The Great-Loli-of-Sword-Qi was all smiles, and said nothing.

Understanding broke over Yue Yang all at once.

The sword path he had grasped was correct enough. But his realm fell short, and at present there was no way he could comprehend the whole of it — in digging out its profundities, in extending its true meanings, he still had ground to cover. On the sword path, every floor you climbed revealed that the floor above held finer knowledge still. The sword intent grasped on each level was never wrong; but the sword path was not one absolute, unchanging truth. Each realm held its own answers, and the higher level held richer, more complete, vaster ones… And now, it seemed, a new realm had arrived — precisely when it was time for him to break through into it.

A fragrant wind had filled the whole dream world at some point.

He turned.

And found, to his delight, the Sword Spirit Imperial Lady standing behind him. He had not seen her in a very long time.

Had she finally shown herself to instruct him again? It seemed that comprehending and using Yellow Dragon Abyss had been a turning point after all.

The Sword Spirit Imperial Lady signalled him to gather his mind. She was always like this — she demonstrated once, and whether or not he grasped all of it, she drifted away afterward.

He had never disappointed her. Every time, he seized the chance and took the enlightenment, gathering the knowledge and rising into a new realm. But that method of transmission carried its own pressure, and confident as he was, he didn’t dare grow careless. Even if he failed to comprehend it, he could always go back and study with the Great-Loli-of-Sword-Qi. But he never wanted to see the day he disappointed the Sword Spirit Imperial Lady.

Failure. Not so much as once.

Seeing him fully concentrated, she gave a slight nod of approval.

She lifted a white wrist and raised one jade finger, and sword intent flashed like starlight, brilliant past describing… Out of the void, trillions of strands of sword-qi tore through and wove themselves into a colossal golden dragon. Against the golden dragon Yue Yang’s own Yellow Dragon Abyss produced, this one was ten times the size, a full thousand metres long. You might glimpse the divine dragon’s head; its tail was another matter entirely.

The same Yellow Dragon Abyss sword.

Yue Yang felt his own sword-qi beside hers was a fledgling against an eagle, a shrimp against a whale. Not remotely the same tier.

And she had almost certainly held the force of the stroke back on purpose rather than going all out, so that its shock and severity wouldn’t disturb his present state of mind and cultivation.

Even so, Yue Yang was struck dumb.

The golden dragon shot skyward and let out a roar of majesty that shook the primordial vault of heaven, and heaven and earth dimmed at once.

If he had not watched it form out of sword-qi with his own eyes, Yue Yang would have taken it for a true dragon, a living thing, and not sword-qi loosed offhand by the Sword Spirit Imperial Lady…

The golden dragon soared along the horizon, wheeling and patrolling above the ninth heaven. Now its head showed, now its body, now its tail — but the body was so vast and so long, and its movement so uncannily alive, that he could never take in the whole of it at once. It rode the clouds or rode the mist; it sank out of sight or hid itself; it appeared or revealed itself; at its height it broke through the roof of the firmament, and diving it returned to the hoard of the ninth earth. Up to heaven and down to earth, snaking and swimming, exactly as it pleased, bound by nothing at all.

“It’s just like a living thing,” Yue Yang said aloud, unable to hold in his admiration.

“…” A trace of a smile seemed to touch the corner of her mouth. Whether it meant agreement or refusal, there was no telling.

Then she reached out and pointed.

Drawing gently from the centre of his forehead.

Yue Yang felt an infinitesimally small piece split off from his soul, itself transformed into a little dragon as fine as a hair, which went bobbing and swaying off toward the golden colossus.

The golden dragon opened its jaws and swallowed it whole.

In that instant.

A violent tremor ran through him, as though his soul had in that one moment fused with some enormous life-guardian war beast… From that moment on he felt that he and the golden dragon were one body, with no dividing line between them. He understood well enough that this was an illusion. The dragon still existed, and he still existed independently; it was only that the two of them now had the closest possible link at the level of the soul, and the feeling of it was as strange as being a single whole.

However you put it, the great golden Yellow Dragon Abyss dragon the Sword Spirit Imperial Lady had created had become Yue Yang’s own double.

Entirely at his command.

The golden dragon had its own nature and its own spirit-sense, but its dragon soul was fused with Yue Yang’s, and from now on it would belong to him forever — a strange existence that was at once one body with him and a separate one.

Similar to a life-guardian war beast. Closer, even.

At first, through his delight, Yue Yang didn’t quite understand. Why had the Sword Spirit Imperial Lady created this dragon for him? Did she know he was going into the Divine War and mean to give him a powerful ally? That didn’t fit. Wasn’t tempering him what she always wanted most?

Before he could work it out, she raised her left hand lightly, and the Yinglong components stored in Empress Vivienne’s Ice-and-Snow World inside the Black Void sealing space teleported instantly into the dream space. She closed that soft, outstretched left hand slowly, and the Yinglong’s parts — which Yue Yang and Princess Qianqian had reckoned would take three or four months at the very least to assemble — locked perfectly together in the space of seconds, becoming the hundred-and-eight-kilometre Yinglong peak war doll he had waited so long for.

The Yinglong peak war doll was complete. It lacked one thing only. A dragon soul.

Wild joy went through Yue Yang.

Heart at three hundred beats.

So she had made the golden dragon in order to make him a dragon soul… The delight had barely risen when he saw her right hand point at his heart, and the Sacred Codex came out of him unbidden and hung in the air before him.

Nor was that all. As she drew her hand back, he saw there was something in her palm.

His Creation Divine Pearl.

The Creation Divine Pearl, which only Yue Yang had ever been able to command, answered her hand as readily as though it were her own. The chaos energy brimming inside it, which he never dared touch, she drew most of out in a single motion, as easily as cutting a cake. He found himself suddenly unable to move; his spirit and his strength seemed to have been drained away all at once by an enormous suction, leaving him weaker than he had felt in a very long time. And yet, with most of that chaos energy gone, the spirit that had been on the verge of collapse and the body close to fainting were both enormously eased — the relief of a man starving to death who is suddenly handed food.

The heavenly music of a phoenix’s cry jolted his spirit.

Like a spirit spring welling up from the bottom of his heart, soaking the whole field of it.

He had no time to look up, but he felt the trace of the phoenix sisters sweeping past overhead… Had the Sacred Grimoire just been summoned? Was that what most of the chaos energy had been for — the requirement of summoning the Sacred Grimoire?

“Eh?” Lifting his head to look, he saw her draw another three-tenths of the chaos energy out of the Creation Divine Pearl.

Guided along three separate strands of sword-qi.

One flew straight to the golden dragon fused above his head, which received it and passed it on to the Yinglong peak war doll. The second bored into Yue Yang’s Sacred Codex and poured into “World,” the being that devoured all the energy of heaven and earth. “World” was like a dry engine filled with oil: it erupted with a roar, its range expanding a hundredfold in an instant, and the newborn ability cracked like lightning through his sea of consciousness.

Yue Yang’s head throbbed; there was no time to digest any of it.

High at the roof of the sky, the Yinglong peak war doll — fused now with the golden dragon — was changing too, and the feedback bombarded his mind so wildly that he saw stars and came near to blacking out.

The chaos energy guided by the third strand of sword-qi merged into Yue Yang’s own Creation Domain.

The Creation Domain, formerly a hundred metres across.

Went straight to ten thousand.

Even a tenth of the chaos energy in the Creation Divine Pearl was more than Yue Yang could currently assimilate; three channels at once, all pouring in like madness, were naturally more than he could bear. Fortunately the Sword Spirit Imperial Lady’s will was guiding it. Had he attempted this himself, he would have been lucky to come away with crippling injuries rather than bursting outright. Chaos energy was vast beyond measure. Never mind a tenth of what the pearl held — a single thread of it was enough to birth a war beast nearly as strong as the Chaos Phantom, and a thousandth of what Yue Yang was fusing now would have been more than enough to raise a pseudo-god.

Three channels pouring in at once, and even though it wasn’t going directly through the crown of his head, Yue Yang suffered every bit of it.

He gritted his teeth and held on.

He knew that surviving this meant a wholly new breakthrough on his road of cultivation, that surviving it meant the greatest advance he had ever made on the sword path. This was an opportunity others could not hope for in their dreams — the very thing Ji Wuri longed for and would never obtain, and here it all lay beneath his own will.

Sovereign!

He possessed the unmoving, undying Sovereign Intent. He would certainly succeed.

She would never set him a task he could never complete. However hard it was to get through, he would get through it; however hard to walk, he would walk it.

Holding to that belief, he bore the pain, keeping his divine sense rational and his consciousness clear, letting that vast chaos energy bombard the sea of his consciousness, letting it remake his body and every last thing about him…

He had no idea how long it went on.

Then his body suddenly went light, the whole of it easing, and the soul that had been heavy as a cangue turned nimble past describing; he felt he might float away. The release itself was something he wasn’t used to. His mind slackened, his consciousness burst out like floodwater, and at last he couldn’t hold it — the whole of him went berserk.

BOOM!

The Fate True Body, unseen for a long time, rose into the sky: taller than a mountain, its frame driven up into the firmament, its head beyond sight.

Beneath the Fate True Body, that golden giant whose presence crushed heaven and earth, anyone at all was pinned and unable to move — even the Solar King, that formidable enemy of the old days. But the pressure had not the slightest effect on the Sword Spirit Imperial Lady. She felt nothing of it whatsoever, and even the Great-Loli-of-Sword-Qi at her side was unaffected, not frightened in the least, tipping her small face up in curiosity to gaze at that golden body of energy rising to who knew what height.

The Sword Spirit Imperial Lady seemed unwilling to watch Yue Yang rampage with his reason gone.

She reached out and brushed his face lightly.

The Fate True Body.

Returned into his body in an instant, and his mind went from berserk back to its former calm. Overdrawn past all limit and put through repeated extremes, Yue Yang fell asleep snoring before he could properly wake.

A faint smile touched the Sword Spirit Imperial Lady’s lips. She passed the slowly slumping Yue Yang to the Great-Loli-of-Sword-Qi to hold.

Then she stepped up onto the empty air, took flight like an immortal, and drifted away.

In the sky the Yinglong, a hundred and eight kilometres of it, opened its eyes, as though life had suddenly turned over inside it… It flew down from the roof of the ninth heaven, opened its jaws, and spat out a dragon pearl a hundred metres across, wrapping Yue Yang inside it. Then it took the pearl gently between its teeth, and its head punched through the barrier of space with a roar and set off into some void or other. And the Sacred Codex wrapped inside with him — and another book whose radiance was ten million times more glorious than the Sacred Codex, the Sacred Grimoire — closed together in the same moment, transformed into countless golden lights, and returned to the sea of his consciousness, to sleep on there until he should call them.

(End of Chapter 1175)