Chapter 1415: Falling Heaven & Their Master!

Phei bent down, and that small movement shattered what was left of Marcus more thoroughly than any storm. His eyes went wide with such absolute horror that for a moment Phei thought the man might destroy his own mind simply trying to flee what he knew was coming.

Marcus tried to shrink back again, useless limbs scraping across the golden surface while his wings twitched in a pitiful mockery of retreat.

Phei extended one finger, and Marcus stared at it.

If terror had a final shape, perhaps it was something this simple: watching a hand come down toward you while every part of your being already knew that nothing you did could stop it. Phei’s fingertip touched the center of Marcus’s brow; disgust stirred in him, because even this tiny touch felt like more than the bastard deserved.

But the feeling no longer mattered at that moment—

"Cosmic Dragon Slave Mark!"

The Soul Realm exploded all at once, so suddenly it looked like the end of everything. The golden sea beneath them heaved upward in one unfathomable surge while the heavens split above, and for a single impossible instant Marcus’s Soul Realm laid bare the staggering wealth of World Essence it held.

The ocean below climbed into the sky in walls the size of continents while the golden heavens seemed to melt and pour downward to meet it. Two shining infinities rushed toward each other, one rising and one falling, until Phei and Marcus sat at the heart of a collision vast enough to make it seem the realm was caught between the death of two worlds.

The first impact swallowed every direction.

Golden storms were born everywhere at once.

Cyclones of raw World Essence twisted across the horizon, wider than mountain ranges, swallowing oceans of light and spitting them back as blazing rain.

Spears of condensed radiance tore through the chaos like heavenly lightning, each one splitting great swaths of the storm before vanishing beneath fresh eruptions. Whirlpools large enough to swallow kingdoms opened in the rising sea, only to be ripped apart by shockwaves rolling across the realm like visible walls.

—every drop of World Essence seemed to wake at the same moment, the once-serene power remembering that what can nourish creation can become just as monstrous when it is violently disturbed. The noise was too great to be called sound. It was pressure given a voice, the roar of an entire Soul Realm that could encompass continents upon continents was being forced to kneel to a new master.

Every current changed direction, and the catastrophe rushed toward Phei.

The rising sea bent inward before the falling heavens followed.

Golden hurricanes curved around the center of the realm while tidal walls that stretched beyond sight folded toward a single point. What had looked like two worlds trying to destroy each other became one colossal convergence, an all-devouring tide of World Essence so vast its crest disappeared into the storm and its base swallowed the horizon.

Marcus vanished inside it.

His ruined body was far too small to matter against what his Soul Realm was doing, and Phei could no longer tell whether the man had been buried, drowned, torn apart or simply swallowed by his own inheritance turning against him.

Phei did not care, because the catastrophe was not coming to destroy him.

It was coming to its new MASTER!

At the very heart of the converging storm lay a perfect circle of calm, and Phei sat within it.

His legs were crossed beneath him and his long white hair drifted around his shoulders in slow pale currents, untouched by the fury outside. His face wore a serenity that bordered on insult while the destruction of Marcus’s Soul Realm closed in from every side.

Beyond that small domain of stillness, golden seas crashed together hard enough to birth new storms with every heartbeat.

Within it, even the faintest ripple died.

The first torrent reached the edge, and its madness ended at once. A wall of World Essence large enough to wipe away a continent softened the moment it crossed into Phei’s stillness, collapsing into graceful streams of liquid gold that curved around his body before sinking into him. Another came screaming down from above with enough force to shatter spirit mountains, only to become a quiet ribbon of light the instant it touched the calm around him.

Then thousands followed. Rivers flowed into him. Seas flowed into him. Whole storms surrendered their violence at the edge of his meditation and poured into Phei as smoothly and obediently as worshippers bowing at an altar.

Outside, Marcus’s Soul Realm looked like the last moments of creation tearing itself apart.

Inside, Phei cultivated as though seated beside a garden pond.

World Essence flooded through his soul in amounts no cultivator should have been able to swallow safely. It came richer, more primal and far purer than almost anything Phei had ever touched, yet the moment it crossed into him there was no struggle.

His soul welcomed it before his cultivation too drank and bathed in the flow. The foundation within him seemed to carve deeper channels with every flood, drawing the power deep into his Soul Realm, where it was tempered and refined until it began to pool and settle, the first faint shores of a Soul Sea was taking shape where only emptiness had been before.

His soul drank greedily, and the boundaries of his own Soul Realm began pushing outward.

With every current his soul aura grew denser.

The overwhelming tide did not shake his foundation; it pressed down on it and compacted it, until the presence radiating from him felt heavier, vaster and older, like an ancient beast stirring after ten thousand years of slumber.

It did not feel like swallowing a stranger’s Essence; it felt as though something sealed deep within his very being had been starving since birth by this very World Essence and was finally being fed what the heavens had always owed it; it was awakening!

The World Essence kept coming.

Beyond the circle of stillness its fury never faded.

Marcus’s Soul Realm went on collapsing around him, golden seas surging upward and heavens crashing down in endless cycles of ruin, yet every calamity bent inward in the end and became another meek stream flowing into Phei.

He refused none of it.

With each breath the domain of calm around him spread a little wider. More of the storm bowed and poured in, and more of Marcus’s Soul Realm became his.

Then a blue light flickered into being before him. The System window was almost laughably tranquil against the devastation, its familiar glow perfectly still while whole golden horizons tore themselves apart behind it.

[Ding! You have enslaved a Progenitor!]

[Slave: Angel Progenitor!]

[Host can now control, wield and fully manipulate World Essence!]

[New Element—]

[New Bloo—]