The tainted dragon.

Liang Chen suddenly leaned forward so rapidly that his forehead crashed into the scaffolding, clutching his chest as a flesh-rending pain ran through his body, it felt like his body was trying to tear itself apart and away from his chest. The white and gray rain got more intense when Liang Chen bent forward, starting to spread out across the rest of the scaffolding.

Two strange scenes took place as Liang Chen clutched his chest, the first was that the strange rain started to transform everything it touched. At first, it was just a small change, the wood drying and withering, but the change got worse as more and more rain fell, the wood taking on a bone-like texture and appearance. This scene alone was enough to cause the remaining onlookers to start fleeing in panic, but the second scene almost stopped their breaths in their throats.

A faint image started to appear around Liang Chen, quickly growing both larger and more corporeal, a massive dragon covered in gray scales and with two differently colored eyes stretching out around and above Liang Chen. The dragon raised its head and opened its maw, unleashing a silent roar towards the clouds above, which were starting to slowly turn blue in color, the sign that a heavenly tribulation was arriving.

But even that grand dragon started to change in front of the panicked and terrified gazes of the surrounding onlookers. Black veins started to appear on the dragon, they first appeared on the base of its tail but slowly started to creep up the rest of the dragon. The veins seemed to grow in power as they traveled further up the dragon, growing thicker and larger, taking up more and more of the dragon's body. By the time they reached the head of the dragon, its entire body had changed into countless black veins coiling and wriggling around each other.

In less than two seconds, it had turned from a relatively normal dragon to one composed entirely of what appeared to be black tentacles, only held together in its current shape thanks to the will of its master. As the dragon was a representation of Liang Chen's bloodline, now fully merged with the blood that had been in the bottle he dug out of Tian Chun's body, a change had also happened inside his body.

Black veins started to appear on the five lotuses that represented his elements, the veins growing all around the lotuses and even starting to stretch out. The veins connected with each other and pulled the lotuses closer to each other with a powerful yank, the source of the horrifying pain that Liang Chen was currently feeling.

The veins pressed the lotuses against each other and fully surrounded them, slowly shrinking and forcing the lotuses closer and closer to each other. The five lotuses were eventually pressed against each other so much that they cracked and shattered, exploding into small fragments of pure energy.

But before any of that energy could run rampant, the veins stretched out and gathered up every single fragment, pulling them back in again. The black veins gathered up all the fragments and pieced them all back together, turning what was once five differently-colored lotuses into a single gray lotus covered in black veins that wriggled slightly.

Liang Chen noticed a strange scene as he grit his teeth and endured the now fading pain to observe the strange new lotus, it occasionally vanished. It would pulsate slightly and then fade, completely disappearing from his body for a short bit before fading back in. He could still use his Qi when the lotus faded away so he was clearly still connected to it, but he had no idea what actually happened to it while it was gone.

Seeing the dragon phantom appear above Liang Chen, and seeing it get tainted by the strange vines, the nagging sense of unease that Yu Jiang was feeling turned into full-blown worry. He knew that only some of the purest bloodlines could project phantoms like this at times, but he had never heard about a scene like a phantom getting tainted and changed like this. He quickly turned to look at his junior disciples, waving and shouting at them.

"Don't just stand there and gawk! Kill him!"

Yu Jiang wanted to join them, but the last attack he suffered from Liang Chen came at the worst possible time, while he was still weak from his previous expenditure of energy. He calculated that he would need at least another five seconds before he would be able to restore and gather up enough energy to join the fray.

The four other junior disciples, which had been dumbstruck by the sudden strange scenes, quickly regained their senses and charged at Liang Chen. They put up shields of Qi around themselves to block the strange rain, but the rain simply started to eat away at the energy within the shields, slowly corroding holes into their defenses.

But before the rain managed to corrode any holes into their defenses, they arrived by Liang Chen and launched their attacks, space creaking slightly from the gathered force of the four attacks. And then their attacks stopped, crashing into an invisible shield that seemed to entirely surround Liang Chen. Their eyes narrowed sharply at the unexpected scene, one of them noticing that not even the dust around Liang Chen was moving.

"It's time! He controls the law of time and has stopped the flow of time around him! Keep attacking, he likely can't keep it going for long!"

The girl who noticed it wasn't entirely wrong, but she didn't know that it wasn't Liang Chen who had used his law of time to stop time around him. It was his fused bloodline that did it for him, a gift to celebrate the birth of the world eater.

The four people raised their weapons again, but an unearthly cold wind blew over the area before they could bring them down again. Liang Chen stopped clutching his chest, the pain all gone now that his bloodlines had finished fusing and created his new Dragon Lotus. He stood up and raised his head towards the clouds, which had now turned completely blue and were unleashing the cold wind. Yu Jiang and the others knew exactly what this meant, their expressions distorting slightly as they quickly moved back.

"It's a heavenly tribulation, wait for it to end before attacking again!"

If they stayed around Liang Chen when the heavenly tribulation unleashed its first attack, they would be considered helpers of him and would also suffer the heavenly tribulation, it would also grow stronger to accommodate more people. As such, it was a smarter idea to wait until Liang Chen finished dealing with it and ended up weakened before they tried to get close again.

Liang Chen lowered his head to look at the corpse of Tian Chun, the frozen time around him starting to move again. He kneeled down and put his hand on her body and head, storing both into his interspatial ring and placing them underneath the tree he had taken from his old home. He then raised his head to look at the blue clouds, his expression so calm that it was frightening, it was like the calm before the storm.

"You're angry, aren't you? Yeah, that's what you always are. You aren't just or indifferent, you're angry. You only ever lash out whenever someone tries to go against you or take a step closer to you, you're nothing but a selfish cunt who wishes to rule all alone, aren't you?"

Liang Chen's voice was low as he spoke up at the clouds, as if they could actually hear and understand him. The white and gray rain was sucked up by the blue clouds and started to gather beneath them, freezing and forming a nearly ten-meter long javelin of ice, the edges of the tip glimmering with a sharp light. Liang Chen didn't raise his spear, he simply looked at the javelin with such a calm expression that it had already entered the realm of disdain.

"Well come then, I've taken a step closer to you, moved my spear a bit closer to your throat. Aim your anger at me, and then let me show you that my wrath will swallow even you."

He looked calm, but that was only because he had swallowed all his rage and sorrow, tucked it all away within his heart and turned it into unrelenting determination. A soft vibration appeared within Liang Chen's chest as he stared down the blue clouds and awaited their attack, a somewhat familiar voice resounding within his mind.

"Congratulations, you've been acknowledged by the Bloodwind Code and have been granted a Ruler rank and title on the Bloodwind List for your universe. From this day and until the day you are overtaken or rise higher in the ranks, you are the Lord of Heaven Incinerating Wrath."

Liang Chen recognized the voice as the voice of Ning Hao, the creator of the Bloodwind Code and one of the men he had seen when he received the full Ocean God Physique, it seemed like he had placed his own voice into the Bloodwind Codes. Liang Chen knew that receiving this ruler rank meant that he gained the right to ask one more question, but he put it aside for now and focused on the task at hand.

The frozen javelin shot down from the sky like a blue blur, freezing any moisture in the air around it as it headed directly for Liang Chen's head. Liang Chen raised his right arm, his hand stretching toward the incoming javelin as he pointed at it with his index finger. The javelin and the finger made contact, Yu Jiang and his junior disciples raising their defenses just in case any remnant waves reached them.

But there was no thunderous explosion, nor any splash of blood as Liang Chen's defenses were pierced. The javelin touched Liang Chen's finger and then started to dissipate, fragmenting and vanishing in a harmless manner. Liang Chen lowered his arm and looked at his finger, and despite seeing a two-centimeter deep bloody hole in his finger, he let out a somewhat hollow laugh.

"Heh, so not even the grand heavens have perfect control over their energy. In that case, can you truly be hailed and revered like you are?"

What Liang Chen had done just now was something he had thought about back in the Thunder Saint's Final Breath, an idea that struck him when he saw how the bolts of lightning dissipated after touching him. The theory behind it was surprisingly simple, if the energy that was the core of something became unstable, that thing would fall apart and dissipate.

The javelin of ice was just a bunch of energy gathered together by the heavens and then launched at him, he simply used his law of time to speed up about half of the energy within the javelin, resulting in it becoming unstable and collapsing. Of course, as long as someone had good control over their energy and was able to quickly notice the change in speed, then they could react appropriately and alter the speed of the energy that Liang Chen didn't touch.

But the attack launched by the heavenly tribulation hadn't done that, meaning that the heavens either didn't have good control over the energy it unleashed, that it hadn't noticed, or that it simply didn't care. Liang Chen didn't care which of the three options it was, all he cared about right now was that it worked, meaning that he had another card to add to his arsenal, he just had to keep it as a trump card since it drained a fair bit of energy and required some concentration to control.

Liang Chen stretched out his right arm again as more and more frozen javelins started to appear beneath the blue clouds. His gray spear appeared in his grasp, thrumming in tune with his buried emotions. He removed his gaze from the blue clouds and placed it on Yu Jiang and his four junior disciples, his eyes narrowing dangerously.

The tip of his spear softly touched the bony scaffolding, a thunderous roar resounding over the city as a crimson bolt of lightning tore through one of the blue clouds that covered the sky. Roar after roar of thunder resounded from the sky, lightning bolts of various colors tearing through the blue clouds and revealing the black clouds behind them, the white and gray rain once again starting to fall.

With his lightning bolts and deadly rain tearing apart half of the heavenly tribulation serving as his backdrop, Liang Chen pointed his spear at Yu Jiang. The world eater stood on his throne of bone and declared the fate of not only Yu Jiang and his men, but even the Sealing God Empyrean that ordered them around, and the decree was death.