Black-Flame Canyon.

Yueyang had looked into the place some time ago, drawn by early interest in Drip-Flame ore. According to everything he’d found, it was a canyon that had been on fire for as long as anyone could remember — permanently, continuously burning — with flames far more intense than anything else in the region and a deep black color that gave the place its name.

The occasional fearless and somewhat death-resistant mercenary ventured in from time to time. Those who survived tended to emerge with reasonably high-quality purified gold, or fire-wash stone — a mineral found almost exclusively near active volcanic openings and rarely available elsewhere. Some, the lucky ones, came back with Drip-Flame ore.

Drip-Flame ore, once refined, became Drip-Flame liquid gold — an extraordinarily high-temperature molten metal used in combination with other minerals to forge various legendary instruments and treasures of the heavenly realm. The highest-quality Drip-Flame liquid gold, refined further through multiple intensive processes, produced Drip-Flame crystal gold: a hard, room-temperature crystalline metal with complete immunity to fire-element degradation. A finger-sized piece of Drip-Flame crystal gold at auction would open bidding above ten million — it was on the permanent standing purchase list that the upper heavenly realm maintained for the lower realm, one of a hundred materials they would always buy.

They were still fifty kilometers out from the canyon when Yueyang’s senses caught it.

A fight. Close-range, escalating.

“Sounds like it’s getting closer,” the Imperial Lady said, waking from her doze and dropping from his back in one smooth motion. She adjusted herself quickly, composure already reassembled, hands tightening into fists as her power began to build. “Is someone fighting out here?”

“Hold still. Watch first.” He waved her down.

She looked at him once, then let her shoulders drop. With him here, following his lead was enough. Whatever came, he could handle it.

The sky turned red.

A rain of heavenly fire-meteors hammered down across a thirty-kilometer radius, lighting the horizon like a second sunset. The nearest impacts were still some distance away, but the shockwaves from them reached Yueyang and the Imperial Lady with enough force to make both of them settle their footing. By Yueyang’s estimate, whoever had launched that attack was Sky-rank tier four at minimum — but here, this close to Black-Flame Canyon, where the fire-element energy was barely restrained even on a quiet day, the explosions on impact performed at Sky-rank tier five. The heat-surge was formidable.

If the fire-element amplification this far out was already this pronounced, the inside of the canyon itself was a different matter entirely. The fire sea had been neutralizable via the hourglass world’s water. This place didn’t have that option. If Yueyang had come alone, it wouldn’t have been a concern — but he’d brought the Imperial Lady, and leaving her out of whatever opportunity presented itself felt wasteful. He’d need to think about the approach.

He made the signal to go quiet and stay low.

She obeyed without comment.

Several figures came stumbling out of the burning terrain. Two of them, Yueyang recognized.

One was the skeleton-man Leiqie — leader of the Southern Realm’s Black Skull Bandit Group, someone Yueyang had encountered before.

The other was the vampire from the incident below Salvation City, the one who had squared off with Rima and then been scared off by a clever trick. Yueyang didn’t know his name, but he knew his strength: Sky-rank tier three, just fractionally below Leiqie.

Both of them looked rough.

Leiqie and the vampire each had two Sky-rank subordinates with them. The fact that those four were still alive spoke to how hard their leaders had worked to keep them that way — both had clearly absorbed punishment rather than let their people take it. Four tier-one subordinates had walked out of that meteor shower because their bosses had chosen their people over their own comfort.

The attacker didn’t pursue. It released one devastating barrage, then withdrew back toward Black-Flame Canyon. Yueyang’s Heavenly Eye caught only traces — a hundred-meter pillar of black flame marking its departure. He couldn’t get a clear look from this distance.

A magical beast guarding the canyon? No one had ever mentioned that. The usual hazard in Black-Flame Canyon was the ground-vein eruptions — unpredictable columns of flame that killed regardless of fire-attribute status. A territorial beast wasn’t something he’d heard about.

“You’re a disaster, Blood-Fang. A complete, absolute disaster — because of your bad intelligence, I’ve lost everything I built over years!” Leiqie, clearly past the point of caring about appearances, was furious in a way that bore no resemblance to his usual self-important presentation. He rounded on his companion with unrestrained heat.

“My intelligence was wrong, I acknowledge that — but not by intention.” The vampire, Blood-Fang, sounded equally miserable. “Your Black Skull Group is done. So is my Bat Company — completely wiped out. The only reason your two people are standing there alive is because I spent my Light Guardian artifact on them. If that’s not putting my resources behind our partnership, I don’t know what is.” He said this last part with the specific pain of someone who has spent something they deeply cared about.

“Boss, what do we do now?” Leiqie’s subordinate ventured the question once the argument seemed to have reached its natural pause.

“Nothing that involves you.” Leiqie’s voice dropped back into command register. “You four don’t have the strength for Black-Flame Canyon — go back to Silver Leaf City and wait. And while you’re there — don’t cause trouble. Especially don’t go anywhere near the new Jade Territory lord and the Longteng, Celestial Demon, and Sky Stairway people. Those western-realm warriors — even the Lionheart King courts them. Stay completely out of their way.” He paused. “I mean it.”

The four subordinates, who had not needed the warning and had never intended to cross those particular lines, acknowledged and left.

When they were gone, Leiqie drove his blade into the ground and carved a hundred meters of rock apart in pure frustration. “The Black-Flame Lord. Hiding underground like a mole for thousands of years, quietly building up strength. We stumbled onto it — if we hadn’t gone in together, that canyon would have kept its secret. He’s been down there absorbing fire energy the whole time. If we hadn’t found him now, when he eventually came out—”

Blood-Fang cut him off with a gesture. “We found him at the right time. He’s in the middle of a breakthrough — trying to advance from tier five to tier six. That’s the opening. If we let him finish absorbing all that Drip-Flame ore, there’s no opening left.”

Leiqie’s skull-head performed a visible thinking motion. “The problem is, just the two of us can’t stop him. Even knowing he’s at a vulnerable moment. We can’t force it.”

“We harass him anyway. Interrupt the breakthrough. Normally there’s nothing to be done against him — but during a breakthrough, interference is the most damage you can do. Even just the two of us.”

“If the Joker were here,” Leiqie said, with a sigh that sounded more resigned than hopeful.

“If the Joker were here, I’d be watching my back the whole time,” Blood-Fang said coldly. “He’d use us as decoys and walk away with everything.”

“That’s probably true. But he thinks better than us, and his success rate would be higher. With just the two of us, I genuinely can’t see a clean path through this.”

The Imperial Lady touched Yueyang’s arm — a quiet question.

He shook his head.

Stepping out now to help would mean splitting the spoils three ways. He had more than enough capability, and he had the significant advantage of being invisible. Why split what didn’t need splitting? Beyond that, neither Leiqie nor Blood-Fang was what anyone would call trustworthy company — there was no telling what a partnership with those two would produce when stakes got high.

And the Black-Flame Lord didn’t sound like a genuine threat. A territorial beast hiding underground and absorbing fire energy. Sky-rank tier five currently, aiming for six. Yueyang had just taken down an entity that dwarfed that — the Inferno Sovereign, in its own amplified domain. A local lord working on a tier breakthrough wasn’t even a named boss by comparison. Mid-level elite, at best.

The only thing that merited genuine caution was the terrain. Black-Flame Canyon’s ground-vein eruptions didn’t care about power levels — they were unpredictable and lethal, and unpredictability was harder to plan around than raw strength.

He turned to the Imperial Lady and made a gesture that communicated the plan with complete economy: they fight on both sides, we pick up what drops in the middle.

Under normal circumstances, she would have found this deeply cynical. But the moral compass she usually kept carefully calibrated had limited jurisdiction in the Southern Heavenly Realm, and the people in front of them were not people whose interests she had any particular reason to protect. Here, everyone was an adversary of some kind. There was nothing excessive about what he was proposing.

She gave him a small nod.

The plan was set.