There was no room for anything other than stark terror in Pijiu’s mind. Like master, like disciple. Tianqi was crueler and even more evil than his master!

Pijiu had been counting on the great influence formed between the Lun Mountain and Lun River to take out his enemy. After all, it could trap and kill connate demon gods! But Tianqi was the god of Mount Tai and a student of feng shui. This kind of layout might as well not exist in his eyes; he could dismantle it with a single huff.

Now that he’d destroyed it in such a simple and brutal manner, Pijiu couldn’t even go down with his enemy if he wanted to. When Tianqi mentioned his father once more, a humbling fear reduced the gray deer to a petrified heap on the ground, hopeless despair written across his face.

Tianqi sneered and stored Pijiu in a seed storage with a wave of his hand. He walked over to Ah Bao and gently lifted her up in his arms, checking her for injuries. She was fast asleep and hadn’t seemed to have suffered anything. If that hadn’t been the case, Tianqi would’ve smashed Pijiu to pieces without further ado, instead of wasting all that time bantering back and forth.

Boooom.

The skies abruptly darkened as an enormous claw descended from the heavens, intending to crush Tianqi flat.

Startled, Tianqi whirled around and hovered protectively over Ah Bao. At the same time, a huge dark figure wreathed in hellfire blasted out from his back. It wielded a pitch-black sickle that flashed viciously before slicing at the claw.

Humm.

Black sword light arced through the void, almost separating sky from earth in a single, mighty slash. Like doom, the terrifying light broke the giant claw to smithereens, and blackish-red blood poured down like rain.

“That’s Ji Du’s greatest treasure, why’s it in your hands?!” A dismayed and furious shriek echoed through the air while the attacker revealed themselves in the void.

It was an immense monkey that was three thousand meters tall. Tawny fur covered his body, but his eyes and mouth were red like they were on fire.

“Yonghe, how dare trash like you make trouble for my master?!” Tianqi immediately recognized the demon god. [1]

Yonghe counted only as middle of the pack; his status was far lower than that of Bashe and Dusk Snake. But as a connate demon god, he was still a lofty being and a chaos realm master. He looked coldly at Tianqi with flames burning in his eyes.

“Why is Ji Du’s blade in your hands?” he asked again.

“My master gave it to me, of course.” Tianqi’s true form was still below, protecting Ah Bao. Up in the air, he used a wisp of hellfire to wield the black sickle and face off against Yonghe.

However, he was secretly very nervous. He wasn’t his master in the sense of being able to use empyrean realm cultivation to defeat a chaos realm demon god. If Yonghe came down hard on him, he wouldn’t be able to withstand the demon god even though he had hellfire at his disposal.

“Lie Shan of the human race?” Yonghe leered. “Though I’m not his match, my opponent today is you! If I eat you, I’ll become the mountain god of Mount Tai and control its power!”

He shrank swiftly as he spoke and turned into a big monkey three meters tall to charge Tianqi.

“You!!” Tianqi’s expression tightened, and the sickle in his hand furiously churned forward. Black rays of sword energy crashed down on Yonghe like they were firing out of an ocean of qi.

An emerald colored club appeared in Yonghe’s hands, twirling and whipping through the air before it smashed Tianqi’s attack to pieces.

“Die!!” Yonghe thwacked his club down and smashed through Tianqi’s hellfire projection, then hurtled downward as a meteor of emerald light, arriving above the boy’s true body in the blink of an eye and bringing his club down a second time.

He wanted to eat the mountain god divine decree inside Tianqi, and not the mountain god himself.

Hummm.

A pillar of black light erupted from Tianqi’s body and blasted into the skies while a black square object floated out of his form. Yonghe’s second attack connected solidly with it, reducing his hands to a messy pulp from the recoil.

“What is that?!” Yonghe screamed from his high vantage point.

Tianqi slowly stood up with Ah Bao in his arms. Hellfire burned in both his eyes and around the big black seal over his head. Two twisted characters slowly emerged on the square seal: Suppression Seal.

This was the seal that Wahuang had gifted to Tianqi upon taking him as a disciple.

“I hadn’t been able to refine this seal all this time—it turns out I needed to activate it with hellfire… senior master…” Tianqi thought of both Wahuang and Lu Yun.

Lu Yun should know how to bring the seal to life, but hadn’t conveyed how to use the connate treasure to his disciple. They’d given their presents to Tianqi, but the rest was up to him. Thanks to a string of happy coincidences, he’d brought the seal to life with hellfire!

The emerald club in Yonghe’s hand was a connate treasure, but it was leagues apart when compared to peerless-grade connate treasures. He should be counting his blessings that only his hands had been injured from smashing his weapon into that treasure.

“This is something that can take your life!” Tianqi laughed heartily. He summoned the seal to action, sending hellfire dancing through the skies to wrap around it and release its incomparable might.

“I’m out!” Yonghe promptly dismissed all ambitions at the sight and flipped backwards, vanishing without a trace.

Tianqi waved a hand and collected the emerald club.

“Mm, this is a connate treasure at the end of the day. Auntie Bao doesn’t have a proper treasure to call her own yet.” A smile crossed his face, he used the Suppression Seal to overpower the club and turned it into a club one meter tall, then shoved it into Ah Bao’s hands.

……

“Pfft!” Yonghe’s swiftly escaping figure jerked to a halt roughly fifty thousand kilometers away and he spat out a mouthful of blood. “My sprout! God of Mount Tai, I will not suffer to live beneath the same skies as you!”

“Yonghe, who do you hate?” A voice suffused with evil sounded by his ear.

“Luo Houluo?” Yonghe jumped and looked at the man in front of him with shock. “No, you’re not Luo Houluo, you’re Darkriver!”

“Kekeke—” The man in front of him who looked like Luo Houluo, but somehow also like Darkriver, stretched out a bloody claw and closed it around Yonghe’s neck. Staring at the newcomer in plain terror, Yonghe couldn’t twitch even a muscle.

How… what… who……..

He slowly lost all movement and ceased shifting entirely. Yonghe’s figure gradually deflated into a dried monkey skin and drifted to the ground.

“Who am I?” Confusion flashed through the eyes of the man who seemed both like Darkriver and Luo Houluo. “Who I am? But… hehe. Lie Shan… Ji Du! Heh heh, no matter who I am, I’ll be coming for both of you!”

1. Yonghe is an ape with yellow fur, red eyes, and red mouth from the Classic of Mountains and Seas. Its appearance often meant impending famine from crop failure.