When Yue Yang opened his eyes, he found himself inside Empress Vivienne’s ice-and-snow palace.

How had he got back? How had he ended up here?

“Don’t look at me. I don’t know what happened either.” Empress Vivienne was in an excellent mood, that peerless body draped half across him, her expression carrying a mischief rarely seen on her, her whole face smiling. “All I know is that Yinglong of yours — the one in bits and pieces that nobody knew when it would ever be assembled — flew out, and came back a living dragon. Though that isn’t the change I’m most interested in. It’s you, little one. You seem to have comprehended some extraordinary secret. Out with it, and tell it truthfully.”

She kissed him before he could answer.

Cherry lips, sealing him.

Scorching.

Passion like fire, burning without end.

Her Majesty Empress Vivienne always took the initiative. She had never gone in for the bashful, half-refusing, half-inviting act; that maidenly business was not her style.

With anyone else Yue Yang would have turned it around at once and seized the initiative, but with Her Majesty he rarely got the chance. Her kisses usually came with a frenzied plundering of the purest Innate True Qi in his body, feeding what her recovery demanded, and every time she left him drained to the point of ecstasy and death both, limbs gone weak, without the strength left to take the lead.

This time Yue Yang expected the same.

And was thoroughly surprised.

There was only scorching passion in Her Majesty’s jade lips now, and none of that frenzied plundering.

Lips and tongues entwined; Yue Yang’s mind swam. He got both arms around Her Majesty and, without quite noticing, took the initiative, rolling her under him instead. His wolf-claws roamed that fragrant snow-white body out of long habit, misbehaving until Her Majesty was gasping without pause, her sensitive demon-body shivering again and again.

Passion rose in them both like a tide, and just as Her Majesty pressed her beloved wolf into the drifted snow of her breast, ready to serve him the finest crimson-plum fruit in all the world —

a small head had appeared at the side of the bed at some point, watching with curiosity.

Big eyes. Not blinking.

“Children can’t watch!” Empress Vivienne noticed her by accident and jumped, overcome with embarrassment. She shoved the buried Yue Yang away, yanked her bodice up fast as a shooting star, then scooped up the snake-demon little loli — who had been watching for who knew how long — kissed her fondly, and set about patiently instructing her own darling. “From now on, when Mama and Papa are cultivating together, you mustn’t stand there watching. My treasure, you’re still too little. Some cultivation methods are secret arts and can only be practised once you’ve grown up. So no more slipping out without a sound like this. It disturbs Papa and Mama’s cultivation very easily. Do you understand?”

“Mm-hm!” Xiao Wenli half understood and half didn’t, but she had always been a good, obedient girl, so she nodded and agreed.

Sick Beauty and City Lord Luohua had said much the same to her before, as it happened.

Yue Yang’s lovers’ dual cultivation, and his husband-and-wife dual cultivation, with all of them.

She saw it often enough, and she was curious, but she didn’t usually come out and interrupt. She had come out this time because Empress Vivienne was the mother she felt closest to; it hadn’t occurred to her that she was intruding, and there was a natural instinct in her to imitate her mother.

Empress Vivienne understood that Xiao Wenli was small and didn’t grasp these things. A smile, a kiss, and it was over. She didn’t send the girl straight back to the Grimoire World either — she handed her to Yue Yang to hold, made an elaborate dinner with her own hands, then sat the little treasure between them, and they fed one another and talked and laughed and made a fuss of her, and she was less an Empress in that hour than a gentle mother doting on a beloved daughter, until the little one’s face was bright with delight.

It had never occurred to Yue Yang that Empress Vivienne had this side to her.

Before long the snake-demon little loli, thoroughly contented, fell fast asleep in Her Majesty’s arms, breathing softly.

“You don’t need the true qi any more?” Yue Yang knew she had long since restored her body to perfection, but her realm kept breaking past her own limits, and creating an ice-and-snow world inside the Black Void space burned divine energy at an enormous rate. Every time he came in, she had craved his Innate True Qi. For her to suddenly not need it surprised him. Had she comprehended a new realm as well?

“Hee. When you came in earlier you were covered in chaos energy, with no consciousness controlling it, and it was dispersing on its own. I hated to see it wasted, so I took a few mouthfuls.” One sentence, and Yue Yang understood.

No wonder the snake-demon Empress was so full of vigour. She had been helping herself.

In that case Yue Yang saw no reason to stand on ceremony. He put an arm around Her Majesty and kissed her, meaning to collect on the debt of what had been stolen from him.

She didn’t resist. She simply turned guest into host, tipping him over beneath her; Yue Yang fought back hard and got nowhere, and Her Majesty kissed him fiercely from above, thoroughly pleased with herself. The two of them fought lip against lip and tongue against tongue without pause, evenly matched for once, locked past separating…

And just as a certain wolf’s claws slipped inside her bodice, climbing mountains and crossing peaks to steal the immortal bud —

Her Majesty bit him.

The tip of his tongue stung.

He grasped at once that haste makes waste, and hurriedly behaved himself. The expedition halted where it stood and feigned an utter absence of aggressive intent — though its conduct remained thoroughly shameless, refusing to withdraw even when Her Majesty reached down to evict it, roaming slowly about the foot of the snowy peak instead, mastering its impatience and waiting for a better moment.

Somewhere in the middle of that fierce kissing, a certain wolf had worked his way back from disadvantage without anyone noticing. Her Majesty’s body went softer and softer, losing ground by degrees, until at last she fell from her lofty throne into her lover’s arms, drunk with feeling at some point along the way, flushed as though burning.

The wolf-claw army launched its assault and gained the summit.

It was on the point of tasting the immortal bud when a dragon’s roar sounded outside the ice-and-snow palace. Her Majesty’s mind snapped awake; she bit him resentfully and rolled upright.

Damn it. At the single most important moment… Yue Yang was livid. The best chance he’d had, wrecked by one dragon roar. Wasn’t the Yinglong a war doll? Since when did it make noise? And it couldn’t have roared earlier or later — it had to be now.

“Probably those little lovers of yours found you missing and are frantic, calling you back.” Empress Vivienne was far too clever. She guessed it in one.

“Then we’ll continue when I get back.” Yue Yang pushed his luck.

“No.” Her Majesty refused flatly.

“…” His head spun. Why did complications always sprout at the most critical juncture?

“If you perform well in the Divine War, this Empress will consider whether to reward you with a small kiss.” She wasn’t going to disappoint him entirely, and offered these terms. The transmigrator’s fighting spirit rose a hundredfold, a thousandfold on the spot. Hei Zhou and Ji Wuri could both go and die. Anyone who dared stand between him and his blissful sex life would be blasted to dust.

Seeing the boy’s wolf-blood come to such an exaggerated boil, Her Majesty couldn’t keep the smile off her face.

Yue Yang took his leave of Her Majesty and returned to his own Grimoire World.

Before he was even steady on his feet.

Bing’er came crying and crashed headlong into his chest.

Yue Yu came rushing after her, arms wide, gathering Bing’er and him together into a fierce embrace, great hot tears spilling onto his shoulder. “Xiao San, you frightened me to death. Don’t you ever frighten people like that again.”

Yue Yang was bewildered. What? What on earth had happened?

He looked up and looked closer, and saw Luohua and little Yi Nan running toward him with tear-tracks still on their faces. Even Princess Qianqian, the toughest of them all, had faintly reddened eyes, as though she had been crying. Fengxian Meiren and the Southern Wilderness Demon King made a show of composure and kept the smiles on their faces, but anyone could see how alarmed they had been, and they teased the others with forced lightness. “We said all along it was nothing. This boy does it constantly — pulls some stunt, gives everybody a fright…”

“What happened?” Yue Yang was completely at a loss. Hadn’t he simply gone into the dream world for some instruction from the Sword Spirit Imperial Lady? Why was everyone crying?

“A while ago the whole Grimoire World went dark, and every one of our mind-ribbons lost its link to you. We thought you’d— you frightened us to death, Xiao San. You frightened us to death.” Yue Yu was crying too hard to get the words out cleanly.

Everyone knew that a Grimoire World collapsing meant the master’s death; only a Grimoire World whose contract had broken returned to chaos.

And their minds were linked to Yue Yang’s.

Even without deliberately looking, they were always faintly aware that he was there.

Once that link was gone, with the Grimoire World dark on top of it, they had all suspected something terrible had happened to him, and the fright was no small one. None of them knew it was Yue Yang undergoing the infusion of chaos energy and fusing with it. Vast chaos energy; the elevation of “World,” the most singular life-guardian war beast on his summoning grimoire; the expansion of the Creation Domain; and Yue Yang fusing his very soul with the golden dragon the Sword Spirit Imperial Lady had created.

All of it, every part, the luckiest of coincidences.

And precisely because of that, they had all been frightened out of their wits.

Afterwards, when Yue Yang broke through into his new realm, light returned to the Grimoire World in an instant, and enormous changes came with it — the whole sky and earth of that space made new — and only then did their hearts begin to settle.

They waited quietly for him to come back. And waited a long time, and saw no sign of him.

Then Yue Yu and the others began to worry that he had made some enormous breakthrough, ascended to the divine realm, and gone off into the Eastern Immortal Clan’s world or the Upper Heavenly Realm, never to return to the Trial Grounds or the Sky Tower again. Without the earlier fright they would have been confident it was nothing of the sort. But their nerves were already in pieces, and as they waited and waited with no sign of him, the terror came back. Bing’er cried out loud and called desperately for her brother to come home…

Xiao Wenli happened to be sound asleep and never sensed the call, so no answer came. Had “World” — evolved from the same source — not reached the Yinglong, and had the Yinglong not loosed that roar to remind Yue Yang, Bing’er’s tears would very likely have flooded the Grimoire World outright.

Listening to them all explain over the top of one another, Yue Yang felt ashamed and moved in equal measure.

If his wolfish impulses hadn’t got the better of him and left him tangled up with Her Majesty, they would never have gone through fright after fright after fright. He hurried to make them a promise. “Whatever happens, I’m not going anywhere alone. Without all of you, I wouldn’t go anywhere at all. Even if somebody caught me and sealed me away for ten thousand times ten thousand years, I’d find my way back to you…”

“Xiao San, don’t say things like that.” Yue Yu put a hand over his mouth. “The good never comes true and the bad always does. Don’t talk nonsense so lightly. It’s enough that you mean it.”

“Yes. My mistake. I said it wrong.” Yue Yang put his hands up in surrender at once.

“Idiot brother!” At the sight of it, Bing’er’s tears turned to laughter.

Tears wiped away, panic dispersed.

Smiles came back to every face, and after this upset they had all, without noticing, grown closer to one another, more tightly bound. Watching the scene, Sick Beauty — the steadiest and most composed of them — murmured softly, with a smile at the corner of her mouth, “Do you see? Without you beside him, he always makes a mess of things. You had better wake up soon. He can’t do without you. Least of all in the Divine War.”

Inside the room, Xue Wuxia, who had lain quietly on the bed in unwaking sleep all this time, seemed to give the very faintest tremble of her eyelashes.

(End of Chapter 1176)