I am the Clone of a Death Row Inmate

“A Tier-9 rule-breaking skill can’t sever my Ancestral God-level rules.” Zuka smiled faintly and suddenly clenched his fist.

The next moment, the threads of rules coiling around Su Ze’s body abruptly tightened. His consciousness contracted along with his soul, and he lost all external sight, able to see only the inside of his own body.

His soul shrank and compressed relentlessly, becoming completely disproportionate to his currently massive body.

Soon, his soul was imprisoned within a tiny area of his body, like a cage custom-made for it.

This was precisely the Ancestral God skill Zuka had mastered—Soul Cage!

It used the target’s own body as a cage to imprison their soul, causing them to completely lose control of their physical form.

Zuka looked at Su Ze’s motionless body, his mood soaring. He took out a spatial artifact and stored Su Ze’s massive body inside.

“A mere Sun God, daring to challenge an Ancestral God. It doesn’t matter how much of a genius you are; it’s impossible.”

Zuka gazed into the distance, spreading his Spiritual Power to search for any sign of the fleeing Magic Cube.

Meanwhile, Su Ze, now inside the spatial artifact, was desperately trying to figure out how to save himself.

His soul was imprisoned, leaving him unable to control his body or break free from the restraints of the Ancestral God’s skill.

Fortunately, before being imprisoned, he had used his Seal-Breaking Sword to sever a few of the rule threads. This seemed to have created a minuscule flaw in the Soul Cage, allowing his soul to maintain a faint connection to his physical body and access some of its abilities.

He began to try and use an ability from his Self-Control skill, one that originally stemmed from Unyielding Will: the power to merge spirit and body.

If his soul and body could become one, they could fight the Soul Cage together.

‘My soul is imprisoned within my body, not separated from it.’

‘And my physical body is incredibly powerful. If I can just borrow its strength, I might be able to break free.’

But an Ancestral God skill was an Ancestral God skill. A mere Tier-8 skill like Self-Control was no match for it.

Su Ze’s attempt failed. His soul couldn’t break through the Ancestral God’s prison to merge with his body.

‘Only an Ancestral God skill can fight an Ancestral God skill…’

Su Ze forced himself to calm down and considered how he could use his only Ancestral God skill, Dream Creation, to break this deadlock.

Fortunately, Dream Creation held infinite possibilities. If he had been stuck with an Ancestral God skill with a singular function, Su Ze would have been completely out of options.

He tried to control the power of dreams—an energy both formless and intangible—and was surprised to find it passed straight through the Soul Cage.

He wove a dream, attempting to create a non-existent key that could unlock the Soul Cage. But after successfully weaving the dream, his attempts to manifest the key from it failed.

‘After a moment’s thought, he understood why he had failed. To create a key from a dream capable of opening the Soul Cage, my Dream Creation skill would need to operate on a higher level than the Soul Cage skill itself.’

‘But as a Sun God, I can’t even unleash the full power of my own Ancestral God skill. To expect it to overpower a skill wielded by a true Ancestral God is asking too much.’

Su Ze changed his approach. Outside the cage, he would manifest another one of his own souls!

To be precise, he would use the power of dreams to create a soul clone!

This wasn’t difficult, and he succeeded easily. After all, his soul was still at the Sun God level; using an Ancestral God skill to create a Sun God-level soul clone wasn’t much of a challenge.

Using this soul clone, Su Ze regained control of his body.

“Liquefaction!”

“Clone!”

Su Ze instantly liquefied his entire body and then split it in two.

His soul clone also split in two along with his body, but only one of the resulting forms contained Su Ze’s original, imprisoned soul.

Su Ze controlled the clone containing the Soul Cage, rapidly shrinking its size.

Smaller and smaller it shrank, down to the size of a basketball, then a fist, then a coin…

…until Su Ze’s body had shrunk enough to be completely contained within the Soul Cage itself!

Now, his body and soul were imprisoned together within the Soul Cage. Inside this space, with no more obstacles between them, his spirit and body merged smoothly.

By drawing on the power of his physical form, his spirit and body fused. The Soul Cage was now effectively imprisoning both Su Ze’s body and soul.

Normally, a physical body couldn’t attack the Soul Cage. But for Su Ze, in his state of Unity of Spirit and Body, every punch and kick was a Soul Attack.

BOOM!

With a single punch, Su Ze shattered the tiny Soul Cage. As his body returned to its normal size, he merged back into one with the clone waiting outside.

The soul clone he had created with dream power was no longer needed and vanished as if from a waking dream.

Su Ze had left a clone outside because he feared this method might fail to break the Soul Cage. If it had, both his soul and body would have been imprisoned together, leaving him utterly trapped.

Leaving a clone outside was an insurance policy. If something had gone wrong, he would have had a way to salvage the situation.

The moment Su Ze shattered the Soul Cage, Zuka sensed it. He had been moving to pursue the Magic Cube, but he stopped in his tracks.

He had just stopped when the storage artifact at his waist exploded, unleashing a barrage of planets that smashed toward him!

Su Ze had shattered the space within the artifact, causing the item itself to break apart.

These planets were all “ammunition” Su Ze had stockpiled in advance—ten stars and a hundred planets.

The celestial bodies crashed into Zuka one after another, forcing him back repeatedly. The fiery light from the impacts illuminated that entire stretch of the cosmos!

More than a hundred celestial bodies exploded in unison, including the ten stars. Their terrifying mass instantly collapsed into a black hole that swallowed Zuka whole.

Alarms screamed in Su Ze’s mind. He immediately executed several consecutive long-range Space Jumps, putting immense distance between himself and the newly formed black hole before finally stopping to look back.

‘Is that guy Zuka dead?’

The thought had barely formed in his mind when he saw a figure reassembling itself outside the black hole, piece by piece like a puzzle. It was Zuka!

It was a talent of the Nian Race: an immortal soul. The black hole’s pull had only destroyed Zuka’s physical body; his soul was unharmed. He had swiftly reassembled his body, emerging good as new.