No matter how Yue Yang approached it, the guard simply would not move.

Its will had merged with the Laws of the passage itself. Force wasn’t an option.

He had no choice but to retreat for now.

The guard’s condition: Perfect Innate Sovereign tier eight or above. The minimum requirement to enter. Yue Yang’s reaction to this was the kind that couldn’t really be voiced in polite company — if he were tier eight, he wouldn’t need to contract a Divine Codex, he’d just march straight into the Central Divine Hall and take whatever he wanted. He said nothing, but the sentiment was clear on his face.

Since he couldn’t go further, he could at least be thorough on his way out. Yue Yang spent the next interval conducting what could charitably be called a comprehensive survey of the outer false Purple-Gold Hall and the dozens of independent spaces around it, extracting every item of value he could locate before leaving. Only then did his mood approach something resembling equilibrium.

“If you brought Xiao Xiao’en here,” the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady offered helpfully, “the guard might let you through out of clan solidarity.”

Xiao Xiao’en — the giant loli with ancient Titan royal bloodline, whose name no one ever questioned despite it making no obvious sense.

Princess Qianqian shook her head. “That guard isn’t necessarily a Titan. It might be a different ancient lineage entirely. And even if it were a Titan — a guard chosen by an ancient deity to stand watch forever isn’t going to be the flexible type. Ancient deities don’t appoint someone who makes exceptions.”

Yue Yu agreed, but softened it: “We’re not coming out empty-handed anyway. There’s still the golden coffin! It might be full of treasures.”

Yue Yang filed the golden coffin under to be investigated at leisure. Things already in hand could wait. It was the things that might slip away that demanded immediate attention.

The search of the outer spaces yielded considerably more than expected. Among the items recovered: Dew of Vitality, which when consumed produced a mild but genuine rejuvenating effect; Leaves of Wisdom, a weaker version of the Wisdom Fruit but present in quantity large enough that the total was meaningful for war beast intelligence enhancement. The single most valuable find, however, was a full crate of Celestial Dragon Crystal Stones.

Celestial Dragon Crystal Stones were not Dragon Crystals. They were something comparable — energy crystals of extraordinary purity, carrying no elemental attribute whatsoever. Their application was extremely specific: war puppet construction. Feeding them to a living war beast would cause attribute corruption — at best the beast would lose certain capabilities, at worst, detonation. For most people, a crate of Celestial Dragon Crystal Stones was essentially useless.

Yue Yang was not most people.

“Rich.” He said it with genuine satisfaction. With over a hundred of these, he had material for extensive experimentation. He was done making Battle Angels — Ika was the achievement of that line and the techniques had been lost to the rest of the world anyway. But other puppet constructs were possible. More immediately, these crystals, combined with specific energy stones and specialty metals, were exactly what he’d been missing for the advanced war beast bracelet he’d been trying to develop.

“Look at you,” Princess Qianqian said with fond exasperation.

The Drunken Cat Imperial Lady kept the thought to herself: His Majesty may be in some danger if the war beast bracelet research progresses. The midnight infiltrations could resume. She arranged her expression into one of total ignorance on all relevant subjects.

Celestial Dragon Crystal Stones? What Celestial Dragon Crystal Stones?

Yue Yu sighed quietly to herself. She was going to be busy. However many test sessions the bracelet research required — she’d be there for them. At least it meant staying close to him.

“Let’s open the golden coffin, take whatever’s inside, and go home,” Yue Yang said.

He was also curious about the ongoing battle situation — they still hadn’t received the post-victory growth notifications, which was genuinely strange. The Solar King was the most dangerous threat and they’d cleared that. Gray Wolf and Tianzhu’s group against the Two-Faced King should be manageable. Fengxian and the others had the Poet’s faction of the Eight Generals. So what was still pending? The question nagged.

“If it’s empty,” Princess Qianqian said, with the particular gleam of someone who had been waiting to deploy this joke, “I can imagine a certain someone’s expression very clearly.”

“Tiger girl,” Yue Yang said with great dignity, “if this coffin is empty, your bottom is in serious danger. I want to be clear about that.”

“You dare?” Princess Qianqian had never been afraid of him and wasn’t starting now. She gave him a look of magnificent disdain. “Pervert.”

“I’m fully supporting this initiative,” the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady said, and quietly reached over to pinch Princess Qianqian’s bottom through the side of a crowd. An excellent result. This provoked immediate and energetic retaliation in kind, and Yue Yang watched both of them with the expression of a man who had made a series of excellent life decisions and was now enjoying the returns.

“This coffin is a little different from the last one,” Yue Yu said, inspecting it with genuine attention and rescuing the situation from total chaos.

With the first golden coffin as reference, the second took Yue Yang about ten minutes to map — tracing the rune formations across its surface, finding the energy pathways, then applying a counter-current.

The lid opened without sound.

A flash of gold light shot out from inside. Yue Yu and the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady both reached — and missed. Princess Qianqian was too far back to intercept. The light had covered a hundred meters before Ika, Hong, or Aman could respond. Duoduo was faster than all of them. Her hand closed around the golden light in a single unhurried motion.

She opened her palm.

A small sphere of light hovered before her. In the center of it, something tiny stared out at the assembled group with very evident fear.

Yue Yang activated his Heavenly Eye of Wisdom and immediately made an involuntary sound. “That’s a metal lifeform. How — a puppet construct can produce actual life?“

Whatever had produced this creature didn’t look like a construct at all. It looked like a spirit — an ancient fairy, half an inch tall, with dragonfly-transparent wings on its back, a slender body clearly feminine in form, wearing something that looked like silk gauze but read unmistakably to any practiced eye as metal. Not woven metal, not armored — something that moved and draped like fabric while being entirely composed of an extraordinary and unknown alloy.

What Yue Yang’s Heavenly Eye supplied alongside the visual was the following:

Ancient Guiding Spirit: Metal lifeform from the ancient era. Sacred-tier. Advanced intelligence. Energy replenishment from ambient spatial energy — automatic. Does not age. Does not tire. Serves only divine beings. Once a master-servant covenant is made, serves for life, until the master’s death or release. Special abilities: Trace, Maze-break, Guide, Thousand-League Instant Transfer, Spacetime Return.

“Please don’t kill me.” The tiny creature’s voice was small and frightened. It spoke only the ancient language — not the celestial realm’s current common tongue, not Sky Tower’s.

Yue Yang couldn’t speak ancient language, but he understood its rune-script. He drew a quick symbol — safe — and gestured for Duoduo to release the creature.

Guiding Spirits couldn’t be killed anyway. No matter how completely the physical form was destroyed, it would reconstitute. The only effective way to contain one was to seal it inside a space it couldn’t exit — as had apparently been done for however many thousands of years it had been in the coffin.

Duoduo released her hand with a slight reluctance. The Guiding Spirit’s fear of the divine beast pressure vanished the instant the containment lifted — and then the creature itself vanished, teleporting tens of thousands of meters away in a single blink and continuing to move until she was completely out of sight.

Princess Qianqian stared at where it had been and turned to Yue Yang with an actual punch. “You’re never this generous usually.”

“The only master it will accept is a divine being,” Yue Yang said. “Negotiating with something like that is a waste of time. Better to let it go.”

Princess Qianqian absorbed this and let the subject drop. Yue Yu and the Drunken Cat Imperial Lady exchanged a small knowing smile — so that was why he’d been so immediately willing to release it. If there had been any possibility of contracting it, that creature would have been in Yue Yang’s possession before it finished blinking.

The coffin’s contents, beyond the Guiding Spirit, exceeded everything from the previous one.

First: an ancient war puppet schematic book.

Second: a small glass bottle containing three drops of ancient divine blood.

Yue Yang nearly levitated.

Three drops of genuine ancient divine blood — compared to which everything he had previously obtained in that category was, in his own internal assessment, barely qualifying as a distant relative of the real thing. With these three drops, problems he had previously shelved as unresolvable became suddenly, actually workable.

Third: a large Soul Stone — its exterior slightly dimmed, probably from the Guiding Spirit having absorbed some portion of its energy over the millennia, but the remaining reserves were still extraordinary. Yue Yang paused over this one. Aman, to push her further? The Chaos Phantom, to use as a soul anchor? Someone else? This required thought.

Fourth: an ancient beast hide of unknown origin — almost certainly a treasure map, though finding anything it indicated across the tens of thousands of years of terrain modification the celestial realm had undergone would be a serious undertaking. Worth attempting eventually.

Fifth: a small metal sphere. Holding it, Yue Yang felt a faint and curious vibration — a specific resonance he recognized as the type produced by a construct’s core module. The equivalent of a brain, driving a body. What body? The war puppet schematic book presumably knew. He filed it for investigation.

By the measure of the three drops of ancient divine blood alone, this expedition had paid for itself many times over.

Yue Yang’s mood, which had been at various points over the past day somewhere between frustrated and philosophical, arrived at genuinely good. He grabbed Princess Qianqian and kissed her right there in front of everyone.

She flushed magnificently and spent the next several seconds pretending to struggle, then accepted it, sharing the small warm joy of this moment with him. The instant he released her, she bit him.

He yelped.

Everyone laughed.

Tiger girl, he thought, always biting.

As the group prepared to leave the Divine Codex space, the tiny Guiding Spirit reappeared.

She had apparently worked out where she was — and what was about to happen to everyone. She hovered at a careful distance from Yue Yang, deeply uncertain, watching each person file into his Grimoire World one by one with an expression that cycled through several emotions simultaneously.

She wanted to come.

She was afraid of him.

One by one the others went in. The Guiding Spirit watched with increasing anxiety until she saw Duoduo extend one small hand toward her in invitation.

She hesitated for exactly one moment.

Then teleported directly to Duoduo, tucked her tiny self into the flowers of Duoduo’s crown, pulled one petal gently across herself like a blanket, and appeared to immediately fall asleep in the most comfortable flower cluster she could find, clearly convinced that she had been completely invisible throughout this process.

Duoduo glanced at Yue Yang and gave him a small nod.

Yue Yang gave her a thumbs up.

Duoduo stepped into the light, smiling.