Ji Wuri drew a deep breath and leveled a finger straight at Yue Yang, as though he meant to say something.

But his lips barely moved, and nothing came out.

Yue Yang was baffled.

If you want to swear at a man, swear at him. Why so quiet about it?

He was just opening his mouth to needle him when it turned out the whole thing had been a feint. The real Ji Wuri had already teleported in front of him, fingers stiff as a spear, driving at his face. The transmigrator had not expected Ji Wuri to come at him in person, or to move that fast; he threw himself backward at the last instant and got clear of the finger that would have gone through his skull.

Ji Wuri did not change the shape of his hand at all. His right foot came up in a high kick, straight at Yue Yang’s groin.

If that vicious kick had landed, Yue Yang might have been in a position to take up the Sunflower Manual. But there was no chance of that happening. Yue Yang would sooner let Ji Wuri hit him in the face than let him get anywhere near his groin, and for the sake of a happy life he brought both hands down to block while flipping backward, spinning like a windmill, and got out of the way of the family-line-ending kick by a hair.

Then a heavy fist, like a thunder god’s hammer.

Ji Wuri seemed to have known exactly how Yue Yang would react.

While Yue Yang was still turning over in the air, he stepped in, drew his fist back like a hammer, held it high, and waited for the spinning body to come round. At the precise instant Yue Yang was at his weakest and had nothing to brace against, the fist came down and slammed into his chest and belly.

Yue Yang was driven into the ground with a thud, with no say in the matter at all.

The hard ground cracked and split under the force of the impact, and a huge crater sank into the earth.

Yue Yang was already pushing himself up before the dust cleared. But something moved faster. A shadow flickered into place in front of him, and the only thing Yue Yang could make out clearly was its legs. He launched himself into the air at speed, scrambling clear of that long leg and its flying kick. The space directly above his head was torn open by a terrible force, and another shadow came out of it and drove an elbow into the back of his skull. The one delivering this storm of blows was Ji Wuri — the man who had not once, until now, shown what he could actually do.

By the time Yue Yang was smashed into the earth a second time, Kumu and Liuguang were standing on either side of Ji Wuri, each condensing divine power into round shells and raining them down like hail.

Ji Wuri, careful as always.

Even attacking with his own hands, and even with the enemy in no position to hit back, he still kept Jingbu guarding his back.

Never mind that Yue Yang currently had no way to counter; even if he had, it would not have turned the situation around. Ji Wuri never left himself so much as a hair’s width of weakness or opening. Whatever he did, he wanted it perfect — perfect without a single flaw. With Yue Yang beaten into the ground and God-Slayer held in the net of love, the whole battlefield had come back under Ji Wuri’s control.

The ground was blown to rubble by Kumu’s and Liuguang’s shells.

The shock wave rolled out across the earth.

But when the drifting dust thinned, there was nothing there but a pitted, broken landscape. The Yue Yang who by rights should have been lying in it, badly wounded, was nowhere to be found.

“Careful. This kid isn’t simple.” Yuanji, watching from the sidelines, warned them with a grim look on his face — because not even he had seen how this slippery enemy had gotten out. On the face of it there had been no gap at all. He had genuinely been hit, he had genuinely gone down, and he had taken the full weight of those shells. In that situation, even if he had survived, he ought to be injured. So how had he vanished without a trace? When exactly had he slipped away? And what kind of special ability had let him fool a whole ring of eyes that had already locked onto him?

“A concealment ability, is it? A cheap little trick.” Ji Wuri reached out and turned a page of the Sacred Codex, and a war beast like a firefly drifted out.

It wagged a rear end striped in black and white and scattered a cloud of glowing powder.

The powder scattered on the wind.

Spread.

Until the whole of heaven and earth seemed to be tinted with that faint glow.

A transparent figure came into view directly in front of Ji Wuri — Yue Yang, standing there quietly, and nobody could say how long he had been there without being noticed. Ji Wuri’s eyes went cold at the sight of him so close and himself so unaware.

“Disappointing. Ji Wuri, if that’s the whole of your hand, then you can be on your way.” Yue Yang was finished testing him.

Now he was going to show what he could do.

The operation to kill Ji Wuri had formally begun.

His fist was ten thousand times faster than lightning. The afterimage of it had barely landed in Ji Wuri’s eyes before the fist itself arrived. Liuguang, the fastest thing nearby, could not get there in time; by the time he arrived, Yue Yang’s punch had already gone into Ji Wuri’s chest and belly, in exactly the spot where Ji Wuri had hit him a moment ago. The only difference was the force behind it. This one was a hundred times heavier. Ji Wuri’s mouth came open as though he were about to throw up his own organs, and his eyes were still full of disbelief as the punch launched him ten thousand meters into the sky.

Faster than the flying Ji Wuri, Yue Yang flashed to a point high above him and waited.

Ji Wuri looked up.

And saw Yue Yang’s elbow coming down like a thunderclap onto the back of his head.

Which was, again, exactly where he had struck Yue Yang a moment before. Same spot. The only difference was that Yue Yang’s strength was a hundred times greater than his.

His skull all but shattered, Ji Wuri went down into the ground like a meteor. The Love-Thread Spider-Demon threw out a second net of love, but even that could do nothing to slow him.

He tore straight through the net and hit solid rock hard.

His own combat experience ran deep.

Even with his head splitting, he still adjusted his body in the air and used both palms and both legs as buffers, cutting the impact down as far as he could and sparing himself most of what the ground would have thrown back at him. Dizzy, Ji Wuri shook his head; and when his vision cleared he found two long legs standing in front of him, the right one already rising with the force of wind and thunder behind it. Only moments earlier he had thrown that same kick at Yue Yang, and missed, because Yue Yang had recovered fast enough to spring clear.

So now Ji Wuri used the same escape, and sprang clear at speed.

And in the instant he came off the ground, he felt that right leg accelerate without any apparent limit, catch up to him easily, and land hard under his chin.

For the first time, blood sprayed into the air.

Ji Wuri’s body spun through several full turns before his scrambled mind came slowly back, and he understood that the kick had knocked him out for a moment. He touched his lip. His hand came away covered in blood.

Rage.

Went up in him like a fire.

Out of the corner of his eye he registered something coming in fast, and a knee filled his vision.

Ji Wuri went spinning away like a shell out of a cannon, smashed through three rocky hills, plowed a trench ten thousand meters long, and finally came to a slow stop. The pain made him angrier still. His face was buried in the sand, which was its own humiliation, and his fists were clenched tight. He swore that he would grind this boy to powder and scatter what was left of him. Nobody had ever done him this much harm, or humiliated him this badly. As a favored son of heaven, as Grand Hall Master of the Sacred Hall of the Central Divine Hall, as the direct disciple of the supreme Divine Hall Sovereign himself, Ji Wuri had never once in his life been made to swallow anything like it.

“I’m going to kill you!” Ji Wuri ground his teeth, ready to pay Yue Yang back a thousand times over, ten thousand times over.

“That’s exactly what I was about to say.”

Yue Yang was standing behind him. Nobody had seen him get there.

Before Ji Wuri could react, Yue Yang had hold of his right ankle. And before Liuguang and Kumu could throw everything they had into a rescue, Yue Yang hauled Ji Wuri clear of the ground, swung him up high, and slammed him down. Then again, the way the Flowery Monk Lu Zhishen works through his drunken Mad Hundred-and-Eight Strikes with a demon-subduing staff — using Ji Wuri as the club and beating the ground with him. By the time Liuguang, the fastest of them, got there, several hundred blows had already gone in. Yue Yang drove Ji Wuri down into the rock, gathered himself, caught the throat of the onrushing Liuguang with one hand, and pinned this reportedly very punchable humanoid war beast under his foot.

Kumu arrived, and his old hands closed viciously on Yue Yang’s shoulders.

Thousands upon thousands of vines and root fibers came pouring out of his body.

And drove deep into the ground.

A withering divine power spread out and fouled the whole of the earth. Soil, rock, minerals — the roots drew the energy out of all of it, and the land turned into a black stretch of poisoned sand.

With his true divine power finally unleashed, Kumu’s aged face filled with an excitement he could not hold down. He had the slippery, uncanny enemy at last.

And just as Kumu was preparing to pair the roots with his master’s Devouring talent and draw the enemy’s energy out through them.

A flame that every living thing holds in awe caught along Yue Yang’s legs.

And erupted.

Into a single column of concentrated fire that ran straight up into the sky.

Kumu, burning inside that column, let out a howl of agony beyond anything a person should hear. Jingbu started forward to save him and Yuanji stopped him; the two of them pulled Liuguang and Ji Wuri out instead and fell back a thousand meters. Kumu, with every root fiber driven deep into the earth, had tied himself into his own cocoon, and there was no possible way for him to struggle free. All he could do was be purified, in agony and a little at a time, in Nirvana Flames that purify everything in the world, until there was nothing left of him at all.

“Nirvana Flames!” Yuanji set down a somewhat battered Ji Wuri, and his expression was that of a man facing a serious enemy. “It seems we’ve run into the biggest enemy of the lot.”

“So that is Nirvana Flame?” God-Slayer, still held inside the net of love, was delighted and puzzled at once.

He had heard of it. He had never seen it.

Who would have thought.

That today he would see it on a strange man impersonating his brother Chiqiu. Could this young man who carried Nirvana Flames really be what the legends described — one of that mysterious people from the beautiful world that stands above everything else in existence?

Yue Yang closed his fist with a snap, closing his palm around the finger-sized crystal of divine power that was all Kumu had left behind.

He looked across at Ji Wuri.

He had never looked so serious in his life.

And he said it one word at a time. “You may say your last words now.”

That killing intent — unshakable, and never going to change — spread out in the form of Sovereign Intent, and Ji Wuri would have felt it clearly even if he had been an idiot. Facing a mortal enemy like this one, who was going to pardon nothing, Ji Wuri felt fear in a fight for the first time in his life. The pressure came down on him like a mountain. His mouth had gone dry, and he swallowed, with real effort.

(End of Chapter 1192)