The slash hadn’t just taken the Water Palace Master Cang Long’s hand — it had also sheared off most of his beard. His robe split at the chest, a spreading bloom of red soaking through the fabric.
“Impossible!” The Water Palace Master’s voice cracked. His expression was that of a man who had just seen a ghost.
“You’re clever, and you hide well.” Yue Yang’s smile was brighter than sunlight. “But let me tell you something: your era is over. And victory obtained through tricks is no real victory at all. That’s not the right path.”
The one with the greatest power wins in the end, regardless of method. Conversely, no matter how elegantly you maneuver, without the matching strength behind it, all your tricks eventually become a punchline.
Yue Yang didn’t press the attack. He simply fixed the old fox with a cold stare and waited.
The Water Palace Master Cang Long looked at his severed hand for a long moment.
Then he began to laugh — the laugh of someone who had lost his grip on sanity. “Ha! Hahaha! Do you honestly think breaking my second talent with some domain or Law-force, cutting off one hand — do you think that defeats me? How delightfully naive.”
Yue Yang looked at him, puzzled.
“Allow me to share some unfortunate news.” The Water Palace Master’s laughter cut off like a blade dropping. He bent, picked up the severed hand from the ground, and pressed it back against the stump. The two surfaces knit together in an instant, indistinguishable from before. The chest wound had already healed — and even the beard at his chin was slowly extending, creeping back to its original length, strand by strand. He tapped his dragon-head staff against the ground and delivered his rebuke with the air of an elder instructing a promising but overconfident student: “Young man. Don’t assume every race in the celestial realm is as fragile as you humans. As a member of the Water People, severing a limb is nothing — even if you took this head clean off, it wouldn’t trouble me. We have none of your human frailties. We are half-elemental bodies. As long as the element exists, we cannot die.”
“You have no idea what human bodies are actually good for,” Yue Yang said. “But I’m not going to argue with you about it.”
The Water People’s immortal physique was real — but so was the fact that human bodies carried the greatest potential of any race, and grew the fastest when cultivated. He wasn’t interested in relitigating that now.
“Breaking my second talent — yes, you’ve done well for someone your age. But as long as you’re human, that fragile and pitiable body of yours is your death sentence.” The Water Palace Master raised his dragon-head staff and began to move. A white mist — the texture of water vapor, but alive with purpose — spread from his body and began rolling outward in every direction.
Yue Yang noticed, almost immediately, that breathing had become difficult.
The mist wasn’t exactly water, so conventional water-breathing techniques did nothing. But the humidity was crushing — being inside it felt like being submerged without being submerged, the lungs straining for air they couldn’t quite reach.
The Water Palace Master was pleased with himself. This was his domain — the Tidal Mist Domain. Any living creature caught inside it fell under his control. An ordinary Sky-rank warrior, he could kill instantly, simply by extracting all the moisture from their body and leaving them a desiccated husk.
Against Yue Yang’s will and power, direct extraction wouldn’t work. But he knew the three critical vulnerabilities of the human body. First: the mind, shielded by sovereign intent and therefore effectively untouchable. Second: the heart — stop it and the body fails, but this young man’s heart was surrounded by too much concentrated energy to easily interfere with. Third: the lungs. The lungs required continuous contact with outside air. Deny them that for a few minutes, and even the strongest human body begins to break down.
Yue Yang was extraordinary. But he was still human.
And humans had to breathe.
The Tidal Mist Domain couldn’t steal the moisture from Yue Yang’s body directly, but it could displace all the air in the space and fill it with mist — mist that, once it found its way into the lungs, would let him do whatever he wished with them.
Yue Yang raised the Crescent Blade and slashed forward.
Cang Long stood right there in front of him — and yet the blade energy veered sideways in the mist, curving away from its target as though the space itself had redirected it, then dissolved into one of the swirling white vortexes behind him.
Second slash, aimed at the ground.
The blade should have carved a deep groove into the white jade floor. At minimum, the edge should have bitten into the surface. Instead, something stranger happened — Yue Yang, mid-swing, found himself lifting off the ground entirely. He floated. He couldn’t anchor himself. He couldn’t push down. Inside the Tidal Mist Domain, everything was subject to its master’s will — attack, escape, even simply standing on the ground was no longer something Yue Yang could take for granted.
“If this weren’t the Divine Codex, I couldn’t do this to you,” the Water Palace Master said, and beneath the venerable elder’s face something sharp and ugly showed at the corner of his mouth. “You could simply retreat into your Grimoire and I wouldn’t have the patience to wait. But here — no Grimoire summoning. There’s nowhere to go.”
“So I’m finished?” Yue Yang’s face showed nothing that resembled fear.
“You’ll suffocate inside this mist. Slowly. I know someone like you won’t go easily — it might take a day. It might take a month. But however long it takes, if there’s a chance of success, I have the patience to wait a year. Ten years. A hundred.”
“Impressive domain,” Yue Yang said. “But don’t you want to know what my domain is?”
“Oh, I don’t need to know that.” Cang Long laughed. “Because my Tidal Mist Domain is a little different from other people’s domains.”
Yue Yang said nothing, waiting.
“Once I deploy it, my opponents lose any opportunity to use their own domains. It is an absolute sovereign domain — it overrides all others.” The Water Palace Master’s satisfaction was visible.
“And the Divine Hall Supreme taught you this as well?” Yue Yang’s voice had shifted, just slightly.
“Perhaps you don’t know — but this is a capability every Hall Master in the Divine Hall’s service is required to master.” Cang Long watched Yue Yang’s breathing become more labored and felt his mood improve with each passing second. He had done this to opponents before. He had never felt quite this satisfied. Killing an ordinary enemy was nothing. Killing the hope of Sky Tower, killing the new Prison Emperor of a rising generation — that was something else.
“Is this how comprehension of Law-force begins?” Yue Yang murmured, half to himself. Something had clicked — he understood now why the Divine Hall Supreme required every Hall Master to master a sovereign domain. It was cultivation through combat pressure. Growth through resistance.
Talent-force, expanding into domain-force. Domain-force, refined into sovereign domain-force. Sovereign domain-force, elevated further into Law-force. The Central Divine Hall had no Rebirth Gate, no requirement that its people walk the Perfect Innate Sovereign path. But this was their version of it — a structured progression from innate ability to domain to sovereign domain to Law. Harder for Sky Tower’s method to access, but vastly more accessible to the broader population of celestial warriors. Sky Tower’s path required absolute individual genius — brilliance or obscurity, no middle ground. The Divine Hall’s path produced reliable elites. Not genius-tier, but enough to maintain dominance.
In one moment, Yue Yang felt he understood the Divine Hall Supreme’s strategy rather better than before.
“Breathe,” Cang Long said cheerfully. “Breathe as hard as you like. The more you breathe, the more mist floods your lungs. This isn’t just in the air around you — it can penetrate the body itself. Before long, you’ll be swollen with water from the inside out. Like a corpse found floating in a river.”
“I have to admit,” Yue Yang said, “your knowledge of human vulnerabilities is thorough.” He paused. “However. There are always exceptions. My body isn’t an ordinary human body. That’s your greatest miscalculation.”
He put away the Crescent Blade.
Both hands spread open.
Ground-origin Yin Flame scattered around his body like seeds dropped from a palm.
The Water Palace Master stared. These flames — the kind that detonated the moment any external energy touched them — were sitting there in perfect stillness. Quiet as a mirror lake. Still as a dry well.
“Still unclear?” Yue Yang began walking toward Cang Long. No matter how the Water Palace Master drove his Tidal Mist Domain, it could not impede Yue Yang’s movement by a single step. What was stranger still — Cang Long tried to retreat, and found the Tidal Mist Domain resisting him, holding him in place, as though the domain’s master had changed hands and its true owner was now this young man walking toward him.
“Impossible. This is my domain.” Cang Long’s face had finally changed color.
“Wrong. This is my Creation Domain. Since the Solar King left, you’ve been inside a dream. Did you know that?” Yue Yang snapped a bracelet onto his wrist — the Energy-Draining Bracelet — and before Cang Long could call up an elemental catastrophe, closed his fingers around the old man’s throat. “I didn’t dare use my domain freely while the Solar King was watching — he might have found the seam. But he’s gone now. And the dream you’ve been in has been very revealing. I’ve learned quite a few of the Divine Hall Supreme’s secrets. Thank you sincerely for your contribution.”
“Even with an elemental catastrophe, you can’t kill me!” Cang Long fought back with every reserve he had.
“I’m not going to kill you.” Yue Yang’s smile was gentle. “I’m going to turn you into a ball of fire. And let you burn forever. I imagine you’ll find it quite warm.”
“No —” The color drained from the Water Palace Master’s face entirely. He stared at Yue Yang’s left hand with something beyond fear, and found — he didn’t know when it had appeared there — a flame the color of rebirth and endings both.
Nirvana Fire.
“Given how durable you are, the conversion may take a while. I’d appreciate your cooperation.” Yue Yang’s free hand pulled the dragon-head staff from Cang Long’s grip as easily as picking up a twig. “And don’t think this staff is going to help you — that snake war beast you’ve been hiding in it is gone. It’s a fake. Everything you’ve seen has been a fake. Though of course, simultaneously real.”
Only now did Cang Long fully believe it: he had been inside Yue Yang’s dream-trap from the beginning.
“Mercy — I surrender!”
“I’m so sorry,” Yue Yang said pleasantly, his smile taking on a quality that was somehow worse than a demon’s, “I didn’t quite catch that. Could you repeat it?”
Cang Long opened his mouth.
What came out was fire.
The confrontation between Yue Yang and the Water Palace Master, inside the Creation Domain, had taken several days of subjective time to resolve.
In the world outside the domain, it had been seconds.
Ming Rihao had watched the whole thing — watched Yue Yang take the Water Palace Master by the throat, watched him convert the unkillable old man into a living flame, watched him toss the result onto the steps in front of him like disposing of trash. The shock of it hit him harder than anything else he’d seen today.
“How did you do that?”
Ming Rihao had known Yue Yang would win. He had not expected the win to look like this.
Yue Yang gave a deeply self-satisfied sound. “Trade secret.”
Yue Yu, who had drifted in from somewhere nearby, was quietly covering her mouth and trying not to laugh. The truth was — against a half-elemental body like Cang Long’s, this particular combination was almost unfair. Natural elemental suppression, domain suppression, Nirvana Fire, Heaven’s Wrath Crimson Lotus, Twilight Sky Flame, Chitian Divine Blaze, Ground-origin Yin Flame, Creation Domain, and the Energy-Draining Bracelet’s elemental catastrophe all stacked together — if Yue Yang still couldn’t take down the Water Palace Master with that arsenal, he wouldn’t be Yue Xiao San.
The more important truth was that inside the Creation Domain, Yue Yang had spent the equivalent of several days working on Cang Long before the fire took hold. It had only appeared to be seconds.
That was the Creation Domain’s real nature — more profound even than the Rebirth Gate. Time and space, life and energy — all of it moved at Yue Yang’s discretion.
Inside the Creation Domain, Yue Yang was the god of that small world.
“And what do we do with her?” Princess Qianqian had noticed the Freedom Queen lying on the steps, and now she turned to fix Yue Yang with a stare that could have been borrowed from a tiger — the precise expression of someone who has just caught a certain person doing something they should not have been doing.