Yue Yang had seen a great many beautiful women in his life.

Some were tender as water; some were sweet and doe-eyed. Some smoldered; some were coquettish and full of feeling. Some were dangerous and voluptuous; some were cold as frost.

In this world, no two beauties were ever the same. Every woman was her own unique being.

Of course, along with the differences, all beauties tended to share certain traits.

A striking exterior, for one.

But Yue Yang had never before seen a beauty as unlike everyone else as the Freedom Queen.

The woman the Sky-rank guards were escorting up in the prison cart was not, in fact, the most beautiful woman he had ever laid eyes on. Her looks, honestly, weren’t as striking as he had expected. And yet — this Freedom Queen was, without any doubt, the most divine, the most forgiving, the most fundamentally kind woman he had ever seen. She was called a queen, but she had none of the trappings of one — nothing that separated her from an ordinary beggar’s daughter. Her clothes were tattered rags. Even the scraps of cloth barely covering her were smudged in places with dried blood or streaks of grime.

She was a woman who ought, by all appearances, to have been indistinguishable from the starving beggars slumped in the streets waiting to die.

None of that impaired her beauty.

Nor did it impair Yue Yang’s shock at meeting her.

Even behind the bars of a prison cart, she smiled — as if the cart were not a cage but a castle protecting her.

That smile.

Was not the smile of someone forcing themselves.

It was a smile that came, entirely, from within — kind, forgiving, and completely without pretense.

It had a maternal quality about it. Like the bright moon in a clear sky.

That smile flowing out from the deepest part of her was like a clear mountain spring: one look, and the black corners of your own heart were washed clean. When she smiled toward the starving beggars kneeling along both sides of the road and gently nodded to comfort them, Yue Yang suddenly understood that this was a genuinely powerful thing — that no ordinary Sky-rank warrior could possibly emit a smile with this kind of force. Only a strong practitioner at Perfect Innate Sovereign or above, someone who had already achieved Immovable Will, could carry that kind of belief-force.

“Don’t cry, all of you. Hunger and pain will pass. Whatever happens — never give up. Endurance and hope, they never leave us!”

“I’m all right — don’t worry about me.”

“Live well, all of you!”

There was no soaring rhetoric in what the Freedom Queen said.

No fiery agitation.

Just plain, flat statements — the tone in which you would state a fact, or in which a member of your own family would gently remind you of something. But Yue Yang — who had reached the Perfect Innate Sovereign realm and had his own Immovable Will — did not, on hearing them, feel that she was wrong. He felt no instinctive rejection of what should have been “laughable persistence and belief” at all.

Coming out of anyone else’s mouth, Yue Yang would have sneered at that consolation.

You do nothing, and hope will find you?

Lie down and wait to die, and hope arrives?

Yet somehow, when the Freedom Queen said it, Yue Yang was startled to find he had no inclination to argue. Because — the Freedom Queen didn’t actually seem to be wrong… What is it that Immovable Will itself does not reject? A god-like will. Beyond even the ordinary divine will — the kind of belief that even Yue Yang, who had once glimpsed genuine divine consciousness, could not refuse.

Yue Yang also realized, with a start, that although the Freedom Queen’s eyes were very bright, there was no visual focus in them.

Which meant.

She was blind.

The Freedom Queen — who could see none of the world’s ten thousand things — was using her eyes to see the whole of the world.

Being “looked at” by her, Yue Yang had the illusion that she was seeing straight into the deepest part of him.

When she smiled, a tenderness and forgiveness like no one else’s welled up from those unfocused bright eyes — an ineffable tenderness that came at you and went straight through to the marrow, wetting the parched soil of the heart. Even Yue Yang’s own heart, which he had for the most part shut tight, trembled at the touch of it.

Standing in front of this Freedom Queen, even Sky-rank powerhouses felt a kind of humility and shame rise up in them of its own accord.

Not because she was strong.

Because of the tenderness and mercy she extended toward all living things.

A woman like her — locked in a prison cart, dressed in rags, threatening no one — was fated to be revered by everyone she met.

The Freedom Queen’s arms were two flawless jade limbs, whiter than snow… But her two legs were no longer there. Or, more precisely, everything from the lower abdomen down had already ceased to exist.

Her lower half, as Yue Yang had heard, had already been sacrificed away — offered up to remove illness and curses from the devout starving.

Even her upper body was no longer entirely flesh and blood.

Half energy, half flesh — and if not for some unnamed divine force perpetually feeding her life, this Freedom Queen would already have died. That divine force, moreover, was the same divine force Yue Yang had extracted from the Wild Bull Brothers earlier. In other words, the Wild Bull Brothers’ lives had actually been saved by this Freedom Queen — not by some divine being.

But how could a Freedom Queen who wasn’t even Sky-rank be using divine power?

Yue Yang was baffled.

“Is that so? Many are cursed? I see.” The Freedom Queen listened, then nodded. Her unfocused eyes “swept” around the crowd — a residual habit that told Yue Yang immediately that her blindness was not congenital. She had gone blind by some other means — perhaps she had sacrificed her sight, forever, to save someone else. The Freedom Queen offered a condition: “If the people of Greenvalley City are given a proper meal — every one of them — then I will lift the curse. Though I do not understand why it must be at the central island of Windstill Swamp… It may be that this is a vengeful curse, one that requires special dispelling.”

“Regardless — please, come with us to the central island. The rest of us are one thing, but distinguished guests from the Upper Heavenly Realm coming here to celebrate my beloved’s birthday have been caught up in this curse. That is Windstill’s failing.” The Windstill national ruler introduced Yue Yang, the Titan Young Lord, along with Tianzhu and the others, to the Freedom Queen.

Finally, Windstill gave his guarantee: “Whether or not the curse is successfully dispelled, the starving of Greenvalley City will receive relief.”

The Freedom Queen heard it and a smile bloomed on that clear face.

A joy that opened from the base of her heart.

She lifted her hands and gave a deep bow. “Goodness meets goodness. The Windstill national ruler will surely reap the best of rewards for his kindness today.”

Yue Yang fell silent. He had seen countless beautiful women in his life — never mind his own people, he’d seen a great many outsiders too, women of every different type of personality. He’d seen the likes of Chi Fei, who followed her Crimson Emperor to the death regardless of whether he was right or wrong, forfeiting any self of her own for love; he’d seen women like Lady Zhiguang, showered with a thousand kinds of affection and still nursing private designs; he’d seen women like Qiluo Immortal, who fought her enemy through a world-shattering battle to mutual destruction and remained trapped even after death in a sealed world with him; he’d seen women like the Night Empress, gambling the survival of an entire clan on her mad chase after the outer limit of power… But a woman like this Freedom Queen — a woman who, no matter what happened, kept mercy and pity for the world in her heart — that he had never seen.

To describe her was beyond him. In Yue Yang’s eyes, this ridiculous woman was, from a certain angle, the biggest fool of all.

And yet, seeing her with his own eyes —

His heart could not help being moved.

What force lets her be like this?

Windstill and Blue Wolf were bad people from head to foot. They had been on the verge of burning her to death only a short while ago. Even the restraints on her prison cart had not been loosened. Why, the moment they asked, was she already agreeing to lift the curse?

If this Freedom Queen were mine, Yue Yang thought, I would pull down her trousers and give her a spanking.

She was too kind. Almost stupid with kindness.

But looking at her broken body and her tender, forgiving smile, Yue Yang couldn’t call her a fool.

There were, in this world, some kinds of love that were unconditional — offered without cost, without expectation of any reward at all, borne in silent, willing endurance of every burden… His own Fourth Mother, for example.

Fourth Mother was not like the Freedom Queen — Fourth Mother was not this way toward everyone. She was tender and attentive only to her family.

But at a certain level, what she gave and what the Freedom Queen gave were the same thing.

What Fourth Mother gave Yue Yang, Yue Bing, and the little one was even more than what the Freedom Queen gave the world at large — Fourth Mother had taken all of that immense love and concentrated it on the Yue siblings alone. That was why Yue Yang felt so fully cared-for. He himself couldn’t do what Fourth Mother did — but he didn’t want to deny that kind of love. Because to deny it would be to deny Fourth Mother.

When the Freedom Queen boarded the luxury airship and agreed to travel to the central island of Windstill Swamp with the Windstill national ruler to face the enemy, the starving of Greenvalley City finally, for the first time, received free food.

They all knew.

That this food had been bought with the Freedom Queen’s life. There was nothing they could do but weep and pray.

Yue Yang took all of this in, carried the biggest question in his heart onto the airship, and — while the Windstill national ruler was consulting Tianzhu about how to prevent an enemy ambush — walked over to the Freedom Queen and asked: “Suppose the Windstill national ruler does not honor his promise. What will you do then? He has power. He does not need to keep his word. And even if he breaks it, you have no power to force him.”

The Freedom Queen turned her unfocused eyes to “look” at Yue Yang and offered a smile like a clean breeze: “So you are the Titan Young Lord from the Upper Heavenly Realm. Your surface is very rebellious, but my heart’s eye can see — you are the only one, among so many people, whose soul shines gold… In this place, no one but you would have asked that question. Which is to say — no one but you has mercy in his heart. Especially cultivators of great power. Only when they lose power do they finally remember: mercy is the greatest power of all. A person with mercy in his heart is the strongest kind of person.”

“How could that be? I do not accept that.” Yue Yang had never once believed that a merciful person was the strongest person. Never once believed mercy was the greatest power.

“Think about it. If you possessed the ultimate power — and looked back at the world — wouldn’t the people below look as pitiful as ants? Bustling about, living petty painful lives, laughing and grieving over small profits, coming to blows over a moment’s reputation. Ruined, sometimes killed, and still lost in the illusion that they were great, when in truth they were only small. Isn’t such a person a comic figure?” The Freedom Queen smiled and asked the question back.

“That is not the same as saying a merciful person is the strongest person!” Yue Yang’s rhetorical skill was second to none — this was the first time he was struggling to argue back.

“A truly merciful person doesn’t need to do things the way I do. I want to do good, but I have not yet reached the true mercy. The greatest mercy is not simply to give the starving a meal. I use this example only to illustrate the point — that only the strongest of persons can truly perceive the smallness of things, can truly look down upon all living beings, and truly understand what mercy is. Those truly powerful ancient gods, up in the heavens, look down on the lower realm as we look down on ants — watching us being born, growing, warring for advantage, tearing each other apart for name and profit, and in that struggle being wounded, aging, sickening, and at last dying… Only from that vantage — only when one sees the whole truth of the world — can one see the pitifulness of low-level life. And only then does one truly understand what it means to have mercy on life at all!”

The Freedom Queen said it, and Yue Yang was utterly shaken.

He felt as though he had experienced a kind of water-poured-over-the-crown awakening — a realization deeper than any he had had before, erupting up out of the deepest layer of his soul.

Before this, he had been endlessly asking himself: What is a god, what is a man, what is the ceiling of power, what is the final purpose of my own growth? And after this one conversation, he had suddenly discovered the best direction forward.

The strongest person — the one standing at the very peak of the world — is the only one who can see the whole truth of it, and who can perceive the smallest smallness within it…

Can, from that transcendent heart —

Look down on countless lives with genuine tenderness.

If one did not understand this, then that was indeed evidence one was not yet strong enough. If it was possible to reach that vantage, then would he really allow himself to be trapped below the level of those who could not reach it? Now he understood. He finally understood…

Yue Yang’s face did not change. But inside, an earthshaking transformation was underway.

(End of Chapter 950)