Hei Zhou shivered.

He had never once denied being a bad man.

As a warlord who wanted, at every waking moment, to bring down God-Slayer and take the seat of first man of Mountain Beyond the Mountain for himself, Hei Zhou had never seen anything wrong with using any means available. So long as the thing got done, any price was worth paying and any sacrifice was worth making. Words like scheming and cruelty and deceit could have been tailor-made for him. He liked them, in his heart of hearts. He even took other people’s anger and fear as a kind of natural praise.

But Hei Zhou was discovering now that his own scheming, his own cruelty and his own deceit were a child’s toys next to Ji Wuri’s.

Next to Ji Wuri, Hei Zhou felt he could almost pass for a good man.

Hei Zhou believed it.

There was nobody in the world more evil, more vicious, or more frightening than Ji Wuri. Tianchou had treated him like his own son and had handed over everything he had, gladly and of his own free will — and Ji Wuri had treated that sacrifice as spoils won by his own scheming.

And Ji Wuri sneered at that completely selfless giving of Tianchou’s.

It was enough to freeze a man’s heart.

Hei Zhou looked at Ji Wuri, still smiling in front of him, and swallowed hard.

He had never cared about the lives of his wife or his children, and they were no kind of leverage against him. But for Ji Wuri to talk that way was a tactic all the same — a tactic for slinging mud. Agree or refuse, the result was identical; Ji Wuri only wanted an excuse to smear him publicly and get away with it. And if he flatly refused, then God-Slayer and that mysterious man who was certainly not Chiqiu would stand back and watch with contempt, draw a line between themselves and him, and refuse to stand with a man that heartless against Ji Wuri.

Which was exactly what Ji Wuri wanted.

“God-Slayer! I’m finished. Zhuye is yours. If you get out of this alive, find it a proper master — I don’t want it ending up like Yinxue.” Hei Zhou shouted it out all at once. If he wasn’t going to live through this, then before he died he could at least make life difficult for Ji Wuri.

Absorb his darkness divine power and then take the Zhuye artifact as well?

Dream on.

He would die before he handed an ingrate like Ji Wuri what he wanted. Better to give the artifact to an enemy than leave it to his own closest nephew.

God-Slayer snorted. “Boring. Whatever the two of you are playing at, don’t play it on me.”

He turned it down flat.

Whatever kind of man Ji Wuri was, it did not stop God-Slayer’s contempt for Hei Zhou. Ji Wuri was an ingrate, certainly. But Hei Zhou was no better.

Yue Yang, on the other hand, was a man with a weakness for treasure, and he was tempted. He volunteered. “Western Divine Sovereign — turns out you’re not a complete idiot after all. If you don’t mind, I’d be happy to look after Zhuye for you. Assuming you can cover the storage fee.”

“And what do you think a fair storage fee would be, for an artifact like Zhuye?” Hei Zhou said nothing. It was Ji Wuri who asked.

“Well, it’s a divine artifact, so obviously the fee can’t be small. The entire wealth of the Western Divine Nation would still be too little — it wouldn’t come close to covering it. As for what would do, let’s say the ancient secret of the God-Slaying Mystic Realm, or the sealing points of the ancient passages between the three valleys of Heaven, Earth and Man. That sort of thing I could just about accept.” Yue Yang named a price like a man asking for the moon.

“Good. That is exactly what I meant to say.” Ji Wuri clapped his hands in approval.

Then he turned to Jingbu and Kumu beside him and gave an order. “Take Hei Zhou. Until he has told us the ancient secret of the God-Slaying Mystic Realm, and told us the sealing points of the ancient passages between the three valleys, do not under any circumstances let him die.”

Then he turned back to Yue Yang, beaming at him like a man greeting an old friend he hadn’t seen in years. “And what storage fee are you able to pay?”

Yue Yang pressed down hard on Liuguang’s skull with his foot and beamed right back. “Can you speak like a person? I don’t understand barking.”

Ji Wuri did not lose his temper in the slightest.

He only waved a hand.

The way an emperor signs off on the execution of some worthless slave, as if it barely needed thinking about.

The Liuguang that Yue Yang had been standing on suddenly scattered into a sky full of points of light, and the points linked themselves together along mysterious lines into some Heavenly Realm rune light-array too intricate to follow, which gradually closed into a cage of glowing runes with Yue Yang trapped inside it. Over on the other side of the battlefield, Kumu and Yuanji had already taken hold of Hei Zhou between them, and Ji Wuri was frantically drawing the darkness divine power out of him.

Hei Zhou stopped resisting and let it happen.

He did only one thing before Yuanji and Kumu got their hands on him. He threw the Zhuye pearl as far as he could, straight at the God-Slayer trapped inside the net of love.

Between Yue Yang and God-Slayer, the one Hei Zhou trusted more was the God-Slayer he had spent ten thousand years trying to murder and replace. He poured most of the darkness divine power left in his body into Zhuye, and handed it to the sworn enemy he had meant, up until today, to fight until one of them was dead.

The Love-Thread Spider-Demon breathed out a love-thread to wrap up the Zhuye pearl.

But to her surprise.

The love-thread that could hold God-Slayer himself had no effect on the pearl at all.

A cold, mocking light flashed across Hei Zhou’s eyes.

For a God-Slayer who was cold on the outside and burned with feeling underneath, love-threads were of course an irresistible force. But for a heartless warlord like himself, they were a joke.

Tie down a Zhuye pearl soaked through with his own will, using one thread of love? Dream on.

He would rather hand everything he had built to God-Slayer than leave a scrap of it to that ingrate of a nephew. So Hei Zhou put up no fight while Ji Wuri drew off the last thin trace of darkness divine power in his body, and his face was full of mockery the whole time. All he wanted now was a fast death — ideally for Ji Wuri to lose his temper and kill him on the spot, which would at least be clean. But Hei Zhou was disappointed soon enough. Having drained the last of the darkness divine power out of him, Ji Wuri did not lose his temper and did not kill anyone. He made a deep and respectful bow instead. “Uncle, please go and stay in the World of Terror for a while. Whenever you find yourself missing your nephew, just call out.”

If Shuanghan had not been inside it at that moment, suffering without end, Ji Wuri’s tone would have sounded like a dutiful nephew who had gone to some trouble to find his uncle a pleasant spot to retire to.

Jingbu’s God-Seizing Eyes opened, and Hei Zhou, with no fighting strength left in him, was drawn inside.

To suffer without end, alongside Shuanghan.

And with no divine power left to shield his body, it hurt him worse than it hurt the others.

The Zhuye pearl flew on toward God-Slayer. No love-thread and no net of love could slow it down. Carrying its master’s last wish, Zhuye tore across the open sky and went straight for the Lihen in God-Slayer’s hand.

Free that divine sword, and God-Slayer would have his fighting strength back.

And just as a thread of anticipation showed in God-Slayer’s eyes —

A dark shape rushed out.

It flung both arms wide with no thought at all for its own life, and put its body across the Zhuye pearl’s flight path.

Pop.

The dark shape was punched clean through.

But that thousandth of a second was delay enough. Ji Wuri had all the time he needed to flash into place in front of God-Slayer’s Lihen, put out a hand, and catch the Zhuye pearl an instant before it could free the sword.

Smoke began to rise off Ji Wuri’s palm.

Zhuye was fighting his grip. The artifact’s spiritual awareness and its will both refused to submit — never mind acknowledging an enemy like this as its new master.

“Haha! What a fine treasure. The more stubborn it is, the better I like it. An artifact with spiritual awareness this high and loyalty this absolute is exactly what I need!” Ji Wuri bore the pain drilling through his palm quite happily, and kept his grip on the Zhuye pearl by force. Nobody paid the slightest attention to the dark shape he had just let take the hit, which came down head first onto the rocks. It was Master Baoshu, who had been turned into a deathless puppet some time ago.

Zhuye was in trouble with nobody able to save it, and the moment could not have been worse.

Ding.

Lihen rang out.

Without God-Slayer directing it at all, the sword sent out a line of sword-qi of its own, cut through the binding love-threads, and struck the Zhuye pearl.

With Lihen’s help behind it, Zhuye’s power shot up in an instant, and it blazed with light. Ji Wuri cried out. His palm felt as though a thousand blades were driving into it, and he let go the way a man lets go of a live wire. Free again, and with Lihen’s sword-qi assisting it, the Zhuye pearl fled at tremendous speed for the outside of the net of love. Kumu’s attempt to cut it off missed. So did Jingbu’s. Even Yuanji, the fastest of them, could not head it off in time.

Ji Wuri, badly rattled, flipped his Sacred Codex open to summon a war beast to help him chase the pearl down.

The next second.

His hands stopped moving.

Because the Zhuye pearl had passed straight through Liuguang’s cage of glowing runes and dropped into Yue Yang’s hand. And before Ji Wuri could do anything about it, the artifact acknowledged its master then and there, the contract naming Yue Yang its new owner.

Yue Yang’s whole face lit up. He looked exactly like an old fox who had sat up on the hillside watching two tigers maul each other and had then quietly made off with the chicken. He held the newly bound Zhuye pearl and clucked his tongue over it. “This is the trouble with being irresistible. You can’t block it even if you want to. I didn’t want the thing at all, and here it comes to my door of its own accord, absolutely insisting on taking me as its master. Honestly, it’s a real headache.”

Ji Wuri’s face went green with rage.

In his whole life he had never hated one man this much.

All that painstaking calculation, and in the end he had come away with an empty bucket — and worse, he had handed a free divine artifact to this creature, who had not spent an ounce of effort on it.

Zhuye was gone. And not only the artifact: he had lost the darkness divine power along with it, which he had been dead certain of absorbing. Hei Zhou’s desperate last throw had actually worked. To Ji Wuri, this was the single greatest humiliation of his life.

He had set out to out-scheme the boy and had been checkmated instead. When had Ji Wuri ever taken a loss like this and had to swallow it?

He understood it now.

Ji Wuri understood.

That damn kid in front of him — why hadn’t he made a move earlier?

Because he had deliberately engineered exactly this dead end, to force the Zhuye pearl, with nowhere else in the world to go, to come to him and take him as its master of its own accord.

What a calculating little snake. He had used Ji Wuri to do it. Left alone, the Zhuye pearl would never in a thousand years have chosen him for a master — and it was Ji Wuri’s own forcing of the issue that had handed it to him. Looking at Yue Yang standing in the cage of glowing runes, still playing dumb and grinning to himself, Ji Wuri hated him so much that smoke came out of every opening in his head. What he wanted was to butcher the boy, slice him thin, and eat him raw with a dipping sauce.

(End of Chapter 1191)