Yue Yang wanted a word with the snow girl.
He couldn’t find her anywhere.
Princess Qianqian needed time to cool off, so he decided to spend the night at Hailan’s and enjoy a little of the Sea Empress’s tenderness while he was at it. Halfway there he ran into Xiayi coming out from Hailan’s place. The girl looked like she had something she wanted to say, hemmed and hawed over it a good long while, and in the end said nothing at all, which left Yue Yang, for his part, with no idea what to make of it.
“What’s wrong?” Yue Yang asked, honestly baffled.
“Nothing.” Xiayi bit her lip, raised a small fist, seemed on the verge of blurting something out — then, for no reason he could see, swallowed it back down. She stamped one slender jade foot, said “Leave me alone,” and took off like a shot. Yue Yang could tell the girl was upset about something, but about what? A woman’s mind really was impossible to guess. No wonder they said a woman’s heart is a needle at the bottom of the sea.
He got to Hailan’s and couldn’t help laying the whole strange business out.
The Sea Empress burst out laughing.
She leaned close to Yue Yang’s ear and said something in a low voice, and the transmigrator got it all at once and smacked his own forehead. “I’m an idiot. I should have figured that out ages ago!”
“She’s a girl, and she’s never been with a man, and being shy about it is perfectly normal. You’re a grown man — you’re supposed to make the first move!” The Sea Empress was hardly the never-been-with-a-man sort she was describing. She had long since become a certain wolf’s finest partner in a certain kind of combat, and once battle was joined the thing rarely settled inside a thousand rounds, let alone a few hundred. Her small hand moved, idly or not so idly, stroking lightly, and struck the spark of a certain happy domestic life. Yue Yang being the clever sort, he took the hint at once, peeled the beauty into a little white lamb with the Clothes-Stripping Dragon Claw technique, and declared a state of war.
“Gently… not like that!” was what the Sea Empress asked for. A certain wolf paid it no attention whatsoever, working in broad sweeping strokes, charging straight through, until she hated him and loved him and could do absolutely nothing about him.
The fighting was fierce, and it went long.
Nobody noticed. Out in the hall beyond the bedchamber.
That enormous mother-of-pearl shell had quietly opened a crack.
He woke clear-headed and refreshed, and had barely opened his eyes — hadn’t even sat up — when Hong burst in. This was not her usual sneaking in to join the battle. Her face was tight with alarm, as though something terrible had happened.
“The Sky Tower is being invaded by Heavenly Realm legions!” The words were barely out and Yue Yang was on his feet.
“What?” Hailan, jolted awake and still fuzzy, hadn’t caught it. But Hong said it again, and Hailan shot upright in fright too, didn’t stop to put anything on, and threw herself across the room to get Yue Yang into formal dress at top speed. She knew he needed every second he had and could not spare one. Yue Yang flew out like a loosed arrow, Hong keeping pace beside him.
He got back to his own hall and found everyone already there.
Fengxian Meiren, the Southern Wilderness Demon King, Princess Qianqian — every face was grave.
The sight of him coming back eased those faces and those moods considerably. With him here, the backbone was here. The Sky Tower had run into a crisis, but there is no ditch in this world that can’t be crossed and no pass that can’t be gotten past.
Princess Qianqian and Yue Yu came forward together, signaling him not to panic. “We only just got this ourselves. That vision of battle in your dreams was a real omen — maybe it was the Sky Tower calling you, maybe someone strong was reaching for you through some talent… the Sky Tower really has been invaded by Heavenly Realm legions, and we think it’s Central Divine Hall people. Several days have gone by already. We were inside the Trial Ground’s laws the whole time, so their messages couldn’t reach us; it wasn’t until your last trial finished yesterday that we came out from under the constraint. We’ve just received three grimoire messages from a very long way off — one from Elder Nangong, one from Ming Yueguang, and one from an expert who didn’t give a name.”
Aren’t we still in the Trial Ground?
Strictly speaking — we’re inside the Grimoire World, but the space-time anchor point hasn’t left Mountain Beyond the Mountain!
And on top of that, I didn’t receive anything at all. How is it they got warnings from every direction and I got nothing?
Yue Yang’s head was full of questions, but before he could open his mouth Princess Qianqian understood what was puzzling him and explained. “Wuxia found it first. None of the rest of us has that kind of sensitivity. She picked up the anomaly inside your dream and analyzed it with her divine sense. We were still inside Mountain Beyond the Mountain’s laws, so she couldn’t get free of the constraint either, and the messages didn’t reach her — but the good news is that she and Her Majesty Empress Vivienne both confirmed your dream omen.”
“Once we’d confirmed it, we begged ‘Eternity’ and the others to bring you out of the Trial Ground, and the second we were out everyone’s messages came in at once.” Yue Yu spread her grimoire open, and Luohua and the rest did the same. Yue Yang saw immediately that Elder Nangong had issued a ‘Call to Arms.’ Every warrior of the Sky Tower had received the same summons.
“No wonder I’ve been having that dream all week!” Yue Yang summoned his own Sacred Codex and found messages packed into it, several hundred of them — nearly everyone he knew had sent word, old friends in the Sky Tower and new ones in the Heavenly Realm like Ming Rihao alike.
“The Trial Ground can wait. Leaving it for now does no harm.” Xue Wuxia had just come back from Empress Vivienne’s Ice-and-Snow World, where the two of them had finished talking it over.
“Good. Then we go back to the Sky Tower right now. Those Central Divine Hall bastards, ambushing the Sky Tower while I’m in the middle of a trial — despicable!” Yue Yang’s temper went up. He had thought he’d covered every angle: move quietly in the Heavenly Realm, never pick a fight with Central Divine Hall people first. And now, with the Solar King wave barely settled, here came another one, and it had nearly cost him his home.
It was a good thing the trial was already finished — over-finished, in fact, since he’d come away with the Divine Codex.
Otherwise it would have been water carried in a bamboo basket.
Not only would the Divine Codex have slipped out of reach.
He would have lost the Sky Tower too, his whole rear base.
Who was vicious enough for this? Who could find the one seam in his defenses and drive a wedge straight into it? Could it be that unfathomable Divine Hall Supreme, who had never once shown his face and yet held the whole Heavenly Realm down under his weight? On one side he sends Ji Wuri to tangle with me, itching to be rid of me; on the other he sends a legion ten thousand li to invade the Sky Tower…
This bastard — he isn’t after the Ruins of the Gods, is he?
Yue Yang sank for a moment into the current of his own thoughts.
Xue Wuxia waited for him to come out of it, gave a small nod, smiled at him, and eased his anxiety. “Let’s get back first and talk after. The situation has changed, but it isn’t that bad yet. We’ll take our openings as they come. And don’t forget — we’re all standing right next to you. Big sister Yu, Qianqian, me, everyone. Even Her Majesty and the others will lend you a hand!”
With her here, with all of them here.
Yue Yang looked around at them — at every small face made for scolding and for smiling, at every pair of bright, worried eyes — and nodded, hard. “That’s right. Whatever kind of enemy this is, not one of them goes home!”
He put out his hand. Princess Qianqian was first to answer it, then glanced at Xue Wuxia, paused a beat, and gave the moment up to her.
Xue Wuxia turned and smiled at her, and laid her jade hand lightly over Yue Yang’s palm.
Princess Qianqian, Yue Yu, Luohua, Sick Beauty, Fengxian Meiren, the Southern Wilderness Demon King — all of them put their hands out.
Stacking them on top.
Hearts joined, the whole of them one thing.
In that instant Yue Yang could feel their intent and their support completely, and he drew a deep breath and laid his other hand on top of the pile. He said nothing at all, but his intent had already handed them the most certain yes there was. And in that pile were bashful, blushing Liuye, who put her hand out bravely anyway, and Xiayi, who had finally let out the breath she’d been holding, and the rest of the girls…
And of course Bao’er, who stuck her hand in to fish in muddy water.
The little thing snickered without a shred of conscience. To a gold spirit with no sense of danger whatsoever, the Sky Tower being invaded was nothing but floating cloud. Invading legion? What’s that, is it good to eat?
Yue Yang brought out the Three Realms Compass. His first instinct was to go straight back to the Tianra Imperial Palace, to see with his own eyes that Fourth Mother was safe.
But he knew he was the one the Sky Tower had waited for harder than anyone, and he knew Fourth Mother would absolutely not want him doing that — however much she missed him, kind as she was, she would never put that ahead of everyone else. Princess Qianqian and the others understood him, of course, and nodded together; and in the instant Xiao Wenli carried Yue Yang out of the Grimoire World, all of them moved at once, each getting ready in her own way — changing into battle dress, summoning war beasts, holding nothing back, bracing for the great battle that might break at any moment.
The moment they were clear of the Grimoire World, Xiao Wenli turned into a fragrant rainbow, one body with him.
Yue Yang had no time to make out where in the Heavenly Realm he was.
He triggered the Three Realms Compass on the spot.
A second later, having crossed from the Heavenly Realm to the Sky Tower, Yue Yang appeared in the Martial Camp on the Sky Tower’s first floor. Jun Wuyou, Elder Yuehai and the others had been waiting here since the day the Heavenly Realm invasion began; they saw a column of divine light come down out of the sky into the center of the Martial Camp, flashing down at enormous speed, and when they looked hard they found the kid they had longed for a thousand times over finally come leaping out of the pillar of light.
And at once, even those old men whose wills had been tempered hard as steel in war couldn’t keep their eyes from filling.
He was back.
He was finally back!
The kid who never stopped producing miracles as long as he was there, who never stopped moving forward and winning as long as he was there — he was finally back!
Tens of thousands of Sky Tower warriors formed up at speed, ranks straight in every direction, every man standing rigid, and in the instant he stepped forward every one of them raised a hand in salute. No one spoke, but they meant the salute to tell this young man something: that whether he knew them or had never laid eyes on them, they were warriors of the Sky Tower, and at a single word from him all of them — who had put themselves under his command by choice — would charge those invaders behind him without one backward glance, whatever kind of enemy it was, the peerless Central Legion or Heavenly Realm mercenaries as numberless as the hairs on an ox…
The instant Yue Yang came back, Gray Wolf — over on the Light Continent, still devouring the invading legion like a madman — felt it in his heart and threw his head back and howled.
The roar shook heaven and earth; it tipped mountains and rivers over.
Once it went berserk, the invading legion, already a mess, came apart entirely. Countless Sky-rank war beasts that looked formidable enough were frightened to death, literally, by that world-ending demon wolf’s howl.
The whole field lay pinned flat under its presence.
The one thing left standing on that battlefield.
Was that world-ending demon wolf, head thrown back, roaring, holding all ten directions in awe.
Unlike Gray Wolf, Sea Fatty felt nothing at all of Yue Yang’s return. At that moment the Young Lord of Dawn was knocking him flat onto the vast earth for the one thousand and ninety-eighth time. Against a super-powerful enemy like the Young Lord of Dawn it wasn’t only him — even Xue Tanglang, the strongest of the group, had been put down a hundred times and more.
“You can knock me down… but you will never beat me!” Sea Fatty, wounded everywhere, dragged himself with enormous difficulty out of the crater in the ground.
Face caked with blood and body caked with mud and ash, he shook his fat frame, spent the last thread of strength he had, and steadied his soft, buckling knees.
There was no telling whether it was a trick of the eye.
His swollen, beaten face.
His bloodshot eyes.
Somehow there was a strange light rising in them.
It was a light the Young Lord of Dawn had seen on only one kind of face — the face of a ‘victor,’ the kind who rules everything.
He looked around. Getting up one after another all around him: that Ye Kong who could not be killed no matter how hard you beat him; that Xue Tanglang who was always cold as a block of ice; that Tianra Prince who even now held on to his own cultivation and would never let madness take his reason; that pair of Liqie brothers who looked so nearly identical and were so wholly of one mind that nothing could ever be driven between them; and, of course, that thoroughly detestable war beast with brains, who had made a contract of its own free will, plundered the Golden Flame Divine Banner, would never actually be loyal, and switched between barefoot girl and Wind-Breath Seabird the instant there was danger… They had been fighting this long; these people had been knocked down this many times; and not one of them had submitted, and not one of them had admitted defeat.
Were these people, raised on Yue Titan’s ideas, all lunatics?
For a dazed moment the Young Lord of Dawn had the illusion that he could see something coming off these battered, broken enemies, off their bodies and their faces — a light he had no words for, the light of war gods.
Could he really beat these lunatics?
Could he really beat enemies who were as unbeatable as war gods?
And in that moment a very slight crack opened in the Young Lord of Dawn’s will — a thread of wavering that before this would have been unimaginable, and impossible.
(End of Chapter 1241)