The moment the mysterious man brought out the Five Divine Bell, one of the six divine artifacts, Yue Yang, for his part, knew without saying anything that this was very bad.
That artifact was absolutely not something to provoke.
It was far more terrifying than the Three Divine Mirror, and the mirror had already lost the good face on its front and kept only the evil one on its back. The ancient sound alone, the one that cowed the mind, was more than a man could stand. One slip and the bell would put him through hell. This was bad. How was he supposed to break this thing?
The transmigrator was frantic, and of all the times for it, the snow girl wasn’t here, so there was nobody at his side to feed him a plan.
He was finished, finished. What was he supposed to do now? What was he supposed to do now!
It happened at the height of the mysterious man’s laughter.
God-Slayer.
The Eastern Divine Sovereign suddenly stepped forward.
The mysterious man, now in his perfect god form, did not spare him so much as a glance from the corner of his eye. As he saw it now, God-Slayer — a man his original form had swatted away with one move — could do whatever he liked in front of the final god form; the only possible result was being killed on the spot.
Divine Sovereign, was he? Empty boasting. The man wasn’t even qualified to be his opponent.
The mysterious man ignored God-Slayer completely.
His eyes were only on Duoduo, Jiangying and Xiao Wenli in front of him. Even Yue Yang got no more than a careless sweep of a look, which counted as acknowledging that the transmigrator existed.
God-Slayer raised the ancient divine sword Lihen in his hand… A mocking curl came to the mysterious man’s lip, and he all but said it out loud: pitiful worm, attack me however you like, you can’t harm a hair on me. Whereas one breath out of me would blow a small insect like you clean past the ninth heaven. He made no move at all to stop him. He simply waited to see what God-Slayer would do, with the sneering attitude of a man watching a play.
His plan was to wait until God-Slayer had put everything into his biggest attack, and then crush this so-called Eastern Divine Sovereign with one finger, the way you would crush a small ant without thinking about it.
The ancient divine sword Lihen was trembling faintly.
It would not stop humming.
A second later, God-Slayer drove it through his own heart.
The impossible act left Yue Yang stunned, and the mysterious man couldn’t believe it either. God-Slayer was killing himself? It made no sense. Nothing was wrong — why would he kill himself?
“Hah!” God-Slayer pulled the divine sword back out, reached into the wound as the blood sprayed, and tore his own heart out of it, still beating.
With the hot blood of that heart he drew a rune formation of surpassing strangeness across the sky.
Then he poured every scrap of divine power left in his body into it.
Yue Yang had understood by then.
He tore toward God-Slayer, shouting like a madman. “Don’t! I don’t need you to do this!”
A smile appeared on that cold face of God-Slayer’s, a rare enough thing, and it looked like a glacier ten thousand years old breaking up. Facing Yue Yang as he came charging in, God-Slayer raised the heart in his hand high overhead, divine light shooting from both eyes, blazing like the sun. “Today I finally understand what Taiyan and Bingli gave up all those years ago. I, God-Slayer, cannot beat down a strong enemy. But if limited strength and limitless blood can seal a divine artifact, then I have not walked this world for nothing! I, God-Slayer, was never a weakling scrabbling to stay alive. At the very least I am a strong man who could overcome himself and earn his own honor! I die today and there is no regret in me. The world will lose no brightness for losing me — but it will have shone the brighter for my having been in it… God-Slayer. My name is God-Slayer!”
Yue Yang got there and reached out to take hold of this man who had never bent to a strong enemy and had never once bent to fate.
God-Slayer’s whole body had already turned to fine powder and scattered on the wind.
All his divine power, all his potential.
His will, his soul.
Every last thing he had went into that strange rune formation.
Lihen gave a grieving cry and fired a shaft of divine light, nailing the rune formation — full of God-Slayer’s will and God-Slayer’s divine power — onto the bell hanging in front of the mysterious man.
Nothing could obstruct that light. The mysterious man turned his divine power into a hundred layers of divine shields and it did no good whatsoever. The light, carrying God-Slayer’s last will inside the rune formation, went through those hundred layers as though they weighed nothing, and inscribed the formation on the bell’s wall exactly as God-Slayer had intended. The bell, which had been pouring out radiance, went dim at once, and the ancient divine sound that had been ringing in the bottom of every heart weakened until it could barely be heard.
“No. No!” Yue Yang’s hand closed on nothing.
He had never wanted this.
Never wanted to buy his own victory with another man’s life.
God-Slayer had sacrificed himself, and had done it willingly, and even so it struck a terrible blow at the pride the transmigrator carried.
Yue Yang never said so, but in his heart he was prouder than anyone. He had never wanted to lean on anybody. He had always fought alone, and however hard the effort cost him, he was unwilling to take half a step of help from anyone on the road of his own growth. Princess Qianqian and Yue Yu and the rest were different — they were fated to walk beside him all his life, and Yue Yang counted them as one body with himself. Letting them fight at his side brought him no shame and did no damage to a man’s pride, because they were what he had spent his life protecting and could not be set apart from him as outsiders…
And even so, in every fight, Yue Yang had always taken the hardest and most difficult part himself.
Now, right in front of him, God-Slayer had spilled his own blood and spent his soul and his divine power to seal the one divine artifact Yue Yang had no answer to — the Five Divine Bell. Yue Yang felt the proud part of himself break. Gratitude and shame he had never felt before flooded him at once, wound together, strangling that last small piece of a man’s backbone he had held onto hardest — and the pain of it was beyond words.
It had happened too fast. Yue Yang didn’t want to accept it, and he had no choice but to accept it.
God-Slayer, that admirable comrade in arms, had fallen just like that.
Gone on the wind.
If it came down to acquaintance, or friendship, then strictly speaking God-Slayer was not Yue Yang’s friend at all. The two of them had met only in this Divine War, and apart from having once joined hands against an enemy there was nothing between them. But from another angle the connection between God-Slayer and Yue Yang ran deep and was nothing ordinary. It was a relationship neither of them could explain or put a name to, because both belonged to the Eastern clan of the Eastern world, and from the first look each gave the other, a certain feeling had been faintly present in both their hearts: one of my own kind… and something closer than that. Brothers.
The divine sword Lihen dropped into Yue Yang’s hand, and it would not stop wailing.
In leaving the world, God-Slayer had entrusted the divine sword he loved — a battle companion of ten thousand years — to Yue Yang: a stranger he had never known, and a brother of his own kind he had felt he knew at first sight.
He believed in this younger brother.
The victory mattered that much.
He had even been willing to die for him.
At the height of the mysterious man’s laughter, God-Slayer had stepped out the way an older brother steps out in front of a younger one — life as the fuse, soul as the seal — gathering all his divine power to seal the Five Divine Bell that the mysterious man had been about to turn loose on the whole field. Yue Yang had not needed him to do it. God-Slayer did it without a moment’s hesitation, and that cold-faced man burned his own blood in front of the world for the first time.
That scalding blood of his burned away the calm and the reason Yue Yang normally kept hold of, and brought to a boil a heart the transmigrator had always guarded and never once shown anyone.
Holding the divine sword Lihen in both hands, Yue Yang — who never wept, who never showed weakness — shut his eyes tight.
A bright bead that might have been water slid slowly down the divine sword.
God-Slayer!
My name is God-Slayer!
That was God-Slayer’s last sentence in this world, and the one that burned deepest into the heart the transmigrator kept hidden.
There had not even been time to sit down over wine with a man that bold and that proud, and already Yue Yang had watched him go in a hurry — and only so that Yue Yang could have one victory. This arrogant swordsman with an ancient divine sword in his hand had held nothing back… He was a man who stood between heaven and earth, and all he left behind was that one line: God-Slayer. My name is God-Slayer.
“Hahahahaha! If you thought one seal like that was going to knock my bell out completely, that’s a little too funny!” The mysterious man had been badly shocked at first, but when he turned the bell and found it only mostly sealed, its power not entirely gone, the arrogance came straight back and he laughed up at the sky. “I’ll say this much — I’m impressed. Ants can’t always be ignored. But an ant is an ant. However high a price it pays, it’s all wasted effort.”
“You—” Yue Yang’s hair went up with rage, and he was about to throw himself at the mysterious man and fight him to the death.
“Wait.” Unlike Shuanghan, whose face was covered in tears, North Divine Sovereign Zhaoxi was unnaturally calm. He rose suddenly, holding the Zhenmiao Divine Mirror in both hands, and spoke word by word, his voice as clear as that ancient divine sound: “Mountain Beyond the Mountain does not have only Eastern Divine Sovereign God-Slayer. It has me. I am not God-Slayer. But whatever God-Slayer could do, I, Zhaoxi, can do as well.”
Zhaoxi drove his hand into his own heart and painted the blood across the Zhenmiao Divine Mirror.
He drew the same rune formation of surpassing strangeness.
Qingyun, weak enough to be all but dead already, did the same. The Northeast Divine Sovereign said nothing at all. Before he poured his whole life into completing the rune formation and let his body go off on the wind, he lifted his head and gave Yue Yang a smile — like an old friend not seen in years, smiling goodbye at the moment of parting.
The mysterious man panicked.
He tried with everything he had to stop them, but a seal that uses a life as its fuse and a soul as its stamp is not something divine power can stop.
The Divine Power Piercing Waves he fired at Zhaoxi and Qingyun were refracted away by Duoduo and Jiangying.
They went nowhere near their targets.
Zhaoxi’s and Qingyun’s remains would scatter on the wind within moments anyway, and even so the women were not willing to watch those waves desecrate them… Shuanghan’s tears turned to frost as they fell to the ground. His whole face was wet with them. He was crying like a child.
In an instant, three of the bell’s walls were sealed, and the divine artifact’s power had been cut down as far as it could go.
Shuanghan was not satisfied.
He wiped the tears away, his face set hard and final, and pointed at the mysterious man, who was angry enough to vomit blood. “Don’t flatter yourself. I, Shuanghan, love my own life more than any man alive. That doesn’t make me a coward! You want to use the bell? You want to stand up there and laugh down at us? Stop dreaming. Every humiliation you handed me, I’m handing back to you, all of it! Go on, laugh like you’re pleased with yourself. You’re the pitiful one here!”
“I’m not God-Slayer, first in Mountain Beyond the Mountain with nobody to match him. I’m not Zhaoxi, who sees through to the truth of a thing and cannot be deceived. I’m not even Qingyun, who loved life and was kind and sincere… I’m Shuanghan. A fanatic who will pay any price and stop at nothing for a goal, for an idea. You can call me a madman. But you will never understand what I want, or what I have been reaching for… You came here and you brought me despair and fear, you brought me pain and humiliation, and now I’m handing all of it back to you! I’m going to make you understand — even an ant is a life, and not to be insulted lightly!”
Before Yue Yang could stop him, countless ice-blood chains came flying out of Shuanghan’s chest.
They stretched out and out.
The mysterious man’s fist smashed the ice-blood chains to powder, and Shuanghan’s body with them.
In the instant he was annihilated, the expression Shuanghan left the world was a pleased smile. A smile of enormous satisfaction.
The bell, sealed four times over in succession by lives, finally went dark and dull. Its divine majesty was gone, and it faded into a plain ancient bell the color of black ink. The mysterious man’s contract with the bell’s weapon spirit was forcibly dissolved, and he was angry enough to smoke from every opening in his head and stamp with rage. If he hadn’t dissolved it, part of his own soul might have been sealed inside the bell as well, and with four powerful enemies — Duoduo, Jiangying, Xiao Wenli and Yue Yang — still standing around him, that was the last thing he was willing to risk. He had in fact dissolved the contract early, back when he swung the fist that destroyed Shuanghan’s ice-blood chains.
That punch was also the punch of a man whose frustration had gone past anything he could contain.
If Shuanghan had not handed every last thing back to the mysterious man who stood so far above them all, how could he have died smiling that easily, that thoroughly pleased?
“Goodbye, brothers. I promise you this — every bit of the pain and the humiliation goes back to this creature. I’m going to make him eat his fill of the despair and the fear he brought you. I’m going to beat him into scraps…” Yue Yang drew a long, deep breath, turned and pointed at the mysterious man. “You have well and truly made me angry now. Want to cry? Want to beg? None of that is going to work anymore. Because I am going to put a foot down and squash you flat.”
(End of Chapter 1204)