli and Duoduo had nothing to match it. Both of them were prodigies, but they had simply not been cultivating long, and how could that stand against an old man who had begun his bitter training tens of thousands of years ago?

The mysterious man hadn’t said so, but Shuanghan and the rest all understood. This had to be the final third form. The god form.

Shuanghan caught up to that and slapped himself in the mouth again.

He really did have a crow’s tongue.

He’d called it right again.

The mysterious man summoned a Sacred Codex that burned as bright as sunlight — and then, unexpectedly, did not summon a life-guardian war beast. He only opened his own unique talent ability. Whether he thought summoning one was unnecessary, or was keeping a hidden card in reserve, nobody could say.

With his talent open, he called out one special war beast of the light-wing type to support him, and his power surged several times over again.

His eyelids, closed until now, opened.

Yue Yang was standing right in front of him.

It was like being hit by a thunder hammer. He was blasted straight out from behind Duoduo and Xiao Wenli’s guard.

He went across the ground like an artillery shell, smashing through hill after hill of rock, and drove straight into a long high mountain range and stuck there. The thorn-flowers spread over the land had no time at all to stop him or shield him. All they were left with was an enormous furrow, ten meters deep and cut as sharply as a drawn line, running ten thousand meters. More than ten kilometers off to the side, Shuanghan, Zhaoxi and God-Slayer — who had not even been the ones stared at — felt something charge their hearts like a wild bull, and their bodies backed up on their own, several steps, and could not stop.

That was what one stare did.

The mysterious man had unsealed his final form and taken back his true god-form body, and he had genuinely reached a level that Divine Sovereigns like Shuanghan could not imagine.

Duoduo and Xiao Wenli both reacted the instant Yue Yang was hit. The little serpent-demon snapped backward through the air, wanting to be at her master’s side at once and block any follow-up. Duoduo charged instead, straight at the mysterious man in his god form.

“Hah!”

The golden divine image behind the mysterious man reached out a hand big enough to blot out the sky.

It closed on the thorn-flower giant’s shoulder.

It tore countless thorn-flower vines apart, ripped the thorn-flower giant — immovable a moment ago, rooted in her sea of flowers — brutally out of the ground, hoisted her high overhead and threw her far away.

The thorn-flower giant sent countless vines out of her body, driving them down into the sea of flowers below and knotting herself back into it. She snapped who knows how many of them doing it, but she finally bled off the golden divine image’s force and steadied herself. Then a foot the size of a mountain appeared in the sky above her, and with a roar the golden divine image stamped the thorn-flower giant’s head into the ground.

“Ha!”

On the other side, the golden divine image’s fist came out of nowhere and blew apart the Rainbow Flower Shield the petal giant had condensed.

Petals sprayed across the whole sky like rain, falling in drifts, dark red as blood.

The petal giant’s body shook hard.

She backed away, and away again, the way something wounded backs away… and Duoduo, who held the petal giant by will alone, had gone paper-white, with a thread of blood running from the corner of her mouth.

Divine power against divine power. Will slamming into will. She was not in the fight with her own body, and even so the danger in that contest of strength was a hundred times worse than fighting hand to hand. Fall a hair short and the damage would be lethal, and no skill and no scheme could do a thing about it.

Under absolute power, only power decides the outcome.

Everything else counted for nothing.

Skill, scheming — all of it looked pale beyond words.

“Life never ends. Heaven’s law is nature itself!” Duoduo’s eyes had gone hard all the way through, and once Xiao Wenli had dug Yue Yang out of the rock he was buried under, her fists closed tighter still, her Sovereign Intent as unmoving as a mountain.

With that one line, the sea of flowers — every bloom of it withered under the mysterious man’s pressure — came back to life at once.

And the thorn-flower giant, head stamped into the ground, wrapped her arms tight around the golden divine image’s knee.

The two-thousand-meter body of the golden divine image began to sway.

Duoduo’s counterattack had begun. She was a Flower Goddess who had already risen to the divine realm, and she held the Life Law, which had been irreversible since the laws of the ancient age were laid down. However strong the mysterious man was, he could forget about forcing a Sacred Sovereign like her to bow.

“Flowers and grass. Sprouting in spring, growing in summer, fruiting in autumn, withering in winter. What a feeble law of heaven that is.” The mysterious man plainly had no respect for plant-type war beasts or plant-type life. To him, ice and wind and thunder and fire — the forces of nature — were worth far more than the living force in flowers and grass. He had barely finished speaking when the golden divine image stamped its foot, driving divine power deep into the earth and waking the magma underneath… Those elemental forces had been lying quiet in the heart of the world, and the moment divine power broke their balance they went off, venting madly out through the opening it had bored.

Rock chips and slag beyond counting, more mud and ash than anyone could measure, erupted out of the crater the golden divine image’s foot had blown open.

Then came the lava, blood-red, in a flood.

The thorn-flower giant’s head was in the way, and it still couldn’t stop that eruption — a waterfall hung upside down and magnified past all measure. The blood-red lava came up like dozens of vast crimson pythons, tore the thorn-flower giant’s head apart and destroyed it, and shot straight into the sky.

At the top of its climb it turned over and came diving back down.

Something mocking crossed the mysterious man’s eyes. Mere flowers and grass — how were they supposed to hold back the force of an eruption like that?

To beat an enemy there was no need to lift a hand yourself. Simply setting off the might of heaven and earth was enough to burn an enemy to ash — plant-type life above all, since it had no defense whatsoever against ice, fire, thunder or lightning. That was the fatal weakness. Any one of those elemental forces could wipe it out easily.

“Creation!” Yue Yang, blasted away by a stare, flashed back to Duoduo’s side. The transmigrator was thoroughly annoyed now, and he had decided to hit back — a tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye. He couldn’t out-stare the mysterious man, so he’d help Duoduo put the guy on the ground first, and then arrange the corpse into thirty-six different poses and stare at it as long as he liked. Letting an insult go unanswered was not Yue Yang’s style, not ever.

With her master’s Creation Domain and Creation Intent behind her, Duoduo was delighted.

She took Yue Yang’s hand.

Their fingers laced together.

In their joined palms, the Creation Divine Pearl — under a divine mind in which the two of them were perfectly of one accord — released both the chaos divine power stored inside it and the innate spirit of the divine artifact itself.

Xiao Wenli charged out in front. The thousand-meter golden serpent-demon threw up a six-armed guard — divine power for a shield, divine mind for a barrier, the Diamond Grimoire for a shell — and just barely turned aside a heavy fist from the mysterious man’s two-thousand-meter golden divine image, buying Yue Yang and Duoduo precious time for the creation they were working together.

The white-hot lava came down out of the sky across the land, and every drop of it became a sweet-smelling flower.

Strange colors, and no two alike.

The huge masses of molten rock, falling like meteors, broke apart and turned into diamonds, clear and glittering, scattering down over the ground… The heavy smoke became rainbows. The flames became butterflies. And the volcanic ash that had filled the whole of heaven and earth became drops of rain and dew, watering the flowers in the sea below, so that all that beautiful plant life came up greener still and swayed in the wind.

The crater that had been venting the fire at the earth’s heart was, at some point nobody had noticed, overgrown with demon-blood thorn flowers, fire-red and brilliant.

The thorn-flower giant, whose head had been destroyed, now stood up.

Her head had not only grown back — it now wore a crown of demon-blood thorn flowers. When she came up again she stood fifteen hundred meters tall. Still short of the golden divine image, but she had closed a great deal of the gap between them.

Yue Yang coughed. He had never attempted creation across a space this large, and never attempted an energy conversion on this scale. Even a single thought of it drew his mind far past its limits. His Sovereign Intent was hard as stone and he had been through a great deal; anyone else — even a Divine Sovereign at God-Slayer’s level — would have had his brain burst long since and died of it. His head splitting, Yue Yang forced himself to hold up and not go down, covering his mouth and nose with a hand to keep the blood from running out and dripping.

He could be hurt.

But he would never let anyone see him weak. Not at any time, not even in the moment before he died in battle. He had to be strong.

There were far too many people behind him — family, friends — holding him up, and every one of them was waiting for him to come back. Yue Yang knew that whatever happened, he could never let himself fall easily. Whatever the enemy, however strong, he had to fight and win… He had to carry victory and success back to the people who loved him. For their sake he had to hold on. For their sake he had to be unbeatable.

He could not let Fourth Mother and the others down. He could not let them cry over him.

And besides, he was the transmigrator — uniquely favored, without equal.

If he couldn’t get past this one, who could?

Going all the way back to the Purple-Gold Marquis, which fight hadn’t he gotten through by gritting his teeth and outlasting it?

The one pity was that the ice-and-snow beauty who had fought at his shoulder that day was still asleep and couldn’t stand with him again for this one. With the Book of Truth in her hands, she would have multiplied what he could do a hundred times over…

Blood crept down through the gaps between Yue Yang’s fingers like red worms.

Xiao Wenli lay curled against his chest.

She had taken a full-force blow from the golden divine image head-on, and the backlash of that divine power had put her small body in terrible pain. The blood from her mouth had soaked through the front of Yue Yang’s shirt.

In the whole field only Duoduo had anything left to hold herself upright. Even God-Slayer, who had been keeping his feet with the help of his sword, was down to one arm braced against the ground just to keep from falling. Shuanghan was close to blacking out. Zhaoxi, who held the Zhenmiao Divine Mirror, had never taken a serious hit and was still clear-headed — but what the mirror’s weapon spirit sent back turned his face white, and he shouted before he could stop himself, trying to warn Yue Yang, Duoduo and Xiao Wenli: “He — has — a —”

North Divine Sovereign Zhaoxi got that much out.

But under the pressure of the mysterious man’s divine mind the rest of his voice was snuffed out, and it never reached Yue Yang’s ears intact.

The mysterious man didn’t think a warning from Zhaoxi would do Yue Yang any good, but he was deeply displeased that Zhaoxi had seen through what he was about to do. His divine mind became countless invisible needles and drove into Zhaoxi’s body, while the pressure of his divine power simply extinguished the man’s voice.

In his own mind, he was the god who controlled everything.

An enemy might want to say something.

He might want to do something.

None of it happened unless this man’s will allowed it.

(End of Chapter 1201)