“BOOM!”
For the hundredth time, the cluster of starlight in the sky was smashed down by divine power and slammed hard into the earth.
Countless flecks of stardust sprayed up, and a world-shattering shockwave swept the whole field yet again. There was one small difference from the ninety-nine times before: the cluster of starlight sunk deep in the ground did not fly back up as it had every other time…
The Unfallen Supreme, a halo of light spreading steadily around his body like a golden divine shield, slowly came down. His massive, mountain-like frame came to rest as lightly as a feather, without stirring a single speck of dust. Both were divine tier, yet next to the twenty-meter-tall Unfallen Supreme, the golden giant Tu Wan — who had seemed so enormous — would have looked like a little golden ant. There was no comparing the two at all.
The Unfallen Supreme hit the eye with overwhelming force and weighed on the mind so heavily that no one could bear to look up at him. Yet his terrifying twenty-meter body did not come from the blood of some race born huge — giants, demons, Sky Dragons or titans.
He was actually a “human” of the Heavenly Realm.
He even had a quarter of dwarf blood in him.
According to rumors whispered around the Heavenly Realm, the Unfallen Supreme’s maternal grandmother had been a lowly dwarf slave. Because of that, his mother had been much shorter than an ordinary human, and of the ten sons she bore, not one apart from the Unfallen Supreme had ever grown taller than two meters.
The Unfallen Supreme owed his terrifying twenty-meter body entirely to his talent.
Stalwart talent: a warrior with the Stalwart talent is a tenacious fighter who will never easily fall on the battlefield. The talent’s holder gains the most brutally powerful body in the world, and however grave the wounds he takes, he will not weaken and collapse. Each time he recovers from a bloody battle, each time he comes back from the brink of death, his body grows twice as strong.
That Stalwart talent, combined with more than ten thousand years of effort, was what had finally made the Unfallen Supreme what he was today.
“…” Deep in the sunken crater, a small cluster of starlight, nearly dimmed to nothing, still flickered. It was the Night Empress, knocked down for the hundredth time.
The Night Empress had peerless talent and abilities of her own. Unfortunately, she had set foot in the divine tier less than two months ago and had not yet unlocked her true potential. And the moment she came out, she had run into an enemy as brutally strong as the Unfallen Supreme.
In talent and everything else, the Unfallen Supreme was not one bit her inferior. The only thing that set them apart was that he had more than ten thousand years of cultivated power and thousands of years of rich combat experience against every kind of divine-tier power.
The Unfallen Supreme had spent a full thousand years getting to know his divine power, and thousands more honing his fighting technique. Combining will, divine power and the support of his war beast in battle, he had reached the peak his tier allowed, in attack and defense alike. An Unfallen Supreme like that was not someone the Night Empress, a newcomer only just climbed to the divine tier, could ever hope to defeat…
“Pathetic. Compared with your ancestor, that Princess Starlight, you still fall far short!” The Unfallen Supreme looked down into the hundred-meter crater and gave a cold, stern snort.
Even having beaten the Night Empress, he showed not a trace of arrogance or swagger. If anything, his expression said this was only the natural order of things.
Neither the Unfallen Supreme, who had done the fighting, nor the two watching quietly from far off behind him — the Undefeated Supreme and the Immovable Supreme — had ever thought the Night Empress had any chance of turning it around and winning. A divine-tier newcomer, practically a rookie — how could she challenge the Unfallen Supreme, steady as a mountain, a man who never fell in battle? And on top of that, even knowing it was a lion against a rabbit, the Unfallen Supreme had not cut a single corner. He had given it everything.
“Zodiac… twelve… twelve stars… star palaces…” Something stirred at the bottom of the deep crater. The mud, sand and stone split open, and one star after another rose up — slowly at first, then faster, a few at first, then more and more, until they were pouring out thick and fast like a meteor shower, shooting into the sky.
Those scattered stars arranged themselves, guided by some divine will.
Slowly they formed constellations exactly like the twelve houses of the zodiac in the sky. Aries, Taurus, Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo — one beautiful constellation after another condensed into being, and with every one that was born, the cluster of starlight at the bottom of the crater, so close to dimming out, grew a little stronger. The Night Empress had been struck down and badly wounded, almost to the point of her true form showing through. Now she sank back out of sight inside the Milky Way, and with the newly condensed Zodiac Palaces empowering her, she raised her divine power once more to challenge the divine-tier power before her, twenty meters tall and armed with the Stalwart talent — the Unfallen Supreme.
“Your Sky Stairway’s Still Night line is very good with star force. For certain races, star force really is a headache. But star force does nothing to me. I, Unfallen, am a fighter who walks under the blazing sun — born to be the bane of your Sky Stairway warriors! Your Still Night line, or your other three, Bright Moon, Hundred Flowers and Butterfly — none of you could ever be a match for me. Least of all a green rookie like you, who has only just stepped into the divine tier and does not even fully understand her own nature yet. How much star force can you possibly convert? It is not worth a laugh!” As he spoke, the Unfallen Supreme raised one arm high, his right palm turned up as if holding up the sky.
Within his palm, divine power welled up at tremendous speed. It gathered more and more, until in the end it had become a “golden sun” a hundred meters across.
In the glare of that hundred-meter golden sun, the Zodiac Palaces the Night Empress had just condensed paled into nothing. Their star force weakened endlessly, and even the Milky Way around her body shrank back so far it could barely veil her lovely form.
“I will not deny it: give you a thousand-odd years and you would grow into something extremely hard to handle. The talents of you Sky Stairway people, and that potential others would kill for, truly are a unique advantage no other race can have. The pity is that no one will give you the chance to grow. Even if I do not strike you down, someone else will. However gifted you Sky Stairway people are, you are doomed never to come of age. So it was with Princess Starlight back then, and so it will be with you today. It is a fate you cannot escape. Do not blame me, and do not blame anyone else. If you must blame something, blame that talent and potential of yours, which no one can let live for long without wiping it out! If you were a mediocre race, ordinary mortals no better than ants, we would never give you a second look. But you are not. You are heaven’s chosen, the kind even gods envy, and so there is nothing to be done. Neither the Heavenly Realm nor the Sky Realm will permit a divine tier to rise beyond its control. The Sky Tower’s past glory was more than enough for us. Its fall is the inevitable outcome everyone wants, and the extinction of you Sky Stairway people is just as natural and inevitable!” Holding up the ball of golden-sun energy above his head, the Unfallen Supreme looked down from on high at the Night Empress in the deep crater.
“The Sky Stairway will never be wiped out. Not us of the Still Night, not the Bright Moon — and the Hundred Flowers and the Butterfly least of all.” The Night Empress’s heavenly voice rang out clearly.
“You mean Yue Titan, do you not? You have staked your whole clan’s fate on him and made him a miracle child who can defy heaven. That is a clever move, I will grant you. But there is one thing you may never have considered. Yue Titan carries your whole clan’s fate — even the fate of the whole Sky Tower. Can that young man actually bear it? He is just a child, and not even divine tier, and you have forced a load as heavy as a mountain onto his shoulders. Can he really hold up under it? Even the Prison Emperor back then did not have it this hard… The Prison Emperor carried only the Sky Tower’s fate, and he broke. The Conquest Queen tried to sweep the whole Heavenly Realm, and she failed. And you ignore all that and pile even more onto Yue Titan’s back: guarding the Sky Stairway, leading the Longteng Continent, reviving the Sky Tower, standing against the Central Divine Hall — one crushing burden after another. Any one of those would break a man, and Yue Titan carries every one of them. Do you really think he can succeed?” The Unfallen Supreme’s stern face showed no expression at all as he put his finger squarely on the pressures and obstacles Yue Yang faced in growing stronger, and said plainly that he did not expect this fight to go their way.
“He will succeed. He is our hope!” The Night Empress understood all of that perfectly well, but apart from Yue Yang there was no second choice.
And she truly believed Yue Yang could succeed.
If she had not, she would never have staked her life and sacrificed herself to buy time for Yue Yang to comprehend and rise before the battle.
The Unfallen Supreme did not argue further. He simply began to press the golden-sun energy ball he held above his head slowly downward, meaning to use this one move to kill and annihilate, once and for all, this new power of the Sky Stairway before him — Yeyu.
He had done the same thing long ago.
With exactly the same strategy and exactly the same ball of divine power, he had annihilated Princess Starlight — a woman so beautiful that, even after he killed her, he had not been able to stop thinking of her, and had grieved over it for thousands of years… Killing Princess Starlight had been a deeply regrettable act. But as a power of the Sky Realm whose task was to hold down the Sky Tower and never let it rise again, the Unfallen Supreme did not mind repeating that regret.
He had already killed one Princess Starlight. Why not kill one of her descendants as well?
For the Central Divine Hall, there was no one in the world who could not be killed.
Hope?
Sometimes, hope is nothing more than the fantasy of the weak in their despair!
“Farewell. With your gifts, you might have needed only two or three hundred years to grow into your full power. The pity is that you will never get the chance. In your next life — if you get a next life — do not be reborn on the Sky Stairway again. No — do not be reborn in this Sky Tower at all; it ought to have sunk into dead silence long ago. Be reborn in our Central Divine Hall, which is destined to rule the Heavenly Realm. That is the true paradise of the strong!” With that, the Unfallen Supreme pressed down with both hands and brought the golden sun, condensed from boundless divine power, crashing down onto the head of the Night Empress, who was resisting with everything she had and refused to give in.
Under the golden sun’s vast divine power, the paled Zodiac Palaces shattered, scattered, and dissolved into nothing.
Without star force to support it, the Milky Way was overwhelmed by the light in an instant.
The starry night was gone.
The clear sky laid bare the lone, slender, helpless figure pinned at the center of the golden sun…
The Night Empress had never shown her true form in front of anyone. Under a clear sky and bright sun forced into being by divine power, her divine power and her will alike took a terrible blow. Her lovely form had almost slipped entirely free of the starlight, and her true face was on the verge of showing.
(End of Chapter 1286)