The antagonists are established governments with their re-education/brainwashing /surveillance state. There is a lot of analogy about Covid like infections here. There are 2 main antagonists organization. One that does mass brainwashing and surveillance while the other has capitalistic ideology but is the main enemy. You can guess which nation the MC is alluding to, it's not that difficult. You can also guess which of the two organization the MC will terrorize the most while being polite to the other.

Our MC is basically a terrorist with one goal. He's going to become immortal and the quickest way is via acts of terrorism. Everything from blowing up the continent, killing trillions of innocents, brainwashing people, mass surveillance, torture, etc... there is nothing he won't do to get what he wants. The entire novel is how he goes about setting up his plans and executing it and his failures. But he has a cheat that he can keep regressing if things go wrong.

this appears to be a reality where evil heretical/unorthadox cultivators won the struggle against orthadox sects, totally shifted the culture of their world, and then took their ideology to it's logical extreme. By plundering everything and using unorthadox techniques they created a distorted world so terrible that the heavenly dao itself tried to purge them by rewriting the rules of reality but ultimately failed to snuff them out. The story starts out with the MC being a reasonable person doing rather reasonable and benevelent things. But each loop and the things he uncovers changes him. In the begining, he saves the people he can save, he repays kindness, but slowly the world of cultivation and the consequences of his cheat corrupts him. It's very subtle at first, and slowly you find yourself going along with whatever he thinks is best. But then you start to notice, the MC isn't all right. Here's a favorite line of mine from a later chapter: "Therefore, to prevent the tragic scenario of brothers fighting each other, Li Fan had to find an opportunity to kill them before that happened." What a great guy, of course you want to save your friends from killing each other... so kill them before they can!