Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

The subterranean depths beneath the Rising Dragon Sect were cold, damp, and completely isolated from the deafening clamor of the battlefield above.

Down here, beneath layers of reinforced granite and ancient dampening runes, the air hummed with a heavy, rhythmic vibration of dense spiritual energy being funneled upward to sustain the mountain’s defenses.

Ling Luochen stared at an altar. It was carved from a single block of dark, blood-streaked spirit marble, etched with complex circuits of glowing azure script that pulsed in synchronization with the heartbeat of the grand barrier.

Hovering suspended three inches above the stone was a jagged, fist-sized crystal of pure, incandescent crimson.

It burned like a trapped heart, radiating intense waves of condensed spiritual qi that fed directly into the subterranean leylines.

This is the last energy node of the formation, and once this was destroyed, the entire formation will collapse.

For eight long years, Ling Luochen had endured the indignity of living among these crude foreigners, watching them treat the sacred arts of cultivation like a trivial diversion.

She had listened to their careless chatter, mapped out their auxiliary relays, and over the past half-hour, systematically disabled the other nodes like this one hidden beneath the civilian sectors without raising a single alarm.

Now, only this final core remained.

Once severed, the entire formation array would suffer an irreversible cascade, leaving the entire compound completely naked before the wrath of the Imperial Academy.

With a subtle flick of her wrist, a tear in space opened beside her fingers, and sliding from the void came a slender blade forged from dark red abyssal iron, its edge weeping faint wisps of corrosive, blood-tinted demonic mist that hissed against the damp flagstones.

Her grip was steady, her knuckles turning pale against the hilt as her boots clicked softly against the stone, closing the distance step by step, her killing intent coiled like a cocked crossbow.

”What are you doing?”

A voice sounded behind her.

It was sharp, laced with cold suspicion and the breathless shock of a commander walking in on an unthinkable sabotage.

But Ling Luochen didn’t even turn around, she did not offer an explanation, nor did she hesitate to confirm the identity of the newcomer.

The moment the voice echoed through the chamber, her legs bent, and her footwork detonated with violent, explosive speed!

She closed the final ten paces in the fraction of a heartbeat, her crimson demonic blade held high, its edge blazing with concentrated, destructive qi aimed straight at the heart of the floating crystal!

”Stop!”

The voice called out, but it was already too late.

Crack!

The dark red blade came down like an executioner’s scythe.

The edge of the sword cleaved directly through the center of the crimson gem, shattering the core into hundreds of glittering, volatile fragments!

Then, a violent, high-pitched shriek of destabilized energy detonated through the cavern as the azure circuits on the altar flared blindingly, burned black, and died.

Far above, across the mountain basin, the colossal, dome-shaped boundary that had held off tens of thousands of imperial cultivators let out a dying, hollow groan.

The translucent runic veil that had felt as solid as a mountain range flickered violently three times before dissolving into billions of harmless, fading blue sparks that were instantly swept away by the northern gale.

The protective wards, the killing arrays, the spatial locks—all of it vanished, laying the entire compound completely bare to the open sky.

Ling Luochen smirked.

The cruel, victorious satisfaction curling at the corner of her lips was palpable.

But then, a sudden, hair-raising premonition of lethal killing intent stabbed straight into the center of her spine!

Her blood ran cold as a sharp feeling of death locked onto the back of her heart, faster than thought, arriving with the terrifying velocity of an expert driven to cornered desperation!

Instinctively, her muscles coiled to throw her frame across the stone floor in a desperate evasive roll, but the incoming strike moved with the unnatural, instantaneous acceleration of a high-tier movement skill.

Stab!

Cold steel pierced straight through her left shoulder blade from behind, bursting out from the front of her chest in a spray of warm crimson!

The kinetic force slammed her forward, pinning her flesh against the stone edge of the ruined altar.

The pain was searing agony that threatened to tear her consciousness apart, but she just gritted her teeth and finally turned around to face her attacker.

Forcing the blood pooling in her throat down her gullet, she gripped the bloodied blade protruding from her shoulder with her bare left hand to stop it from twisting, her boots pivoting on the wet stones as her neck craned back.

Standing behind her, Yun Ming looked like a demon dragged from the depths of hell, his knuckles turning white as he gripped the handle of the sword, trying to twist it.

His pristine imperial blue robes were disheveled, the elegant golden dragons embroidered upon his chest trembling with the violent heave of his lungs.

The calculated, charismatic mask of an enlightened master was gone, completely shattered into pieces.

His eyes were violently bloodshot, burning with incandescent, hysterical rage, and his jaw was clenched so hard that blood seeped from between his teeth.

His sect, his infinite player army, his fortress, his life’s work—erased from the inside out by someone who had shared his wine and accepted his sect’s resources for nearly a decade!

”Ling Luochen, you traitor!” Yun Ming gritted his teeth.

Every word was spat out through venom-coated fangs, his trembling hands threatening to rip the sword sideways and tear her arm clean off her torso.

Ling Luochen just smiled.

Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth, staining her chin and dripping onto the shattered remnants of the red crystal beneath their boots.

Her pink eyes, filled with cold, mocking arrogance, locked directly with his furious gaze.

”Traitor?” her voice was a breathy, painful chuckle, but it dripped with unadulterated disdain. ”To betray you, Yun Ming, I would have had to belong to this pathetic circus in the first place.”

Yun Ming’s fingers remained locked around the hilt of the sword buried in her shoulder.

His chest heaved violently, his blue robes rustling against the cold draft filtering through the shattered ceiling.

”After everything I did for you?” Yun Ming glared at her, the veins along his temples pulsating with dark, violent fury. ”This is how you repay me?”

His voice cracked with the bitter, venomous outrage of a man who felt the entire foundation of his world being yanked out from beneath his feet.

For years, he had treated her as an esteemed pillar of his faction, granting her free access to the sect, clearing her path to high-level cultivation resources, and allowing her to walk sideways without the constant scrutiny imposed on ordinary disciples.

Despite the cold steel currently biting into her collarbone and severing muscle fibers, a soft, raspy laugh escaped Ling Luochen’s bloody lips.

She didn’t wince. She casually leaned into the blade, letting the edges scrape against her bone as she raised her chin, her eyes glistening with sharp, unapologetic amusement.

”Come on, no need to act like that,” she mocked, blood bubbling at the corner of her mouth as she spoke. ”You never trusted me since the very beginning, right?”

Yun Ming remained silent.

The silence hung heavy between them, thicker than the dust of the shattered red crystal on the altar.

After all, that was true.

He already suspected her to be the one killing his gamers years ago.

Over the seasons, thousands of players running reconnaissance missions in secluded forests or mining isolated spirit-stone veins had reported being ambushed from the shadows by a swift, unreadable sword technique, their avatars slaughtered before they could even trigger party alerts.

But since they never really suffered any injuries back in the other world aside from that one time when it first happened, he chose to turn a blind eye.

After all, Ling Luochen was also helping his gamers grow from quests and rewards she was giving.

She was a self-sustaining engine of contribution points and martial progression that accelerated his faction’s timeline by decades.

He had convinced himself that as long as the system’s balance sheet remained deeply in his favor, it didn’t matter what game she was playing in the dark.

Now, standing over the ruins of his defensive array, he realized the price of that complacency was his entire life’s work.

With a sudden, violent backward twist of her torso, Ling Luochen forcefully dislodged her shoulder from the embedded blade.

Shhk!

A spray of dark crimson splattered against the stone floor, but before the blood could even drip from her robes, she casually swung her dark red demonic sword, flicking the air to keep him at bay.

”Now that we’re alone, I want to take this opportunity to ask you,” Ling Luochen spoke, her voice dropping into a measured, calculating cadence that was completely stripped of her usual flippant disguise. ”How are you able to bring the souls of people from another world, into this one and turn them into nigh-unkillable entities?”

Yun Ming’s eyes widened.

A chill crawled straight down his spine, prickling against the nape of his neck like ice, his breathing hitched, the muscles in his jaw freezing in petrified disbelief.

”You... How do you...”

The syllables caught in his throat. This was his deepest, most closely guarded divine secret—the foundational truth that separated him from every native cultivator across the three thousand realms.

Even the greatest sacred masters, the ancestral patriarchs, and the grand emperors of this continent had merely viewed his disciples as eccentric wanderers belonging to an obscure, hidden lineage.

Not a single soul had ever pierced the veil to name the modern, cosmic truth of what they were.

”And...”

Ling Luochen went into a fighting stance.

She lowered her center of gravity, her left foot sliding back across the damp stone flagstones, the tip of her dark red demonic blade pointing in a steady, lethal line toward the hollow of his throat.

Her wounded shoulder twitched once, the bleeding instantly staunched by a surge of dark, thick spiritual qi.

”That status panel or whatever, is related to it, right?” she continued, her lips curling into an eager grin that revealed her pearly white teeth. ”Say, if I kill you, can I take that thing from you and use it for myself?”

The question hung in the subterranean air like a guillotine poised to fall.

Yun Ming stared at her, the frantic panic churning in his chest suddenly burning away into cold resolve.

If she already knew of the players’ origin, and if she had deduced the existence of the interface floating beside his vision, then there was no longer any room for retreat, negotiation, or deception.

One of them was leaving this room as a corpse.

With a flash of brilliant, celestial radiance that dispelled the gloom of the cavern, a halberd materialized in his grip.

The pole was forged from divine solar iron, etched with thousands of circuits that hummed with absolute, unyielding martial authority.

The massive crescent blade on its head blazed with incandescent golden qi, heavy enough to sever mountain ridges with a single downward cleave.

”You’d have to kill me first,” Yun Ming said, his voice cold, steady, and devoid of the earlier hysterical rage.

Ling Luochen chuckled, the sound deep, vibrating, and laced with manic anticipation.

”That suits me just fine.”

Then, slowly, beneath the collar of her ripped, blood-stained traveling tunic, fine lines of pitch-black ink began to burn with a dull, malevolent crimson luminescence.

It was not a static talismanic seal, but a living, writhing brand etched into her very soul.

The dark markings surged outward like blooming thorns, snaking up along the slender curves of her neck, crawling over her jawline, and wrapping tightly around her forearms and fingers.

Intricate, primeval glyphs carved from pure, unadulterated slaughter covered every inch of her exposed flesh, turning her into an image of ancient, primeval war.

Her sclera turned black, the pristine white of her eyes swallowed whole by an abyssal, lightless ink.

Her pupils turned red, burning like two twin embers of concentrated, blood-soaked slaughter in the middle of a starless night.

The simple hairpin holding her pink bun together dissolved into fine ash, and her long pink hair unfurled, defying gravity as it floated into the air, whipping and undulating like dark, shadowy flames in an invisible subterranean gale.

A suffocating, heavy miasma of pure demonic qi detonated from her pores, painting the cavern walls in an eerie, flickering blood-light.

The stone flagstones beneath her boots groaned, fracturing into web-like cracks under the sheer, physical density of the killing intent pouring from her frame.

This is the manifestation of her Descending Asura Demonic Physique!

An artificial demonic constitution born from the deepest, bloodiest pits of the ancient slaughter-realms.

It did not borrow power from the heavens, nor did it pray to the benevolent spirits of the earth; it refined the user’s flesh into a vessel of pure, relentless destruction, where pain was transmuted into raw power and every droplet of spilled blood fueled an insatiable, escalating bloodlust.

”I was always so meek and timid when comparing to those people,” said Ling Luochen, her voice carrying a distorted, double-layered resonance that sounded like the grinding of bloody swords.

She took a slow, deliberate step forward, her demonic blade weeping trails of dark, corrosive mist that melted the granite stone beneath her stride.

”After all, compared to them, I’m average.”

She thought of the monsters of the Imperial Academy—of Shen Haoran, of the Ten Crowns, of Huo Yue and all others.

Among that pack of heaven-defying beasts, she had always been the quiet, unremarkable shadow, the one who stayed behind to handle the mundane tasks, the one whose talents were merely considered standard among the imperial elite.

Her crimson pupils locked onto Yun Ming’s golden halberd, the corners of her lips pulling back into a wide, terrifying, and utterly manic sneer.

”But you? Heh.”