Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

The sprawling avenues of the Rising Dragon Sect buzzed with an unnatural, frenzied vitality that looked more like the eve of an enormous festival than the brink of an apocalyptic siege.

Overhead, the sky within the valley glowed with shifting runic projections, a sign of a Formation being activated, casting iridescent blue light over thousands of figures rushing back and forth across the wide stone plazas.

Gathered near the central logistics node beside the grand teleportation array, a small crowd of highest ranking players had formed a dense circle around an open trade stall.

Their glowing user tags floated vividly above their heads in bold, garish fonts.

”Bro, this is literally the climax event of the whole expansion!” shouted a hulking warrior clad in spiky, mismatched bone armor, his tag proudly displaying the name ”ILoveBigCritsAndICannotLie”.

He slammed a crate of explosive talismans onto the flagstones with a wide grin.

”Look at the quest log! ’World Emergency Defense: Stand Against the Heavenly Scourge.’ The baseline reward is three million experience points and a guaranteed pick from the Divine Armory! If we clear this raid stage, my guild is hitting max level before the weekend reset!”

”Chill out, Crits, don’t get wiped in the first phase like you did on the airship,” laughed a slender scout perched atop a stone balustrade, tossing a set of glowing daggers into the air. ”You saw what happened to BallsDeep and the others who failed to escape. That world boss doesn’t care about your physical defense stat. If they want us dead, they can easily do it. That boss is insane.”

”Who cares about the boss mechanics when we’ve got these crazy NPC lineup backing us?” chimed in a female spellcaster named YezzDaddy96, adjusting the folds of her azure robe while double-checking her quick-access potion slots. ”Did you see who just appeared into the main palace hall? The White Dragon Emperor himself! According to the lore, he’s the strongest expert in the world right now.”

”Not just him,” added a monk named RobedBaldy, who was busily chugging buff potions to boost his passive qi regeneration. ”The Sword Saint, the Wind Emperor, the Xuan Yuan Saint, and the Nine Lives Demon King are all grouped up in the main throne room with Sect Master Yun. That’s five top-tier mythic-grade allies holding the high ground. When the raid timer ticks down, all we have to do is drop our crowd-control spells on the trash mobs while the named NPCs smash the boss to pieces. It’s basically free loot! Easy clear!”

The players cheered and laughed, swapping high-grade recovery pills, testing weapon enchantments, and taking screenshots with the solemn native disciples who stood frozen along the parapets like ornamental statues.

To the gamers, the looming calamity was simply an exhilarating raid encounter with astronomical rewards, an epic spectacle designed for their amusement.

Standing silently in the shadow of a two-story medicinal pavilion just ten paces away, a slender figure leaned against the damp brickwork, her face partially obscured beneath the rim of a wide bamboo conical hat.

It was Ling Luochen.

While the noisy crowd continued to bicker over drop rates and boss phases, Ling Luochen stepped backward into the narrow corridor between the buildings, her spiritual presence shrinking until not even the sharpest sensory array could register her heartbeat.

Her slender fingers rested lightly against the inner pocket of her travel coat, where the small jade Academy Token pulsed with a cool, rhythmic vibration.

She had also received a message and knew that her young master was planning to attack.

As someone who had lived here for eight years, she knew that the Rising Dragon Sect was surrounded by a powerful defensive and killing formation.

Eight long years.

While Chen Feng had been imprisoned in his desolate void and the various imperial prodigies had roamed the continents carving their names into history, Ling Luochen had been planted deep within the belly of this bizarre faction.

She had watched the sect grow from an obscure outpost into a terrifying fortress.

She had watched Yun Ming dispense foreign wealth to build grand monuments, and she had spent countless hours studying the shimmering formation that wrapped around the outer ridges of the valley.

The Great Dragon-Smiting Heaven-Lock Array was a monstrous amalgamation of ancient native killing runes and cold, systemic protocols that operated like a meat grinder.

She had witnessed it kill a Nirvana Rebirth Realm expert before.

It was during the third year of her stay.

A rogue elder from a neighboring holy ground, furious over the Rising Dragon Sect poaching his disciples and stealing his spiritual mines, had attempted to breach the northern gate under the cover of night.

The moment his feet crossed the threshold, the array did not simply resist his strike; it inverted reality.

Tens of thousands of blood-red chains had erupted from the bedrock, skewering the elder’s limbs, suppressing his golden core, and grinding his flesh and soul into fine spiritual dust within the span of three breaths.

The horrifying efficiency of that slaughter had remained etched in her memory ever since.

To attack such a fortress from the outside would require an astronomical expenditure of energy, even for an imperial force.

But Ling Luochen possessed an advantage that no grand elder or orthodox cultivator in this lower world could ever claim: she had spent nearly a decade training, running dungeon excursions, and listening to the endless, careless chatter of the players.

The gamers possessed no concept of military secrecy or sacred discipline.

To them, the array was not an inviolable holy mystery; it was a set of game mechanics, a collection of coded nodes and maintenance relays that they discussed openly in the tavern courtyards.

They complained constantly about the array’s ”cooling cycles.”

They grumbled about having to haul heavy spirit-iron ingots to the auxiliary towers whenever the server reset its defense timers.

Through their casual, vulgar complaints, Ling Luochen had painstakingly mapped out every blind spot in the network.

She knew that the killing intent of the formation did not draw power from a single, centralized core, but was distributed across seven secondary dampening pillars hidden beneath the civilian storehouses—structures designed to be completely overlooked by outside attackers because they lacked any visible spiritual radiance.

And she planned to destroy it from the inside.

Her lips parted in a cold, silent smile beneath her hat.

She pulled a set of slender, pitch-black needles forged from void-corroding iron from her sleeve.

Turning on her heel, she melted into the labyrinthine subterranean drainage tunnels running beneath the stone avenues, moving swiftly toward the first dampening pillar to sever the heart of the sect’s defenses before the first horn of war could even sound.

*

*

*

At this moment, thousands of miles away from the bustling compounds of the Rising Dragon Sect, the atmosphere was frozen in breathless stillness.

The endless sea of white clouds stretching across the northern horizon hung motionless, suspended above jagged mountain peaks that seemed small as pebbles from this staggering altitude.

There was no wind, no chirping of birds, and no drift of morning mist.

The entire sky felt as though it had been nailed down by an invisible, crushing authority that brooked no defiance.

Haoran stood there with his hands resting casually behind his back, hovering effortlessly in the high firmament.

Clad in spotless, moon-white celestial robes that fell around his frame with pristine elegance, Shen Haoran appeared less like a cultivator preparing for an earth-shattering battle and more like an aristocratic prince taking a leisurely stroll through his private garden.

Beside him, Shen Xun’er stood gracefully on the air, her hands folded demurely within the wide sleeves of her robes.

She turned her delicate head toward him and asked if they’re going to wait for others to arrive.

”Young Master,” Xun’er spoke softly, her melodious voice carrying the gentle warmth she reserved exclusively for him. ”Shall we wait for them to assemble our battle lines before advancing upon the valley?”

Haoran simply shook his head.

There was no arrogance in the gesture, only a quiet dismissal of the very concept of an organized siege.

To assemble armies, to line up vanguards, to trade defensive volleys and test formation barriers—those were the desperate methods of ordinary mortals who fought on the same plane as their adversaries.

To him, the thousands of players, the unified righteous sects, the grand masters of the Four Sacred Grounds, and even Chen Feng were merely a gathering of dead leaves swept into a single pile.

There was no need to wait for a broom when one intended to drop a star.

As for the reason why he even bothered to call them, well, it’s because he doesn’t want to spend his time dealing with trash when his main target was Chen Feng and the other protagonist, Yun Ming.

But compared to Chen Feng, Haoran was far more interested in Yun Ming.

That system of his can make these gamers into an artificial protagonist, as he saw when he used his Karmic Light Observation on them before.

In other words, if he get ahold of that system, he’d have an army of protagonists at his beck and call.

Haoran flicked his wrist.

Shhhk.

The empty space beside his right palm twisted like crumpled silk, and a pitch-black Tang Dao sword appeared on his hand.

The Black Imperial Sword, Azathoth.

The weapon was magnificent and terrifying beyond mortal comprehension.

Its blade was straight, slender, and forged from an incomprehensible material that did not merely reflect darkness—it consumed reality.

There were no decorative engravings, no blood grooves, and no ornate pommels.

It was a strip of pure, crystallized nothingness carved directly from the primordial chaos that existed beyond the cosmos.

As the hilt settled firmly into Haoran’s slender, pale fingers, the surrounding light began to bend violently toward the dark steel, shrieking as it fell into the blade’s gravitational embrace.

Haoran’s eyes narrowed into cold, golden crescents as he raised the dark blade with a single, fluid motion of his arm, the straight tip pointing toward the distant, unseen valley thousands of miles away where the Rising Dragon Sect was celebrating its impending defense.

”Come out...” Haoran said as he swung the sword down. ”I know you’re watching, Chen Feng....”

His voice was a soft, calm whisper, yet the syllables carried the unyielding weight of an ancient creator issuing an edict of erasure.

WHOOOOOM!

He brought the Black Imperial Sword downward in a slow, casual vertical arc.

And a black wave of sword intent instantly flew out of his sword!

It did not burst forth as a roaring crescent of flame, nor did it scream with the thunder of mundane sword qi, it simply emerged as an astronomical, horizontal wall of pure chaos—a silent, expanding tsunami of black conceptual severance that tore across the upper firmament at an impossible, terrifying velocity.

The dimensional fabric of the lower realm did not simply crack; it sheared clean in half, peeling backward like burning parchment along the trajectory of the strike.

Then, the true horror of the blade manifested.

It completely drained the world of its colors.

Wherever the expanding black wave traveled, reality itself was stripped bare.

The brilliant golden sunlight pouring from the heavens was snuffed out in a microsecond.

The deep, vibrant azure of the sky bleached into a sickly, washed-out ash gray.

The pristine white clouds turned into murky, colorless smudges of frozen mist.

The emerald forests clinging to the mountain peaks miles below instantly lost their vibrant greens, turning into monotone, dead charcoal silhouettes.

It was as if an immortal painter had spilled an ocean of pitch-black ink across the living canvas of the world, dissolving color, light, temperature, and substance into an unmoving, monochrome graveyard.

*

*

*

Thousands of miles away, Chen Feng, who was seated along with the rest of the experts and Yun Ming, suddenly smiled and stood up.

His gaze turned towards the distance, where the apocalypse was approaching them.

He did not take the attack seriously. For him, it was all show and no substance.

”...so you’ve finally come.”