When Yang Chen's declaration—"I'll die right in front of you"—turned into the purest will of destruction and spread from the source of his Divine Soul.
The entire boiling Sea of Karmic Force seemed to have had its pause button pressed.
Time and space lost all meaning within this abyss of curses.
The pitch-black shockwave, condensed from Ancestral Dragon's lifelong venomous hatred and carrying the wails of billions of dragon souls, came to an abrupt halt less than a foot from Yang Chen's Divine Soul body.
It had not been blocked.
It had frozen solid.
Every wisp of resentment and every remnant soul that formed the shockwave halted midway, as though an invisible yet supreme force had clutched them by the throat.
Ancestral Dragon's vast remnant soul, so immense it seemed boundless, froze as well.
The two hollow sockets in his eyes, lit by ghastly green ghostfire, stared fixedly at Yang Chen. The flames no longer flickered or burned; they simply remained frozen in place, reflecting an unprecedented bewilderment.
He... was stunned.
A pure, fundamental kind of bewilderment that ran through his entire existence.
Dead? He wanted to die? No... that was impossible. Living beings sought survival; that was the foundation of the Great Dao, an iron law established when chaos first opened. This wretch... what nonsense was he spouting? Was this some new divine ability? Or had he... gone mad?
In his understanding, in his long memories spanning the primordial and ancient eras, "life" was the sole goal for which all things struggled.
To survive, one could resort to any means.
To survive, one could bow and scrape.
To survive, one could betray everything.
This was the iron law carved into the deepest parts of every living being's True Spirit in the prehistoric world, the fundamental force driving the entire world onward.
But this junior before him...
This man who had inherited Rahula's karma, who should have been the lowliest of debtors in his eyes, had actually turned "death" into a weapon.
A weapon... powerful enough to threaten him, the creditor.
What kind of tactic was this?
It overturned everything he understood about conflict, karma, life, and death.
How long had he lived?
Even he could no longer remember.
He had once been the first dragon between heaven and earth, the supreme emperor who ruled the Four Seas and Eight Wastes.
He had experienced the Great Calamity of Dragon and Han, an era of bloodshed so brutal that even heaven and earth had been shattered.
He had witnessed the unfathomable depths of the Dao Ancestor and experienced the Demon Ancestor's sinister cunning.
He had fought Phoenix Ancestor and First Qilin for the supreme karmic position of heaven and earth's protagonist, and he had slaughtered countless descendants of Chaos Demon Gods and primordial ferocious beasts.
I, Ancestral Dragon! For the sake of a sliver of survival, I led billions of my kin to stain the prehistoric world with blood. Phoenix Ancestor and First Qilin—who among them did not fight to the last drop of blood for their clans' continuation? Even a fiend like Rahula sought survival through attaining the Dao! Death? Death is failure, the end, oblivion! How could... how could it be used as a weapon?!
He had seen more formidable figures than there were mountains in the prehistoric world.
He had trampled more powerful beings than there was water in the Four Seas.
Yet he had never seen, nor even imagined, that there could be a living being so... unwilling to play by the rules!
Using one's own life to threaten an enemy?
Using mutual destruction to settle karma?
Was this a battle of techniques?
No.
This was kidnapping!
And the hostage had tied himself up, then threatened to kill himself unless the kidnapper guaranteed that he could live well!
How absurd!
How... unsolvable!
This is not the conquest of an emperor, nor is it a duel between the strong. This is... this is the trick of a gutter-crawling worm! Using his own life to threaten me? How despicable! How shameless! But... damn it... it works!
For the first time, Ancestral Dragon's will—that vast and tyrannical will capable of making even Quasi-Saints tremble—suffered a logical break.
What did he want?
He wanted revenge.
He wanted this junior to suffer the endless agony of the dragon clan's extinction for all eternity, using his lowly True Spirit to quell the resentful flames of billions of dragon descendants.
That was the only obsession that had sustained him to this day.
What I want is not for him to die! I want him alive, wailing amid endless karmic fire! I want his True Spirit to endure the gnawing of my clan's dead souls day and night, so that he may taste one ten-thousandth of the pain we endured! I want him to regret it, to regret inheriting this monstrous karma!
But the premise of this "revenge" was that he himself, along with the dragon clan's dead souls, still existed within this Sea of Karmic Force.
If this junior truly detonated boundless karmic force and blasted the entire prehistoric world back into chaos...
What meaning would his revenge still have?
This final indestructible obsession of his, along with the remnant souls of Phoenix Ancestor and First Qilin, would likely be utterly erased in that all-consuming explosion, leaving behind not even the last trace of their existence.
They would vanish like smoke.
Never to exist again.
No... even our final obsessions would be dragged into extinction with him. My hatred, my resentment, would have nowhere left to reside.
In an instant, Ancestral Dragon's thoughts, frozen for countless epochs, fell into a fierce and unprecedented dilemma.
Fight?
The other party would die at once, dragging the entire prehistoric world into the grave with him. Everyone would be finished together.
Do not fight?
Then he could only watch this culprit, who had inherited their blood-deep enmity, swagger before him and even... look at him as though he were an idiot.
He felt as if his Divine Soul were spasming.
That feeling was even more suffocating than when he had been plotted against by the Heavenly Dao and ended up with his clan exterminated and himself slain.
It was the helplessness of possessing boundless strength yet being unable to move beneath a single straw.
It was the absurdity of having every justification on his side, only for the other party to flip the board with the most shameless method possible.
Infuriating! How utterly infuriating! When I died and my Dao dissipated, I still held unwillingness and fighting spirit in my heart. But today, facing a mere Grand Unity Golden Immortal junior, I... I have even lost the right to attack?
He was Ancestral Dragon, the first overlord between heaven and earth.
Yet he, the greatest creditor, had been completely controlled by a deadbeat debtor drowning in debt!
The towering fury with nowhere to vent could not strike Yang Chen, so it began to lash back at himself.
Boom!
The pitch-black karmic fire burning over his broken dragon body suddenly surged thousands of feet high, making the ghostly green light in his hollow eye sockets even more sinister.
His Divine Soul roared, yet not a single sound emerged.
Because he did not know what to say.
Call Yang Chen shameless?
Yang Chen would only laugh even more happily.
Reason with him?
He would turn around and lecture you about "public morality."
This was no longer a battle of techniques. It was a dimensional strike.
Using an entirely new logic that he had never understood, Yang Chen had thoroughly crushed him on a spiritual level.
The next moment, the pitch-black dragon-shaped shockwave frozen in midair began to show signs of collapse.
It was dissipating.
Not because Ancestral Dragon had recalled it, but because the "certain-kill" intent driving it had already crumbled amid its master's mental chaos.
Threads of pure resentment turned back into ownerless black mist, drifting away and returning to the silent ocean of karmic force.
A thunderous strike that had been planned for so long, one that carried the final resentment of the entire dragon clan, ended soundlessly in such an anticlimactic fashion.
How ironic.
How... suffocating!
Ancestral Dragon's Divine Soul trembled violently in the deathly silent abyss.
He realized that he had fallen into a dead loop.
He hated Yang Chen, so he wanted to kill him.
But he also feared Yang Chen's death, so he could not kill him.
Not only could he not kill him, he had to find a way to make him live well. At the very least, he could not let him entertain the thought that "death might be better."
This realization filled Ancestral Dragon's long-dead heart with an indescribable sorrow and savagery.
I, the mighty Ancestral Dragon, must beg a wretch... to live on? Absurd... utterly absurd! This karma, this heaven and earth, everything has gone mad!
He discovered that he, the creditor, was actually so humble before his debtor.
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