Every Sky-rank cultivator in the room was experiencing the internal equivalent of lying face-down on the floor.

This was what it meant to be powerful as a god.

In front of the Solar King, the options available seemed to reduce to one: kneel. Even Yue Yang — who had confronted things that should have ended him and found ways through regardless — found himself looking at this ordinary-seeming man with his reversed clock hands and feeling something he wasn’t entirely accustomed to feeling.

The journey from a clock you check the time with to time itself bends when I say so was the most absurd cultivation arc anyone in the room had ever witnessed compressed into a personal biography.

Blue Wolf and the others sagged where they stood. Resistance had stopped being a concept with practical applications. If dying quickly was on the table, at this point, it was beginning to look like the premium option.

“Figure something out,” Ming Rihao said, and transferred the entire problem to Yue Yang with the ease of a man who has decided that some problems are simply not his to solve.

Yue Yang gave him two fingers of profound contempt.

“I’m giving you a developmental opportunity.”

Ming Rihao accepted the contempt. When the alternative was thinking about the Solar King, the contempt was comparatively pleasant.

“You actually have something?” Dugu Changfeng, still on the stone floor, lifted his head. The Revenge Domain Emperor, the Rage Domain Emperor, and the Radiance Domain Emperor all looked over simultaneously. Even the Solar King and the Silent King beside him — watching. Everyone doubted, but no one doubted quite as carefully as the Solar King, because the Solar King had spent years accumulating fragmentary intelligence on this person and had arrived at the conclusion that this specific young man was the most formidable threat he’d identified in his lifetime. Too young still, insufficiently developed — but give it time, and the Solar King had genuine private uncertainty about the outcome.

“Why are you all looking at me like that?” Yue Yang registered the universal skepticism and found it irritating.

“You really have something?” Ming Rihao asked, with the cautious hope of someone who has been disappointed before and is managing expectations.

Yue Yang waved him back. Stand over there, you’re in the way.

Ming Rihao became extremely obedient. He moved to the side and fixed his full attention on Yue Yang’s hands with the focused intensity of a man who has decided that miracles are a real category of event and is waiting for one to occur.

The Silent King shifted — the beginnings of an intervention. The Solar King shook his head, slowly. Wait. Watch. If Yue Yang could genuinely break the time reversal, stopping him now changed nothing — it would still be breakable. If he couldn’t, there was nothing to worry about regardless. Whatever he did next would be informative either way.

Yue Yang adopted the posture of a senior scholar preparing to illuminate a confused student body, which under the circumstances was either extremely confident or extremely performative or both.

“This thing — it looks difficult, but breaking it is actually quite simple. A little bit of thinking is all it takes.”

The room produced an involuntary collective noise of wounded dignity.

We know you’re clever. We’re not all idiots. You don’t have to say it like that.

Xiao Wenli stood behind him, silent as always, scanning the perimeter, blocking anyone who developed ideas about approaching. She hadn’t changed in disposition since the time reversal had been demonstrated. Her combat intent was exactly what it had been before. She’d apparently decided that the Solar King’s abilities were interesting data rather than a reason to adjust her outlook.

“Let me ask something,” Yue Yang said, to the skeptical audience. “Why is the Solar King called the Solar King? You’d probably say — because he has that impressive Solar Bell. All right. Second question: why is the Solar Bell called the Solar Bell? Because it resembles a sun and a clock at the same time. Yes — but here’s the third question. Why does a clock need to look like a sun?” He let that sit for a moment. “A clock that can accelerate or reverse time should only need to be a clock. Why does it also need to be a sun, blazing with light in every direction, filling the entire stone world so that there isn’t a shadow left anywhere? Why?“

The Solar King’s expression moved. Not much. A small, involuntary shift.

Ming Rihao, Dugu Changfeng, the Revenge Domain Emperor, the Rage Domain Emperor, the Radiance Domain Emperor — all of them simultaneously took on the look of people turning something over.

The cultivators at Blue Wolf’s tier and below produced a different response entirely: confusion. Obviously a life-guardian war beast of sufficient power radiated light in all directions. That was just what powerful war beasts did. Wasn’t that self-evident? What was the question?

That was the normal reaction. Yue Yang had a chronic suspicion problem, which was why—

“You’re suggesting the Solar Bell’s time reversal requires its light to function?” Ming Rihao said, frowning.

“If it works in the dark, I stop asking questions,” Yue Yang said, hands clasped behind his back.

“Your suspicion is correct.” The Solar King said it cleanly, without hesitation. “The Solar Bell requires light-contact with its targets to produce the corresponding effect. Every ability has prerequisite conditions. If it didn’t, I wouldn’t be a half-divine sovereign — I’d be an actual god.”

“But knowing it needs light — what does that change?” The Radiance Domain Emperor shook his head. The Solar Bell was a life-guardian war beast of staggering power. He couldn’t destroy it. Nothing in this room could destroy it. What could possibly block its light? And as long as the light reached its targets, the reversal would function. Knowing the mechanism didn’t create an exit from it.

Yue Yang condensed energy between his hands.

Black. A sphere of it, growing — not gradually but hungrily, pulling ambient energy inward, the quality of something that had decided it was the center of a local gravitational system. Getting larger. And then the Solar Bell’s light, which had been touching everything equally, began touching one thing less — the black sphere was consuming it. Absorbing the radiance the moment it arrived.

Ming Rihao’s reaction was immediate and loud: “Yes!”

If the Solar Bell needed light-contact and the light could be absorbed before it reached its targets—

“Not enough.” The Revenge Domain Emperor’s brief hope expired. He shook his head. “The black hole is already within the Solar Bell’s established range. The Time Domain and the Time Law extend beyond just the light itself — the reversal would cover the black hole too.”

The Freedom Queen added quietly: “Law-force would be needed to sustain it. Divine power, ideally.”

The Solar King closed his eyes. Opened them. Nodded — a gesture of genuine acknowledgment.

“A young man who reached the new Prison Emperor’s position in just a few years. And in this short a time, you’ve found the critical point.” He paused, and for a moment something showed in his face that wasn’t quite an emotion but was adjacent to one — the look of someone confronting a variable they’d hoped wouldn’t materialize this soon. “I don’t want to imagine what you become if you’re allowed to keep growing. Fortunately, I have you contained now, before that happens. If you had divine power — I think you’d do to me what you did to the Nine-Radiance Empress.”

He snapped his fingers.

The Solar Bell’s hands began reversing.

The black sphere in Yue Yang’s hands shrank at a speed that made the word rapid feel inadequate. By the time it had finished contracting, Yue Yang’s hands were in the position they’d been in when he was preparing to begin. The black sphere had never existed. The light had never been interrupted.

Everything — again — as it had been.

The Revenge Domain Emperor’s eyes went to despair’s address.

Whatever you build, time takes it back. Whatever you attempt becomes evidence that you attempted it. There is nothing to do here that stays done.

Ming Rihao considered for a moment, then said: “Any other approaches? If not — I shatter the space. You use the chaos in the Time Domain and the Time Law to slip through with the Compass. That window might exist.”

The self-detonation option. Everything in the room gone, himself included, but the spatial destruction at that scale might create a brief interval outside the Solar King’s control — and Yue Yang, who now understood the Bell’s mechanism, might be able to use it.

Yue Yang rolled his eyes.

“Old Hao. Stop trying to die. I’m thinking. Calm down.”

“You have something?” Even the Revenge Domain Emperor blinked.

“Roughly three or four approaches. Still working out which one is optimal.” Yue Yang was counting options on his fingers with a slight frown of concentration.

Ming Rihao hit the floor. Not figuratively.

Three or four. Three or four options for breaking time reversal, and the man was mildly annoyed that he couldn’t immediately rank them. Not if I have an option but which of my options. The gap between existing in the same species as this person and being this person was apparently not a gap — it was a different category of existence entirely. And this creature was younger. Was still growing.

“I’d genuinely like to know,” the Two-Faced King said, with the particular smile of someone who doesn’t believe what they’re hearing but wants the theater to play out, “how you break something that has never been broken.”

The Solar King said nothing. Thinking.

The battle was his. Had been from the start. With the Solar Bell active, timing was irrelevant — an hour from now and a moment from now were operationally identical, because nothing anyone did would persist past his decision to reverse it. He had nothing to rush.

What he was thinking about was the only thing in the room that he couldn’t fully account for: whether this young man would actually produce something. If he could break the Bell — it was important information. It meant Ji Wuri could potentially break it too. It meant others at their tier might have approaches. The Solar Bell’s reputation as an absolute ability needed to be accurate or it needed to be revised, and he preferred to know which.

Yue Yang, for his part, was enjoying something he didn’t often get: an audience of extremely intelligent people watching him think, in a context where the thinking actually mattered.

He was younger than everyone here. Less experienced. Lower in formal standing by most metrics.

His intelligence was higher.

Not slightly higher. Meaningfully, operationally, categorically higher — the kind of difference that didn’t close with time and experience on the other side.

“Let me explain this properly,” he said. “The time reversal isn’t the Solar Bell’s primary ability. The Solar Bell’s primary ability is — it augments the Solar King’s Restoration talent. The Restoration talent, combined with the Solar Bell, running through the Time Domain and the Time Law, produces the time reversal as an output. The Solar King isn’t powerful because of the Bell. The Solar King is powerful because of his Restoration talent. The Bell is the delivery mechanism.”

He paused.

“So if you’re trying to break the time reversal by attacking the Bell, you’re solving the wrong problem.”

“Then how do you break Restoration?” The Radiance Domain Emperor, against his better judgment, was now invested in the answer.

“The Restoration talent is powerful. But it has a weakness.”

Yue Yang said it simply.

It landed like a physical thing.

The Solar King — who had shown nothing through the entire conversation except polite attention — showed something now. A fraction of something. The quality of a man who has just heard his name called in a place where no one should know it.

Is this real?

The new generation’s Prison Emperor of the Sky Tower — could he actually have an answer? Could he actually beat the Solar King, with time reversal, with the Bell, with everything?