One day later.

When the Inferno True Core had been cut free and the consciousness it had housed was expelled, the enormous body — no longer inhabited — toppled into the lake. It lay there soaking in the cold water for a full day before it began to harden, gradually calcifying into stone.

The True Core conversion had occupied Yueyang entirely through the final phase of the battle — using the Creation Domain, the Energy-Draining Bracelet, and the Frost Bloom Sword in combination to transform the Core’s concentrated fire energy into something that wouldn’t immediately try to kill him. If not for the unfavorable terrain and the Sovereign’s complete miscalculation of Yueyang’s offensive capabilities, the defeat wouldn’t have been so clean. The most critical factor was that the Inferno Sovereign had possessed enormous power but no human body — and without a human body to interface with Sovereign intent, it simply could not express its true strength. The synergy between cultivated intent and physical form was something the Sovereign had lost tens of thousands of years ago and apparently never fully mourned.

The Rekindling Domain had also been neutralized by the water world. On home ground, in the fire sea, that ability alone would have made the Sovereign essentially undefeatable in a sustained engagement.

In the end, dismissing the Nirvana Flames, the Eternal Wheel, and the Wheel of Apocalypse had been the decisive mistake. Those three techniques grew with Yueyang’s cultivation — faster than anything else he possessed — and at his current level, any one of them was effectively irresistible to anything below the divine realm.

The displaced soul — driven out of the True Core — howled with impotent resentment that even Yueyang couldn’t fully suppress. It didn’t matter. The hourglass world’s own laws wouldn’t permit the Inferno Sovereign or the Qiluo Immortal to leave in any form. Until Yueyang’s will exceeded the will of the ancient god who had laid the seal — the same threshold that kept him from extracting Vivienne from her void-space prison — extraction wasn’t possible.

To ensure the Sovereign’s Rekindling Domain could never be used to reconstruct another body, Yueyang sealed the soul inside a puppet war beast and sank it to the lake bottom. He encased it in permafrost — the kind that wouldn’t thaw in ten thousand years — and layered his own awareness into the seal. If anything ever broke through and released it, he would know the instant it happened.

It wasn’t a perfect solution. But it was the best available one for now, and it would become unnecessary the moment his cultivation advanced to the Perfect Sovereign divine realm.

The Inferno Sovereign’s magma-composed body had long since cooled to rock and settled quietly on the lake bottom, ten thousand meters away. Over the site, Yueyang drew a celestial rune formation — closely modeled on the fire-rune formation the Sovereign had used, but drawing on water energy for its power source rather than fire.

“Done?”

When Yueyang surfaced from completing the seal, Qianqian was back. She was in a good mood — she handed him a towel without ceremony, then watched him apply it incompetently for about three seconds before taking it back and drying him off herself with the brisk efficiency of someone who has decided it’s simply faster to do the job. Like a conscientious small wife attending to a hopeless husband. “Without Yue Yu and the others here, you can’t even look after yourself. Sky Stairway’s foremost genius — foremost disaster is more accurate.”

“I’m providing you an opportunity,” Yueyang said, grinning. “Developing your practical skills.”

“Who asked for the opportunity,” Qianqian said, with a particular kind of eye-roll that conveyed both exasperation and affection, and did not stop what she was doing.

“Battle results?”

Yueyang submitted to being attended to with the ease of a man who has accepted this as his natural state. The absence of a reclining chair was his only real complaint.

“I killed two of the Oil-Flame Bats. The Eagle was too fast — the moment the Sovereign went down, it defected and ran, and I couldn’t close the gap. Gray Wolf still had the anglerfish and couldn’t help, so Xiao Wenli went after it herself.”

While she reported, she stripped off his soaked outer layer and began fitting a dry set of clothes. Alone with him — properly alone, with no audience — Qianqian was a completely different person from the tiger-girl the rest of the world knew. The ferocity went somewhere. What was left was this: quiet, attentive, only the faintest trace of competitive spirit remaining in the way she still refused to lose verbally.

“What about the Fire Dragon Eel?” The eel and the Blazing Divine Eagle were the two Yueyang was most interested in tracking. The Eagle had real intelligence and solid potential — if he hadn’t wanted to recruit it, he’d have prioritized killing it immediately. The Fire Dragon Eel was actually somewhat more powerful, but its limitations were significant: pure fire attribute, enormous body, couldn’t enter water, couldn’t stay airborne for extended periods. Terrain constraints would hamper it constantly in serious combat. In terms of development ceiling, oversized war beasts rarely made it to Sacred Beast rank.

“It surrendered the moment the Storm Valkyrie grabbed its tail. Immediately and completely.” Qianqian paused in what she was doing. “Its loyalty was never really to the Sovereign. When everything else was attacking us, it was hanging back on its own. My guess is it was sealed in here alongside the Sovereign’s other war beasts, not contracted willingly — it was just stuck.”

Yueyang’s expression brightened. The Eagle might have escaped, but this trip had been more than worthwhile. The Qiluo Umbrella, the history of the six divine artifacts, and now a Fire Dragon Eel that had apparently been waiting tens of thousands of years for a better employment situation.

Qianqian was working on replacing his inner layer when she encountered something that required a moment’s pause.

Something that was standing at attention in a manner suggesting imminent military engagement.

Color rose in her cheeks.

She gave it a light tap, both reproving and startled. “What is wrong with you? Is that all your head contains?”

The moment her hand made contact she pulled it back as though burned.

Yueyang laughed. “Completely involuntary. If a beautiful woman attending to me produced no effect whatsoever, what would be the point of being alive?”

He reached for her hand with the specific intent of returning it to the scene of the crime.

Qianqian resisted with conviction for approximately four seconds, then gave up, touched for roughly one tenth of a second, and withdrew with the speed of someone who has just confirmed a hot stove is in fact hot. The flush on her face had reached her neck. She glanced around the empty lake. No Wuxia. She drew herself up. “It’s not as though I’ve never seen it before. You’ve even kissed me.”

She realized, one beat too late, what she had just said.

Yueyang went very still.

Qianqian felt the words hanging in the air and moved to contain the situation. “That was a bet with Wuxia. She said she dared to kiss you. I wasn’t going to lose.”

“I wasn’t there for this,” Yueyang said, with genuine and deep mourning.

“You were unconscious at the time.”

He looked so devastated that something warm and involuntary moved in her chest. She put her arms around him and kissed him once, lightly, on the lips. “Fine. I know — I fight with you too much sometimes, but you start it too. That kiss settles it. I’m not angry with you, you’re not angry with me. Clean slate.”

“One more.”

“No. Wuxia’s going to be back soon.” She checked the surrounding sky with guilty haste and began dressing him faster.

“She’s still far away — I can feel it. She went after the Volcanic Whale, didn’t she?”

He pulled her in while she was still half-occupied, and kissed her properly — long enough that when his hand found its way inside her clothing it actually startled her back to awareness. She caught his wrist. Her breathing had shifted. “No. She really is coming back soon. If I let go, you’ll have every piece of clothing off me inside a minute. Tonight — I’ll let you hold me tonight. But not here, not now — if Wuxia sees this I won’t be able to look anyone in the face — put your shirt on, she’s almost—”

A point of light in the distant sky, bright as a falling star.

Then Xue Wuxia was standing in front of them, the Book of Truth in hand, smile settled on her face the way morning light settles on still water.

She said nothing. Just looked at them both.

Yueyang had no conscience to trouble him. Qianqian was still pink. She seized the initiative: “You’re back just in time — this idiot’s soaked through and I am not his personal attendant. Gentle and warm-hearted Wuxia should handle it.”

Wuxia stepped forward, took the hand that had recently been somewhere it wasn’t supposed to be, and raised it to her nose.

She inhaled.

Still said nothing. Looked at Qianqian with the smile completely intact.

Qianqian’s face went from pink to scarlet. “He forced me—”

“Correct,” Yueyang confirmed, raising his hand. “One hundred percent my doing. I will testify.”

Qianqian, furious and flustered in equal measure, stamped hard on his foot, grabbed his hand, and thrust it toward Wuxia. “No favoritism. Touch Wuxia too.”

Her working theory was that Wuxia would retreat in alarm. This was wrong.

Wuxia, with complete composure and not one trace of panic, took Yueyang’s hand in both of hers and pressed it gently but deliberately against her own very generously proportioned chest.

Qianqian stared.

Yueyang’s face entered a state typically only achieved by people who are about to either faint from happiness or refuse to believe what’s happening.

“A little kissing in private isn’t something to be jealous over,” Wuxia told Qianqian pleasantly, the mischief in her eyes the only sign she was enjoying herself. Then, as if the thought had been waiting, she became thoughtful: “I wasn’t going to say anything, but fighting the Inferno Sovereign made something clear to me. Real Sovereign power — the kind that reaches its full potential — requires a human body. That’s why Sacred Beasts and Divine Beasts ultimately take human form. The body isn’t incidental. It’s foundational.”

“True.” Yueyang grew serious alongside her. “The human body looks like the weakest design at first — no horns, no fangs, no claws, no scales, no inherent elemental nature. Only intelligence. But because the starting point is so low, the ceiling is higher than anything else. Lose the human body, and even tremendous power can’t be fully expressed. The Inferno Sovereign spent tens of thousands of years not noticing that everything it had cultivated — every technique, every pattern of combat that depended on human form to execute — had simply ceased to be available to it.” He looked at her. “What made you think of it?”

“The Volcanic Whale. Its size and rank were comparable to the Storm Valkyrie’s. In raw terms, it might have been stronger. But it lost comprehensively — almost no ability to counter her. It will take her days to finish the fight, but there was never any possibility of the whale turning it around.” She smoothed his collar with careful fingers. “The same way the Inferno Sovereign had no possibility of turning it around once you committed. If either of them had possessed a human body — that fight would have been different.” A pause. “We need to advance faster. If we can’t step into the Sovereign realm before the next confrontation, we’ll stop being useful.”

“We’ll get there.” Qianqian’s six-sense intuition had been humming since the battle ended — that particular vibration that meant something real was coming, whether she understood its shape or not. “I have a feeling. One of us — maybe both of us — will step into the Sovereign realm soon.”

She couldn’t say which. Only that the feeling was strong.