Yueyang was pushing through one of the warped dimensional spaces when Xiao Wenli emerged.
Her expression was serious.
More than serious — there was something close to tension in the way she was watching the space ahead. Yueyang couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen that look on her face. Since she’d reclaimed her past-life memories back in Conquest City, her composure had been essentially unshakeable. If something was making her tense—
He swept his senses outward and his stomach dropped.
The entire space had the feel of someone else’s domain. The anomalous energy had transformed this place into a world of fire — but that was the strange part. Even a god shouldn’t be able to sustain a domain of this scale. Yueyang’s Heavenly Eye of Wisdom searched for the boundary and found nothing. The fire sea below extended in every direction without an edge in sight.
Beneath his feet — flame. Endless. Numberless volcanoes hidden under the surface, erupting intermittently to hurl cascades of magma skyward. Churning black smoke and volcanic ash swallowed the sky until it was as dark as ink, and even Yueyang’s senses couldn’t pierce what lay beyond the cloud ceiling — he could only tell that the energy up there was radically different from what surrounded him down here.
The superheated air drove into his lungs like burning knives. Sulfur and the particular scorched smell of flame burning for a very long time made breathing an unpleasant act.
“This has the quality of someone’s domain, but no domain should be able to reach this size — and if it were a domain expressing itself as will, we’d be feeling that pressure pushing back against us.” Yueyang couldn’t make full sense of what he was looking at. Out of caution, he called Qianqian and Wuxia out of the Grimoire World to think it through together.
“Something is very wrong here,” Qianqian said, her brow furrowed tight. “There’s a destructive energy — enormous, and it’s eating away at this whole world.”
Wuxia consulted the Book of Truth, then shook her head. “Nothing definitive.”
“Both of you go back,” Yueyang said. “If I can’t win, I need to be able to run fast, and I run faster alone.”
This was not, to be clear, any kind of cowardice. Yueyang simply had no interest in dying heroically when a tactical retreat was available. His preferred approach to an unfavorable engagement was to kite the enemy — probe, harass, wear them down slowly over a very long time. If you wanted to say that politely, it was patient, technical warfare. If you wanted to say it honestly, it was shameless, scheming, dishonorable conduct of the lowest variety. Either way, fighting at a disadvantage for the sake of some principle of fair combat was not something Yueyang had ever considered. Even when he had the clear upper hand, he was the type to feign weakness, let the enemy get overconfident and careless, then put them down in a single devastating strike. Chivalry and honor in battle were concepts he found fundamentally unserious. His personal aesthetic was to arrange the enemy in an interesting shape on the ground and then stand on top of them singing a victory song.
Qianqian had found this approach deeply objectionable when they first met. A great many battles later — after encountering enemies that would have destroyed a more principled fighter several times over — she had come around to it entirely, and was now a full convert. Wuxia had always been there already. The only result that mattered was winning.
As she stepped back toward the Grimoire World, Wuxia paused and offered a thought: “You mentioned domain. I think you might actually be right.”
Qianqian blinked. “If this is a domain, then the owner — what kind of being has a domain this large? Not even a god should be capable of this.”
“I haven’t seen a god’s domain, so I can’t speak to that,” Wuxia said. “But if this fire sea is a domain — I think there’s a way it’s possible. Not as a domain expressing will or intent, but as an expression of an intrinsic quality. A particular power, crystallized outward. If the person who created this could perfectly control fire — if their domain was that mastery given form — then this could be explained. Not as something they built all at once, but as something that grew. It might have begun as a relatively normal domain. But month after month, year after year, with no one to stop it — the fire sea would simply expand. And expand. Until it became what we’re standing in now.”
Yueyang was quiet for a long moment, turning this over. Then he nodded. “That fits. If this isn’t a true domain but an energy extension of the fire sea itself, that explains why we’re not feeling the will-suppression a real domain would produce. This is the Inferno Sovereign’s domain-force spreading outward, not a domain with intent behind it.”
“Then you need to be extremely careful,” Qianqian said, her voice low.
“Agreed.” Wuxia was already thinking ahead. “The fire sea has no will-suppression, but it absolutely amplifies its master — and that master is almost certainly a fire-control expert, most likely the Inferno Sovereign. So: I would strongly advise against using the Nirvana Flames. Whatever the tactical effect, the moment a fire-control master sees the Nirvana Flames, they will sacrifice everything to take them. And if they can’t take them, they’ll sacrifice everything to kill the person who has them. To avoid that chain of events — I’d go further and avoid even the Heavenly Wrath Crimson Lotus. Work with ice and lightning. Keep the fire hidden.”
It was the kind of advice that was worth more than most plans. Yueyang took it.
As an extra precaution against being caught with no escape route, he also persuaded Xiao Wenli back into the Grimoire World.
If Gray Wolf weren’t somewhere in this fire sea, Yueyang would have already been gone — the moment he saw the Inferno Sovereign, he’d have turned around without a second thought. But it was here, so the plan was simple: find it, extract it, and immediately use the Three Realms Compass to get everyone out of this burning hellscape. Fighting the Inferno Sovereign on its home ground was thankless work of the worst kind, and Yueyang had no intention of doing it a moment longer than necessary.
“Gray Wolf wouldn’t be stupid enough to wander into a fire sea and deliberately pick a fight with the Inferno Sovereign,” he muttered as he pushed through another transmission. “It’s always been the most cowardly war beast I own. It should be somewhere else entirely.”
But the deeper he explored, the more uneasy he became. This fire sea was not measured in dozens of kilometers. It was a world. He had transmitted more than a dozen times and covered something approaching a thousand kilometers, and the fire still showed no boundary.
He was about to call Wuxia and Qianqian back out for another consultation when something happened.
The Celestial Fire Phantom — who had absorbed chaotic energy and Calamity god-force back in Desire Valley and then been deployed in Beast Valley for the trial runs — emerged from wherever she had been sleeping.
She was awake.
And she was not the same creature that had gone to sleep.
Born from the fusion of the world’s purest Nirvana Flames, the universe-source chaotic energy, and the most destructive Calamity god-force — she had completed her evolution. The transformation had produced something new: a Quasi-Elemental war beast of a category that hadn’t existed before.
The Chaos Phantom.
Perhaps it was the sheer scale of fire-attribute energy surrounding her — she had barely finished evolving when she felt it, and the sensation was apparently something like acute hunger. Her hands rose, almost without her choosing it, and in a radius of ten kilometers the entire fire sea lurched upward at once. Countless columns of pure flame launched themselves skyward, a sight so overwhelming that even Yueyang had never seen anything like it — a reverse waterfall of infinite fire, billions of streams flowing upward rather than down, all of it pouring in a steady torrent toward the Chaos Phantom’s body.
She possessed the chaotic energy capable of absorbing and fusing every fire and heat in existence. With that came what was effectively an infinite stomach. No amount of flame was too much — she took it all in without slowing, feeding ravenously. The fire sea was vast beyond measure, and her ten-kilometer radius of consumption was a drop taken from an ocean, but she was clearly just getting started.
“That’s enough,” Yueyang said. “Find Gray Wolf first, then eat your fill later. You disappear for the whole crisis, sleep straight through it, and now that nobody needs you anymore you decide to show up and cause problems.”
The Chaos Phantom made a sound.
She had never been good at self-control — but if there was one person in the world who could issue her a command, it was Yueyang. She drew in several more enormous mouthfuls of pure heat energy with visible reluctance, then stopped, looking like someone being forcibly separated from a favorite meal.
Yueyang told her to return to the Grimoire World. The freshly evolved Chaos Phantom — stronger than before, self-control not meaningfully improved — shook her head and refused. She was probably worried that if she went back in, she wouldn’t be called out again. She couldn’t stop Yueyang from moving forward, but she was clearly not prepared to leave an unlimited feast behind her.
There was nothing to be done about it. Yueyang shook his head and let her stay.
Among all his war beasts, she was the most reliably difficult. The fact that she was managing not to keep absorbing fire energy despite being surrounded by an endless supply of it was, in fairness, an impressive exercise of restraint by her standards.
After a few more transmissions through the fire sea, the Chaos Phantom’s flame-hands shot out abruptly, pointing toward the southeast. She had sensed something.
“Hmm?” Yueyang was startled. He hadn’t detected anything yet — and he was a Perfect Innate Sovereign with the Heavenly Eye of Wisdom. How had she sensed Gray Wolf before he did? Her detection ability used to be the weakest of all his war beasts.
The Chaos Phantom’s face — increasingly defined after the evolution, fine-featured now, with burning flame-eyes — ignited with a sudden blaze of red: fury. She turned toward the fire sea and released a wave of energy saturated with Calamity god-force.
In an instant, the fire sea answered. A massive flame tornado erupted — thousands of meters tall, tens of meters across — and tore away to the southeast at tremendous speed.
Yueyang understood. In this fire sea, the Chaos Phantom was being amplified just as the Inferno Sovereign was. She’d felt Gray Wolf through the fire sea itself, the same medium the Sovereign controlled. And her attack told him something else: there was an enemy, Gray Wolf was in active combat, and the enemy was powerful enough that she’d moved to assist from this distance without waiting to be asked. Gray Wolf would only be in that kind of trouble with a very specific opponent.
Gray Wolf had genuinely run into the Inferno Sovereign.
That stupid, worthless dog. It had seen a being like that and instead of running — had apparently stayed. If Pandora’s prophetic ability hadn’t warned them, if he hadn’t come, Gray Wolf was going to die here.
The anger and the relief arrived together in approximately equal measure.
“Move,” Yueyang said, already going. “You block anything that comes at us. Once we have Gray Wolf out, we are going to have a very thorough conversation with that dog about knowing when to run.”
The Chaos Phantom fell in behind him as he launched himself forward into the wake of the tornado — using the massive fire-and-Calamity-force vortex as cover for their approach, hidden inside the leading edge of something that was growing faster and larger as it consumed the fire sea around it. In the seconds of travel, Yueyang drove his condition to its absolute peak.
He didn’t know the full scope of the Inferno Sovereign’s strength.
But looking at the fire sea it had created — measuring the scale of what a single being had built over ten thousand years in isolation — Yueyang felt it in his bones.
This might be the hardest fight of his life.