The Golden Flame Divine Banner.

When the Young Lord of Dawn raised this treasure, the expression on his face did not change, but the satisfaction in his eyes could not be hidden.

With this and the Golden Arena working together, the Young Lord of Dawn had never yet met an opponent in a decisive battle who could genuinely match him. Perhaps only Light Hall Master Zhonghua, whom he had no intention of challenging yet, or that insufferably arrogant Ji Wuri, could possibly break the terrible power of these two treasures paired together.

“Strip.” The Young Lord of Dawn pointed a finger lightly at Sea Fatty.

“Ah, how terrible…” Sea Fatty shook all over, as though he had seen the hell of the legends, and in the end could not even stand. He collapsed onto the arena floor, limp as a worm.

“Watch out for the light from that banner.” The Tianra Prince warned Ye Kong and the others urgently. He had seen Sea Fatty struck by the light the Golden Flame Divine Banner sent out, and only then go down and stay down as though his reason had been stripped away, and he hurried to warn everyone not to look at the Golden Flame Divine Banner. Unfortunately the warning came a little late. After Sea Fatty the Liqie brothers were struck by the light too, and although they did not go down the way Sea Fatty had, they clutched their heads and held on painfully to a reason very close to lost. Their numbers had been small to begin with, and now three of them had been stripped out of the fight at a stroke. The situation turned worse at once.

“It’s no use. You don’t have to look at the Golden Flame Divine Banner. Being struck by its light is enough to fall into madness or confusion.” The Young Lord of Dawn felt that against an opponent like Sea Fatty there had been no need to use the Golden Flame Divine Banner at all.

But as Dongfang’s son, he would absolutely not permit himself any carelessness that might give an enemy a chance to turn the board over.

However weak an enemy was, he was determined to deliver a fatal blow if he could.

Never make a mistake.

That was his father’s requirement of him and his own requirement of himself.

Still less with Ye Kong, Xue Tanglang and the Tianra Prince in front of him, three young opponents of considerable strength. These three could not be treated lightly. Given enough time to grow, the Young Lord of Dawn believed any one of them would not fall very far behind him — and above all that silent Xue Tanglang, whose blows carried enormous power. This ice-block of a man was without question one of the great rivals of his life.

He had to be removed before the boy grew. Otherwise the trouble later on would be endless.

The Sky Tower’s martial artists grow extremely fast to begin with, and driven by a Yue Titan who had come out of nowhere, Ye Kong and Xue Tanglang and the rest had grown at a thousand li a day. In a few years they had gone from insects of no strength at all to a level where they could stand up and call him out. Give them a few more years and where would it end?

“Kill.” The middle-aged scholar waved a hand, and the gold-tier Sky-rank war beasts behind him erupted at once and rolled toward Ye Kong and the others, blotting out the sky.

“Don’t kill them carelessly. I need them alive. These boys have excellent natural gifts and the puppet warriors refined out of them will be first-rate.” The black-robed old man had fixed on Xue Tanglang. The ice-block, the strongest of them, was his first target.

“Get away from me.” Xue Tanglang, fighting as one body with his life-guardian war beast, froze the fastest of the puppet war beasts into an ice sculpture with a heavy palm and then kicked it away like a meteor.

The ice-sculpture puppet war beast shattered against the Golden Arena with a crack and lay in pieces across the floor.

And it was not affected in the slightest.

The black-robed old man did not need to thaw it by hand. Under the light of the Golden Flame Divine Banner, the shattered ice sculpture threw up fierce flame across its whole body, and in the blink of an eye the ice was entirely melted off. The broken puppet war beast reassembled itself and healed its injuries rapidly, and in under ten seconds it was as good as new.

One after another the golden puppet war beasts were struck flying by Xue Tanglang or Ye Kong, broken apart, even beaten into a pulp of meat.

But under the light of the Golden Flame Divine Banner, not one of them truly died.

Every one of them stood up again.

Restored as it had been.

“That banner doesn’t only strip an enemy’s will. It has the particular power to remake their own side’s war-beast corpses. This is simply endless resurrection.” The Tianra Prince took one look and cried out. In a situation like this it was flatly impossible to win, because however many times the enemy’s war beasts went down they could get back up again. However strong his own side was, they could not beat that, and in the end they would certainly die of exhaustion on this Golden Arena.

“It is not resurrection by remaking corpses.” The Young Lord of Dawn laughed out loud. “It is only a reshaping by divine power. It is not an absolutely invincible thing. If you could hold out for three days and three nights, perhaps my Golden Flame Divine Banner’s divine power would be exhausted. Perhaps. Ha.”

“Three days and three nights?” Ye Kong’s brows jumped. Never mind three days and three nights in a fight like this — thirty minutes was impossible.

That one round of attacks had already spent nearly half the strength they had.

From here it would presumably only get worse.

Defending was certainly not going to win them the final victory.

The one chance, he estimated, was to throw everything away and gamble it all against the enemy… but if the consequence of doing that was failure, they would be wiped out to the last man. And while Ye Kong stood frowning over it, unable to decide, Xue Tanglang stepped forward and said one cold thing. “I’ll take the banner.”

The Young Lord of Dawn behaved as though he had not heard it, and went on looking at the battlefield in front of him with a face full of smiles, his gaze sliding across Xue Tanglang’s face and Ye Kong’s and the Tianra Prince’s, and not even missing the Liqie brothers, who were still holding off the invasion of chaos in their minds. The only one he ignored was the Sea Fatty on the ground, curled like a worm. At a waste product like that, the Young Lord of Dawn spared one look and no more, because looking any longer would only waste his time.

Ye Kong put his strength into guarding the left.

The Tianra Prince, one body with the Fire-Wing Sky Demon, held the right.

Xue Tanglang, one body with the Storm Giant, roared like thunder, lightning crackling up over him in threads and lines, and at the vortex-center of frost and storm he came close to tearing the whole of space open. He forced an attack corridor out from among a dozen and more gold-tier Sky-rank war beasts by main strength, gathered a heavy thunder-palm of countless lightning serpents, and drove it out viciously.

The target was the Young Lord of Dawn, standing easy and unhurried at the center of the Golden Arena.

The middle-aged scholar, fused with a Golden Python, had been waiting a long time. He had slid to Xue Tanglang’s side at some point, dodged the heavy thunder-palm, and pressed both hands down to seize the ice-block by the shoulders.

The nails of ten fingers.

They turned in an instant into venomous python fangs, and drove deep into Xue Tanglang’s left shoulder and left arm.

Faster than he was, the black-robed old man, one body with a Skeleton Giant Demon, had already laid out a bone-cage trap on the ground, positioned exactly for Xue Tanglang to step on and trigger. In that same instant, the skeletal arm behind him swung an enormous vicious-dragon legbone, and with the great bone joint at the end of it, which could crush diamond, lashed with utter malice at the back of Xue Tanglang’s undefended skull.

Hard behind that came Shuntian, the former ruler of the Sky Tower whose strength the Young Lord of Dawn had raised by who knew how much. Shuntian, one body with a Golden King, put out a terrible power to rival the sun.

It shone into the depths of Xue Tanglang’s pupils and blocked his sight.

Apart from golden light, no image surfaced at all.

With the vicious dragon’s legbone coming from behind and his own fist from the front, Shuntian gathered every scrap of strength with his life-guardian war beast’s help and drove out a mountain-shattering heavy punch of a kind he had never thrown before, straight at Xue Tanglang’s forehead. Never mind that Xue Tanglang had walked into an ambush and could not defend against it at all — even with a defense up in time, given a fighting style strong on attack and weak on taking hits, his defensive power would presumably not have been enough to hold off a driving killing punch from Shuntian.

“No.” Ye Kong’s eyes went red. He wanted to charge in and break it up, and instead several gold-tier war beasts pressed him flat to the ground between them and he could not go to the rescue at all.

“All of you get away from him…” The Tianra Prince did burst out of the gold-tier war beasts’ encirclement — but his body, flying through midair, was swatted away by the strongest thing on the field and the only one that had not yet attacked, the Demon-Flame Bone Dragon, with one blow of its tail.

The other Sky-rank level six beast, the Rock Giant Ape, was waiting at the edge of the Golden Arena.

Before the Tianra Prince could even hit the arena floor, it caught him casually in an enormous palm, spun him around several times, sprang into midair, and slammed him down head-first with all its strength.

Set against a Xue Tanglang at death’s door, the Tianra Prince, pulled two ways at once, had fallen into an equally painful predicament.

A shadow flashed in the sky.

The barefoot girl, who had not appeared in a long time, suddenly flashed into being above Xue Tanglang’s head.

It was her appearance earlier that had let Ye Kong and Xue Tanglang and the others escape safely out of the spacetime rift, and in the confusion afterward she had vanished without anyone noticing. Through the whole fight just now, whatever difficulties Xue Tanglang and the rest ran into, she had absolutely not lifted a hand. Only at the final pass between life and death, in the instant when Xue Tanglang’s skull was about to burst and kill him, did she appear again.

It was like a tsunami breaking. On the surface there is no sign of it, and from a distance nothing looks the least bit out of the ordinary.

But when she appeared, heaven and earth changed color for it.

A power that overturned heaven and earth twisted space and time.

Every attack launched at Xue Tanglang checked in the instant she appeared — no, every fight on the whole Golden Arena checked in that instant.

Except for one person.

The Young Lord of Dawn.

As though he had known all along that someone like this would come to save Xue Tanglang by exactly this method, as though he had rehearsed it a thousand times, the Young Lord of Dawn appeared behind the barefoot girl and put out a golden right hand lightly and laid it on the back of her neck. In the same instant that she reached out to pull Xue Tanglang from the bone cage, the Young Lord of Dawn hauled the barefoot girl up bodily with tremendous style, held her up in midair, and threw her offhandedly toward the Golden Flame Divine Banner. And that raised Golden Flame Divine Banner produced a golden cage of light, and opened the cage door as though it had been waiting a long time, ready to take the barefoot girl inside.

“I never once forgot you, clever little seabird. Perhaps you don’t know it, but from the very first moment I laid eyes on you, you were fated to be a thing in the palm of my hand.” The Young Lord of Dawn laughed up at the sky. Everything he had done, every part of it, had in fact been designed to capture this cunning, quick-witted barefoot girl.

If he had wanted to kill Ye Kong and Xue Tanglang and the others, he had no fewer than a hundred methods.

There was a reason he had deliberately walked into the trap and entered this barren world.

He wanted to use the best of those methods — the Golden Arena plus the Golden Flame Divine Banner — to capture this barefoot girl he had long since delightedly determined to bind into servitude.

Even in the Heavenly Realm, a war beast like this, uncontracted and with limitless potential, is a rare sight. Still more so when she is an intelligent female battle pet whose shift into human form is absolutely perfect.

Perhaps he had searched a thousand years. Perhaps he had come ten thousand li to the Sky Tower for exactly this — to find this little seabird.

She was fated to belong to him.

The Young Lord of Dawn had made that decision from the first moment he saw her, and had felt it as one of the great convictions of his life. He did not yet understand why a man like Yue Titan would let an intelligent battle pet like this slip past him, but he felt he would absolutely never be as stupid as Yue Titan. He would not let her slip. Though he exhausted every method in the world, he would have her.

“Contract.” The barefoot girl shrieked it — and in the instant she was thrown into the Golden Flame Divine Banner’s cage of light, she contracted with the Young Lord of Dawn of her own accord.

“Wh — what?” The Young Lord of Dawn was very nearly knocked senseless by that happiness.

He had assumed that an intelligent war beast as frighteningly clever as this would need a long stretch of time and patient persuasion before she would contract. What he had not expected was that in the instant he threatened her, she yielded — that she cleverly made the best available choice, contracted with him of her own accord, and refused to waste any more time or strength sitting in a cage that served no purpose.

Perhaps only a battle pet as clever as she was had the qualifications to stand at his side.

He and she were simply the most perfect combination in the world.

The Young Lord of Dawn had never in his life been so excited. His heart was suddenly hammering like a war drum, his blood was up, even his pores had opened, and joy and laughter he could not hold in came bursting out of him… she had contracted with him of her own accord. She. She belonged to him at last. That perfect creature belonged to him now, truly and genuinely.

Hahahahaha!

The Young Lord of Dawn could not wait to summon his own summoning grimoire — but before he could turn a page, he could not hold down the excitement and satisfaction in him, and stood there holding the grimoire and laughing wildly up at the sky.

Who in this world is the cleverest?

Apart from that father of his, peerless and never once caught out in a calculation, who among the younger generation could be spoken of in the same breath as himself?

That Light Hall Master Zhonghua, posturing all day long? That favored son of heaven, Ji Wuri, who looks at people down his nostrils? No — they might be stronger than he was, but they could never be cleverer, and in calculation and planning at least, he was first in the world. And what was that Yue Titan the people of the Sky Tower had made into a god? Nothing but a blind man with open eyes, who had let a battle pet this fine slip through his fingers. However many rumors there were, they were exaggerations. And what about himself, who had come to conquer the Sky Tower? From one successful piece of planning alone, he had obtained the intelligent battle pet he had dreamed of and disposed of the companions Yue Titan had cultivated so carefully.

The Sky Tower’s young elites amounted to no more than this.

Ask heaven above and earth below — who can compare with me?

In the middle of the Young Lord of Dawn’s laughter, beside himself, everything else forgotten… the barefoot girl kicked that cage of light away like lightning, put out a hand and seized the Golden Flame Divine Banner, and took it for her own use. And Xue Tanglang, caught in the bone cage, ignored Shuntian’s killing blow coming at his face, brought the heavy thunder-palm back around at will, and struck the middle-aged scholar full in the face. And in the same instant that the black-robed old man’s giant dragon legbone struck the back of Xue Tanglang’s skull, Shuntian’s driving killing punch somehow slid past Xue Tanglang’s face and landed instead, with perfect accuracy, on his own master’s…

The middle-aged scholar tried to fall back. Behind him, on the piece of ground the Young Lord of Dawn had looked at once and then ignored, the Sea Fatty curled up like a worm and shaking without stopping was gone.

All that was left was a skyful of starlight.

And every ray of that starlight was a killing punch that had been building for a long time.

(End of Chapter 1237)