At the moment the Volcanic Whale and the face-anglerfish were moving to strike simultaneously, Yueyang’s figure vanished.
The rune formation flared. Its suppressive force multiplied.
But it could only lock onto Gray Wolf. The actual target — Yueyang — had disappeared without a trace, without a detectable moment of departure. The Chaos Phantom swept her will-driven fire tornado around Gray Wolf, drawing the Doom Wolf — wreathed in flame — into the funnel. Together they rose, spinning upward with the tornado’s momentum, and broke through the black cloud ceiling. The Inferno Sovereign watched them go with an expression it had not worn in a very long time: genuine incomprehension.
It tried. Multiple surges of aura-pressure, the fire-rune formation amplified beyond tenfold output. Against the Chaos Phantom and Gray Wolf, it produced no effect. They passed through as though the formation didn’t exist.
That part was not the most astonishing. Both were fire-attribute, and fire-attribute entities naturally resisted a formation whose power source was fire energy — that much could be rationalized, however grudgingly.
What the Inferno Sovereign could not make sense of was the boy.
An ice-attribute warrior — directly opposed to the formation’s attribute — should have felt its suppression more than anything else in the fire sea. By the laws of elemental opposition, he should have been pinned flat. He should have been the last one to escape. And yet he had vanished cleanly, without triggering the formation, without the Sovereign’s senses catching even the afterimage of the departure.
The Sovereign expanded its will across the entire domain. Searched every corner of the flame world.
Nothing.
The arrogant young man had ceased to exist within its perception as completely as if he had never been there at all.
“Find him. Search everywhere. As long as he remains inside the flame world, he cannot escape me.”
The Volcanic Whale, the face-anglerfish, and the freshly summoned fire-attribute war beasts dispersed in every direction. The Inferno Sovereign also sent a Sky-rank tier three Blazing Divine Eagle up through the clouds to pursue the Chaos Phantom and Gray Wolf. The Chaos Phantom was a life-guardian war beast and permanently beyond acquisition — but the Doom Wolf remained the most desirable alternative target in the Sovereign’s experience.
With a Divine Beast of the Doom Wolf’s caliber under contract, everything changed.
High in the black clouds, Yueyang moved with Gray Wolf and the Chaos Phantom, pressing upward.
Something was pulling at him. A faint resonance — not quite a call, more like the fire-rune formation below had a corresponding note somewhere far above, and that note was vibrating in response. He’d already understood the formation’s weakness the moment his Heavenly Eye of Wisdom had read through it. The path to countering it was clear. But the moment that understanding had settled into place, instead of turning to press the advantage, he had felt the pull — a curiosity about what else the flame world was concealing — and followed it.
The clouds thickened and resisted. The higher he climbed, the more he felt something wrong with the energy — not the fire sea’s heat, not the Inferno Sovereign’s suppression, something different. Something that didn’t belong to this burning world at all.
Then, without transition, there was light.
White cloud. Endless white cloud spreading in every direction ahead of him. Yueyang looked back: black cloud behind. White cloud in front. The same vast sea of cloud on both sides, distinguished only by color.
Both he and Gray Wolf felt it the moment they pushed through whatever boundary lay between them — a shift, like passing through something that had no physical substance. The water-attribute energy ahead was oceanic. Vast in a way that matched the fire sea below. The Chaos Phantom, feeling it, pulled up short. She gave Yueyang one look, confirmed he was not turning back, and returned herself to the Grimoire World without waiting to be asked. Whatever lay ahead, she wanted no part of it.
Gray Wolf wasn’t enthusiastic either. The sensation was approximately that of falling into a pond — suddenly, thoroughly soaked, in the way that wasn’t physical but was felt in the bones regardless.
Yueyang kicked it.
The two of them shot forward.
What he found when he broke through the white clouds made him nearly shout aloud.
He had been flying upward. He arrived upside down.
A water world. Limitless water, stretching to every horizon — but nothing like the desolation of the fire sea. This place was alive. The surface was thick with green aquatic plants. Countless insects of every variety moved through the air. Silver fish leaped from the water in glittering arcs, chasing and playing across the surface.
Yueyang righted himself and looked up.
The sky above was white cloud. Boundless white cloud, the underside of the ceiling he had just come through. Far in the distance, traces of a recent light rain still hung in the air, and a rainbow curved across the horizon.
Fire below, water above, and between them — only clouds.
Two worlds that should have been mutually destructive, existing in the same space, each self-contained and yet somehow joined. He would not have believed it if he were not standing inside it.
“What kind of world is this?” He stepped onto the surface of the water and felt the water energy radiating upward — no less immense than the fire sea on the other side.
“A hourglass world.” The voice came from the water ahead of him. “Fire on one side, water on the other. Every three months, the hourglass turns — the energy transfers. The water and the fire don’t vanish, and they don’t exchange. Only the spatial positions change. As for why, I cannot fully explain it. But in ten thousand years of waiting with nothing else to do, I worked out the timing.”
The water surface rippled. A figure took shape from clear water — a woman’s silhouette, emerging slowly from the lake. Most remarkably of all, she was holding an umbrella. A deep sapphire-blue umbrella, the kind of artifact that didn’t need labeling — Yueyang’s instincts registered it the moment he saw it. Sub-divine artifact tier. And the woman holding it was, at the very least, the equal of the Inferno Sovereign.
Yueyang’s tone shifted entirely from how he’d spoken to the Sovereign.
“Senior — could you be the Qiluo Immortal of legend? I am Yue Titan, a junior from the Longteng continent.”
The water-woman’s expression flickered briefly with surprise at being named so precisely, then settled. “I didn’t expect anyone to still remember that name after so long. The Sky Stairway has grown this prosperous? A young man as young as you, already at the Perfect Innate Sovereign Realm — that’s extraordinary.”
Beside him, Gray Wolf turned away and covered its mouth.
A young man like you. The entire Sky Stairway had exactly one specimen of that particular category. If not for Yueyang existing to wave in front of the heavenly realms as proof that the Sky Stairway was not completely hopeless, the contempt of the celestial warriors would have been total and absolute.
Yueyang shot the wolf a warning glare. Gray Wolf strangled its laughter with visible effort, forcing the amusement to stay somewhere in the vicinity of its stomach rather than emerge through its face.
“The Sky Stairway is indeed thriving,” Yueyang said, adopting the posture of a very well-behaved young person. “Young people like me are everywhere — countless of us, truly. The heavenly realms have a saying about us: geniuses thick as weeds, Sovereigns walking every road. Though I shouldn’t boast — by my family’s standards I was considered something of a disappointment for years, too slow to progress, on the receiving end of quite a few dismissive looks.” He said all of this with complete sincerity, which was to say he fabricated it effortlessly and without the slightest physiological sign of dishonesty.
The umbrella-woman sighed, long and deep. “The Sky Stairway truly flourishes now. When I was there, the demon clans and celestial warriors were constantly at our throats — years of fighting, so many young talents lost in those battles. But when our generation was gone, it seems the survivors learned from the loss. I’m glad.” A pause, something melancholy underneath it. “I’m trapped in this hourglass world. I can never leave. I would have liked to see it.”
“Senior,” Yueyang said immediately, “someone with your power — surely you can break through the spatial boundary here?”
She shook her head. “This is my punishment. The Inferno Sovereign and I — our feud, our endless warfare — nearly destroyed the Longteng continent. An ancient ancestor grew furious enough to intervene. On the one thousand nine hundred and eighty-fifth time we faced each other, he appeared. He destroyed both our physical bodies and cast us into this hourglass world. As imprisonment. As consequence for what we had caused.” The sapphire umbrella turned slowly in the water. “Here there is only the extreme balance of fire and water. The Inferno Sovereign and I cannot meet, cannot fight, and cannot leave. Ever.” She looked at him steadily. “Young man — I don’t know which senior told you of us. But let me say plainly: this is not a safe place. The Inferno Sovereign is a tyrant, and his ambitions have not shrunk in ten thousand years of captivity. He despises everything, and young people of exceptional ability most of all. He will not let you go.”
“The furious fire-giant — yes, I’ve met him. He’s strong. But the fire sea limits his options considerably. I can’t beat him, but leaving wasn’t a problem.”
“You went to his side first and fought before coming here?” She looked genuinely surprised. “A young ice-attribute warrior, entering that fire world — you shouldn’t have been able to escape. And this Doom Wolf—” Her gaze moved to Gray Wolf, currently swimming enthusiastic laps through the lake with its tongue hanging out. “It follows you so willingly. Why haven’t you contracted it? A Divine Beast under contract can sometimes be more valuable than years of personal cultivation.”
“Contracting it would take away its freedom,” Yueyang said easily.
“You have so many war beasts that you can afford not to contract a Divine Beast?”
“There are some open slots. But there may be better choices later.”
He was not about to tell a senior of several tens of thousands of years that he only contracted female war beasts. Lying, fortunately, was something Yueyang had long since elevated to the level of unconscious reflex. He found a vague answer and moved on.
“Remarkable,” the umbrella-woman said softly. “That kind of spirit — is the Sky Stairway truly full of young people like you? I’ve never heard of anyone turning down a Divine Beast contract. How many Divine Beasts do you have?”
“A few,” Yueyang said offhandedly.
The sapphire umbrella slipped from her fingers and hit the water surface. She didn’t notice.
After a very long silence: “A few. You understand — in my time, I ranked in the top ten of the entire Sky Stairway. I didn’t have a single Divine Beast. You genuinely have a few?”
Yueyang scratched the back of his head with mild embarrassment. “There are a few, yes. And some others with the potential to reach Divine Beast rank — the cultivation conditions have been favorable, so the advancement hasn’t been too difficult. Gray Wolf here was the first to advance. The later ones caught up quickly through their own fortunate encounters, which means it’s actually fallen a bit behind relative to the others.”
The water-woman stared at him with the expression of someone who has been told something their mind is refusing to process.
“I cannot believe this without seeing it. Show me another.”
Yueyang was showing off intentionally. He had something to ask this particular senior, and a cooperative audience required some groundwork. He arranged his expression into its most agreeable configuration. Gray Wolf, reading the situation with practiced ease, also assumed the bearing of an extremely well-behaved Divine Beast.
Yueyang called Xiao Wenli out of the Grimoire World.
The small serpent-demon girl emerged — and the senior’s voice cracked into an outright cry:
“That’s — is that a Transcendent Beast? How — how do you have a Transcendent Beast? That’s impossible. You — who are you? No. You’re not from the Sky Stairway. You can’t be. You must be from that legendary bloodline — the one from the ancient stories—”