The game space.
Beneath the pine, before the stone table.
The middle-aged scholar held a white piece in his fingers and stood over the board, looking down at it for a long time. Then, deep in his eyes, a flash of anger he could not suppress broke through.
His wide sleeve gave a gentle wave, and the scenes from a dozen-odd different areas appeared again. When he saw the brute of a girl who had charged into the ancient passage after the Tianma Divine General — one of the Eighteen Divine Generals under his command — and wrenched the general’s head clean off his shoulders, the middle-aged scholar could not hold back a low roar. “You really are the same man you were back then! Golden Emperor, what have you done!”
Yue Titan’s life-guardian war beast was alive and well.
Then the Yue family third young master, the brute girl’s master, could not possibly have died in battle.
In other words, the Golden Emperor had never killed Yue Yang, Yue Titan, at all. He had used a radiance of endless day to deceive Dongfang’s own eyes!
“Damn him!” The middle-aged scholar did not lose his temper easily, but now he could not stop himself from picking up an important piece on the board, the one that stood for the Golden Emperor, and crushing it to powder in his fist!
If it had only been a matter of protection — if the Golden Emperor, unable to bring himself to kill Yue Titan, had used the radiance of endless day to fling him bodily into some unknown otherworldly space to drift there, so that the Yue family third young master could never return to the Sky Tower — that would have been acceptable. It would at least have met the lowest line he could tolerate.
But that was not how it looked.
The Golden Emperor had most likely used the radiance of endless day only to send Yue Titan somewhere Dongfang could not find him. Beyond protecting him, there was a hidden intention behind it: to use his divine mind to enlighten the young man toward ascending to the divine realm.
What he had said while he was attacking had sounded very wrong indeed.
This old friend, who owed him an enormous debt of gratitude, had actually disregarded ten thousand years of friendship and ten thousand years of Dongfang’s painstaking planning. Right there on the battlefield, he had given that young man — lucky enough to make anyone jealous — enlightenment toward the divine realm. He had even taken the risk, knowing Dongfang would see through it, of using his greatest divine power to send the young man away so that the brat would have a safe place to settle and improve… Was that what an old friend was supposed to do?
Had he known it would turn out like this, he would have been better off never summoning the Golden Emperor from the Heavenly Realm at all.
He had called in that favor at exactly the wrong time!
Now, with the important piece that stood for the Golden Emperor gone, a huge swath of the board lay empty, leaving countless unpredictable openings and irreversible dangers. Fortunately, the overall shape of the game still gave his white pieces an absolute advantage. Even without the piece that stood for the Golden Emperor, he still had more than enough pieces to reach the final victory.
“Do not think that without you, I will lose!”
“Golden Emperor, you are nowhere near as important as you imagine! You wish to ruin my game? Impossible!” The middle-aged scholar laid another piece on the board, and his composure returned. “Under my designs, no one can turn the game around. In the game, I am forever the one who is never defeated. So it was in the past, so it is now, and so it will be in the future!”
At the same moment, Yue Yang opened his eyes and found himself lying on a flight of stone steps.
A supreme power of ancient law made his whole body feel as heavy as lead. He could hardly move. It was as if even twitching a fingertip or blinking an eye would take every ounce of strength he had.
Where was this?
Why had he never seen any of this scenery before?
And why did this place look a little like the World Tree inside the Sky Stairway?
His head felt ready to split. The last thing he remembered was being punched flying by the “Golden Emperor” of Tang Valley’s Three-Legged Golden Crow Clan. How had the Golden Emperor punched him all the way here? He’d thought he would be flung into a spacetime rift and wouldn’t be able to find his way back to the Sky Tower for a good long while, but it turned out he’d never left at all! The World Tree — this had to be the World Tree inside the Sky Stairway. But how many hundreds of thousands of steps up was this? How could the power of law here be so crushing? He was strong — his strength already went far beyond the realm of a true god, even if he hadn’t ascended — and even he was being pressed down until he could barely breathe… This couldn’t be above the five-hundred-thousandth step, could it?
“This is the millionth step!”
A voice sounded beside his ear, and it delighted Yue Yang so much he nearly jumped up.
Yue Yang struggled to sit up and turned his head to look back. He found a figure with its back to him, familiar and yet strange, standing there quietly.
Familiar, because it was a figure he could never forget. Strange, because it had changed beyond belief from what he had known, so much that he could hardly believe it, and he could not help feeling both things at once.
It was the Supreme!
It was the extraordinary woman whom everyone in the Sky Tower respectfully called the Supreme.
She did not turn around, just as before. Except for the very first time, when she had appeared as his guide at the Martial Camp, she had always preferred to keep her back to him. Perhaps it was to protect his little bit of manly pride. She did not want to put on the face of a master, and she wanted even less to see him forced to look up at her because he could not surpass her supreme will.
She, who could look down on all living things, did not, from the bottom of her heart, want to see him among them.
No one had ever longed for Yue Yang to grow up quickly the way she did.
Only if he grew up quickly, took her place as the new Human Supreme and became the new guardian of the Sky Tower in her stead, could she be even a little free.
“I told you I would wait for you on the millionth step.” When the Supreme said it, Yue Yang really did remember. That’s right, she had said that. She had even promised that if he made it, she would give him a chance to court her.
“Ahem. I’m a little fuzzy on how I actually got here.” Yue Yang scratched the back of his head and grinned, a little embarrassed.
“You idiot, I’m the one who pulled you up here. That Golden Emperor punched you into a spacetime rift in the Sky Stairway, and it took me a great deal of effort to pull you here beside me. Did you think the Golden Emperor was kind enough to send you here? Besides, he doesn’t have that ability! No one can get past the laws of the Sky Stairway. The reason I pulled you here beside me is… that’s a secret. You don’t need to know the truth.” Once the Supreme called something a secret, Yue Yang could be as curious as he liked and it would get him nowhere. If she didn’t want to say, prying the truth out of her would be harder than climbing to heaven.
“Really? Well, whatever happened, I still made it up to the millionth step!” Yue Yang, for his part, seized on that one point. Reach the millionth step and he could court her. Never mind how he’d gotten up here; as long as he was up, that was enough. It wasn’t as if this was the first time he’d played dirty anyway.
“That doesn’t count. You’ll have to walk it again from the start.” The Supreme felt this brat had no sincerity at all and was pushing his luck.
“What? You’re kidding, right?” Yue Yang, for his part, was dumbfounded.
Climb it all over again?
How much time would that take!
Never mind whether he could even climb these terrifying million steps. Even if he could, who knew how long it would take, and even if he got to the top, there was no guarantee he could beat the ancient wills of those who had come before him here… He had finally made it up, and it didn’t count. That was just too pitiful!
Yue Yang, for his part, tried to come up with an excuse — the Heavenly Realm legions invading, for example, so he had no time to spare for climbing.
Of course, that was hardly a good reason.
No time now? Then climb it later!
Besides, if the climb didn’t count because he hadn’t made it himself, he really didn’t have a leg to stand on if he tried to argue the point.
Just as Yue Yang was wondering how to win her over, the Supreme gave a light wave of her hand. “Let’s not argue about that. Right now, think first about how to deal with the crisis facing the Sky Tower! That traitor Dongfang has been planning this for several thousand years, close to ten thousand. He won’t be easy to beat. He must have many moves in reserve that we don’t know about yet, and we need to become much stronger, or we’ll never be able to fight him to the end! And even if we defeat Dongfang, the Divine Hall Supreme hiding behind him, Tianyu, will certainly strike at once… while you haven’t fully grown yet, at the moment we are weakest after the battle. That will be his best chance to attack.”
“I know this fight is going to be hard.” Yue Yang nodded, but he was not discouraged. “Grit your teeth and the hard part always passes. I’d bet that if we weren’t enough of a threat, they would never have launched their attack this far ahead of time. As long as we use our advantages well, victory will be ours in the end!”
“You have the Immortal Clan’s protection. I know that, of course.” The Supreme was silent for a moment, then gently disagreed. “Victory will be yours in the end — that much is certain. But it will not necessarily belong to the Sky Tower.”
“What?” Yue Yang nearly jumped out of his skin.
“Even my ‘Divine Sight’ can’t see the future of this war clearly. I believe you will win in the end, but what price will be paid along the way — that is something I can’t see… Perhaps many people will fall. Perhaps I will be among them, or the Night Empress, or that Majesty of yours, or perhaps even those little girls at your side… Listen to me, Yue Yang. If you aren’t strong enough, you can’t master the power of fate. And once you can’t master the power of fate, fate will rule you, and you will struggle under other people’s divine power. In a situation like that, how can you keep the people you love safe?”
“No — no, I will never let anything like that happen!” Yue Yang broke out in a cold sweat. He could not bear to imagine it. If even one of the people at his side fell in this war, it would be something he could never accept.
“That is why you need not only the power to control your own fate, but the power to master other people’s fates as well. You are not only yourself. You have your family, the women you love, your companions, your followers — standing beside you and standing behind you are thousands upon thousands of family and friends. All of their fates have to be in your hands, and only then will they be safe. Do you fully understand what I mean? Do you fully understand the responsibility you want to shoulder, and the true meaning of the life you are living? If you understand that, then you need to understand one more thing: how much power you must have to protect so many people’s fates and hold them firmly in your grasp!” The Supreme’s words left Yue Yang drenched in sweat.
He knew he had tremendous power.
But to be honest, he really did not know exactly how much power he had.
Even now, when he lost control and went berserk, he was far stronger than he was in his normal state!
And that proved one thing. Even today, having risen to such a realm, he was still nowhere near his limit, still nowhere near the full power he ought to command…
All that endless potential, and no way to bring it out.
Was he really going to stand there and watch helplessly while that Sky Tower traitor Dongfang and that Divine Hall Supreme Tianyu hurt the people closest to him, with no power to stop it? No, no — that was absolutely not something he was willing to see! This wasn’t a game. There was no respawning. If he wanted the people he loved to stay at his side forever, he had to keep them alive. He had to use the power he could not yet master to knock the enemy down, drive the invaders back, hold his homeland and watch over his family and the women he loved!
Yue Yang clenched his fists tight.
He drew a deep breath.
He fought to calm himself, brought his mind back to a clear, empty state with no stray thoughts in it, and then looked straight at the Supreme. “Please teach me. Tell me what I have to do!”
“That is exactly what I am going to tell you! Once, there was a day when a young mother came to find me — a woman without equal in all the world, so remarkable that even I felt ashamed of myself beside her. She told me certain truths about the future that I could not understand at the time, let alone see for myself. Then one day, I finally climbed to the millionth step, and here I received all the profound mysteries she had left behind. At last I understood. Every secret lay open before my eyes, and I knew what I had to do… Here, on the millionth step of the Sky Stairway, I will pass on everything that mother taught me, in her place and holding nothing back, to her son! And, as that mother asked of me, I will help her son until he becomes an eternal existence and the greatest person the Sky Tower has ever known, without equal in all of history — a Sacred Sovereign, truly supreme above all!” As the Supreme spoke, she turned around.
“And that person is you!”
Her peerless, heavenly face broke into a smile that set Yue Yang’s very soul trembling.
Her Divine Sight looked straight into the depths of his heart and flowed together with his soul. No words were needed, yet Yue Yang took in every one of her thoughts and every part of her awareness: Are you ready to take up the share of responsibility you are willing to bear, and the share of fate’s power you ought to command?
Yue Yang walked over. Nothing held him back or swayed him anymore, and with their hearts joined, he took the strongest person in the Sky Tower into his arms — this Human Supreme, held in awe by the whole world. “I choose to master fate — everyone’s fate! Mine, yours, the Night Empress’s, Her Majesty’s. I won’t let Wuxia and Qianqian and the others fall in front of me. No one will ever snatch their fates away from them in front of me. They belong to me, forever!”
(End of Chapter 1263)