The Western Heavenly Realm. Xihe Domain. Lingyun Kingdom.

Sunlight City, the city nearest the Heavenly Realm Gate, had ceased to exist a long time ago.

In its day, Sunlight City had been the logistics base for the assault on the Sky Tower, and Sun Island had been the rear headquarters for the Heavenly Realm’s strong. Then the warden, Old Qi, trying to stop the prisoners taken in the Sky Tower’s defeat from escaping, triggered the Light-Forbidding Star-Crusher device in the Light Secret Passage outside the Light-Forbidding Dungeon. It destroyed Sunlight City down to the ground, and leveled everything for tens of kilometers around with it.

Today a party came flying in to ruins nobody had set foot in for a very long while.

The party was Sea Fatty, Ye Kong, Xue Tanglang and Tianra Prince, the ones Yue Yang had left behind in Greenvalley City in the Tianhua Domain to toughen up.

Ye Kong stopped short of the ruins, unusually careful, and split off to one side with Sea Fatty going to the other, as though something terrible might come out of the rubble at any moment and pick a man to eat. It was not only Ye Kong and Sea Fatty. Xue Tanglang and Tianra Prince were braced for the worst as well, staring hard at the scorched earth.

“Children. Don’t be nervous.”

A mild voice, seeming to come from very far off in the sky and yet perfectly clear at their ears.

One patch of the scorched ground lifted away, impossibly, revealing a round opening a man could go down — about ten meters across, and no telling how deep. A silver-haired old man in immaculate clothes, his hair combed without a strand out of place, came slowly up out of the hole, walking on empty air. This was the man who had gone by the name Jiao Shi, disguised and hidden in Sunlight City all that time as its steward: Gao Peng, the Sky Prison King, one of the Four Kings under the Prison Emperor in his day. Never mind juniors like Sea Fatty and Ye Kong — even Yue Yang, for his part, who was the Prison Emperor’s heir, kept a certain respect for this old man.

Yue Yang had come to Sunlight City and freed the Sky Tower elders who had been imprisoned there since the Prison Emperor’s war. But most of those old men were soul-bodies by now, and with the years gone by — six thousand of them — they had no wish to go back to the Sky Tower and face however many generations of descendants.

They wanted only to stay in the Heavenly Realm and go on quietly guarding a home a long way off.

“Sky Prison King. Elder Gao.” One look at Gao Peng and Ye Kong and Sea Fatty let out a breath.

Xue Tanglang and Tianra Prince, keeping watch in the sky, came down as well.

They paid their respects to the old man.

Gao Peng waved it off gently. “There’s no Sky Prison King now. This is the new Prison Emperor’s age, and it belongs to you. There’s no need to stand on ceremony with old men like us. Now — that matter you spoke of before. Has it been confirmed?”

At the question every face there set, and even Sea Fatty, who normally laughs and clowns, turned serious.

Ye Kong nodded heavily. “The report is accurate. It’s confirmed.”

Hearing that answer, Gao Peng — once the Sky Prison King, one of the Prison Emperor’s Four Kings — went grave himself, and sighed a little. “Six thousand years. It has been six thousand years. Even without a new Prison Emperor rising, the Central Divine Hall was never going to forget to deal the Sky Tower another blow. They have never once given us the leisure to rest and recover. The Sky Tower has always been the thorn in their eye and the barb in their flesh. Six thousand years gone, and how were they going to keep watching without acting? Still less now that the growth of that little fellow has begun to threaten them. They will never turn a blind eye to that. I had the feeling the moment the Solar King died. As it turns out, they are only coming a little sooner than I guessed.”

Sea Fatty scratched his head in agitation. “That kid isn’t here. With just the few of us, how are we supposed to bite through the Central Divine Hall’s punitive army?”

Tianra Prince gave him a contemptuous look. “Don’t talk big. The Central Divine Hall’s punitive army? The mercenary legions they’ve hired out of the Heavenly Realm alone would be enough to flatten the whole Sky Tower. The Central Divine Hall is said to have conscripted a hundred thousand Heavenly Realm powers at Sky-rank level five or above, never mind the irregulars below level five and below Earth-rank. A million enemies at the very least, and you think the few of us can take them on? Even if they didn’t fight back — even if they stretched out their necks for you — how many could you kill, fatty?”

“A hundred thousand?” Hearing that the Central Divine Hall had conscripted a hundred thousand Heavenly Realm powers at Sky-rank level five or above, Gao Peng fell silent for a long time and said nothing.

“They planned this well in advance,” Xue Tanglang judged.

“Even for the Central Divine Hall, conscripting a hundred thousand at Sky-rank level five or above is very difficult. Not every kingdom-lord-level Sky-rank power is willing to die for them, or willing to march all the way to the Sky Tower. That they can raise that many now proves they have been preparing,” Ye Kong agreed.

“And this report came from?” Gao Peng badly wanted to know how Ye Kong and Sea Fatty could be so clear about the Central Divine Hall’s movements.

“It’s like this. Perhaps you remember, Elder. Third Young Master once saved a prince of the Golden Crow Clan here in Sunlight City, along with the man’s beloved concubine. When that Eighth Prince of the Golden Crow Clan, Wuhai, got wind of the Central Divine Hall’s plans, he did the loyal thing and went straight to the Tianhua Domain to tell Third Young Master. He didn’t know Third Young Master had already left for the Trial Grounds, and after a good deal of trouble he reached Greenvalley City and found the few of us.” Ye Kong explained it to Gao Peng in detail.

“So you sent that Doom Wolf over to bring us the news.” Gao Peng nodded.

“Where is Gray Wolf?” Sea Fatty only now noticed that Gray Wolf wasn’t there.

“Him. I sent him back to the Sky Tower.” Gao Peng sighed slightly. “Your message wasn’t clear enough, but I could guess an army was coming down on us, so I sent the Doom Wolf back in the hope that the Sky Tower would learn of it early and could prepare.”

“Isn’t the spacetime rift at the Heavenly Realm Gate extremely unstable? Is Gray Wolf in danger?” That gave Ye Kong and the others a real fright.

If Gray Wolf were lost inside the spacetime rift in the Heavenly Realm Gate’s sealed space.

There was no telling how they would explain it to Yue Yang.

Gray Wolf might be a Doom Wolf, but he had no contract with Yue Yang and he was certainly not a life-guardian war beast. If he died, or if the whirlpools in the rift swallowed him, he might never come back at all — never return to any of them…

Ye Kong and Sea Fatty had sent Gray Wolf with the message because he was fast and because he was safe.

It had never occurred to them to send him through a spacetime rift to the Sky Tower.

And now the Sky Prison King said this.

It shook every one of them.

Please let nothing have happened to him. Otherwise there would be no facing Yue Yang again.

Gao Peng smiled. “That Doom Wolf is cleverer than the lot of you, and near enough immortal besides. What is a little spacetime rift going to swallow? Besides, I didn’t send him through the rift at the Heavenly Realm Gate. I didn’t want to beat the grass and startle the snake, so I thought of another way. In fact, it’s right here underneath these ruins. When the Light-Forbidding Star-Crusher device went up, the blast opened a thread of a rift. Old ghosts like us made that fissure in the first place, trying to break out — six thousand years of work at it and we never managed. And then one explosion blew a spacetime rift straight through to the sealed space… The crossing would be somewhat dangerous for a human body, but a Doom Wolf should have no trouble with it. Set your minds at rest. I am not so far gone as to throw a Doom Wolf away for nothing.”

Thank heaven.

Ye Kong and Sea Fatty both thumped their own chests. It took all that from the Sky Prison King before they could set down the stone that had been sitting on them.

“So the Sky Tower already knows the Central Divine Hall’s army is coming.” Tianra Prince let out a breath too. An army bearing down on you is hard to hold off, but it beats knowing nothing and preparing for nothing.

“The message has presumably gotten back, but without exact numbers.” Gao Peng shook his head. “All you sent was one letter, and the intelligence in it was thin.”

“Actually, the exact figures behind it came from another ally.” Ye Kong could do nothing about that either. “Eighth Prince Wuhai didn’t know the specific numbers or the shape of the offensive. He simply came at once to warn us. And what he said wasn’t that they were marching on our Sky Tower. It was that they were massing an army and setting out for this Xihe Domain, to bring in Third Young Master and the Dark World rebels — with the fine excuse of avenging the Nine Luminaries Clan, no less. But we understood it the moment we heard it. Their real target is the Sky Tower… Not long after we sent Gray Wolf with the message, another friend, a man called Dugu Changfeng, confirmed it as well. He says the Sky-rank powers of nearly a hundred domains around the Central Divine Hall have gone through a general mobilization on an enormous scale, and that Heavenly Realm powers at kingdom-lord level are being conscripted in numbers past counting for this expedition. To get the most accurate figures we could — and to see whether Third Young Master might make it back in time — we waited in Greenvalley City for nearly a month. He is still in the trial and has not returned. But we did get accurate numbers, from Ming Rihao, brother of Ming Yueguang, one of the three great powers of the Heavenly Realm who fought the Prison Emperor back then. The Central Divine Hall’s punitive expedition has over a hundred thousand elites at Sky-rank level five or above, over a million in the ordinary legions, and that’s before counting several million in logistics.”

“A million men are not so easy to move. We should still have a little time.” Gao Peng put the formal invasion at three months off, at the earliest.

“The Central Divine Hall is said to have a teleport called the Divine Light Beacon that can cross domains, and very fast,” Ye Kong said, not without worry.

“True. But even so, moving a million men is no easy matter.” Gao Peng nodded.

“We have to be ready inside a month.” Tianra Prince delivered his own judgment. As for Xue Tanglang, he could not be bothered with that kind of thinking. The part he was responsible for was the fighting, and killing as many of the enemy as possible.

“Our allies in the various parts of the Heavenly Realm will buy us a little time as well.” Sea Fatty, for one, was optimistic.

“Ming Rihao has actually become an ally? Can he be trusted?” Gao Peng still had his doubts. Back then the three great powers of the Heavenly Realm had fought the Prison Emperor hard enough to crack the sky and break the earth. How had one of them turned into an ally overnight?

“That, well — that’s because of Third Young Master.” Ye Kong laughed it off.

If a certain Third Young Master hadn’t kept writing love letters in ancient runes to court Ming Yueguang, getting an alliance out of them would have been a good deal harder.

Of course, Ming Rihao’s becoming an ally was also a friendship forged in the battle against the Solar King. After that fight, Uncle Ming Rihao — a man with unusual tastes — was free to live happily and lovingly with the eight-meter-tall Lady Zhiguang. Yue Yang, for his part, had even sent a wedding gift, though it was never going to be the Prayer Pearl, which is a quasi-divine artifact.

Hong had it right at the time. Once a treasure goes into Yue Yang’s hands, getting it out again is hard…

In any case.

Ming Rihao was a diehard ally and a relative besides. That much was certain.

“So what do you plan to do now?” Gao Peng found this difficult himself. He had sent Gray Wolf back with the news, but the intelligence was inexact and the Sky Tower would not know how to prepare. Somebody had to go back. And the spacetime rift was extremely dangerous — never mind juniors like Ye Kong and Sea Fatty, he had no confidence he could get through to the Sky Tower himself. It was not a question of how strong a man was. It was that the whirlpools inside the rift could very easily lose a man in that tangle of spacetime passages. He might come through unharmed and still have burned a year or eighteen months finding the exit — and where would that leave the matter?

“We’ll make the trip.” Sea Fatty stepped forward and thumped his chest.

“You? All of you?” Gao Peng shook his head at once. “Think again. This rift is extremely narrow, and less stable than the one at the Heavenly Realm Gate. A human body cannot withstand it. Sovereign Intent will hold out for a while and not for long, and this is not a crossing of a few hours — it might be days, it might be ten days or half a month, it might be a year or eighteen months. How would you endure it? And the more of you there are, the more dangerous it gets. If one of you is pulled away by a whirlpool, that’s one more chance of somebody going missing. Getting all of you back to the Sky Tower safe is harder than climbing to heaven… Better yet — you hold this rift open and let us old ghosts go. We’ve all lived long enough, unlike you little ones, whose futures have no limit.”

“We have a better way than that!” Sea Fatty put his head up and his chest out, wearing a proud look. “Never mind that we don’t know how to control a spacetime rift’s energy — even if we did, we couldn’t let you take the risk. A lot of the elders have nothing left but a damaged soul-body. One step into that rift and they could be annihilated outright. So this crossing is ours to make. We’re the juniors. Being bold enough to explore, going forward without turning back — that has always been the Sky Tower’s tradition… And most important of all, we’ve found the best method.”

“You have a method? What method?” Gao Peng was startled. Well, well. This little fat one has a method I couldn’t come up with?

“Classified for now.” Sea Fatty showed all eight of his front teeth in a way that begged to be hit.

“…” Gao Peng had nothing to say. Could I stop being the elder here, please? What sort of juniors are these? How is every one of them craftier than the last, slyer than the last? That Third Young Master being a bad boy is one thing — how has this little fat one got a bellyful of tricks as well? Was I really this naive at their age? I do not understand young people at all these days.

And Yue Yang, for his part, over in Mountain Beyond the Mountain, could not possibly know the Sky Tower was about to be invaded by the Central Divine Hall’s legions.

After beating the mysterious man and comprehending a new realm.

The first thing he did was bring Princess Qianqian home.

While Hong and A-Man were hunting for traces of Ji Wuri, and while he waited for Xue Wuxia — who had gone off to who knew where — to come back, he decided to get properly familiar with the various things his new realm had opened up and go on raising himself. And just as he was getting ready to try some new experiments with Yue Yu and Sick Beauty, he suddenly remembered that there was still a certain Freedom Queen at home he had never gotten anywhere with, a woman stubborn enough to refuse his help to the death.

Half of that girl’s body was simply gone, and she still wouldn’t be treated, and now…

Now.

It seemed the moment had come.

He was going to have to have a proper talk with her.

(End of Chapter 1215)