“You think that’s enough to kill me?” The Solar King’s expression was composed. Beneath it, he was furious.

It was the particular fury of someone who had trusted a friend and been deceived without mercy.

He had believed he understood this young man. He had known there were hidden cards — there were always hidden cards — but not this many. He had told himself: pay a certain price, absorb a certain amount of damage, and the victory would come. He would stand over the defeated enemy and feel the appropriate emotions — the grudging respect for a worthy opponent, the weariness of a hard-won fight. That was what he had expected.

This was something else entirely.

Yue Yang Titan wasn’t trying to hold out. He was trying to kill him.

Something cracked open in the Solar King’s chest — the shame of being deceived, and beneath that, the outrage of being genuinely challenged. Of being hunted.

You think you can kill the Solar King?

You haven’t earned that right.

He drew a long breath and forced the anger down. “Even if the Conquest Queen came herself, she could not kill me. I am no longer the coward who fled ten thousand years ago. I am the Solar King of the Sun God Palace.”

Yue Yang said nothing.

He was gently wiping the two trails of blood from Xiao Wenli’s eyes — the price her Binding talent had extracted from her. He pressed a careful kiss to her pale little face.

The Solar King’s fist closed hard. “Whatever else you’re hiding — you will die here. The gap between us is too great.”

His entire body erupted into divine radiance. He was prepared to spend everything — to burn reserves of divine force accumulated over ten thousand years, to damage his own perfected body, to take a loss in power tier after this battle ended — if it meant killing this infuriating young man.

Ji Wuri, the heaven-favored prodigy of the Central Divine Hall, had never looked at him with eyes that said I am going to end you.

This young man did.

“Die.” The Solar King drove his Time Domain and Time Law outward until they filled the entire Purple-Gold Divine Hall, then gathered his terminal solar divine force into his fist and drove it at Yue Yang’s heart — absolute and unstoppable.

You put an arrow through my heart. I’ll put my fist through yours.

Yue Yang pushed Yao and Yu aside and met the strike with his arm spinning in a spiral — trying to bleed off some of the impact’s momentum.

The Solar King feinted. At the last instant, his gold fist pulled back — and in the gap where Yue Yang’s deflection met empty air, reinforced by the Time Law, the second strike came.

No obstruction this time.

The divine-force-laden fist drove into Yue Yang’s chest with full weight behind it. Ribs broke. The fist sank in.

“Die!” The Solar King’s howl carried genuine satisfaction. Inside his Time Domain and Time Law, every defensive measure became meaningless — the entire spatial field was his.

“Back at you.” Yue Yang’s throat sent a spray of blood directly into the Solar King’s face.

Xiao Wenli’s twin blades came sliding in from behind like fish moving through water, pressing against Yue Yang’s skin, slipping through the torn clothing, crashing down onto the Solar King’s still-embedded fist. The fist recoiled — divine force scattering into gold light that could harm nothing — but the skin along the Solar King’s forearm flash-froze, slowing the withdrawal significantly. The dragon sisters’ combat kicks came in immediately after, landing on his knees — not enough to seriously wound him, but enough to shift his center of gravity by a small degree.

Yue Yang used the opening.

Both hands. Ten fingers like sword blades.

He drove them into the Solar King’s left and right ears simultaneously — Black Returning Burial and Scarlet Heaven Tempering, both released at once.

The Innate Body-Piercing Invisible Sword Qi. In the days before Yue Yang had fully developed it, the sword qi alone had cut through everything it met. What he unleashed now, condensed to this point — even the Solar King couldn’t stop it, especially with most of his divine force already committed to the punch that had just connected with Yue Yang’s chest. Like two knives pressing through a sandbag, Black Returning Burial and Scarlet Heaven Tempering broke through the Solar King’s protective energy and drove straight through into his skull.

The Solar King felt a spike of pain directly in his mind. His vision went black.

His right fist hadn’t retracted yet. His left came around.

A golden fist. Divine force behind it. Thunder in its momentum.

It scattered Yao and Yu sideways, broke through Xiao Wenli’s guard, and hit Yue Yang in the chest like a fired cannon shell.

He had been aiming for the skull. The pain of two swords through his ears had disrupted his targeting. Yue Yang hadn’t dared take it fully — he threw himself backward, using the retreat to bleed off as much of the force as the angle allowed.

Blood sprayed from his throat.

Where the fist had connected — his ribs were gone. Beneath them, his lungs had been turned into something that felt like a volcano erupting inside his own chest. The Solar King’s divine force was inside him now, burning.

He couldn’t breathe.

Pain. Lung injury. The divine force itself. All three conspired against the basic function of drawing air.

Yue Yang had never experienced anything quite like this. His Innate Sword Qi tempered body, his Nirvana Flame-cleansed constitution — this body that had been rebuilt and refined through more cycles of death and regeneration than could be counted — was struggling under the impact of a single punch. Without the Innate Sword Qi and Nirvana Flame and his devouring instinct all simultaneously working to erode the Solar King’s divine force from within, Yue Yang had no doubt he would already be dead.

So tired. So much pain. I want to fall down —

Even knowing he couldn’t, his body had stopped listening to that knowledge.

“AHHHH!” Yue Yang drove the White Frost Bloom sword into his own left chest.

His heart had stopped.

The Solar King’s Time Domain and Time Law, combined with the divine force ravaging his interior — a stopped heart would not restart on its own. It would only continue to fail. He had been holding the White Frost Bloom back precisely for this: to drive out the divine force lingering inside him. Under normal circumstances he might have waited longer, absorbed more through his devouring instinct, but right now there wasn’t a second to spare.

“Start beating.” He found that the White Frost Bloom was insufficient. It cleared some of the solar divine force, but not enough. His heart recovered slightly — and still would not beat.

Xiao Wenli screamed.

Blood tears ran from her eyes. Her small hands, with total disregard for the cost to herself, poured pure light energy into a healing sphere and pressed it flat against Yue Yang’s chest.

The Solar King swayed. Despite two swords having been driven through his ears, he was still standing. His face was painted with Yue Yang’s blood and his own — the mingled marks of this exchange. His expression was ugly. “It’s useless. A heart shattered by divine force cannot be healed by anything. You’re finished.”

Xiao Wenli’s face went through something when she heard that.

She pressed the expression flat. The tears came anyway. She bit her lip to stop the sound of crying and kept building the light sphere — kept trying to drive the residual divine force from Yue Yang’s chest.

Yue Yang, strangely, went calm.

One hand on each of them, he stopped Yao and Yu from moving toward him. Stepped them back.

The Solar King wiped the blood from his eyes. He looked at Yue Yang’s face.

The face was calm in a way that wasn’t peace.

He’s going to take me with him.

The Solar King, who had believed this was already over, felt something he hadn’t expected. A formless unease. To press it down, he moved through the dizziness and pain still ringing in his head from the sword strikes, stepped forward, and threw another gold fist at Yue Yang.

A force the Solar King had never sensed before erupted from Yue Yang’s body.

It was full of hatred. Full of ruin. It felt like something that wanted to extinguish every living thing that existed. The curse in it made the Solar King’s own soul shudder. Against this force, solar divine force felt like winter afternoon sunlight — pale and distant.

But Yue Yang couldn’t actually channel it fully. He was only pushing through the thinnest thread of it —

The Solar King pulled his fist back.

His golden fist had gone black.

The other force was acting like a contagion — spreading from fingers to forearm to shoulder, pouring toward his heart. Like falling into a world of absolute cold.

The Solar King turned and stepped back. Yue Yang was already dying. He could simply observe the process.

Yue Yang and Xiao Wenli were sent flying together, landing a hundred meters out.

He had taken the Solar King’s punch head-on, and the bones of his fist had fractured under it. In raw physical force, several full tiers separated them. That wasn’t changeable.

The dragon sisters rushed to get him upright.

Yue Yang pressed one hand against his chest. The heart was still not beating. His blood was moving on the forced circulation of the Innate Sword Qi alone, and even that couldn’t hold indefinitely. He was weakening with every second that passed.

“Kill.” The word came out of him low and without sound — but his eyes carried it. Kill the Solar King. That was the only way to stop and heal. Otherwise he simply ran out of time.

Xiao Wenli flung the dragon sisters out of the Purple-Gold Divine Hall. The message was clear: go get Yue Yu and the others.

The Solar King’s hand swept up, sending dozens of light columns shooting forward.

Yue Yang leapt. In the air, spiraling like a soaring dragon, he deflected every column and drove himself straight at the Solar King, carrying divine force of his own in the rush.

The Solar King had learned. He didn’t take it directly. He produced a sphere of almost living light — his special war beast, the Rebounding Light — flexible, elastic, amplifying any force that struck it back at the attacker.

Yue Yang flicked one finger.

The Rebounding Light sailed away sideways, harmless, with no apparent effort.

His feet came down on open air and he drove the Solar King toward a direct exchange.

The Solar King shifted sideways, threw a kick — still refusing to commit to a frontal clash.

But the contact happened anyway, and when it did, the Solar King felt the paralysis spread through him. Because what Yue Yang carried now was not the Calamity god-force from before — it was something older. Something chaotic. The primordial energy before creation had sorted itself.

His mind went to fog. His body went numb.

In the sky above, a great golden serpent demon image appeared — the shape and bearing of the Conquest Queen in her prime, unstoppable, absolute.

The image raised the weapon in its hands.

Full force.

It came down on the Solar King where he still held his kick-position.

The Solar King’s midsection exploded with blood. He nearly came apart at the waist. The pain tore through his control and he couldn’t hold the sound in.

In the same instant, behind Yue Yang, a second enormous golden image appeared — divine in its presence — and slapped both Yue Yang and Xiao Wenli sideways through the air.

Yue Yang hit the ground.

The Solar King, who had been screaming, had already crossed the distance.

A golden fist, the third time. Driving at Yue Yang’s chest with the full weight of a body prepared to kill, the Solar King’s quasi-divine form fully unleashed.

“Let me send you off.”

The Solar King’s face in this moment was the face of a man past all pretense.

Yue Yang said nothing. But the Solar King looked at his eyes, expecting fear, and found instead a coldness that reached into him.

The Solar King’s instinct spiked and he tried to pull the punch back.

Too late.

A column of Nirvana Fire — focused, concentrated, everything Yue Yang could compress into one beam — erupted from the point of contact and engulfed the Solar King entirely.

The sound it made broke through the roof of the Purple-Gold Divine Hall and kept going.