Chapter 182 — Heaven's Wrath
The Sword Questions the Heavens · Page 4 of 6
With the golden dharma array dispersed, there was nothing left to suppress Ming Li; the pressure upon him vanished in an instant, and he felt his whole body go slack, while the newborn true essence within him circulated without cease, endlessly renewing itself—a pleasure beyond all words.
Yet before he could make a single move, he who had disturbed the heart of Heaven saw only this: from the deepest reaches of the dark clouds along the horizon, amid the rolling crash of splitting thunder, a pillar of light came down from the sky, irresistible, as though it would pierce clean through Heaven and Earth—crashing down, straight at him.
Where it passed, all was searing heat; along the edges of the light pillar a ceaseless hissing filled the air, and whether from the sheer temperature or not, it seemed to smelt everything around it. And what Ming Li faced was this colossal wrath of Heaven and Earth—no avoiding it, nowhere to hide...
Seeing that Ming Li was about to be struck by that heaven-shaking pillar of light and reduced to dust, Pu Cheng and the other monks could not bear to watch, and one and all shut their eyes and turned away. Pu Cheng's heart ached the more; try as he might, he could not understand how his good intentions to deliver Ming Li and dissolve the murderous qi upon him could have come to this—how he had drawn down the Heaven's Wrath Fierce Thunder, unseen for ten thousand years, known only in legend!
Could it be that Heaven truly would not suffer this man to live?
The pillar of light arrived in the blink of an eye. Before it even touched him, Ming Li's face was ashen; in the roaring wind he opened his mouth and cried out—but no sound came forth at all, all of it drowned in that colossal wrath of Heaven and Earth. And one saw that, enveloped in the divine might of Heaven and Earth, blood streamed from every orifice of his face, his expression ghastly with despair—and even the Soul-Devouring demonic staff that had always guarded him so faithfully was now, before the Heaven's Wrath, pressed down to a dull and lusterless thing.
Everything, it seemed, was about to end!
The august vault of heaven seemed to send forth a faint, mournful dirge, echoing across the sky.
Suddenly, behind Ming Li, the wordless jade wall—already dimming—seemed to sense something; countless flickering characters blazed bright once more, and above all the nine great characters at its very center: *Heaven and Earth are not benevolent; they treat the myriad things as straw dogs.* They burst forth in a dazzling, piercing glare, blazing up—and in their bearing there seemed to lurk a trace of unrivaled, defiant arrogance.
Even before the blue heavens that countless people in this world bow down to worship, even before that Heaven's Wrath that seemed forever invincible, the light upon that jade wall did not recede by so much as a hairsbreadth!
In an instant the radiance upon the Wordless Jade Wall blazed to its uttermost, as though the brightest of all sparks had suddenly been kindled, and no one could any longer see what lay within that light. That light, wild as madness, came surging down from above in the space of a breath, sweeping from top to bottom until it had wrapped Ming Li's whole body within it; and at the same moment a vast, measureless glory soared upward into the heavens, its boundless force driving straight for that mysterious gigantic vortex at the sky's rim.
"Boom!"
"Boom!"
"Boom!"...
Across the vault of heaven the thunder roared loud enough to deafen, each peal carrying the menace of a sky-splitting wrath; and in an instant, as though it had been roused to fury, the pillar of heavenly punishment, terrible beyond measure, shifted a little, drew away from Ming Li's body, and struck squarely upon that untamed glory leaping upward from the Wordless Jade Wall.