After resting in the warmth of his beloved’s company, Yueyang emerged refreshed, every trace of fatigue stripped clean, ready to continue his journey through Beast Valley’s trial grounds.

The Boulder Field.

The third test was unlike the first two — and in its own way, the most demanding of all. It carried none of the immediate mortal peril of the Spirit Beast Hall or the War Beast Cannonball challenge, and there was no time limit. But the Boulder Field was widely regarded as the cruelest test a war beast could face, because it measured one thing and one thing only: intelligence. It didn’t matter how powerful a war beast was. Without sufficient wisdom, the doors simply would not open.

In practice, owners waiting outside often worked through the problems alongside their beasts, pooling their thinking toward the final answer. Some war beasts were so hopelessly dim that even with their owner helping them cheat, they still couldn’t pass — not because they couldn’t reach the right answer, but because they lacked the intelligence to execute it correctly once they had it. Knowing and doing, it turned out, were two entirely different things.

Within the Boulder Field, the problem with the most fearsome reputation — the one considered the hardest of the hard — was simply called the Boulder Push.

It was this puzzle that had given the entire third test area its name.

Some problems could at least be brute-forced by sheer persistence. A question like “if you collect one gold coin on the first day and double it every day for thirty days, how much have you collected?” could theoretically be ground out by even a slow mind given enough time. But a problem like “wind-fire multiplied by water-earth equals fire-water-wind-earth; earth-wind multiplied by water-fire equals wind-fire-water-earth; what is wind-fire-water-earth?” — that could drive a challenger and their war beast to the edge of madness. You could spend an eternity throwing numbers at it and never once touch the answer, because raw effort was useless without the right method, the right insight, the right quality of mind.

The Boulder Field did have its easier problems, of course. Questions along the lines of “a certain number multiplied by eight, plus nine, equals 987,654,321 — what is the number?” were genuinely solvable, but passing that sort of basic question earned nothing more than a rating of minimal intelligence. Beast Valley’s Laws offered no reward whatsoever.

To earn rewards, a challenger had to attempt the Ten Great Problems.

Wind-fire-water-earth was, in fact, the simplest of the Ten — and a handful of challengers over the ages had supposedly solved it, though none had ever made the answer public. It had remained one of Beast Valley’s oldest secrets.

The hardest of the Ten Great Problems was the Boulder Push itself.

Its premise looked almost insultingly simple: the war beast was given twenty round stones and asked to push them into arrangements where every set of four formed a straight line. The minimum requirement was sixteen such lines. Sixteen lines earned the basic reward. Eighteen doubled it. Twenty lines earned the reward of the Wisdom Light — a divine intelligence-awakening. And anything beyond twenty carried an even greater prize: an intelligence-awakening of the Celestial Divine Brilliance. That final reward had never once been claimed. Not since the day Beast Valley came into existence.

Like the War Beast Cannonball, this was a trial that had stood unconquered across ten thousand years.

Anyone could attempt it at any time. There was no failure penalty and no death.

And yet no one had ever done it.

“No need to rush straight to the Boulder Push — there’s no time limit on that one. We could start with something else, like the doubling-gold problem. I know the answer to that one.” Longma and the sickle weasel were practically vibrating with excitement as the most eager witnesses imaginable. They weren’t the only ones — a substantial crowd of beasts who had watched Yueyang casually demolish the War Beast Cannonball’s ten-thousand-year unbroken record had followed along, gathered around the Boulder Field’s perimeter, hoping to be first to hear more good news.

“Let her try it on her own.” Yueyang smiled and waved off Longma’s offer, leaving the Death Reaper Mantis to work it out for herself.

“Mm!” The Death Reaper Mantis was well aware her master had a copy of the Human-Faced Tiger’s answer notes. She didn’t look at them. Instead she opened her own mind and began to think.

One gold coin on the first day, doubled each day — how much after a full month? The Death Reaper Mantis picked up a dry twig with one tiny hand and began scratching calculations in the dirt.

At first her speed was remarkable — fast enough to draw looks of shame from more than a few beast-people and residents watching. Gradually she slowed, taking care at each step, checking her work before moving forward, refusing to let a single line of arithmetic go unverified before building on it. This habit of checking — working both forward and backward — she had absorbed from watching Yueyang teach Yue Bing and Yue Shuang, sitting beside them in lessons. At the time her mind hadn’t been open enough to truly understand what she was learning. Only now, with her awakened intelligence, did all of it come together into something she could actually use.

After roughly ten minutes, she arrived at her answer.

To be certain, she ran through the whole calculation again in reverse.

Then she looked up at Yueyang, flew into the Boulder Field under his smiling gaze, landed before the test monument, and pushed the stones into position: 5-3-6-8-7-0-9-1-2.

The monument blazed with light. The answer was correct. The challenger had passed.

The crowd erupted. The beasts waiting outside couldn’t see the answer itself and couldn’t follow the Death Reaper Mantis’s method of calculation — so they did what they could, which was applaud loudly and crane their necks, hoping someone who knew would announce it aloud and let them finally put to rest the gnawing frustration of having never solved it themselves. Those who actually knew the answer sniffed and looked away. Work it out yourself.

That first success lit something up in the Death Reaper Mantis.

She realized that if she hadn’t been deliberately cautious, she could have found the answer in five minutes rather than ten. But no matter. The fact remained that in this entire gathering of challengers — past and present — virtually no war beast, operating without its owner’s help, had ever solved this problem independently. One legend held that a particularly stubborn creature had spent a full hundred years arriving at the answer through pure brute-force accumulation. A hundred years versus ten minutes. That was the gap intelligence made.

“Let’s go!” The Death Reaper Mantis pumped her tiny fist.

What followed was the rest of the morning, and it belonged entirely to her.

Problem after problem — questions the residents of Beast Valley had long since given up as unsolvable — fell before her. Each time she submitted a correct answer, the crowd lost itself in applause, then cheers, the noise building from round to round until people were simply roaring.

The easy problems were behind her now. She was going after the Ten Great Problems.

Wind-fire-water-earth — the one that had stumped challengers since the beginning of time — took two hours of focused thought and calculation. When the Death Reaper Mantis flew to the test monument and submitted her answer, a column of golden light shot skyward and hung there, blazing, unwilling to fade.

That was the sign. A Great Problem solved. The crowd fell completely silent before the golden light, and then broke apart into something close to reverence. Those who had bet on the little one hitting a wall found themselves unable to do anything but stare. Wind-fire-water-earth had a standing bounty of a million gold among the residents — and yet the answer had never once been sold, because no one had ever possessed it to sell. Who could have imagined that it would be solved not by a celebrated challenger but by a war beast alone, on its own merit?

She was a Sacred Beast, yes. But this was still extraordinary.

“Wuu—!” The Death Reaper Mantis shot out of the Boulder Field and buried herself in Yueyang’s arms, crying with happiness.

The harder she had pushed in those tests, the faster she had felt her mind expanding. Growth without form, without noise — just the quiet sensation of more becoming possible. And when she thought back to everything Yueyang had taught her over the long months, and then looked at what she had just done — what had seemed impossible had simply… yielded — she couldn’t hold back the tears.

It wasn’t her intelligence, she knew. It was what her master had given her.

Yueyang rested a hand lightly on top of her small head. “Good girl. No crying. You did beautifully. And honestly — these tests weren’t all that much to begin with. If we weren’t pressed for time, I’m completely confident you could finish the whole thing on your own.”

Now, if Yueyang hadn’t spent the previous day casually clearing the War Beast Cannonball’s ten-thousand-year record, a statement like that would have earned him a very loud chorus of jeers.

The Ten Great Problems were simple?

If these were simple, there was no such thing as difficult.

But from a man who had cleared the Cannonball’s ten shots in under an hour with his war beast — nobody in the crowd dared question him. This person was a freak of nature. Maybe the Ten Great Problems really were simple to him. They didn’t entirely believe it. But they didn’t dare say so either. Every last spectator simply held their breath and watched.

Only Longma, the sickle weasel, and the quietly unmoved Poison Wasp King held their faith in Yueyang without reservation. They knew he didn’t brag about things he couldn’t back up. If he said it, he had a hundred percent certainty behind the words.

“Memorize the remaining problems — do them at your leisure later. For now, let’s aim to finish this afternoon, because tonight there’s special training scheduled.” Yueyang stood, stretched with a casual roll of his shoulders, and sent the Death Reaper Mantis a silent instruction through their mental link.

The Death Reaper Mantis didn’t understand the reasoning behind the instruction. But the moment she flew into the Boulder Field, reached the test monument, and positioned the stones exactly as Yueyang had directed — golden light erupted.

She flew back. Yueyang sent a second instruction. No deliberation, no hesitation, as if the answers came from somewhere outside of thought entirely.

Another column of golden light climbed the sky.

Every eye in the crowd looked at Yueyang the way you looked at something that had no right to exist.

Freakish people existed. But this variety of freakish — this was something else.

The Ten Great Problems appeared to be less effort for him than shelling sunflower seeds. The crowd noticed that the only delay between answers was the time it took the Death Reaper Mantis to fly back and forth — if not for that, he could have presented all the answers simultaneously and raised a forest of golden light at once. And it would have been one thing if he’d spent the morning working through the problems. He hadn’t. He’d spent the morning in bed. He had only been told what the Ten Great Problems even were a short while ago, when Longma and the sickle weasel briefed him.

What kind of mind made this possible? What quality of intelligence reached this level?

Was this still a human being?

This was a god.

No — this was something that made the gods of legend look inadequate.

If they could have gotten away with it, half the watching beasts would have pried open Yueyang’s skull to check whether the architecture inside was different from everyone else’s. A gap in intelligence was understandable. But a gap this wide? How was anyone supposed to go on living with themselves after witnessing this? The damage to one’s sense of self-worth was permanent — the kind of wound that never fully healed, the shadow that lingered long after the sun had moved on.

“I… I submit.” The Eagle King had tears streaming down its face. One person being smarter than another was tolerable. A war beast being smarter than you was already hard enough. The owner being even smarter than that — how was a person supposed to cope?

“All hail!” Longma and the sickle weasel were on the verge of fainting from sheer emotion. Following this young man through the trial grounds had been the single luckiest and most correct decision of their entire lives. Nothing had ever come close.

Only the Poison Wasp King maintained any semblance of composure — careful not to reveal the alliance they shared, keeping her expression deliberately cold and distant as she watched everything unfold.

The rest of the beast-people and residents had abandoned all restraint. The chant began — low at first, then building, then roaring:

Boulder Push. Boulder Push. Boulder Push. Boulder Push.

Yueyang’s smile was like sunlight.

Every beast-person and resident who saw it felt something catch fire inside them. In this moment, no one thought of Yueyang as an enemy. He was their pride. He was what they had been waiting to witness. The records would never fall to their hands — but they were here when the records fell. That was enough. More than enough.

The young man who was about to shatter one more ten-thousand-year impossibility was standing right in front of them.

Yueyang raised one hand. The entire crowd fell silent.

Every breath was held.

As if a single exhaled breath might disturb the stones before they could find their place.

The Death Reaper Mantis received her master’s instruction. Her small face was incandescent with excitement — she flew three extra loops overhead just to work off some of the feeling before she could trust herself to descend with proper grace. When she finally swept down and began to draw the twenty stones into position, guiding them with a touch as light as a dance, the pattern that emerged was strange and intricate and perfect.

The Boulder Field erupted in golden light.

She wasn’t done. Under Yueyang’s guiding gestures, she continued repositioning the stones. The sixteen-line formation gave way to an eighteen-line arrangement of breathtaking elegance, and a second wave of golden light flooded every corner of the field.

“Twenty lines! Twenty lines!“

The crowd was screaming. Every voice demanding he continue, demanding the record fall, demanding the Wisdom Light be claimed for the first time in all of history. Yueyang raised a hand, and the noise died as though cut by a blade — even the ragged, excited breathing was bitten back. Everyone watched his hands. Under his guidance, another supposedly eternal record was about to become dust. About to become history.

Witness to history. Witness to miracles.

Not just once — yesterday, and today, and perhaps tomorrow as well, the witnesses gathered here would see this young man keep making the impossible ordinary.