What did divine-tier mean?

Especially for a consumable medicine or herb, earning a divine-tier rating made it a treasure almost beyond imagining!

“Keep watch. Don’t let anyone disturb me for the next half hour. And be careful — whatever you do, don’t let anyone strike the Ground-origin Yin Flame with an energy attack. If its stillness is broken and it erupts, this whole space will turn into a hell!” Yue Yang looked at the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady with a touch of gravity.

“Don’t worry. I’d sooner die than let anyone cross that line by so much as a step.” The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady felt the blood in her whole body come to a boil.

There was no telling how long Leiqie and Blood-Fang could keep the Black-Flame Lord tangled up, but she reckoned that no matter how hard they fought, it wouldn’t last more than half an hour. If Simba couldn’t pin him down out there, the Black-Flame Lord would very likely come racing straight back. Yue Yang needed to throw himself heart and soul into separating out the Fire God Soul-Tempering Herb — and the ground still held the Ground-origin Yin Flame, which the moment its energy balance was broken would erupt in a world-shaking explosion.

She had to strike first and take the enemy down, or the consequences would be unthinkable.

The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady forced down her wild heartbeat, clenched her fists tight, and breathed in deep.

With all her might she stilled her trembling body… She couldn’t let herself grow tense. She had to bring out one hundred percent of her fighting strength and guard him well. Until he’d successfully claimed the Fire God Soul-Tempering Herb, no one — no one at all — would be allowed through.

Slowly she drew forth the Golden Dragon-Slaying Spear that Yue Yang had given her, closed both eyes, gathered her spirit and held her breath, and let herself sense any stir in her surroundings.

Time crept past, one second at a time.

To the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady, every second dragged as long as a year.

Half an hour of guarding was far, far too long. There was no way Leiqie and Blood-Fang could keep the Black-Flame Lord tangled up that long. Given how much the Black-Flame Lord prized the ‘Fire God Soul-Tempering Herb,’ he wouldn’t give chase either — he’d turn back the very first moment. And once he discovered Yue Yang stealing his treasure, there’d be no avoiding a desperate fight to the death. Worse, in the depths of despair, the Black-Flame Lord might well strike the Ground-origin Yin Flame, set off a cataclysmic explosion, and drag them all down with him.

If only she were a little stronger. If only she had the strength of a Perfect Innate Sovereign right now…

“Come on, you can do this!”

The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady gently bit her lip to steel herself — she didn’t dare bite hard, afraid it might tip her into tension.

Her breathing slowed too, drawn out as long as she could make it.

Every scrap of her awareness spread out across her surroundings.

One guarding all four directions.

“Crack! Crack!”

A few chips of stone, shaken loose by the rising flames, dropped onto the ground.

It nearly made the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady’s heart burst — thankfully, they hadn’t fallen within the range of the Ground-origin Yin Flame.

She hurried to hold on to the single-minded focus she’d worked so hard to reach, but couldn’t quite press the thought down in that instant: Honored ancestors of the Hundred Flowers, please protect this treasure hunt and let us come through it safely. If we make it through this time, this junior will cast aside every reservation and cultivate together with him in dual practice, and make it her foremost duty to strive to grow stronger.

Boom, boom, rumble-rumble-rumble!

From the ground far away, a tide-like tremor came conducting in through the sound waves.

The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady quickly gathered her spirit, flicked the tip of her spear in a swift stab to shatter the fallen pebbles to powder, then set the disturbed air spinning into a whirling column of heat that would not settle — refusing to let the Ground-origin Yin Flame suffer even the faintest disturbance.

In the face of hardship and adversity, insufficient strength was nothing less than turning somersaults on the bridge over death itself.

Every move was a gamble with her own pounding heart.

The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady was drenched head to toe in sweat. Loosing a single deft technique had left her as exhausted as if she’d battled an enemy three days and three nights.

“Relax a little. Don’t be nervous.” Yue Yang’s thought came transmitted into her mind. The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady knew he was reminding her, and her tightly strung heart eased greatly, her spirit settling back once more into that original single-minded focus. Throwing herself wholly into sensing the space around her, she gradually slipped into a state of hyper-awareness she had always longed for yet never once entered. This state had appeared before, beneath the World Tree, in the moment when her spirit and Yue Yang’s had together glimpsed the divine realm — but afterward, relying on her own insight, she had never reached it again. Who would have thought that in this life-or-death moment of tension, she would instead succeed in stepping into it.

“Haah… haah…”

With every breath in and out, the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady could clearly feel herself being sublimated.

Her cultivation was soaring upward. The energy she’d stored up over her training was being ceaselessly converted in this ascension — one part flowing out beyond her body, one part merging into her spirit, and yet another part of elemental energy channeled by the Energy-Draining Bracelet onto the Golden Dragon-Slaying Spear, so that it too reaped the benefit.

If only she didn’t have to guard Yue Yang.

Then she would gladly steep herself ten days and nine nights in the sublimation of her realm.

A thread of movement appeared in one of the cave mouths overhead. An enemy had come in.

The enemy didn’t charge straight in. Instead he probed again and again, as though playing hide-and-seek with someone — sometimes halfway in, then backing out to observe for a while.

Was it the Black-Flame Lord?

Had he driven off Leiqie and Blood-Fang?

The instant that thought surged up, she could no longer hold the single-minded state. The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady found her own energy quiver faintly with the shift in her heart.

“Roar!”

Even without her eyes, the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady could ‘see’ it — she sensed the Black-Flame Lord’s energy ripples stirring down below as he pounced madly downward. She had to stop him in the cave. Barely a minute, perhaps, had passed. If she let him in, Yue Yang — utterly absorbed in gathering the herb — would be in danger. Should the Black-Flame Lord hurl his energy into the Ground-origin Yin Flame, both she and Yue Yang would be gravely wounded!

Kill!

With no time even to open her eyes, the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady raised the Dragon-Slaying Spear. The energy still lingering from her new realm, not yet fully faded, plus what she’d refined before — together with her will — burst out at the spear’s tip and stabbed toward the enemy.

No defense. No follow-up move.

Just a single thrust.

Loosed with everything she had!

The Black-Flame Lord — mighty, at Sky-rank tier five — was stunned to find a spear come stabbing at him like a striking dragon. As easily as puncturing an eggshell, it pierced through his protective shell of energy-flame, and then, under his own disbelieving gaze, drove straight into his heart. The Black-Flame Lord was enraged. This was a sheer humiliation. Though he’d already forged a body of pure element, letting someone stab a spear into his heart was truly the greatest of disgraces.

What enraged him even more was that the enemy had crept into his very lair, and he hadn’t noticed at all — instead he’d been merrily brawling with Leiqie and Blood-Fang, those two decoys.

“Get lost!”

The Black-Flame Lord gripped the spear shaft with a hand of flame and unleashed mountain-shaking force, meaning to shake his opponent to death on the spot.

Yet, against all his expectations, that spear — merely a Gold-rank weapon — erupted with power surpassing a Sacred-tier artifact. His flaming hand couldn’t hold it fast; it slid easily on through his chest, passing clean from front to back in a single piercing thrust!

“Away!”

Her momentum still unspent, the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady, spear and all, skewered the Black-Flame Lord and hoisted him, flying upward all the way.

The Black-Flame Lord clawed at the cave walls with both talons.

He gouged deep gashes into them, yet still couldn’t halt that irresistible lifting force… In the blink of an eye, the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady had heaved him a thousand meters up on her spear. Seeing he couldn’t resist, the Black-Flame Lord blazed up in a heaven-piercing inferno, crossed his fiery claws, and slashed them scissor-like toward the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady’s neck, meaning to end her in a single stroke: “Loathsome little human worm, I’ll butcher you!”

Simba, battered and covered in wounds, appeared behind the Black-Flame Lord.

Together with his master.

Attacking from front and back.

His sharp claws raked heavily across the Black-Flame Lord’s skull.

“So this stinking cat was yours!” It all came clear to the Black-Flame Lord at last — why a tier-three Sky-rank lion king had ambushed him the moment Leiqie left. Its master was her!

Over half his skull smashed apart, oozing black-red, scorching-hot magma, the Black-Flame Lord paid the wound no mind at all and sneered coldly, huh-huh-huh: “You think that’s enough to kill me? How naive. I forged a pure-element body long ago. Attacking me with blades and brute force can’t hurt me in the slightest! The probing’s over — now you can die!”

The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady blasted out a heaven-piercing punch.

The Black-Flame Lord caught it effortlessly with one fiery claw, then used his other flaming hand to wrench the Golden Dragon-Slaying Spear out of his chest and stab it disdainfully into the passage wall to the side.

A great hole was bored through his chest, endless black-red magma pouring out — yet this was nowhere near fatal.

The powerhouses of the Heavenly Realm were unlike humans. The heart was not a fatal weak point.

Especially once one had forged a pure-element body — unless the attribute countered his own.

Otherwise, attacks did nothing.

“Human worm, watch me crush your fist to pieces!” The Black-Flame Lord ignored Simba at his back. Being of the same flame attribute, he found a fight with Simba all but meaningless — beating Simba wasn’t hard, but to kill something of the same attribute might take days and nights and still not be done. The human woman before him was another matter. She looked terribly frail; one light slap and she’d be finished in an instant!

“Fool.” The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady’s once-tense expression suddenly shifted, turning relaxed: “Do you still remember what it feels like to freeze?”

“Wh— what?”

The Black-Flame Lord was first stunned, then discovered to his horror that his own arm had begun to freeze over.

When he fixed his eyes and looked clearly, he suddenly saw on her wrist an Energy-Draining Bracelet — the very ‘Elemental Calamity Bracelet’ that struck terror into no small number of Heavenly Realm warriors and elemental war beasts. She actually possessed such a treasure?

Simba bit down on the Black-Flame Lord’s tail and strained with all his might to drag him out of the cave.

Alarmed, the Black-Flame Lord had already realized something was wrong. From the spot where his chest had been pierced, what flowed out was no longer magma but steam — the result of frost colliding with the heat inside him… The chest that had never once kept a permanent crack since he became an element-body kept hardening and splitting open. With scarcely any hesitation, the Black-Flame Lord spat out a searing tongue of fire and formed it into a fiery sickle.

Gripping it in his other, unfrozen flaming hand, he swung it sideways and sheared half his own body away.

Using his sole remaining right leg to kick the steadily cooling body toward Simba, who was holding him back, the Black-Flame Lord dodged the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady’s second thrust, turned into a meteor-like ball of raging flame, and shot down toward the bottom of the cave.

The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady panicked. Down below, Yue Yang was still plucking the Fire God Soul-Tempering Herb. If she let this creature descend, he would surely be discovered.

She was about to give chase.

When suddenly she saw the Black-Flame Lord split in two.

From within his body, the Black-Flame Lord split off a mass of black flame and sent it blasting toward the Ground-origin Yin Flame, while his true body abruptly stopped and blocked the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady’s Dragon-Slaying Spear with a fiery claw: “I won’t deny you came prepared. But in terrain like this, I can never be defeated. Even if I’m left with just one-tenth of my fire energy — no, even with none at all — the Black-Flame Soul Crystal alone is enough to withstand one baptism of the Ground-origin Yin Flame. And you, human worm, you’ll be reduced to flying ash in the Ground-origin Yin Flame’s eruption! Hahaha, farewell!”

“No!” The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady screamed in despair. As that mass of black flame slammed into the Ground-origin Yin Flame, what filled her heart was not herself but Yue Yang. If only she hadn’t been too weak to freeze the Black-Flame Lord over entirely, a blunder like this would never have happened.

She forced her way past the Black-Flame Lord’s fiery claw, even as it carved a long wound across her back.

Fresh blood spurted.

She paid it no heed at all!

Now she had only one wish — to beat the Ground-origin Yin Flame’s eruption and throw herself in front of Yue Yang.

She could die this very moment, but nothing could be allowed to happen to him! This wasn’t only for the sake of the Sky Tower’s hopes — it was to guard the love in her heart. Even though it had never once been spoken aloud, that love truly existed; of this she was utterly certain.

For the sake of a love she’d been too late to voice and had never been willing to formally admit, she would shield him with her own body. Even if she couldn’t hold it back, she would die together with him!

Faster, faster, and faster still…

Hot tears streaming, the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady plunged down through the thousand-meter passage.

She paid no mind to the black flame smashing into the Ground-origin Yin Flame, single-mindedly flinging her arms wide. Even in death, she would be with him!

In that final second, her heart cast off all misgivings, shyness, guilt, and every stray thought, leaving only the purest wish — to be with him, together forever and ever, whether reduced to flying ash or anything else, never to be parted again…

“My nose!” Yue Yang, slammed into by the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady as she came charging in with all her strength, was sent tumbling a hundred meters away, snapping two stalactites clean off before crashing spread-eagled into the hard cave wall, his shin twitching out a mournful little wail. Clutching his nose, he rounded on the stunned Drunken Cat Imperial Lady and bellowed in a fury: “Cat-cat, what on earth are you doing?!”

“I…” The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady found her mind coming up short. Never in her wildest thoughts had she imagined she’d send Yue Yang flying with her own chest.

Ah — fine, call it a blunder and be done with it, but then why hadn’t the Ground-origin Yin Flame gone off?

Wasn’t it just now, at the very last second before death?

What in the world was going on here?

(End of Chapter 900)