Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

At this moment, in Rising Dragon Sect.

Compared to five years ago, it has now become even more majestic, with players numbering into hundreds of thousands, with the strongest of them already being in the Golden Core Realm.

The desert where their sect is located had been physically rewritten.

What had once been an abandoned cultivation school with rotting wooden pavilions, cracked stone walkways, and a handful of weak outer disciples was now a bustling megalopolis of spiritual warfare.

Jade pavilions and defensive stone walls fortified with glowing array formations stretched as far as the eye could see across nine connected peaks.

Hundreds of thousands of figures scurried across the roads, clad in mismatched enchanted gear, loudly haggling over demonic beast pelts, shouting strange alien slang, and seem to treat the world as a game.

And at this moment, Yun Ming was lounging on a rattan chair, basking under the sun with an orange juice.

He was situated on the topmost observation balcony of the main sect master’s manor, wearing loose, comfortable linen daoist robes that were unbuttoned at the collar.

He had dark circles beneath his eyes, the chronic exhaustion of a transmigrator who had to micromanage a digital economy for hundreds of thousands of internet degenerates, but right now, he was content.

The crystal glass in his right hand held chilled orange juice pressed from sweet third-tier spiritual citrus, ice cubes clinking lazily as he took a slow, refreshing sip, letting the warm sunlight wash over his chest.

’This is the life,’ he thought, letting out a long, contented sigh. ’Five years of grinding, building up the infrastructure, acting like an enigmatic NPC... finally, things are stable. The players farm the resources, I take a ninety percent cut through quest fees, and I can just kick back and cultivate at my own pace—’

PING!

A sharp, digital chime detonated directly against his auditory cortex!

The peaceful midday breeze seemed to freeze as a semi-translucent azure interface materialized before his eyes with jarring, urgent velocity.

Glowing crimson warning borders pulsed around the text, flashing with an ominous, suffocating frequency.

[Major Quest: The Last Stand — The otherworldly demons had been plundering the world since ancient times. The Host must gather all forces in the world to resist them and free the world from their grasp]

[Minor Quest: Remnant — The strongest force in the world, the White Dragon Sect, is in danger of being wiped out, requesting Host to save them]

[Minor Quest: Remnant 2 — The Four Sacred Grounds are being hunted down by the otherworldly demons, requesting the Host to rescue them]

[Rewards are based on Host’s performance]

The glass of orange juice slipped an inch through Yun Ming’s fingers, almost splashing over his bare shins.

The lazy, relaxed contentment vanished from his features in an instant, his jaw dropping as his eyes scanned the crimson-lettered notifications over and over again, feeling a cold bead of sweat roll down the back of his neck.

Yun Ming turned serious.

He bolted upright on the rattan chair, planting his bare feet against the warm jade flagstones, gripping the armrests with white knuckles as he screamed internally into his sea of consciousness.

”System, what the hell?! My sect is barely even mid tier! You want me to participate in a world war? Did you think that I’ve been living a good life lately?!”

His chest heaved with genuine, exasperated panic.

He had barely brought his strongest players to the initial stages of the Golden Core realm!

In the grand hierarchy of the cultivation world, Golden Cores were merely slightly larger ants who could fly on iron swords!

Beyond them were the Nascent Souls, the Spirit Ascension, the nine stages of Nirvana, and the terrifying, god-like Saint realms!

To throw a mid-tier sect populated by chaotic internet trolls into a global war against ’otherworldly demons’ that had systematically plundered the realm for millennia was not a quest—it was sending pigs to a cosmic slaughterhouse!

Even if they can revive, only the most hardcore, masochist gamers can repeatedly go die again and again facing an impossible to complete quest!

The mechanical, genderless voice of the system chimed back inside his head, carrying a strange, unprecedented tremble of metaphysical distress.

[Host, if the otherworldly demons succeeded this time, the world will surely never be able to recover once again. I don’t know the reason, but I felt like the world’s luck is slowly dwindling. If this continue, not to mention reaching Saint, even achieving Nirvana will become impossible]

The warning struck Yun Ming like a bucket of ice water poured down his spine.

The world’s luck is dwindling?

That meant the very fabric of the plane was being hollowed out.

If the world’s karmic fortune was harvested to zero, the spiritual veins would dry up, the atmospheric qi would rot, and the native laws would decay into a dead realm where cultivation was permanently capped.

If the sky fell, his cozy, player-powered sect would be buried under the rubble alongside everything else.

Yun Ming scratched the back of his head, his face twisting into a bitter, helpless grimace.

”Shit, fine! I’ll go save the White Dragon Sect first...”

He exhaled a long, frustrated breath, rubbing his temples as he re-read the second prompt.

”...speaking of, isn’t the White Dragon Sect the sect of the strongest expert in the world? How come they are in danger?”

The White Dragon Sect was the undisputed titan of the world!

They are pretty much the America of cultivation world, possessing the world’s strongest military and richest economy.

[Host, I’ve scanned the whole world, and I didn’t feel the presence of White Dragon Emperor. Perhaps he is currently in a different dimension]

”Tsk. Fine.”

Yun Ming clicked his tongue in deep irritation, setting his half-empty orange juice down on the small wicker table.

”I will issue a mission to the players, they will rescue the White Dragon Sect.”

He immediately opened the administrative backend of the system, typing out a server-wide announcement with ruthless efficiency.

[Server-Wide Emergency Campaign: The Fall of the White Dragon! Rank: SSS. Objective: Reinforce the northern mountain gates of the White Dragon Sect! All participating players will receive quadruple EXP, exclusive faction titles, and spirit stone subsidies!]

Within seconds, the tranquil murmur of the outer mountains erupted into a deafening, hysterical roar as hundreds of thousands of players received the quest notification, screaming, rallying their guild banners, and stampeding toward the teleportation arrays like a tidal wave of locusts.

*

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Meanwhile...

In a massive training hall in the center of the sect, Ling Luochen stared at the mountain of demon beast cores and corpses.

Her cherry pink lips curled in feral hunger as she raised her slender, pale hands.

From the pores of her skin erupted a pitch-black, swirling miasma of demonic devouring intent!

The dark mist swept over the mountain of corpses like an endless, swarming swarm of microscopic locusts.

SCHLUCK. CRACKLE. SLURP.

The flesh dissolved into crimson vapor; the dense, marrow-rich bones pulverized into grey dust; the thousands of crystallized beast cores cracked and liquefied.

Every ounce of raw vitality, every drop of boiling beast-essence, and every sliver of primal spiritual power was greedily dragged into her chest, swirling through her widened meridians, feeding her bottomless, demonic cultivation core.

Within three breaths, the twenty meter mountain of death was completely gone.

The basalt floor was left dry, polished to a dull shine, without leaving behind a single trace of gristle, fur, or a single drop of crimson blood.

Ling Luochen exhaled a long, steaming breath of refined spiritual mist, her pink eyes glowing with intoxicating, cruel satisfaction.

”Using these ’gamers’ really is worth it,” she couldn’t help but chuckle.

Her melodic, husky laughter echoed off the barren stone walls.

For the past five years, to avoid suspicions of being the one to kill that disciple, Ling Luochen acted normally.

And when clumsy, low-level disciples struggled with their meridian alignment, she offered gentle pointers; when groups of inexperienced cultivators were pinned down by rogue spirit beasts in the outer valleys, she gracefully stepped in, severing the beasts with a single flick of her sword before vanishing into the trees.

She played the role of the sect’s gentle, mysterious fairy to flawless perfection.

In return, she found out that she can actually use them to do her bidding, granted she can give them something in return.

These bizarre disciples did not care about Daoist philosophy, sect lineage, or ancient traditions.

They were driven by an incomprehensible, single-minded madness for ’rewards.’

If she gave them a handful of mid-tier medicinal pills, an old, discarded spirit sword from her storage ring, or even a handwritten slip of paper promising ’favorability points,’ they would enthusiastically dive into the deepest, most dangerous swamps of the continent to harvest whatever she demanded!

Over the past five years, she hadn’t needed to step outside the sect once; she simply posted personal collection requests through the disciples, and thousands of these madmen brought endless mountains of fresh demon corpses straight to her training door day after day.

And she had also spent months observing their behavior, eavesdropping on their strange, nonsensical jargon, and slowly piecing together the puzzle through calculated, innocent-sounding questions.

And that is... they are actually people from another world, and for them, this world is just a game, and since it’s a game, they can revive infinitely.

Ling Luochen was shocked when she first found out about that.

The concept was terrifying, an absolute blasphemy against the supreme laws of the cosmos.

Across the three thousand realms, even true immortals who had stepped into the upper heavens possessed only a finite number of soul-reconstructions.

Life and death was the unbending, iron foundation of the universe.

To be able to step out from the jaws of a fifth-tier dragon, be torn to shreds, and then casually walk back through the sect gates twenty minutes later laughing with one’s companions—such an ability defied every foundational principle of cultivation!

But then she thought, such heaven defying ability must have its limits, otherwise, it wouldn’t make sense.

Heaven and earth operated on balance.

Nothing in the infinite multiverse was truly without cost.

If a mere mid-tier sect master could grant absolute, unconditional immortality to hundreds of thousands of mortals simultaneously, he would be more powerful than the primordial Dao itself!

There had to be a mechanism.

There had to be a flaw.

So during some outer expeditions, she disguised herself and ambushed dozens of isolated disciples in the wilderness.

She severed their heads; she burned their dantians; she sealed their corpses in ice; she tried to trapped their departing spirits in soul-bottles to observe the metaphysical processes that occurred the moment their physical vessels expired.

And her brilliant intellect had stripped away the divine miracle, laying bare the mundane, mechanical truth beneath.

It was not true resurrection; it was an industrial, mass scale soul transplantation!

The true consciousness of these ’gamers’ never fully inhabited their mortal shells.

Yun Ming held something, perhaps an ancient, unknown apparatus that clipped a tiny, microscopic sliver of their astral essence and anchored it to a clone.

When the mortal body was destroyed, the tether yanked that sliver of consciousness back into the hub, crammed it into a fresh, pre-fabricated vessel, and spat it back onto the courtyard!

It was a brilliant illusion, but it harbored a fatal, terrifying vulnerability.

If you can destroy that soul before it can be taken back, then the gamer would just slowly become brain dead.

She had tested it herself on three unfortunate disciples in a sealed cavern.

Using her soul-scouring demonic needles, she had pinned their astral forms before the recall tether could activate, systematically shredding the soul fragment into formless ash!

And just as she predicted, the link snapped permanently.

Although they still revived, it took them far longer than normal.

Now, the only thing she needs to figure out is how Yun Ming was able to do that.

She crossed her arms, her dark robe draping over her lithe figure as she stared up at the stone ceiling, her sharp eyes piercing toward the distant sect master’s manor on the highest peak.

How could a young man who barely possessed such a weak cultivation command such an incomprehensible relic?

What kind of artifact could coordinate hundreds of thousands of dimensional anchors simultaneously without collapsing under the cosmic backlash?

She suspects that it’s related to this ”status panel” that these gamers are talking about.

Every single one of them, from the lowest Qi Gathering recruit to the proudest Golden Core, constantly muttered about their ’panel.’

They waved their hands at the empty air, tapped on invisible light, and spoke of ’attributes,’ ’leveling,’ and ’system prompts’ as if it were an omnipresent god whispering directly into their brains.

A dangerous, feral smirk curled the corners of Ling Luochen’s lips.

”A status panel...” she whispered, her tongue lightly wetting her upper lip, ”Whatever artifact you are hiding behind that curtain, Yun Ming... once I find out how to tear it from your soul, your immortal army will belong to me.”