“Weep. Tremble. Insects.“

The gold shadow raised both arms wide, threw its head back, and then drove both palms down onto the ice with the force of someone who had been waiting a very long time to do exactly this.

Hundreds of flame jets — close to a thousand — erupted from beneath the frozen ground simultaneously. The two largest came up directly under Yueyang and Qianqian.

Yueyang was already moving before the eruption completed. A midair flip carried him clear of the blast column in the same instant it reached his feet. Qianqian was faster still — the Vermillion Bird’s flame-wings had appeared at her back at some point without announcement, and her real body was already behind the gold shadow before the afterimage she’d left finished dissolving in the fire.

The Prison Emperor’s divine sword came down.

A strike that could kill a Sky-rank warrior outright. Heaven-splitting, earth-cracking force.

Chitian River raised one finger.

One finger, held up with the casual contempt of a being that found the gesture amusing — and caught the full weight of Qianqian’s divine sword on that single fingertip, the strike stopping dead above its head.

“Those who show contempt for the divine receive divine punishment.”

It turned its golden eyes on Qianqian and looked at her.

Just looked.

An invisible force took her like a physical blow. She flew — crashed into what was left of the ice wall with an impact that buried her several meters in, her whole body shaking with pain. The Prison Emperor’s divine sword had absorbed the larger portion of the force. Without it she would have lost consciousness on the spot.

From a glare. A single glare.

Chitian River turned away, satisfaction written across its features, and made a dismissive sound. “Insignificant little insect.”

Smack.

The sound was not loud. But it was extremely clear.

Chitian River went still.

A hand had just struck it across the face. A human hand. The blow itself wasn’t significant — but what it was was an act without precedent in the personal history of something that considered itself divine. Even in the form of an energy copy, being slapped across the face by a mortal was a category of humiliation that required several seconds to fully process.

When it turned, Yueyang was right there, wearing an expression of cheerful innocence that radiated an almost supernatural irritability.

“Satisfying,” Yueyang observed. “That’s a lot of face to work with.”

“DIE.“

Chitian River’s patience ceased to exist. Divine fire erupted across its entire form. Both massive palms came together in a clap aimed at crushing Yueyang between them — the motion of someone swatting a mosquito, except with the force of a collapsing mountain on each side. Yueyang’s afterimage dissipated as the palms met; he was already on the ground, and the gold shadow, a hundred meters tall, found him somewhere below its field of vision. It raised a foot and drove it down.

The shockwave from the impact converted all the ice within ten thousand meters to spray and scattered it into the air like a new snowstorm. In the air where Yueyang had been — apparently caught in the edge of the pressure wave — something human-shaped tumbled downward looking dazed.

A burning giant hand closed around it and drove it into the earth.

The impact left a scorched handprint in the permafrost, a hundred meters deep, fire still roaring in it. The ten-thousand-year frozen earth blackened and burned.

Chitian River controlled the energy copy, planted one foot at the edge of the handprint, and sent a wave of divine fire downward through the sole. When the foot lifted, the accumulated pressure detonated — the ground itself erupted upward, a volcanic event from beneath, carrying a charred human silhouette in a column of fire and magma that shot toward the sky.

“Mortals who anger the divine die by divine punishment.” It closed one fist.

The fire and magma in the air compressed, hit the threshold of what it could contain, and detonated. A thousand thousand burning drops scattered across the whole sky.

The presence it had sensed was gone. Its anger settled, slightly. It would have preferred to draw the process out — but what could be done? The creature had been too weak. Barely a mortal. Nothing more.

It turned the energy copy back toward Qianqian.

And stopped.

The thing that should have been dead was not dead.

Not only was it not dead — it appeared to be cooking chicken wings.

Yueyang stood at the edge of the divine fire, holding a skewer, rotating it with the focused attention of someone who had learned from experience that even heat requires patience. He was humming something that loosely resembled a song. The expression on his face could be described as many things, none of them “recently immolated.”

“Give me some,” Qianqian said, materializing at his side.

“Wait, the big boss fight isn’t over yet—” A golden fist the size of a house came down. He stepped aside.

Chitian River chased them both across the ruined landscape, driving divinely powered attacks into the ice, the ground, the air, with the methodical fury of something that had lost its composure and was now committed to the process. The terrain around them was being systematically demolished. Neither Yueyang nor Qianqian were being hit. They had abandoned direct resistance in favor of movement, and the movement was working. Between evasions, they split the second wing.

Then the gold shadow stopped.

It simply stopped moving, mid-motion, and stayed stopped.

Yueyang and Qianqian looked at each other. They approached cautiously.

Yueyang tested it first — brought the Crescent Blade around and jabbed the frozen shadow in a sensitive location. Nothing. It couldn’t move.

He waved Qianqian forward with significant enthusiasm and an expression indicating she should not hold back.

“I’m going, I’m going, I’m going—” She attacked it with the Prison Emperor’s divine sword from every angle she could reach. The results were mixed. Chitian River’s gold copy was extraordinarily resilient; major damage wasn’t happening, and most of what she shaved off was external divine fire rather than the form itself. Yueyang watched with building impatience. “You absolute idiot, why are you attacking its face? It has no dignity left to damage. Fingers. Toes.“

“How was I supposed to know it had such thick skin!” she protested, with some genuine indignation.

Both of them threw their full strength into it — Four Symbols power, Prison Emperor’s divine sword, Crescent Blade, combined attack — and after considerable effort, they separated one segment of the copy’s little finger from the rest of it.

Yueyang snatched it up despite the divine fire still burning across its surface, tucked it away, and started to compliment himself on the acquisition—

One second after it left the copy’s hand, the entire gold shadow dissolved.

Every piece of it became golden light and streamed back through the tunnel in the ice wall, returning to Chitian River’s real body. What remained of the ice mountain — already badly damaged — began breaking apart in earnest. Peaks the size of hills detached and fell. The sound of it was close to the sound of the world ending.

Qianqian split the falling ice with the divine sword.

Yueyang, on the ground below, quietly loaded all of it into the Grimoire World.

He had been doing this the entire time, in fact. Every fragment that fell, every broken shard, every piece of ice that came within range — into the Grimoire World. Whether advancing, retreating, or mid-evasion, the collection had never stopped.

“YOU TWO DETESTABLE INSECTS. YOUR DEATHS ARE OVERDUE.“

The bellow from inside the mountain hit like a physical shockwave. Ice splinters launched in every direction. A crack split the mountain’s face, and through it came a light like a trapped sun, and the form of a man inside that light — straining, pressing outward, fighting the remnants of a seal that had held him for tens of thousands of years.

The seal itself was unlike any rune formation Yueyang had seen. Its structure lay buried deep within the ice, and from it, countless threads of light wrapped around Chitian River like silk around a cocoon.

Chitian River had received the gold copy’s energy back into itself. Its power spiked. Divine fire blazed ten times stronger than before. Within the cocoon of light, it wrenched — and freed one arm.

One arm only.

“Hahaha, hahahaha — you were born foolish! If you’d had more courage and come forward to reinforce the seal, you could have held me for ten thousand more years. Instead you destroyed the ice mountain, drew Youlang’s divine nature away from its guardian position, and sat there with your heads pulled in when I was stalling for time — too cowardly to approach! Your stupidity is what brought this day about. And as thanks for your stupidity and cowardice, I’ve decided to grant you both an early death!”

The satisfaction in its voice was the specific satisfaction of a plan working. The arrogance had shifted texture — from contemptuous dismissal to something colder, more deliberate.

“Are you quite done?” Yueyang said. “Because for the record — you were stalling, and we were also stalling. Don’t congratulate yourself too hard. And honestly, the self-satisfied laugh? I’ve seen chimpanzees figure out how to stack boxes to reach the bananas up high, and they made exactly that face. You’re very close to evolution but you haven’t quite gotten there yet. Scheming, as an activity, requires more development than you’ve currently achieved.”

Qianqian lost the battle with her composure entirely.

While he was delivering this assessment, Yueyang was also peeling Wuxia — who had absorbed almost all of the divine light by now and had gone quietly unconscious in the process — away from where she hovered and handing her carefully to Qianqian. He gestured: take her back, put distance between them and what was coming, give him room.

Qianqian had time to say “be careful” before his palm-strike sent her a full kilometer back.

The moment she was clear, Yueyang went directly at the partially-freed Chitian River, Crescent Blade sweeping down with force enough to rend the sky—

The freed arm moved.

Extended. Extended further than an arm should extend.

Five fingers like divine weapons, driving straight for Yueyang’s heart.

Hsss—

Five lines of red opened across his chest. Blood flew. He went through anyway — through the fingers, through the spray of his own blood, through the arm that reconfigured itself into a snake-coil shield and then reached after him, pursuing his back, fingers extending again, and in the same moment the arm drew itself across the sky in a net pattern, closing every available angle of escape—

The descending blade-strike vanished.

As though it had never existed. As though Yueyang himself had never existed.

He dove headfirst into the seal.

Not as an attack. Not angled toward Chitian River’s body. Just — into the seal itself.

Like he was throwing himself away.

Chitian River processed this for a moment.

And then it had to admit, privately, that it was confused.

Hitting him didn’t concern it — even with one arm, he couldn’t win that exchange, and every strike he landed on the seal actually helped break it faster. That tradeoff was entirely fine.

But he hadn’t hit it. He’d ignored it entirely and gone into the seal.

What was this idiot doing?