“But the energy merging into your body,” Qianqian said, the question still sitting uneasy in her. “What is that?”

“There is an ancient rune formation in the mountain.” Wuxia lifted one hand, slowly, and both of them watched as cold energy — the kind that had refused every act of will since they arrived in this world — drifted inward from all directions and gathered in her palm. “It shares my attribute. It’s been calling to me.”

The gathering was faint. But it was unmistakable. Wuxia had begun to command the cold-force of this entire unit world.

All she needed was to fully absorb the rune formation at the mountain’s heart, and it would be complete. When that happened, the whole unit world would answer to her.

Yueyang felt the surge of joy — and then the problem arrived right behind it. The rune formation was almost certainly the mechanism holding the enemy sealed. Remove it, and whatever was in there would be free.

Qianqian looked at Wuxia and waited.

Wuxia already knew what they were thinking. She shook her head with a quiet smile. “The rune formation would be extraordinary — but it isn’t a guarantee of victory, and absorbing it would require time to consolidate. Time we wouldn’t have. I won’t put you both in danger for my own advancement. And releasing something that powerful into the Sky Stairway would be bad for everyone, not just us.”

“We’re getting the formation,” Yueyang said flatly. “We just need to figure out how.”

From somewhere distant and without direction — from nowhere and everywhere simultaneously — a voice descended into all three of their minds.

Not heard. Felt. Like a thunderclap detonating at the base of the skull.

An ordinary person would have collapsed. Would have knelt without knowing why, face pressed to the ice, overwhelmed by something they couldn’t name. Yueyang’s Sovereign intent held him upright, but the pressure of it was real.

The voice was magnificent and intolerable in equal measure:

“Even if you wished to refuse, how would creatures like you refuse the gift of Chitian River*? Pitiful insects. You cannot even conceive of the distinction between mortal and divine. Do you imagine that raising a sword and chipping a few pieces of ice means you have transcended your wretched condition? Humble lives — you are frogs at the bottom of a well, every one of you, and there you will remain.”*

Yueyang’s patience evaporated.

He had encountered no shortage of insufferable arrogance in his time — Shuntian, the Crimson Emperor, the Black Prison King, the Ten Thousand Demon King, the Ancient Demon King, the Night Empress, Jiuxiao, the Void — all of them had carried themselves with the certainty of the genuinely powerful, some of them aggressively so. But none of them had come close to this. This made Ji Wuri look like a man of humble and retiring temperament. This was arrogance without edges, arrogance that had been sealed inside a mountain for tens of thousands of years and had apparently spent the intervening time becoming more arrogant.

And on top of that — a god was a god only from the perspective of those who couldn’t match one. Reach that threshold yourself and it was just another realm. The divine sovereign state conferred a divine nature, a form of existence that transcended domain and carried limitless power — but limitless meant nothing without a ceiling to compare it to. The ancient beings who had created worlds or annihilated them with a gesture — those were genuinely awe-inspiring existences. Someone who had just barely crossed the divine threshold was nothing next to that.

This creature had been sealed inside a mountain. And it still had the audacity to call other people frogs.

The more Yueyang thought about it, the angrier he got.

“Don’t.” Wuxia caught the shift in his expression immediately. She was most sensitive to this kind of attack — some spiritual pressures stabbed like needles, some drowned like floods, and some worked invisibly, dissolving reason until the victim was a puppet of their own anger. “This is a provocation. It wants you angry. Whatever happens, don’t lose your clarity. Promise me.”

“I won’t get angry,” Yueyang said. “Everything it just said, I’m filing under ‘mangy dog flatulence.'” He paused. “Though, for the record, if I did lose it, that thing would probably have a much worse time than it’s imagining.”

He believed that, and it was probably true. The power he produced in a full berserk state was categorically beyond what he could access through rational application. Though Wuxia’s warning might have been less about the danger to the enemy and more about something she’d sensed — some foreknowledge, some prompting from the divine law-force that had been guiding her.

The mountain’s atmosphere had changed. Where before there had been nothing — pure, silent cold and nothing else — there were now multiple divine forces occupying the same space, each pressing against the others. Fire-attribute divine power building toward eruption. An absolute cold-force that could seal anything. A fortification-type sealing power, dense and rigid as a fortress wall. And something else, something none of the three of them could identify, a fourth presence of unknown nature. All four pushed against each other, held against each other, balanced in an arrangement that was simultaneously extraordinary and deeply wrong.

None of these had been present before. The mountain had been utterly silent for ten days.

Had the Black Void’s assault on the ice wall woken something?

Yueyang kept the thought private, eyes moving, tracking. Beside him Qianqian had her hand near the Prison Emperor’s divine sword. Storm Valkyrie held position on Wuxia’s flank.

The ice wall — the section he’d demolished in his rage — erupted.

Millions of ice fragments blasted skyward, and through the gap a beam of divine light came straight for him, fast and direct as a lightning strike.

Yueyang had already condensed Black Returning Burial and White Frost Bloom. He brought White Frost Bloom up to meet the beam on reflex — and the sword connected, and nothing happened. No damage. No recoil. The beam wasn’t harmed. If anything it seemed to grow stronger and more radiant at the contact, taking on something of White Frost Bloom’s own quality.

Slowed fractionally by the deflection, the beam curved off its original trajectory, grazed past Yueyang’s left side, and arrowed toward Qianqian.

She brought the Prison Emperor’s divine sword across to block it.

The beam refracted again, bent by the sword’s angle, and struck the Book of Truth directly. Bounced. Hit Wuxia between the eyes.

“—” Yueyang’s jaw worked without producing sound. If he’d known it would end up there, he’d have let the thing hit him at the start.

“I’m fine.” Wuxia’s voice was immediate, quiet, steady. “Don’t—”

“That scared me half to death,” Qianqian said, guilt written across her whole face. “If I’d known—”

“Hahahaha.” The voice again, rolling with undisguised satisfaction. “Exactly as I planned, little insects. Did you imagine, with your limited mortal minds, that the light was an attack? It was a divine consciousness guiding beacon. Youlang — that treacherous woman — dissolved her own divine consciousness to prevent my escape. Clever. But she never accounted for this: that tens of thousands of years later, three fools would break open the ice walls and wake me from my sleep. And the most delicious irony of all — among those three fools, a descendant of Youlang herself. The most suitable possible inheritor of her power. You insects — you cannot do anything except weep at fate’s design. Youlang scattered her consciousness, but her guiding beacon is gone — so I’ve simply replaced it with mine. When that insect woman inherits Youlang’s divine nature, the seal breaks. And when the seal breaks, all of you die. Fate — fate — how marvelous you are—”

“Move.“

But it was already too late.

The entire mountain was trembling.

Wuxia stood motionless, eyes fixed on Yueyang. Her body had begun to disappear under ice and snow — drawn up from the ground, forming across her limbs, rising — and from the direction of the mountain, countless pinpoints of divine light were moving toward her, slowly, like a galaxy drifting across the sky. Some flowed into the Book of Truth. The greater portion flowed directly into her.

A divine predecessor’s power, flowing freely into a compatible successor — under any other circumstances, this would have been the most extraordinary gift imaginable. But these divine energies were the seal. When they entered Wuxia, the seal would dissolve, and whatever had been contained for tens of thousands of years would step free.

Yueyang turned to Qianqian. He looked at her directly — really looked at her — and pulled her into his arms.

Then he kissed her.

When he let go, he reached up and smoothed the loose strands of hair back from her forehead.

“Qianqian. Go. Now. Find the Night Empress and the Supreme and tell them we need help.”

Qianqian, who did not cry — who made a point of not crying, who had made it a defining characteristic over years of stubbornness and pride — felt the tears coming before she could stop them.

“Don’t send me away. I know what it means if I go — I know I won’t see you again.” Her voice broke slightly. “I pick fights with you all the time. I’m always arguing with you. But that’s just — that’s me being — I just want to stay close to you. Let me stay. If we’re together, even dying doesn’t matter. If you make me leave, what’s the point of surviving—”

“Hey.” His voice was different than it usually was with her. No teasing, no deflection, no performance. Quiet and absolutely certain. “You’re not going to lose me. Wuxia’s going to be fine. It doesn’t matter if this is some broken-down god — I was made to go against heaven. There’s nothing that can stop me.”

“If that’s true,” she said, crying harder, “then why are you sending me away? Let me stay with you. If you can defy heaven, I’ll defy it alongside you. If you fail, I’ll fail with you—”

He cupped her face in both hands and wiped her tears, again and again, as fast as they fell.

Behind him, Wuxia had stopped being able to speak.

The Book of Truth was in her hands, and she was half submerged in ice now — the galaxy of divine light pressing in from all directions, incomprehensible in volume, a river of power flowing into both her and her grimoire. The seal was almost gone.

Far off, the mountain shook to its foundations. The needle tip that had pierced the sky began to fracture, slowly, as though something inside it was finally leaning against the walls.

Slowly, within the ice, a form was becoming visible — a silhouette assembled from divine light, a thousand meters tall, no consciousness animating it, purely a divine nature without a mind: the remnant divinity of a woman, her features carrying a faint resemblance to Wuxia’s. Brilliant, immeasurably powerful, utterly empty of self.

As it drifted free and moved toward Wuxia, the mountain behind it shuddered with something that was definitely, this time, trying to get out.

Yueyang could not convince Qianqian to leave.

He found, standing there, that he was not afraid.

He looked at what was coming and he laughed — not the performance of fearlessness, but the real thing.

“We may have gotten in a bit deep this time,” he said. “But I’m not worried. You want to know the truth? Picking a fight with fate and winning is my favorite thing in the world.”

Something in his eyes changed.

Not a technique. Not a power he was consciously invoking. Something that had always been there, surfacing the way the sun breaks through when the clouds finally clear.

Divine light seemed to move in his gaze, or something like it — something that made him look, standing there at the foot of a shuddering ten-thousand-meter mountain with a goddess’s remnant soul descending toward the woman behind him and something terrible about to be released from the ice—

Like a figure from myth.

Or perhaps more accurately:

This was who he had always been.

Qianqian and Wuxia, watching his back, felt it at the same moment — a strange and vertiginous sense of scale shifting beneath their feet. The thousand-meter divine silhouette. The ten-thousand-meter mountain. Both of them seemed, somehow, to be below him.