Three days passed quickly.

For Chitian River, the time was both endless and brief — tens of thousands of years of imprisonment, and freedom was now measured in hours. The anticipation was genuinely painful in its intensity. But the waiting, combined with the maddening behavior of that human, made every minute feel stretched. What unsettled him most was that the woman with the divine sword had stopped attacking his exposed arm and simply left, sometime after the boy vanished into the seal’s core. Something about that departure felt wrong in a way he couldn’t quite place.

Still, the progress was undeniable. First one arm free, then his head. By the second day, his torso. On the third day, only his right leg remained bound in the seal’s light-ribbons.

Almost there.

Chitian River had stopped himself from roaring with triumph several times. Who could understand what tens of thousands of years of forced sleep felt like — and then this? The moment of finally, almost—

“When my power is fully restored, the Sky Stairway and the Ruins of the Gods will both fall to me.” He had the divine blood, the divine body. Ten thousand years of seal-suppression had left him diminished, but even at one-tenth of his true capacity he surpassed anything else that walked this world. More than could be said for most beings who emerged from long imprisonment barely able to stand.

Crackle. Snap.

When the light-ribbon bindings had been reduced to just his right lower leg, Chitian River noticed something at the edge of his perception.

At the perimeter of the Eternal Wheel — strange lightning, popping and hissing. Barely perceptible at first. Growing.

Something was building inside it, pushing outward toward the surface. His divine sense couldn’t see it directly, but he could feel it: deep in the Eternal Wheel’s interior, at the core zone of the ancient seal, something was changing. Silently, continuously, with the steady quality of a process approaching completion.

The Eternal Wheel itself was expanding.

Slowly at first. Then faster.

That human.

Had he actually done it? Had he actually absorbed the ancient rune formation at the seal’s core? If so — if he’d become the seal’s master — then everything the boy had said became literal truth. He wouldn’t need to fight Chitian River. He would simply reach out a hand.

The Eternal Wheel continued growing, drifting toward Chitian River’s position with increasing speed, its edges alive with golden lightning like thousands of writhing serpents about to boil over.

“Damn it.“

The math was clear and Chitian River hated it. One lower leg. That was all that remained bound. If the Eternal Wheel reached him before that last piece broke free—

He made his decision in the space between one breath and the next.

His own divine sword, condensed from concentrated divine power, flashed in his right hand. He drew every particle of energy from the leg below the knee, redirecting it to his core. Then he cut.

Clean through the knee.

Golden divine blood welled at the cut — and stopped. Didn’t spray, didn’t fall. Sealed itself in the same instant it appeared. The wound’s surface was mirror-smooth, as though the lower leg had never existed.

The seal’s light-ribbons caught the severed portion and held it. More ribbons reached toward him, questing, hunting the rest.

Chitian River didn’t wait to watch.

Like a golden thunderbolt, he drove himself upward — through the ceiling, into the sky above the collapsed mountain, through and past the reach of every ribbon. When the last thread fell away, he came back down in a descent that blazed like a sun arriving.

His expression was complicated. Joy was there, and fury, and something that felt embarrassingly close to wounded pride, and something else he would not have named aloud under any circumstances.

He landed ten thousand meters from the mountain. Well outside the seal’s perimeter. He was not going to give it another opportunity.

“Detestable insects.” The voice had regained its grandeur, if not quite its confidence. “It’s time to settle accounts. You forced me to cut away a divine foot. I won’t deny it — you had a certain rat-like cunning. But this is where your cleverness ends. From here, I administer judgment.”

The light from his body outshone the sun by a hundred times over. His right hand rose.

A single forward wave.

The cracked ice mountain trembled — then along its entire face, from the midpoint to the base, a wound a thousand meters long and impossibly deep cracked open. The ice fragments that blasted into the air were so numerous they blotted out the sky. The shockwave that followed arrived several seconds after the visual, rolling outward at visible speed, sweeping the ice plains for dozens of kilometers before the energy finally dissipated.

Chitian River paid the attack no attention. He was watching for the seal — whether its law-force would reach him at this distance.

It couldn’t. The ribbons were agitated, stimulated by the discharge of divine energy near them, but they couldn’t extend beyond the mountain’s boundaries. At ten thousand meters away, Chitian River was safe from them.

“Now then.” He gathered himself fully, pressing divine power into both palms until dozens of divine flame spheres coalesced there, packed close together, dense with force. “Let’s see how much disruption it takes.”

He threw them all at once. Every one of them aimed at the mountain’s core — at the seal zone where Yueyang was still in the process of absorbing the ancient rune formation.

The calculation was straightforward. Absorbing an ancient rune formation required absolute stillness, absolute focus. Any significant external interference during the process could damage the cultivator’s spirit at minimum, kill them at maximum. And even if Yueyang somehow survived the bombardment — the seal’s law-force would respond to the attack by intensifying dramatically. The boy would never get out.

Chitian River hated him. He recognized this as a feeling not entirely compatible with dignity, and did not care. Being forced to sever his own divine foot — being compared, repeatedly and at length, to a large unintelligent ape — being addressed as if his tens of thousands of years of existence were a developmental stage to be patronized — any one of those alone would have been sufficient. All three together, and then the foot — no. He was not leaving without dealing with this first.

The divine flame spheres hit the mountain.

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM—

The mountain that Qianqian’s full-powered divine sword strike hadn’t been able to scratch became rubble under the sustained assault. Mountain-sized chunks of ice flew in every direction. The sky disappeared behind a white wall of snow-powder and debris. What had been a ten-thousand-meter spire was now barely two thousand meters at its highest remaining point, the tunnel Yueyang had carved through it with the Black Void Seal buried completely under fresh collapse.

“Insect. This is what becomes of those who disrespect the divine.”

A cold sound. He didn’t particularly need to gloat, but it came naturally.

The boy was almost certainly dead. Even if the absorption had gone perfectly, the shockwave from that many divine attacks converging would have destroyed a mortal body and scattered a mortal soul. And even if — by some miracle — the body held, the intensified seal-force would have locked him inside forever. Either way, the problem was resolved.

Chitian River turned to leave.

The divine sword came down from directly above.

Qianqian’s timing was excellent. Her selection of target was, unfortunately, the problem: a Chitian River that had just freed its actual body, rather than an energy copy — and even the energy copy had stopped her cold. What stood here now was categorically beyond that.

He looked at her with the specific expression reserved for things that are mildly irritating in their persistence.

One finger, raised. Her full-force strike with the Prison Emperor’s divine sword stopped against it. A flick of that same finger sent her spinning through the air — she hit a mountain-sized block of fallen ice and disappeared into it.

Before she could extract herself, Chitian River reached toward the ice block and closed his five fingers in the air.

The entire structure compressed. Caved inward. Buckled and twisted into a shape that no ice formation had ever naturally achieved, a massive five-fingered depression crushed into its center.

Something struck at his back — Storm Valkyrie, arriving with the force of a meteor and the accuracy of someone who had spent a long time studying his movements. He felt it coming and shifted, just enough. Unlike with Qianqian, he actually turned his attention somewhat in this direction — not enough to strike back, but enough to take it seriously in the small way. He simply moved. Not turning to face her, just sliding out of each impact’s path with the unhurried economy of someone walking through light rain.

Dozens of strikes. Hundreds.

Storm Valkyrie, who ranked at minimum in the top three of all war beasts by combat capacity, could not land a single blow on Chitian River operating at one-tenth of his power. The gap wasn’t a gap. It was a different category of existence.

In the pause after one of Storm Valkyrie’s sequences, Chitian River reversed direction without appearing to rush and drove an elbow into her midsection.

The impact didn’t sound like a collision. It sounded like a mountain range compressing.

Storm Valkyrie left through multiple hundred-meter-thick ice formations without slowing appreciably, finally embedding herself in a distant ice wall in a perfect spread-eagle impression, very deep.

Chitian River regarded this at a forty-five-degree angle, with the vaguely melancholy expression of a being that has just done something that felt necessary but not particularly satisfying. He exhaled slowly.

“This is what insects do when they struggle. Those who consider themselves human forget: to the divine, humans are no different from insects. Small. Temporary. Pitiable.” He shook his head, with what appeared to be genuine regret. “Very well. I am a merciful being. I’ll send you all on your way now. Divine punishment, for creatures like you — it really is more than you deserve, isn’t it.”