“You have succeeded in making me angry.” The middle-aged scholar drew in a long, deep breath, and the red went slowly out of his eyes and left them calm. He looked at Yue Yang with a cold, wintry gaze. “Originally I only wanted to take back the things that were mine. But now I am sorry to have to tell you, young man, that losing your temper and provoking someone with strength enough behind him is not a clever thing to do.”

“If you want to be a whore, don’t go putting up a monument to your own virtue.” Yue Yang snorted and smiled coldly. “I don’t see any reason to be polite to a traitor. That’s all there is to it.”

The middle-aged scholar stopped talking.

He no longer wanted to fight Yue Yang with words, because he had discovered that doing so was extremely unwise.

As for this third young master of the schemers’ house in front of him, the one he had assumed he could control and hold down — he had to admit that in a pure shouting match he was no match for the boy at all. The boy’s tongue was not merely vicious; it was sharper than a knife.

Against an opponent like that, the middle-aged scholar felt the best method was to crush him like an ant under absolute strength. Against an opponent no less clever than himself, absolute strength is the best blow available and the last one. And of course, after a certain amount of investigation, he already knew perfectly well what strength and what hidden cards this young man held. First there had been the unsealed Void and Jiuxiao, and later the Ancient Demon King and the Nine Luminaries Clan’s Heavenly Empress, and even the Central Divine Hall’s Solar King — every one of them defeated in turn at this Yue family third son’s hands… And behind the boy there was powerful support as well.

If he had not been absolutely certain of the outcome, he would not have dared move so lightly.

But.

He had reached the final step of the arrangement now.

However hard the boy jumped, he was not getting out of the palm of his hand.

However monstrous a genius he was, in the end he was no match for an arrangement ten thousand years in the laying, and no match for the force of ten thousand years of accumulation.

The middle-aged scholar waved one sleeve lightly, a gesture of an elegance beyond describing, and in that instant heaven and earth changed. The forest and the rock face vanished. The flying waterfall and the spirit spring dissolved into nothing. The green pine with its coiling branches seemed to roll itself up and disappear. Heaven and earth were like a dream, shifting and unfixed, and except for Yue Yang and the pieces on the stone table in front of him, nothing existed at all. In the whole world there were only two men, one table, and the many pieces scattered around it.

Reaching out to take up another piece, the middle-aged scholar had recovered his old unhurried composure, as though heaven and earth were in his hands and wisdom sat in his palm like a pearl.

He showed Yue Yang the smile of a man who had already won. “This game. If you can beat me, I will hand over everything to you. But if you lose, everything of yours will cease to exist.”

On the stone surface.

Black pieces and white, clearly divided.

The piece the middle-aged scholar had taken up was white, which meant that by the rules of the game Yue Yang could hold only black.

And when the middle-aged scholar set that white piece gently down on the stone, he reached out and brutally swept away one whole corner of the black pieces — which until then had been almost equal in number — and that one motion took better than a dozen of Yue Yang’s pieces off the board. Because of that sweep, Yue Yang’s black side went from slightly behind to very nearly past saving. An entire corner of the board, gone.

“What the hell kind of move is that!” Yue Yang had thought that putting down a fistful of pieces at once made him a shameless player. He had not expected this Sky Tower traitor to be more shameless still. No — this creature was simply barbaric. One piece that eats a whole corner of the other man’s board, one piece that takes better than a dozen of his pieces — what species of rules were those?

“The game of heaven and earth.” The middle-aged scholar smiled with enormous pride. “Heaven and earth for a board, all things for pieces. The winner lives and the loser dies. The hand of a god, moving all living things at a thought.”

He had not finished speaking when the empty sky above them abruptly changed.

More than a dozen scenes appeared in the sky.

Each of them showed a place in the Sky Tower, and the places were spread across all its floors. Three of them were on the Longteng Continent alone: White Stone City, where Yue Yang had first appeared; the Yue family castle; and the Ivy Academy in Shangjing, the capital of Great Xia… The scenes looked no different from any other day. Everything was ordinary. Except that in the sky above each one there now hung a golden Divine General, blazing with a force that stood comparison with the sun.

The golden Divine Generals waited quietly. Their eyes seemed to be turned toward Yue Yang.

The middle-aged scholar waved a hand lightly.

They seemed to take it as an order given, and as one they bowed and saluted and accepted the command. Then, one after another, they gathered up shockwaves of unbearable brilliance, and hurled those shockwaves — each one able to destroy an entire land — down at their targets, at White Stone City and the Yue family castle and the rest.

“You son of a bitch!” One look and Yue Yang was on his feet.

Eyes splitting, he watched White Stone City and the Yue family castle and the Ivy Academy and all the rest come apart under the Divine Generals’ shockwaves, and watched with his own eyes as those dozen-odd places were reduced in an instant to rubble in the smoke and the firelight. The Divine Generals’ destructive power was in no way inferior to that of the Solar King’s Four Kings. Never mind the three places on the Longteng Continent, whose defensive strength had been drawn away — even the City of Sin in the Demon Abyss, the strongest defended of the dozen, did not hold ten seconds before it broke.

The Demon Abyss powers who defended it and the energy barrier collapsed together under that shockwave.

Almost nobody escaped.

It caught the warriors of every race, and the civilians with them.

Nearly all of them were wiped out in an attack that came down with no warning at all. Even the thick walls and the high towers, the castles and the mountain faces, were reduced to a state of ruin, most of the buildings ground to powder, everything on the surface swept away until nothing was left…

Now Yue Yang understood. No wonder this traitor ‘Dongfang’ had been so utterly without fear — he had laid his hidden pieces long ago and ambushed the Sky Tower from behind. What he was playing was not a game at all; the board was the disposition of a battle! The man might have a talent of that kind, one that looked on the surface like playing a game, but every single move Dongfang made was linked to his subordinates, and every command, every word he said, could be carried out by those subordinates across an enormous distance of space and time.

“That’s right. This is my Game talent!” The middle-aged scholar did not deny it in the least. He smiled calmly instead and gestured toward Yue Yang with tremendous elegance. “Under my Game talent, all things are my pieces. However powerful the warrior, however intelligent the war beast, none of it — none of it at all — escapes the law of the board of heaven and earth. Under my will, everything is a piece. Of course, a game without an opponent is a very dull life, so I have decided to give you the right to be a player too, and let you try this feeling of holding heaven and earth and playing with all living things as your pieces. How about it, little friend? Isn’t the feeling rather good? Take note — every move you make from now on stands for your side’s response, and once a piece is placed there is no taking it back. For the safety of those relatives and friends of yours, you had better play carefully!”

As he spoke the scene of the attack changed.

The vision of destruction in the explosions was gone.

What appeared in front of Yue Yang now was several young men covered in wounds, surrounding a young lord who was very nearly a god.

One look, and Yue Yang forced the fury that had been erupting out of him like a volcano back down into his chest, and the fist that had been meant to land hard on the middle-aged scholar’s face came back to his side. He was beginning to understand. This was not a fight that could be settled with fists. To win this one he had to overwhelm — in will and in wisdom both — this traitor to the Sky Tower who had been calculating against him for who knew how long, this ‘Dongfang’ they called the Central Divine Hall’s foremost sage.

The world in that scene seemed to be right beside him, with nothing between them but a sheet of transparent glass.

It seemed that if he put out a hand.

He could break through the barrier.

But Yue Yang did not, because he knew it was useless. If he wanted to be any real help to those blood-drenched young men in the scene, the first thing he had to do was stay calm.

“What the hell is going on? Is this young master seeing ghosts in broad daylight?” Out in the Boundless World, Sea Fatty found a strange scene flickering into being in the sky over his head — a completely unfamiliar middle-aged scholar playing a game against a young man with a face full of rage, a young man very close to going berserk, whose eyes looked ready to shoot flame.

That young man was his boss, so of course he recognized him.

But he had almost never seen this young man, who did not anger easily, blow up into a fury like that one.

One thread further past the breaking point, and what came next would probably be a mad, all-out rampage with reason gone entirely and heaven and earth torn apart.

“Father!” The Young Lord of Dawn, whose spirit Sea Fatty and Ye Kong and the rest had nearly driven to collapse, was instead wild with joy. He was so moved that two long lines of tears ran out of his eyes. Facing that middle-aged scholar in the sky overhead, the Young Lord of Dawn knelt with heartfelt submission and enormous respect and knocked his head hard against the ground, his voice choking like a child who has been bullied past bearing and has just seen a powerful elder who protects him arrive. He wept as he spoke. “Father, I knew it. With your wisdom, which never leaves a gap in a plan, you would never sit and watch your child in difficulty and do nothing! I know that all of this is your plan. I know that all of this is inside your grasp!”

“This — this is bad…” Unlike the exhilarated Young Lord of Dawn, Ye Kong felt his heart seized as though by a demon’s hand. The thing he least wanted to see right now was Yue Yang in that near-berserk rage. Lose his reason, and it really would all be over.

The enemy was using exactly that in him as a lever.

If Yue Yang fell for it.

The consequences did not bear thinking about.

The Sky Tower could do without him. It could do without Sea Fatty. It could do without Xue Tanglang and the Tianra Prince. It could, in the end, do without anybody at all — but it absolutely could not do without this third son of the Yue family, who could make miracles happen and lead them all up out of their long sinking toward a revival. Whatever else happened, he must not fall for the trap now and go mad. He must not lose his reason…

“Big sister!”

“The Supreme!”

“Her Majesty!”

“Fourth Mother!”

In nearly the same instant, several names burst out at once.

The one who shouted big sister was Xue Tanglang, who hoped that in this moment Yue Yang would think of his own big sister and come back to his reason. What Ye Kong shouted was the Supreme, because he knew Yue Yang was the Supreme’s disciple, and that if he heard her name he would certainly realize how much was at stake. The Tianra Prince was desperate too, and what he shouted was Her Majesty — and although Her Majesty was a subject everyone silently avoided, he was past caring about that now; to bring Yue Yang’s calm and his reason back, he risked the enormous impropriety and shouted it out, junior though he was. And the last one, who shouted Fourth Mother, was the barefoot girl the Wind-Breath Seabird had transformed into. She understood Yue Yang better: a man selfish on the surface and, underneath it, utterly bound up in his family. Shouting other names would have some effect, but nothing that could match Fourth Mother.

Unfortunately, Yue Yang could see the tension and the desperation on their faces and could see their mouths open — and could not hear one word of what they were shouting.

He did not have the middle-aged scholar’s talent. He could not listen across that enormous distance of space and time.

Even the scene of those people had been put in front of him deliberately by the middle-aged scholar.

“It seems your friends are very anxious about you! Would you like to hear what they’re calling out to you? Tsk, tsk, tsk. Really quite moving!” The middle-aged scholar had deliberately shut the sound out. All Yue Yang could see was Ye Kong’s and Xue Tanglang’s mouths opening and closing, with no sound reaching him at all.

“I heard them!”

Yue Yang’s reason came back to him completely and all at once, and his heart went as quiet as an immortal sitting in meditation in a mountain forest. He pointed at his own chest. “I have a heart. I can listen with that.”

(End of Chapter 1246)