Yueyang’s counterattack came like a breaking storm.

Slow at first — then building, fists accelerating into something continuous and relentless, each impact following the last without interval. Chitian River lost count of how many times he was hit. With any other body, even one twice as powerful, this would have been the end. Only the divine body kept him standing, absorbing blow after blow without breaking.

The Eternal Wheel faded gradually as time passed — it couldn’t hold indefinitely — and the moment it finally released him, Chitian River didn’t flee. He drove his hands into the blur of incoming fists and caught one, then the other.

“Is that enough for you?”

He seized Yueyang’s wrists, flooded his divine power through his arms, and wrenched Yueyang off the ground. Up — and then down, a full-force slam into the frozen earth. Space cracked at the impact point. He followed immediately with a headbutt that drove Yueyang halfway into the infinite void from below, and then pinned him there with one hand, looking down with the composed contempt of someone who has reasserted the natural order.

“You can hit me as many times as you want. Nothing changes. I have a divine body — eternal, indestructible, beyond anything that doesn’t share that nature. Whatever peculiar techniques you’re carrying, whatever insect-level strength you think you have — against a divine body, they mean nothing. Absolutely nothing. I am a god. You are a mortal. That is the gap between us, and it is a gap you cannot cross. Not ever.”

“Even so,” Yueyang said, “I’m going to kill you.”

Something in his eyes made Chitian River, with all his confidence and all his divine body’s certainty, feel a prickle of something he didn’t want to name.

The killing intent from this human was heavy.

Storm Valkyrie arrived again.

Her fists hit Chitian River’s ears for the third time — and this time the force was ten times greater than both previous strikes combined. The impact actually made him stagger.

She’d been hiding it. That much was immediately obvious. The power she’d shown earlier, the casual swat that had sent her flying, couldn’t have produced this. This was force that approached his own.

He’d been played. Twice over.

The Chitian Divine Fire erupted in response to his fury. A golden energy copy forced itself free of his head, fists blazing like comets, and drove Storm Valkyrie back dozens of meters.

Then both Chitian River and his copy stopped.

The sensation was similar to the Eternal Wheel but carried something additional — a quality of will that pressed inward rather than simply halting motion. Like a judgment arriving from somewhere that recognized no appeals. A light without a visible source, cold and absolute.

A small hand, white as a magnolia flower, extended from where Xiao Wenli had been holding a glowing sphere. She opened it fully. Made a fist.

And tapped Chitian River gently on the forehead.

The force of the tap was genuinely negligible. It wouldn’t have troubled a mosquito.

What traveled along that tap — following the existing cracks Storm Valkyrie had left in his defenses, diving deeper, spreading through the structure of his soul like fracture lines propagating through stressed material — was something else entirely. The soul recoiled, wrapped divine power around itself by pure reflex, severed its connections to the outside in the time it took to register the intrusion.

It was enough to stop the damage from going further.

What it was not enough to stop was what happened next. Xiao Wenli’s small hand rotated — a small, precise motion — and released what remained of the force along a new angle.

Chitian River’s forehead developed a crack.

While he was processing this, Storm Valkyrie had taken hold of his energy copy — not struck it, taken it, physically wrestled it outside the range of his direct control — and she and Yueyang had it positioned over a pillar of Nirvana Flames. The copy sat in the flames and was quietly being refined, its stolen divine energy purified away from Chitian River’s imprint and converted to something clean and unaffiliated.

“NO—”

By the time Chitian River forced the foreign presence out of his mind and reestablished awareness, the energy copy was already a sphere of pure unaligned energy with nothing of him remaining in it. He screamed before he could stop himself.

He had not realized Xiao Wenli was hiding anything. He had assessed her as a negligible threat based on her apparent power and filed her accordingly. That assessment had been one of the most costly mistakes of his very long life.

Her concealment was better than Storm Valkyrie’s. Her combat instinct was sharper, her timing more precise. She fought like someone who had survived an uncountable number of battles where survival required reading the moment perfectly — nothing like the small, fragile-seeming creature she appeared to be.

And her will. It shouldn’t have been possible. A divine beast’s will might approach a god’s, but surpass it? And yet the pressure he’d felt from her—

Dwelling on it wouldn’t help.

The energy copy was gone. The immediate priorities were: kill the human, kill his war beasts, stop holding back.

Yueyang made the decision for him by acting first.

He gave the recovered pure energy sphere to the World without hesitation — not an ideal allocation, but this wasn’t the time to be selective. The priority was removing it from Chitian River’s reach. Then he turned to Xiao Wenli and Storm Valkyrie and layered five Giant Shadow augmentations onto each of them.

Xiao Wenli opened her eyes for the second time and fixed them on Chitian River. Her binding talent bloomed.

Storm Valkyrie spent two full seconds drawing everything she had together, holding it, waiting. In the third second — the last instant before Chitian River tore free of the binding — she drove both fists into his ears again, Giant Shadows behind her and nothing held back.

The resulting sound was not a shockwave. It was closer to an event.

For the first time in his existence, Chitian River’s divine body reached a threshold it couldn’t simply absorb. Both eardrums shattered. The shock traveled inward through bone and fluid and arrived at the core of his brain without meaningful resistance. He heard his own blood and inner-ear fluid spraying outward with a detached clarity before the pain hit.

His howl shook the sky. It sounded like an army charging.

The divine body lost its balance. As he fell, Yueyang was already moving — both hands lifting the Prison Emperor Divine Seal, bringing it down with full force onto the exact crack Xiao Wenli had opened in his forehead.

The Seal erupted with a pressure that didn’t care about the distinction between divine and mortal. One impact, just one, and it exceeded the cumulative effect of Storm Valkyrie’s four strikes. Chitian River’s forehead caved.

And this was before Yueyang and the Seal had formally recognized each other. If that bond had been complete, the result would have been different in kind.

Even critically wounded, Chitian River’s divine body had reflex responses. Both arms found the ground; his remaining leg drove a desperate kick at Yueyang’s chest with the full weight of his body behind it.

Yueyang didn’t dodge.

He closed the distance instead — arms wrapping around Chitian River, driving in rather than back. His law-force and the calamity-force, both pushed past their normal limits. The Metal Beast manifested, transformed into the Heaven-Piercing War Blade in his hands, and Yueyang drove it into Chitian River’s chest with everything he could put behind it — one foot planted on Chitian River’s sternum for leverage, screaming.

Chitian River’s divine power tried to hold.

It wasn’t sufficient.

The blade went through. Clean through, spine to front, emerging from the back.

Chitian River stared at it. A weapon that could pierce a divine body — not a terrestrial divine weapon, not a heavenly divine weapon, something beyond that classification entirely. He had no category for it.

And the expression on the human’s face — the expression of someone who had committed completely and wouldn’t be stopped by anything — told him that what came next would be the blade drawn across his neck.

“DIVINE BLOOD — SACRIFICE!”

Fear crossed his eyes, just for an instant. He kicked Yueyang away with the desperation of something that has finally encountered its limit, launched himself upward, and drove his own hand into the wound in his chest. He pulled out a mass of golden divine blood.

His lips moved.

The light that erupted from him was total — from every pore, every inch of skin, hundreds of kinds of divine radiance pouring outward simultaneously. His body expanded as the light built, growing at visible speed — ten meters, twenty, thirty — until he stood as a crimson giant above them all.

Around him, a river of red blood appeared, flowing with purpose, encircling him, alive with something that recognized him as its source.

This was Chitian River’s final forbidden technique. The one he had never used. The one that would cost him a thousand years of recovery — possibly longer, leaving him diminished and vulnerable for a period that might as well be forever. He would not have reached for it if the alternative had been anything other than what it was.

“Crimson Blood Celestial River.“

“Then let’s end this.” Yueyang was already committed before the words left his mouth. The Eternal Wheel materialized at his feet and in the same breath converted — the Wheel of Apocalypse, powered by the full force of his Sovereign intent and the primordial rune formation’s amplification together.

The Wheel began turning.

From below, rising, cutting upward toward Chitian River—

And from above, the Crimson Blood Celestial River answered — the full release of divine blood sacrifice, crashing downward like a celestial waterfall aimed at Yueyang’s head—

Both techniques, simultaneously, in full, without reservation.

One rising, one falling.

Meeting in the middle.