Sky Tower, first floor. The Martial Camp.

“Good. It’s good you’re back, it’s good you’re back!” Jun Wuyou had ten thousand things in his heart and could not get one of them out. What made him proudest was not only that the young man in front of him — the Sky Tower’s hope — had come out of the kingdom he governed, but that the swordswoman with the Tiger-Prison Divine Sword across her back, the one who had campaigned at that young man’s side across the world, that dashing figure with no equal anywhere, was his own precious daughter.

To have a son like this in the younger generation and a daughter like this — what more could a man want?

He did not step forward.

This was not the moment for him, the king, to stand up and speak. Right now he wanted every eye in the place on one person: the young man the whole Sky Tower had been waiting for, the third young master of the Yue family, the one they called Yue Titan.

Not one person in the field made a sound. All of them stood rigid as mountains.

Waiting for this young man to review them.

And then he came walking through.

Old generals who had spent lifetimes on battlefields, rookie Dragon Riders barely out of the nest — not one of them could help it. It stirred them. It made them wild.

Elder Yuehai did not stand there as a clan head or as a grandfather either. He stood more like an old general waiting on orders from a new commander. His eyes never left the young man, and a pride he had never felt before filled up his chest. Years ago he had watched this young man’s father in exactly this way, and that father had gone out and never come back. Today the glory was his again, and this time it was a hundred times, a thousand times what it had been… This was no longer a race war between humans and demons. The kid standing in front of them all had risen to the height of leading every warrior of the Sky Tower in a war against the Heavenly Realm’s invasion. Never mind the present age — in all the long history behind them, the men who had held that honor could be counted on two hands.

And every one of them was an ultimate power whose name outlasted the ages.

Empress Vivienne the Conquest Queen, for one.

Or the Prison Emperor Zhanfeng.

Today that kid stood at last at the center of the whole Sky Tower — the kid who had inherited those forerunners’ power and their unfinished will, the boy of a later generation Yuehai had never once imagined, the super-genius the world had sneered at in his early days as a good-for-nothing. Every hope and every eye were on him. And like the Prison Emperor or the Conquest Queen before him, he threw his defiance at the far-off, enormous Heavenly Realm and at the powers there past counting, thick as the sand in a river, in the loudest voice he had.

And in a voice that belonged to nobody but him.

“The Sky Tower has never lacked for fighters, and it has never lacked for fights.” Yue Yang had stopped walking. First he swept a grave look around the whole field, and then, in the silence of the Martial Camp, perfectly clearly, he put what he intended in front of the world. “Countless men came before us. Their names may already have gone under in the long river of history, but what they left us is the best guidance there is and the strongest stance there is. The Sky Tower does not submit. We can be knocked down. We can even be killed. But nobody can beat us. Not anyone, not ever! The Sky Tower never submits! And the warriors of the Sky Tower never submit… Whether what comes at us is the powers of the Heavenly Realm or the Central Divine Hall’s Conquest Army, they can forget about conquering us! Step forward — friends I have known for years and friends I have never laid eyes on — and let’s guard our home together, the way countless men did before us, with blood and fire, with slaughter and with dying, and tell the enemy there are no cowards in the Sky Tower!”

“BOOM!”

The battle-lust that had been bottled up in the Martial Camp so long went off like a bomb.

Every man there threw up his right arm and shook his fist at the sky, and every one of them roared like a starving wolf, like a tiger — even a human king as polished as Jun Wuyou, even the gold spirits with their civilized, elegant manners…

The whole field shouted and screamed like a volcano going up, venting every bit of the fury and the fight in them.

They were like men on fire.

Lit by Yue Yang’s words, and burning in an instant.

“The Sky Tower will never submit! There are no cowards in the Sky Tower!” Elder Yuehai raised his maimed arm and howled along with the countless fighters behind him, the howl of an old soldier whose ambition had never gone out of him. In that moment it was as though he were back on the first battlefield he ever set foot on — a hopeless place where instinctive fear seemed to have been cut straight out of him, and all that was left in him was a bloodthirsty madness.

“Fight — and never submit!” Even the human sages, whose feelings ordinarily lay as still as water in an old well, whose unshakable calm was a fixture of the world, blazed up and let out the loudest sound of their lives.

Maybe it was wanting exactly this moment that had kept them alive in the world at all.

They had lived on into old age and weakness.

And it had never worn away one thread of the honor in their hearts.

Everyone knew that once a man joined a war like this one there was very likely only one outcome — an honorable death in battle, and a place among those countless forerunners in the long river of history, the ones who left names and the ones who left none. But who among them cared about living or dying now? They had had their fill of living. In their clans and in their sects they had already tasted every glory this world had to give. What they were after now was the one regret a lifetime had never let them settle: to die like a hero on a battlefield guarding his own home, alongside all those forerunner heroes, as one of them… Most of them would go nameless, no more than an unremarkable grain of sand in that long river. But even so, it would be the brightest, most dazzling light of their whole lives.

“Look who has come here. Noble kings and lords. Deeply learned sages. Brave men the whole world praises. Strategists whole armies look up to. Peace-loving spirits. Demons wild for war. Plenty of friends who back me, and plenty of my old enemies too… In the last invasion, when the Nine Luminaries Clan came, we learned to put our hearts in one place and work as one. No — through the whole of history, over battle after battle, our forerunners held the enemy outside the door of this house in exactly that way! You came here and trusted me without conditions. Some of you have handed me your lives of your own free will… For that trust, and for the responsibility you’ve put on me, I have decided. The laziest, most selfish, most trouble-shy man who ever lived gives you his answer now, and it is nailed down like iron: I, Yue Yang of the Yue family, the Sky Tower’s Prison Emperor of this generation, first disciple and first heir of Empress Vivienne the Conquest Queen, will lead you against the invading Heavenly Realm legions! And not only that. We are not only going to hold the enemy off — we are going to do what our forerunners did and cut our way into the Heavenly Realm, and bring the Sky Tower back to the glory it had ten thousand years ago, so that our children and our grandchildren can stand with their heads up and their chests out as warriors in their own right. Not wretches conquered by the Heavenly Realm and put in chains. Not the country bumpkins and dirt-clod hicks that thousands upon thousands of Heavenly Realm warriors take us for — too backward, they say, to even get in the door!”

“From our earliest ancestors we have never been slaves, and we have never been bumpkins or hicks. Just the opposite. In the whole history of the Sky Tower our forerunners guarded, we can throw our chests out and say this to the Heavenly Realm: the people of the Sky Tower are the strongest there are! The Longteng Continent is a place that makes even Central Divine Hall warriors shake. The Demon Abyss is a thing Heavenly Realm warriors go pale at the name of. The Sky Stairway is a training ground every power alive dreams of, gods included… The Sky Tower is the best home there is, the most honorable and the strongest place there is, and our ancestors guarded it with their blood and with their souls! Are we, who came after them, supposed to throw away everything we have and get down on our knees in front of an enemy like house servants and beg for our lives? We are not wretches! We were not before, we are not now, and we never will be!”

“If the enemy can be fought, then we fight to the end! Fight to the end — and like the Conquest Queen, we counterattack all the way into the Heavenly Realm, all the way to Radiance Mountain, the mountain the Central Divine Hall calls holy and calls its own! We are the Prison Emperor’s descendants. We are the Conquest Queen’s descendants. They could make an enemy shake, and we who inherited their will can make an enemy shake in front of us too!”

“Aaoooo—”

Another wave of battle-lust rolled across the whole field like a tsunami.

Every man felt himself wrapped inside a shout the size of a breaking wave, then lifted by that boiling morale, and finally melted into it completely, until all of them together made one unshakable giant shaped like a mountain range.

Every eye turned to the young man in the middle, shining gold, like a god.

As long as he was there.

They had a heart in them.

As long as he was there, the whole Sky Tower was a giant with a brain, with a straight spine, with two legs to carry it forward and two fists to swing at an enemy… As long as he was there they had everything, and whatever was in front of them, not one of them was afraid. Six thousand years ago the Prison Emperor led them like this and broke the Heavenly Realm’s invading legions. Ten thousand years ago the Conquest Queen led them like this out of the Sky Tower to declare war on the Heavenly Realm… Today this young man was leading them the same way, like every ultimate power in the Sky Tower’s history — leading them toward victory, toward another new epoch, opening a whole new age.

A thousand li away.

A middle-aged scholar, sitting at his ease under a pine, brushed the pieces on the stone table lightly out of their places.

He looked at the sun coming up in the east, at that thread of first light forcing its way through a thick layer of cloud that could not shut it out, falling across the earth and throwing back a brilliant golden glare. For a while he sank into silence and said nothing at all.

It was no longer morning now.

He had assumed that heavy cloud would keep the whole day overcast.

Unfortunately that thread of sunlight was simply too strong, too brilliant, to be covered over by anything. Give it one small hole and it came down out of the sky, unstoppable, and lit the earth up gold. A change in the heavens is a fact no human strength and no human will can turn back or alter — which is to say, whatever Heaven intends, nobody can force.

The middle-aged scholar let out a soft sigh. “Heaven’s will. Heaven’s will… The Sky Tower had already sunk. Even I could not calculate that the world would produce a third young master of the Yue family, still less imagine that he would grow this fast! Is it possible the Sky Tower really does have the spirits of countless old ghosts quietly guarding it? Otherwise how did I miss a move? Why? Why on earth? Why should the world have a third young master of the Yue family at all? He should never have existed. Wasn’t his fate supposed to be the existence of a puppet? How could he possibly have grown into what he is today? The Ancient Demon King was not a wrong move. So why did I still leave a gap? Who interfered with me? Who guided all of this…”

Heaven and earth made no sound. Every voice in creation was still.

There was nobody who could answer him.

Not even the man himself, who was reckoned the foremost intellect in the Central Divine Hall.

(End of Chapter 1242)