When Yue Yang went to see Yingluo, the Freedom Queen, he found that something was off with her.

She had been refusing him all along.

Princess Qianqian, Sick Beauty and Yue Yu had taken turns trying to talk her around and she had not budged an inch, until Yi Nan and Yue Bing — nobody knew by what method — finally brought her over. Yue Yang had talked with her then, and never got as far as fusing a goddess body onto her, because what she said set something off in him and he broke through into a new realm instead…

Going to her now, he had assumed the whole thing would be much easier. She had agreed, after all.

He had not expected Yingluo, the Freedom Queen, to refuse him again.

“Why?” Yue Yang, for his part, had nothing to say to that.

“Could we leave the reason unsaid?” Yingluo seemed unwilling to tell him the truth, and the look on her face was distinctly strange.

“No. If I don’t work out why, I won’t sleep when I get back, and then it’ll build up until I burst, and my head and my heart and everything else will go off at once.” Yue Yang had no idea what to do with that. She had agreed to let him fuse the body onto her. At the time he had even thought of using her to make a god, and yes, that idea had been a little naive, but the caring behind it was real.

“You are always so overbearing.” Yingluo would not look him in the eye.

“What? If I were actually overbearing I wouldn’t be standing here talking to you in this nice soft voice. I—” Yue Yang came close to losing his mind.

“The reason I refuse is that there is a light in your eyes that makes me uneasy.” Yingluo bit her jade lip and gave him that much, quietly.

“My eyes glow?” Yue Yang went straight to a mirror. Still human. He hadn’t turned into a wolf under a full moon. Since when did they glow?

“No. Not that kind of glowing…” Yingluo waved it away and explained without much patience. “The point is that I feel — a little uncomfortable. Or not uncomfortable. It is hard to describe. I cannot put it clearly. It is a very particular feeling, and my mind is in disorder now, and I do not know what to do about it. Allow me a stretch of time to grow calm.”

“You’re afraid? You’re afraid of me?” Am I a tiger who picks a person and eats him?

“…” Yingluo shook her head.

“You don’t trust me?” Yue Yang was privately alarmed. That’s it. She’s seen through me. She knows I’m a bad man.

“…” Yingluo shook her head again.

“Then you don’t feel safe?” Yue Yang, for his part, simply could not guess it. As the saying goes, a woman’s heart is a needle at the bottom of the sea — who can guess it? Guessing more is only wasted effort.

“…” Yingluo bowed to him, gracefully and slightly. “Yingluo will keep the promise she made to her two little sisters Yi Nan and Yue Bing. But her mind is in disorder at present and she truly cannot cooperate. Would another time do?”

What she meant was that she would not go back on her word, and would certainly work with him to complete the plan to fuse the divine body.

What she did not say was why she was refusing him this time.

The whole thing left a feeling behind that nobody could make sense of.

Never mind Yue Yang.

Anybody else in his place would have been left dizzy and grasping at nothing by behavior that strange.

Yue Yang had no choice but to take his leave, and then, at the door, he suddenly turned back and fixed his eyes on Yingluo — who had come to see him out — the way a wolf fixes its eyes under a full moon. The abruptness of it gave the Freedom Queen a real fright. She stepped back at once and stared at him, startled, with no idea what he meant to say.

And Yue Yang said nothing at all. He turned his head and walked off again.

Just as the Freedom Queen was patting her own chest in relief, he came charging back and put his face right up against hers, staring into her startled, questioning eyes.

“You — what does this mean?” Yingluo was thoroughly confused by him. He had something to say and would not say it, and kept turning back to bear down on her. What was he doing?

“You had me guessing riddles just now, didn’t you? So I’ll let you guess what I mean. Let it back up inside you until it hurts. Let you feel what I’m feeling.” One look at how badly he had frightened the Freedom Queen and Yue Yang’s mood came right back up. He burst out laughing.

“…” Yingluo had nothing to say to him. Is this man still a child?

“I’m off.” Yue Yang waved airily and went. This time he really did mean to leave.

“Wait.” And then Yingluo spoke, and called him back. “You do not lack for beautiful women. Every day of your life is full of laughter and voices, and you are happy. Why bother with me? Yingluo has always been like this, and it is fine. She does not need anyone’s pity. This is none of your business. Why must you insist on putting your idea of things onto Yingluo? Have you — have you — have you ever once thought about how Yingluo feels?”

“Ah.” Now it was Yue Yang, for his part, who had nothing to say. Because he genuinely had not.

He had thought all along that he meant well.

Fuse a goddess body onto Yingluo, the Freedom Queen, and she would be a whole woman again instead of living propped up on a broken one.

The intention was good enough. But Yue Yang had never once thought about how Yingluo felt. His instinct was that since this was a good thing, why on earth would she not be glad to accept it? Besides, he wanted nothing from her. He was only doing somebody a good turn — and for a man who had done ten thousand bad things and rarely managed a good one, if the girl refused it, that might well be the greatest loss the Heavenly Realm had ever taken.

Yingluo came closer and pressed her eyes against the transmigrator’s, and the detached, gentle voice she used every day of her life was gone. She raised it. “You are always like this. Does the best thing have to be the thing I choose? Why did you not ask me first?”

Yue Yang was pushed so far back by her that his body arched, and he wiped sweat with a guilty conscience. “I didn’t ask? I think I did ask? I sent everyone to ask you.”

Yingluo pressed in another step, until her eyes were almost against his, the tips of their noses brushing and their four lips less than two inches apart. “Yes. You sent other people to ask me. And you? Did you come and ask me yourself? You told everyone about me. You discussed my affairs with all of them. You worked the whole arrangement out among yourselves — and you did not come first, and right to the end you never once came to Yingluo yourself. That is the part that hurts. All of you decided everything about me for me. I know your intentions were the best possible and that it is the best choice. But you do not know, and you do not try to find out, that what Yingluo wants most is a day when she can arrange her own life. Before all this, Yingluo spent her whole life working for other people’s happiness — until you told me that everything I had done was only the happiness I hoped for them, and not the happiness they had actually gotten. You told me to release myself. To let the world’s people strive on their own and find their own happiness. And that Yingluo could live free… That is what you said to me. But you did not do it, and you never gave me the chance! You — you do not know that this is the part that grieves Yingluo most. You are willing to accomplish everything on my behalf, and you have not once tried to understand this lonely person who has lost her original faith, who is lost in a dream, who thinks all day and does not know what to do!”

“I didn’t know.” Yue Yang was sweating hard. “The feeling I got from you was that you were resolved. More resolved than my Sovereign Intent. I didn’t know any of this.”

“You are unwilling to understand.” Yingluo held his eyes. “You trust only the girls you brought from the Sky Tower.”

“That’s not true.” Yue Yang defended himself in a hurry. “Absolutely not true.”

“You. Are. Lying.” Yingluo’s eyes seemed able to see straight into a person’s heart, and sweat came out on Yue Yang’s forehead.

“It might look that way on the surface, but actually — actually you’ve got the wrong idea.” Yue Yang tried to think of a counterexample. Ming Yueguang, say. But that girl’s trust had been hard-won too, with a long stretch of teasing in the middle, and he had not truly trusted her until the instant she became a god and their hearts met. Or Qingping — the cursed fish-girl from the Sky Tower’s traitor clan — who would probably never have been trusted at all without that final sacrifice that laid her heart bare, and who is lying in Hailan’s mother-of-pearl shell right now repairing her body. Or Bi Lv, who started out as a chess piece he was using, and who ended up bound to him by a marriage alliance, though once he had taken her to bed and gotten her body and heart together it stopped mattering. And the same for Commander Lieyan, who became Bi Lv’s twin after eating the Fairy Sacred Fruit…

Thinking it through to the end.

Yue Yang, for his part, decided it really was like that.

The people he trusted most were still the women who had come from the Sky Tower. They were his lovers or his family, and the bond was not something love at first sight could stand in for. From his earliest fights, from his earliest growth, Bing’er and Yi Nan had been at his side. The first time he faced a powerful enemy, the Purple-Gold Marquis, it was Xue Wuxia who fought him to the death alongside him. In every battle Princess Qianqian, Luohua and the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady had been beside him.

The Heavenly Realm. Out of pure instinctive wariness, he carried a natural resistance to everything outside the Sky Tower.

However well he covered it on the surface, that did not change the fact.

However loyal his subordinates in the Heavenly Realm were, they could not match his subordinates from the Sky Tower — still less companions like Ye Kong and Sea Fatty and Xue Tanglang, who had fought and grown up alongside him.

The more Yue Yang thought about it the guiltier he felt, and the harder he sweated.

In the end there was nothing else to do.

He had to use the last resort.

The transmigrator planted his mouth on Yingluo’s, and while the shock of it went through her whole body he kissed her hard, and only let go when she was on the point of suffocating and could not get her breath. Then he stared straight back at her, pinned her with his body, and spoke ten times louder than she had, with the presence of a tiger coming down off a mountain.

“That’s right. That’s exactly the kind of man I am. You’ve got it completely right. I arranged everything for you, including coming to live in the Grimoire World, including fusing a goddess body onto you. That’s what I’m going to do and that’s what I want to do. Why? You want the reason? Fine. I’ll tell you, so listen. I hate looking at you up there being holy and merciful and saving the world. I don’t like that way you have of standing outside everything. I don’t like the way you want nothing. I don’t like a single thing about you. You make me ashamed of myself and you make me feel small. With you around, my selfishness gets magnified past all bearing, and that conscience I don’t have floats up to the surface where I can see it, and then it interrogates me, hard, and it feels terrible. I need a thousand reasons, ten thousand reasons, to explain that I’m in the right — and you smash every one of them without even trying. I don’t want to be a good man and I can’t be one and I don’t need to be one. But with a Freedom Queen like you in the world, I feel awful. Somebody like you, I think you’re a freak. A freak who lost her feelings and her desires along with her woman’s body. So I’m going to change you. I’m going to turn you into a real woman. I’m going to make you selfish, make you work for your own happiness. I’m going to turn you into a real woman and let desire torment your heart and your body, and then I’ll be satisfied, then I’ll have what I want, then I can sleep with a clear conscience. Now — any more questions? This is what I’m going to do. I’m going to turn you into a real woman. I’m going to make you submit to my will. I’m going to make your world stop being other people’s vague, floating happiness and freedom and turn it into your own love, drop by drop, wound around you, so that in your whole life you never have a spare minute to think about what real happiness is, so that for the rest of your life you have to stand next to me grinning like an idiot. Do you understand me now?”

Yingluo’s eyes went wide. She looked at Yue Yang the way a person looks at a madman.

And just as Yue Yang, having laid his heart bare and put the whole scheme on display, was getting ready to grease his heels and run for it.

She smiled.

That holy little face had never held anything so glad or so sweet. She asked it of a Yue Yang who was staring at her with his jaw open.

“Do I look silly when I smile?”

(End of Chapter 1216)