Before a Sovereign Intent of that order, everything was like an ant. Even the divine tier.

Both of them wielded the power of law. But the Night Empress, who had only just stepped into the divine tier, and the Unfallen Supreme, who had spent nearly ten thousand years comprehending and perfecting himself, were not on the same level at all. The law power the Night Empress had comprehended was crushed on every front, like a crystal sunk ten thousand meters into the deep sea with no chance of ever rising again.

The golden-sun energy ball the Unfallen Supreme had condensed came crashing down, blotting out the sky like the Milky Way pouring down upside down, wiping out everything in the world beneath it.

The Night Empress could not possibly withstand a blow on that scale.

All she could do was watch, helpless, as her power was beaten down by her powerful enemy’s divine power bit by bit, and shattered bit by bit…

The starlight was gone. Heaven and earth no longer existed. Only one thing was left in the whole world: the fierce, matchless light of the sun, enough to burn everything in the world to ash. Space shattered too, and formed a colossal solar storm that spun at tremendous speed, carrying a shockwave with it, spreading madly outward and devouring everything in its path. But long before that, the sunlight the Unfallen Supreme had condensed out of divine power had already pierced through everything like a myriad of sharp swords, and destroyed everything.

Wherever the shockwave passed, there had already been nothing but fine powder.

There was no mushroom cloud rising after a great explosion.

There was no clash of resistance either, not even a trace of anything fleeing the center of the blast. Everything had been annihilated by divine power. Every last thing was gone.

“It is over.” Majestic as a god standing above the clouds, the Unfallen Supreme, with his twenty-meter frame and his Stalwart talent, stood in the shattered void, looming and grim as a mountain.

“How dull.” A voice that seemed to come from somewhere between the highest heavens and the netherworld drifted over on a strange thread of divine sense.

“Compared with Princess Starlight, who resisted to the death back then, this newcomer of the Sky Stairway’s Still Night, only just risen to the divine tier, truly falls far short in strength. But had it been a few hundred years later — had she been left to grow freely for even two or three hundred more years — the ending would have been entirely different.” The Unfallen Supreme’s face showed none of the delight of other victors. If anything, it was grave and heavy with thought.

He had beaten the Night Empress easily, but he did not look down on her as an enemy. On the contrary, he acknowledged her potential.

If not for the shortage of time, a newly risen divine tier like that would surely have come to shine with countless times the brilliance she had now. The pity was that she had been strangled in the bud, at a single stroke of supreme divine power, by an enemy of the Unfallen Supreme’s caliber… In talent, in the nature of his divine power, in years of cultivation, in combat experience, he was overwhelming in every way, so killing a green rookie was nothing to be pleased about. And the rookie he had killed had not behaved like a rookie at all. The potential she had not had time to show in full, half-hidden and gone in a flash, had still been enough to send a chill through the heart of the Unfallen Supreme, the victor.

“A pity we cannot kill the one sleeping inside the Mirage. If we could, the Sky Tower’s resistance would not be worth a moment’s worry.” The voice that seemed to come from between the highest heavens and the netherworld spoke again.

“That one is past the moment when killing her was possible. As they say, a chance missed never comes again, and the matter is settled now. To have forced her to fall back into the Mirage and sleep on in that unfathomable dream world is already a rare achievement.” The Unfallen Supreme shook his head. To him these were two entirely different things. Killing a divine-tier rookie of the Sky Stairway’s Still Night clan was one matter. Killing a perfected divine tier who had fully comprehended the power of law, who wielded tremendous might and stood unique and supreme within her own world, was another matter altogether.

“Indeed. If that fellow Tianyu were not watching from the shadows, perhaps that one would already have woken in the dream world, and Dongfang alone could never have stopped her.” The voice from between the heavens and the netherworld had views of its own, but it agreed with certain facts.

“Then let that one sink slowly along with the Sky Tower!” The Unfallen Supreme let out a long sigh.

“The Sky Tower’s fall is settled. No one who comes can reverse it — not even this so-called miracle genius, Yue Titan.” The voice from between the heavens and the netherworld considered the outcome decided.

“Yue Titan. I would truly like to meet that young man!” The Unfallen Supreme was in fact somewhat curious about Yue Yang. Going by the story of how he had risen, this young man was even more freakish, more gifted and more full of promise than the Prison Emperor Zhanfeng had been in his day, which was a little too incredible to believe. The Longteng Continent was not without peerless geniuses, but set beside this Yue Titan, any of them paled.

“At a moment this critical, this Yue Titan’s whereabouts are still unknown…” The voice from between the heavens and the netherworld suspected some trick.

“Even if he does come out, he will be a divine-tier newcomer at most, nothing to fear. What worries me more is the Conquest Queen who stands behind him. If Vivienne has truly revived, there will be a bitter fight. Undefeated, if you meet that Conquest Queen, I expect your title of Undefeated Supreme will be dragged through the dirt.” The Unfallen Supreme felt that the thorniest problem was still Empress Vivienne, who had never once shown herself and who might or might not have broken free of her seal. If the Heavenly Realm’s Conquest Queen were ever free, she would surely raise a storm of blood that blotted out the sky.

“It does not matter if my title of Undefeated Supreme is dragged through the dirt, so long as I am the one laughing at the end.” The owner of the voice from between the heavens and the netherworld saw the matter quite clearly.

“Immovable, we have waited this long without seeing any sign of change. It seems this Sky Stairway woman called Yeyu is certainly annihilated. Shall we set out for our next stop?” The Unfallen Supreme turned and asked the Immovable Supreme, who had been there all along without saying a word.

The Immovable Supreme rarely spoke, but he was the eldest. Every decision needed his nod. Without it, not even the divine-tier wills of the Unfallen Supreme and the Undefeated Supreme could lightly act.

The Immovable Supreme still did not speak, keeping his silence golden to the very end.

Sometimes silence meant consent. But sometimes it meant exactly the opposite: refusal.

Without a word from their eldest, the Unfallen Supreme and the hidden Undefeated Supreme had no choice but to keep waiting where they were. The shattered void was slowly closing again under the laws of heaven and earth, but even ten more days would surely not restore it completely to how it had been. The damage the Unfallen Supreme’s divine strike had done to space was simply too great.

The shattered space kept drawing together, forming one small piece after another. Along the edges that had not yet closed, countless serpents of lightning flickered, thick and dense, while countless eerie pulls sucked madly inward, devouring energy to make up for what the repair of space required.

The sight was terrifying and endlessly shifting, but to the Unfallen Supreme and the Undefeated Supreme, who had seen it all before, there was nothing special about anything in front of them. Why did the Immovable Supreme insist on staying here instead of setting out for the next target? Did he really think that the Sky Stairway woman named Yeyu, the divine-tier newcomer of the Still Night clan, could come back to life under a clear bright sky and a blazing divine sun?

A clear bright sky and a blazing divine sun completely countered that Still Night woman’s talent.

Without night, where would starlight come from? So long as there was a sun in the sky, how could starlight ever rise into it?

The Still Night woman named Yeyu was dead for certain. The Unfallen Supreme was sure of it, because he had crushed her with more than ten times the force it would take to kill an ordinary divine-tier newcomer of the Heavenly Realm. However gifted she was, however great her potential, she could not have taken that deadly blow.

Under divine power that strong, never mind starlight — heaven and earth themselves had shattered, and space had exploded into countless fragments.

Heaven and earth were both destroyed. How could a mere human body survive?

No one knew how long it was before their silent waiting was finally rewarded with something new.

A single point of starlight, like the morning star climbing the eastern sky at dawn, came drifting up, faint as first light.

The Unfallen Supreme’s eyes went wide. An impossibly strange sight was appearing in front of him, and if he had not seen it with his own eyes, he would never have believed it. Quietly — one, two, three, some bright and some dim, some clustered and some scattered — points of starlight crept into the sky without anyone noticing, more and more of them, until, above the sky still broken into pieces that would not close, the stars filling the heavens had returned. There were the Northern and Southern Dippers, the Herd Boy star and the morning star… and constellation by constellation, the twelve houses of the zodiac and all eighty-eight constellations surfaced one after another.

Most marvelous of all was a single stroke of a brush, drawn with godlike skill. It swept across the sky in one line such as had never been seen since the dawn of time — and became the dazzling river of stars that untold poets have sung of and been enraptured by, and longed to sprout wings and fly into.

Across the glittering, star-filled sky, a shooting star like a beauty’s teardrop fell all of a sudden, and in a blink vanished into the brilliant spill of the Milky Way. And in the void, still shattered and shifting this way and that, there was now a comet’s glorious fall — a shimmering, dazzling blur of light, with a lovely figure faintly visible inside it.

The golden pupils in the Unfallen Supreme’s eyes grew ten times wider.

He had discovered that the Sky Stairway woman before him — whose death he had confirmed, whose soul he had seen annihilated — was completely unharmed. Her divine power and her will were stronger than before. The law power she commanded, crushed on every front a moment ago, was gradually turning the tide, almost in balance now, with every sign of rising to stand as an equal against him, a divine tier of nearly ten thousand years.

“Why?” The Unfallen Supreme could not help asking. With all his wisdom and experience, he simply could not understand something so incredible.

“A bright sun cannot destroy the stars, and a clear day cannot annihilate the night sky… Day and night take turns, round and round. Neither has ever existed alone, and neither has ever been able to devour the other.” The Immovable Supreme, who had not once opened his mouth, suddenly spoke. His voice was like an echo in the empty valleys of mountains that had stood for ten thousand ages, or like a silent canyon at the bottom of the sea suddenly shaken by a volcano. It struck dread deep into the heart. Yet his words held the deepest truth, as natural and beyond doubt as the setting sun over a long river or the moon rising over a dark sea. Even an enemy could not help sinking into them, listening to those words of truth echo in the soul.

“So that is how it is.” The Unfallen Supreme finally understood.

“When the setting sun ends, the still night is born. However brilliant the light in the world, there comes a moment when it peaks and declines. When the golden crow sinks in the west, the first lamps are lit and the stars are scattered across the sky like pieces on a board — only then does the night arrive in its gentlest beauty. The night deepens and all is quiet, clearest of the clear and stillest of the still, purest of the pure. And if someone speaks softly then, with a clear heart that sees its own nature, it will surely be a voice that moves the music of heaven, that turns the stars in their courses, that lays bare every one of heaven’s secrets… Little girl of the Still Night clan, your talent and gifts are truly the greatest I have seen in my life. I fear that even Princess Starlight, who in her day surpassed all of the Sky Tower in beauty, gifts and insight, would fall a few degrees short of you. The Sky Stairway’s line of succession keeps producing outstanding people, generation after generation. One cannot help but sigh at it!” When the Immovable Supreme said this, the Unfallen Supreme very nearly jumped in shock.

The Immovable Supreme had not said that many words in at least a thousand years.

He had never seen anyone worthy of such high praise from that golden mouth of the Immovable Supreme. Only the woman in front of him.

This Still Night woman of the Sky Stairway named Yeyu had won a judgment just short of the highest there was. If it was as the Immovable Supreme said, then Yeyu’s talent must be the “Heavenly Speech” talent, the talent that speaks heaven’s secrets aloud.

A single word that could lay bare heaven’s secrets?

A thought that moves the stars; a word that breaks heaven’s secrets open.

In that light, not even overwhelming divine power, not even a tyrannically blazing sun in a clear sky, could keep her starlight from shining… No wonder that, though she was a rookie only just risen to the divine tier, she had had the daring to challenge an enemy above her tier — and that, facing annihilation, she could break through life and death in a way beyond all understanding, and come back like a returning comet!

(End of Chapter 1287)