Ji Wuri looked at Yue Yang and said nothing for a long time.

And then, all at once, he waved a hand and gave Jingbu and Kumu an order. “Kill him.”

Up to this point he had been probing this Chiqiu — this man who had turned out to be beyond anything he had imagined — with his habitual caution. And the more he probed, the more strongly Ji Wuri felt that here was a formidable enemy.

At the start he had entertained a certain idea: absorb this Chiqiu’s divine power and strengthen himself a further step. But as things looked now, that was not going to be achievable. This Chiqiu’s strength was no less than God-Slayer’s, far beyond anything he had projected, and Ji Wuri had no particularly effective way of countering or suppressing him. So the plan would have to be altered on the spot.

When a thing cannot be had, the best decision is to destroy it as fast as possible.

Besides which, Chiqiu was dangerous prey.

He had to be dealt with before God-Slayer tore free of the net of love. Once God-Slayer had his freedom and joined hands with Chiqiu, the consequences did not bear thinking about.

A man who had likewise comprehended Sovereign Intent, but who had no nemesis at all, and who could walk out of the World of Terror without any difficulty.

A figure that uncontrollable.

He had to be removed at once.

Otherwise the entire God-Butchering Plan might well develop in directions nobody could predict — and the unforeseen was the one thing Ji Wuri had never in his life been able to tolerate.

The moment Ji Wuri gave the order, Jingbu flung himself at North Divine Sovereign Zhaoxi, still befuddled and lost in his drunkenness, and the God-Seizing Eyes blazed with an awe-inspiring radiance. Zhaoxi did not so much as react, let alone struggle, before he was drawn into the World of Terror. He was luckier than Shuanghan in one respect: because the wine had taken his wits away, the World of Terror’s torments had almost no effect on him. But should Zhaoxi remain in that state, there would also never be any room for him to struggle free of it.

The third to be drawn into the World of Terror was Qingyun.

He had been barely breathing to begin with, his senses very nearly gone, and the suffering he took was nothing like as great as Shuanghan’s.

On the other side, Kumu launched an attack too.

The one Kumu attacked was not Yue Yang.

It was Master Baoshu, who had been standing frozen in fright throughout, with no idea what to do with himself.

Master Baoshu was unquestionably loyal to Hei Zhou, the Western Divine Sovereign. He had escorted — and kept watch on — “Shafeng” all the way to the battlefield, and had then, out of pure habit, taken himself off to a corner to wait for Hei Zhou’s orders. What followed was entirely beyond anything he had been prepared for. The whole sequence of reversals ran so far past his imagination that his unfortunate brain could not get round the corner.

He had gone on staring blankly at the shifting battle, with no idea how he ought to react.

Stay loyal to his master Hei Zhou? Or pledge himself to Ji Wuri, the new master who was taking control of the whole board?

And then Shafeng had turned into Chiqiu, with his strength enormously increased.

And Sovereign Intent comprehended into the bargain.

The situation had been stirred into a complete shambles, which left him, a mere subordinate, dizzier than ever, with no idea how he was supposed to handle any of it. Shafeng had become Chiqiu; an ally had become an enemy. To claim it had nothing to do with him was a little hard to sustain, since it was he who had delivered this “Shafeng” here. And yet to say it did have something to do with him would be an injustice past all bearing.

Seeing Kumu come flying toward him, Master Baoshu knew he was going to have to make a choice. Surrender, or fight?

Attach himself to the new master and help put him on the throne, or go on serving the old one?

He looked at Yuanji, who had Hei Zhou in a thoroughly wretched state; then at South Divine Sovereign Tianchou, who had turned his coat long ago. A shiver went through him. Then he looked at Kumu — vicious as a demon god, killing intent coming off him in waves — and hurriedly threw every other consideration aside and shouted, “I surrender! I submit to my lord Ji Wuri!”

“Trash. Useless article. What possible use are you?” Kumu sneered.

And drove a heavy palm at the terror-stricken Baoshu.

Master Baoshu had no choice but to raise his hands and meet it, preserving himself for the moment, hoping to drag things out and find some chance of living through it. The palms met, and he put every scrap of strength he had into it — not seeking to injure his enemy, only to survive. Who could have guessed that Kumu’s palm-force, thunderous as it appeared, would turn on contact as soft and yielding as silk floss.

Soundless.

The two palms pressed tight together.

Master Baoshu, sensing something wrong, groaned inwardly and tried to pull his palm back and break away. But Kumu’s hand seemed to exert an inexhaustible suction. Not only could he not withdraw and escape — he felt the strength of his whole body being drawn out through the point where their palms met and absorbed into Kumu, like a clay ox walking into the sea.

“Spare me!” Terror scattered Master Baoshu’s soul, and he begged for his life, over and over.

“The power’s respectable enough. No sense in wasting it. As for this piece of rubbish you call a body, it’s fit for growing flowers in and not much else!” Kumu flung Master Baoshu down on the ground, laid his aged hand across the crown of his head, and went on drawing his strength out of him in a steady, unbroken stream. As he absorbed it, a look of rapt ecstasy came over Kumu’s face — to Yue Yang’s eye, exactly like the pleasure of an addict at the moment of the fix: contorted, evil and willingly degraded all at once. Master Baoshu’s skin and flesh withered visibly as they watched, and several thousand years of accumulated energy was drawn dry by Kumu, using his master Ji Wuri’s Devouring talent.

By the time Master Baoshu lay collapsed and limp, he was weak enough that a three-year-old human child could have killed him with one punch.

Kumu smiled, grimly.

And a black seed shot out of his sleeve.

It punched straight through Master Baoshu’s chest and belly and lodged there in the withered flesh. That black seed came alive on the instant like something demonic, sprouting and driving down roots at speed, absorbing Master Baoshu’s flesh and blood in a frenzy to feed its own growth, seeding itself parasitically through his five organs and six viscera, and then spreading out through his entire body.

In under half a minute, Master Baoshu’s body was covered over by the devil tree-seed‘s root fibres. The flesh was gone. What stood there had become, to all appearances, a parasitised tree-man.

Had Master Baoshu’s mind not still been present, and his eyes not still been his own.

Then nobody at all.

Could have been brought to admit that this devilish tree-man was the man who a moment ago had been Baoshu, First National Preceptor of the Western Divine Nation, ranked below Hei Zhou alone.

Master Baoshu got back to his feet. But from the despairing kill me in his eyes, it was plain that he was no longer the man he had been. What he was now was only a puppet tree-man with a devil tree-seed living inside him. Whatever Master Baoshu’s own wishes might be, as a puppet he could no longer command his own life or his own body; both of them belonged entirely to Kumu now. And until Kumu gave his consent, Master Baoshu could not so much as die, however much he might want to.

“Go, my deathless slave. This is your moment to fight!” Kumu pointed at Yue Yang, who was watching it all with cold eyes.

Thud. Thud. Thud.

Master Baoshu — under the devil tree-seed’s control, and now a puppet tree-man — charged at Yue Yang with no say in the matter. Before he had even arrived, countless vines had bored their way out of his body and become a mass of sharp, spear-like wooden barbs that went flying at Yue Yang. And a hundred times faster than the puppet Master Baoshu came Liuguang, who never once stopped moving up there in the sky, turning himself into a brilliance like a falling meteor and shooting straight at the middle of Yue Yang’s back.

Jingbu did not move. But he was watching Yue Yang.

The moment an opening appeared.

He would launch the killing strike.

Not one of Ji Wuri’s “Four Greats” was anything less than a super-powerhouse. Any one of them, singly, could put down an expert of divine tier.

Master Baoshu, who possessed the strength of a super divine general, had had no power at all to resist in front of Kumu.

Abused from beginning to end.

Unable to live and unable to die.

Kumu’s strength could put down Qingyun; Liuguang had made Shuanghan wish he had never been born; and as for Jingbu, he was the strongest of the “Four Greats,” deployed to counter Chiqiu and to fill in whatever the Love-Thread Spider-Demon left undone in countering God-Slayer. Now, with the sole exception of Wuwang — who was still in disguise as the Prophet’s envoy, and whose speciality was the Light of Oblivion — Liuguang, Kumu and Jingbu, three of the Four, had all been sent out together to converge on Yue Yang at once. Which was some measure of how seriously Ji Wuri took the “Chiqiu” Yue Yang was impersonating.

A battle staged with this much ceremony, with the full array drawn up and waiting.

Was a rarity even across the whole course of Ji Wuri’s own life.

“Ha! If I never bare my teeth, do you take me for a Hello Kitty?” Yue Yang, for his part, was not permanently low-key. When he was in a good mood, running about as an extra bothered him not at all — but at the critical moment, and above all once he had gathered roughly as much intelligence as he needed, he would start stealing the scene. If he couldn’t be the leading man, then he’d be the director instead, and toy this leading man to death personally.

Liuguang passed clean through Yue Yang’s body, and assumed his ambush had succeeded.

But when he had flown back up into the sky and looked down over his shoulder, he found that the man who had gone down was Master Baoshu, with a large hole punched through his chest.

Before he had time to work out how that had happened, Liuguang noticed a shadow overhead, blocking the light. He looked up — and discovered, with a jolt of pure fright, that the “Chiqiu” he had just run through the heart was somehow directly above him.

Tunlong appeared.

And came down hard on the top of Liuguang’s skull.

At the beginning there had still been a certain mockery on Liuguang’s face. When his special ability was active he was nothing but a mass of light, with no substance to him at all. Against a smashing blow of that sort, ten thousand times the force would have made no difference whatsoever. And on top of that he had the innate talent of converting elemental energy, so any additional damage of an elemental attribute was equally useless against him. Which was to say: whatever technique this Chiqiu chose to use was a joke, because Liuguang was fundamentally a special existence that could not be harmed at all.

The Tunlong spear came down on Liuguang’s skull like the Golden-Hooped Rod in Monkey’s hands.

BOOM!

Liuguang’s skull was very nearly shattered.

The whole front of his face was beaten out of shape.

His entire ball-of-light body turned solid and went hurtling toward the ground like a falling meteorite. It ended buried deep in the earth, and the impact shook the ground for a long moment.

Wretched, and in pain right down into his bones, Liuguang could not begin to understand why. And when reflex drove him to climb back up out of the ground, he found another shadow blocking his view — that same uncanny “Chiqiu” who could actually, physically, land a hit on him. Yue Yang planted Tunlong in the ground at his feet, took a fistful of Liuguang’s hair, and hauled him bodily up out of the crater like a dead dog. This Liuguang had been extravagantly handsome; one spear had beaten him into a pig’s head.

And in the course of Liuguang’s struggling, Yue Yang periodically slammed his head into whatever rock happened to be jutting out of the ground.

Each smash a fresh pleasure.

The work suited him beautifully.

As if Liuguang had been born into this life for the sole purpose of being tormented by him.

Kumu’s jaw hit the floor. He could not believe his own eyes.

Jingbu’s eyes went round as well.

Liuguang, who could never be caught up with and never be pinned down, had been seized? And was being dragged about like a dead dog and thrashed?

“What I hate most in this world is other people being good-looking. Especially the sort who’s a ten-thousandth as good-looking as I am.” Yue Yang criticised Liuguang with great conviction, punctuating it with fists and boots to that swollen pig’s-head face. “Why do you have to be this handsome, exactly? You’re a war beast — a war beast ought to have some sense of his own place. Being better-looking than your own master Ji Wuri, who hasn’t got a cock on him — what’s the thinking there? Showing off, is it? And let me tell you, I’m not disciplining you on my own account. I’m doing it entirely for the sake of your master, the Central Divine Hall’s head palace eunuch. And what in hell was all the running about? Going that fast, leaving this young master panting after you — trying to work me to death, were you? Go on, run again, let’s see it. The people I hate most in the world are fly-men like you buzzing all over the sky! What are you looking at? Hitting you is only right; not hitting you would be the tragedy. Don’t you know how punchable your face is?”

“Agh! Ow! Agh!” Liuguang screamed and went on screaming.

He had no way at all to answer back.

And he could never have dreamed there would come a day when he was caught. Up in the sky, so long as there was any gap at all that light could pass through, he could not be seized; and without a speed that exceeded light itself, he could never be overtaken.

Who would have thought it. The battle had barely opened.

And he had already been collared.

Liuguang genuinely wanted to weep and had no tears to do it with.

This Chiqiu — what sort of ultimate technique and what sort of strength did the man actually have? None of it matched the intelligence reports at all. Some distance away, Ji Wuri, who had Hei Zhou pinned and was frantically absorbing his darkness divine power, was stunned by the sight; and Yuanji was so far beside himself with shock that he let go of Hei Zhou entirely without noticing he had done it.

Only South Divine Sovereign Tianchou, who had been wary of Yue Yang from the first, finally caught the ideal opening — at the moment Yue Yang swung another fist at Liuguang.

He flashed into place behind Yue Yang.

And the divine blade Yinxue stabbed at tremendous speed for the middle of his back.

(End of Chapter 1189)