The sky had fallen utterly silent, a dead stillness.

It was as if that colossal divine hand no longer existed at all. Were it not for the shadow still cloaking the land in a darkness deep as night, one might have believed the crisis had already lifted.

Yue Yang lifted his head.

He watched, long and unmoving. He waited, long and unmoving.

That single stroke had poured out every last drop of his strength, together with all the spiritual power lent to him, all of it forged into boundless sword qi that shot straight up into the heavens.

Had the god-slaying blow succeeded?

If it had, why was there no reaction at all? And if it hadn’t, why had that unimaginably vast divine hand gone still, hanging motionless in the air? The situation was uncanny, the circumstances all wrong—impossible to read. Sharp as Yue Yang was, clever to the point of being a prodigy, even he could not make sense of it.

RUMBLE—RUMBLE—RUMBLE…

Overhead, the divine hand began, slowly, to move again.

Disappointment washed through Yue Yang. To think that even after fighting to this extremity, he still could not touch his opponent.

Truly, this was a ‘god’ enthroned high above.

And yet.

On second thought, a kind of peace settled over him.

Possessing an undying Sovereign Intent, he could stand unbowed even in the most hopeless straits—all the more so against a ‘god’ who had merely attained godhood ahead of him.

“Clumsy puppets. A tiresome, remote-piloted consciousness. All of it so terribly boring. Had this been my true body, I’d have snuffed you out in a single second. Preen all you like—but hear me, boy: today was only a beginning.” A will of matchless power, like a savage bandit barging brazenly into another man’s home, forced its way through the defenses of Yue Yang’s mind and struck viciously into his thoughts. This was the very consciousness of the ‘god’ he had fought so bitterly against. It said nothing more, but Yue Yang already understood: the god-slaying sword he had loosed with everything he had a moment ago had accomplished nothing. The ‘god’ who had taken that blow was entirely unharmed.

And Yue Yang grasped one thing more.

This enormous divine hand that had assailed him all this while was not even the god’s true body.

It was only a puppet—a puppet fashioned by the god, a stand-in through which the god acted at a distance within Human Valley.

The great divine hand withdrew with a rolling rumble. Yue Yang couldn’t fathom why the arrogant god had not attacked again, had not gone on smashing down with that hand. Had it come even once more—just one more strike—Yue Yang could never have withstood it.

His strength was wholly spent, every last measure of it poured into that one ‘god-slaying sword.’

Should the divine hand strike again, Yue Yang reckoned his only hope would be to lose his mind and go berserk—

To drag out and unleash the power of the Fate Giant.

Or else the aid of the qilin girl Bingyin, or of the Phoenix Sisters.

Why?

Why had the god stopped attacking him?

From the way it had spoken just now, it hardly sounded like something that would let him off lightly. So why had it not pressed on? What on earth was the reason?

Just as Yue Yang was turning the riddle over and over without answer, a mountain peak suddenly dropped out of the sky—more terrible than a plummeting meteor—tearing through the atmosphere’s protection with a thunderous roar and driving straight down into the ground. One look and Yue Yang’s blood ran cold. Ignoring the exhaustion wracking his whole body, he scooped up Young Lord Mingzhu and ran for his life, while Yao and Yu, transformed back from Human Divine Soldier into companion birds, guarded him the whole way, shattering the meteor shower raining down from the sky and knocking the fragments spinning off elsewhere.

The Heaven-Devouring Beast had just finished digging Taotie and the Star Scorpion out of the dirt; it looked up—and its jaw hit the ground too.

Across the sky, a dragon-shaped silhouette flashed past in an instant.

Ren Tiange, Hauge, Qingmo, the Silver-Eyed Great Sage, and the others, still buried in the earth, were all wrenched forcibly out of the ground by some wondrous force and flung scattering through the air. A shockwave crashed down from the heavens, and the burning, colossal peak—with a speed and force too swift to cover one’s ears—punched through the sky and came thundering down amid a horrific shriek of rending, spearing straight into the ground.

BOOM!

The entire Tower Beyond the Tower was obliterated by the shockwave.

Dust, earth, and burning smoke surged up in the wake of the blast, swelling into a mushroom cloud thicker than any volcanic eruption, blanketing the whole of the sky.

How long passed, no one could say, before Yue Yang—cradling the still-unconscious Young Lord Mingzhu with painstaking care, his face caked in mud and ash—finally emerged from beneath the flank of a massive fallen boulder. And when he looked at that peak still blazing fiercely, charred black from end to end, he was struck dumb: this was no mountain peak at all. It was one of the fingers of that very hand—the one he had struggled so desperately to hold aloft, straining beneath it like Heracles bearing the sky!

Heavens above—that was a finger!

At the finger’s peak was a cut surface, flawlessly smooth and perfect.

Only now did Yue Yang understand: the ‘god-slaying sword’ he had loosed with all his might, backed by everyone’s spiritual power, had not been entirely without effect after all. The killing of the god had failed—but at the very least, he had severed one finger from that divine hand.

The god-controlled puppet body had likely taken far graver wounds besides; it was simply too vast, and shrouded in too much divine pressure, for the damage to be seen.

Gazing at that severed finger, huge as a mountain, wave upon wave of feeling rose in Yue Yang’s chest.

He had challenged a god.

He had fought a god.

And in the end he had not been beaten. He hadn’t reached his goal, true—but he had, all the same, cut off one of its fingers.

Even if this finger was not a finger of the god’s true body but only of a god-forged puppet—from a certain angle, was it not still, in its way, the god’s finger? Was it not, in its way, a victory? In all the ages, past and present, how many souls had ever dared to challenge a god? And how many, having fought one, had walked away whole? He had not lost. He truly had not lost! With the support of Xiao Wenli, Hong, Aman—of Xue Wuxia, Princess Qianqian, Fengxian—and of the Fourth Lady, His Majesty, the Night Empress, and the Supreme in the great rear guard of the Sky Tower, he had driven back that ‘god’ enthroned on high, however unfathomable its power!

The god-slaying sword had cut off one of a god’s fingers!

Before him stood the spoils of his war!

This finger, towering like a mountain and still burning fiercely before him, was the finest proof of his victory!

Yao and Yu gathered close, moved to their cores, and wrapped Yue Yang tight in their arms; and even the near-ruined Taotie, the Star Scorpion, and the Heaven-Devouring Beast bounced about in delight. As for Ren Tiange and the others, ambushed by divine power at the very start and knocked senseless, they were still snoring away like dead hogs, sunk in slumber and dead to the world.

“One day, I will surpass you—and when I do, it won’t be a finger. It will be your head that my god-slaying sword takes!”

One arm clutching the frail, unconscious Young Lord Mingzhu, Yue Yang clenched his free hand into a fist.

And swore a great oath.

To reach the divine tier was the goal of every warrior.

But Yue Yang’s goal now was not merely to reach it. It was to surpass it. And not merely to surpass it, but to leave it far, far behind.

When Ren Tiange and the rest came to, and saw the Tower Beyond the Tower reduced to something worse than rubble, and saw before them that ‘severed divine finger’—driven into the ground yet towering taller than many a mountain—they could only gape in dumbstruck horror. They could not begin to imagine what kind of battle Yue Yang had lived through, and still less dared they imagine how, in a fight against a ‘god,’ Yue Yang had contrived to cut off one of its fingers!

This—this—this was too incredible for words!

Had they not seen it with their own eyes, you could have beaten them to death and they’d never have believed it!

“Let’s go. I’ve hit the very limit of my limits—I can’t hold out a moment longer!” Yue Yang felt more spent now than after fighting the Heavens-Splitting Demon Lord for a hundred straight days; and the cruelest part was that, drained to the dregs as he was, he still couldn’t rest—he had to keep feeding energy into Young Lord Mingzhu, mending this stubborn fool’s body.

“Go, go, go—!” Hauge, scared witless, bolted as if a snake had bitten him on the backside.

“The transport gate was clearly destroyed. How can it still be standing here?” The Silver-Eyed Great Sage had spotted the discrepancy.

“Get out first, worry about it later. Never mind how—we need to leave this place as fast as we possibly can!” Ghost King Phantom, Blood Shave, Golden Bones, and the other dark-path powerhouses—men who feared neither heaven nor earth—saw the Great Sage still planted before the gate, studying it, and stamped their feet in a fury. Dispensing with all courtesy, they swarmed him, and with a great deal of shoving and hauling dragged the insatiably curious Sage away. They’d been frightened badly enough already; and hearing Yue Yang say the god was unhurt, had only left for the moment, and could return at any time, made their scalps crawl worse still. They slipped off as fast as their legs would carry them, unwilling to linger in this Tower Beyond the Tower a single second more.

Passing through the transport gate, they saw the three white-clad maidens standing before the two-way portal.

And all at once, they understood.

So it was the maidens who had repaired the gate.

Otherwise, they truly would have had no idea what to do!

The white-clad maiden cradling the silver grimoire in her jade hands waited quietly, and only when she saw Yue Yang—carrying Young Lord Mingzhu, the last of them to emerge—did she give a slight nod. “It seems the situation is better than expected. And you have proven finer than we imagined, too.”

Yue Yang, for his part, went up in flames. He couldn’t help himself, and let fly a mouthful of curses. “Holy shit—what kind of garbage assessment is this? It’s a straight-up death sentence! If you don’t explain yourselves right now, I swear I’ll tear this damned Heavenly Pride Academy to the ground. Do you have any idea? We just clawed our way out of the grave—these are lives we scraped back from the dead! I nearly got one-shotted by a god in there just now! ‘Clear out the puppets,’ you said. Inside there’s a ‘god’ so monstrous that nothing in heaven or earth could stop it, and you sent us in there to die? What in the world kind of assessment is that?!”

The three white-clad maidens had wonderfully even tempers.

Gentle and serene as jade, cool and soft as water.

They let Yue Yang rattle off his whole clattering tirade, waited until he’d vented it all, and only then did the maiden in the middle, the silver grimoire in her hands, explain: “No one but you would have woken that god. No one else would have come under its attack—because no one but you carries an ancient relic upon them. Had you been willing to trust us, and handed the ancient relic over for us to keep beforehand, then going in would have been a perfectly ordinary assessment, with no mishap of any kind.”

At that, Yue Yang’s fury only rose higher. “So the way you tell it, this is my fault? I went looking for my own death?”

(End of Chapter)