“Pfft—”

Qianqian clawed her way out of the ice and snow with something less than her usual dignity. She propped herself up with the divine sword, knocked the loose ice off her clothes with one hand, spat out the taste of blood twice, and asked Xiao Nu — who had appeared beside her at some point without announcement — “Pandora. Is that what divine beings in the heavenly realm are normally like?”

“I don’t remember all of them from before,” Pandora said, from within Xiao Nu. “But something that stupid could never have legitimately acquired a divine nature.”

“Oh? Interesting.” Chitian River’s eyes went wide.

He had only just noticed it — the divine power residing inside Xiao Nu’s body. Impossibly clean. Purified beyond anything he’d encountered. He didn’t know yet what its specific nature was, but that was secondary. What it represented to him, freshly freed and still operating far below his peak, was the single most valuable thing he could imagine finding at this particular moment.

Kill the girl. Absorb the divine power. Not only would he recover fully — he might break through entirely, reaching a true divine sovereign state with a genuine divine nature rather than the divine blood inheritance he’d been riding all this time.

The thought was intoxicating. He let it develop. A true god, with a true divine nature — opening the Ruins of the Gods would be straightforward. And once he had everything inside — the martial souls, the divine blood, the divine consciousnesses, the divine natures accumulated from the ancient era—

The path to becoming God-Lord opened in his imagination with blinding clarity.

God-Lord. The Sky Stairway, the heavenly realm, the upper realm — all of it his.

He started laughing before he could stop himself.

“This scary big ape is very scary,” Xiao Nu whispered, trembling.

“Don’t be afraid,” Pandora said. “He’s a profoundly unintelligent primate. I can’t read everything clearly from here, but one thing comes through without ambiguity: he’s going to die soon. Badly.”

Chitian River’s attempts at divine serenity evaporated.

He didn’t look like an ape. He was imposing. He was magnificent. The reddish markings across his face were dignified species characteristics, not—

Absorbing her divine power would be a gift to her. The honor he was conferring. And this tiny insect dared to predict his death? Gods did not die. Not at the hands of mortals. The divine body he possessed had endured tens of thousands of years of seal-suppression without meaningful damage — in the absence of any actual threat, what was any of this?

He composed himself. Contempt settled back into place.

He didn’t know that Pandora had once been the most feared Goddess of Misfortune in the upper realm, that her predictions of death had no recorded failures, and that her prediction regarding Yueyang — the man who refused to die like a cockroach refusing insecticide — had come terrifyingly close to being accurate.

Pitiful small things.

“…” Qianqian watched Chitian River’s face cycle through its expressions. “He does kind of look like an ape when he’s thinking.”

“This big ape is so scary!” Xiao Nu was nearly in tears.

“Hey.” Qianqian raised her voice. “Are you going to keep playing dead in there? Your precious maidservant is about to get stolen. How bored are you?”

“I take that as a serious accusation and I reject it entirely.” Yueyang emerged from the collapsed ice mountain looking like he’d been through something significant, which he had. Every stitch of clothing was gone. In their place, countless intricate rune patterns covered every surface of his skin, still pulsing with soft light. He appeared to have no awareness of the clothing situation whatsoever.

He jogged over and wrapped his arms around Xiao Nu, who was still shaking. “It’s fine, it’s fine. Apes are easy to deal with — you just throw them some fruit. Like this—”

He threw a banana.

“YOU—“

Chitian River vibrated with a frequency that was difficult to categorize as a sound.

Qianqian laughed until she had to lean on the divine sword.

For someone who had just survived what was, by any accounting, a near-death experience in the core of an ancient seal, she decided she wasn’t particularly bothered by the absence of Yueyang’s clothing. He was alive. He was throwing bananas at a god. Everything was fine.

“By the way,” Yueyang continued, one hand still soothing Xiao Nu’s hair, “I should clarify one thing. I told everyone that was a ancient rune formation in there. Turns out it was a primordial rune formation. Different tier entirely. Much harder to absorb. I nearly failed approximately eleven times. The only reason I finished when I did was because our large friend here obligingly bombarded the ice mountain and the shockwave gave me the last push I needed. So technically we owe him a small debt of gratitude.” He considered this. “Not going to pay it, but it’s worth acknowledging.”

Qianqian stopped laughing. “Primordial?” She thought about what that meant. Then she thought about what would have happened if it had gone wrong, and her expression moved through several stages in quick succession.

Then she opened her arms.

“You absolute idiot,” she said, pulling him in. “I told you the seal was dangerous. I told you. And you just went in anyway and then nearly got killed by a primordial formation and you couldn’t even be bothered to—” Her hands were moving over him as she spoke, checking, cataloguing. She found the rune patterns still burning themselves into his skin and her throat tightened. “—you’re not even done absorbing it, are you? You came out early because of us, didn’t you—”

“The pain is manageable,” Yueyang said. “Don’t touch the patterns, they’re—”

“I have an excellent solution for the pain,” Chitian River announced. The divine fire blazing around him had consolidated into something focused and purposeful. He moved carefully around Xiao Nu — her divine power was still the plan, and damaging it would be counterproductive — and reached for Yueyang’s throat with a hand that burned like a captured star. “If you’re dead, it stops hurting entirely.”

“That’s surprisingly insightful,” Yueyang said, sounding genuinely impressed. “Did you think of that yourself?”

“DIE.“

The fire-claw closed around his throat.

Yueyang’s hands moved once — a gentle push, soft enough to be affectionate — and Qianqian and Xiao Nu both sailed a thousand meters away simultaneously.

Xiao Wenli appeared behind Chitian River.

Her eyes opened fully.

The binding talent she carried — not quite the equal of a proper seal’s law-force, but approaching it — wrapped around the hand at Yueyang’s throat and stopped it. Not permanently. But for a moment.

In that moment, Storm Valkyrie emerged from the snow and ice she’d been buried in, materialized at Chitian River’s back, and drove both fists into his ears simultaneously with everything she had.

Half a second later, Chitian River had broken free of Xiao Wenli’s binding and shook his head once. Storm Valkyrie was thrown clear by the protective divine force. One hand remained at Yueyang’s throat. The mockery in Chitian River’s expression was unhurried, composed, certain.

“Little insect. Pitiful creature. What else do you have?”

Yueyang smiled.

“I’ll tell you what I have. I have this: it doesn’t matter if you’re a genuine god or not — I’m going to blow you apart. Power alone isn’t the answer. Power plus strategy gets you further. But what matters most is knowing precisely what you have and what it can do.” He held Chitian River’s gaze without blinking. “I know exactly what I have. You? You’re a creature with power and nothing else. An nouveau riche who inherited divine blood and divine fire and thinks that makes him divine.”

Chitian River’s face did something complicated.

He had genuinely never encountered someone whose throat was in his hand who looked back at him with this particular expression. Not fear. Not defiance. Something closer to — clarity. The calm of someone who knows something you don’t.

Enough. No more talking. He would burn this one to ash and then absorb the girl’s divine power and then everything would proceed as planned.

He ignited the Chitian Divine Fire in his palm—

And felt heat. In his own hand.

His hand had been scorched.

His hand. His. Chitian River’s. The being with a divine body that had survived tens of thousands of years of sealed imprisonment. His hand had been burned—

Then he saw it.

On Yueyang’s body, burning without source or fuel, without consuming anything, with a quality of light that was simultaneously the most beautiful and most absolute thing Chitian River had ever seen in his long existence:

Nirvana Flames.

The fire that did not merely burn — that purified. That could reduce anything that existed to its essential truth and remake or unmake it from there. That recognized no hierarchy of flame, no divine fire as superior, no divine body as immune.

The first fire.

The only fire that was in a different category from all other fires.

Chitian River felt something he recognized with an unpleasant shock as jealousy. He had an Eternal Wheel — that was already absurd for a mortal — and a primordial rune formation — more absurd still — and Nirvana Flames? What precisely had this one human being done to accumulate three things that shouldn’t coexist in one person? It wasn’t fair. It was grotesquely unfair. The divine should have more than the mortal. That was how it was supposed to work.

He abandoned burning and switched targets. Physical force, then. Divine power applied directly to the spine, crushing pressure to the skull, anything that didn’t involve fire—

“Ridiculous.” Yueyang’s head moved, and the minor law-force he released was like ten thousand invisible hands all prying at Chitian River’s fingers at once — bending them backward, gradually, inexorably, until the grip on his throat loosened and broke. His right hand, Nirvana Flames still burning steadily across it, came up and closed around Chitian River’s throat in return.

“Don’t think you’re the only one with divine power. I have something stronger — primordial chaos-force and World Source-force both. Within my Creation Domain, no one — including gods — can break my neck while I retain consciousness. You want to know what Sovereign intent actually is?” He held the grip without urgency. “You have no idea. You’re a man who was given divine blood and divine fire and never had to build anything for himself. An inheritance isn’t the same as a foundation.”

Chitian River grabbed Yueyang’s arm with his left hand and wrenched.

His right arm swung forward in a fist, driving into Yueyang’s midsection — one punch, two punches, fifty, a hundred, all in under one second.

Yueyang’s body did not move.

His right hand maintained its grip on Chitian River’s throat. His left hand, with no defensive motion whatsoever, formed a fist and delivered exactly one hundred punches to Chitian River’s face in return — one for one, perfectly matched, while Chitian River was still processing that the first punch had connected.

BOOM.

Both of them stood as though rooted.

Neither had defended against anything. The twin shockwaves they’d generated between them erased every trace of ice and snow within ten thousand meters, the force exceeding anything a natural storm could produce.

Qianqian and Xiao Nu, already a thousand meters back, found themselves pushed further — and further — and couldn’t stop moving until the wave finally passed.

Chitian River’s eyes had gone the color of burning coals.

Not just the physical experience. The experience. He had hit the enemy, and in the same moment the enemy had hit him back an equal number of times. In the face. His divine face. This was, in the complete record of his existence, a thing that had never happened before.

He reached inside himself for the deepest layer of what he kept in reserve.

“Vacuum Divine Detonation.“

The gesture he made was subtle. The power he compressed was not — he folded something internally, a force capable of erasing a mountain range, tighter and tighter until it could fold no further, and then placed his palm flat against Yueyang’s chest and released it.

This was one of three techniques he had never shown anyone. He had never had occasion to.

He had occasion now.