Hei Zhou hid inside his own Grimoire World and sat there blankly for a long time.

In the end he gritted his teeth.

He decided to go back out and take his chances after all.

Hiding in the Grimoire World meant his life was in no danger, but it also meant his life was over. For a man of his kind — a ruthless warlord — women and wealth were not things that could move him. Only power did that. Supreme power. And a man who wants it has to have the strength to command it, or the whole thing is empty talk.

When his life had been in danger, Hei Zhou, the Western Divine Sovereign, had felt that life was the most precious thing there was.

Now that he was safe, though, he found that simply living on, empty like this, was worse. Everything lost, nothing left, a life that was nothing but a walking corpse — was that what he, Hei Zhou, wanted?

In the space of a few hours he turned it over more times than he could count.

A few hours and he already couldn’t stand the loneliness, never mind a few years, a few hundred, a few thousand… Keep hiding and scrape out a life, or go out and take his chances and see whether he could turn the whole thing around?

If not for that supreme, majestic, mysterious force, Hei Zhou would never have considered it. But having been through that majesty, he had formed a bold suspicion. The invincible mysterious man might already be dead. There was no telling why. Perhaps an ancient god had taken exception to the man’s swagger. Perhaps the Trial Grounds had a guardian power of their own. Perhaps it was something else entirely. Whatever the reason, the mysterious man who had swept everything aside and looked down on every living thing had certainly been wiped out by that supreme, crushing, holy force.

And if the mysterious man had been destroyed, then Yue Titan, Ji Wuri, God-Slayer and the rest had not escaped death either.

Yue Titan, Ji Wuri and God-Slayer.

They had probably been killed by the mysterious man.

Otherwise the mysterious man would not have provoked the guardian power of the Trial Grounds. He must have killed Yue Titan, a peerless prodigy with every chance of passing the trial, and Ji Wuri, the first genius of the Central Divine Hall. Excessive slaughter — above all the frenzied slaughter of gifted juniors whom heaven itself had favored — was what had angered the ancient god.

The ancient god who guarded the Trial Grounds had descended in person and annihilated the arrogant old ghost.

Which meant one thing.

Mountain Beyond the Mountain would go back to the way it had been before…

The ancient god would not stay. Hei Zhou’s rivals — the mysterious man, Ji Wuri, Yue Titan, God-Slayer — very likely no longer existed. As for the ones left, Zhaoxi, Shuanghan, Qingyun, there was no telling whether they had survived. They might have gone the way God-Slayer had, destroyed by the mysterious man.

And even if they had survived, they could not possibly be a match for him.

The most important point was this.

If he went out there now, then even if he could not win, he was confident nobody could stop him from running.

The only thing that felt like a waste, a small pity, was all the care he had put into the false trail meant to mislead everyone.

Hei Zhou gritted his teeth.

He decided to leave the Grimoire World and go back to Mountain Beyond the Mountain.

If God-Slayer had also died in this Divine War, then Mountain Beyond the Mountain would belong to him.

“I, Hei Zhou, was born to be first. If I cannot make myself first in Mountain Beyond the Mountain, then I would rather die than live as a coward scraping out an existence.” Hei Zhou decided to gamble and go back into the fight. He was not fool enough to head straight for the battlefield, of course. His first move was to go to the God-Slaying Mystic Realm. With his strength still down, he thought he ought to go there and see whether he could draw on the ancient divine power left behind in that place to bring himself back faster, so as to reach his goal of seizing and ruling Mountain Beyond the Mountain that much sooner.

He had run too early. He had not heard what Qilin Girl Bingyin said.

If he had known that at the ancient sealed passage in the God-Slaying Mystic Realm there was an evil god named Weiguang, more terrible than the mysterious man, squeezing his way through at that very moment, he would certainly have gone straight back to what he had thought before — that he would sooner grow old and die in the Grimoire World than take any part in the struggle for Mountain Beyond the Mountain.

Once the scar heals, a man forgets the pain. Ordinary people are like that.

How much more so a ruthless warlord and overlord like Hei Zhou, who could not go a day without power or a day without a fight? Could a heart like his, made for struggle and for name and profit, ever have let him stay in hiding?

The answer.

Of course it could not.

Below Storm Fortress, the great battle between the Eastern and Western camps was burning at full heat.

After that supreme pressure passed, the soldiers on both sides carried a fear that heaven and earth were coming to an end. If there had been no battle to hold them, every one of them would have bolted in whatever direction came first and spent his days in dread. But they were interlocked on the battlefield like the teeth of two dogs, and nobody could get clear. So they turned that buried fear into frenzied killing, and used slaughter, and blood, and the deaths of their enemies to cover the cowardice and the terror in their own hearts.

“Kill. Kill—”

“Charge!”

Soldiers on both sides had gone red-eyed, swinging their weapons at the enemy for all they were worth, past reason, like wounded bulls in a ring.

There was nothing left in their eyes but killing.

The Eastern camp’s disadvantage had eased somewhat. Most of the hovering motherships had been driven into the ground by the supreme pressure and could not be brought back into working order any time soon, so the great majority of them were out of the fight. The Eastern camp’s fleet had been badly outnumbered — and now that nobody had ships to use, the situation had leveled out instead. They were no longer being beaten down by the Western camp with no way to strike back. More than that: the Great Swan was the only vessel that could still take to the air, needing no crew at all and running with precision on its Black Tortoise Guard war dolls. In the part of the field where the mothership fleets faced each other, the Eastern camp now had a slight edge.

The people aboard the Great Swan had felt the pressure, but the ship itself was Yue Yang’s work. It felt the pressure and took no damage from it.

The Black Tortoise Guards, the Black Tortoise Giants and the Black Tortoise Colossi.

They had even picked up a measure of blessing from it.

Simply by being able to fly, the Great Swan was the one and only sky vessel on that battlefield until the Western camp’s great fleet got its power back and could fight in the air again. That alone was enough for the Eastern camp’s soldiers to lift their heads and hit back hard at the soldiers of the Western fleet…

One side held a natural stronghold and defended it. The other side had absolute numbers and attacked hard.

The fighting burned.

When this battle would end was not up to them.

It would go on until the Divine War produced a final result, however heavy the casualties. Because they all understood that, every commander and every soldier gritted his teeth and held on, waiting for his own nation’s Divine Sovereign to take the final victory and set him free. Until then, every enemy in front of him, every threat in front of him, had to be destroyed.

Either the enemy died or you did.

Any man who kept the smallest scrap of mercy was doing the cruelest thing he could to his own life.

The soldiers of the Eastern and Western camps, more numerous than ants and locked in vicious fighting across every hill and every field, were playing out a duet of divine war with their flesh and their lives.

Something much the same was happening elsewhere.

In front of the Reception Platform, two men were locked in a fight to the death, every move lethal, nothing they would not use.

They were, of course, Jiuxiao, who had laid this ambush for Ji Wuri deliberately, and Ji Wuri himself — once the first genius of the Central Divine Hall, now beaten down blow after blow, damaged in body and mind, and trying to get out of Mountain Beyond the Mountain.

In scheming and in strength alike the two were natural enemies, each the other’s match: a general meeting a worthy general, a chess player meeting an equal across the board.

Settling which of them was the winner would take a hundred days at the very least.

But Jiuxiao was in no hurry.

As he saw it, he had all the time in the world.

The longer it went, the better for him. The day his revered master came back victorious would be the day Ji Wuri died. All he had to do was hold the man here with everything he had, and the final victory was his. As it happened, Ji Wuri was thinking exactly the same thing. He also felt the longer the fight ran the better, because he knew the mysterious man could not possibly be alive to come to anyone’s aid, and the longer it went the better his life-guardian war beast Yuanji would recover. With Yuanji’s help, beating Jiuxiao — even this Jiuxiao — would be no trouble at all…

They were two men with private agendas, each fighting with everything he had and working out his own plan at the same time.

Each plan had the same ending.

Each of them was the final winner.

There was a splash. Yue Yang had been swimming a good long while, and came up out of the lake wiping his face. Yue Yu handed him a towel from the bank and scolded him without much patience. “Your body hasn’t recovered. Anybody else would be flat on his back for ten days, half a month at least. Not you. You’re barely awake and you’re up and in the water. That does nothing for your recovery.”

“Yes, yes, yes. My fault. But after a fight, if I don’t get a wash, my whole body feels wrong.” Yue Yang grinned and wiped the water off his face, then made a placating gesture at Yue Yu to say he wouldn’t do it again. “Has nobody caught up with tiger girl and the rest yet?”

“Yika and Weilai caught up with them long ago. But Qianqian says they’re not going to the God-Slaying Mystic Realm after all — they’re going to Storm Fortress to have a look instead. God-Slayer and the others paid with their lives to seal the Five Divine Bell for you and turned the battle around, and she says they can’t stand by and watch what happens to the Eastern camp. That debt has to be paid.” Yue Yu made this precious younger brother of hers — the one she doted on most and worried about most — lie down and rest properly, then sat beside him and worked her small hands over a body that had been overdrawn in battle. The Nirvana Flame and the Innate Sword Qi restored him, so however badly he was hurt his body came back whole rather than staying broken. Even so, it hurt her to look at him. And there was no way to stop him. Every time he was out there fighting, staking his life against powerful enemies, she was sick with worry. This boy was the one person in her life she could never set her mind at ease about, the one she fretted over most, and a day without seeing him left her uneasy.

“Why should we? They didn’t really die. They only lost their bodies. Their awareness and their souls are still there, aren’t they?” Yue Yang, for his part, had enormous respect in his heart for what God-Slayer and the others had done. The act had moved him deeply. His mouth was never going to admit it.

“Who else would give up his own body for someone else? What God-Slayer and the others did is an inheritance… Taiyan and Bingli did the same thing all those years ago, and in our Sky Tower a great many of our elders did the same, sacrificing themselves for the ones who came after without asking anything back. That is an inheritance we are obliged to understand. And besides — unless you have a way to unseal the bell without damaging it, they will never come out of it. How is that different from dying in battle? They dissolved the contracts with their own divine artifacts. Even if the seal could be opened later, they could never get their human bodies back. No human body, no divine rank. Nobody knows how it ends for them.” Yue Yu sighed softly. She was deeply grateful to these strong men who had died to help her brother, and there was no way at all to show it. Even a word of thanks would not reach God-Slayer and the others, whose souls were sealed inside the bell along with everything else.

“Maybe they’ll get out fine later on. Maybe they’ll even work out the true divine realm inside the seal and come away with a real divine rank. Who knows?” Yue Yang offered an ending he did not believe himself.

“Let’s hope.” Yue Yu felt that for that to happen, it would take an ancient god on the order of the Dragon God Supreme, and nothing less.

Under her gentle hands Yue Yang began to feel sleep coming on, and sank into the land of dreams.

Fast asleep.

Looking at the small ease that had come naturally into Yue Yang’s face, Yue Yu quietly took one of her own cloaks out of her storage bracelet and laid it slowly over him. She knew how much this precious brother of hers was carrying. Sleeping easily like this was a rare thing for him. She had often seen the shallow, high-alert sleep he kept for training or for war, the kind where the smallest sound woke him on the instant. And now and then she had seen him hunched in a shadow with a loneliness on his face that broke her heart.

What made her glad was the noise and warmth of everyone around him, and the care she gave him herself.

He was resting better and better now.

He slept soundly.

That heartbreaking sadness was fading too, and only surfaced very rarely now… Perhaps he was thinking of Fourth Mother and Shuang’er and the others back home. Perhaps he was thinking of his mother… He never said so, but nobody knew him better than she did.

(End of Chapter 1208)