Yueyang had never seen anything like it.

When he found Gray Wolf, he stopped dead.

A mountain of flesh — taller than Iron Ridge Peak — stood jutting toward the sky, erupting intermittently with cascades of magma and volcanic ash. Without the Heavenly Eye of Wisdom, Yueyang would never have identified it as a war beast. Anyone else would have taken it for a volcano. It was shaped like one, it behaved like one, it was entirely indistinguishable from one — and yet it was alive.

The Volcanic Whale. A war beast that no longer existed anywhere in the Sky Stairway, surviving here in legend and apparently in fact. Yueyang had never expected to see one. He had certainly never expected to see one like this.

At the base of that nearly-unviewable mass of flesh, Gray Wolf — expanded to several hundred meters itself — had its jaws clamped around the front edge of the Volcanic Whale’s mouth. Head thrown back, the Doom Wolf was using its neck and the full force of its body to hold the prehistoric creature pointed at the sky.

Yueyang stared.

Of all the things to bite into. Even if swallowing were the goal, you picked a smaller target. This was a prehistoric leviathan measured in thousands of meters — a Sky-rank tier six creature, on its home ground, in a fire sea that amplified it and did essentially nothing for Gray Wolf. The whale wasn’t even struggling that hard, and digesting it would already be an act of delusion. The whole arrangement was poisoned medicine — temporarily effective and fundamentally untenable.

How Gray Wolf had gotten the thing’s mouth open and lifted it vertical in the first place was a mystery for another day.

A deep grinding rumble came from beneath his feet.

The fire sea below him pulled inward. Burning magma began to spin in a slow, enormous circle — a vortex thousands of meters across, opening directly under where he stood.

Something large was moving in it.

A face appeared — human-shaped, enormous, surfacing from the swirling magma. Yueyang’s eyes locked onto it. Before he could focus, the mouth opened.

It was the size of a football pitch.

The interior — magma, serrated teeth, and a pull that reached outward like a physical force, drawing in flames, smoke, molten rock, anything within range — accelerated toward him at a speed that allowed no reaction.

The jaws snapped shut.

Yueyang and the Chaos Phantom, both swallowed whole.

As the face-creature burst clear of the fire sea, Gray Wolf finally registered what had been lurking beneath the surface this entire time — hidden, waiting, watching — an enemy that had never shown itself. Now it revealed its true shape: a massive anglerfish, human-faced, its body the color and texture of burning stone. The proportions made no sense. Its mouth was grotesquely oversized relative to everything else. On top of its head, a single fire-tendril hung like a fishing line, and at the end of that tendril: a sphere of light, pulsing with a clean, pure energy.

The face-anglerfish dropped back into the fire sea, satisfied. It turned, ready to dive deep and resume its ambush position, waiting for the next target.

Then its just-swallowed meal made itself known.

The enormous mouth — the one that had just closed around Yueyang and the Chaos Phantom — bulged outward. Then it blew open.

The tornado of flame that had been tracking across the fire sea, visibly decelerating in the distance, abruptly stopped decelerating. Its power multiplied a hundredfold in an instant. The entire fire sea for kilometers around was yanked upward into the funnel. The face-anglerfish had no time to dive. It was ripped from the surface and hurled into the air before it could react.

Sky-rank tier four — and against a tornado seeded with Calamity god-force in disguise, even that wasn’t enough.

The Chaos Phantom emerged from the creature’s mouth with the air of someone who had been mildly inconvenienced. She raised one hand.

Gold lightning came down from directly overhead.

Multiple strikes, simultaneous, all of them connecting with the face-anglerfish’s skull inside the tornado’s funnel.

The creature convulsed and regurgitated everything it had swallowed in a spectacular and indiscriminate spray — but when the mess cleared, there was no sign of Yueyang.

“What are you looking around for?” Yueyang’s actual voice came from directly above Gray Wolf. “Did you really think a broken fish was going to eat me?”

Gray Wolf looked up.

Yueyang was standing on its head. And before Gray Wolf could process the relief, a kick came down — hard, sharp, and exactly as familiar as ten thousand previous kicks.

That impact carried something beyond physical force. Innate True Qi, and a thread of law-force, flowed from the blow directly into Gray Wolf’s body.

The master came.

The coiled, grinding tension of the past however-long dissolved in a single moment. Gray Wolf’s size doubled on the spot, the influx of energy releasing constraints it had been fighting against for hours. Without a breath of hesitation, it opened its jaws and released the Volcanic Whale — that terrible, unchewable mountain of flesh — and let it fall. The stiffness in its neck and throat and chest unspooled all at once.

This is what freedom feels like. It had nearly forgotten.

The mutual lock had been misery for both parties. The Volcanic Whale had been suffering, but so had Gray Wolf — especially with the Inferno Sovereign’s spiritual force hammering relentlessly at its mind, trying to force a contract. Every second had felt like a year. Now, riding the wave of Innate True Qi from Yueyang’s kick, Gray Wolf swung its head in a full-force headbutt and sent the falling mountain of whale-flesh crashing sideways and away.

It wanted to tell Yueyang: the whale isn’t the real threat. The Inferno Sovereign went quiet a moment ago. That’s the dangerous one. That’s what to watch.

But it didn’t get the chance. The next instinct was more immediate — Gray Wolf pivoted upward and spread its entire body across the sky above Yueyang’s head, a living shield interposed between its master and whatever the Inferno Sovereign was about to do.

The fire sea exploded upward.

A massive flaming palm drove out of the surface without warning and hit Gray Wolf with everything the Sovereign had, slamming it aside. In the same motion, the palm curled — cupping inward, closing around the spot where Yueyang stood, with the casual intention of crushing something very small.

Against the Inferno Sovereign’s palm, Yueyang was smaller than an ant.

The hand closed.

The fist clenched.

The temperature inside spiked a thousand degrees beyond the ambient fire sea — past the point where gold melts, past the point where stone becomes vapor, past the threshold where matter simply ceases to hold together. The fire spilling out from between those fingers was bright enough to sear the eye.

The sent-flying Gray Wolf reversed its trajectory immediately, arrowing back — only to catch a massive tail-strike from the Volcanic Whale, which had recovered the moment it hit the fire sea. The impact sent Gray Wolf streaking across the sky like a falling star, gone from sight in seconds.

The Inferno Sovereign rose from the fire sea.

Its expression was not the satisfaction of a kill.

It was confusion.

It looked at its right fist — the one that had just closed to crush.

The fist was frozen.

From fingertip to knuckle, from knuckle to wrist, spreading outward and inward simultaneously, the fire-energy that formed its hand was crystallizing in ice. The Inferno Sovereign stared at it with an expression that had not appeared on that face in a very long time.

Nothing had ever done this to it. Not in ten thousand years of existence. Not even the old enemy — the one it had traded mutual destruction with at the end. Even then, with no fire sea to amplify it, no fire-element body to reinforce it — not even then had anyone frozen its hand.

It was a perfect master of flame. This was not something that happened to it.

The Sovereign’s will detonated outward. The frozen fist clenched — crushing the ice to shards — and a furious blast of flame-breath incinerated every fragment before they could fall.

Where the fist had closed, Yueyang stood.

Completely undisturbed. The smile at the corner of his mouth hadn’t moved.

He looked like nothing had happened at all.

“Who are you?” the Inferno Sovereign asked. Something didn’t fit. This young man clearly knew the Doom Wolf — he wouldn’t have risked entry to the fire sea otherwise. And the wolf’s reaction to seeing him had been immediate and total: the spiritual shackles the Sovereign had been building for hours had snapped the moment Yueyang appeared.

“Who I am is less important than who you are,” Yueyang said pleasantly. “Specifically — are you unaware that Gray Wolf is my guard dog? Whoever touches the dog answers to the owner. You tried to take my dog. You were looking for a fight.”

He had the bearing of a small-time delinquent explaining something obvious to someone who should have known better. The Inferno Sovereign’s brow furrowed despite itself. The words were absurd — there was no contract between them, anyone with eyes could see that — but the young man didn’t seem to be lying, exactly. Could the Sky Stairway have produced another figure like the Buried Sword Immortal in the ten thousand years since? The boy had the air of a pampered young master from a powerful house. But even a pampered young master didn’t have this kind of power at this age without serious backing. And if the guard dog was a Divine Beast—

The Sovereign recalculated. Killing the boy immediately might attract exactly the wrong kind of attention. It pulled back the impulse to strike and shifted to interrogation.

“Who are you? When a junior stands before a great senior — before this Divine Sovereign — and fails to bow, is that what your elders taught you?”

“My elders taught me to be careful around people with bad intentions,” Yueyang replied, with a cool smile. “Courtesy is situational. For a senior who opens with an ambush — I think I’ll figure out who you are before I start bowing. Whether you’re a divine sovereign or just divinely unhinged, I genuinely have no idea. So: who are you?”

“When I’ve captured you, I’ll be happy to introduce myself.”

The Inferno Sovereign expanded its consciousness across the entire fire sea.

There was Yueyang. There was no one else.

A lone young man who had wandered into the domain without supervision. No guardian. No reinforcement that the Sovereign could detect.

Killing him might be premature — there were questions to answer first. How much had the world changed in ten thousand years? Was this boy connected to the old enemy’s lineage? That particular bloodline should have died with their mutual destruction, but stranger things had happened. The Sky Stairway reliably produced extraordinary individuals every few generations. If no one had surpassed the Sovereign’s current strength in the years since — then it was time, finally, to stop hiding and claim what should have been its a long time ago.

Today: capture the boy. Extract what he knew about the Sky Stairway. If no threat remained above the Sovereign’s level — emerge.

The Inferno Sovereign’s laughter rolled through the fire sea.

This child thinks a powerful backer makes him untouchable. That backer isn’t here. He’s alone. And alone, regardless of whose son or student he might be—

“Let me teach you some manners, little one — since your elders apparently didn’t bother.”