Yue Yang had been watching the middle-aged scholar the whole time.

This traitor to the Sky Tower had not moved a hair. He held his piece and went on thinking deeply, paying no attention at all to what was being done to his own son.

“Ruthless enough! Worthy of the Central Divine Hall’s foremost strategist — to calculate against somebody else, even a son can be a discarded pawn!” Yue Yang, for his part, had enormous respect for this Grand Hall Master Dongfang. You can’t catch a wolf without giving up a child, and you can’t catch a wolf of the other kind without giving up your wife — whoever came up with those sayings was probably describing a man like Grand Hall Master Dongfang. What Yue Yang did not know was that Grand Hall Master Dongfang had better than a hundred sons, and this Young Lord of Dawn was one percent of them. If he was discarded, then he was discarded. It hardly counted for anything.

Never mind one Young Lord of Dawn. If he threw away the lot, what of it?

At most he would father another hundred-odd later on.

In the Heavenly Realm, Grand Hall Master Dongfang might run short of other things, but he would never run short of sons. If the Young Lord of Dawn had made something of himself, then he could be called a son. Having ended up like this — sorry, that makes him a discarded pawn.

The Young Lord of Dawn’s screaming was piteous, but in Sea Fatty’s ears it was lovely to listen to.

Their one reservation was that the sound was a shade monotonous.

If the Solar Divine General could be brought in for a duet, they believed it would be more perfect still.

Having finished with the Young Lord of Dawn, Ye Kong and the Liqie brothers turned toward the Solar Divine General — all except Sea Fatty, who went on researching whether a chrysanthemum and a short golden spear could be made to produce a better tone of friction. Xue Tanglang, the Tianra Prince, the Wind-Breath Seabird, Ye Kong and the Liqie brothers were by now closing slowly around that still perfectly composed Solar Divine General.

“Tsk!” The Solar Divine General laughed coldly. “If you imagine I am going to be knocked down and tortured for sport like that piece of garbage, you are very badly mistaken!”

“Is there a difference?” Ye Kong could not see one anywhere.

“You have the Gold-Crowned Thorn Queen’s blessing. Your bodies do not take damage from brute force and you recover quickly. But you have one fatal weakness.” The Solar Divine General ground it out a word at a time. “You gained nothing on the attacking side. All you strengthened was your defense!”

“That’s enough.” Xue Tanglang was fastest off the mark, and rushed the Solar Divine General.

“So long as I do not let you close, the few of you are worth less than a pack of mice scurrying across a floor!” The Solar Divine General tossed the light ball he had gathered into the ground without even looking.

He had confidence enough for it.

Even with an infant-stage Gold-Crowned Thorn Queen standing in front of him, it was not enough to make him afraid.

The power a Divine General holds is a thing no Sky-rank power can imagine — and besides, these juniors in front of him topped out below Sky-rank Level Five, which made them rookies. How were they going to get close enough to lay a hand on a Divine General? They wanted to attack him with the methods they had used to torture the Young Lord of Dawn? Laughable! Could they even understand what a Divine General’s might was?

The ball of energy he had thrown into the earth went off in another great explosion.

Once again it erupted under Xue Tanglang’s feet.

It was not like the last time.

The last time, Xue Tanglang and the rest had thrown everything they had into it and barely escaped alive as a team that moved as one, by the narrowest of margins, and Xue Tanglang, the strongest of them, had nearly gone down into the infinite void…

This time was entirely different.

Xue Tanglang was not blown off his feet. Both feet stayed where they were.

As the great explosion went off, he watched the Solar Divine General with his expression unchanged, as though he were seeing this enemy for the first time.

Boom!

The light ball’s energy was beyond measuring. Mud and stone and gravel were flung up in the shockwave, throwing out a mushroom cloud very nearly the equal of the last one. The only difference was that this time the explosion happened on ground already covered over with green grass, and neither heaven nor earth was shattered by it — not even cracked. Even the ripple through space was very small. You could say it was an enormous noise and nothing else.

When the great mushroom cloud broke apart, the shockwave slid away across the boundless green surface of the field.

The sound trailed off behind it.

And its force faded by degrees, until at last it came to nothing at all.

The crater under Xue Tanglang’s feet was recovering its green at a speed the eye could follow. A gust of wind came across, and the heaven and earth that had been blasted black a moment ago were restored to a green plain with clean air moving through it.

“The Gold-Crowned Thorn Queen’s will really is a powerful thing!” The Solar Divine General fixed a cold eye on Duoduo, and his voice went from low to loud until it became a thunderclap that shook the land. “So explosions on the ground do not work. What about a piercing strike out of the sky? Since you are set on forcing me to act, then let me acquaint you with the anger of a Divine General! Ants like you — have you ever seen the pillars of the sun?”

The Solar Divine General raised both hands to the sky and gathered a light ball as fierce as a sun.

This was not energy.

Nor was it a talent or a domain. It was his life-guardian war beast — an elemental war beast in the form of a sun…

That perfectly round sun beast spun madly under its master’s will, and thirty-six pillars of light, like light-spears hurled down by a god, drove straight at Xue Tanglang and the Tianra Prince and the Liqie brothers and the rest, standing on the ground with their faces turned up!

And not only at them. Even Old Fox, who had not made a sound all this while, and Duoduo, who was only looking on, had several pillars driving down at their heads.

Ye Kong reacted fastest. He sprang into the air and rammed himself head-first into one of the small green hills of that land, meaning to use the mass of the hill to block a sun-pillar of that unmeasurable power.

What he could not have known was that the sun-pillars could bend and move.

They did not simply pick a direction and hold it.

The one after Ye Kong cut an arc through the air.

Under the Solar Divine General’s will, it locked onto Ye Kong and came after him.

Hssss… The small green hill it touched first was scorched black and blasted out of existence, and like a thunder god’s stroke coming down, hill and Ye Kong together were blasted into ten million grains of powder. In the next second, Xue Tanglang, the Tianra Prince, the Liqie brothers, Sea Fatty, Old Fox and even Duoduo — the position every one of them stood in was blasted to pieces.

All that was left on the green earth were dozens of charred lines crossing and cutting through one another into a pattern with no name.

“Hmph. This is what comes of angering this general!” The Solar Divine General checked, and found that the place where Duoduo had been standing had likewise been blasted into an enormous deep pit, with nothing inside it — he assumed she had been reduced to powder. The grass there did not grow back, and across the green plain the flame the sun-pillars had cut was burning fiercely now, the land sunk in a sea of fire. He drew back his arrogant gaze and spat contemptuously at his own feet. “So much for the Sky Tower’s young genius that appears once in a century. So much for the invincible Gold-Crowned Thorn Queen. All of it empty wind! Sky Tower people simply love to brag. Tedious idiots!”

Having said his contemptuous piece, he saluted the middle-aged scholar, who was still sunk in thought. “Grand Hall Master, your subordinate has completed the task. Your instructions!”

He did not say it out loud.

But what was on his face was the arrogance of a man saying give me something with some difficulty in it next time.

The middle-aged scholar was still deep in deliberation and did not answer. The Solar Divine General saw it and let nothing show, only drew his brows together very slightly, wondering what could be the matter with the Grand Hall Master. Why was he still thinking? Was that Yue family third son Yue Titan really so frightening?

The Solar Divine General looked at Yue Yang as well, meaning to find shock and grief on the transmigrator’s face. Unfortunately for him, he was going to be disappointed.

There was no shock on Yue Yang’s face.

And no grief either.

He poured himself a cup of tea without a heart or a conscience anywhere about him and drank it at his leisure, which made the sharpest possible contrast with the middle-aged scholar holding a piece and thinking bitterly. This attitude of Yue Yang’s left the Solar Divine General thoroughly put out. The Gold-Crowned Thorn Queen was a life-guardian war beast and would not truly die, granted — but it was still a grave wound, and his teacher and his teammates had all been burned to ash, and he could still drink tea? What kind of mind was that?

Was this Yue family third son Yue Titan, the man they called the Sky Tower’s miracle, an idiot?

Yue Yang paid him no attention and went on drinking his tea.

Making a noise over it.

There was another voice, though, a sweet one, and it spoke up behind the Solar Divine General. “I was going to let you enjoy yourself a while longer. But I truly cannot stand the face of a small man who has had his way and gone giddy with it. Killing somebody like you would dirty my hands, so I’ll just turn your life-guardian war beast into fertilizer for my flowers instead!”

The Solar Divine General whipped around in shock and found Duoduo standing behind him.

And not only Duoduo. Old Fox, Xue Tanglang, the Tianra Prince, Ye Kong and the Liqie brothers were all there, and at the very back, the Wind-Breath Seabird and a Sea Fatty carrying the Young Lord of Dawn by the scruff.

“What?” The Solar Divine General could make no sense of it. He had plainly seen these people turned into ash. How had every one of them come back to life and gotten behind him?

“Eeeek!“

A shrill, urgent scream came out of the sky, the panic of a mouse that has been fixed by a venomous snake.

The Solar Divine General looked up.

His pupils shrank at speed.

Down to needles.

He was looking at something horrifying and impossible.

There was a giant up there whose body was made of thorn flowers, reaching a hand down from high in the sky, and as a man might pick up a flatbread, it picked up that ‘Sun’ which could fire off dozens of piercing sun-pillars at any moment, took a greedy bite out of it, leaving a notch clean out of the sun, and stuffed the whole remaining piece down its throat.

This terrifying giant, something like a woman and more like a thorn flower, closed its enormous mouth and swallowed hard, and when the great lump of food had gone down its neck—

It let out a belch like low thunder…

It was as though somebody had punched the Solar Divine General hard in the head. Two lines of blood came out of his nose, and stars swam through the waves of darkness across his eyes. He fought to hold his swaying body up and threw energy desperately against the injury to his spirit. Impossible as it was, he was now certain: his life-guardian war beast ‘Sun’, the beast his whole name rested on, really had been eaten by that giant. And this eating was not the digestion that kills. It was a higher and far more hopeless kind of sealing. Every scrap of the energy was stripped away and the remaining shell was sealed inside that giant’s body forever, as a part of her.

The life-guardian war beast had not died. It had been swallowed, and in the swallowing that demon-flower giant had sealed it.

This.

This was the most terrifying result of all.

Having lost his life-guardian war beast, the Solar Divine General tried to see Duoduo clearly. He could not understand why a Gold-Crowned Thorn Queen would hold a sealing power fit for a god — and not even sealing with her own hand, but sealing through a single demon-flower giant made out of her will. What did a will like that mean? Was this Gold-Crowned Thorn Queen who looked like a small girl in fact a god?

“In my name, I grant you the power of the Ancient Thorns!” Duoduo had no more patience to waste words on this Solar Divine General. She scattered out several clusters of light points with a sharp radiance in them and let them sink into Ye Kong and Sea Fatty and Xue Tanglang and the rest.

And then she turned straight into a shaft of divine light and vanished into the sky above the boundless land.

Duoduo left.

And Sea Fatty, with that shameless grin all over his face, came sidling up again and addressed the Solar Divine General with enormous warmth. “I understand how you feel. You’ve lost your life-guardian war beast, and now you’ll never be able to posture again — what a terrible misfortune! Allow this big young master to offer you his sympathy and his condolences. Ah — his deep sympathy and condolences! What’s that look for? Are you angry? Do you want to hit me? Come on, come on, don’t stand on ceremony. Where would you like to hit this big young master? How about the face? Hit it hard. Whatever you do, don’t hold back on my account!”

“Get lost!” The Solar Divine General’s head was still in pieces, and seeing this damned fatty cawing at him like a crow, he lost control of himself entirely and drove a heavy punch like lightning into that oily, shameless grin.

The next second.

The Solar Divine General felt a familiar fist-force come in through his own nose, grinding the nose bone and the bones of his face to fragments as it went, and drive straight into his brain.

Nearly fainting with the pain, in the swimming of his own vision, he found that the damned fatty was still standing in front of him — still wearing the shameless grin, not only unhurt but bouncing up and down and making heavy, jeering gestures like a great bear. And into his roaring ears came a voice, disgusting and delighted with itself. “Hit me! Go on, keep hitting me! Harder — don’t punch like some little woman who hasn’t had her dinner! Where shall it be this time? If the face doesn’t do it for you, hit me in the chest. Break my breastbone with one punch, smash my insides to pulp. No — the chest isn’t satisfying enough. Why not hit my little brother instead? Blow it right off. You’ve got to blow it right off. I don’t want my little brother anymore. My poor eggs are aching something awful, and I really do want a beating!”

“Go and die!” The Solar Divine General felt that voice, more irritating than a fly, buzzing away in front of him and turning his thinking to mush, and in the middle of his fury a second heavy punch went out like lightning, exactly as habit had trained it to.

That damned fatty with the aching eggs sprang up and spread his legs wide.

One punch, dead center.

And then the Solar Divine General watched a very satisfied, very disgusting expression come over the damned fatty’s face… while he himself, in the middle of his own pain, discovered, oddly enough, that something down below his belly had broken, the way a dropped egg breaks.

(End of Chapter 1251)