The battle booming from the Purple-Gold Divine Hall continued without pause.
To the ear, it sounded like two equals trading blow for blow — neither gaining ground, neither losing it.
But Princess Qianqian and Yue Yu both understood exactly what the true gap was. It was simple: Yue Yang’s foundation, his base depth of power. No matter how extraordinary his talent, no matter how hard he worked, he could not yet match the Solar King’s accumulated strength. Talent could compensate for many things, but not for ten thousand years of cultivation. That gap was simply too wide.
Princess Qianqian bit down, turned away from the Purple-Gold Divine Hall above them, and ran. Worrying while standing still was a waste. Finding the palace’s secret as fast as possible, then getting up there to help — that was the only thing that mattered.
Past the vast imperial gardens, a massive wall separated the outer and inner palace sections, with three gates set into it.
Before the central gate, a young woman stood waiting.
She was dressed in gold — a radiance coming off her that made it difficult to look directly at her. The light wasn’t ornamental. It was power.
Princess Qianqian’s heart sank the moment she saw her.
She had never met this woman, but she could feel her. This woman fell just below the Nine-Radiance Empress in raw power — which put her significantly above the Nine-Radiance King. A serious opponent, and Princess Qianqian had very few people with her.
“You must be Yue Yang Titan’s wife.” The woman’s voice was measured. Her eyes moved over Princess Qianqian with steady appraisal. “I imagine your goal is the same as mine — find the Divine Codex’s secret, help your husband win. Before we decide this between us, shall we exchange names? I am Wulan. Three-Legged Golden Crow Clan, Tang Valley. My husband’s second consort. And you?”
“Also a second,” Princess Qianqian said. “Family name Jun, given name Yuan. Of the Jun family of Sky Tower’s Longteng Continent.”
She didn’t mention that Yue Yang knew the Golden Crow Clan’s Eighth Prince Wuhai. On a battlefield like this, personal connections meant nothing. Mentioning it would only drain her own spirit — this woman Wulan wouldn’t spare her out of any connection to a junior clan member, and Princess Qianqian wouldn’t spare her either. Besides, Wulan had clearly married into her position very early; she might not even know someone as junior as the Eighth Prince.
“What a coincidence — you’re also a second.” Wulan smiled. “Then the gentle-looking girl must be the first wife.”
“She’s his sister.” Princess Qianqian shook her head firmly. “And the actual first — if she were here, you’d already be dead. She’s considerably less patient than I am.”
In any other context, Princess Qianqian would never admit that Xue Wuxia outranked her. At minimum, she’d insist they were equal. But right now she needed the threat, and Wuxia — sleeping through divine nature integration, emerging with power that certainly exceeded Princess Qianqian’s current level — made an excellent trump card to keep in reserve.
“Oh? Is she the one the Jester’s intelligence named as Sky Tower’s foremost — the Supreme?” Wulan’s smile didn’t change.
“She is not the Supreme.” Princess Qianqian declined to hand her anything more.
“Sky Tower lives up to its reputation,” Wulan said, looking past Qianqian to take in the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady, the chilong girl Jiang Ying, and Gold-Crowned Thorn Queen Duoduo. Her nods were genuine and slightly admiring. “Once it rises, nothing seems to stop it.”
“I’m also his wife, though I’ve lost track of what number I am — the man has no sense of moderation.” The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady stepped forward and offered a proper bow.
“Each one more remarkable than the last.” Wulan’s attention moved to the last arrival. “And all three of you are life-guardian war beasts? That’s extraordinary. Three different species simultaneously — a dragon girl, a thorn queen, and you—” Her eyes narrowed slightly at Ika. “You’re not an earth divine soldier. Not a human divine soldier either. Are you what the legends call a celestial divine soldier?”
“I’m human,” Ika said flatly. Outside of those she recognized as her own, Ika had nothing for enemies. She had been designed and built in the ancient era for a single purpose: killing.
She was not human. She was a Battle Angel — the distillation of an era’s greatest knowledge, then altered further by Yue Yang’s intervention. Originally Sacred-tier, something in the process — Yue Yang’s blood, some unknown mutation in the creation — had produced something far beyond that threshold. Everyone had initially estimated Divine-tier, but Ika’s rate of growth had made them reconsider. Whatever she was, she exceeded all their categories, and kept rising.
She had started weaker than Hong, Aman, Jiang Ying, and Duoduo. After her training on the Sky Stairway’s World Tree, she had caught up to all of them — and even Hong, Aman, and Jiang Ying, who had fully absorbed the power of ancient deity gifts and were learning to wield their own Law-forces, couldn’t pull ahead of someone whose very nature was built around slaughter.
“I suppose there are advantages to a man with broad tastes,” Wulan said softly. “More help in a fight.” Her expression settled. “I thought this would be straightforward. I see now it won’t be. Come then, all of you. I fight for my husband — you fight for yours or your master. Let’s make this a proper one.”
“Lady Ye — take Jiang Ying and Ika ahead,” Princess Qianqian said. If Wulan was the second consort, then the first and third had already gone through. Wulan was here as the rearguard. “Duoduo and I will follow.”
“Confidence is admirable,” Wulan said pleasantly. “Just don’t let it become carelessness—”
Her hand rose.
A sphere of energy condensed above Princess Qianqian’s head — a hundred meters across, radiating heat comparable to a small sun — and dropped.
Princess Qianqian screamed and charged directly into it, Prison Emperor divine sword swinging, completely ignoring the sphere above her, presenting every indication of mutual destruction.
Jiang Ying moved from behind the group before the sphere could land. Both hands wove ancient rune formations. Dragon Sovereign divine power exploded outward — and the sun-equivalent sphere stopped dead above Princess Qianqian’s head, suspended by force of will. Jiang Ying stamped her foot. Her body flooded with energy. Under the guidance of her Law and will, that energy became a water dragon that shot straight up into the sky, growing as it rose.
At its peak it turned and came back down.
Open-mouthed, it swallowed the sphere whole. The heat made the dragon writhe and convulse. It spat the sphere out, then swallowed it again. Several cycles of this, and the sphere had diminished — compressed into a dragon pearl the water dragon now tossed and played with in the air, entirely detached from its original master, harmless.
On the other side of the exchange, Princess Qianqian had brought the Prison Emperor divine sword down in a full-force blow.
World-ending. Annihilating.
Wulan caught it between two fingers.
“I did say.” Her jade hand held the divine sword in place; her other hand called up nine spheres, each several times more powerful than the first, and detonated all of them at point-blank range into Princess Qianqian’s face.
“Watch out!” The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady had seen it — Wulan’s first attack was a decoy all along.
“Cover.“
A cold sound, faster than lightning by a hundred times. Ika appeared in front of Princess Qianqian — no one had seen her move — her third combat form active, the blade-like wings spread wide and closed around her charge. Let a planet explode against those wings, and not one hair on Princess Qianqian’s head would be touched while Ika still stood.
Nine solar spheres detonated. The impact that should have annihilated everything in range met Ika’s wings instead.
Three of the nine, steered by Wulan’s will, split off and curved toward Jiang Ying, the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady, and Duoduo respectively.
The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady was the weakest of the three. She didn’t try to take it directly — she vanished in an instant and reappeared behind Duoduo.
Jiang Ying raised her second water dragon, which swallowed and absorbed the incoming sphere, converting it into a second dragon pearl.
Behind Duoduo, a strange flower had grown from somewhere, its mouth open — it swallowed the two spheres that came for her, then swallowed the energy from Jiang Ying’s sphere as well, and began to evolve. Where there had been one flower, now there were two blazing sunflowers, burning and growing.
Wulan stared at Duoduo’s flower. She had assessed Jiang Ying’s water dragon as the most capable neutralization method present. The flower had been more effortless.
A plant-type war beast suppressing a Golden Crow Clan’s Nine-Nine Blazing Sun?
“Arrow!“
Ika had taken five consecutive hits from Wulan’s spheres in the process of shielding Princess Qianqian. She was driven back a hundred meters and came up furious.
Her life-guardian war beast — the Wishing Angel — appeared and sounded a horn, pouring maximum empowerment into its master.
Above Ika’s head, a battle avatar rose.
Her own form, replicated at enormous scale — hundreds of meters tall, solemn and immovable as a divine statue.
That colossal Battle Angel avatar drew one arm back like a bowstring, using hatred itself as the arrow, and released.
The arrow struck Wulan directly.
Wulan’s face changed. She felt it the moment it hit — this was Law-level force. Unavoidable. Unblockable. Something no power could intercept or deflect. She hadn’t known Ika carried the Hatred talent — and she didn’t know what it meant, but she felt it immediately: from this moment, until Ika died or the hatred faded, the arrow would remain embedded in Wulan, and no external force could remove it. Ika herself, meanwhile, had just gained ten times her normal hatred-fueled power and entered a berserk state that rendered her immune to every debuff in existence.
BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM —
Ika began firing. Hundreds of energy shots per second, light columns falling like rain.
The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady and Jiang Ying scrambled sideways to avoid friendly fire.
Only Duoduo held position, steadily summoning thorn flowers and letting them devour the ambient energy as it poured past, each absorption making them larger, more evolved, more voracious. For Duoduo, the more violent the battle, the better — every exchange fed her flowers, and her flowers fed her growth.
“Annihilation.“
Ika’s eyes had gone past red into something beyond it. Both arms came up and behind her back, where an enormous energy cannon had materialized — she lifted it overhead and the barrel began drinking in energy at a terrifying rate. The solar spheres from earlier, as devastating as they had been, were sparrows compared to this eagle. If this cannon fired and hit something —
Wulan had been deflecting Ika’s rapid-fire volley with one open palm. Now she changed her face and screamed “She’s insane!” and threw herself clear.
The beam that left the cannon exceeded sound.
It shattered the space it passed through.
In one second it crossed the distance to the wall — the wall that had shown not a crack from the combined force of several solar spheres and nearly a hundred energy blasts — and blew a hole through it ten meters across.
The beam kept going. Deep into whatever lay beyond.
Ten seconds passed.
Then the shockwave returned — the sound of the impact reaching them long after the light.
Wulan’s face went white.
She knew exactly how durable that wall was. She had tested it herself — half-power, deliberate, careful — and produced a hairline crack. The inner structures of the Divine Codex space, protected by Law-force, were effectively indestructible. And this creature had put a ten-meter hole through the wall in one shot.
If that cannon hit her directly —
That battle angel’s peak destructive output is above mine.
She was lucky the firing rate was slow. Lucky it couldn’t be sustained continuously. But even with those limits — if she had taken one of those shots cleanly, there wouldn’t be much left to describe.
“I see I’ll need to give this my full attention,” Wulan said, studying the ache in her palm from the sustained rapid-fire impacts — each individual shot was manageable, but the accumulation was adding up. “You’re all more dangerous than I expected. Waiting for backup would be a mistake.”
She needed to end this quickly.
The blood-red flooded Wulan’s eyes. Just the killing intent from that crimson gaze was enough to push Jiang Ying back several steps. Her jade hands blurred into motion — one sweeping cut that tore the space open, unleashing dozens of feather-shaped sword qi that stacked into ranks, then spiral formations, then sweeping vortexes that engulfed Princess Qianqian, the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady, Jiang Ying, Ika, and Duoduo all at once.
Before the sword qi finished its work, Wulan raised both arms high, clawed hands reaching toward the sky — then drove them down.
Two golden claws, each a thousand meters from tip to base, blotted out everything.
The left came down toward the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady — the weakest target.
The right targeted the girl with the divine sword.
Wulan had never seen Princess Qianqian demonstrate the ceiling of her power. But instinct and the particular sharpness that belonged to women told her: this one, holding a divine artifact, was the most dangerous of all of them. Divine artifacts could not be underestimated. Not in anyone’s hands. Not ever.
Take her down first, before that truth asserted itself.
“Opening — counterattack!” Princess Qianqian’s cry cut through everything.
Jiang Ying became a water dragon and threw herself alongside Princess Qianqian toward Wulan. Duoduo called up ten million thorn flowers — a sea of them — pressing back against the golden claws from above, the flowers devouring the sword qi vortexes simultaneously, carving open a corridor through the chaos for the charge.
Ika was already there, faster than any of them, the Angel’s Blade swinging in from the flank to hit Wulan from the side at the exact moment her two great techniques had extended their reach and she had not yet pulled them back.