The Inferno Sovereign had been in a foul mood for two days.

The arrogant young man and the uncontracted Divine Beast wolf had vanished completely. The Blazing Divine Eagle, the Oil-Flame Bats, and the Ghost-Fire Crows had swept every section of the cloud layer and found nothing. The Sovereign was certain they were up there — hidden somewhere in the clouds — and equally certain it couldn’t find them.

The fire sea search had been equally fruitless. The Volcanic Whale, the face-anglerfish, and the Deep-Sea Fire Dragon Eel had turned up no trace of the enemy.

The arrogant young man had ceased to exist within the Sovereign’s perception as completely as if he’d never been real.

Which made the memory of his face all the more maddening. A kill within reach, a piece of prey as good as cooked — and it had walked away. The Sovereign had replayed the moment countless times, each replay arriving at the same infuriating conclusion: if it had simply committed its full power from the start, there would have been nothing left of either of them. No escape, no recovery. Just ash.

That opportunity was gone. It would not come again the same way.

“Boy,” the Sovereign muttered into the empty fire sea, “if we meet again, there will be no warning.”

Empty threats directed at no audience. Without an enemy in sight, all that power had nowhere to go.

The two Ghost-Fire Crows came back in a rush, visibly alarmed.

The Sovereign’s mood lifted slightly. An enemy sighting — and if it was the wolf, perhaps the situation could still be salvaged. Losing the arrogant boy was acceptable. Losing an uncontracted Divine Beast of that caliber was not. That had been gnawing at the Sovereign ever since. If it had simply hit the wolf with everything it had, captured it, and worried about forcing a contract later — that would have been better than the current nothing.

Southeast. Two thousand kilometers.

The crows’ report was terse. The Sovereign didn’t dwell on their obvious reluctance to return to the area. Fire-attribute war beasts in the Rekindling Domain couldn’t truly die — there was no rational basis for cowardice. Though admittedly, the Chaos Phantom was a difficult matchup for anything fire-attribute, and two Sky-rank tier two crows surviving contact with her was already something.

The Sovereign organized its forces. The Volcanic Whale, the anglerfish, and the Fire Dragon Eel formed a wide encircling net, joined by several dozen recently Sky-ranked volcanic elementals. The Sovereign itself took the Blazing Divine Eagle and the Oil-Flame Bats and followed the Ghost-Fire Crows southeast.

This time there would be no restraint. The wolf would be subdued or destroyed — no third outcome.

What the Inferno Sovereign found when it arrived was not what it expected.

It stopped.

It stared.

An ocean.

An actual ocean, stretching across tens of kilometers of what had been its fire sea. The sky above had been punctured — a waterfall several thousand meters tall and a hundred meters wide came howling down through the cloud layer, its impact thundering against the surface below. Where the fire sea had been, cooling lava had solidified into black reefs and small islands. Here and there, pockets of residual heat still vented steam, the surfaces cold while the interiors continued to glow. Beyond the flooded area, heavy rain was falling — a downpour that extended almost a hundred kilometers outward, creating a cycle: rain hitting superheated ground and boiling into steam, rising, condensing, falling again.

Gold lightning split the black clouds overhead with a crack that rolled across the entire fire sea.

The Sovereign’s heart felt like it had been split along with them.

It couldn’t work out where this much water had come from. It couldn’t work out why the water hadn’t converted — why the fire sea’s laws hadn’t already absorbed it and transformed it back into fire energy. That conversion was supposed to be irreversible. That was the fundamental law of how this world operated. And yet the water was still water, and spreading.

It didn’t matter. Explanations later. Finding Yueyang was what mattered.

“Open.“

The Sovereign’s arms swept outward. Every volcano within range erupted simultaneously, blasting thousands of meters of molten rock skyward. The ordinary rainfall was nothing against temperatures this extreme — it evaporated on contact, couldn’t even reach the surface. A river of magma carved its way toward the flooded area, laying a burning road of molten stone across the cooling lava crust.

The Sovereign strode onto the magma road, furious. The face-anglerfish seized the moment — it charged ahead, craning upward, adding its own magma-spray to extend the road further. The fish was quick but small in scale; it needed three or four bursts to maintain enough surface for the Sovereign to walk on.

At the edge of the flooded area, it stopped. No matter how much magma it spat, the road dissolved. The water absorbed everything without yielding.

“ENOUGH.“

The Sovereign erupted.

Both arms thrust toward the sky. The cooling dead-volcano islands across the entire flooded zone detonated simultaneously — explosions that shook the water’s surface and hurled it in waves thousands of meters high. Magma fountained into the air, twisted and turned in the Sovereign’s spiritual grip, and came down as columns — pier after pier of cooling stone, hardening as they hit the water, solidifying into pillars. More magma poured onto them, building a broad causeway across the lake’s surface.

The anglerfish saw its moment and redoubled its contribution. The Blazing Divine Eagle and the Ghost-Fire Crows circled the waterfall from a distance, searching for the source — hoping to find a way to block the flow before it could spread further.

Three bolts of purple lightning detonated in the clouds overhead.

Each one found a target.

The Blazing Divine Eagle — Sky-rank tier three, a creature that could normally shrug off ordinary lightning without noticing — screamed as the purple bolt hit, tumbling through the air, scorched feathers spiraling away in every direction. The two Ghost-Fire Crows fared worse. They’d already been reluctant to approach the waterfall; the Sovereign’s order had forced them forward. The purple lightning hit them both and they nearly dropped from the sky entirely, struggling back to level flight at the last moment before the water surface, their bodies still crackling with residual charge and issuing thin streams of smoke.

“Caw. Caw. Caw.” Both crows made it back to the magma causeway and immediately collapsed, barely avoiding falling into the lake.

The Inferno Sovereign’s head was wreathed in fifty meters of fire.

“Oh, you came.” Yueyang dropped out of the sky, grinning like he’d spotted an old friend he hadn’t seen in years. “What do you think? Nice pool, right? A bit small, maybe, but it’s a work in progress.”

“You think a little water is going to save your life?” The Sovereign’s laugh had the edge of someone who has moved past anger into something colder.

“Saving my life isn’t really the plan,” Yueyang said pleasantly. “What I was thinking was — if you don’t object — I’d like to turn this whole area into a proper sea. Then when you’re gone, you’d get a sea burial. That’s not something just anyone gets, you know. Usually it’s sailors and pirates. For a minor walk-on character like yourself, getting a sea burial is honestly a bit of an honor. You should be grateful for my consideration.”

The expression on his face was the pure distillation of I’m doing this for your own good — the universal expression of someone who enjoys getting their nose into everyone else’s business and occasionally arranges their funerals.

“You won’t have the opportunity,” the Sovereign said flatly.

“Hmph,” said Gray Wolf, which covered most of the bases.

“Hmph hmph,” Yueyang agreed, entering the spirit of the thing. “Well, we’ll see—”

Qianqian had heard enough.

One kick for Yueyang, one kick for Gray Wolf, both of them sent stumbling toward the water’s surface. Princess Qianqian did not do things by halves, and she had no interest in watching the opening ceremony go on indefinitely. The Prison Emperor’s Divine Sword rose in her hand. Her Sage power domain detonated outward at full expansion, all four divine manifestations appearing around her simultaneously: the Azure Dragon’s lightning weaving a crackling net across the sky, the Vermilion Bird’s fire-wings spreading from her back in a blaze of heat, the Black Tortoise driving cold through the air until the world itself seemed to contract, and the White Tiger’s sacred power doubling over itself with the added force of Qianqian’s own White Tiger Sacred Beast. The Divine Sword’s power climbed past what any of them had seen it reach before, the weapon’s nature responding to the full convergence of all four sacred forces.

“What—” The Inferno Sovereign’s shock was genuine — the six divine artifacts, in its own history, had struck down its comrades and beaten it half to death. But this — the scope of what this young woman was producing — went beyond its memory of what the sword had done.

“Lightning — Azure Dragon Binding!“

Qianqian’s voice split the air like the leading edge of an avalanche.

The sword came down.

The sky went dim around it. The face-anglerfish and the Volcanic Whale both threw themselves sideways rather than attempt to intercept it, the instinct for self-preservation overriding whatever instructions their master had given — neither was prepared to find out what being in the path of that particular strike felt like.