The moment Ji Wuri was hurt, every one of the war beasts rushed over and put themselves around him.
Against anybody else, that protection would have counted for something.
Against a mysterious old man whose attacks ignored defenses and ignored everything else besides, protection was nothing but a display of loyalty. The Love-Thread Spider-Demon let go of God-Slayer at once and gave the first man of Mountain Beyond the Mountain his freedom back. Her thinking was that God-Slayer was no match for the old man either, but he was at least one more body on the field; if he could tie the man up even a little, that was better than keeping him wrapped in the net of love.
Jingbu released Shuanghan, Zhaoxi and Hei Zhou from the World of Terror inside the twisted halo as well.
Every additional target on the field was one more place the mysterious man’s attention had to go. Which meant their gravely wounded master might draw less of it, and his odds of living through this went up a fraction.
Shuanghan and Hei Zhou still had no idea the situation outside had been turned completely upside down. They assumed Ji Wuri had the whole board under control.
One look at him, gravely wounded, and the color went out of their faces.
North Divine Sovereign Zhaoxi, whose drunkenness had only just been lifted along with the Drunken Muddle-Worm and whose mind had only just cleared, was more lost than either of them; his understanding of the fight was still stuck somewhere much earlier. But they were Divine Sovereigns. Wounded and weak as they were, their senses still worked, and every one of them could feel how terrifying the mysterious man was. Without meaning to, they all drifted toward God-Slayer — Hei Zhou included, who had been God-Slayer’s sworn enemy and had wanted nothing in the world so much as to kill him. Things were worse now. If they didn’t group up and pull together, the old man was going to break them one at a time and grind every one of them into paste.
“Wait. I’ll take him. The rest of you get as far away as you can.” God-Slayer raised the ancient divine sword Lihen and drew a long breath.
An enemy this frightening.
He had never met one before.
The question now wasn’t whether he could win. It was whether he could get one swing off at all.
Whatever else was true, God-Slayer was a strong man, and he refused to be someone who didn’t even have the courage to fight — who ran for his life without drawing once, and got killed by a finger at the end of it anyway. If he was going to die, God-Slayer wanted to die fighting, on a battlefield, and not go out in disgrace like a deserter.
“It’s no use. We can’t win and we can’t run.” Zhaoxi, who held the Zhenmiao Divine Mirror, gave a particularly bitter smile.
“Haah.”
Hei Zhou thought his luck had never been this bad in his life.
Ji Wuri had been monstrous enough, and Hei Zhou had been a toy in his hands. Who could have guessed that a Ji Wuri that formidable would end up an ant himself, cut up for somebody else’s table? Hei Zhou could have enjoyed that — the worse Ji Wuri’s luck ran, the better he liked it — except that this appallingly strong mysterious man, who treated Ji Wuri as an ant, treated Hei Zhou as an ant he could crush without thinking about it. Beneath consideration entirely.
Put simply: Ji Wuri was going to die, and so was he. Every one of them was already dead.
How was anybody supposed to enjoy that?
Shuanghan looked over at Yue Yang.
He had noticed that this “Chiqiu” was the only one on the field with any fight left in him.
And it wasn’t God-Slayer’s kind of fight, which was a last throw made for the sake of honor. What Shuanghan saw in Yue Yang was not a desperate struggle at all. It was calm, rational thinking — steady, stubborn resistance. Weak, and hopelessly outmatched, certainly. But there were no dead ashes in Yue Yang’s eyes and no despair in them either. What was in them was something close to madness. Something close to a fanatic’s appetite for the challenge.
It was that firmness, that refusal to bend, which nobody else on the field had.
That was what decided Shuanghan to back him.
Whether they’d win was something he wasn’t going to think about for now.
At the very least, Shuanghan felt he ought to stand behind a fighter who still had some resistance in him and a will that wouldn’t break.
“You want to fight me?” The mysterious man seemed to find this odd. He looked at Yue Yang and asked, smiling, “Do you think there’s any chance you’d win? Never mind that you’re still a beginner — you could live another thousand years and still not shift one of my fingers.”
“Bullshit. Whether I can beat you is one question. You expecting me to fold my hands and shut my eyes and wait to die is another, and that’s not happening.” Yue Yang laughed out loud.
“Confidence and fighting spirit are good things. But from where I stand, whatever you do, the result comes out the same.” The mysterious man had earned the right to say it. Never mind tens of thousands of years later — back on the day Buried Sword Manor was washed in blood, he already had more than enough strength to beat Yue Yang into the ground.
“I’ll be honest with you, old man. You’ve got a face that’s begging to be hit.” Yue Yang couldn’t help himself.
“Yes. A lot of people have said that.” The mysterious man nodded, and added, “They’re all dead.”
“You—” Yue Yang choked on it. He was usually the one making other people cough blood, and today was payback, pure and simple. Squeezed into a corner by the mysterious man, he was hopping mad and could do nothing about it. If he’d had the strength, he’d have taken that smug old ghost’s head off and kicked it around like a ball.
And then a flash of memory went through him.
Yue Yang, who had been chewing on the problem and getting nowhere, suddenly had all of it at once.
He pointed at the old man, lost control of himself for a good while, and finally let it out like a floodgate opening. “I know who you are! You — you old bastard are the one who looted Buried Sword Manor while it was burning and walked off with the Three Divine Mirror! You skulking, sneaking, back-alley snake! While Tianyu was leading the Heavenly Realm’s experts in the attack, you hid in the dark and struck from behind, and you took the Three Divine Mirror out of the six divine artifacts. And here I was thinking you must be some great god. Turns out you’re just a thief fishing in muddy water. Give me back my family’s Three Divine Mirror!”
Never mind that Buried Sword Manor had been a ruin and a piece of Sky Tower history for tens of thousands of years. That did not stop Yue Yang for a second from filing the six divine artifacts inside it under family heirlooms.
If the Buried Sword Immortal had been alive to hear it, he would probably have kicked the shameless brat in the backside.
The skin on this kid’s face is unbelievable.
The mysterious man found Yue Yang’s claim strange.
He neither denied it nor admitted it. He asked, smiling, “And how do you prove you’re a descendant of Buried Sword Manor?”
Yue Yang held the Prison Emperor Divine Staff up high. “Look at it. I don’t think this needs any explaining. This staff is enough on its own to prove I’m the genuine, rightful Buried Sword heir and master of the six divine artifacts.”
The mysterious man’s response to that was immediate contempt. “If producing one divine artifact makes a man a Buried Sword heir and master of the six, then Tianyu, who came away with the Four Divine Armor, must be a Buried Sword heir and master of the six as well.”
He hadn’t finished before Yue Yang produced the Prison Emperor Divine Seal too and announced, entirely unembarrassed, “Don’t lump robbers in with owners. I’m the owner. He’s a robber and so are you. You can hold one of the six all you like and it will never change what’s actually true.”
“Of the six, besides those two — didn’t the Prison Emperor also have a divine sword?” the mysterious man asked.
“Also in my hands.” Yue Yang spread his hands, in the manner of a man for whom divine artifacts are ornaments lying around the house. As many as you want. Try not to make a fuss.
“Very good.” The mysterious man granted him the point. “Holding at least three divine artifacts, you really are a Buried Sword heir. But who knows that? And even supposing somebody knew, who would care? Tianyu wouldn’t care. I don’t care. Dongfang, who hates the Sky Tower, wouldn’t care either. When you come down to it, what the Heavenly Realm runs on is strength, not one treasure, or several, that give you a leg up. It may make you angry to hear it, but it’s a hard fact. Take right now, for instance. I kill you, I take every treasure and every divine artifact you own, and then I announce publicly that I am the Buried Sword heir and the master of the six divine artifacts. Do you think people would believe me? They would. As long as I have the strength, nobody will question it. Do you think anyone in the world would speak up on your behalf, or go to any trouble to clear your name? Not one person. Because you’re a pitiful weakling.”
“That’s all the meaning survival has in the Heavenly Realm. The strong eat the weak. If you aren’t strong enough, then you spend your whole life being the defeat and the shame and the pain that other people’s victories and honors and happiness get measured against. Here’s a thought, though. It occurs to me that simply killing a Buried Sword heir and a master of the six divine artifacts isn’t cruel enough. Hand over every treasure you own, destroy every war beast you have, break your Sacred Codex contract voluntarily and make a cripple of yourself — and then I’ll consider whether to let what’s left of you go on living in disgrace.”
“That way you get to beg for your life like a dog, and I get everything there is to get out of the honor and the pleasure of humiliating a peerless genius the Sky Tower doesn’t produce once in ten thousand years. Everybody comes away with something. What do you say, little friend? Why not think it over?” That was the mysterious man’s proposal.
Yue Yang would give up everything, and live.
The mysterious man would take everything, and get the incomparable satisfaction of reducing a gifted junior to a dog on top of it.
Terms like that were a humiliation without precedent, and a final choice with no coming back from it, ever. The one thing on offer in return was a shameful, scraped-together life.
God-Slayer’s eyes went very cold. He would die before he agreed to anything of the kind.
Zhaoxi glanced at the badly wounded Shuanghan.
The two of them.
Both nodded, without a word.
Each of them understood the other was not the sort of man who would bend and scrape and live as somebody’s slave to keep breathing.
The one who spoke was Hei Zhou — most of his divine power drained off by Ji Wuri, his body wrecked, Zhuye gone, so weak now that he could barely stand up. He forced it out through a raw throat. “I’m willing!”
“You don’t have the standing to choose.” The mysterious man treated Hei Zhou the way a hard-handed butcher treats a mouse he happens to notice. Not worth a second look.
His eyes were on Yue Yang and nowhere else. He would not spare a glance even for the wounded Ji Wuri, or for God-Slayer standing there with Lihen in his hand.
Yue Yang smiled.
Red lips, white teeth, and a smile like a whole day of sunshine.
With the old man bearing down on him this hard, Yue Yang gave his answer with the middle finger raised high. “Old ghost, has your brain gone soft? Did you forget to take your medicine today? Because you look pretty far gone to me. If you’re tired of living, this young master will see you off free of charge. You’ve lived a few extra days and now you’re strutting around about it? All that means is you wasted a few more days’ worth of rice than the rest of us. Who exactly do you think you’re scaring? You want a clear answer out of this young master? Fine. This young master will give you one word, and the word is: fuck.”
Yue Yang did not stop at saying it.
The instant he finished, he came in with the Prison Emperor Divine Staff and the Prison Emperor Divine Seal, meaning to finish the old man off.
This old thing was nothing but a man Fairy Qiluo‘s husband had beaten, once upon a time. What was there to strut about? If Fairy Qiluo’s husband could take him back then, Yue Yang figured he could take him now.
(End of Chapter 1196)