The blood altar.
The Lion King opened his massive jaws and fired nineteen Lion Blast Winds in rapid succession. Inside the Silent King’s Prayer Domain, this already devastating attack was amplified to its absolute ceiling — dark gold in color, solid as physical matter, the kind of thing that would kill any Sky-rank warrior below the national ruler tier outright with a single hit. That alone wasn’t enough. The Silent King’s life-guardian war beast, the Devout, guided all nineteen blasts with pure focused intent, threading them under the Prayer Domain’s reinforcement.
All nineteen Lion Blast Winds struck Yue Yang’s body.
Every single one landed.
BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM —
A chain of explosions tore through the space around the altar. Shockwave after shockwave ripped the surrounding air apart, warping and shredding the space itself. The ravine walls collapsed in massive sheets. Boulders lifted into the air. Dust and smoke rose in a curtain that blacked out the sky, and the center of the blast shone so violently — like a sun shattering — that no one could look at it directly.
Fireballs continued burning in the sky long after the impacts ended.
Lightning writhed and crackled in golden arcs.
Under that kind of attack, aimed at any other target, the Lion King would not have wasted a single second wondering whether the enemy survived. The answer would be obvious.
But this was the new Prison Emperor. The Lion King found he couldn’t bring himself to be fully confident even now. This was a young man who had flipped heaven and earth and hung the stars upside down as casually as turning over a page. A young man who had fooled the razor-sharp Solar King, escaped the Divine Codex, returned to the Storm Sea, then fooled the Silent King and everyone else with him — and somehow, with some technique no one could identify, transported every single companion to the fifth level of Sky Tower’s Sky Stairway.
Could nineteen Lion Blast Winds kill that?
Heavily injuring him would already be something, the Lion King told himself.
Without the Silent King pouring everything into holding the young man in place, there would never have been an opening to unload all nineteen. Whatever happened next, at least they had landed.
Human bodies were human bodies. No matter how warped his abilities, his flesh was still mortal. And mortal flesh had no reason to emerge from that unharmed.
Among all living creatures, the human body was among the most fragile. Against truly powerful species, it was practically synonymous with the word breakable.
Yue Yang went quiet.
Not a sound. Not the faintest trace of presence.
Could the ambush have actually — actually —
No. That’s not possible.
The Silent King’s divine force palm had connected cleanly as well. Was this young man the type whose body could resist soul-level attacks but not raw energy discharge? Was that his weakness — couldn’t hold up against blunt force and burning? If so, how had he survived the Solar King’s solar burst energy storms?
“Is he actually dead?” the Golden Crown King asked, exchanging a baffled look with the Lion King.
The two of them edged forward. The Silent King held position at the rear.
Together they struck — both palms at once — and the resulting wind became a full gale that swept the entire area, tearing away every particle of smoke and grit the way a hurricane strips a coastline clean.
The blood altar emerged from the haze.
Empty.
No body. No remains. Just the altar standing there in the cleared air, silently suggesting that whoever had been standing on it was simply gone.
The Lion King and the Golden Crown King stared at each other — half elated, half convinced they were dreaming.
“The human body,” the Golden Crown King said, his voice actually shaking with the effort of containing his relief, “really is remarkably fragile, isn’t it.”
“Don’t celebrate yet,” the Lion King said, already sounding more cautious than he felt. The Silent King had done most of the work here — the credit belonged to him.
They were about to move forward to examine the blast site when the Silent King’s pupils snapped down to pinpoints.
He had seen something.
He turned.
Slowly.
The expression on his face — on the face of a man who never showed anything — was the expression of an ordinary person who has just seen a ghost.
The Lion King and Golden Crown King lurched forward at the sight of it, then spun around simultaneously, ready for an attack from behind.
There was no attack. There was no one there at all. Only empty sky, only the broken stone wasteland with its desolate wind moving through the ruins, everything exactly as it had been.
“What’s wrong?” the Lion King couldn’t see it.
“Everything looks normal,” the Golden Crown King said, turning left, turning right, finding nothing.
The Silent King said nothing.
Then, with an abrupt decisiveness, he pivoted and kicked the Mudskipper Hound at his feet as hard as he could — sent it arcing through the air in a long curve, slamming into the cliff wall tens of thousands of meters away.
“That was the Mudskipper Hound,” the Lion King said, unable to keep the wince out of his voice. Only a Hall Master or above could own one. The Silent King had always treated his war beasts well — and the Mudskipper Hound was his prized companion. There was no logic to kicking it. What in the world was happening?
The Golden Crown King felt a jolt of the same alarm — and then he found it.
The Mudskipper Hound hit the cliff wall.
Rock exploded outward.
But there was no yelp. No sound at all.
The Mudskipper Hound didn’t vocalize. It simply shattered — collapsed into a pile of rubble.
A fake. The creature sitting at the Silent King’s feet had been a stone double. Which meant if it was an enemy’s work, they were already inside the group’s perimeter. The Lion King and Golden Crown King couldn’t work out how Yue Yang had substituted a stone replica for a living war beast without any of them noticing.
And where had the real Mudskipper Hound gone?
Woof. Woof woof.
Barking.
Right at the Silent King’s feet, where the stone had been, a living Mudskipper Hound was sitting.
Was this one real or another substitute?
The Silent King’s face changed. He raised both palms and detonated everything — his full output combined with the Devout — condensing it into an enormous sphere of divine-sense energy the size of a small sun. He drove it straight into the ground.
The Lion King and Golden Crown King barely had time to register what he was doing before they were throwing themselves skyward, clawing for altitude, trying to get clear of the blast radius in time — that thing went off at point-blank range, it wouldn’t just destroy whatever he was targeting, it would tear up everything within range including them —
Then the world changed.
Like a curtain being lifted from a stage. Like a breeze dissolving morning fog. Something that had been covering everything simply was no longer there, and what had been underneath was revealed all at once.
In one instant, the world was completely different.
The broken ravine, the desolate ruins, the stone wasteland, the goddess statue rising from the blood altar — every bit of it gone.
The Lion King found that he and the other two were hanging upside-down from the sky itself, suspended above a vast, pale snowfield stretching in every direction below them. Pieces of ice drifted through the air at various heights, large and small, dissolving with an almost imperceptible slowness —
The Silent King raised his arm.
His own skin was dissolving.
Not quickly. But completely without resistance. Whatever was consuming it, no power he could bring to bear had any effect on it. His energy, measured against the force eating at the space around him, was like trying to dam a river with a handful of soil.
“Well, well.” A voice came from across the snowfield, from inside a palace of ice crystal that rose from the white expanse below. The voice wasn’t loud, but it carried through the entire frozen world and landed against the Silent King’s, Lion King’s, and Golden Crown King’s consciousness like a hammer striking a bell — not painful, simply absolute. There was a quality in it that no vocabulary could quite reach: a certainty so complete it didn’t need to announce itself. It entered their minds and opened something, the way a key opens a lock. “Silence, of all people. Barging into Sky Tower to cause trouble — and it turns out to be you.”
The Silent King went rigid.
Fine cold sweat appeared at his temples.
“Is that the Supreme?” the Lion King said. The Jester’s intelligence had been clear: Sky Tower’s two great threats were Yue Yang, the new Prison Emperor, and a woman who went by the title Supreme.
“Something about the voice,” the Golden Crown King muttered, searching his memory. He couldn’t place it, but it tugged at him — something he had heard before, somewhere.
“Allow me to make an introduction.” Yue Yang appeared from nowhere in particular, clapped his hands together to get everyone’s attention. His expression was pleasant. Pleasantly villainous. The kind of face that made people want to put a fist through it. Xiao Wenli followed a step behind him as always. She raised one small hand, gave a light toss — the Mudskipper Hound landed on the snowfield surface, and the moment it hit, it scrambled to its feet and bolted straight for the Silent King.
This time it didn’t get far.
One jump from the snow and the Mudskipper Hound froze solid mid-leap — fully encased in an instant, momentum carrying it forward even as a corpse, a block of ice sliding across the surface until it came to rest at the Silent King’s feet. Through the transparent ice, the Lion King could see the Hound’s expression on the far side: the flicker of recognition, the sudden joy at finding its master, the eagerness of the last few meters —
And then nothing.
The Lion King was now completely certain. The Mudskipper Hound was dead.
Irrevocably dead.
It had been killed by a force of Law — operating at a tier comparable to the divine. Under that kind of force, a Divine Beast itself would struggle to survive, let alone a tracker war beast. And unlike ordinary death by cold, the Mudskipper Hound’s body didn’t persist. A second force — different in nature but equally terrifying — simply consumed every particle of its energy. With nothing left to sustain it, the ice shell vanished as they watched: first to powder, then to nothing. Gone so completely it might never have existed.
“Ah — I may have been a little slow with the introduction there, but no matter, I think you’ve gathered the essentials.” Yue Yang coughed lightly and looked apologetic. “This is Black Void Space — an ancient deity’s sealed domain. Below us is Her Imperial Majesty Vivienne’s ice world, currently under construction, which is why the ice palace is a touch unfinished. However, as a student of Her Imperial Majesty Vivienne — or so I’m told — I really couldn’t in good conscience fail to receive our esteemed guests properly.” He pressed his palms together with every appearance of genuine contrition. “I’m afraid I was rather a poor host back on the fifth level of the Sky Stairway. I’ve only just taken up the role of Prison Emperor and my manners are still developing. I do hope that, for Her Imperial Majesty’s sake, you’ll overlook this one lapse.”
Anyone who didn’t know better would have thought he was inviting them to dinner.
The sincerity, at least on the surface, was impeccable.
One large drop of sweat traced its way down the Silent King’s temple. He was beginning to grasp the severity of what was happening.
This was no longer simply a question of dying in battle.
If the Conquest Queen moved — if she truly acted — they would be taken prisoner. All of them, himself included. And if they were taken prisoner, he couldn’t hold the Divine Hall’s secrets. He couldn’t hold anything. And the Lion King and Golden Crown King would hold even less. If the Conquest Queen is about to break free of the Black Void seal and return to the world —
He turned to the Lion King and Golden Crown King and made a rapid sign.
Self-detonate.
The Lion King and Golden Crown King felt the ground drop out from under them.
Self-detonate? Without even seeing the Conquest Queen face to face? She was sealed — she’d been burning her reserves for years — maybe this was all a bluff. Blowing themselves up without being sure would be an absurd waste.
“Thinking about dying?” The voice came an instant before the speaker did — faster than sound, faster than they could track. By the time the words registered in their ears, their eyes had already seen it: the Silent King, preparing to detonate, his head suddenly seized and held by a woman in crystal battle armor. He froze solid in one instant — every part of him, entirely encased, a perfect ice statue. She turned.
The face she revealed stopped the Lion King and Golden Crown King colder than any ice could.
They would have known that face if they’d forgotten their own parents. That face had once shaken the entire celestial realm. That face had, nearly alone, driven the Central Divine Hall to the edge of defeat.
Their voices broke out of them simultaneously, without any decision to speak:
“The Conquest Queen!”
Vivienne’s luminous eyes moved across them.
The way you’d glance at insects.
Her killing intent was a physical pressure in the air.
Her voice, when it came, was colder than the world around them:
“Will you submit — or shall I make you?”
The Lion King, named the most courageous warrior in the entire Central Divine Hall, felt his soul leave his body. His knees nearly buckled. He tried to swallow, tried to open his mouth to say something, anything — and found his throat had gone completely dry.
“Kneel.” Vivienne’s expression had gone very still, in the way that meant the storm had already arrived. “I have not moved in ten thousand years, and you insects took that for an empty tower.”