Two shadows, pinned together by a blade.

Blood.

Drop by drop.

Spattering down onto the ground.

South Divine Sovereign Tianchou, who had launched his killing strike at the perfect moment, held the posture of Yinxue’s thrust for a long time. Standing in front of him was Yue Yang, still with his back turned. Blood had stained a wide patch of Yue Yang’s robe, a crimson so dark it hurt to look at.

But none of it was his blood. It was South Divine Sovereign Tianchou’s.

The divine blade Yinxue was clamped under Yue Yang’s left arm, its point emerging through the front of his chest — so that from behind he looked exactly like a man who had been run through.

In the instant the divine blade “passed through the body,” Tianchou began to regret it.

He had never in his life regretted anything so much.

A trap.

That perfect moment for the ambush had been a lethal trap all along, laid by the hand of the supremely cunning enemy standing in front of him. Liuguang had genuinely been caught, certainly. But whatever else was true, a “Chiqiu” clever enough that the word for him was crafty would never, with a battle still unfinished, lay into a man like some petty street thug. The opening that beating had exposed was the bait.

Unfortunately, he understood it far too late.

By the time he understood.

The fish had already swallowed the bait in its greed and dropped into the great net of death.

All greed is a mistake; and every mistake has its price to be paid. In that instant, for no reason he could name, Tianchou found himself remembering what his own master had taught him all those years ago.

His master had said: as an assassin who works with a blade rather than a dagger, it is not enough to disguise yourself as the stupidest man in the world. You must also never do the cleverest thing in the world.

Do otherwise, and you pay in blood.

Only now, at this moment, did he understand that saying completely. And it was much too late.

Whether as a man of the blade or as an assassin, falling into an enemy’s carefully laid trap has only one ending.

Which is: death.

The Tunlong spear came out from under Yue Yang’s right arm and drove clean through Tianchou’s chest and out through his back, the bloodied head and shaft extending far past him, blood running off them drop by drop. Grave bodily injury alone could not have been fatal to a powerhouse of Divine Sovereign rank; but the Taiyan Divine Power stored inside the Tunlong spear, together with a force that felt to Tianchou both utterly unfamiliar and utterly concealed, erupted in a double blow. Tianchou felt his soul take enormous damage as well. Even if he did not die — even if by some luck he escaped this Divine War with his life — he would not recover his present realm inside several thousand years.

But would this young man in front of him, cunning as a fox and cold as a wolf, give him the chance to rise again?

Plainly not.

Death.

It had been the settled ending from the moment the trap was laid.

“You — you’re actually the same as God-Slayer. The two of you are the same kind of man. What you really killed me with wasn’t the Tunlong spear, and it wasn’t Taiyan Divine Power. It was a sword-qi. A sword-qi more terrible than God-Slayer’s divine sword Lihen! There is nobody like you in Mountain Beyond the Mountain. Young man — who exactly are you?” South Divine Sovereign Tianchou’s eyes were fixed hard on Yue Yang. What he wanted now, before he died, was a truth that would let him close his eyes in peace.

“The answer is in your own heart.” Yue Yang drew the Tunlong spear slowly back out.

“In my heart?”

Tianchou clapped a hand over the hole punched front to back through his chest, held the divine blade Yinxue in the other, and stood there blankly where he was.

Down on the ground, Liuguang was shaking from head to foot with fright and had forgotten to run.

By the time he came back to himself and tried to turn into a ball of light and slip away —

A foot came down on his head.

And drove it straight into the sand.

Escape, without Yue Yang’s permission? Not a chance.

“Uncle Tianchou.” Ji Wuri’s eyes went red all at once. He flung himself over, quite forgetting himself, and held South Divine Sovereign Tianchou’s body up, trying with everything he had to stem the blood that was fountaining out of it.

“It’s no use. I’m an assassin. I know what I ought to be doing at any given moment, and what I ought not.” Tianchou waved a hand, stopping Ji Wuri’s attempt to save him. His worst injury was not to the body but to the soul. In that soul-world no eye can see, a great quantity of Taiyan Divine Power and one mysterious sword were tearing it apart. Healing the flesh would only have salvaged a piece of meat; it was no use at all. What Tianchou decided to do instead, while the chance was there, was to give Ji Wuri one last lesson. “Death was the fixed ending from the day I first chose this assassin’s road. Either I kill somebody else, or somebody else kills me. Death, for me, is nothing but a release. There’s no need for you to grieve.”

“No!” Tears welled up in Ji Wuri’s eyes.

This favoured son of heaven of the Central Divine Hall — who ordinarily carried himself with such arrogance that he regarded every living being as an ant — showed genuine feeling in that moment.

Tianchou sighed faintly. “From now on there will be no Uncle Tianchou. You’ll have to walk on well by yourself. There won’t be a master and an Uncle Tianchou everywhere you go, paving every road ahead of you. The Heavenly Realm is boundless and the road you have to walk is still very long and very far. If your master and your Uncle Tianchou cannot walk it beside you, then you will have to set out on it alone. Every powerhouse is fated to be lonely. Just as your master is.”

Ji Wuri was shaking from head to foot, apparently struggling to keep his emotions in hand.

Yue Yang watched it all with cold eyes.

He watched, pitiless and unmoved, and even as Tianchou and Ji Wuri played out a moving scene of parting between the living and the dying in front of him, he regarded it as though it were not there.

Finding more flaws and more weak points in his enemies was the one thing he had to do.

Ji Wuri was an enemy, not a friend.

Mercy toward an enemy is cruelty toward your friends and your family.

Yue Yang would far rather be the blood-handed butcher whose name makes enemies flee at the rumour of him than be some idiot who is cruel to his own friends and his own kin.

Whether Ji Wuri wept or laughed, he had to die. If Ji Wuri did not die, then the ones who died would be himself, his family, his friends, and every last soul young and old in the Sky Tower. If Ji Wuri lived, he and his master would certainly level the Sky Tower flat and damn it past all redemption. Better to harden his heart and rid the world of a scourge than waste pity on a crocodile’s tears.

“He isn’t Shafeng, and he certainly can’t be Chiqiu. Chiqiu — I did suspect him too, once. But he is absolutely not Chiqiu.”

If Tianchou had been healed at that moment.

He could very likely have scraped through and gone on living. Gravely wounded and much reduced in strength, but with the possibility of recovery.

What brought the sweat out on the foreheads of all three watching men — God-Slayer, Hei Zhou and Yue Yang — was that Tianchou then cut his own body open with the divine blade Yinxue, and scattered out the fragments of organ tissue and the blood that the Taiyan Divine Power had eaten through. “Do you see it clearly now? On the surface it is erosion by Taiyan Divine Power. But my real mortal wound is a sword-qi. In my soul-world, hidden away inside the Taiyan Divine Power, there is a black sword, and it is destroying my soul. And I believe that black sword is only the beginning — that it is not one sword but many, and that this may well be the weakest of them. Even so, it was concealed inside Taiyan Divine Power. Wuri — this young man in front of you is the greatest enemy of your life. If you carry so much as half a fraction of contempt for him, you will pay dearly for it.”

Ji Wuri nodded hard, then cried out in grief, over and over, “Uncle Tianchou, give me one piece of counsel. Before you go, please — give me one piece of counsel!”

Tianchou looked at him and nodded gravely. “That is exactly what I meant to say. Wuri, you are a genius. Your natural gifts and your potential are beyond anyone’s reach, and I have never in my life seen a junior as outstanding as you. That is why I have doted on you and supported you. But hold firmly to one thing: the Heavenly Realm is infinitely vast, and geniuses of your kind are certainly not unique. Even if none appears in a hundred years, in a thousand years or ten thousand one or two will be born. So you will never be the only one. And if you go on facing a peerless genius of your own order with the arrogant attitude and the habits you use on ordinary mediocrities, you will pay very dearly indeed. Never forget it — in the Heavenly Realm, never be proud and never be complacent. Even your master does not dare stand still. He examines himself three times a day and still finds a great deal wanting.”

Ji Wuri nodded through his tears, his face full of grief.

South Divine Sovereign Tianchou laid a bloodied hand on Ji Wuri’s Sacred Codex, one part doting and nine parts encouragement. “Wuri, your Uncle Tianchou has no great abilities and can’t give you more than this. Before I go, I make you a gift of every scrap of knowledge and divine power of my life. I hope you advance without limit, and surpass your master in the end, and become the first man of the Heavenly Realm.”

“No — Uncle Tianchou—” Ji Wuri’s tears came streaming down.

Two teardrops.

Sliding slowly down his face.

Tianchou’s body began to shake in agony.

A purple-gold flame kindled across the whole of him, and wherever it caught, it swallowed away that part of his body and of his soul.

Collapse.

Annihilation.

This was Tianchou’s ending, and it could not be reversed.

But before it took him, he imprinted the entirety of his life’s knowledge onto Ji Wuri’s Sacred Codex; and poured in, without holding back a fraction, the divine power of ten thousand years of accumulation. Ji Wuri’s Devouring talent could not efficiently absorb divine power of a differing attribute — but against an act like Tianchou’s, a voluntary infusion by a man willing to be destroyed in order to finish giving, it was unquestionably the ideal union. Tianchou even poured the divine blade Yinxue itself, and the last remnant energy of his own flesh and blood, into the Sacred Codex — hoping that this final and greatest support would furnish Ji Wuri with a divine artifact and with divine-body flesh-energy for raising war beasts.

South Divine Sovereign Tianchou did not even keep back his own body.

All of it, given.

Under the agony of the backlash from so vast an overdraw, the whole man was annihilated. Not so much as a wisp of ash was left of his body.

His soul was annihilated with it.

Any divine-tier being killed in battle leaves at least a faint imprint behind, even in a state of destruction. When the breeze came across the ground, Tianchou had left nothing at all. It was as though this South Divine Sovereign Tianchou had never appeared in the world; as though there had never in all the world been an “Uncle Tianchou” who gave everything he had, willingly and without reserve, for his nephew Ji Wuri.

Only the divine blade Yinxue, its contract dissolved, hummed on and on without stopping, keening for the master who had once existed.

God-Slayer fell silent.

Giving everything unconditionally, the way Tianchou had, was something he acknowledged he could not have done.

Hei Zhou still less. He was Ji Wuri’s uncle by blood, but set against Tianchou — a martial uncle rather than a blood one — he would not have parted with so much as a hair on Ji Wuri’s behalf.

Yue Yang, watching, was silent too.

Tianchou was a bad man — bad enough that if it came round again, Yue Yang would kill him with his own hands and not hesitate for an instant.

But that did not stop Yue Yang from admiring a man like Tianchou.

How many are capable of giving like that for someone else? Never mind Mountain Beyond the Mountain — in the whole Heavenly Realm, how many? Yue Yang suddenly thought of Ye Kong and Sea Fatty and Xue Tanglang, whom he had not seen in a very long time. At the final moment, those fools would certainly do the same — throw their lives at the enemy like a pack of idiots. They were all of them born fools, the sort who give without holding anything back; set beside them, he could never manage it himself. And then Yue Yang thought of Fourth Mother, and the Night Empress, and the Sovereign waiting for him at the millionth step of the Sky Stairway. None of them would ever admit it out loud — but in fact the answer needed no asking at all.

In battle, the snow girl and the tiger girl had thrown everything they had into the fight, more times than he could count.

From that battle with the Purple-Gold Marquis onward.

All the way to now.

Ji Wuri had one South Divine Sovereign Tianchou. But Yue Yang had a great many friends, and a great deal of family.

And just as Yue Yang was preparing to raise the Tunlong spear and go at Ji Wuri, Ji Wuri suddenly began to laugh like a madman.

“Hahaha! What a moving scene that was! Oh dear, oh dear — I very nearly moved myself. Sometimes tears do the work of a million words. Divine power without a scrap held back, knowledge without a scrap held back, flesh-and-blood energy without a scrap held back — and this is what a few drops of my tears bought! I detest being lectured at, but look at it: all I have to do is arrange my face into humble attentiveness and listen, and one fool after another will empty out their knowledge and their experience and every last thing they have and press it on me. How many is this now? Hahaha! The fifth? The sixth? Ah, however did I come to have so very many uncles who love instructing their juniors? Now really — none of you is to laugh. Be serious. Did you not hear my Uncle Tianchou’s teaching? Be humble, do not be proud. What are you all looking so pleased with yourselves for? You especially, Yuanji. Don’t imagine that because you took most of the benefit you’re entitled to mock my Uncle Tianchou. He may have been a fool, but you are not permitted to mock him. Understood? Only I — the humble little junior nephew who listened so attentively to his uncle’s instruction — am qualified for that!”

Yuanji, Kumu and Jingbu, and Liuguang too, still pinned under Yue Yang’s foot, all burst into wild laughter.

God-Slayer’s expression changed violently, into fury.

Hei Zhou’s likewise.

The divine blade Yinxue, having a spirit of its own, gave out a shuddering ring that wept blood, as though it could not believe what it was hearing.

Only Yue Yang, for his part, went on standing calmly on Liuguang and watching the whole thing in silence. His gaze was what it always was. Cold as ice.

When Ji Wuri had finished laughing.

He wiped his tears away.

First he looked at the wet marks on his fingers with open mockery.

Then he glanced up at Yue Yang, and a warm and friendly smile came onto his face. “You won’t mind if I settle a small piece of family business first? Do forgive me — give me one more minute.”

And then he turned his head toward Hei Zhou. “My uncle. Would you be willing to make the same offering Uncle Tianchou made? If you are willing, then all my aunts and all my younger brothers and sisters will feel honoured by you and proud of you. I shall count to ten, my dear uncle. Do think it over carefully.”

(End of Chapter 1190)