Perhaps sensing that a tiny, insignificant ant had dared to defy it so brazenly, that lofty consciousness enthroned high above was instantly enraged.

Divine power that tore the heavens and split the earth.

It swept in, ten million times more vast than a tsunami. Wherever it passed across the land, nothing was left unground to dust, and in the space of a single breath this onrushing flood of divine force swallowed Yue Yang whole where he stood pinned beneath that colossal divine hand.

His small frame was no more than a single grain adrift in an endless sea.

How could a grain hope to stand against a tsunami?

“Hold!” Yue Yang’s body stood immovable as a mountain, rising proud and unbent within the deluge of divine power. Yao and Yu had long since answered his will, transforming into a pair of companion birds that circled his body in flight. Drawn by their Companion Wing divine power and fused with the force of Yue Yang’s own Law, an outward pressure began to spread. This was no brute contest of strength but a spiraling vortex of willpower and energy, and through that profound, almost unfathomable whirlpool of will the world-destroying tide of divine force was gradually turned aside, peeling away from Yue Yang’s body, retreating with bitter reluctance.

Guided by the god’s awareness, that divine power surged back to attack again and again.

But the vortex of will only widened, and Yue Yang’s own will would not be shaken; with the dragon sisters spinning their companion-wing flight around him, the god’s attempt to simply drown him beneath raw divine force had failed.

The tsunami of power abruptly changed its shape. No longer a wave sweeping across the land to crush all in its path, it condensed instead into the form of a golden idol a thousand meters tall.

The idol had no face, no gender.

It was only a humanoid colossus of pure divine force, and somewhere in the immeasurable heights of the sky a divine consciousness governed its every motion.

Between the colossus’s fingers a dazzling energy began to gather, and a pillar of golden light—so thick that ten men linking arms could not have circled it—shot straight down from the heavens, its target the struggling, blood-soaked Yue Yang who still braced the divine hand aloft.

A strike so concentrated could not be broken by Yao and Yu’s exquisite companion-wing flight.

Worse, the two sisters had already burned through a great deal of their divine power in that spinning defense. There was no possibility of them absorbing so lethal a blow now.

“RRROOOAAARRR!”

Just as the sisters gritted their teeth and prepared to throw themselves into the light one last time to shield him, a black shadow leapt out and swelled at terrifying speed, opening a maw that could never be sated—and met the world-piercing pillar of energy head-on, catching it with nothing but its mouth. It was Taotie. It had beaten the sisters to it, planting itself before Yue Yang and devouring that killing blow with its black-hole belly and its endlessly ravenous jaws.

BOOM!

The pillar was swallowed, but the divine force detonated straight out from within Taotie’s stomach.

Even a belly like a black hole could not fully consume the power of a god.

Taotie was very nearly blown apart. Across a vast stretch of land centered on its body, the horrific shockwave pulverized everything on the surface into the finest dust, leaving something close to nothing at all. A bottomless crater opened beneath it. Smoke poured off the earth divine soldier from head to tail; it looked as though a hundred million blacksmiths had hammered on it for a hundred years, its whole body shattered beyond recognition—so ruined that even Yue Yang, its master, could not have said this broken thing was the earth divine soldier Taotie he had forged with his own hands.

It twisted its head back, wanting one last look at Yue Yang.

But its ruined body had already lost all strength, and it dropped limply, plunging straight down into that fathomless pit.

The sisters had no time to grieve. Overhead the sky birthed another pillar of light, hurtling down so fast it left no room to so much as draw breath.

The Heaven-Devouring Beast tried to hurl itself out and catch the blow as Taotie had.

The Star Scorpion’s tail-hook lashed out and flung the Heaven-Devouring Beast aside. True, the Heaven-Devouring Beast could fold itself into a sheath to mate with the Tiger Prison Divine Sword, but it was only days old and could not yet call up a fraction of its true power—not only was it no match for Taotie, it still fell some way short of even the Star Scorpion. Flung away, the Heaven-Devouring Beast could only watch, helpless, as the Star Scorpion—no frontal fighter, a creature built for ambush—faced the divine pillar alone.

The clever Star Scorpion did not try to take a blow that even Taotie could not withstand head-on.

Its tail swayed lightly.

Countless points of starlight were born across its body. It fell far short of the simulated cosmos its master Yue Yang could conjure, and further still from the Night Empress’s Domain of Stars, yet there was a kindred artistry to it. The scattered starlight could not weave the galaxy Yue Yang so favored, nor could it summon the twelve houses of the zodiac constellation by constellation at will the way the Night Empress did—the Star Scorpion had not yet reached that height.

But it could shape its starlight into the one thing it knew best: Scorpio.

A giant scorpion was born, vivid and lifelike, its body composed of ten million points of light. In the instant the divine pillar came screaming down like an arrow, that colossus of starlight swept up its tail-hook, straining to snag the pillar and drag it clear of the direction where its master stood.

Starlight met divine pillar, and the explosion shook heaven and earth.

The great scorpion in the sky shattered, its starlight snuffed out, blazing and vanishing like a shower of silver sparks; under the crush of divine force it could not become true, eternal stars. The soul-rending shockwave was more dreadful than an erupting volcano—only seconds after the destroying force had ground the surrounding air, the rock, even the very fingertips of the divine hand into powder did a mushroom cloud finally rise, climbing to the ninth heaven, twisting and shifting into a shape more terrible than a demon fleeing hell. On the ground the Star Scorpion had no time even to keen before it was blasted into the air, slammed down hard against the fingertip of the divine hand, bounced off, and driven deep into the earth, only the barest tip of its tail-hook left showing.

The third pillar of divine light came.

Faster than before. Fiercer.

The sisters had not even found their footing before they saw, helpless, the pillar bearing down on them from directly overhead.

The Heaven-Devouring Beast lunged out—at last its turn had come to meet the enemy. But halfway there, a dragon’s cry sounded, and a long, slender shadow slipped by, gliding past the Heaven-Devouring Beast with effortless ease.

A soft, sinuous tail flicked, and the Heaven-Devouring Beast—the group’s newborn little brother, only days old—was sent tumbling helplessly to the ground once more, without even glimpsing who had done it.

The divine pillar drove down, carrying the will to annihilate.

The sisters could barely follow it; all they could make out was a slender shadow rushing—incredibly—straight into the pillar’s core, gnawing a tunnel clean through its center, eating its way to the far end, and boring out the other side. The great idol that had loosed all three pillars had only just raised its hand to seize that slender shadow when the shadow whipped its tail across—and half the divine hand fell severed from the wrist.

The golden divine hand, the instant it lost the god’s sustaining will, dissolved at once, wafting away from the sky as unclaimed divine smoke.

And it was not only the golden hand. The pillar of divine light through which the shadow had chewed its tunnel lost its cohesion too.

It scattered wildly. The Heaven-Devouring Beast had drawn only a few breaths and was just settling in for a great restorative feast when it found the shadow already skimming through the sky at blistering speed, siphoning the remaining divine power clean away, snatching up the severed hand along with the drifting divine smoke, dodging the maimed idol’s grasping clutch, and fleeing far into the distance.

Its speed was truly lightning-swift, and smooth as a fish through water.

Not just the Heaven-Devouring Beast—even Yao and Yu could only sigh, in their hearts, that they were no match for it.

The remote divine consciousness, though shaking with thunderous fury, seemed to grasp that pursuit was pointless and gave up the chase. It switched tactics at once. The divine colossus dispersed and did not re-form; on the surface it resembled mere mist, but beneath ran a vast array, faintly configured into a snare of divine force, waiting for its prey to blunder in. At the same moment the mountainous “crushing hand,” its fingertips rivaling peaks, wrenched itself up out of the ground so suddenly that Yue Yang—who had been pouring everything into holding it aloft—nearly pitched over from the loss of resistance. It rose tens of thousands of meters into the sky, then came smashing back down at ten times the speed.

This time the god had chosen the most direct and most overbearing method of all: raw, crushing force. Given his size, and the impossible position of a man who could not abandon his friends and flee alone, this attack was without question the most effective and the most lethal.

This was what came of provoking a god.

A punishment beyond all imagining.

Death.

And death was only the beginning. Should Yue Yang fall to it, surely the enemy would tear out his soul as well—if not to seal it, then to snuff it out utterly, so that he would never again exist.

Facing this Mount-Tai-toppling blow, Yue Yang glanced at the friends lying senseless around him—Ren Tiange, the Silver-Eyed Great Sage, Qingmo, Hauge—all of them his companions. Short of abandoning them completely, there was no way to bear them all clear under such divine pressure.

Then he looked down at Young Lord Mingzhu at his feet, gravely wounded by the god’s sneak blow in the act of trying to send Yue Yang to safety.

Could he really cast aside this Young Lord Mingzhu, the one forever swinging a golden hammer to knock some sense into him, and flee?

Yue Yang didn’t need to think. He already knew the answer was no.

And above all—in every battle of his life, Yue Yang had never once flinched, never once fled the field. He had not run from the mighty Purple-Gold Marquis in those early days; had not run from the far mightier Shuntian; had not run from the once-invincible Demon King Hasin, the Crimson Emperor, or even the Black Prison King. In the Prison Emperor’s Divine Hall he had not run from the three great powers, Void and Jiuxiao. On his first ascent to the Heavens he had not run from the formidable Black Lake, the Flame Supreme, the Flame Progenitor. Back in the Sky Tower, he had not run from the Myriad Demon King and the Ancient Demon King, nor even from the Heavenly Empress leading the Nine Luminaries Clan in full assault. Ascending to the Heavens again, contesting the Sacred Codex against the Solar King—so cunning he was near-demonic—Yue Yang had not fled for all the odds against him. So no matter who it was, even if the enemy standing before him was a god, nothing could make Yue Yang yield, nothing could send him fleeing in terror.

Fight. A fight to the death, without end.

A fight that would never concede defeat.

That was Yue Yang.

“Slay the god!” Yue Yang drew both hands inward, and Yao and Yu transformed in an instant into a Human Divine Soldier, fusing with him into one.

“Hm?” In the Grimoire World, Princess Qianqian felt her heart shudder. Keen in all Six Senses, she caught the change in Yue Yang’s spirit—and not only she. Xiao Nu, who had no interest whatsoever in the martial path; the Sick Beauty, serenely and quietly studying her ancient runes; Yue Yu, preparing materials in her laboratory; Yue Bing, who had just finished her cultivation; Fengxian, still sweetly asleep and dreaming—every one of them sensed the change in Yue Yang in that moment. For an instant it was as if they could reach straight into his heart and resonate with his thoughts, and their spirits shook as one as they saw Xiao Wenli, deep inside the Grimoire, wildly forcing her power higher.

“AAAAAAHHHH!” At some point Hong and Aman had rushed to Xiao Wenli’s side, and together they erupted with the peerless might of Divine Generals. They could not go out to fight at his side, but through some secret art of Xiao Wenli’s—or perhaps by direct transmission of the heart—they seemed able to lend their master some measure of aid.

“We’re coming!”

At the very zenith of the Grimoire World’s sky, the chilong dragon girl Jiang Ying and Ika arrived neck and neck—one becoming a rain-summoning chilong, the other a demon-slaying divine angel—and threw themselves into the pillar of spiritual energy that Xiao Wenli, Hong, and Aman had raised.

Beside them the Chaos Phantom was a little slower, as if it did not quite understand why they were doing this.

But it did not stop to think. It moved on its most basic will.

Plunging down, joining the group.

Princess Qianqian and the others tried to rush in and join too, only to be thrown back by the energy. Try as they might, again and again, they could not break through—and every one of them burned with helpless urgency.

Then a sky full of flower petals came drifting down, and a strange fragrance welled up, soaking into their very lungs. Across the ground countless blossoms unfurled at impossible speed, and Duoduo—who the instant she appeared was already turning the whole Grimoire World into an ocean of flowers—descended through the air like a goddess among flowers. She waved one jade hand, and at once Qianqian and the rest felt their bodies bathed as if in a spring breeze; the barrier that had held them out simply ceased to exist, and in an instant they melted naturally into the pillar of spiritual energy the others had raised, fusing into one with it in the most wondrous way, without the slightest rejection.

And in truth it was not only them. The whole Grimoire World—every living thing, every last power within it—answered Duoduo’s will and flowed in, all of it joining that pillar of spiritual energy, giving Yue Yang, out beyond the Grimoire, the greatest support they could.

Even Pandora, who normally lay dormant, woke at Duoduo’s guiding call.

Every divine artifact, every sacred relic resonated together as one.

Every war beast raised its voice in a single cry.

Hearts merged into one.

And even Xue Wuxia—who had slept so long, fusing with that nameless goddess-nature within the icy statue of a goddess—suddenly opened her eyes.

Yue Yang had meant to hold off the enemy with his own strength alone. What he had never dreamed was that the moment he drew his sword in fury to duel a god, Xiao Wenli, Hong, and Aman would reach past the very bounds of what life-guardian war beasts were meant to do, forcibly breaking through the shackles of the Law to pour their energy into him.

Within seconds, more had joined—the chilong dragon girl Jiang Ying and Ika, the Chaos Phantom and Duoduo, Princess Qianqian and Fengxian.

The mighty Pandora, and little Bao’er, who had almost no fighting power at all.

The Freedom Queen, who had refused to let him restore her body, and Qingping, the rebel clan’s daughter, whose shattered body had not yet fully healed.

And—to his boundless joy—even Xue Wuxia, the long-slumbering, long-awaited girl he had all but given up hope of seeing wake! Without this Xue girl at his side, Yue Yang always felt he made a hopeless mess of so many things; he had lost count of how many times he’d longed for her return and been denied. And now, of all moments, because her man had walked into danger, she had woken straight out of that chaos to come to his aid.

And there were countless war beasts besides, each straining to lend the faint, meager power of its heart.

Faintly, distantly, Yue Yang thought he could even feel strength reaching him from the Sky Tower.

Only—he could not tell whether it came from the Fourth Lady, or His Majesty. Or from the Night Empress, or the Supreme.

“Slay the god!” Yue Yang’s heart surged past all restraint. With aid like this behind him—god or not, he would fight! Even if you are a god, I will cut you down beneath my blade!

Yu’s Companion Wing Bow wound itself around Yue Yang’s body; she took no lead in the fighting but bent all her Companion Wing divine power to reinforce her sister.

And Yao, the elder sister, transformed into the Companion Wing Sword, swept up in Yue Yang’s grip.

One sword, raised to the heavens.

To slay the sky. To slay the god.

(End of Chapter)