As spectators, Ren Tiange and the others had started out stunned, then progressed to horrified.

Then afraid.

But as time kept passing, their minds gradually grew numb. On the first day, everyone watched with complete focus — especially the moments when it looked like one side was about to win, which were genuinely breathtaking to witness, impossible to look away from. But one day passed, then two, three, five, ten, a full month, and the handsome swordsman Qian Chong and that monstrous newcomer were still fighting on with undiminished persistence — everyone had long since accepted it as completely normal. If they woke up one morning and didn’t hear the thunderous crashes of combat nearby, that would have been the strange thing.

This great battle.

Lasted over three months. To be precise: a hundred days.

During that stretch of time, Ren Tiange and the others had made countless bets on how much longer the two combatants could keep going. Every single bet was wrong, because nobody had imagined that the handsome swordsman Qian Chong and that freak of a newcomer could fight for a full hundred days.

The two didn’t stay in one place — they fought and moved, fought and moved, both exhausting every trick available to them, using every terrain feature and environmental element to their advantage.

From the Dark Sky Nest ruins, they’d fought their way across the Godfiend Mountain Range, through Radiance Canyon, carved up Death Rift Valley, and even brought down the Snowdragon Pillar Sky Peak — Demon Valley’s highest summit. Ren Tiange and the others followed the battle from a distance the whole way, and there were times they fell asleep, only to wake and find the combat had moved on, at which point they would scramble to catch up. Their purpose had long since stopped being mere curiosity — they were waiting for a final result. One day of waiting, then ten, half a month, then a full month and two months — they didn’t care how long it took. Whatever happened, they weren’t leaving without seeing an outcome.

“Are they done yet?” That was the question everyone asked each other most often.

“Still going.” That was the most frequent answer, and the most helpless one.

This battle between the two.

If you set aside the danger of watching it up close, it was genuinely spectacular.

Hauge, however — a Supreme tier five leader — lasted only one day of watching at the relatively close distance of ten kilometers before voluntarily retreating to fifty kilometers away to wait for news. He’d decided that getting one-shotted by a shockwave from Qian Chong and the newcomer’s exchange would be the most pointlessly stupid way to die imaginable.

The battle naturally drew the attention of both the Angel Alliance and the Dark Alliance before long.

In the beginning many challengers had come to have a look from a distance, but after warnings from Ren Tiange and Ghost King Phantom, they’d all backed off. Anyone within ten kilometers for even a minute could be killed by a shockwave without any further ceremony. If Supreme tier five Hauge couldn’t stay close for long, ordinary challengers certainly had no business being there. Because of the epochal battle between the two, neither the Angel Alliance nor Dark Alliance challengers bothered with each other at all anymore — everyone was waiting, and whatever Ji Wuri had done beforehand felt like something from a different era entirely.

What was Ji Wuri, anyway?

Sure, he was capable of bullying weaker opponents, pushing around ordinary challengers — but could he fight a battle like this?

Ren Tiange and Ghost King Phantom and all the great leaders had been reduced to spectators — could Ji Wuri produce a fight that left all the great leaders standing on the sidelines? Could he carve through the Godfiend Mountain Range dividing line, sweep Radiance Canyon near the Angel Alliance’s main base, obliterate Death Rift Valley near the Dark Alliance’s main base, snap the Demon Valley’s highest peak in two?

Ji Wuri was powerful, certainly. But a battle for the ages was beyond him.

Not just the ordinary challengers — even Ren Tiange and the other great leaders felt this way.

Because of the epochal war between the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord and Yue Yang, Ji Wuri’s shadow had long since vanished completely from Demon Valley. Even the weakest challenger would curl their lip at the mention of his name: “Hmph, Ji Wuri got out early — if he’d stayed until now, he’d have been turned to dust.”

“I’m estimating they might be at it for ten years. Maybe a hundred.” Some people had moved their betting window all the way to a century out.

“With their strength, it might not be resolved even in a thousand years — the question is how long the fight itself can physically last.” Others felt sustaining the combat for a century was simply impossible.

Even just a hundred days.

Was already a battle unprecedented in all of history, shaking the heavens and illuminating the world.

Never before had anyone fought for this long. Never had anyone possessed endurance and will this unbreakable. And never had two opponents been balanced this precisely — neither able to get a decisive edge over the other.

Ren Tiange and the others sighed countless times that these two had been born into the wrong era.

If only one of them had existed, either one of them would have been an unrivaled overlord who could look down on all living things. The problem was both of them existing in the same time — and then meeting each other. The world might be vast, but it seemed too small to contain them both at once. This battle was absolutely a clash for the ages, heaven-splitting and earth-shattering in its scope. Without having witnessed it in person, there was simply no way to grasp even a fraction of its brilliance.

One combatant: overwhelmingly rich in power, tens of thousands of years of experience and strength to draw from, pouring out endlessly strange and brilliant techniques paired with countless war beasts, manifesting unlimited and inexhaustible combat methods.

All of them ancient-era techniques.

When they reappeared from his hands, Ren Tiange and the others watched with bated breath.

They were too magnificent, too profound — if the handsome swordsman Qian Chong hadn’t actually used them, the onlookers would never have believed combat techniques could produce effects like this.

The other combatant: young, completely at a disadvantage in both strength and experience, should by all rights have been finished quickly. And yet this young man’s intelligence surpassed everything they’d encountered — any technique, seen just once through those perceptive eyes, was immediately adapted and transformed, endlessly varied and reinvented, creating counter-techniques from pure instinct and comprehension. No matter how the enemy’s techniques flowered and shifted in ten thousand variations, he reflected them all back like a clear lake mirroring the heavens and earth, missing nothing, adapting from within those reflections to counter and press back, forcing the enemy to produce ever newer techniques…

Divine artifacts, Sacred Codex, war beasts, treasures, divine medicines, terrain, timing, environment — there was nothing the two of them didn’t use to its absolute limit.

At the beginning, whenever a new divine artifact or divine beast appeared, Ren Tiange and the others would still find themselves astonished.

Later, they’d gone completely numb.

Especially regarding the freak newcomer — whatever he produced, Ren Tiange and the others took it as completely normal.

How many life-guardian war beasts did he have? And all of them at divine soldier level or above? Not surprising. He also had a little serpent-demon loli who casually brought down the Snowdragon Pillar Sky Peak without making a sound. That move had been extremely dangerous — if Ren Tiange and the others hadn’t dodged fast enough, it wouldn’t just have been “Qian Chong” in trouble, the great leaders themselves would have been in serious trouble too. As for both fighters stopping in the middle to continuously drink divine water and heavenly dew to recover their strength — that was something they’d only complained about at the start. Later, if one of them stopped drinking, the watching crowd would actually be surprised: “Hey, why aren’t they drinking divine water to recover? Does that mean the fight’s about to end?”

Divine water, heavenly dew, clarity beans, misty spirit leaves and other recovery treasures worth fortunes were disappearing into both fighters’ mouths with reckless abandon.

Ren Tiange and the others watched with tears streaming from their eyes.

Comparing yourself to others really will infuriate you.

Later, when the handsome swordsman Qian Chong actually produced divine blood to recover, every person watching completely lost the ability to stay calm about it.

The most killing detail of all was that the freak newcomer was using chaos energy, Calamity God-Force, and even residual divine power from a shattered divine nature to recover himself and his war beasts — which drove every onlooker to such heights of envy that they nearly charged forward screaming “robbery!” What could you even say about a freak like that?

You could only acknowledge that this person had the resources and the strength to sustain a battle for the ages. Did the penniless version want to fight a battle for the ages too? Setting aside strength for a moment — did you have divine water, heavenly dew, divine blood, divine energy? Any of those things?

And if you had divine water, heavenly dew, divine blood, and divine energy, why would you be fighting at all?

You’d be hiding somewhere absorbing it in peace.

After a hundred days of fighting, with half a month of recovering on divine blood, the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord finally reached his limit.

He realized he’d spent his entire fortune to fuel this battle out of pride alone — and the freak young man across from him looked more energetic with every passing day of fighting. The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord would never know that the divine water, divine dew, divine blood, and divine energy in Yue Yang’s bottles hadn’t decreased by so much as a drop. It had all been show. In truth, Yue Yang — having absorbed the core energy of the ancient rune formation in the sky and received its heritage — possessed inexhaustible chaos energy stored to overflowing in his Genesis Divine Pearl, energy he’d been too afraid to deploy all at once, worried his body couldn’t handle a full release.

The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord had been willing to fight a battle for the ages alongside him, and if not for the need to pursue Ji Wuri and stop him from obtaining the Divine Codex, Yue Yang wouldn’t have minded fighting the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord for a full hundred years.

Because every additional day of fighting, every time he exhausted his body’s energy completely, he could cleanse his body once more with chaos energy.

And every cleansing integrated a little more chaos energy into Yue Yang’s body.

In other words, as long as he wasn’t one-shotted by the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord, every moment of the battle was also a moment of Yue Yang steadily digesting and absorbing the Genesis Divine Pearl’s chaos energy. On those terms, fighting for a hundred years or a thousand years or ten thousand years would have been nothing but profit.

With his old body, the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord’s relentless assault and devastating power might have been more than he could endure.

But a Yue Yang whose body had been remade by the Nirvana Flames countless times, who had furthermore comprehended the Heart of the True Dragon, simply could not be one-shotted — not even by a divine being. And as long as he wasn’t killed in a single strike, the overflowing chaos energy would surge out wildly and flood his body, restoring him to his absolute limit. If Yue Yang hadn’t been deliberately managing how much damage he showed externally — giving the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord the impression that his attacks were working — the Demon Lord would have given up on this battle long ago.

“I’m pausing this fight. But our duel has no end — not ever.” The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord had no choice but to acknowledge that he couldn’t kill the other side.

“I’m free to leave Demon Valley.” Yue Yang stated a simple fact.

“Hmph.” The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord could leave too — but he couldn’t bring himself to go, because his Grimoire and divine sense were still deeply sealed within the Demon God Hall. Once he left, the seal might shift in unpredictable ways, and at minimum would become tighter and harder to dissolve. The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord had refused to leave Demon Valley for thousands of years precisely because he’d never found an effective method for breaking that final seal.

“Your strength is passable — decent enough, I suppose. But I’ll say this: you’re old.” Yue Yang threw everything he had at attacking the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord verbally — even if he couldn’t beat him in actual combat, getting a few insults in was worth something.

“Laughable. To me, time is just a collection of meaningless numbers.” The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord had never once accepted being called old.

And his appearance was still that of a twenty-something handsome swordsman, at that.

Looking only marginally more mature than Yue Yang.

Yue Yang glanced over at the distant figures of Ren Tiange and the others, and smiled. “Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord, farewell. I’m leaving Demon Valley and heading to the seventh gate — Human Valley. Once I obtain the Divine Codex and reach the divine realm, I’ll come back to visit. By then, though, I might have already stopped paying attention to minor figures like yourself — haha! All right, don’t be too angry about it. One day, maybe I’ll look back fondly on our hundred-day battle. Some of those ancient techniques you showed me were… tolerable.”

The Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord sneered coldly. “Wherever you go, I go. Junior, don’t think for a moment that you can grow beyond my reach. Human Valley? What’s stopping me from going there?”

Ren Tiange and the others heard this and went pale.

This was bad.

These two freaks were also heading to Human Valley? Did that mean Human Valley was about to become a second Demon Valley?

(End of Chapter)