“Ah!”

Yue Yang came awake out of the dream with a jolt and sat up.

“What’s wrong?” Hailan, deep asleep beside him, had been startled awake too. She asked it drowsily, half under.

“I had a dream.” Yue Yang worked at remembering it. The dream had been perfectly clear a moment ago, and now that he was awake there was nothing left of it at all. He frowned. “In the dream I think I went back to the Sky Tower. No — it was more like a voice was calling me, and then I was back at the Sky Tower… Maybe it was calling me back to the Sky Tower. I knew exactly what it was while I was in there. How does a person wake up and lose the whole thing?”

“Go back to sleep.” Hailan guessed it was the hard fight he’d just come through, on top of the enormous pressure coming off the evil god Weiguang. She said, to settle him, “Rest properly. Get yourself back in order as fast as you can. Every one of us is behind you.”

“But I…” There was a feeling in Yue Yang he couldn’t put a name to — that there was something he urgently needed to do, and that he of all people had gone and forgotten it.

The transmigrator turned it over and got nowhere, and lay down again.

In the dream, he still felt the voice.

Calling to him from somewhere far off.

He searched the whole way.

He wanted to find out who kept calling him, and no matter what he did, there was no trace of anyone.

When he woke the second time, his head was still fogged, but he came around quickly — and gave everyone nearby a bad fright. The room had filled up with people at some point: the Sick Beauty, Yue Yu, the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady, Princess Qianqian, all of them there. Even Fengxian the Beauty and the Southern Wilderness Demon King were sitting by the bed. Nobody so much as blinked. They were all “observing” one deeply embarrassed transmigrator.

On account of a certain bad deed before bed — the kind that is very good for body and mind — Yue Yang, for his part, had not one stitch of clothing on him. He was in the fully unclad state of naked truth.

Thank heaven for the thin quilt.

Otherwise Yue Yang, with this many people watching this hard, would have needed a crack in the floor to climb into.

“What are all of you doing here?” Yue Yang got the quilt wrapped tight in a hurry, in real fear that the Southern Wilderness Demon King or Fengxian the Beauty would decide to be funny and yank it off him.

“Hailan said you were unsettled and talking in your sleep the whole time. She was worried about you, so we came to look in.” No one was gentler than the Sick Beauty. She took out a handkerchief and blotted the cold sweat off him, then put a cup of tea in his hand for his dry throat.

“It was only a dream.” Yue Yang made a show of being at ease and took a long swallow.

“You’ve been having this dream for a day and a night, though, and it looked like agony. You kept talking in your sleep and none of us could understand a word of it — the only things we could make out were burning, war, that kind of thing. All killing and fighting. Who are you at war with in there?” The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady was thoroughly puzzled. Ordinarily the Heart-Link ribbons joined them all and their minds ran together, but a dream this strange offered nothing to feel. They could sense Yue Yang’s confusion and unease, but they could not make out what was happening to him inside it.

“I…” Yue Yang hunted for it desperately, and found that the dream world, so sharp while he was in it, had gone from him a second time. There had been something important he’d been trying to hold on to. In the dream something had kept telling him, over and over, to fix it in his mind — and the instant he woke it was gone.

“Yi Nan isn’t here. If she were, with the spirit mirror she might have been able to tell us something.” What Princess Qianqian really wanted to say was Xue Wuxia. With her Book of Truth, and a mind-sense closer to Yue Yang’s than anyone’s, she could certainly have gotten to the bottom of it. Yue Yang’s condition had everyone half suspecting the same thing — was the evil god Weiguang up to something?

Could Weiguang be getting to him somehow, by some means?

If he could put Yue Yang off his stride —

Then the coming battle would tilt his way, and no question about it.

Only there was one problem: what method, what means, could Weiguang possibly use? Yue Yang had been inside his own Grimoire World, and after that inside Hailan’s. However strong Weiguang was, there was no way for him to reach into another person’s Grimoire World. That was a supreme law no god could touch, laid down by the ancient deities — an existence no will could destroy or alter.

And if it wasn’t the evil god Weiguang, then who?

Who else could send a quasi-divine-tier expert — a man who stayed lucid even inside his own dreams — wandering through nightmares one after another?

Everyone in the room fell to thinking about it… and because of this strange business, Yue Yang’s plan to rebuild a perfect body for Qingping had to be put on hold. Fortunately Qingping was still lying quietly inside the mother-of-pearl shell, recovering, with no idea; otherwise she’d have been badly let down.

Because she was waiting to be reunited with a certain big bad wolf, and her neck had gotten long from waiting.

“One way or another, I am going to kill the evil god Weiguang.” Yue Yang was not knocked down by any of this. If anything he was spoiling for it.

What he’d come away with from the Trial Grounds was not the Sacred Codex.

That was not a thing you got by wanting it.

Divine artifacts choose their masters.

A Sacred Codex more than any of them. Nobody in this world can force it.

Yue Yang’s real gain in the Trial Grounds was what came to him each time he pushed through a gate. From the fourth gate, Desire Valley, to the seventh, Human Valley, every one had given him a different experience of living and a different understanding of life. The deepest of them, and the one he was least aware of on the surface, was the three little lolis inside the endless world of the silver grimoire — Creation, Destruction, and Eternity. They had opened his eyes. They had told him the actual truth, and made him understand for the first time what creation really is, what destruction really is, and what eternity really is. A martial artist who doesn’t understand that truth — at any rank, however fearsome in the divine realm, however overwhelming the strength he shows — is nothing but hollow dust adrift, a passer-by in time, not worth mentioning.

It was that, plus the Sword Spirit Imperial Lady’s guidance, plus Princess Qianqian and the others walking every step of it with him.

Which was how Yue Yang, at the quasi-divine tier, with a will belonging to the super-divine tier and strength he himself could not classify —

Killed the mysterious man, who had been stronger than anything he’d ever seen.

The mysterious man was a monster out of the same era as Tianyu, the Divine Hall Sovereign of the Central Divine Hall. Even Ji Wuri, heaven’s own favored son, had been beaten in front of him and run like a whipped dog… though Yue Yang did not credit that kill to any real strength of his own. It had come down to his trump cards, and above all to the Fate Giant.

Actually challenging the mysterious man was still a long way off, never mind killing him.

That brutal fight had also shown Yue Yang the size of the gap between himself and those undying old things. The Demon Dragon, whom the three little lolis Creation, Destruction and Eternity considered an idiot; “Dongfang,” the first mind of the Central Divine Hall; Tianyu the Divine Hall Sovereign; the Peerless Emperor Wushuang, still shut inside his seal; the evil god Weiguang, waiting right in front of him for the war to open… all of them, every last one of these old relics. Some were enemies and some were friends, some were strangers and some were threats in waiting, and which of them stood across from him now and which he’d have to go after later was not settled. Every one of these old ghosts was a summit Yue Yang could not yet climb past.

Catching up to them, and challenging them, was going to take more time and much harder work.

“Let’s start training. You fight me first.” Princess Qianqian seemed to have forgotten the humiliating business of Yue Yang spanking her backside in public. Looking at him now, with his blood up, she said nothing out loud, but inside she agreed with him completely. This man who never backed off, who was forever pushing the limits of the martial path, whose fighting spirit went up against heaven itself — this was what she most wanted to see in him, and the greatest pride of her life besides.

“Right!” Yue Yang came off the bed in one bound, chest out, chin up, war radiating off him.

He had completely forgotten he was in the fully unclad state of naked truth.

He sprang up.

The sheet slid off him, and his original form stood revealed.

The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady went blank. The Southern Wilderness Demon King covered her mouth and snickered. Fengxian the Beauty gave him a thumbs-up. Princess Qianqian turned on her heel and left — she had run out of anything to say to a certain wolf. Yue Yu put a hand over her forehead, aching for this reckless brother of hers, and it was a long way from the first time… Liuye, sitting in the corner, went scarlet and covered her small face, not daring to look again for even a second. And Xiayi, who had been perfectly composed about Yue Yang’s nightmares, was struck dumb by the murderous, unrivaled something that had just presented itself at close range. Her mouth came open and would not close again for a good while.

Which was fair enough, because from where she was sitting she could see it very clearly.

Only the gentlest one, the Sick Beauty, and the best-behaved one, Xiao Nu, kept their heads enough to pick up the quilt and his clothes and get him covered, taking a little of the edge off an atmosphere that had become suffocating.

The Sky Tower.

First floor. Longteng Continent. The Tianra Imperial Palace.

Not one of the guards outside the palace gate saw anything. Even the Thousand-Eye General on duty — universally reckoned the most loyal and the most alert man they had — found nothing out of order. It was not until one of Her Majesty’s own maids started out to announce the meal that anyone discovered two strangers, standing outside the great hall, who had been there for who knew how long. Ordinarily nobody entered this place without permission — not even the Yue family’s third young master, who bothered Her Majesty often enough that every servant in the palace knew him by sight. Today two strangers had simply arrived uninvited, which was not what anyone in the palace had expected.

Two men who could slip past the guards and the Thousand-Eye General, past every open post and hidden watcher in the palace, and reach Her Majesty’s own hall without a soul noticing.

They were obviously not weaklings.

As a maid who attended Her Majesty personally, the girl had the finest upbringing in the world.

Once she was over the shock, she did not lose her head and scream about assassins, nor did she go pale and run back to guard her mistress. She composed herself, put a courteous smile on her small face, gave the two strangers a light curtsy, and — not forgetting her errand — went on to announce the meal.

She left the two of them standing there, assassins or guests, and withdrew, quick and unruffled.

By then maids further off, and inside the hall, had noticed the disturbance as well.

Not one of them panicked either. After the first shock they did exactly as the first maid had done, each going about her business as though the two strangers were not there at all, carrying on with the work in her hands.

“Mr. Chunyu, watching this, I sincerely feel the girls at home could stand to improve themselves. What is breeding? What is bearing? What is courtesy? What is refinement? This! I think there is nowhere else in the world you will find maids of such quality.” The man who had spoken stood slightly forward. He was middle-aged, in a white robe, clear-featured and of a rare and elegant bearing, plainly one of those deeply read scholars who hold the whole world inside them. Those deep eyes carried a light of wisdom past describing. Never mind ordinary people — any famous scholar alive, seeing those eyes, would not be able to help feeling small.

He seemed to have no martial power at all, and yet those eyes alone were enough to make you feel he held the greatest power there is.

That kind of knowledge and wisdom, above all things and reaching through heaven and earth.

Apart from this one scholar.

Nobody could ever have had it.

Even the old man standing beside him — white-haired with a child’s complexion, an elder of wisdom in his own right — was dimmed to nothing the moment he stood next to a scholar as bright as the open moon, and could be overlooked entirely.

That wisdom was not only knowledge, and not only bearing. It was a kind of power.

The kind that holds heaven and earth in its chest and lets nothing escape its palm.

“You two came ten thousand li to discuss my maids?” Her Majesty’s voice was like something out of a dream, and like spring water dropping through an empty valley.

“Naturally that is not the only reason.” The white-haired, child-faced old man the scholar had called Mr. Chunyu laughed out loud. “I have long heard that Your Majesty excels at making things out of dreams — mirages of endless beauty. This old man is a lover of dreams himself. I have come ten thousand li hoping to discuss with Your Majesty that thing which ordinary mortals puzzle over and grope after and never get hold of: the ‘dream.’ I ask Your Majesty not to be sparing with her instruction.”

(End of Chapter 1221)