Chapter 178 - The Wrath Incarnate

A bolt of thunder fell upon him, striking Cale directly and sending him crashing to the ground.

It was not weak by any means.

The impact shattered what remained of his defenses, leaving him gasping and bleeding on the scattered stone pieces.

But he rose again.

Slowly, agonizingly, Cale forced his half-crippled, bleeding body upward, rising from the shattered land to face the sky...

Turning his back to the ruined mountain, he threw his arms wide open in a fearless gesture of defiance.

"If... I’m dying... why won’t I mock my killer...? Hahaha!"

His torn, blood-soaked robes slipped down his broad, heavily scarred shoulders, exposing his battered, muscular burnt back to the roaring storm as his long hair whipped wildly in the celestial tempest.

It was healing, but the heavens were deliberately slowing it, denying him even that small mercy.

He stood beneath the overwhelming, blazing golden and crimson vortex that dominated the heavens, surrounded by massive chunks of shattered stone floating in air.

"If I’m dying, I want a cool death..."

He wasn’t sensing them before, but many presences suddenly appeared around him.

"This..."

To think such a thing would happen. The eyes of eternity upon him.

Then, an idea came to him.

If he chanted and preached Dao, helping even one of them in their cultivation, they could help in return. Or else, just chanting itself helped in increasing his own strength too. There were no demerits.

He took a deep breath,

"You old foggers... listen up!

Because you believe upper realms exist, you perceive yourselves as nothing more than ants trapped within its boundaries. Blaming everything on the heavens! You just look for something above you to blame.

You struggle... resist, and you devote your lives to breaking free from this so-called mortality. But what’s even the point?

But tell me, even if you succeed in escaping this, what then? Will you truly be free?

Humans are greedy creatures! We will always fight each other, because maybe beyond transcendence lies another realm. And another one beyond that. It’s just the universe testing your limits of how much you can take!

You are creatures trapped in laws and rules you yourself made! You can’t even break free of those. How the hell would you ever hope of escaping the will of heavens?

I can tell... many of you are stuck in your realms for hundreds of years with no progress at all.

I understood this truth just a year ago.

So tell me...

Why must there be a Heavenly Will at all? To control humans? Nah... it’s for humans to break and take control of!"

It hadn’t even been thirty seconds, yet the heavens were likely preparing its final attacks. Or maybe it forgot to breathe too.

For a cultivator of his incredibly low realm to utter such audacious, blasphemous things would normally be an instant death sentence.

Yet, as his heaven-defying words echoed through the spatial rifts, the countless people watching from the void did not move to silence him.

Instead, they were shaken by the purity of his conviction.

Intrigued by the madness of his rebellion, many supreme beings made a collective, unprecedented choice.

From across the fractured dimensions, dazzling rivers of incredibly dense, vibrant qi suddenly poured out of the spatial tears.

Cale grinned.

’It worked... it’s so easy to mess with their brains...’

Like a majestic, multi-colored meteor shower, the boundless energy of countless legendary cultivators fell downward, forcefully channeling directly into Cale’s shattered body to help him sustain his domains.

It was an unspoken wager against the heavens themselves.

By lending him their strength, the watchers were putting his audacious Dao to the test.

If the heavens ultimately crushed him, his words were nothing but the arrogant ramblings of a fool.

But if he somehow survived, it meant his defiant truth was meaningful.

Regardless of whether he emerged victorious or was reduced to ash, one thing was certain: the name Cale had just been permanently seared into the annals of history, destined to soar as a foolish legend throughout the entirety of the Eight Planes.

Cale’s long white hair was now completely drenched in his own blood, falling in heavy, crimson strands across his battered shoulders and framing his cold, piercing gaze.

Pushing his body past the point of oblivion, he forcibly fused the multi-colored energy pouring in from the watching cultivators with his three overlapping domains, channeling it all into his Beast Phantom Technique.

The technique was strictly bound to the laws of nature. It was designed to manifest the ethereal forms of monsters and savage creatures, incapable of projecting a human soul.

Yet, Cale no longer cared for the laws of nature.

Deep within his ruined core, he possessed something far more terrifying than any beast: an endless reservoir of heaven-slaying wrath.

Tapping directly into that bestial wrath, he bypassed the technique’s limitations by using his own manifestation of wrath as the example.

Instead of a serpent or a dragon, the turbulent heavens erupted with blinding golden and crimson light to birth a colossal, towering Dharma body.

The massive manifestation took the exact form of Cale himself.

Driven by the bestial fury of its creator, the giant human phantom lunged upward.

The heavenly will, pushed to the brink by Cale’s unprecedented trick and the audacious interference of the watchers, refused to tolerate his attacks any longer.

As his colossal, wrath-fueled Dharma body surged upward to tear at the void, the sky violently churned, ripping itself open to unleash a new, more powerful attack.

A colossal fist erupted from the heavens, plunging downward with intent to kill.

The strike was heavily reinforced by massive, rune-etched golden plating that burned with the authority of the heavens itself.

Driven by the fury of the cosmos, the blow aimed directly for Cale’s manifestation, intent on mercilessly defeating his bestial wrath into nothingness before he could ever reach the Astral Sovereign Body.

The clash between Cale’s manifestation of wrath and the heavens’ descending crimson fist pushed the isolated inheritance world past its breaking point.

BOOM!

The collision was truly out of the world. The dimensional boundaries shattered like glass.

’Hahahah... as planned!’

Unable to endure the realm-shattering pressure of this battle, the very foundations of the dimension started to dismantle.

Recognizing the unstoppable, terrifying force of Cale’s will, the will of the inheritance space finally surrendered.

Rather than be torn apart by forces it was never designed to contain, the realm actively yielded, throwing its full, desperate support behind the bloodied mortal.

The inheritance itself — the accumulated power of a Divine Stage cultivator’s legacy, poured into Cale, helping him forcefully solidify his control over the Astral Sovereign Body.