Princess Qianqian had no interest in building a kingdom in Mountain Beyond the Mountain and being a queen of it or anything of the sort.

None of that appealed to her at all.

She had cowed every officer and soldier on the field and taken them as sword slaves for one reason: to stop a farce that would otherwise have run until everyone in it was dead. Having made her point, she stopped caring what any of them did and went back to the Grimoire World with her nose in the air, leaving several million officers and men of the two camps staring blankly after her, at a complete loss, with no idea what they were supposed to do next.

Luohua had no appetite for that kind of mess either. She yawned and went back to sleep for her complexion.

Fortunately there was still Yue Yang, for his part.

Otherwise every officer and man at Storm Fortress would have wept himself to death — several million abandoned wives drowning the countryside in tears. And when they saw that Yue Yang, for his part, was also getting ready to slip away, every man of marshal or general rank and above, Eastern camp and Western alike, converged on him. They stood there staring at him, eye to eye, not daring to breathe loudly, waiting for him to speak.

Yue Yang, for his part, privately regretted not running faster. If it hadn’t been for God-Slayer and the others, this mess could go to whoever wanted it. He didn’t.

“What are you all looking at me for? Don’t tell me you still don’t believe it.” Yue Yang did not stand on ceremony. He casually brought out the ancient divine sword Lihen, the Zhuye Divine Pearl and the Yinxue Divine Blade and set them out for viewing, with enormous nonchalance, without realizing that he had already drained the color out of every marshal and general there.

“My lord God-Slayer fell in the Divine War as well?”

The Wind Ear Marshal wilted at the sight and sat down heavily on the rubble of Storm Fortress.

An exhaustion and a weight without end came over him, and the morale that had been at its peak a moment ago would not lift by so much as a hair. He heard himself muttering. “We have fought for our lord this whole time. What do we do? What are we supposed to do now? What actually happened out there? The eight Divine Sovereigns — how could every one of them fall in a single Divine War? This is beyond anything.”

He did not want to believe it.

But.

The fact was in front of him and there was no arguing with it.

The divine artifacts had all come free of their contracts, and every one of them was in Yue Titan’s hands. That proved the eight Divine Sovereigns had fallen. Nothing else could have made it happen.

Guhai, Wan’e and the other Western camp marshals were more frightened still, because they had noticed that Hei Zhou’s divine artifact, the Zhuye Divine Pearl, had already accepted Yue Titan as its master. If Hei Zhou were alive, there was no possibility at all of the Zhuye recognizing a new one.

Had this Yue Titan and that sword goddess of a woman killed all eight Divine Sovereigns just now?

Every marshal and general there began doing his private arithmetic.

The thing was done, so hesitating was pointless.

Sword slaves, then. Fine.

Better to take service under a new lord than to go on clutching at eight fallen Divine Sovereigns — and the faster the better, because the credit for being the first to declare for him was not something to let anyone else take.

“We greet our lord Titan.” Guhai and Wan’e exchanged one look and went to their knees almost together.

They had always been men who put profit first.

Which made them the quickest to react to a thing like this. In an instant they could drop everything and abandon the past, kneeling at the same moment, racing each other to swear loyalty to Yue Yang and take the credit of being first.

Rank and station did not matter in the slightest. Be the first man a new lord looks kindly on, and your prospects are unlimited.

And wasn’t a change of master an improvement?

This new lord could kill all eight Divine Sovereigns.

More than that, this new lord had a sword goddess of unbelievable strength backing him up.

“You—” Marshal Griffin and Golden Eagle General found what Guhai and Wan’e were doing thoroughly contemptible, and there was nothing they could do about it. The men were shameless, and they were declaring for the new lord, and you could not even say they were wrong. In front of absolute power, how ridiculous is resistance? Besides, Yue Titan was somebody they already knew. Being taken into his service was better than bending the knee to a Divine Sovereign who was a stranger.

“I have no intention of staying in Mountain Beyond the Mountain, and no intention of taking on subjects or retainers. Let’s dispense with all of that.” Yue Yang was not about to take men like Guhai and Wan’e into his service. He did not so much as glance at them. He did nod to Marshal Griffin and the others he knew. “God-Slayer, Zhaoxi, Shuanghan and Qingyun gave their lives to seal the divine bell, and at the end they entrusted everything to me. I’ve accepted the divine artifacts and the grimoires. What goes on inside the Divine Nations is not my business — sort it out yourselves, do whatever you like, and whatever you do, don’t ask me. Hei Zhou, Tianchou and Shafeng are all gone, some killed by me and some by others. Only Chiqiu survived, once he shed his divine power. He handed me the Tunlong Spear and decided with his wife to withdraw from the world and live as they please. So it isn’t wrong to say all eight Divine Sovereigns have fallen. The Divine War got somewhat complicated and I can’t explain it all at once — so here. I already went over some of it with the Star Pirates on the way here. Flower Duck, Guoguo, come out and tell everyone about it. I’m going back for a nap.”

Having found Princess Qianqian, and with Xue Wuxia weighing on him again, Yue Yang, for his part, finished speaking and bolted straight back into the Grimoire World. Slow was not the word for it.

Before they got to Storm Fortress, Yue Yang had gone over part of it with Flower Duck, Guoguo and the rest of the Star Pirates aboard the Great Swan, covering in outline whatever could be told to the world. He didn’t want to spend too much time facing Marshal Griffin and the others, and he wanted still less to repeat the whole account over and over.

So he handed the heavy responsibility to the Star Pirates.

Flower Duck and Guoguo, called out by name.

They were somebody at last.

Heads up, chests out, faces flushed with pleasure — a flock of very proud roosters.

In fact Chiqiu was not the only one of the eight Divine Sovereigns still alive. Hei Zhou was not dead either. But Yue Yang had already learned through Xiao Wenli’s mind-speech out of the Grimoire World that Yika and Weilai had picked up Hei Zhou’s trail. What they had found was that the Western Divine Sovereign, far from going into hiding, was brazenly making for the God-Slaying Mystic Realm, apparently intending to break the evil god Weiguang out of the trap he was caught in. Yika and the Death Mantis-sister both concluded that this creature meant to release an evil god at no benefit to himself and take everyone down with him, and the fury of it sent them straight at the fallen Western Divine Sovereign.

Yika’s Wishing Angel sounded its horn, her hatred talent erupted in full, and she nailed an Arrow of Hatred into Hei Zhou.

Before Hei Zhou is dead.

There is no getting that arrow out of him.

With Yika and the Death Mantis-sister working together, and Hei Zhou’s divine power gutted, his divine artifact gone over to somebody else and nothing at all left to him — he was not dead yet, but Yue Yang had already passed sentence on him in advance. Princess Qianqian had gone further: back when she was condensing the giant sword, she had already judged Hei Zhou a dead man, which is why she said Hei Zhou is defeated and gone.

What sort of death was poor Hei Zhou going to get? Yue Yang, for his part, had no interest in finding out.

He knew one thing.

The man’s death was not going to be an easy one.

A comfortable death, for someone with one of Yika’s Arrows of Hatred in him? Don’t make me laugh.

Still, thinking about it — Hei Zhou, the peerless ruthless warlord who had ruled the Western Divine Nation, vicious and merciless his whole life, a killer of men past counting, cruel and without pity, soaked in blood — dying at last at the hands of Yika and the Death Mantis-sister Weilai counted as a kind of just deserts. If Hei Zhou had run into Hong and A-Man, being stared to death by A-Man wouldn’t hurt much. If he had run into Duoduo and Jiangying it would have been easier still: he would simply have become fertilizer. Meeting the Divine Punishment girl and the Southern Demon Queen would have been slightly more tragic, though before the lightning killed him he might at least have gotten a requiem out of it… Dying at the hands of Yika and Weilai was the worst luck of the lot. Either Weilai would take hold of him and scour his soul with a divine angel’s divine power, or Yika would shell him with ten thousand guns until he was a sieve.

Better for him if he didn’t have much divine power left. Otherwise the dying would take longer.

Yue Yang thought about it and found himself a little worried on the man’s behalf.

Those two girls, Yika and Weilai — they weren’t going to spend three days and three nights killing Hei Zhou and still not be done, were they? Because if so, that really was too tragic for words.

Nobody except Yue Yang and Princess Qianqian and the others knew how Hei Zhou was going to die, and nobody cared either. Right now several million people were sitting below Storm Fortress in a ring around the giant sword, glaring at the enemies beside them who had been trying to kill them a few minutes earlier, and waiting quietly for Flower Duck, Guoguo and the rest of the big-mouthed Star Pirates to begin… A Divine War in which all eight Divine Sovereigns fell. Who was going to miss that?

Flower Duck, Guoguo and the other Star Pirates and rebel soldiers took up their positions aboard the Great Swan, hanging in the sky, thoroughly pleased with themselves.

They did not dare fly over to the giant sword and stand on the hilt the way Princess Qianqian had.

Any of them bold enough to try it would not have needed Marshal Griffin or Golden Eagle General to deal with him. Wind Hawk, Winged Tiger and Flamingo would have punted the little bastard a hundred kilometers and then dragged him off to be buried alive.

Every one of them held Princess Qianqian, who had condensed that giant sword, in absolute awe, and felt it from the bottom of his heart.

That respect was not one hair less than what the Wind Ear Marshal felt for God-Slayer, or Marshal Griffin for Chiqiu.

And why would it be? That giant sword, unprecedented in all of history, stood right there in front of them. Anyone in front of it felt small and insignificant, and found the urge to prostrate himself coming up unbidden.

“So. That Ji Wuri, after plotting in secret with the former Western Divine Sovereign Hei Zhou, sent one of his avatars to the reserve camp in the valley at Lean Dog Ridge behind Storm Fortress, and used the name of a Prophet to lure us Star Pirates and the rebel army into his trap. But we’re clever men, and we saw through his scheme at a glance—” Flower Duck did not get to finish. Several million listeners spat him down. So clever, and you swallowed it like a dead dog? Without Yue Titan you’d have burst and been done with. The whole crowd below erupted. Guoguo saw how this was going and hurriedly changed styles. “We fell for it, we did. But that Ji Wuri, what a sinister man — he had several million of us being played with in the palm of his hand and none of us noticed a thing! And not only us. The eight Divine Sovereigns fell for it too! You have no idea. This Ji Wuri drew an evil god of the most terrifying strength here from the Heavenly Realm, and that god knocked Hei Zhou down with a single finger — and even Ji Wuri himself took the backlash of it… A Divine Power Piercing Wave, crack, and Ji Wuri, with a divine artifact shielding his body, was run through by that evil god’s one finger, front to back, an enormous transparent hole in him. You cannot imagine how strong that evil god was! And that’s not the half of it. God-Slayer put everything he had into one sword stroke, and the evil god stopped it with a single finger—”

“Ssss.” Several million listeners drew breath through their teeth in one wave of sound.

God-Slayer’s full-strength sword stroke, stopped with one finger?

Wasn’t that evil god a bit of a monster?

That was how the common soldiers took it. In the ears of the Wind Ear Marshal, Marshal Griffin, Wan’e, Guhai and the other men at that level, it produced an entirely different reaction. If the evil god was that terrifying, then Yue Titan and that sword goddess from a moment ago, who had killed the evil god, were more terrifying still. And neither of them had looked particularly injured.

Wind Hawk, Winged Tiger and Flamingo worked hard at telling themselves to stay calm. Yue Titan was an impossible person. They had known that for a long time.

The hovering motherships that Taiyan and Bingli, those two great gods of legend, had invented and created — in ten thousand years nobody had been able to alter them, God-Slayer and Hei Zhou included. This boy had turned the Gannet into the Great Swan, and on top of that could build several hundred Black Tortoise Guard Shenmie war dolls to run her…

So stay calm. This boy simply cannot be worked out by ordinary reasoning, all right?

“Now then. That evil god, worked into a temper by Lord Titan, gave a great roar and transformed into a beast giant that blades could not cut and water and fire could not touch, and at that point not even Lord Titan could hurt him in the slightest! So how was he supposed to fight it? And here’s the worst part — for that evil god, that was only the first form. Behind it were the demon form and the god form, two final shapes many times more powerful still. Facing a fight that difficult, how was Lord Titan going to answer it? Have a think about that, everyone, take a guess. I’ll leave it there for a moment. First I’ll have a drink of water.” Guoguo, who had been telling it with flying eyebrows and flying spittle, had finally talked himself dry and decided to take on some fluids. His decision to dig a pit and leave them in it met with unanimous contempt. You dare leave us hanging? At the most important moment, you just stop? And you want us to guess? Guess your sister!

Clods of earth and stones past counting went up at him like rain.

If Guoguo had wanted to put up a building, there was enough stone there for a skyscraper with plenty left over.

Yue Yang, for his part, had no idea his edited version of the Divine War would be this popular. If he had known in advance he would certainly have charged admission, or written it up as a novel — and the manuscript fees would not have been small…

“It really has changed completely!” Princess Qianqian, back in the Grimoire World, could hardly recognize the place she lived in every day. She did not set much store by the change itself. What left her both delighted and uneasy was that Xue Wuxia was gone. If Wuxia had woken, that would be one thing — she had been hoping for it a long while, and had wanted to know how much the snow girl who inherited the ice and snow divine power had risen, and what new abilities she had comprehended in her sleep. But Xue Wuxia had woken and then vanished, and nobody knew where she had gone. With things standing like that, even if Princess Qianqian had wanted to be a little jealous, she would have been too embarrassed to try.

She looked at Yue Yang sitting silent in front of the bed where Xue Wuxia had lain, and then reached out and gathered him in, holding his head tight against her, letting him rest it on the high, firm curve of her chest, and comforted him in a gentle tone she almost never used, soft as a breath of wind.

“Don’t worry. She’s only gone back to her own Grimoire World to sit in seclusion. Condensing a divine rank isn’t easy — Duoduo and Jiangying both needed a long stretch of seclusion when it was their turn. I know what you’re afraid of. You think she’s gone to challenge the evil god Weiguang. But I can promise you this: the first thing she wanted to see when she opened her eyes was you. If she hadn’t had no choice, if there hadn’t been some reason she had to go back and sit in seclusion, she would have waited for you. Do you know how much she has to say to you? How could she leave without a word? She hasn’t gone anywhere. She’s still right here beside us. All you have to do is be patient a little longer. You’ve waited this long. Are you really going to begrudge a little more time?”

Yue Yang was deeply moved. Pillowed on that fragrant peak of jade, breathing in a maiden’s scent that cleared the mind at one breath, he felt the chaos in him settle down by degrees.

Then Princess Qianqian’s body gave a jolt.

She raised a small fist with something haughty in it and something savage, and waggled it at him. “Just lying there like that, you’re already taking every advantage there is, you awful man. And you, greedy creature that you are, you have to put a hand on me as well? So much for comforting you.”

“Ahem. This — this is force of habit…” a certain wolf argued, speciously.

“Force of habit for me too!” a certain tiger girl made as if to bite him.

The next second his mouth was over hers.

Biting, and kissing.

Sometimes there is not much difference between the two…

(End of Chapter 1213)