The Yang Clan had grown to this point, and so had Chen Yang. The trust and bonds they had forged along the way could not have been born of power and might alone.
And therein lay the most fundamental difference between Chen Yang and Wu Chang in this wager over the future of the Divine Dao.
To Wu Chang, Bai Di and the Demonic Dao cultivators had always been beneath him. He viewed everything from above, as a ruler.
He directed everything from behind the scenes, using Bai Di as his hands and feet, yet never took part himself.
In his eyes, everyone was someone he could control and command, nothing more than a piece on the board of his grand undertaking to revive the Divine Dao.
As one of the surviving adherents of the Ancient God Path, it was understandable that he thought this way.
For in the age when the Divine Dao had stood at its height, everything he had seen and heard had reinforced it. The belief in the Divine Dao's supremacy had long since taken deep root in him.
Nor had he, like Liuli, encountered the method of the Union of Immortals and Gods at an early age through her father.
In the past, Chen Yang had used two occasions when Yang Clan cultivators broke free of a crisis on their own—at the Blood Demon Blessed Land and the Unreturning Wind Cave—to warn Wu Chang. He had urged him to recognize how the relative strength and standing of the Immortal Dao and the Divine Dao had changed over ten thousand years of rise and fall.
Regrettably, when the mighty power that could place him above all others became his, that deep-rooted belief won out in the end.
That power convinced him that divine might could govern