The gate into the spatial passage opened, revealing a long corridor of unusual shape stretching away into the dark.

The Hanged Man surveyed the assembled Sky-rank cultivators with an expression that suggested he’d been thinking about hurting people for a while and was open to opportunities.

“All of you — inside. The Lazy One may not feel like moving, but killing a few people is the one task even he finds manageable. If we don’t find out where the Star Realm Stone fragment is from the Windstill national ruler, none of you leave.”

“On the other hand,” the Poet said, his tone measured and almost reasonable, “if the national ruler generously provides the Star Realm Stone fragment, you may not only leave — we’ll lift the curse as well.”

Blue Wolf and the others said nothing.

They knew perfectly well that nothing coming from these people had any binding force. Calling out the obvious cynicism of the offer would only accelerate the timeline to open violence. Better to maintain the pretense of negotiation, however useless, while the situation developed.

Blue Wolf glanced at Yue Yang and found the Titan Young Lord looking thoroughly unbothered — the expression of someone who has decided not to be concerned about something and has done so completely. It was, oddly, steadying.

Taking Yue Yang’s lead, the group moved. One by one they followed the Poet into the spatial corridor, proceeding deeper. The Hanged Man took the front position, dragging the critically injured Windstill national ruler and Lady Zhiguang. The white-bearded elder brought up the rear — an arrangement that communicated clearly who bore the actual threat.

Behind them, in the Storm Sea, the Two-Faced King hadn’t moved. He stood above the water with the patient stillness of someone waiting for guests who had not yet arrived.

The corridor felt different from the ordinary spatial passages Yue Yang had traveled. He couldn’t pinpoint the specific anomaly, only the sense of one — a vague instinct that the space around him was operating by slightly different rules than it should.

Then the passage ended, and the world opened.

A stone world.

No sky. No earth in any recognizable sense. The domed ceiling, several thousand meters above, was stone. The floor was stone. The water was stone. Everything was stone — but not the ordinary stone of roads and cliffs. A special energy-stone, varied in its manifestations: transparent varieties floated overhead forming a kind of ceiling-sky, the opaque and heavy settled underfoot as ground, the fluid variety ran in streams and filled pools. Between these ran formations of stone flowers and stone trees and stone stalactites in shapes that seemed to have grown rather than been placed.

The space was enormous. Larger than any of the major cities Yue Yang had seen — larger than most things that had impressed him with their size.

He picked up a piece from the ground. The energy density inside it would have made it exceptional anywhere else he’d ever been. Here, it was a piece of gravel. The genuinely remarkable specimens glittered above like stars, countless and casual.

The stone flowers were vivid as real flowers. The stone trees as leafy and dense as real forest. The stone stalactites descended from above and grew from below in forms that suggested weapons — some like swords, some like axes, some like spears, dense as a forest of blades — and between them, smaller formations that had somehow arrived at the shapes of animals: rabbits, mice, dogs, cattle, each one so precisely formed that you expected them to startle and run if you came too close.

Most remarkable: the water.

Yue Yang cupped some from a nearby stream. It ran between his fingers the way water should, but it weighed like stone — heavier than rock, flowing as liquid. The energy content was extraordinary. Not quite on the level of the Ten-Thousand-Year Earth Mother Spirit Liquid, but if the streams and lakes of this entire space were collected and refined together, the output would be comparable.

Blue Wolf looked at the water Yue Yang held and sighed quietly. “A pity.”

He meant: we can’t use it. The stone-nature of everything here meant that even Sky-rank physiques couldn’t directly absorb what this world offered. Unless your entire cultivation attribute was earth-aligned, the energy was simply inaccessible — visible, present, and untouchable.

Yue Yang said nothing.

Nirvana Flames. Refinement through fire had solved harder problems than this.

And for the Chaos Phantom, whose entire nature was quasi-elemental: absorbing ambient energy was her primary activity. She would need to be physically removed from this place to stop.

The Death Reaper Mantis had similar inclinations.

But the one who would truly be at home here — the one for whom this stone world would be less an environment and more a feeding trough — was Aman, who carried the Earth Heart. Aman fighting in this space would be absurd in the most favorable sense. He filed the thought for later. Bring Aman here.

“Stop looking,” the Hanged Man said from above, perched on a pointed energy-stone formation with the Windstill national ruler and Lady Zhiguang held in either hand. “Nothing here belongs to you people. The stone world’s law restricts what can leave. You can’t absorb the energy, and you can’t take a single pebble with you when you go.”

Blue Wolf understood now why the Poet, the tribesman, the dwarf, the fat man, and the elder had shown no particular interest in the energy-stones around them. The restriction was real.

They followed the Hanged Man deeper into the stone forest.

Roughly ten kilometers in, the procession stopped.

At the center of a clearing surrounded by stone-flower trees stood a wall.

Not a rough wall. Something that had been polished by time or intention until it was nearly translucent — a surface like carved jade, crystalline, the energy within it so dense and settled it glowed with gentle continuous light. Across its face ran formations of ancient runes, layered and interlocked, difficult enough that even Yue Yang — who had devoted serious effort to understanding rune-script — had to look slowly.

Around the rune formation, twelve recesses had been carved. Eight of them were filled. The remaining four were empty.

Star Realm Stone fragments. The energy crystals that opened the deeper space beyond. He could see the mechanism clearly now: fill all twelve recesses, open the gate.

“Windstill national ruler.” The Hanged Man dropped the national ruler in front of the wall. “If you’re sensible, you hand over the fragment now. I let you live.”

The national ruler coughed blood and smiled bitterly. “I genuinely don’t have it.”

“No matter. We can open the gate without the last fragment — it just requires more blood in the ritual. I’ll start with your beloved woman, and see if that helps your memory. If you think I’ll be moved by pity — forget it. For the divine body, for the legendary Divine Codex, I’d kill my own father without hesitation. You two are entertainment.”

He took Lady Zhiguang by the throat, lifting her with the careless ease of someone who has never found fragility worth respecting.

“Your Majesty — save me—” Lady Zhiguang’s composure had finally broken. “If you don’t give them the fragment, I’m going to—”

“My love — don’t be afraid.” The Windstill national ruler raised his hand, preparing to make a decision about his own life that would at least let them leave together. “I won’t let you go alone.”

This produced a genuinely affecting scene.

Yue Yang, who had somehow ended up at the star-realm stone wall during the preceding exchange, was not participating in the affecting scene.

He had his face pressed against the translucent surface, peering through.

“Whoa — there really IS a divine body in there! Only the lower half though — no head, no torso — wait, actually this looks like it might be female — but she’s wearing a robe, the important parts are covered, I can’t see anything, this is completely outrageous—”

Blue Wolf and the others produced sweat in quantity.

Young Lord. We are in a life-threatening situation. Could you perhaps register that.

The Freedom Queen’s face went pink.

“Stop that,” she said, with the controlled dignity of someone who is trying to be stern while being deeply embarrassed. “Show some respect. That is a goddess.”

“Is it? I genuinely cannot tell from out here!” Yue Yang produced a laugh of theatrical innocence. “For the record — I have always shown complete respect to goddesses. I would never entertain an unworthy thought. I am, in fact, a gentleman of entirely upright character.”

This statement landed in the assembled space and caused various consequences.

The Hanged Man’s group came closer to mass collapse than anything that had happened in the fighting so far.

You. You specifically. Upright character. You are arguing this.

The Hanged Man recovered first and addressed the group with the tone of someone who has had enough of everyone present.

“As you can see — this is the Star Realm Stone, the gate to the Star Realm Space. We have collected three fragments. The fourth and final fragment is in the Windstill national ruler’s possession. If you can convince him to produce it, we’ll consider sharing a portion of the divine blood from the body inside. If not — you become the blood offering.” He drew breath for the countdown.

Then he noticed nobody was looking at him.

Every person in the space — his own group included — was staring past him with the expression of people who have seen something that should not be possible.

He turned.

Yue Yang was inside the Star Realm Space.

Visible through the translucent wall, in the space that was supposed to require a complete set of twelve fragments and a blood ritual to enter, the Titan Young Lord was standing beside the lower half of the divine body, apparently preparing to lift the hem of the goddess’s robe to improve his viewing angle.

The Hanged Man came very close to dropping Lady Zhiguang.

How. The Star Realm gate required twelve fragments, or a significant blood sacrifice to force partially open. It was not something that individual strength could bypass. The Central Divine Hall’s strongest had looked at this problem and treated it as a problem. And this young man had simply walked through it because—

Because what? What ability, what treasure, what cultivation technique could account for entry into a sealed Star Realm Space that was currently running four fragments short of functional?

The Hanged Man entertained briefly the idea of shredding Yue Yang and then himself, in that order. This was not available to him — Yue Yang was inside the space, and the Hanged Man was outside, and the gate between them was not something external force could penetrate.

The only thing preventing total catastrophe was the observation that Yue Yang appeared, at present, to be primarily interested in improving his view of the hemline situation, rather than immediately pocketing the divine body and leaving.

He looked at the Poet.

The Poet, for perhaps the first time in this operation, looked like he had encountered something his planning had not included.

The Titan Young Lord was inside a sealed Star Realm Space, separated from everyone else by a gate that nothing outside could touch, and apparently his priority was the robe situation.

Nobody had a next step for this.