Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

Ling Luochen set foot down the stone stairway leading toward the main grounds.

She had barely crossed the boundary of the guest courtyard when a thunderous rumble of rushed footfalls shook the gravel path.

From behind bamboo groves, out of drainage ditches, and vaulting from low rooftops, a feral swarm of disciples descended upon her with wild, dilated pupils.

Within moments, Ling Luochen was completely surrounded by dozens of manic figures, all clamoring, shoving, and jostling for position like rabid spirit beasts during a blood moon.

”Bro, move! Let me through, I found this NPC first!”

”So this is the NPC that Dragon Slayer and his party found?! Holy shit, the graphics on her face are unreal!”

”Excuse me, Miss Ling, do you need any wild mountain ginseng? I have twelve in my inventory! Please take them!”

”Senior Sister Ling, look over here! Are there any hidden chain quests? Do you have an escort mission? An assassination bounty? I’ll kill whoever you want, just give me the quest marker!”

”Step back, you simps! Senior Sister, please step on me! Does getting stepped on trigger an affection point flag?! Let me test the hit box!”

Ling Luochen froze in place as the sheer volume of bizarre, incomprehensible gibberish being shrieked directly into her face made the veins at her temples throb with violent irritation.

But soon, her pink eyes narrowed to razor slits, the freezing intent rolling off her frame thick enough to frost the clothes of the nearest men.

Yet, just as she was about to attack them, she recalled the casual, smiling words Yun Ming had offered her in the tea pavilion earlier.

’If you encounter those lunatics outside, Miss Ling, pay them no mind. Just play along with whatever nonsense they spout, or toss them a minor chore. They’re not right in the head, you see. If you humor them, they’ll run off on their own.’

They are not right in the head...

Ling Luochen drew a slow breath through her teeth, forcefully suppressing the urge to turn the entire courtyard into a slaughterhouse.

She suppressed her disgust and forced her icy expression into an unbending, regal mask.

She pulled a few common medicinal herbs and several ordinary iron needles from a storage ring, speaking with freezing detachment.

”I... require space to meditate. Those who retrieve thirty pieces of dry pine wood from the southern slope and place them by the outer wall may present their findings later.”

DING!

To the players, that single sentence was equivalent to the voice of an angel ringing across the heavens.

”A QUEST! THIS NPC CAN REALLY TRIGGER A QUEST!!”

”FUCK YES! FARMING PINE WOOD, LET’S GO!”

”Out of my way, noobs! The lumberjacking are mine!”

”Senior Sister Ling, I love you! Wait for my wood!”

Satisfied with having their quest logs updated, they all erupted into manic cheering and bolted down the stone stairways in a frantic stampede, shoving each other over fences and tumbling down embankments in their haste, finally leaving her some breathing room.

But the sudden quiet that descended over the ridge was almost deafening.

Ling Luochen released a long, frigid sigh, brushing an invisible speck of dust from the sleeve of her dress, her headache had only intensified, but now her resolve was steeled.

She decided to look around the place and observe everything carefully, using this period of calm to survey the sect grounds from top to bottom.

If there were clues regarding the true nature of this place or sect master’s hidden agenda, then it would be very useful to her.

She walked with silent, weightless strides, keeping to the shadows of the eaves and tall pine trunks.

And once again, as she observed the daily conduct of the disciples, she concluded with absolute certainty that these sect disciples were profoundly, irrevocably weird!

Near the training grounds, three men were taking turns jumping off a three-story guard tower, landing face-first into stone flagstones, breaking their necks with audible cracks, and then laughing hysterically from the dirt as they compared their ”fall damage reduction.”

At the edge of the weapons pavilion, a woman was rhythmically stabbing herself in the thigh with a rusty dagger, muttering under her breath about ”pain threshold calibration.”

Two cultivators were sitting in a horse trough, completely submerged except for their noses, actively timing how long it took for their lungs to collapse.

It defied every principle of self-preservation, martial dignity, and common mortal sanity.

Ling Luochen walked farther down toward the dilapidated western quarter of the sect.

The buildings here were ancient, with rotted cedar rafters and sagging tile roofs that predated the current settlement.

As she continued her walk along a narrow stone walkway, her ears caught the loud sound of splintering wood and raucous shouting.

Rounding a corner, she paused behind a cluster of bamboo.

Ahead of her, a bunch of disciples were actively wrecking an old, three-story wooden pavilion.

They weren’t dismantling it carefully for salvageable materials; they were using crude iron sledgehammers, wooden clubs, and their bare, bleeding fists to violently smash the load-bearing pillars at the foundation.

”Hit the western support beam! The physics here are so real that I’m confident that the whole second floor will cave in!”

”Watch out, the ceiling’s tilting!”

With a terrifying, groaning shriek of stressed ironwood, the structure gave way.

The entire heavy, three-story tiled roof collapsed in a colossal avalanche of rotten beams, pulverized masonry, and choking clouds of gray dust.

Right beneath the epicenter, a young male disciple was caught dead center.

A colossal oak rafter smashed directly onto his crown, flattening his skull into the dirt with a sickening CRUNCH, followed immediately by several tons of falling tiles that completely buried his mangled torso in a pool of dark, spreading blood.

He had been killed instantly.

There was no question about it; his spine had been pulverized, his skull caved in, and his life aura completely snuffed out.

Yet, as Ling Luochen’s pupils contracted, preparing herself for cries of horror and mourning from his martial brothers, the surrounding disciples merely burst into uproarious, side-splitting laughter.

”HAHAHAHA! Look at dumbass! He got flattened like a pancake!”

”Clip that! Somebody tell me they clipped that!”

”What an idiot, his dodge roll was half a second too late! RIP his durability!”

”Leave his corpse, let’s finish smashing the east wing before he respawns!”

Ling Luochen stood motionless in the bamboo grove, a cold, sickening chill creeping up the back of her neck.

To watch a comrade, a sworn brother of the same sect, be violently crushed to death before their eyes, and respond with nothing but sadistic, hysterical merriment...

’These people are truly not right in the head,’ she thought, her lips pressed into a thin, pale line.

Repulsed by the grotesque display, she turned on her heel and left quickly, taking an isolated path through the stone alleyways between the outer dormitories to clear her mind.

However, barely three hundred paces from the disaster site, Ling Luochen suddenly halted as her breath caught in her throat.

Coming from the direction of the center of the sect, a young man was sprinting along the cobblestone path, clad in identical gray linen garments, waving his arms, and laughing loudly as he sprinted back toward the collapsed building.

It was the exact same youth who had just been crushed into meat paste beneath the falling pavilion.

There was no blood on his brow, his skull was intact, his spine was straight, his limbs were supple, and his face held the exact same obnoxious grin.

Yet... He was alive and well, running with boundless, buoyant stamina back to the very place where his corpse lay buried.

Ling Luochen’s vision blurred for a fraction of a second.

She rubbed her eyes, blinking rapidly against the cold glare of the afternoon sun.

She was not dreaming.

Less than sixty breaths had passed since his skull was flattened, yet here he was, sprinting through the sunlight without a single scar or lingering trace of death.

At that, her face immediately turned solemn.

Resurrection?

In less than a hundred heartbeats?

Without a high-tier rebirth elixir, without an astral soul-reforging array, and without even developing a Nascent Soul?

For an ordinary, low-tier disciple of a backwater sect to casually brush off catastrophic physical annihilation as if it were nothing more than a stumble on a garden path was an impossibility that shattered the foundational laws of the cosmos.

Ling Luochen’s eyes darkened, burning with cold, predatory resolve.

She needed verification. She needed to see the mechanics of this phenomenon with her own hands.

So without hesitation, she concealed her presence entirely, blending into the ambient frost of the shadows as she followed the alleyway.

She looked around, her divine sense sweeping through the quiet corridor, and noticed one of the disciples walking alone.

The youth was casually tossing an iron pebble in the air, humming an off-key tune as he ambled toward the rear latrines, completely oblivious to the world around him.

SWISH!

Using her extreme speed that bypassed mortal vision, Ling Luochen blurred into an imperceptible gust.

Before the boy’s foot could touch the dirt, she materialized directly in his blind spot, her pale, slender hand shot forward with terrifying precision, slamming over the disciple’s face, her fingers clamping like an iron vice over his nose and eyes.

”Mmgh—?!”

Before a single whimper of alarm could escape his throat, she dragged him violently backward into the deep, shaded crevice of an abandoned stone alleyway.

Then, without a shred of hesitation, devoid of emotion, and purely driven by the clinical need for truth—Ling Luochen clenched her fist!

CRACK-SQUELCH!

Her cold, immense Nascent Soul physical might detonated through her fingertips, and the disciple’s skull caved in like a fragile clay vessel, pulverized into bone fragments and dark blood beneath the pressure of her grip.

All the while, she did not look away.

She observed the body with laser-sharp focus, her divine sense wrapping around every single muscle fiber, bone splinter, and blood droplet to record the process of death.

HUMMM—

As the head was crushed, the expected puddle of blood and brain matter did not pool onto the cobblestones.

Instead, the moment the biological signs of life ceased, the entire corpse began to shimmer with a faint, translucent blue luminescence.

The mangled head, the shattered bones, the torn linen clothes, and the blood on her fingers broke apart into thousands of tiny, glowing motes of light.

The light particles drifted upward like fireflies caught in an updraft, dissolving into thin air until not a single hair, not a speck of ash, and not a single drop of crimson remained upon the stones.

The alleyway was completely clean.

Ling Luochen frowned deeply, staring down at her empty palm.

Was that just a puppet? A high-tier construct? Or some localized illusion projection?

She needed to test this again, she thought, and decided to find another disciple to verify if this was an anomaly unique to that specific person.

Ling Luochen withdrew her presence, merging her silhouette into the damp moss and shadows behind a rotting rainwater barrel in the dead-end alleyway.

She waited in the alleyway for a few minutes, keeping her breathing silent, letting her divine sense scan the surrounding perimeter.

Barely three minutes had passed when heavy, stomping footsteps echoed at the mouth of the alley.

A young man rounded the corner.

He was breathing heavily, his face flushed red with furious, indignant rage as he carried a jagged, rusted iron machete in his right hand, his teeth bared as he kicked a discarded wooden bucket aside.

It was the exact same disciple she had just crushed into light motes less than five minutes ago.

”COME OUT, YOU MOUTHERFUCKER!” the youth roared at the empty air, swinging his machete wildly. ”I saw you! Sneaking up on me from behind like a coward! You think you can gank me and get away with it?! I’ll have my revenge! I’m taking all your loot—”

SWOOSH!

Ling Luochen did not give him the luxury of finishing his threat.

Reacting with instantaneous, lethal fluidity, her figure flickered out of the shadows like a wraith as she materialized directly before his chest, her slender hand shooting out once more to grab him on the face again.

SLAM!

His head was violently pinned against the damp stone wall, choking his screams back into his windpipe.

This time, she did not merely crush the skull.

As she locked his jaw shut, Ling Luochen’s eyes flared with incandescent, freezing intent as she unleashed a soul attack, driving a needle of concentrated spiritual sense straight into the boy’s glabella, diving directly into his sea of consciousness to thoroughly shatter his soul to pieces.

PZZZT—CRACK!

Within his mind, the ”soul” that anchored his consciousness fractured into a hundred glowing shards.

Ling Luochen was certain—she had completely destroyed his soul, erasing his consciousness down to the conceptual root to ensure no ghost, no remnant, and no reincarnated thought could survive.

Yet... the moment the soul broke apart, the expected spiritual dispersion into the atmospheric void did not happen.

What!?

She was deeply shocked, her eyes widened as she felt the severed fragments of the boy’s soul.

Instead of dissipating into the natural cycle of heaven and earth, that destroyed soul actually turned into a stream of pure, crystalline energy.

She tried to capture it, but the energy did not linger for even a fraction of an instant and was violently, yet smoothly sucked away by an unknown, terrifyingly subtle force, vanishing into an untraceable destination!

In her grasp, the boy’s physical body once again dissolved into harmless motes of blue light, slipping between her fingers like cold water.

Ling Luochen stood frozen in the dim alleyway, her breathing slow, her hand suspended in the empty air.

Weird.

Really weird.

A cultivator whose physical body dissolved into light upon death.

A soul that could not be permanently destroyed, because the moment it broke, it was harvested and reassembled by an unseen, overarching force.

A continuous, seamless cycle of death, harvest, and instantaneous resurrection.

....this, could a hidden expert be raising these disciples just to devour them...?

The dark, chilling theory took root in her mind like creeping frost.

In the ancient epochs, there were vile, supremes who bred billions of mortal souls within pocket dimensions—treating human lives like cattle, allowing them to grow, slaughtering them repeatedly, and harvesting the refined spiritual essence of their terror to feed their own decaying cultivation.

She was sure that what’s happening here was similar to those.

So... Could it be... Yun Ming?

The image of that pleasant, ordinary-looking young man flashed across her thoughts.

The plain sky-blue robes, the gentle, unhurried movements as he rinsed teacups with boiling water, the total, unnatural absence of any detectable cultivation base, and that eerie, calm smile.

What if his mundane appearance was just to hide the horrifying perfection of an ancient demonic supreme?

What if this entire ”Rising Dragon Sect” was nothing more than a slaughterhouse, and she was currently standing in the center of the butcher’s pen?

Ling Luochen lowered her hand, her pupils hardening as she looked toward the distant roof of the main sect hall.

She had to tread with extreme caution.

The game being played in this valley was far darker than she had ever imagined.