A hundred and eight kilometers of Yinglong. In theory a peak-tier war doll like this was absolutely invincible.

If the evil god Weiguang’s planet avatar had not existed.

Then no war doll and no warship in the entire Heavenly Realm could have been mentioned in the same breath with it. The primordial and ancient ages were too far back for anyone to know the particulars, but in the several tens of thousands of years of the near-ancient era, the histories record nothing like the Yinglong ever appearing. Before he built it, Yue Yang had not known he could reach this level himself.

In fact the credit for the Yinglong’s birth belongs mainly to the Sword Spirit Imperial Lady, who swung a sword and cut the chaos energy inside the Creation Divine Pearl into its portions. Without her, Yue Yang — whose mind was already clouding and whose power had gone out of his control — could never have built the Yinglong that exists today.

And even if he had built it, it could never have reached this supreme state of man and dragon made one.

“Roar!”

The whole Yinglong took flight under the direction of Yue Yang’s will and drove forward like a mad thing.

The dragon’s cry, thrown up at the sky, shook heaven and earth.

Weiguang’s divine mind could no longer hold down a Yinglong and a Yue Yang climbing at full extension. With man and dragon fused, that unstoppable ascent could break a spacetime barrier, let alone anything else.

Facing the Yinglong’s charge, the evil god Weiguang, working the planet avatar, felt his opponent’s presence and the threat of it at once. If he had not come to Mountain Beyond the Mountain — if he had still been at Tower Beyond the Tower in Human Valley — then his planet avatar would in fact have been no match for a hundred and eight kilometers of Yinglong. But he had come to Earth Valley, and Human Valley’s prohibitions did not reach here. Weiguang had gone into water like a fish, his strength had exploded upward more than tenfold, and the planet avatar had swollen tenfold along with it. Against that, the hundred-and-eight-kilometer Yinglong had turned into a thin little dragon no bigger than a mud loach.

“Rrrrumble!”

The sky went dark fast.

Then a palm came through the sky. The planet avatar spread its hand and pressed it down toward the ground.

Weiguang, trading on the sheer size of that body, had no intention of giving Yue Yang or the Yinglong any opening at all. He meant to swat both of them dead in one stroke.

The whole sky looked as though it had shattered. The air, struck at that speed, threw off burning sparks so fierce they dazzled the eye — the sky was nothing but orange flame from edge to edge, and no other color in it. The air currents were a hundred times more savage than any storm, and they drove outward from the center by force, exploding away like a shockwave, except that the shockwave was hundreds of kilometers across.

The planet avatar’s palm had not landed yet, and the land below had already cracked open and deformed.

Mountains snapped.

Enormous rocks sank into the earth.

Trees came up by the roots, and great stretches of forest went to nothing.

Rivers and lakes threw up water in the millions of tons, and the water shot away with the spreading air currents to who knew where.

“Go!”

Yue Yang, fighting as one body with the Yinglong, had come through any number of brutal fights and had a will hammered tougher than steel. Even so, the sight of a scene out of the end of the world took hold of him. The shadow of death came down with that sky-covering hand and blotted out the sky inside him.

At the most dangerous instant, Yue Yang, who possessed supreme Sovereign Intent, held out against Weiguang’s divine-mind pressure and against the fear working on him from inside.

That giant hand, hundreds of kilometers of it, came down to destroy the world.

Yue Yang drove the Yinglong.

And he went forward instead of back.

Inside a space storm that was pulverizing everything, the Yinglong, checked once and checked again, drove up against it.

Under the weight of Weiguang’s divine mind, the planet avatar’s palm had the Yinglong covered and would not let go. Yue Yang refused to yield. He set his teeth, drove the dragon, and plowed a trench hundreds of kilometers long straight across that palm — and in the moment before the heavy hand struck the ground, he brought the Yinglong’s long body curling out around a finger, barely.

Weiguang’s reactions were quick.

The smallest movement of his divine mind.

And the giant palm, which had just come down on the ground and produced the most terrible impact and earthquake in the world, whipped back up. The hand opened at the web of the thumb, the five fingers spread, and it went to catch and crush the Yinglong between them.

The Yinglong, swimming wildly through that violent shockwave, spun three hundred and sixty full turns before it got clear of the planet avatar’s grab.

Weiguang was not satisfied. He swept his hand back in pursuit, trying to catch the escaping Yinglong on the backhand.

Yue Yang, with his fighting spirit boiling, made an extremely bold decision.

The Yinglong climbed to its limit and came back.

That long body, which had been drifting upward, shot back down like a loosed arrow, the dragon’s head thrown wide, and drove straight at the sky-standing thumb, tens of kilometers of it. At the instant of impact the head twisted aside and slipped the collision, the dragon’s horns grazing around the sky-standing thumb — and in the moment it slid clear of the giant palm, the Yinglong’s tail lashed hard across the joint of that thumb. Off the force of the blow, the Yinglong reversed its body at once and went on flying forward.

The sky-standing thumb, hit from nowhere by a dragon’s tail, cracked open at the joint in a terrible fissure.

Weiguang was angry.

He put on speed regardless of the damage to his finger and came after the Yinglong hard.

Yue Yang had been building the charge for some time. The Star Burst came out of the Yinglong’s mouth — a ball of star-burst energy compressed without limit — and detonated on the cracked joint of the sky-standing thumb. A Star Burst can blow a star to powder and there is no arguing with the force of it. If Yue Yang had used it against the Solar King or Ji Wuri the effect would not have been much; the charge time and the delivery make it hard to land on an enemy who crosses a thousand li in an instant, and no amount of power helps if it never connects. But however nimble Weiguang’s planet avatar was, it was a super-colossus and it could not dodge an attack.

That sky-standing thumb, tens of kilometers of it — never mind Yue Yang, you could put a blind man behind the Star Burst and he would hit it comfortably.

An explosion shook the sky.

Sand and stone flew.

The dust it kicked up rolled across the whole land and blotted out the sun.

But when the storm carried the dust off, Yue Yang found that the sky-standing thumb, which by rights should have broken, was still standing there in front of him. Fissures ran over it like a spiderweb and it hung unsteadily at the joint — but not even something as powerful as the Star Burst could blow apart a thumb that had already taken a heavy strike from the Yinglong’s tail.

And this was only one thumb of Weiguang’s planet avatar. Set against knocking down the whole of it, a man felt helpless.

Weiguang’s planet avatar reached for the Yinglong again — and this time with both hands.

The two palms closed together and cupped, trapping the Yinglong against the avatar’s chest.

Yue Yang played stunned.

Not a movement.

He waited until the planet avatar had the Yinglong’s body caught and was ready to bear down and wring it in two, and then he came up all at once, with the force of a thunderclap, and out of the Yinglong’s head he sent the sky-tearing crimson sword-qi.

Scarlet Heaven Tempering. The moment it appeared the whole vault of heaven was dyed with rose light, and the sword-qi, stored up and never released, went straight at the bright sky, carrying Yue Yang’s killing intent and his Sovereign Intent with it. The sword-qi cut space open and very nearly outran time, and before Weiguang’s divine mind could respond it had already passed over the target Yue Yang had locked in long before: that sky-standing thumb, struck and struck again and covered in damage.

The sky-standing thumb broke where it stood, in two, at the joint.

Yue Yang took the opening and tore free, and with man and dragon as one he drove the Yinglong upward at the fastest speed of his life, straight at the head of the planet avatar — a head so enormous he could not see the whole face of it.

Weiguang’s planet avatar suddenly opened a terrible mouth, as though to swallow in one bite a Yinglong that was a hundred and eight kilometers long and still looked tiny beside it.

The Yinglong changed direction desperately and kept correcting its course, and it did not retreat. Flinching from a fight was not in Yue Yang’s will.

In the end, before the teeth of that terrible mouth could close, the Yinglong broke by main force through the enormously thick lip of rock.

And it carved into the planet avatar’s face a gouge a thousand meters deep and hundreds of thousands of meters long.

The Yinglong struck a piece of rock the size of a small mountain off the planet avatar’s nose.

The Yinglong ran the length of the bridge of that nose.

And it drove head-on into the point between the brows of Weiguang’s planet avatar, where the dragon’s star let out a golden sword-qi that destroys all things: the Orange Vast Radiance.

However strong Weiguang’s divine mind was, taking the Orange Vast Radiance at that range and with that accuracy was not pleasant. The surface wound between the planet avatar’s brows was not serious, but the innate sword-qi had gone through the defense and driven straight at the divine mind hidden inside the avatar’s skull, the thing that controlled all of it.

Weiguang, feeling the outrage of having been hit, clawed furiously at the planet avatar’s own face with both hands.

The broken rock all gathered into his hands.

The Yinglong and Yue Yang, having landed the blow, were running for their lives, and the planet avatar blew out a gust of divine mind that scattered the broken rock out of its hands and turned all of it into a terrible meteor rain, chasing the Yinglong across the sky.

Yue Yang put the Yinglong completely upright, head down, and dove.

It presented the smallest possible target.

But Weiguang was not letting him go that easily. His divine mind stayed locked on the Yinglong, and long and slim as the hundred-and-eight-kilometer body was, it was still an enormous target. Getting clear of a meteor rain that Weiguang’s divine mind was steering was very nearly impossible. More to the point, the planet avatar had already spread both arms and was waiting outside — and the moment Yue Yang cleared the meteor rain, those arms would sweep back around and have him.

“A drizzle. Who’s supposed to be scared of that?” Yue Yang talked tough, but he knew that taking a meteor was not going to be pleasant, and that once a meteor connected the Yinglong would lose speed, which would very likely give the planet avatar the catch it wanted.

“Boom. Boom. Boom.”

Yue Yang drove the Yinglong weaving and threading through the meteor rain like something possessed.

If there had been a second option he would not have taken the risk.

Unfortunately this was already the best method available.

He got clear of the largest and the fastest of the meteor groups, but there was no dodging all of the smaller ones. Choices had to be made, and this one was unavoidable.

Countless meteors came down like rain on the Yinglong’s head and body, and a few of the big ones grazed its wings and knocked the dragon rocking from side to side as it threaded through. If Yue Yang’s will had been any less firm, or his concentration any less complete — if he had not been buying survival time at the smallest possible cost the entire way — that wave of meteors would very likely have buried them alive.

More powerful than the meteor rain was the sky-standing thumb, now broken off and falling.

Twenty kilometers of it, on the scale of a small planet.

It struck the ground.

Everything on the land evaporated.

The shockwave it produced threw Yue Yang’s Yinglong and the meteor rain both straight back up into the sky… caught between two destroying forces, the Yinglong and Yue Yang began a hard journey with no say in it at all. Having only just escaped the mouth of Weiguang’s planet avatar, they were being shaken right back into it.

Weiguang was delighted at the sight. The planet avatar brought its two palms together around the Yinglong and the meteor rain along with it.

He had only to use divine power to crush the ball of it.

And this loathsome enemy of his.

He would be so much ash.

The meteors that slipped the net shot back and struck the planet avatar’s huge body, and Weiguang paid them no attention whatsoever. All of his divine mind was on holding down the Yinglong and Yue Yang, who were fighting to break out of his hand and nearly doing it.

A meteor struck the crown of the planet avatar’s head hard.

At first Weiguang took it for one of the meteors from his own rain, and thought nothing of it.

Then, one after another, several more meteors arrived, and faster.

They knocked gusts of rock smoke off the top of the planet avatar’s head.

Only then did the planet avatar, its hands still closed around the ball, register that the attack was coming from behind it. The enormous head turned back and looked up into the depth of the sky. For the first time, Weiguang’s divine sense noticed how bright the stars were — the twelve houses of the zodiac above all, so dazzling they hurt to look at — and a mysterious star force was coming down out of that endless star-filled sky, faintly connected to the burning ball of meteors in his hand. Only then did Weiguang understand that Yue Titan, inside the Yinglong, had been up to something.

The twelve zodiac houses in the sky seemed to be turning, slowly.

And every fraction those stars moved.

The star force increased by a fraction.

When Leo, which had been near the zenith to begin with, moved to the top of the sky, Weiguang’s divine sense found a ball of light coming down at a speed beyond imagining.

He put his divine mind out toward it, touched that terrible ball of light, and discovered to his shock that it was made of the meteors of the meteor belt between Mountain Beyond the Mountain and Earth Valley. They had gathered toward him as though they had been called, faster and faster, and with Leo’s star force behind them they had started accelerating a few thousand kilometers out. By the time they came inside a thousand kilometers, all of them had turned into a terrible meteor shower.

If it were only a few hundred meteors, there was the planet avatar.

Weiguang would not have cared.

But if the meteors of the meteor belt had been called in by Leo’s star force at a tenth — no, at a hundredth of their number — that would be enough to bury him alive a hundred times over.

Was the stab that brat put between his brows a moment ago not meant to enrage him at all, but to plant a mark on his head to guide an attack?

The brat had not even set foot in the divine realm. How could he possibly have fooled Weiguang’s own senses and called down a meteor shower with star force?

And a meteor shower on this scale, besides.

If the whole of that meteor shower came down on Mountain Beyond the Mountain, Mountain Beyond the Mountain would presumably be destroyed. Had the brat gone mad? Or had he known all along that he could not win, and drawn Weiguang in deliberately, and then done something this insane to take them both down together?

Weiguang extended his divine sense and found there was no counting the meteors Leo’s star force had called in. Tens of millions, and no end to it.

Endless.

Coming down over everything, and covering the whole of the sky.

(End of Chapter 1227)