Ji Wuri’s stroke here was cruel enough.

First — the gang-up: three-on-one, wounding Chiqiu near to death. Then, in case Chiqiu had somehow survived, the trap of South Divine Sovereign Tianchou. The result — Chiqiu fell into the trap, dying miserably on the spot, and worse, misplacing his trust in Tianchou, entrusting God-Slayer’s secrets to him… With that, Hei Zhou would have intelligence in his fight with God-Slayer, and would surely gain a huge upper hand.

Tianchou was the East Camp’s biggest deep mole. Northeast Divine Sovereign Qingyun had declared neutrality. Southeast Divine Sovereign Chiqiu was dead.

The East Camp was now down to God-Slayer alone.

And at God-Slayer’s side stood a piece like Tianchou — a hidden card that could turn on him with a fatal strike at any moment.

If that wasn’t poisonous enough — there was also Ji Wuri, using a special-type war beast to fuse and shape-shift into Chiqiu, joining the field to surround-and-attack God-Slayer.

God-Slayer alone would face his lifelong rival Hei Zhou, plus Zhaoxi, Shafeng, and Shuanghan — four Divine Sovereigns joined — plus the biggest deep mole Tianchou, plus a Ji-Wuri-disguised-as-Chiqiu. That was worse than one against six. In such disastrous conditions, however monstrously strong God-Slayer might be as Mountain Beyond the Mountain’s foremost, he could not defy heaven itself. Before the fight even began, its outcome was written: God-Slayer would swallow his hatred and fall.

Yue Yang shook his head.

Sighed inwardly.

At the same time, he grew still more wary of the mastermind, Ji Wuri.

For ten thousand years Hei Zhou had wanted to remove the roadblock God-Slayer and become the foremost of Mountain Beyond the Mountain, but though he had a surface strength advantage, he had never gotten his way. Now that Ji Wuri had come, Chiqiu had been set up and killed, and God-Slayer had been backed into a certain-loss trap… If all of this was Ji Wuri’s covert design, he was terrifying indeed!

A Ji Wuri of this order Yue Yang had to remove — the earlier the better.

Otherwise he would grow into an even greater problem later on!

“Is Chiqiu really dead?” Ji Wuri, now wearing Chiqiu’s shape, looked down at Chiqiu’s real corpse, his eyes full of doubt.

“His divine consciousness is scattered. His divine power has melted away. Even his grimoire has broken contract — turned dull and grey. Isn’t that dead?” Shafeng, several wounds on him, saw Chiqiu truly dead and, gritting through his pain, laughed. “If nobody’s satisfied, I can cut his head off and make a chamber pot out of it!”

“Enough. Chiqiu was, after all, a Divine Sovereign. In life we could say what we would — but in death, leave him a little dignity. Respect an enemy, and it means we respect ourselves.” Zhaoxi did not agree with defiling Chiqiu’s body. Not just him — even Shuanghan, ruthless as he had been during the killing, shook his head, disapproving of an act unbecoming of a superior. If Chiqiu were not dead, Shuanghan would not have minded ten thousand cuts on him. Now that he was dead, dismembering the body meant nothing at all — and it damaged the heart of a strong man.

“Fine. He’s dead — leave him a whole corpse.” The blade-wielding middle-aged man raised his blade, cut through empty space, and vanished in an instant.

“Summoning grimoire — yes, contract is broken…” Ji Wuri did not, in the least, trust surface signs like scattered divine consciousness or melting divine power. To him, having seen every strange and wonderful talent in the Heavenly Realm’s races, “playing dead” was a special ability he had witnessed in hundreds of forms, each craftier than the last. One careless move and you were fooled. So Ji Wuri would never trust an enemy easily — even one who had become a corpse. He kept his caution and his guard.

The one thing he did trust was the summoning grimoire.

Summoning grimoires do not lie.

If the master was not dead, no matter how well he disguised, no matter how deft the deception, the grimoire would not lie. It would maintain the contract… Conversely, if the summoning grimoire had broken contract, then its master was surely dead. There was no second possibility.

Zhaoxi, half by intention half not, cast a glance in the direction of Yue Yang’s hiding place. Yue Yang held his breath and did not stir.

He was afraid of being spotted by the bottomlessly-perceptive North Divine Sovereign.

The Zhenmiao mirror above all —

Was most to be feared.

Fortunately, Zhaoxi took it to be a passing suspicion of his own, and did not dig further. However he thought about it, he could not have imagined that a being might be in the world who could hide right beneath his eyes and observe without being detected.

Once Zhaoxi and Shuanghan had confirmed Chiqiu was truly dead, they departed together. Ji Wuri, having reached out and sensed the dulled, greyed summoning grimoire and confirmed Chiqiu’s death, drifted off too. Throughout all this, no one on the field, Shafeng included, had bothered to try to claim the Tunlong spear. All knew: divine artifacts choose their masters.

Even though “Tunlong” wasn’t a full divine artifact yet, it already had a degree of will and sentience.

Chiqiu’s death —

Did not entitle anyone to become its new master.

Shafeng aimed a foot at Tunlong, standing upside-down in the ground, and kicked it high. As it spun down, Xuanya caught it. Xuanya knocked Tunlong across the field with a sharp clang, and it plunged deep into the chest of Chiqiu’s corpse…

Chiqiu was long dead through and through. No reaction.

Shafeng watched, laughed a queer laugh.

He turned into a golden light and left the field, tossing aside even the ancient relic body he had so carefully and reverently brought out earlier, without so much as another look. The ancient relic’s presence generated that hundredfold-weakening divine-domain space, comparable to the God-Slaying Mystic Realm. Shafeng was no fool. Except to trap Chiqiu, he ordinarily would not have dared carry it around at all…

“Hm? Something’s off!” Yue Yang did not step out at once. Everyone had left, but his danger-sense had not receded.

Yue Yang chose to stay.

Watch and wait.

An hour later, the field suddenly shifted.

The Chiqiu who had been thoroughly dead — his body twitched strangely, like a rising corpse.

Yue Yang, for his part — for all the great scenes he had seen — could not hold his curiosity down. His eyes went wide as he watched every stir Chiqiu made.

Chiqiu’s mangled, blood-slick body was healing rapidly. His hands slowly straightened, then slowly closed. His ten fingers flexed. Like a man frozen stiff just now returning to warmth, stretching to test his body. A minute passed. Chiqiu’s eyes gathered divine light again; his consciousness had returned. He reached out and gently drew Tunlong, which had been pinned through his chest, from his own body. Tunlong hummed on and on, seemingly delighted to see its master return… After Chiqiu steadied his own head and neck, adjusting the shattered pieces of his skull one by one and letting divine power knit them anew, the wounds all over him had already restored, whole as if new.

Even the pierce-hole through his heart where Tunlong had gone in — gone. All that remained was a red mark the size of the wound.

The pink scar of new-grown flesh.

Three minutes.

Chiqiu was completely healed. Not a scrape left on him.

If Yue Yang had not seen it with his own eyes, he would not have believed such a bizarre thing… Killed and yet resurrected? What kind of talent-ability was this?

Now, the only thing to prove Chiqiu had been through a brutal fight was that his divine power was over seventy percent scattered and dispersed, with less than thirty percent able to reassemble. If he had not truly been killed, no wound short of the greatest could have left him this drained.

Chiqiu stroked Tunlong’s shaft as one strokes a lover’s skin.

He clenched Tunlong tight. “As soon as my divine power comes back, I shall kill Shafeng, that swine — and, of course, everyone in the West Camp. No one will believe it, no one will know: I have the talent ‘Chi-Dragon Beard Self-Regeneration.’ A pity only about my summoning grimoire. It cost so much to sign it in the first place — per Taiyan and Bingli’s ancient secret contract — and now I have lost it once again. And I do not know whether I can bind another grimoire at the same cost, when the day comes…”

With a small sigh, Chiqiu walked toward the cover where Yue Yang was hiding.

He meant to shift the fallen stones.

To find his beloved’s body.

And Yue Yang was startled to find that the woman he had secretly taken out earlier was also mending — her wounds steadily improving. Her self-healing pace was far short of Chiqiu’s, but it was still striking. Perhaps not long from now, she would come round to consciousness.

Because — even now — her eyelashes were beginning to tremble, as if she had recovered some awareness.

“Shared Life, Shared Death? So this woman’s special ability was Shared Life, Shared Death…” Yue Yang had suspected as much before, but hadn’t been able to work it out. Now the truth was laid before him. This woman had the ability to share life and share death. So long as Chiqiu did not die, then even if her body were destroyed, she could rebirth from an energy form; she would never truly die.

“Hm?” Chiqiu, shifting stones, suddenly changed expression. He gripped Tunlong and straightened his back.

“You’ve grown so weak, and can still sense me. As expected of one of the eight Divine Sovereigns of Mountain Beyond the Mountain — first-rate at playing dead, our Chiqiu!” Shafeng had, at some point, been standing behind Chiqiu. Chiqiu’s revival took an hour, and yet this Shafeng’s patience had been extraordinary — he had waited a full hour, until Chiqiu was completely restored, before showing himself.

“Given your wits — that you could guess I had feigned death — I confess it is beyond me.” Chiqiu held Tunlong, his expression flat, no panic at all.

“With only thirty percent of your strength left, do you still want to trade lives with me? Isn’t that a little naïve?” Shafeng laughed aloud.

“Ten percent is all I need to kill you!” Chiqiu snorted coldly.

“Very confident, aren’t we!” Shafeng did not believe him at all.

“On Taiyan’s body I inherited his Taiyan Divine Power. Only, in ten thousand years I have never shown it to anyone. Ten percent of my divine power is enough to drive the Taiyan Divine Power hidden in Tunlong. Shafeng, if not for Zhaoxi and the others being here, I would need less than a minute to kill you!” Chiqiu swung Tunlong hard, and the divine power hidden inside — which even Yue Yang’s Heavenly Eye of Wisdom could not see through — surged forth.

Its might, once revealed, cowed heaven and earth.

Ten thousand demons bowed their heads.

Shafeng’s face changed on the spot.

A death-threat wrapped his heart.

Taiyan had died ten thousand years ago, but his divine majesty of that age still lived in Shafeng’s memory, held there in awe.

Yue Yang truly had not expected the story to have such a turn. Wonderful, he cheered inwardly — no wonder they’d lived tens of thousands of years, these old monsters. None of them fools. All of them holding cards. Beating them was not going to be easy.

“Goodbye, Shafeng!” Chiqiu lifted Tunlong high. He was about to unleash a heaven-and-earth-destroying strike drawing on Taiyan Divine Power.

Even as Southwest Divine Sovereign, Shafeng’s chances of surviving that Taiyan Divine Power —

Would have been vanishingly slim.

Tunlong — one thrust to shatter the sky, heaven and earth to break with it…

Yue Yang, dying to see the truth of what was about to unfold, could no longer help himself. Never mind exposure — he unfurled his Heavenly Eye of Wisdom.

And found that the certain-to-die Shafeng did not, in fact, meet a tragic end under Taiyan Divine Power. Instead, gritting through the agony of Tunlong piercing his heart, Shafeng summoned his golden grimoire — and slipped into Grimoire World in an instant… Taiyan Divine Power might destroy heaven and earth, but it could not damage a golden grimoire in the least — let alone one Shafeng had already fled into.

Chiqiu was startled, then furious.

Then, deeply resigned.

Shafeng slipped back out of Grimoire World soon enough. Bedraggled, but smiling. He grinned at the frustrated Chiqiu. “You must have forgotten. When Taiyan and Bingli opened the ancient secret to us, we all bound grimoires. Not just you — I did too. Neither of us is a pseudo-god that a true god can one-shot anymore. Ha ha ha — summoning grimoires? I have one too! Even if it can never be upgraded again, forever only a golden grimoire, that is enough. I too can be called a true god! Chiqiu, you never truly held Taiyan Divine Power. You are borrowing it. With your summoning grimoire gone, you’re a mere pseudo-god now. How could you one-shot a true god like me? Unless the legendary Sacred Sovereign descends, who can one-shot me, Shafeng?”

Chiqiu stared at the smirking Shafeng for a long moment, then said only: “I can’t kill you. But someone else can!”

“A joke. Not even God-Slayer or Hei Zhou has the ability to one-shot me. In Mountain Beyond the Mountain, God-Slayer, Hei Zhou, Zhaoxi, and Tianchou may be stronger than me, but if I don’t fight them head-on, what can they do? Killing me is sheer wishful thinking! God-Slayer can barely keep himself safe now. Aside from him, who among your East Camp has that ability?” Shafeng’s face was full of scorn, dismissing Chiqiu’s words entirely.

“Let me try. How about that?” A clear voice Shafeng had never once heard in his life sounded in his ear.

The voice was soft, but heard —

It landed like thunder.

Eardrums nearly bursting, Shafeng — like a bird startled by a bowstring — moved to flee back into his Grimoire World… He had just eluded the Taiyan Divine Power strike an instant ago. And now, to his astonishment, he found his own body heavy as a stone. He tried to lift off the ground and felt his feet had grown roots in the earth. However he moved his divine power, however he willed with divine consciousness, he could not budge a hair.

A shadow walked out from behind him, past a snake-demon little loli who was staring at Shafeng with fixed eyes.

He did not come at Shafeng from behind.

He walked around to stand in front of him.

Only when Shafeng had made every mental preparation, marshaled every defense and counterattack in mind, did the stranger slowly extend a hand and gesture to the cute snake-demon little loli. “That’s enough. Let him go. I feel it’s better to do this one-on-one. If you join in, he might feel it’s unfair — a real blow to his heart. What if he cries?”

(End of Chapter 1169)