When Yue Yang woke again, he found his body much improved. The vitality he had spent going all out against the mysterious man had not come back entirely, but most of it had.

Neither Sick Beauty nor Yue Yu was beside him.

The moment he stepped out the door, he was startled to see Qilin Girl Bingyin charging straight at him. Yue Yang, for his part, jumped in fright and dodged in a hurry.

Bingyin saw the state he was in and could not stop laughing.

“Give me back the Three Divine Mirror.” The girl was in a good mood, so Yue Yang tried to get back what she had taken. He knew it was unlikely, but he had to try — it was the Three Divine Mirror, one of the six divine artifacts. It hurt just to think about it.

“Don’t want it. The good side and the evil side of the mirror have already been separated, and after that long apart, refined differently and contracted separately, they probably couldn’t be put back together now even if you wanted to. It’s junk. I don’t want it. Here, take it back.” And Qilin Girl Bingyin actually handed back the evil reverse of the Three Divine Mirror she had stolen. It shook the transmigrator to his boots and left him staring. What was wrong with this girl? Since when was she this agreeable? Had the sun come up in the west today? Or was he still asleep?

Yue Yang reached out and pinched Qilin Girl Bingyin’s small face. Nice to the touch, smooth as jade.

But the girl only kept grinning and didn’t headbutt him.

He couldn’t help sighing. “So it is a dream after all… I knew it. Nothing this good ever happens. Bingyin, little sister, teasing me in real life is one thing. In a dream, could you at least leave me a way out?”

Qilin Girl Bingyin suddenly lowered her head.

Then she knocked Yue Yang ten meters through the air.

Yue Yang bounced back to his feet, mouth wide open, and stood there astonished for a good while before he rubbed the spot on his chest where she had hit him. “Ow, that hurts. This isn’t a dream!”

Sick Beauty and Yue Yu had appeared behind him at some point, both covering their mouths and laughing quietly. With the Three Divine Mirror in hand, Yue Yang, for his part, could afford to be magnanimous and not hold too much against a girl like Bingyin. He had only the evil reverse of it, but he suspected that the spirit mirror Yi Nan had contracted in the Twelve Zodiac Houses was the mirror’s good face — that it had been broken, its power badly reduced, and had therefore taken the form of a spirit mirror. If that was so, then finding a way to join the two and restore the divine mirror’s full radiance would raise his little sister Yi Nan’s strength enormously.

As though she had seen straight through what he was thinking, Qilin Girl Bingyin pouted her soft pink lips. “Don’t be stupid. The two of them can’t be joined at all. I tried it the moment I got back. There’s a great deal still missing.”

Yue Yang did not doubt her, but he was not ready to let it go. “If it doesn’t work, we find a way. There’s always a way…”

A flash of light went through his mind.

Yue Yang seized the inspiration and held on to it. “North Divine Sovereign Zhaoxi of Mountain Beyond the Mountain had a Zhenmiao Divine Mirror. That’s a divine artifact — maybe we could use it to fill in the part the Three Divine Mirror is missing.” If Zhaoxi had been alive and the Zhenmiao Divine Mirror had still recognized him as master, Yue Yang would have been too embarrassed to simply take it. But Zhaoxi’s soul was sealed inside the Five Divine Bell now, and the mirror had been left entirely in Yue Yang’s hands to dispose of, so the transmigrator was not about to stand on ceremony.

“Huh?”

Qilin Girl Bingyin heard that and was interested.

She moved faster than anybody. She had the Zhenmiao Divine Mirror and the evil reverse of the Three Divine Mirror out of Yue Yang’s hands in one motion and was gone with a whoosh, leaving one line trailing and echoing in the ears of Yue Yang, Yue Yu and Sick Beauty. “Big villain, I’m borrowing your little sister Yi Nan for a few days. I’ll give her back when I’m done!”

Yue Yang was angry enough to want to smack her backside. Borrow the sky, borrow the earth, borrow objects — whoever heard of borrowing a man’s wife?… It was lucky she was a silly little thing, or Yue Yang would have coughed blood and died on the spot.

Lend her out for a few days, and she comes back with principal and interest.

As for the interest.

That would naturally be the silly little thing herself.

Yue Yang was still off in that fantasy when the Qilin girl came whooshing back and held out one soft pink hand, palm up. “Hand over that Tianxin too. I’ve thought of a method. If we add your little sister Bing’er as well, using life source power… explaining it to an idiot like you is a waste of time. Hurry up, lend me Bing’er for a few days as well… Wow, wow, I actually came up with a method this good. I’m so clever.”

Lost in self-admiration, the Qilin girl ignored the transmigrator’s furious look and took Tianxin — the quasi-divine artifact left behind by Divine Sovereign Qingyun — straight out of his possession by force.

Cheering to herself, thoroughly pleased, she went bouncing away.

That left Yue Yang, for his part, where he was.

He squatted on the ground, gloomily drawing circles…

Borrowing Yi Nan, that sweet, lovely little wife of his, wasn’t enough — now she wanted to borrow his adorable little bundle of energy too. The girl was insufferable. Had it never occurred to her that she didn’t have nearly enough to cover the interest?

Sick Beauty and Yue Yu talked the transmigrator down before he went berserk.

Then they laid on a lavish spread and let him turn his grief and rage into strength, working a bellyful of anger out on the food.

“Oh, right…” Yue Yang was in the middle of demolishing the feast when the Qilin girl came charging into the house again, and he nearly wept. Girl, exactly how many of my womenfolk do you need to borrow for one job? Entirely unaware of any of this, the Qilin girl squeezed in beside him and poked one pale jade forefinger at the middle of his chest — an adorable gesture, and hard enough to nearly drill a heart-shaped hole through the transmigrator. “I forgot to tell you. I very generously went and scouted it out for you. That vicious character has squeezed more than halfway in, and the ancient will has him trapped. There are two laws tangled around him as well, ice and fire. My estimate is that even if he gets all the way through, he won’t be out of that fog-covered hellhole for ten days, maybe two weeks. You can rest easy for a few more days. Well? I worked this hard to help you. Shouldn’t you be very grateful to me?”

“Girl, I’m so moved.” Yue Yang shot to his feet and gripped her small hand tightly. “Short of offering you my own body in marriage, I honestly cannot think of a better way to express the gratitude in my heart.”

“…” Qilin Girl Bingyin rolled her eyes. There was nothing to say to a man like this.

A savage girl bandit running into a shameless lecher.

That was about the size of it.

Sick Beauty and Yue Yu pretended not to have seen any of it, then went off out of sight and laughed until they could barely stand.

Once the Qilin girl was gone, Yue Yang stopped worrying about the Three Divine Mirror and started worrying about Princess Qianqian and Fengxian the Beauty and the rest, and whether they might run into Ji Wuri — who had made a Little Fleeing Turtle of himself. Never mind that the mysterious man had beaten Ji Wuri into scattered petals; Ji Wuri’s own strength was formidable. He simply hadn’t been a match for an old tortoise like the mysterious man, who had already lived tens of thousands of years.

“Don’t worry,” Yue Yu said. “Duoduo and Jiangying are with them. They’ll be fine. Even if they do run into that thief Ji Wuri, they’ll come back safe.”

Duoduo and Jiangying were strong enough, no question. But both of them had been hurt to one degree or another in the fight with the mysterious man.

They should have been resting properly long since.

Then again, Princess Qianqian had Hong, A-Man, Yika and Weilai along with her. Without an enemy on the mysterious man’s level — with only Ji Wuri to deal with — running into him really wasn’t something to fear… Yue Yang turned it over and over and still couldn’t put his mind at rest. He decided to get his body back into shape and go bring Princess Qianqian and the others home at once. Tempering was necessary, but Mountain Beyond the Mountain was too dangerous now. The mysterious man had barely died and here came the evil god Weiguang, and Ji Wuri’s whereabouts were unknown for the moment as well. A man like that was a menace every day he was left alive.

“Regulate your breathing a while longer. The faster you recover, the safer they are and the easier our minds will be.” Sick Beauty finished, then gave Yue Yang a pleasant shock. “While you were in that terrible fight — Duoduo and Jiangying had talked us out of going, and when the two of them went out to help you — I think I felt Wuxia’s consciousness.”

“She woke up?” Yue Yang was overjoyed.

“That, I’m not really sure about. I was too worried at the time to pay proper attention.” Sick Beauty could not be a hundred percent certain. It had only been a kind of sense.

“I really hope she wakes up soon…” Yue Yang went to look, and found Xue Wuxia still deep asleep, with no sign of waking.

He couldn’t help sighing.

Yue Yu and Sick Beauty comforted him in turns.

After the three of them left, Xue Wuxia’s long lashes — she was still deep in her sleep — trembled once, so faintly it was almost impossible to see.

The fight with the mysterious man had shown Yue Yang a great many of his own shortcomings. During the fight he had had no time to think at all. The pressure the man generated came down like a mountain, and whether it was the divine power’s outward pressure or the pressure on his mind, both were heavy enough to make thought impossible.

Now the fight was over, and Yue Yang, thinking it through calmly, began to see it.

There was a great deal he had not done well enough.

A great many gaps.

In the endless world inside the silver grimoire, the three little lolis who stood for Destruction, Creation and Eternity had once laid out for him what the Sacred Sovereign realm was and what it meant to exist at it. A true power, a true god, can not only destroy everything in the world but also create all things — and beyond that, is himself an eternal existence, one that no force can break or deny.

A man who cannot do that is not a Sacred Sovereign in any real sense.

He is not a true god.

In the fight with the mysterious man, if Yue Yang had been able to hold Eternity the whole way through, then however strong the man was, how could he have harmed him at all?

As Yue Yang saw it, he could not hold Eternity — and he could not even meet the standard of Creation, where a single thought makes a thing so.

If he could have held the realm where one thought creates a world, then how could the mysterious man’s three forms — beast, demon, god — or his Divine Power Piercing Waves, or the divine artifacts in his hands, have broken an infinite creation where one thought brings forth all things? Duoduo and Jiangying could use the creation of their own realms to stand against the man. They came up a little short, but they were never in the position he had been in, unable to resist at all.

In the end, the one he could just barely manage was Destruction.

And not even the Destruction that truly destroys everything.

Apart from the true Nirvana Flame, the Innate Sword Qi and the Wheel of Apocalypse, almost nothing he threw could hurt the mysterious man… He had assumed that having grasped the true meaning of the three Sacred Sovereign mysteries — Destruction, Creation and Eternity — he would stand a great deal higher than Ji Wuri. Who would have thought that in an actual fight it came to the same thing, with not much progress at all?

“I really am an idiot!” Yue Yang grabbed his head and shouted it. Through his mind went the guidance of the three little lolis in the silver grimoire, Empress Vivienne’s explanations, and the Sword Spirit Imperial Lady’s final revelation in the dream realm — and all at once his mind went clear and he understood completely.

The power of that understanding.

It erupted out of his body all at once.

Endless Chaos Source came surging out of him and poured into the Creation Domain, newly born and still refining and evolving. The Nirvana Flame went up in a single enormous pillar of fire. Taotie, Waning Crescent Moon, Starfield Sky Scorpion and his other divine soldiers ranged themselves out. The human divine soldiers, the sisters Yao and Yu, changed into a pair of companion-wing birds and circled their master without settling. And five swords — Black Returning Burial, White Frost Bloom, Scarlet Heaven Tempering, Orange Vast Radiance and Yellow Dragon Abyss — took shape from one thought and pointed separately at the sky.

A Milky Way blazed like a starfield domain, and the Twelve Zodiac constellations condensed out of it, more dazzling than anything else there.

The black stone, the destroying light, and the Supreme’s own original sword technique, the Sword of Life.

They appeared again, one after another.

Rising on that sudden enlightenment, Yue Yang lifted his face to the sky and opened both arms.

High above, a cry like the music of heaven sounded and shook the soul. At the top of the pillar of Nirvana Flame the Phoenix Sisters came down spinning, too fast for Yue Yang’s eyes to catch any shape or shadow of them, and they had already gone in through the crown of his head and become one body with him…

(End of Chapter 1209)