Yue Yang didn’t answer.
But the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord had already guessed the answer, and his mood darkened considerably.
He’d always been the one using his gift of precognition to scheme against others — when had he ever been schemed against in return? What made it most galling was that he’d been the one using a calculated plan to get this young man to break the seal on the Demon Lord’s Sword, and now the young man had seen through it entirely and, in a completely unexpected turn, had helped him break the seal anyway. What was this boy’s game? Surely there was some ulterior motive at work?
But no matter how he looked at it, breaking the Demon Lord’s Sword’s seal had nothing but benefits for him — how could this young man possibly have agreed so cooperatively?
The gift of precognition was nearly invincible.
It could foresee the truth of most future events, and even when the future couldn’t be changed by force, knowing it in advance meant minimizing danger and maximizing gain. The gift of precognition had never once failed him. Precognition was simply fact, effective against everything except divine beings — and yet today, for the first time, it couldn’t foresee this young man’s future at all. This boy wasn’t a divine being — so why couldn’t precognition reach him? More puzzling still, anything connected to this young man became murky and indistinct the moment precognition tried to touch it.
What in the world — did this boy’s talent involve shadows or fog?
“Whatever you do, you’re walking toward a dead end.” The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord let thousands of thoughts flash past without showing any of them, delivering only cold, crushing words outward.
In terms of raw strength, he held an absolute advantage.
Yue Yang still didn’t answer.
He raised the Prison Emperor’s Divine Seal in his hand and pushed his energy to its limit, pouring everything into it.
The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord felt a faint inward jolt. A young man bonded with the Prison Emperor’s Divine Seal was no simple opponent — pity he was too young, his strength still insufficient; otherwise he’d be a genuinely troublesome adversary. At the same time, he felt a flicker of wariness toward the Prison Emperor’s Divine Seal itself, because the divine artifact’s aura and sealing force produced a sensation of genuine danger from somewhere deep inside him.
If this young man could maximize the power of that artifact, going toe-to-toe with him wasn’t entirely out of the question.
The thought crossed the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord’s mind and vanished. He smiled coldly with lofty contempt. “You’re impressive — but far too young. Let me show you the gap between us, boy.”
He raised the Demon Lord’s Sword.
One casual strike.
Heaven and earth split apart immediately, a shattered void sword-scar ten meters wide and roughly a thousand meters long tearing through the air.
The destructive force, faster than lightning, swept down at Yue Yang head-on. Yue Yang’s afterimage vanished, reappearing ten thousand meters away — but in the same instant, the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord appeared at his back, free left hand pressing directly against the back of Yue Yang’s skull.
BOOM!
Locked by the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord’s supreme Sovereign Intent, Yue Yang couldn’t flee or maneuver — he had no choice but to take it straight. His entire body was driven into the ground. The force was so terrifying it shook the entire ruins, the ground erupting worse than a magnitude ten earthquake — stone pulverized, and Yue Yang was driven into the earth like an arrow, the impact site cracking open into a vast pit a hundred meters deep. But this wasn’t the end of the impact — it was only the beginning of the Demon Lord’s Six Strikes technique known as “Moon Seizure.”
Buried deep in the earth, Yue Yang suddenly felt a rebounding force rise from below.
The resistance within his own body was drawn along by it.
Helpless in its grip.
Reversing — what had been a driven downward slam transformed into an upward reverse-launch.
BOOM! Before Yue Yang could react, his body had already been reverse-launched up into the ceiling of the Dark Sky Nest ruins, slamming backward into the hard stone wall.
Driven into the rock again.
The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord on the ground below regarded him with arrogant indifference, sword tucked casually behind his back. One hand raised, he drove the reverse-launched Yue Yang crashing down before him with a boom, leaving Yue Yang on the ground in a genuinely sorry state.
“You see? That is the gap between your strength and mine.” The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord didn’t spare Yue Yang’s pain so much as a glance, sneering coldly. “I don’t know your reasoning, but breaking the Demon Lord’s Sword’s seal was without question your most catastrophic mistake. Because with the Demon Lord’s Sword in hand, not only you — even Ren Tiange or Ghost King Phantom couldn’t survive three strikes from me. If my divine sense weren’t still sealed in the Demon God Hall, I would surpass even the divine beings you’ve heard of in power. I think I’ve made myself perfectly clear. So — pitiful ant of a young man — do you still want to fight?”
“……” Yue Yang didn’t answer. He bit down hard on his jaw, pushed through the pain, and stood up.
“If you didn’t have the divine artifact protecting you, that first strike would have killed you already.” The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord gave Yue Yang’s Prison Emperor’s Divine Seal a brief sideways glance.
Without a word, Yue Yang started walking toward the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord, eyes as steady as ever. The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord himself didn’t believe that one move could break a Supreme-tier warrior’s spirit — after all, anyone who reached the Sovereign Realm was an absolute powerhouse in their own right.
But a young man like Yue Yang.
Clearly outmatched, clearly unable to win, and yet charging forward without a trace of fear or hesitation — this kind of spirit, somewhere between stubbornness and unyielding resilience, was something the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord genuinely rarely saw.
The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord swung his sword — not attacking Yue Yang, but tracing a light slash through empty space, then drawing a second slash of identical power across the thousand-meter crack already hanging there. Between the two collapsed ruins of heaven and earth, a terrifying cross-shaped pattern formed.
The same technique again — the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord appeared behind the dodging Yue Yang.
Left hand hovering behind Yue Yang’s skull.
Moon Seizure, second of the Demon Lord’s Six Strikes, launched again — Yue Yang was driven into the ground, hit his limit, and the Demon Lord raised one hand, sending Yue Yang’s body reverse-launching into the ceiling, cracking the stone as he drove into it. Then, as the force reached its limit again, a single gesture from the Demon Lord brought Yue Yang crashing thunderously back down at his feet, this time writhing from pain across his entire body.
“Still don’t understand? My actual strength surpasses that of certain divine beings — were my divine sense not sealed in the Demon God Hall, I could one-shot you and Ren Tiange in the same breath.”
“Hah — if I were at my absolute peak, the entire Demon Valley would take three days to reduce to primordial chaos.”
“Struggling is pointless. No matter how hard you try, you’re a mantis blocking a carriage.”
“Weep, little insect.”
The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord delivered blow after blow with savage glee, methodically battering Yue Yang’s spirit through repetition. Moon Seizure used again and again, with no particular hurry to actually kill him.
Third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, eighth time… Same technique, same execution, and Yue Yang had no answer for it. The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord wasn’t doing this because he lacked other effective attacks — he had countless options. But he wanted to use this method to drive home one message to this young man who simply refused to die: against absolute strength, all struggle is futile.
Yue Yang’s expression didn’t change.
Calm and untroubled, not a hint of anger, eyes still clear and bright as always.
As though it wasn’t him being knocked down eight consecutive times, but someone else entirely.
The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord found Yue Yang’s expression deeply irritating — despite being the one delivering the beatings, watching the one being beaten maintain this kind of unaffected composure was genuinely unsatisfying. What bothered him most was this young man’s will — it was incomprehensible that after this kind of treatment, not the slightest waver showed.
Was this boy’s will made of solid steel?
The ninth time.
The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord used Moon Seizure again.
This time, with ten times the force of before — even with the divine artifact’s protection, the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord estimated the other side would at minimum snap an arm or a leg, possibly even his spine. With the artifact protecting him, death wasn’t likely — which also wasn’t the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord’s intention. This was about proper, thorough suffering; letting the other side die easily wouldn’t do at all.
The void was carved open with the sword-scar.
The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord appeared behind Yue Yang as usual, left hand hovering behind his skull — in terms of speed and force, this was completely unanswerable, this attack approaching the level of a deity’s law-force, unstoppable. Slightly different from the previous eight — this ninth Moon Seizure, carrying ten times the power, pressed into empty air.
The Yue Yang who’d been knocked down eight times had dissolved into an afterimage and vanished.
He appeared behind the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord. The Prison Emperor’s Divine Seal, which had been held back all this time, came down on the back of the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord’s skull exactly as casually as Yue Yang might crack a walnut on little Yue Shuang’s head.
The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord’s expression flickered — a flash of shock.
In less than a thousandth of a second, the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord’s body was driven face-first into the ground, the impact shattering the hard surface into spiderweb cracks around him. He didn’t sink into the earth the way Yue Yang had — one hand caught the ground, and simultaneously the Demon Lord’s Sword swung, aiming to sever Yue Yang’s legs.
Yue Yang launched a kick.
Like taking a shot at goal, he sent the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord flying.
BOOM!
The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord shot through the air like a meteor and smashed into a rock pillar ten thousand meters away, shattering it on impact.
But even as his body was breaking through the pillar, he had already reversed his trajectory, surging back with fury, aiming to put Yue Yang down with a single sword strike.
Yue Yang was standing right below him at that moment. Doing his best impression of the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord’s own earlier technique, he used a redirecting force to catch the incoming body and guide it — the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord, wearing an expression of complete astonishment, slammed face-first into the ground in front of him. This time the Demon Lord only managed to catch himself with one arm, no time to bring the sword around — and the moment that single arm was braced against the ground, Yue Yang’s foot came sailing up, mimicking “Prison Break Strike,” and came down hard across the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord’s spine.
He’d put so much force behind it that Yue Yang’s own gold-rank boots shattered to pieces under the impact, leaving his bare foot exposed.
The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord’s bracing arm sank deep into the ground.
But before Yue Yang could steal and attempt the follow-up move “Sun Crack Strike,” the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord let out a roar — louder than ten thousand charging soldiers, more thunderous than a bolt of lightning splitting the sky — energy erupting from his body like a volcanic detonation, effortlessly blasting the Yue Yang standing on his back off into the distance several thousand meters away.
“Insolence — no one has ever stood on my back in my entire life!” The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord had never in his existence been this furious.
“There’s a first time for everything.” Yue Yang indicated it would get easier the more it happened.
(End of Chapter)