“Since a bright sun cannot hide the starlight, and a clear sky cannot snuff out the night, then let this one take a turn.”

With the Night Empress’s return, and with the Immovable Supreme’s golden mouth singing her praises, the Undefeated Supreme — who had stayed hidden somewhere beyond the highest heavens and the netherworld, untouched by anything around him — suddenly took an interest in fighting. He spoke up, sounding a little eager to try. “Unfallen, if your killing will not work, why not try my sealing? To seal away a seed of such great promise forever, let her enjoy solitude through endless ages, and let imprisonment and confinement keep her company for the rest of her life — would that not be a satisfying thing to do?”

The Unfallen Supreme snorted when he heard it. “When it comes to sealing, you are the more skilled, it is true. But there is no need to trouble you this time. This is my fight!”

Refused, the Undefeated Supreme was silent a long while.

Then his voice came from between the highest heavens and the netherworld. “Then I will give you half a day, Unfallen. You have already wasted too much time.”

“Two hours at most. Perhaps one will be enough for a perfect seal.” The Unfallen Supreme looked at the Night Empress before him, still gathering star force, and made his estimate. Sealing was not like killing; it could not be settled in a single move, and a perfect seal needed even more time. And after the Night Empress’s astonishing return a moment ago, his estimate of her strength had gone up and then up again. He had originally meant to say he would settle it within ten minutes, but to be safe he had stretched that several times over, to an hour.

“We shall see.” The Undefeated Supreme did not think much of his chances, even with the time stretched several times over.

The Unfallen Supreme’s twenty-meter frame erupted with divine power that soared into the sky, like fire burning the heavens.

Countless bolts of thunder and lightning danced around his body like wild golden serpents.

The domain his divine power covered was suffused with his one-of-a-kind will, forming a law power that reigned supreme within the domain, set apart from heaven and earth.

Under the Unfallen Supreme’s will, everything inside the domain obeyed him. Even a divine-tier enemy standing in front of him had no choice but to bow to this greater, stronger, higher law power… The star cluster, together with the space that had not yet had time to close, was wrapped up in divine power and law, then compressed and condensed without end.

Countless stars that had filled the whole sky were twisted out of place and dragged toward the very center of the cluster.

An immense twisting force compressed the cluster into a spiral. Then, bit by bit, at a speed the naked eye could follow, it squeezed it into a star cluster that grew ever smaller, ever denser, and ever more blindingly bright.

Inside the cluster was the Night Empress, resisting with all the strength of her own supreme will.

This was another kind of battle — one fought without fists, yet more terrifying and more agonizing than any brutal fight of punch after punch landing on flesh, blood spraying, limbs broken and bodies maimed. For the loser there was no chance of ever turning things around. Defeat would only ever end one way: sealed away beyond recovery until her life ran out.

The cruelest blow of a seal like that was not the loss of freedom, but going on living — tormented forever by loneliness and despair.

With the Unfallen Supreme at the center, the domain space for ten thousand meters around was compressed little by little. At its core was the star cluster where the Night Empress still resisted; around it was nothing but sealed space, in the form of a black sphere condensed from shattered space packed incredibly tight.

All he had to do was add more divine power, break down the resistance of the Night Empress’s will once and for all, and swallow her strength completely, and the seal would be done.

That would also be the end of the fight.

Seeing his seal going so smoothly, the Unfallen Supreme felt a surge of satisfaction. The opponent before him truly was an outstanding genius of astonishing talent and potential. To seal away a seed this fine would be a glorious deed worth remembering in any lifetime. The only pity was that such a fine genius had not come from the Sky Realm, but from the Sky Tower — from the Sky Stairway’s Still Night clan, which had once fought his side to the death.

At that thought, the Unfallen Supreme raised his hidden divine power tenfold.

The whole space nearly burst under divine energy as strong as the sun.

The star cluster wrapped inside shrank and shrank, until only a tiny black dot was faintly left.

Just as the light was about to swallow everything in heaven and earth, a “butterfly” suddenly flew out — winged with starlight, its whole body glittering and dazzling. Heedless of the fierce power of the divine sun, it danced on its own, and every open and close of its wings scattered flecks of starlight.

The Unfallen Supreme’s law power, will and divine energy whipped up a terrifying storm of divine power.

Inside it, countless divine hands born of will wove together like a net, trying to catch this one free and unfettered star butterfly.

But however the divine storm roared, however the hands it spawned grasped, none of them could touch the “star butterfly” in the slightest, as though it had been born formless and unreal, something that existed only in fantasy and dreams. The free star butterfly slipped lightly through the divine storm, drifted through the gaps in the net of divine hands, and passed out of the sun-strong domain, free of the seal. When it appeared again in front of the Unfallen Supreme, it settled gracefully and became, once more, the Night Empress he had set his heart on destroying.

The Night Empress took human shape again from the star butterfly, her lovely form there one moment and gone the next.

The starlight wrapped around her still shone brightly, not much diminished by the divine seal a moment ago.

She could not come close to an enemy like the Unfallen Supreme in raw power, but in the independence of her will she was a supreme who had comprehended the divine tier as well, with a will of her own that was eternal and unchanging. Even if the stars of the night sky were sealed by divine power, she could turn herself into one small star butterfly and come back out of shattered space. However strong the Unfallen Supreme’s sunlike radiance, however fierce the divine storm he raised, however tight the net of interwoven divine hands, none of it could stop her Sovereign Intent from standing on its own.

“I am of the Still Night clan, but I am not limited to the Still Night. As a daughter of the Sky Stairway — Hundred Flowers, Butterfly, Bright Moon, all of it — how could these not be my people’s nature too?” The Night Empress’s heavenly voice gave a soft little humph.

“In that case, I will beat you until your body is covered in wounds — until your skin cannot hold your bones together!” The Unfallen Supreme decided to use his last resort.

If he could not kill her, and could not seal her, then he would simply wound her gravely.

A grave wound at the divine tier took at least a hundred-some years to recover from, and some took a thousand years and still never fully healed.

So long as he wounded this unbelievably stubborn Still Night woman badly enough to take her out of this fight, he could take his time sealing her afterward. The Sky Tower had only a handful of divine tiers anyway; wounding one of them was the same as cutting the Sky Tower’s fighting strength nearly in half.

Now the Unfallen Supreme had finally adjusted his thinking.

He no longer treated the Sky Stairway woman in front of him as a rookie, however plainly she was a divine-tier newcomer. He did not know how she had comprehended it, but the facts had proved one thing: her will was racing toward a perfect, supreme divine mind and was already very hard to destroy. Killing and sealing were no longer the first choice, much less the best one.

“I’ll see it through to the end with you.” The Night Empress had known from the start that this would be a hard fight.

Fighting the Unfallen Supreme on her own strength was already hard enough. And behind the Unfallen Supreme stood the even stronger Undefeated Supreme, and the Immovable Supreme, whose strength had reached who knew what level!

To give Yue Yang enough time to cultivate, for the revival her people had hoped for through countless ages, for the rise of the Sky Tower, for a tomorrow that would never sink again — she had to hold on. Even fighting alone, she would hold on to the end!

The Night Empress’s small body was tiny beside the Unfallen Supreme’s twenty-meter frame, but her Sovereign Intent met his pressure head-on and did not give an inch.

For the third time, points of starlight were born in the sky and formed star after star, constellation after constellation… The river of the Milky Way drew its long stroke across the sky, and the starlight still shone bright.

“Watch me smash your stars!” The Unfallen Supreme drew in a long, deep breath and raised his giant fist high, gathering boundless divine power. Even if it was the stars themselves, he would pound them to powder with one punch. No enemy could ever survive in front of him — that was his will to fight.

“Mirror.”

From somewhere unimaginably far off at the edge of the sky, a voice as clear as a bell suddenly spoke.

It breathed out a single word, light as a bubble blown by a little fish in a pond — or like the crisp chirp of an adorable little bird hopping on a spring branch, calling its friends to come and play.

A marvelous divine mirror appeared before the Night Empress, condensed entirely from pure and spirited divine power. It spun like the paper pinwheel in the hand of a little girl running laughing in the sunshine — fold after lovely fold, turning round and round — and the strange mirror surface it formed could even reflect the Unfallen Supreme’s furious and startled face.

The Unfallen Supreme roared like thunder and swung his fist with everything he had. It slammed into the mirror’s surface.

The divine mirror guarding the Night Empress did not move a hair.

Instead, the Unfallen Supreme — who had thrown that full-force blow — was knocked back a step, impossibly… And that one step back landed squarely on a patch of divine thorns. These divine thorns, born from who knew where or when, sprang up at once like a startled octopus, flailing countless thorny arms that wrapped around the Unfallen Supreme’s ankle. The barbs bristling all over them glinted coldly and jostled each other to drive into his divine body, which was harder than steel many times over.

The thorns met a little difficulty and resistance going in. At most they sank in a fraction of an inch before his skin stopped them.

Yet the Unfallen Supreme, who could shrug off a thunderbolt to the head, suddenly howled in pain.

His twenty-meter divine body swayed, and he very nearly fell.

His gleaming golden frame dimmed rapidly. An unknown, deadly dark-green poison poured in where the thorns had pierced his ankle and raced madly through his body. His skin and hair changed color, and the Unfallen Supreme, who had stood like an unshakable mountain, actually felt weak, as though he were about to come crashing down… His lips turned deep green, and his howls of pain grew hoarse and rasping — more pitiful than those of a man bedridden for ten years.

The only thing that had not changed was the Unfallen Supreme’s golden divine eyes, which still held reason and clarity.

“Damn it, what kind of poison is this? How can it taint and damage my divine blood directly?” In utter fury, the Unfallen Supreme tore his ankle free of the thorns. He had meant to stamp them to pieces, but he saw the divine thorns below him writhing and waiting for him, came to his senses and stepped well back. Then he hurled a ball of divine fire that could burn heaven and earth, meaning to destroy that cluster of divine thorns with his will.

What galled him even more was that the divine thorns, even as they burned, were steadily swallowing the divine fire his will had created and turning it into part of themselves.

They were swallowing it slowly, but he could already see the truth: no amount of divine power was going to burn away these damned divine thorns.

They were not afraid of fire at all. Or perhaps they could treat divine fire as nourishment, and every further blow would only make them grow and spread twice as fast.

The Unfallen Supreme ripped hard at his chest, and the nameless deadly poison that had entered his body was forced out through the wound in his chest. In an instant his dimmed, dark-green divine body was once again a gleaming golden frame, and all his staggering weakness was swept away.

Did anyone think they could make the Unfallen Supreme — who never fell on a battlefield — go down?

A mirror and a cluster of poison thorns were nowhere near enough. To the Unfallen Supreme, who had been through countless brutal, grueling battles, this was child’s play!

What puzzled him, though, was where in the Sky Tower this divine tier had come from. Apart from the one sleeping at the entrance to the Ruins of the Gods, who had stood guard there for a thousand years without coming out, and the Still Night clan’s Yeyu in front of him, did the Sky Tower have any other divine tiers?

Impossible!

Not even Yue Titan, the most gifted and most freakish person in the Sky Tower, had climbed to the divine realm yet — let alone anyone else!

Mirror and poison were not the powers of the Conquest Queen Vivienne, who might or might not have broken free of her seal. Mirror and poison were not the Conquest Queen’s specialties at all, and besides, she could not possibly have so little strength… Could it be that, besides this Still Night woman named Yeyu, the Sky Tower had two more divine-tier newcomers just as gifted?

That question baffled not only the Unfallen Supreme but even the Night Empress, guarded by the divine mirror.

“Huh? It’s you two? When did you two climb to the divine tier?”

The Night Empress had never been so shaken in her life.

She very nearly wondered whether she had fallen for an enemy illusion. “I’m not dreaming, am I? Is it really you two?”

(End of Chapter 1288)