Storm Fortress.

The soldiers of the Eastern and Western camps, locked in a hard fight, suddenly felt a supreme and majestic force come down on top of them.

Across the whole field, every soldier and every commander was driven toward the ground like a meteor falling. Guhai, Wan’e, the Wind Ear Marshal, Marshal Griffin and Golden Eagle General were fighting like madmen in the air — super divine general-tier fighters, the strongest men below a Divine Sovereign — and even they were no exception.

It was not only the two sides in the fight. The hovering motherships anchored in both camps lost control as well, and went roaring down toward the ground.

Their prows drove deep into the earth.

Wind Hawk, Winged Tiger and the other Star Pirate leaders tumbled toward the ground aboard the Great Swan, fast as a meteorite.

That supreme pressure had erupted out of nowhere, and until the majesty of it passed, not one person could lift his head and look up at the sky. Not one glance upward was possible. Anyone below divine general strength couldn’t so much as twitch a finger, and could only lie there terrified, as though the end of the world had come and there was nothing left to do but wait for death… Nobody knew what had happened, and nobody had reason enough left to think about it.

Ji Wuri, two thousand kilometers clear of the field by now, suddenly pitched forward.

He was pressed flat against the ground and held there.

He spent everything he had resisting it.

It did no good at all.

The fright nearly drove Ji Wuri’s soul out of his body. His first thought was that the mysterious man in his god form had caught up with him.

The same thing happened to Hei Zhou, who had just finished laying out every piece of his misleading trail. He was about to look for an empty valley, wipe out his own aura completely, and then go back into the world inside his golden grimoire and hide from the world for a thousand years or more — until things outside had settled, and then come out and see whether it was safe.

He had found a valley almost nobody ever walked through, and was about to summon a war beast to erase the last trace of living aura from his body, and then go back inside the Grimoire World.

The supreme pressure hit in an instant.

The great bulk of Hei Zhou’s divine power had been stripped from him and he was already desperately weak. Now the pressure drove him headfirst into the dirt, face down in it like a dog at a mud puddle, as undignified as a man can look. He was more frightened than Ji Wuri. If he had been able to open his mouth and beg, he would have been pleading with the mysterious man for his life long since. His heart turned to ash. He had laid out every piece of his plan and thought himself clever, and here he was in front of the mysterious man anyway, an ant whose struggling meant nothing… Facing a divine majesty that pressed down from above and made him smaller than he could imagine, Hei Zhou did nothing but shut his eyes and wait to die. There was no fight left in him.

He had given up entirely.

Neither of them could have imagined it — not Hei Zhou, the ambitious ruthless warlord of the Western camp, and not Ji Wuri, the favored son of heaven whose gifts had no equal inside the Central Divine Hall. That supreme divine majesty pressing down on the world was Yue Yang’s doing.

Nobody in Mountain Beyond the Mountain knew what Yue Yang was like once he went berserk.

Fewer still knew anything about the Fate Giant’s supreme pressure.

Everything the Fate Giant had ever stepped on came to the same end.

The Solar King, who had once forced Yue Yang into a corner; the Heavenly Empress, who led her people in a full invasion of the Sky Tower… every one of them died in the end. There were no exceptions.

Not necessarily on the spot. But these were supreme powers who had once looked down on the world and ruled their own territories, and not one of them could withstand the tread of the power of fate. In the end their divine power scattered, one after another, and their souls and their awareness went off on the wind, and a brilliant life became a period at the end of a line in the record. Never mind the enemies who took the full weight of it — Yue Yang, its own master, could not command a supreme divine power that far past imagining.

Yue Yang had never been able to summon or direct the Fate Giant deliberately. With his mind clear, it was all but impossible for him to use a power he couldn’t control.

It took the most furious kind of rage, the state where he went berserk.

Or a wound bad enough to knock him unconscious.

Either one could set off the deep potential Yue Yang couldn’t reach while he was awake and clear, and only then was it possible to summon the Fate Giant and bring down an attack that came like a judgment.

“HAAAAAAAAAH——” The golden Fate Giant’s body ran straight up through the cloud ceiling into the vault of the sky. Nobody could look up at it. Even the golden serpent-demon divine image and the seven-colored petal giant, both of whom had taken a supreme blessing the moment they appeared, and both of whom stood over a thousand meters, did not reach the Fate Giant’s knee. Every living thing in the world bowed its head beneath the Fate Giant’s toes, and there were no exceptions.

With Yue Yang screaming like a man gone berserk, the Fate Giant put one foot on the mysterious man — whose divine power shield had expanded to a full thousand meters — and stamped him deep into the earth, the leg sinking in as far as its own knee.

That enormous shield of his could hold off any attack in Mountain Beyond the Mountain.

In front of the Fate Giant it was as fragile as a soap bubble.

There was a small pop.

It shattered.

The mysterious man, frightened out of his wits, was driven a thousand meters down into the rock of the earth… He tried to brace himself and resist, and both his arms broke, and every bone in his body burst into countless fragments.

The Sacred Codex gave a thunderous roar, burst out of the void in front of him and shot up into the air.

That particular sign meant the mysterious man had been killed outright.

Only a grimoire whose master has died bursts free like that.

And yet the mysterious man was, strangely, alive. Every bone in his body was broken and his skin looked as though countless wind-blades had gone through it, but he was still drawing breath and he had not died. Something stranger still was happening to him. The life-guardian war beast — the one thing that never betrays its master and never truly dies — came out of the mysterious man’s body all at once, fell to the ground in pain, shook there, and then scattered on the wind, flesh and spiritual awareness together, annihilated outright in this world. It did not do what a life-guardian war beast does when it “dies” — return to the Grimoire World to sleep and recover.

“No!” The mysterious man let out the most despairing cry of his life, inside his own mind.

He knew what had happened to him.

The life-guardian war beast was dead.

Truly dead.

Its master had been killed outright, in a single blow, by a supreme divine power nothing could resist, and the life-guardian war beast that was one body with him had given every last measure of its loyalty in that final act of guarding. It died in his place… It traded the life that could never truly die for its master’s survival, and it was annihilated forever.

Its annihilation also meant the Sacred Codex’s contract with him was broken.

The life-guardian war beast had poured out the whole power of the Sacred Codex to take a blow that should have killed him, and had traded its life for its master’s, loyal to the very end.

And the mysterious man could not find one scrap of gladness in it. He would rather have died back there than watch himself scrape out a life like this. The Sacred Codex was gone. Gone too was the life-guardian war beast fused with him, the one that never died and that recovered at enormous speed no matter how badly it was hurt.

What did he have left?

Why hadn’t he died a moment ago?

If he had been killed outright back there, he wouldn’t be feeling pain like this… The pain in his body was nothing at all. The blow to his mind and his will was the wound that made a man want to stop living.

The Fate Giant overhead lasted only a few seconds, until a thread of reason came back into Yue Yang’s divine sense.

Then it was gone.

It felt as though a mountain that had been sitting on top of him had simply vanished. The mysterious man felt his body come back under his control, and of course his numbed senses started reporting everything else along with it, and the pain tore at him… He ignored the state of his body, threw himself forward, put out a shaking bloody hand and laid it on the dimmed Sacred Codex, meaning to contract it again.

He could lose everything else. He could not be without this Sacred Codex.

The bloody hand came down on the Sacred Codex.

It was not like before.

Not this time.

The Codex did not answer its old master. Instead the dimmed book grew slowly cold, the way a living thing does when it sleeps from exhaustion, and went back into an endless silence.

“No. No. No!” The mysterious man was desperate enough to shed two lines of bloody tears.

“Your mother — after all that, you still aren’t dead?” Yue Yang, overdrawn to the point of collapse, stood at the top of the thousand-meter cliff the Fate Giant’s foot had stamped into the ground and leaned over to look. The mysterious man was still alive, hanging onto life as stubbornly as a cockroach, and Yue Yang’s temper went straight through the roof. He condensed both swords, Black Returning Burial and White Frost Bloom, meaning to put whatever he had left into one final strike and finish off this old ghost who could not be killed by any means. Duoduo — fully restored by the Fate Giant’s supreme divine power, and stronger now than she had been — caught him and held on.

“Tsh!” On the other side Xiao Wenli took up a guard in front, the golden serpent-demon divine image crossing her twin blades into a slanted X.

BOOOOOOOM——

At the bottom of the enormous footprint canyon, the mysterious man could no longer hold the god form. He switched wildly into the demon form and came surging up out of it, claws tearing at heaven and earth, coming forward instead of retreating, attacking Yue Yang with everything vicious in him. He was desperate, and he meant to take Yue Yang down with him.

Duoduo’s petal giant and Xiao Wenli’s golden serpent-demon divine image blocked him together.

High in the ninth heaven, something moved.

Jiangying, who had shifted into chi-dragon form at some point nobody noticed, came diving down from the very top of the sky carrying the dragon god’s annihilating power.

The petal giant and the golden serpent-demon divine image, who had been holding off the demon form’s attack together, went straight into a coordinated counter.

One from the left and one from the right, they seized the demon-formed mysterious man and slammed him down.

The demon form could shift between solid and insubstantial at will.

Under their will it could no longer become the phantom that ignores every attack, and the demon-formed mysterious man watched, wide-eyed, as the Chi-Dragon Woman came down like the Milky Way hanging upside down out of the ninth heaven, the dragon god’s power leading the way, devouring as she came.

“Aah— no!”

The demon-formed mysterious man wrenched himself free with everything he had, and just barely got his head and upper body out of being devoured.

Everything from the chest and belly down was caught by the dragon god’s power.

All of it was swallowed.

For a moment the mysterious man could not hold even the demon form, and he fell back to the first one, the beast form. Half a body was all that was left of him, and the beast-formed mysterious man dropped to the ground in pain and despair. In that moment the shadow of death came over his heart. A fear he had never known and a pressure he had never tasted took possession of his whole mind.

If tears could have won any of it back, the beast-formed mysterious man would gladly have wept his heart out.

If he had known in advance that it would come to this, he would never have gone to Mountain Beyond the Mountain.

There was that Sky Tower junior, Yue Titan.

However much noise he made, the answer would have been to pay him no attention at all… Unfortunately, every regret had come far, far too late. There are many roads in the world to choose from, and at a crossroads anyone may make his decision according to his own will. But once the choice is made, nobody can reverse it.

There is no taking it back.

Because this was the result of what he chose himself.

The mysterious man could have stayed away from Mountain Beyond the Mountain. He could have left Yue Yang unhunted. He could have never laid this scheme in the first place.

If he had done that, he could have gone on living free and easy. Nobody would know who he was. Nobody would know he was one of the attackers all those years ago. Nobody would know he held a Sacred Codex, the Three Divine Mirror and the Five Divine Bell.

But he chose this. From the contemptuous hunt at the beginning, when he had no one in his eyes at all, to right now — at the last abyss of the road of his life, standing in front of this cliff of death — there was no way back for him. He chose this hopeless dead-end road himself. There was nobody else to blame. If he had to blame something, he could blame the overbearing arrogance he had started out with.

“Let’s — let’s die together! You want to kill me? Hahahahaha, you really are too naive. And not just you. I’m going to have every living thing in Mountain Beyond the Mountain buried with me!” The beast-formed mysterious man’s body began to swell, terribly, like a rubber ball expanding without limit.

“Self-destruction?” Duoduo and Xiao Wenli moved to draw him back into the Grimoire World and out of danger, and Yue Yang stopped them.

Not only did he not get clear — he charged straight in like a madman.

The beast-formed mysterious man was laughing, a pleased and vicious sound.

Yue Yang punched himself in the heart, imitating the Supreme’s Sword of Life, spat out a mouthful of blood, then overdrew every bit of strength he had left to make that blood take shape. It became an enormous golden dragon and went to devour the beast-formed mysterious man, who had swollen into a ball and might blow at any second. Having sent out that Yellow Dragon Abyss, made from the purest heart’s blood of the True Dragon Heart, Yue Yang didn’t last long enough to see the golden dragon come back. His strength gave out and he fainted.

He fell out of the sky.

Xiao Wenli got there in time and caught him in her arms.

The beast-formed mysterious man saw the golden dragon and roared in despair. He couldn’t wait for the last of his divine power to gather, and blew himself apart in a frenzy.

In the instant the shock wave of that self-destruction spread outward, the golden dragon had already arrived. The way a dragon swallows and spits its dragon pearl, it opened its mouth and took every bit of the energy down in one gulp…

(End of Chapter 1205)