“This game. I’ll play it with you.” Yue Yang drew a deep breath and set himself to his best condition, then slowly picked up a piece, ready to lay it gently on the board.
However bad the position was, this was a fight that had to be met.
Not only met with everything he had. Won.
Only that way.
Only that way would the Sky Tower have a future, and only that way would it truly rise again. Every rebirth in this world and every renewal comes with a labor pain nobody can stand, and demands a sacrifice nobody can measure — not only for a man, a house, a country, but for a whole world besides. If the Sky Tower wanted a new life, if it wanted to rise again, it had to get past the Central Divine Hall, and it had to walk out of the shadow the Heavenly Realm held it under.
Say that Dongfang, this traitor to the Sky Tower, had schemed for ten thousand years, had laid a net across heaven and earth, had set every trap and every trigger, and had only to sit and watch the Sky Tower sink and die.
Yue Yang would not allow it to happen.
He did not know what he could accomplish, and he did not know whether what he was doing was a hundred percent right. But Yue Yang felt he had reason enough to do it, because at the very least, doing it could change him.
Start by changing yourself.
And if every single person in the Sky Tower began by changing himself, then he believed there was no power anywhere, no person and no force of any kind — not the Divine Hall Supreme of the Central Divine Hall, not this Sky Tower traitor Dongfang with his ten-thousand-year scheme — that could ever completely defeat the people of the Sky Tower once they were twisted together into a single rope.
The Heavenly Realm legions were invading in full force, and rather than call that a disaster that would destroy them, it was better to call it the ordeal that breaks a thing so it can be built again.
Only by coming up out of the sinking and beating a powerful enemy.
Only then could they really stand straight with their heads up and their chests out, become confident men of the Sky Tower again, and win the right to take up their distant ancestors’ supreme glory once more.
“This game, you have already lost. You will be beaten into the ground, exactly like Zhanfeng in his day.” The middle-aged scholar smiled, full of confidence.
“I am not the Prison Emperor Zhanfeng!” Yue Yang snorted coldly.
“Indeed you are not. You are not even his equal.” The middle-aged scholar laughed out loud. “In cunning you are the better of the two. But in every other respect there is simply no comparing you to Zhanfeng — no, with the strength and the state of mind you have now, comparing you to Zhanfeng means you could not see his dust! If Vivienne were not propping you up from behind, the Solar King would have ground you to scraps long ago; you would not even have gotten past the Nine Luminaries Clan’s Heavenly Empress! What gives a creature like you the right to strut in front of seniors like us? Junior, you have no idea at all how high heaven is or how deep the earth!”
The middle-aged scholar finished speaking and gave another light sweep of his great sleeve, which drifted like cloud.
The scenes in the sky did not disappear.
Sea Fatty and Ye Kong and Xue Tanglang were all still there. But outside the scenes, one more point of light had appeared.
Brighter than a star, and falling fast. At first it was still out past the sky, unimaginably far away, and in a few seconds at most a pressure fiercer than a meteor of heaven-fire bore down on the whole field — a ball of light carrying a roaring blaze came shrieking straight down out of the crown of the sky.
“BOOM!”
One enormous crash.
It threw up a column of earth and smoke a thousand meters high that formed into a magnificent mushroom-shaped cloud of explosion.
The terrible shockwave swept across the whole boundless land in an instant. Ye Kong and Sea Fatty and the rest could not keep their footing at all and went over one after another, thrown high and dropped low in the shockwave like small boats in a terrifying sea, in a thoroughly sorry state. The Liqie brothers, working together without needing to speak, drove both legs into the ground like spikes — but the whole slab of rock under their feet cracked and blew upward, and flung the pair of them, in a sky full of flying stone, ten thousand meters out.
Even the Young Lord of Dawn, whose strength was in a class of its own, had no choice but to give ground with the force of it, and even with a treasure protecting him he tumbled better than a dozen times in the air before he barely evaded the shock and came down safely.
In the whole field, the only one still standing on both feet was Xue Tanglang.
He had frozen the entire space around him with absolute cold.
And even so.
Xue Tanglang, with the Storm Giant resisting at full power, was still driven sliding back a hundred meters by the shockwave.
Under his feet, a trench — over half a meter deep at the worst of it and tapering off gradually, and still appalling to look at — had opened up in front of him, plowed there by the shockwave forcing him back as his two feet held… The others who put up the same resistance as Xue Tanglang were the Tianra Prince and the barefoot girl the Wind-Breath Seabird had evolved into.
But the Tianra Prince and the Wind-Breath Seabird did not have Xue Tanglang’s power to resist.
One after the other, the shockwave blew them away.
They slammed deep into a rock face and printed a great human shape into it.
The barefoot girl the Wind-Breath Seabird had transformed into came off better, because at the last possible moment Sea Fatty threw himself in front of her without a thought for himself and made a wall of his own body. He took some injury for it, but Sea Fatty’s fat soaked up the overwhelming bulk of the force. The Tianra Prince, who took the whole of the shock alone, went into the rock face, his spine and the arm bones he had braced with very nearly snapping, blood welling out of his mouth, a red thread he could not stop, sliding down from the corner of it — leaving a man who was always elegant and always unhurried looking like a wreck.
“This game, you will certainly lose!” The middle-aged scholar lightly took up a white piece and slapped it down on the stone with enormous elegance, and made his declaration like a prophet. “Every step, you are inside my calculation. Every step, you are fated to lose!”
He had put that piece down beside one of Yue Yang’s.
If that move had not been made.
Then nothing on the whole board would have looked like a problem. But with it made, Yue Yang immediately had a feeling that not only the pieces beside that white one but the entire position was about to collapse… It was a move that would bring the whole board down, and the man had made it, ahead of Yue Yang, in the deadliest place there was.
Yue Yang’s face changed.
Of course, the main reason he was startled was not the position on the stone. It was the change in the scenes.
He did not need to guess now. Yue Yang could see clearly what this Sky Tower traitor Dongfang’s Game talent actually did. It was a talent that could take the whole shape of a battle and make it develop according to its owner’s will, following his arrangement: the moment its wielder laid down a single piece, the whole shape of the battle correspondingly gained some advantage that had been arranged long in advance. When one game was finished, the winning side would take everything — the battle and the duel both — and the losing side would have nothing at all, might even be ruined in name and body, and die on the spot.
This was not an ordinary game at all.
It was a duel.
A duel that put every person on the board and turned every living thing in heaven and earth into a piece — including the lives of the two players.
“I could go on placing pieces until you despaired, but to keep anybody from talking, I will hand you your chance instead! Junior, do not say that I, your senior, bullied you. I am giving you a chance at a fair game right now. Weren’t you saying how clever you are? Come. Place your piece. Bring out every bit of that strength you have been hiding! That Vivienne who props you up from behind, for instance — that Conquest Queen who was arrogant enough to swear she would sweep the Heavenly Realm — why not have her come out and turn the battle around for you? How about it?” The middle-aged scholar made the offer with the win already in his hand, as though the Conquest Queen — whose name once turned Heavenly Realm powers pale and broke their nerve — were no threat to him at all.
Yue Yang did not place a piece. He stared straight ahead at the new change in the scenes.
Out on the boundless land, in front of Sea Fatty and the others.
A tall golden man, with the light of the sun pouring off his whole body, was slowly taking shape out of the earth and smoke.
First he tossed forward, without any particular care, a withered, shadowy figure he had been carrying. Then he raised one wrist idly, spread his five fingers, and closed them gently — and the mushroom-shaped cloud of explosion standing a thousand meters high shrank at speed, as fast as if a black hole were swallowing it, contracting under the will of that golden man who gave off waves of sunlight, gathering into a ball, turning slowly, spinning in midair like a tiny star afloat above his palm… Meeting the shocked eyes of Ye Kong and Xue Tanglang and the rest, the tall man let something show in his cold golden eyes, a contempt with nothing human left in it. “Ants. This general is the ‘Solar Divine General’ of the Eighteen Divine Generals under the Grand Hall Master. Putting little worms like you to death is no work for this general, but the Grand Hall Master’s order leaves this general no choice but to make the trip. I hope you will do your utmost and resist a little more fiercely. Don’t let this general kill you too easily. That would be too dull for words.”
The tall man who called himself the Solar Divine General had thrown a withered black shadow onto the ground.
Ye Kong and the rest took one look at it and rushed over in horror.
Because it was Old Fox, who had been in hiding outside the Sky Tower’s Falling Star Sea.
Nobody had imagined that the man holding the line out there could have been caught by this Solar Divine General — and dragged all the way here, to the boundless land, which nobody could enter at all once the duel had begun…
“I’m all right. Cough, cough!” Old Fox began to cough in pain. The enemy had smashed a great piece out of his chest, his ribs were broken clean across, his heart and lungs had turned into a sea of blood inside him, and every cough sent a great quantity of blood out of his mouth and nose. Even in that much pain, Old Fox, being a teacher, still got the first piece of intelligence through to his students. “Careful. There are two of them. Cough, cough. Two — two of them!”
“The Lunar Divine General has no interest in joining a fight with ants like you. If it weren’t for the Grand Hall Master’s personal instruction, this general wouldn’t have come here to dispose of little worms either! Hunting down the Sky Tower’s powers — Tianlu, Qianye, Wuse, the ones who hide like turtles and never see daylight — that is our proper work!” The Solar Divine General waved a hand with complete indifference, and did not spare even one glance for the Young Lord of Dawn, who was overcome with joy and shock together. The same radiance poured off him, the same dazzle like a small sun — but set beside this Solar Divine General, the gap in the Young Lord of Dawn was not an ordinary one. If the Young Lord of Dawn was a bloom of firelight in the dark, then this Solar Divine General was a burning volcano.
Head up, arrogant, ignoring the eyes of Ye Kong and Xue Tanglang and the rest.
The Solar Divine General put out one finger. “Come together. One finger is all I need to grind you into powder! Ants, use every scrap of strength you have — though there will be no second kind of result, and in the time that follows all of you will be howling and begging this general for mercy. Because you are going to find out very soon that death, for ants like you, is a luxury!”
Oh, for—!
Yue Yang was so angry his navel nearly went crooked.
He had seen plenty of stuck-up creatures in his life, but never in all his years one this stuck-up!
If Yue Yang had been on the scene, he would certainly have beaten this Solar Divine General or whatever he was into a pig’s head with three punches and a couple of kicks. Posturing in front of your old man? Light Hall Master Zhonghua and Ji Wuri both stood in front of your old man like somebody’s grandson, didn’t they! Your old man damn near made the Solar King cry, didn’t he! Who the hell do you think you are… Unfortunately, furious as Yue Yang was, there was no way for him to get there. All he could do was stand and watch Ye Kong and Sea Fatty and the rest get bullied by this Solar Divine General.
“Now, I give you a chance to place a piece!” The middle-aged scholar smiled, and the smile could not have been more brilliant. “Aren’t you the one who’s best at turning a battle around? Turn one around for me, then! Come on, don’t stand on ceremony, place your piece. Aren’t you the one who protects these brothers of yours? Aren’t you the one who talks about loyalty? Hurry up and save your brothers — my subordinate is about to grind them to death!”
(End of Chapter 1247)