Storm Fortress.

The soldiers of the two great camps, East and West, had fought themselves to exhaustion.

Bodies. Wreckage of every kind and severed limbs, piled into hills. The blood thrown across the ground had run together into streams and pooled into ponds, deep enough to carry a shield away. Loyal men sworn to die and ordinary soldiers swept up alongside them all roared and threw themselves at the enemy, fighting the kind of fight where one of you does not walk away. This was a decisive battle that would not end until the dying stopped, and at the end of it there would be no losers. There would only be a winner.

Only the winner would still be alive at the end.

A man who wanted to live had one option.

Go forward, and kill every enemy who appeared in front of him.

The battlefield below Storm Fortress was a mill for flesh and blood with no equal anywhere, and it was eating the lives of fighting men by the minute and by the second.

Yue Yang came up to Storm Fortress at the head of the Star Pirates and rebel soldiers he had just gotten free of the forbidden power, and the state of the fighting drew the breath out of him. A million men on each side, at each other’s throats, filling the earth and blotting out the sky, the two forces smashing together like tides — and at every moment somebody went down and died there, thrashing in agony. There were savage officers who kept charging with their bellies opened and several meters of intestine dragging behind them, wild as tigers, unstoppable, eyes gone red, as though a monster had gotten inside them and meant to pick a man and eat him. They went on until their strength ran out and they fell, and then the enemy closed around them in a ring and the blades came down together and chopped them into pulp.

Every conflict in the world looks small beside a battlefield like this one.

Every second, hundreds of men went down.

In the time it takes to snap your fingers, countless living bodies dropped with a crash, blood coming up out of the wounds, and souls that did not want to go went out through clenched teeth…

“You’re supposed to be resting. What are you doing here?” Princess Qianqian’s voice came from behind him.

“This — this is—” The Star Pirates took one look at Princess Qianqian and jumped, then worked out that this was Yue Yang’s wife, and immediately every one of them started making faces at the others. She was in heavy armor, but the presence she carried was beyond anyone’s matching, and the bold figure she cut was enough to kill a Star Pirate’s dog eyes stone dead. The quick ones, Guoguo and Flower Duck, bent double in salute at once.

“Whoa, whoa — Boss Titan, what a lucky man! Look, here comes another one!” Flower Duck’s mouth was open wide enough to stuff an ox-eating toad into it.

“I could die of envy!” Guoguo simply fell over on the ground, his calves twitching like a cockroach somebody had stepped on.

Princess Qianqian had only just landed.

And down out of the sky came Luohua, who had traveled with her.

Unlike Princess Qianqian, Luohua wore brocade and fine clothes and had no taste for putting armor on. She came drifting down like a banished immortal setting foot out of the ninth heaven for the first time.

Set against the tiger girl in her heavy armor, Luohua’s face — astonishing whether she was cross or pleased — and a figure nothing in the world could match set each other off perfectly. The Star Pirates had never seen beauty on that scale, and of course took her for something out of heaven. When they saw her come down and put her arms straight around their own boss, they were not about to be slow about it. They came scurrying forward to bow and pay their respects.

In their minds, this beauty who was so completely at ease with him had to be the official wife.

The fierce one, cold as a sword, was a different matter.

Her relationship with Lord Yue Titan was probably not as close…

“Where are Duoduo and the others?” Yue Yang saw that only Princess Qianqian and Luohua were here — Hong, A-Man, Yika, Weilai, Duoduo and Jiangying had none of them come — and it puzzled him at once. What were they doing?

“God-Slayer and the others paid with their lives for that seal. We split up just now to gather in their families and relatives, so nobody gets at them quietly. Mountain Beyond the Mountain is unsettled at the moment and everything’s in chaos. Once it’s straightened out we can arrange things properly. Never mind, though — you don’t need to handle any of it. What you need to do right now is rest. Understood? Leave these small matters to us and go back and rest.” Luohua explained it briefly, and then, with an ache in her chest for him, told him to go back and rest early. There was a far more dangerous Divine War waiting after this one.

“With you all running around out here, I can’t rest easy.” Yue Yang still could not find any trace of Ji Wuri, and there was no telling when the evil god Weiguang would break loose. Asking him to sit quietly in the Grimoire World and rest was not going to happen.

“Honestly. We’re not children.”

Princess Qianqian awarded Yue Yang, for his part, an enormous roll of the eyes. She looked thoroughly annoyed on the surface. Underneath it, she liked being worried about.

Princess Qianqian’s brows drew together over the fighting below Storm Fortress.

These were not people from the Sky Tower or the Longteng Continent.

They were strangers she had never met.

And killing like this still filled her with a disgust she could not name — not at any one person, but at the war itself.

“A Divine War has nothing to do with common soldiers. Hei Zhou set them fighting here for one reason, to wipe out the followers God-Slayer had in the Eastern camp. God-Slayer is dead now and nobody knows where Hei Zhou is. This war has no meaning left at all.” Princess Qianqian signaled Yue Yang not to act. She had decided to settle this quagmire of a war herself.

“Get well back.” Yue Yang waved the Star Pirates and rebel soldiers away.

He could have raised the Creation Domain and supported her however he liked while she showed what she could do.

But she wanted to do it with her own hands, so of course he backed her without limit. He decided to stand quietly and watch, and see whether the tiger girl had resonated with that strange breakthrough of his and gained a step forward too.

Inside the Grimoire World, Sick Beauty and Yue Yu and the rest had each come away with their own comprehension and their own rising.

There was no reason for Princess Qianqian and the others to have come away with nothing. And she looked different.

She was greatly changed from what she had been.

So what exactly had Princess Qianqian come away with?

Something in Yue Yang started looking forward to this.

She drew the Tiger-Prison Divine Sword slowly up out of the Heaven-Devouring Beast, and the Holy Power Domain erupted across the whole field. Lightning tore the sky open and wove itself into countless threads of thunderlight. At the very top of the heavens a dragon’s head came out, and for a moment golden snakes danced wild and purple thunder burst, and every soul on that field was shaken into confusion. Heaven-fire came drifting down like rain, and onto Princess Qianqian the Vermilion Bird that rides such fire descended without a sound and became one body with her, adding a pair of wings to either side of her divine armor.

A dragon’s cry, and a tiger’s roar.

Every soldier on that battlefield felt the particular fear of a man being marched up to the block.

In the instant the White Tiger came down, a killing intent went up into the sky like a black wind and drowned a great many guilty souls, annihilating them.

The earth broke apart in a frenzy, splitting into cliffs. The ground opened in fissures no horse alive could have jumped. An endless force out of the abyss blew the whole land to pieces, and Storm Fortress — which nothing could break — shook under it, came apart, and went over onto its side…

Countless men were frightened enough to try to jump clear into the air, out of reach of that terrible earth-splitting force.

The thought had barely formed when a cold beyond cold came for them.

Every one of them was frozen solid.

“Hah!”

Princess Qianqian raised the Tiger-Prison Divine Sword over her head and stabbed it up into the empty air, straight at the sky.

Across the ground, weapons past counting — owned or ownerless, the heavy blades and sharp axes in generals’ hands or the spears and pikes and shields of common soldiers — were all pulled up toward the sky by the divine sword’s force and Princess Qianqian’s Sovereign Intent.

Several million weapons went up fast and packed thick — rain firing backward.

Wherever her divine sword pointed, they followed.

All those instruments of war, too many to count and every shape imaginable, gathered into a single body, as though an invisible divine hand in the sky were pressing them together with a power beyond anything. In a grinding of impact that set the teeth on edge, several million weapons closed at enormous speed into one sword of a kind that had never existed. Nearly a hundred meters across and a thousand meters long, and every part of it — edge, spine and point — made out of the weapons that had come up off the ground…

The moment that world-shaking giant sword was whole, it gave off countless streams of sword-qi that swept across the land and blotted out the sky.

They forced the soldiers of the two camps, East and West, apart from each other.

Any man loyal enough to refuse to fall back got his answer.

He was cut open in front of his own line.

The giant sword came down out of the sky with a roar.

A mountain of blade over their heads, and the weight of it set every living thing on that land shaking.

It drove deep into the ground in front of Storm Fortress, several hundred meters down, almost to the hilt, with only a length of that enormous spine and the hilt left above the surface, and the land shattered around it. Even so, what was left showing was enough to drain the color out of every soldier’s face on that field, set their legs shaking under them, and very nearly leave them collapsed in a puddle of their own making.

In the instant the blade went into the earth, the Vermilion Bird’s holy power set fire to the ground — and she judged it exactly right, thawing every frozen life free without doing the smallest harm to a single body.

The White Tiger’s holy power came cold and bristling and had already shattered every piece of armor and cloth on both armies.

It stripped the will to fight out of every man there.

Nobody could say who was the first to go down on his knees in awe.

With that one beginning, what followed was an avalanche. The soldiers of both armies looked as though they were competing to submit fastest, going down one after another with a crash… And nobody could say who let out the first wail, but it set off a collapse across the field like a tidal wave. Almost every man there was weeping, and the sound of grief came up out of the ground everywhere and did not stop. In front of absolute power, even the most committed of the die-hards was cowed by the fear in his own chest. In front of that giant sword, not one man could raise the will to fight or work up the killing intent to go on.

“Silence.” Princess Qianqian came down light as a drifting thing on top of the giant sword’s hilt.

The Tiger-Prison Divine Sword, held up in her hand.

Heaven and earth shook together under that sword. Even men at the super divine envoy level — the Wind Ear Marshal, Marshal Griffin, Golden Eagle General — did not dare lift their heads and look up at Princess Qianqian with a divine sword in her hand. The Star Pirates, who a moment ago had been muttering about whether she was Boss Titan’s little sweetheart or someone he was still chasing, had long since wet themselves. Every one of them lay flat on the ground with his backside hoisted higher than his head, terrified that any shortfall in respect would get him annihilated on the spot by the sword-intent of this heavenly maiden.

Princess Qianqian paid no attention to anyone’s attitude. She looked down from where she stood, took in the whole field with contempt, and delivered the first declaration she had made since setting foot in Mountain Beyond the Mountain. “God-Slayer is dead. Hei Zhou is defeated and gone. The eight Divine Sovereigns have all fallen. From this day on, whatever your camp and whatever your birth, you are all slaves beneath my sword.”

Sword slaves?

There was no time to digest that piece of news.

The whole field was beginning to catch up. God-Slayer dead? Hei Zhou defeated and gone? All eight Divine Sovereigns fallen?

Each item more shattering than the last, each one harder to believe than the last, and together they knocked the soldiers on that field senseless and wet… Even the marshals and the great generals of the various Divine Nations, all of them above super divine envoy level, went weak all over when news like that arrived, with their hearts close to bursting.

Was it true or not?

And if it was true, then it was madness. It was the end of hope…

(End of Chapter 1212)