Over the next day, Yue Yang was scribbling and sketching.

Seemingly, doing nothing in particular.

Princess Qianqian at first ignored it, but curiosity got the better of her. She found excuses to swing by and peek several times, only to see that the scribble-covered papers were rough sketches of scales and claws and bits, not tightly-drawn designs, still less anything cohering into a whole. She was astonished. Time was tight — how did this fellow have this kind of spare-time mood? What on earth was he tinkering with?

Never mind her — even Sick Beauty and Yue Yu, who were the ones who normally worked out details in tandem with Yue Yang, could not tell what he was doing.

The pile of scribble-papers just kept growing until it was a thick stack.

Aside from Yue Yang, nobody could read what any of it was.

“What are these things?” Princess Qianqian flipped through a day’s worth of sketches. Her eyes swam. She had helped with the engraving of Heavenly Realm runes before, but she had never seen designs as intricate as these.

If these were design drafts, what was Yue Yang planning to make?

Princess Qianqian couldn’t figure it out.

The more she looked, the more confused she got.

Yue Yang paid her no mind at first, staying with the flashes of inspiration he was still catching on paper. Only half an hour later, when the last stroke was done, did he set the pen down with a sigh of relief. Tired, but still visibly excited, he explained to Princess Qianqian, Luohua, and the others: “I want to use God-Slaying Mystic Metal to make a war doll — to fight the Evil God in Human Valley. The Evil God’s single finger is on the scale of a mountain peak. Extrapolate to the whole body and I estimate his height at somewhere between thirty and fifty kilometers. Against something that big, ordinary war dolls mean nothing. Sometimes, sheer scale can crush everything. So if we want to beat the Evil God, we have to build a ‘peak war doll’ the same size as him, or larger. The idea came to me on the old Tange hovering mothership. Yes — I’ve decided to build a peak war doll out of near-indestructible God-Slaying Mystic Metal. In peacetime we can ride it like a hovering mothership. In war, it turns into a war doll.”

“Build a war doll over fifty kilometers long?” They were all left dumbstruck.

Mountain Beyond the Mountain’s largest hovering motherships — the Dragon Eagle and the Kunpeng — were only ten kilometers long.

Fifty kilometers vs. ten kilometers was another matter entirely.

That was the gap between a grown man and a newborn.

And even the ten-kilometer Dragon Eagle and Kunpeng, as they’d heard from Golden Eagle Great General, took a century to build. Every one of them, without exception.

Nobody doubted Yue Yang could make such a peak war doll. But everyone was a little worried.

Would there be time?

They had to return to Human Valley within six months.

And Earth Valley and Mountain Beyond the Mountain were on the verge of the Divine War.

How much time was Yue Yang planning to spend making this peak war doll? A month, or three? If it took too long, was there still time?

“There’ll be time!” Yue Yang saw everyone’s worry at a glance and reassured them with a smile. “I’ve calculated it. If my estimate is right, and things go smoothly, half a month will do.”

“What?” Princess Qianqian and the others were left with jaws open.

This was a fifty-kilometer war doll — and made entirely of God-Slaying Mystic Metal at that. Half a month would be a good pace just to prepare the materials.

Where did Yue Yang’s confidence come from?

And what kind of plan was he going to run next?

Even the Divine Punishment Empress, not usually much interested in war dolls, felt her curiosity rise. “If it’s on the scale of the Evil God — at least fifty kilometers long — and you only have half a month, how exactly do you plan to build it?”

Yue Yang looked surprised. “Who said fifty kilometers? I’m planning a hundred-and-eight-kilometer Yinglong! Fifty, I could do in a week!”

Everyone fell silent.

Fifty kilometers wasn’t enough for him? He wanted to build a hundred-and-eight-kilometer Yinglong…

Wait — what was Yinglong? At the sight of this brand-new war doll idea, everyone’s interest rose. They circled around, and even the half-elf Xiao Nu, who never took part in the councils, blinked her big eyes and waited cutely for Yue Yang’s answer.

Yue Yang, for his part, saw no way out and had to explain the Yinglong of the Eastern lineage: “Really, this one can be summed up in a single line. It’s the strongest slaughtering divine beast.” Of course, a summary that short would not satisfy them. So Yue Yang, for his part, launched into the tale of the near-invincible Great Demon King Chiyou, laying out the Xuanyuan-vs-Chiyou war of gods and demons in vivid detail, telling them how the two archenemies fought until heaven and earth cracked, how each pulled out the strangest of tricks, how they called the wind and hailed the rain, and how, for the sake of the throne of supreme kingship, they fought until sun and moon and clouds went dark. He put on every ounce of colour and drama, and everyone listened in relish.

At the very end, Yue Yang, for his part, wrapped up in one sentence: “That fearsome Chiyou — he was slain by the Yinglong!”

Now everyone was jolted.

Chiyou and Xuanyuan had been locked in the fight of their lives — two peerless powerhouses. How could a Yinglong that had merely wandered by have been the one to kill Chiyou?

Before the question could be voiced, Yue Yang was already listing more cases. Xingtian, who could not be killed even with his head cut off. Kuafu, who chased down the sun. The river demon that had tried to stop Great Yu’s flood-taming. The primordial Dragon-Turtle whose head could eat the sky and whose gaze could swallow the earth, whose legs Nüwa cut off to prop up the vault of heaven and mend the sky. Gonggong, who lost his fight with Zhurong and, in a fit of rage, smashed Mount Buzhou down… and so on. In the end, they were all slain by the Yinglong.

They were myths, sure, and not necessarily fact. But from the sidelines they offered a picture of the Yinglong’s fighting power — and its fighting power was, undoubtedly, off the charts.

Among the Eastern lineage, most races were mild and peace-loving. They did not enjoy fighting, and enjoyed war even less.

The Yinglong was one of the rare exceptions — a warlike breed.

In the Eastern world, the Yinglong, whose tail could split the earth, and the fairy Ba, whose fire could scorch a thousand miles of red earth — these two races were the war-mad ones, the “gods of slaughter” whom enemies feared to name.

“Isn’t there only one Yinglong?” the half-elf Xiao Nu asked innocently.

“Actually, the Yinglong is a whole race, like the Nine Luminaries Clan or the Golden Crow Clan we’ve met — a lineage. The Golden Crow Clan can still just about count, but the Heavenly Realm’s Nine Luminaries Clan no longer counts as a pure Eastern race. The truly pure Eastern races — Bingyin, whom we know, she’s of the Qilin race, and the Qilin, like the Yinglong, are the East’s purest and most powerful immortal clans. The Qilin are kind by nature; the Yinglong are cruel and love slaughter. Of course, the Yinglong race is a member of the Eastern world after all. They don’t initiate slaughter, and they aren’t bloodthirsty. It’s just that if an enemy provokes them, they won’t hesitate to cut them down — they won’t ignore or forgive as other Eastern races do…” At first, Yue Yang had not known much about the Eastern immortal clans, but perhaps through Sword Spirit’s subtle influence and long accumulation, he had, without noticing, come to know many of the Eastern world’s secrets.

He didn’t usually bring up the Eastern world unprompted.

But today, everyone had asked.

He held nothing back. They were all his own, women who would share his life; there was nothing in the world he could not say to them.

Aside from Sword Spirit, which he left out, there was almost nothing to hide. And of course, everyone had the tact not to press. Even if they guessed there was a higher existence beyond the Phoenix sisters, so long as Yue Yang didn’t speak of it, they wouldn’t ask, and would let him keep the important, necessary secrets to himself.

“Will we ever get to see the Yinglong race?” Tianzai, this little girl, was a fight-mad one herself, and she worshipped a race like the Yinglong.

“Ah, whether you’ll get to see one — I can’t say for sure. But in the legends, the Yinglong looks — well, a little like this glutton!” Yue Yang plucked the Metal Little Beast off his wrist, where it was coiled and snoring, and unrolled the little fellow’s body to explain: “The Yinglong has wings, which sets it slightly apart from the true dragons of the Eastern lineage. But the Yinglong is a true-dragon race too. The Eastern true-dragon lineage is a huge clan — divine dragons, true dragons, sky dragons, jiaolong, chi-dragons, qiu-dragons, and so on. Some of them don’t even look particularly like dragons, like the Nine Dragon Sons. The Yinglong’s form is fairly close to a true dragon’s — with an extra pair of wings.”

“So that’s what it looks like?” Tianzai tried to grab the Metal Little Beast’s tail and dangle him upside-down for a better look.

“…” The sleepy little fellow gave the crowd a lazy glance, curled himself back up in an instant, returned to Yue Yang’s wrist, transformed back into a coiled-dragon-shaped bracer, and went right on snoring.

“Then, would the Sky-Reaching War Beast happen to be a Yinglong?” the Southern Wilderness Demon King raised the question.

“Very possibly!” Liuye and Xiayi believed it firmly.

“No, that’s impossible! This little thing is lazy and greedy — no way it’s a Yinglong!” Princess Qianqian felt it was too much of a stretch.

“And this little thing’s body is metallic. It’s a strange kind of life-form, very different from Bingyin. And Bingyin doesn’t recognize it either, which is telling. Of course, there might still be some connection — after all, the resemblance is striking…” Luohua wasn’t entirely sure.

“Is there any point in discussing this now?” Yue Yang broke into a sweat. Whether the Metal Little Beast was a Yinglong or not, it was still just a glutton that hadn’t grown up! Small-scale rough-housing, sure — but count on it to be a real help? A thousand more years might still be too early!

At any rate.

Yue Yang’s plan to use God-Slaying Mystic Metal to build a “Yinglong” war doll — that was locked in.

And the transmigrator, brazen as ever, had gone so far as to design a few transforming combat forms for this never-before-seen peak war doll “Yinglong” — one of them a humanoid form modeled on his own likeness. Even Sick Beauty laughed at him for being too vain… But Yue Yang, for his part, felt that if you were designing a war doll of your own, using someone else’s face on it would be a losing bargain of the worst kind. The advertising space was rightly his!

Yue Yu believed her little brother, but she was still worried about the timeline. “Even by one-thought-and-it-is-made, half a month is too little!”

Yue Yang could shape things by a single thought.

But no matter how fast, no matter how efficient — no matter how much faster than Hei Zhou and God-Slayer by a hundredfold or a thousand — he was still a person.

Even mighty “gods” like Hei Zhou and God-Slayer had their limits of fatigue, let alone Yue Yang, who was still “a person.” Making a peak war doll with a diameter over five kilometers and a length of a hundred and eight kilometers, unprecedented in scale — how simple would that be?

Just making the dragon’s head alone would exceed the difficulty of the Dragon Eagle hovering mothership that Hei Zhou had spent a century building.

And this was a shape-shifting war doll, not merely a flying vessel.

The two were not on the same level.

Most importantly — this had to be done in half a month…

If it weren’t for the fact that Yue Yang, for his part, was clear-eyed and steady-mooded as any Celestial Court subject, everyone would have started to worry that this fellow had gone mad!

“Building the whole thing at once, no — half a month is out of the question,” Yue Yang laughed brightly, apparently perfectly assured. “My domain is limited in range. Even with all of you helping, it can’t be expanded that much. But we don’t need to build the whole thing. We only need to make it scale by scale, whisker by whisker, claw by claw, tooth by tooth — separately. That way it becomes much easier. We can’t manifest the whole thing by a single thought — not even one ten-thousandth of it. But subdivided, it’s easy. So long as our design is correct and executed without error, then combining the parts at the end — half a month should be enough! Think about it. The Yinglong is a war doll to begin with — it’s not a living being. There’s no need for one-thought-and-it-is-made as a single act. Why not subdivide it into individually numbered parts, produce them in an orderly way, and then assemble the whole afterward?”

“Big brother, I’ll help too!” little Yue Bing rolled up her sleeves with high spirits, resolving to pitch in with her big brother — to take down this unprecedented, hundred-and-eight-kilometer Yinglong in half a month!

“You’re not planning to just move the entire God-Slaying Mystic Realm back here, are you?”

Princess Qianqian couldn’t imagine it.

Squeezing a hundred-and-eight-kilometer Yinglong into Grimoire World would be a squeeze indeed. Yue Yang’s Grimoire World was big, but not so unbounded as all that. If you tried to stuff an Yinglong in, everyone might well end up living on its claws.

Yue Yang smiled.

Even once the Yinglong was finished, he wasn’t going to leave it in Grimoire World — that would be far too cramped!

Empress Vivienne’s Black Void space and the Ice-and-Snow World were boundless. Those were the ideal places. And in the future battle against the Evil God, perhaps he’d need to trouble Her Majesty Empress Vivienne to lend a hand. Did they really think possessing the Yinglong would settle the fight with the Evil God? Not necessarily. Human Valley was a martial-arts-forbidden zone, and Yue Yang’s combat power there was the weakest of any of the trial grounds — nothing like Earth Valley or Mountain Beyond the Mountain!

“Let us help. We can’t be much use, but numbering and sorting the pieces — that we can handle,” Liuye and Xiayi and the other girls whose strength wasn’t at the top had always regretted not being able to help Yue Yang. Now the chance had come — they could pitch in too!

“Not so fast — first, error-checking…”

Yue Yu hurried to hold the enthusiastic girls back, especially Bao’er and Tianzai. Who knew if they’d help or only pile on more trouble?

The plan was right, but the blueprints were the most important thing. One error anywhere, and the entire Yinglong project would collapse. What was most important right now was not the doing but the error-checking. The design had to be flawless, its realization absolutely possible; otherwise no amount of blood, sweat, or heart poured into it would produce an Yinglong.

Bao’er, the little troublemaker who dreaded the world being at peace —

Also reached for one of the sketch-sheets.

Even Sick Beauty, who normally spoiled her rotten, hastily shielded the drawings and didn’t dare let her get her hands on them. Yue Yang, for his part, ordered her: “Off you go. Corner. Stand there. Eyes may look, hands may not touch!”

“Hmph!” Bao’er answered him with the sort of little pink pout you could hang an oil bottle off.

(End of Chapter 1162)