Countless points of divine light enveloped Wuxia where she hung suspended in the air.

She was half-conscious. The light carried vast quantities of divine-realm information compressed into every mote, and the sheer volume of it was splitting her head open from the inside — there was nothing left of her attention to spare for anything else.

The divine pressure had hurled Qianqian back a full kilometer. She couldn’t get close. And what worried her wasn’t Wuxia, who was at least being protected by the divine energies flowing into her — it was Yueyang.

The ground moved like an earthquake.

The ice mountain came apart.

The fractured peak — that needle of ice that had driven ten thousand meters into the sky — snapped free of the rest of it with a sound like a continent breaking, and something invisible took hold of it in the air, rotating and angling it until the point faced straight down, aimed at Yueyang on the ground below. Ten thousand meters of fall, plus deliberate targeting — even an Innate cultivator taking that impact head-on would be reduced to fragments.

Yueyang was not an ordinary Innate cultivator. He was a Sovereign, and not merely that — the Perfect Innate Sovereign, the ceiling of what the realm could express.

He raised the Crescent Blade and released Slash That Breaks Mountain and River.

The blade-qi that tore through heaven and earth divided the falling peak down its exact center — two halves, symmetrical to a degree no craftsman’s measurement could match, splitting apart around him with a hundred-meter gap between them. The two halves struck the ground on either side with the force of meteorite impacts. The shockwave swept across the entire snowfield. Billions of ice fragments blasted into the air, forming a blizzard that could be called a catastrophe by any standard. The frozen ground itself rippled outward like ocean swells under hurricane winds, the effect carrying for dozens of kilometers before it finally dissipated.

Between the two planted peaks, holding the Prison Emperor’s divine sword, Qianqian stood untouched. Yueyang’s Creation Domain had wrapped around her the moment it mattered. The deafening impacts, the pressure wave, all of it — muffled to something like distant thunder, clear but harmless, as though she were observing from a hundred kilometers away.

She took in the scene — the enemy’s casual, terrifying manipulation of a ten-thousand-meter structure, and the way Yueyang had answered it — and felt both things at once. The fear of what they were facing. The relief of who was standing beside her.

Anyone else she knew would have been scrambling to get clear.

From somewhere high above, a sharp fragment of ice drifted deliberately toward the suspended, half-conscious Wuxia. The divine energies surrounding her would deflect anything — no attack could touch her right now — but the gesture was clear. A taunt. A way of saying I can reach her whenever I choose.

Yueyang didn’t bother drawing a weapon. He extended one finger and flicked.

The ice fragment exploded into powder and scattered in the wind.

This wasn’t an attack. It wasn’t even a real probe. It was delay — the enemy still wrestling with the seal, buying time with minor irritations while it worked its way free. Yueyang recognized this. So did Qianqian, which was why neither of them moved to press the offensive. She fell in behind him without a word, the divine sword ready, watching his back so he could focus forward.

“You imagine that a little extra time will let that insect woman absorb the divine power? Hahahaha. Naive. Without months of preparation, a cultivator at her level cannot integrate the divine nature of an independent god.”

“I’d like to point out,” Yueyang said pleasantly, “that whether you call yourself Chitian River or River Chitian or whatever other name you’re going by, you really do talk an extraordinary amount.”

“And whatever you say,” Qianqian added, her voice cool, “we’re not attacking. You won’t use our strength to break your own seal.”

“Hahahaha — you amuse me. Yes, I’m still within the seal. But that’s a function of my divine power being so vast it can’t disengage instantaneously, not any limitation on my ability to leave. As for insects like you — a single finger. That’s all it would take. Crushing you would be less difficult than stepping on an ant.”

“Would it?” Yueyang tilted his head slightly. “Give it a try.”

And then, completely ignoring the divine presence in the mountain, he turned his attention to the fallen ice peaks and began collecting them into the Grimoire World.

While the ice had been part of the mountain, the seal’s law-force had protected it — the Black Void was the only thing that could consume it. Now that the peaks had broken free and struck the ground, the law-force no longer applied. Yueyang didn’t need to expend anything on this; it simply went where he directed it.

The deliberate indifference apparently landed exactly where it was most aggravating.

A beat of silence from the mountain.

Then the gold shadow reappeared in the ice. The damaged side of the mountain erupted — millions of ice fragments launching into the air simultaneously, a dense bombardment raining down like artillery shells.

“Azure Dragon.”

Qianqian didn’t wait for Yueyang. She was already moving, already in the air.

The Azure Dragon’s image blazed above her head.

What she released was not the binding technique she’d used before. This was a rotation strike — the sword-qi shaped like a dragon, threading through the storm of falling ice, contacting each piece just enough to set it spinning on its own axis. Every fragment that should have hit like a cannonball drifted down instead — spinning, weightless, landing on the ice surface with the gentleness of feathers, doing nothing more than rotating in place on the smooth ground.

Not one piece broken. Not one piece falling hard enough to crack the surface below.

For anyone below Sky-rank, watching that would have been enough to stop the heart.

Even above Sky-rank, it was difficult to explain. There were probably King-class warriors at Sky-rank tier five in the heavenly realm who couldn’t have managed it — destroying the volley was trivial enough, but catching every single piece and bringing it to rest without breaking any of them, using sword-qi and lightning as the tools?

That was beyond technique. That was something else.

“Trivial tricks,” Chitian River said, with the contempt of someone who absolutely did not want to admit they were impressed. Whatever he’d been capable of at Qianqian’s level of cultivation — and he knew, privately, that it wasn’t this — was irrelevant. He was vastly beyond that now. Ants and their cleverness, however charming to observe, remained ants.

The gold shadow separated itself from the mountain’s interior and began working its way through the tunnel Yueyang had opened in the ice wall — moving with surprising delicacy, careful not to disturb the seal’s remaining structure, squeezing through the existing passage rather than making a new one.

Yueyang watched this and said nothing for a moment.

Then: “That’s a very large golden rat.”

Qianqian, who had been holding a reasonably serious expression, made a sound she immediately tried to pretend she hadn’t made.

The shadow did, admittedly, look somewhat rodent-like as it navigated the tight passage with painstaking caution — nothing at all like the magnificent divine descent it was presumably aspiring to project. When it finally emerged fully from the ice and cleared the seal’s range, however, the posture shifted immediately and completely. Power flooded outward. Divine light blazed from every surface. Above its head, a radiance like a small sun ignited — something that was actively painful to look at directly.

It turned its gaze on Yueyang, apparently remembering his recent commentary. The expression on the gold shadow’s face contained feelings.

It reached forward.

A golden palm, enormous, blazing — five vast fingers closing slowly. Within a hundred meters of Yueyang and Qianqian, five convergent forces began contracting simultaneously. The ice beneath them ripped upward as though clawed by heavy machinery, masses of it accelerating inward, compressing toward the point Yueyang occupied. The individual blocks joined and reformed in midair into a single massive hand of ice, five fingers reaching, squeezing—

“Break.” Qianqian brought the Prison Emperor’s divine sword through in two sweeping cuts and severed all five fingers.

The hand’s grip collapsed, the severed fingers falling without completing their purpose.

Her momentum carried through the cut. She rotated in midair, half-knelt on the ice, drove the divine sword point-down into the surface with both hands reversed.

The sword’s power expanded silently through the ice beneath her.

The five convergent forces — all of them — simply ceased. Like soap bubbles meeting a needle. Gone without even a pop, dissipating into nothing.

The gold shadow looked down at its hand. The fingers weren’t severed — but there were cuts across all five of them, hairline-thin and precise. The White Tiger sacred power, Qianqian’s true attribute — working without sound, without visible force, killing at the point of contact and nowhere else.

“If you think deflecting a casual grab is worth celebrating, you’ve made a significant error in judgment.” The gold shadow blazed brighter. “My actual divine power has nothing to do with ice.”

From beneath its feet, something erupted.

Not the quiet, self-contained Ground-origin Yin Flame that burned only when its balance was disrupted. This was the opposite — a fire that had never been quiet, that burned without ceasing, that poured outward with the enthusiasm of something that had been waiting for exactly this opportunity. With it came golden lightning, crackling and snapping in all directions.

Yueyang looked at this fire, compared it mentally to the Ground-origin Yin Flame, and felt something click into place. The expression that crossed his face wasn’t alarm. It was more like recognition.

Qianqian had the same reaction — a small, quiet nod, as though something she’d been working out had just confirmed itself.

The gold shadow transformed. The fire built upward and outward until it wore the shape of a blazing giant, roaring, filling the space. The ice retreated from its heat — melted, driven back, receding like a tide going out — until a clear circle a kilometer across surrounded the figure, every surface within it scorched free of cold.

The cuts across the five fingers had already healed. The palm now burned with fire pouring from its center.

Like a volcano finding its moment.

“My true divine power — the power of Chitian River — was never ice. It was always fire. Under my Chitian Divine Fire*, nothing in existence is indestructible. My will can set all of creation burning. Pitiful insects — receive the punishment of a god’s flame. Hahahaha — struggling in the presence of divinity is meaningless. The only sound you’re entitled to make is screaming.”*

The gold shadow raised its hand. Chitian Divine Fire erupted skyward in a pillar.

Yueyang, who was himself a reasonably accomplished practitioner of fire — who happened to carry Nirvana Flames, a fire capable of burning anything that existed — looked at this display and said nothing.

He wasn’t going to stop the enemy from being theatrical.

In his experience, the bosses who talked the most right before the end were usually the ones who had the least time left to talk.