Mountain Beyond the Mountain. The Reception Platform.

Jiuxiao and Ji Wuri had not stopped fighting. Shock wave after shock wave spread past the edge of the ancient relic’s Shenmie domain and turned into destructive detonations of energy, or into raging hurricanes, blasting the land into a deep crater for ten-odd kilometers in every direction — until the piece of the Reception Platform still inside the domain stood in the middle of it like an island.

“Let’s end this pointless fight.” Ji Wuri sprang clear of the circle and waved a hand, all the interest gone out of him. “Your strength really has come a long way. Recovering that fast after being sealed, and breaking through on top of it — Jiuxiao, your progress is well beyond what I expected. But if you think power at this level is going to beat me, that’s a joke. However far I’ve fallen, Ji Wuri is not a man some quasi-divine-tier Great Power of the Heavenly Realm can put down. Never mind you. That supremely confident revered master of yours couldn’t keep me here either.”

“Is that so?” Jiuxiao broke into a long, arrogant laugh, and that strange voice of his — hauled back into the black hole’s endless pull the instant it reached Ji Wuri’s ears — was a horrible thing to hear.

“Don’t tell me you’ve been holding something back.” Ji Wuri looked unconcerned. Underneath it, something in him went cold.

“Long before you talked me into going to the Sky Tower and making war on the Prison Emperor, I was already watching my back. I kept a card in reserve.” Jiuxiao laughed coldly, and went on laughing. “The Prison Emperor’s strength was beyond matching, so your scheme worked. I’ll admit it — I had spent everything I had by the end, and I still could not get out from under his seal. It was lucky I wasn’t the main thing he was sealing. Otherwise I would never have come back out of the Prison Emperor’s Divine Hall in the Sky Tower, not ever… I came back to the Heavenly Realm with a healthy respect for the Prison Emperor and a great deal of anger, and the first thing on my mind was not revenge. It was not slaughtering the Sky Tower.”

“That hellhole. Whether it has fallen on hard times, or is still hiding any number of secret masters who never show themselves — either way, I never want to go there again.”

“What Xukong wants to do about it is his business. He’s welcome to it.”

“But nobody is getting me to set foot in the Sky Tower again.”

“I hate the Sky Tower. I hate the things that live there. Most of all I hate how terrifyingly fast they grow and how insanely willing they are to die for one another… The first time I laid eyes on that boy I understood that the Sky Tower had produced another Prison Emperor. A craftier one, with an immortal beast guarding him. Anyone who decides to go and subdue the Sky Tower, to destroy everything in it, is about to have very bad luck. Xukong right now, for instance. And your Grand Hall Master Dongfang. I had a few thousand years inside that seal to think about the Sky Tower calmly, and that hellhole simply cannot be conquered. Someone could level your Central Divine Hall and the Sky Tower still would not fall. There is something impossible in that place, and the mysterious Eastern clan guarding it where nobody can see… I believe your revered master knows this. He will certainly have told you the secret. And you, who call yourself the dearest friend Xukong and I have, pushed the two of us toward a pit of destruction that nobody comes back out of.”

“By great good fortune Ming Yueguang was there, and we got out in the end. But I have been storing up my anger every moment since, Ji Wuri, waiting to get back and offer you a small, insignificant thank-you in person.” Jiuxiao looked at him and laid out what he wanted in a perfectly level voice. “If I don’t twist that noble head off your shoulders and stuff it up your ass, I don’t think a few thousand years of stored-up anger is going to fade by so much as a hair.”

“You? Hahaha — am I allowed to laugh out loud?” Ji Wuri snorted at the idea.

“I said a moment ago that I kept a card in reserve before the war with the Prison Emperor.” Jiuxiao spoke very slowly, every sound of it sucked back into the black hole the instant it left him, which was a deeply strange thing to watch. “I left my life-guardian war beast, Black Sea, behind in the Heavenly Realm. Nobody would believe I’d be mad enough to do that. But it worked. By the time I came back to the Heavenly Realm alive, my revered master had already poured into my Black Sea the potential of every warrior he had killed across several thousand years, and it was waiting for me to come back and fuse with it. It falls a long way short of what the old man himself has. It is more than enough to reach the divine tier and kill an old friend like you.”

Ji Wuri’s face changed hard at that.

It was a long while before he got it back under control.

He clapped. He put his back into it, shaking his head all the while, and sighed. “Jiuxiao. Jiuxiao. You have well and truly earned your place as the one rival in Ji Ge’s life he worries about and guards against most. You are so far past anything I expected. Tsk, tsk, tsk. Leaving behind the strongest life-guardian war beast you have, the one thing that could keep you alive, before a decisive battle — a man can only admire nerve like that… But Jiuxiao, you’re clever, and Ji Wuri isn’t a fool. All right?”

Jiuxiao went still, thrown for a moment, and it took him a beat to press the anger down and snort. “You held something back too?”

Ji Wuri burst out laughing. “My old friend, look how disappointed you are. I’d love to be able to say no. But a man with nothing in reserve — how would he be the great rival of your life? How would he be the first genius of the Heavenly Realm, the one who has always stood a head above you? You have a remarkable revered master. So do I. Mine doesn’t shelter his juniors at every turn the way yours shelters you, but I have not stopped learning from him in several thousand years. At the very least, I have never once stopped collecting the forbidden power I learned from him. Set aside what I gathered elsewhere — here in Mountain Beyond the Mountain alone, I have collected the enormous potential of ten thousand people, burst open by forbidden power or drawn out of them… If I hadn’t held myself back from the divine tier on purpose, to grind through the seventh gate of the Human Valley and go after the Divine Codex at any cost, I would have set foot in the divine tier long ago. I would hardly be standing here letting you show off in front of me.”

“I have a suggestion.” Ji Wuri put out a hand, smiling all over his face, and dared him with it. “Why don’t we both use what we’ve been holding back, at the same time, and see which of us reaches the divine tier faster and comes out stronger? How does that sound?”

“…” Jiuxiao drew a long breath. “Good. Very good. Killing that version of you is the only thing that would be any thrill at all. The only thing that would feel like an achievement.”

“That,” Ji Wuri said, “is exactly what I was going to say.” The smile did not come off his face. His voice was ice.

Yue Yang, for his part, had no dogfight of his own going the way Ji Wuri and Jiuxiao did.

He was covering ground toward Storm Fortress as fast as he could go.

The snow girl was missing.

Not being able to find her had him worried enough.

He was not about to let anything happen to Princess Qianqian and Luohua on top of it, so he had no time to count his treasures and no time to rest. He was tearing toward Storm Fortress like the house was on fire.

In a valley a few tens of kilometers short of Storm Fortress, Yue Yang noticed something odd below him.

There was a strange aura spreading down there.

Yue Yang knew that aura very well. Forbidden power.

“You natural-born idiots. I told you not to take part in any test. Pies do not fall out of the sky. But no — you were stupid enough for anything, greed went to your heads. Where in this world is there something for nothing? Well, now look. Ten thousand people have already been reduced to slag and you’re all going the same way sooner or later. Move closer to the middle. Without the ancient relic’s power every last one of you bursts… And the worst part of it is that saving you garbage dragged me into the pit alongside you. Knowing a pack of cut-rate gluttons with no use in them but a mouth is the single greatest misfortune of Black Leaf’s life.” When Yue Yang came down, he found Raven standing in the middle of the crowd, tearing strips off a ring of seated Star Pirates without pausing for breath.

“Boss, you never said don’t do the test. I brought it up at the time and you said fine.” Flower Duck defended himself, thoroughly aggrieved.

“Did I say fine? Did I actually say fine? Are you sure about that?” Raven’s temper caught fire the moment he heard it.

“You didn’t say it, no. But you didn’t say anything either, and normally when you don’t say anything that means yes!” The Star Pirates backed Flower Duck up on this, because Raven really was like that. Silence meant agreement.

“In a situation that dangerous, did I dare say no? Your mother — could you use your head for once? That many fanatical morons walking in there to die, and you were all having the time of your lives, brains as fogged as a boar beast’s. And now you tell me my silence meant yes. Yes your sister. That was me suffering with my mouth shut!” Raven kicked Flower Duck’s legs out from under him and gave him a thorough beating.

“So what do we do now?” Pelican lay on the ground with his head down, gnawing without interest on a leg of mutton.

“All that power I went to so much trouble to get… I’ve never been this strong in my life, and now I can’t use it and I could burst at any second. I — this is just too unlucky!” Guoguo was in a worse state than any of them.

“Get lost, you damned traitor.” Raven was in no mood to talk to him.

“That’s not fair! I only sold out Lord Titan a few times, and then my conscience got the better of me and I turned over a new leaf. I didn’t sell you out this time, did I? I really have reformed!” Raven kicked Guoguo’s legs out from under him and beat him too. Guoguo howled and kept protesting all the way through it.

“Conscience, my ass. If the man Wuwang left behind had been able to take me, you’d be a traitor right now.” Raven had seen through him at a glance.

“Actually I knew all along you’d win. Back at the first hijacking of the Gannet — no, sorry, what’s now the Great Swan — you already knew how to use forbidden power. So I never had any intention of turning traitor.” Guoguo had no talents to speak of beyond the thickness of his own face. His analysis was correct, though. When the Star Pirates took the Gannet, the forbidden power Raven used had made an enormous difference.

Unfortunately Wuwang did not know it when he arrested Raven with his own hands.

Otherwise he would certainly have killed Raven on the spot instead of hauling him back to be brainwashed with forbidden power. The brainwashing failed, and what came of it instead was Raven getting a large crowd of Star Pirates out, along with the rebel army soldiers who had followed them in.

Yue Yang could not work out at first how Raven and the rest had ended up in this state.

A few minutes of listening and it came clear.

Ji Wuri had been at work behind the scenes.

He wanted the physical potential of ordinary soldiers, taken by force, to store up and spend on his war beasts or on himself. So he had cooked up an attractive-sounding scheme.

It was lucky that Raven had been through it before and, had broken free of the forbidden power’s control using the method Yue Yang worked out. That was what let him get this many people out. Without Raven, every one of them would probably have ended up fuel for Ji Wuri’s ascent.

If this had come up before that recent “breakthrough” — the one that changed the Grimoire World enormously and raised him not at all — Yue Yang would have had nothing good to offer these Star Pirates, who could only huddle in front of a fragment of ancient relic and would burst and die the moment they left it. As things stood, he had at least three ways to solve it. None of them were perfect. For a crowd of rough Star Pirates, keeping them alive was enough.

“Greed always costs you something.” Yue Yang, for his part, made his entrance like a fraudulent prophet, and the Star Pirates who knew him — Pelican, Flower Duck, Guoguo and the rest — went misty-eyed with delight. The rebel army soldiers, who did not know him, reacted as though a great enemy had arrived: every one of them jumped up on guard, wearing the alarmed look of men ready to rush him in a mob.

“Sit down, you halfwits. Nobody asked you to talk.” One look at the fools and Raven was hopping with rage again.

“Lord Titan, your shoes are dirty.” Guoguo shot out of the crowd.

“You traitor—” Flower Duck saw him trying to steal his job and lost his temper too. He had been about to forgive Guoguo. He changed his mind on the spot.

“This is — this is — this is so humiliating!” Raven found that it was not only Guoguo and Flower Duck. Every Star Pirate there, Pelican included, had gone into full shoe-shine mode. He covered his face and could not bear to watch. These people were a disgrace and he honestly did not want to admit he knew them. All the same, Yue Yang’s arrival finally let him breathe out.

Before he dealt with the forbidden power problem at all, Yue Yang’s mind was on Princess Qianqian and the others, who had gone on ahead.

He couldn’t help asking, “How’s the fighting going at Storm Fortress?”

(End of Chapter 1211)