Yue Yang picked up a piece.
He meant to set it down on the stone, and discovered to his astonishment that his hand could not place the piece anywhere in the position that most needed rescuing.
What — what on earth was going on? Why could he, who held Sovereign Intent, not break the shape of this Game talent — break out of it, and stand? And the most frightening part was not even that. It was that he, holding Sovereign Intent, could not so much as take part in this game… Not even take part? Had this Sky Tower traitor Dongfang already reached the Divine tier, and understood the eternity of the game from inside it?
“Ha ha ha!” The middle-aged scholar threw his head back and laughed, and shook his head over and over at Yue Yang’s astonished face. “Do you see now, junior? Without my consent you have not even the right to place a piece. You have not even the right to play. At most you are a pitiable piece for somebody else to move around by hand!”
When the mocking little lesson was over, he waved a hand again, elegantly.
Indicating that he had consented, and that Yue Yang could now place his piece.
Even so, Yue Yang could not play as he pleased, because he found that although the force of the law had loosened a great deal, for the moment there were still a great many rules binding it that he could neither name nor explain.
He wanted to play, and still he could not get the piece onto the stone.
The middle-aged scholar laughed again at length. “Junior, let me teach you one more thing free of charge. To play, you must have pieces — which is to say, you must have the capital to play against me. With nothing to your name and no cards in your hand, how can you put a card down? By the same reasoning, if you have no pieces in your hand, how can you place one out of thin air? Listen carefully. From this moment, every step you take must be a piece you actually hold in your hand. No — let us say, the family and friends around you, or those supporters of yours whose heads are so hot they will not repent even in death… You must use their lives as your pieces. Only then can you play against me. Only then are you qualified to play against me!”
He had to use the lives of family and friends as his stake? He had to convert everything he had into the pieces in his hand?
And if one step went wrong, then the consequences…
And while Yue Yang was holding the piece and unable to commit, the scene coming through from the transparent world changed again.
As Ye Kong and Xue Tanglang gathered their courage and charged, that Solar Divine General put out a hand, neither hurrying nor slowing, opened his five fingers and closed them, and gathered a golden ball of energy that stood comparison with a small sun.
He tossed the golden ball of energy lightly at the ground, and in an instant it sank into the earth.
Xue Tanglang and the rest came charging in.
Their fists never so much as reached the Solar Divine General’s face.
Under their feet, a terrible explosion went off. Earth and rock and everything else were annihilated in the blast, reduced directly to flying ash and scattered smoke, and space itself was blown to powder. The twisted fissures in space were like the mouths of primordial monsters, sucking desperately at everything around them. Xue Tanglang reacted fastest: he pulled back the fist he had swung at the Solar Divine General to guard his face, and spun both feet like a whirlwind, blasting the Liqie brothers and the Tianra Prince clear.
The Liqie brothers and the Tianra Prince got out safely, but Xue Tanglang was left standing in the middle of the explosion with nothing between him and it.
The twisted fissure in space and time, in the shape of a monster, swallowed him whole.
Xue Tanglang could not resist it at all.
Like an ordinary man sinking into quicksand, he went down by degrees until it closed over his head.
That kind of black hole in space and time is not affected by any outside force, and however hard a man struggles the ending is the same… And in the instant Xue Tanglang was about to be lost forever in the infinite void, Sea Fatty, gravely wounded and near death, suddenly threw himself headlong across, looking exactly like a madman, and forced both hands into the closing fissure to hold it open. With the tier and the strength he had at that moment, trying to stop a fissure in space from closing was as stupid as a mantis raising its arms to stop a cart. But Sea Fatty knew that perfectly well and reached in anyway, overreaching himself, swearing to pull Xue Tanglang out of the infinite void.
“Get off!” Xue Tanglang was an iceblock of a man, no good with words. Sea Fatty’s move touched him, but he knew it was the most foolish and least advisable thing that could be done. He wanted to be saved; he absolutely did not want a second companion dragged down on his account. All that would come of this was that Sea Fatty would follow him in.
“Talk out of your ass. This big young master is your boss!” Sea Fatty’s whole body stood out in ropes of blood, his face twisted and ferocious, his eyes glaring at Xue Tanglang like brass bells, and he forced one sentence out of a mouth running with blood. “As the boss, naturally I’ve got to cover you, kid…”
Xue Tanglang had never once admitted Sea Fatty was his boss, and did not feel there was any part of this creature that could be connected, even slightly, with the word.
But at this moment he did not open his mouth to say so.
Sea Fatty was not the boss. But there was no denying one thing: sometimes this glutton really could do something only a boss could do. This rescue, for instance — the ability was garbage, but there was a thread of something moving in it. Xue Tanglang felt that every part of him, his will included, ought to have been holding at absolute freezing. So why did the rims of his eyes feel hot just now?
Seeing Sea Fatty’s ferocious face and his furious struggle, like the Mountain of Flesh Demon King himself, a good deal of Xue Tanglang’s ice-heart melted, and his fighting spirit broke out again.
The Young Lord of Dawn threw a short golden spear.
A Quasi-Sacred treasure bearing the name ‘Thorn Dragon’ came shooting through, unstoppable.
Sea Fatty could not evade it at all. He had not even seen the Young Lord of Dawn’s ambush; he was still throwing everything he had into pulling Xue Tanglang out… A tall, thin shadow, its whole body hard as refined steel, flashed into place at Sea Fatty’s back.
The short golden spear Thorn Dragon bored in through that shadow’s clasped palms, forcing its way, a fraction at a time and unstoppably, drilling through with countless scraps of flesh and blood, and finally drove deep into the shadow’s chest and came out through his back. The spearhead stopped when it reached the flesh over Sea Fatty’s heart — because the shadow’s bloody hands had already caught the butt of it and were holding it fast.
It was Ye Kong.
It was this man who acted more than he spoke, this teammate who could be trusted at any hour, who had used his own thin body to force a stop to the Young Lord of Dawn’s killing blow.
The barefoot girl the Wind-Breath Seabird had transformed into shot over Ye Kong’s and Sea Fatty’s heads like lightning, hung upside down from above them, put out one slender jade hand, and grabbed for Xue Tanglang where he was sinking into the infinite void. In the space of a spark she got hold of that spiky upstanding ice-hair of his, the coolest thing about him, and hauled him out of the infinite void in one go.
The Young Lord of Dawn smiled coldly.
Golden light flickered in both his hands.
Dozens, nearly a hundred golden arrows came shooting at Ye Kong and Sea Fatty and Xue Tanglang and the Wind-Breath Seabird like falling rain.
This time Ye Kong did not have to block the arrows. Two shadows had already rushed in front of them… The golden arrows nailed the two of them into hedgehogs. Apart from the heads and faces they had covered with their hands, their bodies were wounds from one end to the other; they had become, quite literally, two man-shaped archery butts.
The two of them were, of course, the Liqie brothers, who had come back to help in the same instant and without needing to agree on it.
And not only the Liqie brothers. From some distance off the Tianra Prince shot two chains of fire back as well, one coiling around the Wind-Breath Seabird’s waist, one sliding along the ground to wrap Ye Kong’s right leg. Ye Kong spun, first kicking Sea Fatty in the backside, then using the recoil to launch himself, spreading both arms, catching hold of the hedgehog-shaped Liqie brothers — and then, as the Tianra Prince reeled the chains in, withdrawing out of the Young Lord of Dawn’s attack range.
The Wind-Breath Seabird, still holding Xue Tanglang by the hair, hooked out with one slender foot.
There was no time to hook anything solid.
In her haste she hooked into Sea Fatty’s great mouth, the pink toes changing into bird claws, seizing Sea Fatty’s tongue and teeth and carrying that unspeakably heavy creature away with the rest of them…
Behind them the fissure in space and time snapped shut, and since Sea Fatty’s backside was on the ample side, the space of the fissure sheared a good piece of it clean off.
One hundredth of a second slower and Sea Fatty’s entire lower half would probably have vanished into the infinite void.
“Make your move, and be quick! Your friends cannot hold out much longer. And although ‘Solar’ is only a Divine General, and among the Eighteen Divine Generals his strength does not even reach the top ten, those friends of yours really are pitifully weak — they cannot take a single move!” The middle-aged scholar watched Yue Yang in an excellent humor, a smile like a spring breeze staying on his face. “Yue family third son, do not tell me you cannot overcome even this much small difficulty. If that is really so, I shall be very disappointed indeed. I did so want to treat you as the great rival of my life!”
“Quit running your mouth. This young master already said it: this game, I’ll play it with you to the end!” Yue Yang put out a furious hand and slapped a black piece down on the stone.
That move of his.
It did not go in the place on the board that most needed rescuing. It did not even go near it.
Yue Yang had played casually, under no constraint and no influence whatsoever, straight from the heart, setting the piece down in an empty space that even the middle-aged scholar could not have guessed at. That one move, considered apart from the whole position and on its own, had the free carriage of an immortal flying in from beyond the sky, and a subtlety in the way it broke the shape of things that left no track at all to follow, entirely outside anything the middle-aged scholar had expected.
Not in his dreams had the middle-aged scholar imagined Yue Yang would play like that, would play a move like that.
He could not make it out at all.
Why do this?
Playing a step like that seemed to do the whole position harm and no good. Not only did the move fail to rescue the part of the board that most needed rescuing, it put a seemingly unimportant piece on an unimportant patch of empty ground.
“Hm?” The middle-aged scholar sank for a moment into deep thought. He could not tell yet whether this boy Yue Yang had placed a piece at random on purpose, deliberately to disturb his thinking, or whether it was done for a particular reason. And if it was done deliberately, then what was the intention behind that step? What effect would it have on the whole shape of the game? This boy Yue Yang was absolutely not a rash, impulsive fool. The game turned on life and death, on whether the Sky Tower survived at all, and however much the boy let his temper rule him, there was no possibility of his playing at random. That step must have a deep meaning in it…
The middle-aged scholar settled into a long deliberation.
The scene coming through from the transparent world changed again.
Out on the boundless land, facing the Solar Divine General with his crushing strength and the Young Lord of Dawn ambushing from the side, Ye Kong and Sea Fatty and Xue Tanglang had no strength left to resist with — even keeping themselves alive was in serious danger.
And their teacher, Old Fox, who studied spatial transfer and strategy, what was he doing now?
From the moment he came in, Old Fox had been watching Yue Yang, up in the sky, playing the middle-aged scholar.
He stood hunched over his staff.
Even with Xue Tanglang and the others in mortal danger he did not divide his attention or look away; he watched Yue Yang the whole time… Not until Yue Yang made up his mind, took up a piece, and slapped it onto the board did Old Fox seem to let out a held breath, his whole body loosening. He slowly summoned his golden grimoire, took a carefully tended spore out of the space inside it, and planted it in the ground in front of him with great care.
The Solar Divine General and the Young Lord of Dawn were both watching, and neither of them understood in the least. This old thing was gravely wounded, at the point of death, with one breath left in him — what exactly did he imagine he was doing?
The spore went into the soil.
Very soon.
It sprouted and grew.
It became a small, fragile thorn flower, breaking up out of the earth like any ordinary plant putting out a shoot.
If the golden grimoire’s energy barrier had not been shielding it, the Young Lord of Dawn reckoned, one careless sneeze from him could have pulled that pitifully feeble thorn flower up by the roots, blown it clean away, or shaken it to powder outright.
“Ha ha ha! You’ve gone senile, haven’t you? You’re actually starting a war with one measly thorn flower? Ah ha ha ha, my God. A fragile thing like that thorn flower — only a backwater like the Sky Tower would even have one. In the Heavenly Realm a pitiful thorn flower like that wouldn’t survive a day. No — it wouldn’t survive a second! You’re going to attack me and the Solar Divine General with a thorn flower? I have to say, you really are an old ghost with a genius as deep as the sea. They didn’t name you Old Fox for nothing — a genuine old fox, no question. You nearly had me fooled. Just barely nearly…” One look and the Young Lord of Dawn was laughing hard enough to spray tears.
“How tedious. This general has wasted far too much time on you people. It is a simple waste of a life!” The Solar Divine General had nothing left to say. He decided that on his next move he would wipe these Sky Tower warriors with something wrong in their heads out entirely, destroy them to ash forever, and not leave so much as a soul behind.
“A thorn flower?” Unlike the two of them, the middle-aged scholar facing Yue Yang drew his brows together.
“What do I want to say? Every kind of war beast has its own nature and its own abilities. There are no garbage war beasts in this world — only arrogant, contemptuous stupidity, and the kind of dismissal that thinks it already knows. The thorn flower is not a weak war beast. It never has been. And if you knew it possessed particular abilities like spores and division, you ought to be still more careful about speaking lightly.” Old Fox gave the warning in complete earnest. Unfortunately, the Young Lord of Dawn and the Solar Divine General were not in the least grateful for it.
“Oh, I’m terrified!” The Young Lord of Dawn heard it and could not stop laughing. “Is the thorn flower that frightening a war beast? I really am terrified! Wah, such a terrifying war beast has appeared on the battlefield, whatever shall I do? Should I kneel down and knock my head on the ground and beg for mercy? Ah ha ha ha!”
“Scaremongering old nobody. You can go and die now.” The Solar Divine General decided to stop wasting breath.
He put out his golden right hand.
In the next second he would blast them into ash.
Old Fox, Ye Kong, every one of them standing in front of him.
But in the second before he moved, a shaft of divine light rose up from that thorn flower too frail to stand in a wind and shot into the sky, and then scattered into a skyful of petals that came drifting down like snow. The scent covered the whole field, and the whole boundless land turned in an instant into green grassland. Countless flowers bored up out of the earth, growing at a speed the eye could follow, and opened.
A hundred flowers blooming at once!
The boundless land that had been a ruin a moment ago turned in an instant into a field of flowers, spring come back to the earth.
The middle-aged scholar across from Yue Yang saw it, and his face changed violently.
The Young Lord of Dawn and the Solar Divine General had faces full of disbelieving shock… What on earth had just happened? At this moment they were both still completely in the fog.
(End of Chapter 1248)