Apart from a few hours spent returning to Thunder Fortress on Floor Six so that the toad-fatty Jude could pass word to Jun Wuyou and the others that he and Qianqian were cultivating on Floor Ten, Yueyang didn’t leave the unit world.

During the days, he channeled minor law-force to guide the Black Void, drawing in ice by the mountain-load to help Vivienne accelerate the construction of her ice world. In the evenings, he returned to the Grimoire World and let Xiao Nu’s hands undo some of the accumulated damage. If Qianqian was in a good mood, she came and shared the bath — with the strict provision that certain hands were to remain in unambiguous territories, on pain of teeth.

Good days passed, one after another. Ten more of them.

Wuxia still hadn’t woken.

Yueyang estimated that fully integrating the mysterious divine nature would take her at minimum six months — and that was with him supplying innate true qi every day to support the process. The divine nature was simply that powerful. Even now he couldn’t work out why someone with a divine nature of that caliber had spent themselves sealing Chitian River away. The question didn’t have an answer he could reach.

“Wuxia got a divine nature out of nowhere, the Book of Truth is upgrading itself toward divine artifact, you got a primordial rune formation, Vivienne got her ice world — and what did I get?” Qianqian said, with the tone of someone presenting evidence in a trial. “Nothing. I got nothing.”

“Something suitable will come next time, Qianqian—”

“Let me bite you.”

“What?”

“I’m upset.” Qianqian folded her arms.

Her request was not granted, for the reason that Yueyang employed the more efficient method of silencing her with a suffocating kiss, after which she was too occupied with the immediate situation to pursue the original complaint.

He did feel genuinely bad about it. She’d contributed enormously, and walking away empty-handed while everyone around her acquired extraordinary things wasn’t fair. He resolved to make time to help refine the Prison Emperor’s divine sword for her — the collapsed ice mountain had been collected almost entirely into the Grimoire World by now anyway.

Under normal circumstances Qianqian would have refused. Currently she was still recovering from the kiss and her tiger-ferocity had temporarily misplaced itself. So she abstained, and Yueyang’s motion passed unopposed.

The technical problem with refining the sword was significant. The sword had originally recognized Yueyang as its master — only the Prison Emperor’s residual will had redirected its use to Qianqian. If Yueyang cleared that residual will, the newly refined sword would bond to Yueyang completely, and Qianqian would lose even the current usage rights she had. That outcome served nobody — Yueyang already had the far superior Prison Emperor Divine Seal, and once he’d finished refining the Seal’s full potential, its power would exceed the sword in every respect anyway.

More importantly: Qianqian in armor with the divine sword was a specific aesthetic experience that Yueyang was, privately, entirely unwilling to eliminate. He had never said this out loud, being a man of concealed depths. He had fantasies about the armor specifically that he also kept to himself.

Qianqian’s fist connected with the side of his head mid-reverie. “Stop drooling.”

The impact shook something loose.

Not in the painful sense. In the sense of an idea that had been sitting in a back drawer for years, not quite ready, suddenly finding itself in a room where everything it needed had finally assembled.

He’d had a version of this thought before — years ago, before the resources or the skill were there to execute it. He’d shelved it. The punch had apparently retrieved it and handed it back.

“Wait. I need to do an experiment first, before the sword. Just to verify something. And accumulate some experience with the process.” He grabbed her hand and kissed it emphatically enough that her fingers trembled. Then he jumped out of the water without remembering to take his clothes — which were not, at that moment, on his person — and ran for the laboratory.

Qianqian’s face cycled through several shades.

“You idiot,” she called after him, not very sternly. “Look at yourself—“

But she was already laughing.

He was, when he was like this — sprinting toward something that had just ignited in his mind, completely oblivious to every other consideration — genuinely impossible to be annoyed at. Everyone else would remark on his smile as his most compelling quality. Qianqian privately thought that was them being fooled by a wolf wearing pleasant expressions. What she actually found most compelling was this: the way he looked when he was chasing something real.

Yueyang turned the Crescent Blade over in his hands.

“You’re finally getting your day. I honestly wasn’t sure you weren’t headed for the trophy shelf.”

The Crescent Blade. Forged when his skill and resources were both limited — Platinum-rank was the ceiling he’d managed, Sacred-rank hadn’t been possible. In the early period it had been genuinely useful, but as the Gluttony Blade evolved, as the Scorpion Heaven-Piercing Blade came into existence, as the divine artifacts accumulated around him — the Crescent Blade had become the weapon he reached for when he specifically wanted to seem less threatening than he was. Even the Sacred-grade Assassin’s Dagger and the black-light pseudo-Five-Color Divine Radiance outclassed it. It had been quietly rusting in his storage ring for some time.

The battle with Chitian River had reminded him it existed, for the first time in a long while.

But it was what he’d found during the Black Void’s consumption of the mountain that had restarted this old thought.

In the innermost core of the mountain, in the absolute-zero heart of the ice, he had found a few fragments of someone’s divine consciousness — scattered, broken, impossible to restore. The divine nature itself had gone to Wuxia. What remained was almost nothing: a few wisps of a person’s awareness, drifting in the cold like the last light from a fire that had burned itself out.

He couldn’t read her memories. He couldn’t learn anything about who she had been. From the divine nature’s resonance, and from nothing else, he knew she had been a woman.

Using the final remnant of such a powerful predecessor as a weapon spirit wasn’t, strictly speaking, respectful.

But the alternative was letting those last fragments dissolve. When the ice core finally dissipated, they would go with it — completely, permanently. Nothing would remain.

“I don’t know your name, Predecessor,” he said, to the fragments he’d carefully preserved. “But if you’re willing — please come into the Crescent Blade. It’s ice-attribute, so you shouldn’t find it unwelcoming. Fuse with it, and let’s fight together from here on.”

He cut his palm and began.

His blood carried his insights into the new primordial rune formation; he traced them into the blade’s surface first. Then the massive ice core went into the forge — and wrapped in the divine blood, cradling the fragments of the unknown woman’s consciousness, the whole was slowly introduced into the blade. Nirvana Flames sealed the work.

Alongside all of that: Dream-Ice Crystal Gold from the Standing Demon Venerable. The ancient rune formation “Permanent” that the blade had carried from the beginning. The heavenly rune formations “Frost” and “Sharp.”

And his own blood, carrying the new primordial inscription: Rebirth.

One full day passed.

At the peak of the refinement, Yueyang bit through his tongue and drove his blood and primordial chaos-source force into the blade in one sustained release.

Qianqian had both hands around the hilt and was not breathing. Xiao Nu had both hands over her mouth, convinced that if her teeth started chattering from nerves she would ruin something.

Light erupted from the blade like flowers opening — all colors simultaneously, spreading in waves. Through the light came an intangible cold will that permeated the entire Grimoire World, touching everything.

Ding.

Like a clear note struck against something that had no business making such a beautiful sound.

The Crescent Blade had completed its reforging.

It drifted upward and hung in the air above Yueyang’s outstretched palm.

The shape had changed less than he’d expected, because the original design had been good — he’d put thought into it even when young. What the unknown woman’s consciousness had contributed was length: the blade extended slightly further on both ends, the curve becoming more slender, more precise, more like something made for the refined pleasure of excellence than the crude purpose of cutting. Around the exterior of his blood-rune work, she had added a layer of fine intricate patterning — small as embroidery, complex as a language he didn’t recognize. Whatever it meant to her, it was clearly something it had meant enough to mark.

The primordial rune Rebirth had changed everything it touched:

Permanent had become Eternal Preservation — transcending its original ancient rune category into something without an established classification.

Frost had become Glacial River.

Sharp had become Heaven-Rending.

None of these were at the same level as their predecessors. They were something different in kind.

As for the blade’s overall quality—

Yueyang hadn’t aimed for Sacred-rank. He hadn’t dared to aim for above-Sacred. He’d thought, maybe, he might get there with effort.

What he held was a sub-divine artifact.

The Crescent Blade had gone directly from Platinum-rank to sub-divine, skipping the entire Sacred tier entirely. If the unknown predecessor had left more of her consciousness — if even a fragment of her divine nature had remained and not gone to Wuxia — it might have become a true divine artifact.

What it was instead was already far beyond anything he’d allowed himself to imagine.

“Crescent Blade.” He raised it. The words that came out were, for once, proportionate to the feeling behind them. “Let’s cut down every demon and god that stands in our way.”

Ding.

The blade responded — light spreading from it like the full moon clearing clouds, beautiful and absolute. The clear tone that followed moved through the Grimoire World and into the chest of everyone present, ringing there long after the sound itself had faded.

Qianqian, who had been rigid with tension for the past hour, bolted in and punched him.

“Absolutely insufferable, you actually did it—”

He seized the opportunity to grab her and commit what could only be described as an extremely enthusiastic greeting. Before her fist came back up he turned and grabbed Xiao Nu with the other arm and buried the evidence in an expression of theatrical overwhelmed-by-success.

Qianqian’s eye twitched. Her six-sense talent didn’t leave much room for plausible deniability. But she let him keep his dignity on this one.

“Now that you’re in good form,” she said, waving off the divine sword when he turned toward it, “do the Breaking Eye Dagger and the Twin Fish Ribbons first. Especially the Ribbons. If we can push those up, there are battle scenarios where we control the entire field.”

Yueyang turned this over. “The Twin Fish Ribbons…”

She wasn’t wrong. If those could be elevated, the crowd-control potential was genuinely frightening — something like a war-lock on the entire battlefield, trapping every enemy in place simultaneously. The implications were significant.

“All right,” he said. “Ribbons first.”