The heavens refused to stop. Thunder boomed in a non-stop attack outside the dome, each strike packed with enough power to wipe out mountains and destroy kingdoms. Yet the golden barrier held its ground, its surface rippling like a huge ocean resisting a storm. Inside that sealed world, total chaos took over.
Bolts of lightning poured through the crack overhead, smashing down onto the island without mercy. At this point, it didn't matter who was an enemy or an ally. Everyone suffered the same.
A Starborn warrior screamed as a bolt hit his shoulder. His flesh burned away instantly, showing charred bone underneath. But before he could fall, a web of invisible bloodline connections spread across the battlefield. Dozens of nearby Starborn clansmen coughed up blood at the exact same time, and the warrior's wound suddenly shrank and closed. The terrible burden had been shared across the clan, not removed, but shared through their blood.
More lightning slammed down. Entire groups turned to ash in a flash, while others survived by just a fraction of an inch. The activated bloodlines had turned the clan into one single, connected body. Every person now carried a piece of the pain felt by the others. Thousands suffered together, thousands endured, and not a single warrior turned off their bloodline. They knew exactly who was carrying the heaviest weight at the center of the storm.
Their Patriarch.
Sigil.
High above the ruined ground, Sigil stayed floating inside a storm of black and white fire. His body had become a battlefield of its own. White lightning raced through his veins, met instantly by his own devouring black flames. The lightning struck back, and the fire answered, locking his body into a brutal loop of tearing apart and instantly healing over and over. Blood dripped from every part of his body, yet his mismatched eyes stayed locked on the sky, completely unyielding.
A massive pillar of lightning dropped right on top of him, lighting up the entire island. For a moment, Sigil vanished completely under the bright flash.
Then, the lightning cleared.
He was still standing.
The impossible sight brought a dead silence over the battlefield. Even the surviving enemies found themselves staring in shock, not at a rival cultivator or a powerful patriarch, but at a man who simply refused to bow down to heaven itself.
Far below, Three stood unmoving beside his mother's body, his eyes fixed on the shape in the sky. At some point, he had stopped praying for victory or hoping for a miracle. Instead, he just watched. He watched his father take punishment that should have killed him a thousand times over, and a heavy truth settled in his heart.
Sigil never once looked back down at him. Not a single time. It wasn't because he had forgotten his son, but because his trust in the boy was absolute. He trusted Three enough to focus every bit of his attention on the fight ahead.
Three lowered his head, his fingers tightening around Khate's staff until the wood creaked. For the first time since her death, he understood something. His father wasn't enduring all this because he felt sure he could win. He was enduring because failure was not an option.
Right next to him, Orion stood like an immovable guardian. The stray lightning bolts kept striking his position, but unlike the panicking soldiers around him, Orion welcomed the pain. Every strike left fresh wounds and drew blood, but the violet lightning wrapping his body only grew stronger, fed by the heaven's energy. His bloodline was now fully activated. Golden heavenly lightning entered his body, processed through his veins, and came out as raw violet energy. The process was painful enough to make normal cultivators beg for death, but Orion just grinned through the blood.
Another bolt slammed into him, making his body shake violently as blood poured from dozens of previous wounds. Then, he took a deep breath, sucking the lightning right down into his core.
"A bit stronger than before," Orion muttered.
Three stared at him. Only Orion would treat tribulation lightning like free training resources.
Far above, Morgan watched everything in silence. His attention wasn't on Sigil anymore, nor was it on the battlefield. His focus was entirely on his link with the ancient inheritance. Something felt wrong.
A faint golden thread of data appeared in his mind. Morgan instinctively reached out to grab it, but the thread vanished into nothing. His hand froze in midair, a frown spreading across his face. The information should not have disappeared.
He tried again, summoning a second thread to force the dome to suppress Sigil. The command never finished. The thread flickered erratically before ignoring him completely.
Morgan's expression turned dark.
This had never happened before. Not once. The inheritance always obeyed his commands.
A third thread appeared, dumping a quick burst of info into his mind: Tribulation pressure. Structural integrity. Energy reserves. Everything seemed normal, but then the information cut to a dead stop.
Morgan blinked.
The stream had simply ended in a blank void. Nothing followed.
His eyes narrowed immediately. The inheritance system was incapable of producing incomplete information. Or at least, it was never supposed to. Yet that was exactly what had happened.
He snapped his gaze back onto Sigil, a sudden wave of uncertainty hitting his mind for the first time since taking control.
"What are you becoming?" Morgan whispered.
No answer came, only more lightning.
Another massive heavenly strike hit the dome, and the crack overhead widened further. The heavens had locked onto their target, and they were running out of patience.
Morgan tried to patch up the damaged section, sending golden threads surging upward. Halfway there, several threads vanished out of nowhere.
His pupils shrank.
The inheritance wasn't just dropping commands; it was actively resisting him.
He tried another direct order to suppress Sigil, but the pressure that came down was noticeably weaker than expected. Morgan felt the drop instantly. The inheritance was still tied to his soul, but its obedience had fractured.
Something had changed.
Far below, Sigil suddenly snapped his head up. The heavy pressure grinding his bones down had loosened for a split second. It was just a tiny moment, but his battle instincts caught it instantly.
Across the plains, more weird things started to happen.
A Starborn launched a long-range attack. The technique traveled halfway toward its target, then vanished into thin air. Gasps of shock rippled through the crowd as the attack suddenly reappeared dozens of meters away, exploding harmlessly against an empty rock. The cultivator froze, completely unable to understand the failure of his own magic.
Moments later, another strange error happened. A wounded elder stumbled backward from the frontline, but for a bizarre second, the physical distance between him and the soldier right next to him stretched out into an impossible, endless space. Then, reality snapped back together with a jerk, and the elder collapsed onto the ground in total confusion.
The survivors began to notice the shift. The entire battlefield felt wrong, subtly, but undeniably broken.
Even the heavenly lightning was acting weird. A massive bolt shot down from the sky, but midway through, it split apart unpredictably, the fragments bouncing into entirely random areas. Several cultivators died instantly, while others survived through pure luck.
Morgan's expression got worse as the inheritance fought to calculate the errors, trying to find the source. Every answer pointed toward the exact same conclusion: the dome, the tribulation, and Sigil's ongoing transformation were three overwhelming powers trying to occupy the exact same space. The reality of the island simply couldn't handle the weight of all three at once.
Then, it happened.
A section of space right above the main battlefield distorted.
It didn't shatter like glass, and it didn't tear open into a void. It rippled, warping like a reflection on the surface of water.
The phenomenon lasted less than a second, but every single person saw it.
The fighting stopped. The screams died down, and even the thunder outside the barrier seemed to fade into a distant hum.
Thousands of eyes turned toward the spatial ripple as a cold, instinctual dread gripped the island. Every single cultivator felt it in their bones: something far worse than the lightning was coming.
High above, another massive strike slammed into the golden dome, shaking the entire island down to its roots.
But nobody looked up at the sky anymore.
Their attention stayed glued to the place where reality had trembled.
Genuine, pure unease appeared on Morgan's face.
He finally understood what was happening.
The heavens were no longer the main threat to his plans.
The island itself was beginning to break apart.