Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

While the blood-soaked soil of the Rising Dragon Sect buckled beneath an apocalyptic sea of flame, venom, and severing blades...

Shen Haoran remained hovering in the air, his robes completely undisturbed by the howling drafts rising from the slaughter below.

His fingers remained locked around the hilt of the Black Imperial Sword, Azathoth, its blade still buried deep inside Chen Feng’s hollow, mangled sternum.

The White Dragon Emperor’s head hung like a dead weight, his eyes glassy, his vital fires completely extinguished.

Within the boundless, primordial expanse of Chen Feng’s fading spiritual sea, the final phase of assimilation had reached its apex.

The titanic silver dragon lay entirely pinned beneath the spiritual gravity of Haoran’s might.

The tripartite halo of incandescent gold, silver, and deep abyssal purple continued to turn behind Haoran’s soul-form like the cosmic gears of creation.

Haoran took a single step forward in the mental void, his right hand reached out, his slender fingers lightly pressing against the center of the silver beast’s pinned, mountainous skull.

”Fulfill your purpose,” Haoran murmured softly, his voice devoid of hatred, bearing only the absolute chill of an inevitable law. ”Cease your existence, and become the foundation of my throne.”

CRACK!

The third golden eye on his forehead pulsed with incandescent majesty.

The ravenous might of the Supreme Trinity surged through his fingertips like a deluge of pitch-black, corrosive lightning!

The dragon trembled and let out a final, soundless shriek that rippled through the fabric of his internal cosmos.

Its scales dissolved into an ocean of pure, liquefied starlight, woven from the fundamental concepts of cosmic order, dimensional rigidity, and primeval draconic authority.

Haoran’s physical body outside shuddered as the floodgates opened.

The power of the Heavenly Order poured into his meridians, not as a gentle stream, but as a torrential, boiling tsunami of law!

It coursed through his flesh, colliding head-on with the power of his Infinity Dragon God Physique!

According to the dragon, the Heavenly Dao forbids the fusion of the Nine Dragon God Physiques.

To force them together was to incur the wrath of heaven. It was an heresy of the highest magnitude, an unnatural blasphemy that defied the very design of the universe.

Within Haoran’s chest, the two titanic bloodlines violently clashed!

His heart slammed against his ribs like a war drum struck by an ancient god.

But, his teeth did not clench; his breathing remained as measured and calm as an autumn breeze.

He used his own soul, fueled by Supreme Trinity, as the anvil, and with cold, dictatorial will, he brought down the hammer of his divine consciousness, crushing the two warring concepts of Infinity and Order together!

BOOOOOOOOOOM!

A silent detonation of sublime authority echoed through his cellular architecture as the two supreme constitutions fused.

The pitch-black scales of the Infinity Dragon that coiled deep within his dantian were suddenly rimmed with blinding, incandescent silver runes of law!

His bones, already denser than celestial iron, turned into an incomprehensible, iridescent material that hummed with the resonance of both creation and destruction.

His blood transformed into a dark, viscous gold, coursing through newly widened meridians that could channel the power of dying galaxies without tearing!

At this moment, his entire being sublimated into something...”more”.

But, at that moment, the universe itself reacted.

The physical world outside violently recoiled.

The Heavenly Dao, which had remained silent, suddenly turned its gaze towards where Haoran was.

The sky, which had been choked with the dark smoke of the Rising Dragon Sect’s burning pavilions, was instantly cleared.

Then, an unnatural, terrifying twilight descended upon the world, plunging millions of miles of land into an eerie, lightless gloom.

RUUUUUUMBLE!

The atmosphere groaned in agony as high above the battlefield, far beyond the reach of mortal cultivators, the dimensional clouds churned into an astronomical, spiraling vortex that spanned over ten thousand miles wide.

The clouds turned pitch-black, veined with sickly, incandescent crimson and necrotic green lightning—it was, a Heavenly Tribulation!

The very air turned into poison. The gravity across the surroundings multiplied by a hundredfold, forcing the fleeing mortal beasts to collapse into the dirt, their lungs bursting under the atmospheric pressure.

The spatial fabric surrounding Haoran crystallized into brittle, black glass, hissing as millions of tiny dimensional cracks formed around his silhouette.

*

Down in the burning ruins of the sect, the clash between the Imperial Academy and the defenders ground to a chaotic, terrified halt.

The Sword Saint, his robes drenched in blood, looked up at the sky, his eyes widening in pure, paralyzed horror.

”What... what kind of tribulation is that?!” the Sword Saint rasped, his voice trembling like a dried leaf.

Even Augusta, the chief of the Sun Tribe whose flesh had withstood ancient solar flares, stepped back from the edge of the crater, her pupils contracting as she stared into the heart of the crimson-veined vortex.

”The heavens are weeping blood...” she whispered, her fingers unconsciously tightening around her brass blade. ”Something that should never exist has drawn breath.”

*

High in the sky, Shen Haoran slowly, languidly opened his eyes.

The third golden eye on his forehead remained open, burning like a divine star of pure imperial decree.

His left eye was an immutable, cold pool of liquid silver, reflecting the absolute order of the cosmos, while his right eye swirled with the bottomless, devouring purple void of the infinite.

A subtle, tripartite aura clung tightly to the surface of his skin, weaving together into a majestic, phantom set of draconic battle-robes that fluttered silently in the vacuum of space.

Then, he slowly tilted his head upward, his three divine eyes locking onto the apocalyptic, ten-thousand-mile eye of the tribulation storm that was preparing to rain down bolts of crimson lightning.

The corners of his lips curved into a cold, contemptuous smirk.

”You want to judge me?” Haoran’s voice was soft, barely carrying above a murmur, yet it rippled throughout the realm, carrying an arrogance that challenged the cosmos itself.

With a slow, fluid motion of his wrist, he cleanly withdrew the Black Imperial Sword from Chen Feng’s chest, letting the lifeless body of the White Dragon Emperor plummet like a stone into the ground below.

Azathoth gave an eager, metallic shriek as Haoran raised the dark blade, pointing its straight, obsidian tip directly into the churning maw of the heavens, ready to test the newly forged might of his unified physique against the wrath of the universe itself.

”Unfortunately, you’re not worthy yet.”

As if provoked by his words, the heavens detonated.

KABOOOOOO-BOOOOM!

The first tribulation struck without a whisper of wind and descended not as an ordinary jagged bolt, but as a three-thousand-meter pillar of pure, condensed crimson lightning!

It tore through the troposphere at beyond the speed of light, carrying the absolute concept of molecular incineration, aimed squarely at Haoran’s head!

Haoran did not dodge, nor did he raise his blade, instead, he simply took the strike with his bare frame!

The blinding crimson pillar smashed into his skull and a concussive shockwave swept outward across the sky, stripping the mountain peaks ten miles below of their bedrock!

Yet, as the blinding plasma washed over his shoulders, the newly synthesized draconic marrow within his bones sang a low, resonant note.

The dense, iridescent scales of the Heavenly Order formed an invisible microscopic lattice across his fair skin, casually drinking in the heat and diffusing the kinetic impact into harmless sparks that drifted off his white sleeves.

Before the light of the first strike could even fade, the second and third tribulations descended simultaneously!

A jagged double-spiral of Emerald Lightning shrieked from the storm, tearing two parallel chasms through the spatial fabric.

These strikes were not meant to burn; they were designed to shear apart the metaphysical soul, to unravel the karmic threads binding his consciousness to reality.

Haoran raised his left hand, his fingers uncurling in a languid, dismissive gesture.

”How weak,” he murmured.

The bright silver of his left eye flashed as the power of creation surged forward, erecting a silver barrier in empty air.

The two lightning strikes struck the silver barrier and instantly ground to a halt, their terrifying momentum arrested as their spatial equations were effortlessly solved, dismantled, and scattered into harmless, drifting wisps of green luminescence.

The sky shrieked with audible, frantic fury as the fourth, fifth, and sixth tribulations merged into an apocalyptic three-phase deluge—a massive, rotating drill of Black Nine-Hells Calamity Thunder!

The lightning was dense, liquid, and cold as absolute zero, carrying the weight of ancient dying stars, capable of crushing the golden cores of a hundred peak Saints into paste.

The black drill crashed into Haoran from above, dragging him downward by three inches through sheer gravitational density!

The space around him groaned, spiderweb fissures of dimensional glass peeling away into the void.

Yet Haoran merely exhaled a cold breath of pristine mist as his right eye flared with hungry purple light.

The power of destruction surged forward, and instead of resisting the crushing weight of the black calamity thunder, Haoran simply, and completely destroyed it!

As the terrifying, star-crushing lightning rushed down his throat and into his meridians, it was instantly located and crushed by his soul, broken across the anvil of his imperial will!

Haoran chuckled, ”Weak! Weak! Weak! If this is all you can do, then you’re not worthy of standing above me!”

Hearing his words, the sky turned dead, featureless white.

Then, before Haoran could prepare himself, the seventh and eighth strikes fell as twin spears of golden and red bolts inscribed with ancient, primeval runes of cosmic mandate.

They carried the authority of erasure: ’That which defies the design must cease to be.’

They struck Haoran’s chest and back in the exact same second!

BOOOOOOM!

The sky fractured like a cracked porcelain bowl.

The kinetic force pushed Haoran’s hair back, his robe finally rustling against the sheer, violent pressure of the divine law.

For a heartbeat, the ancient runes attempted to bite into his flesh, to dissolve the unnatural fusion of two primeval dragons.

”Not enough! You are not yet worthy!”

Haoran sneered, the first trace of mocking arrogance slipping into his voice as he looked up, the golden pupils of his third eye shone bright!

CRACK!

Then, with a simple, violent surge of raw authority, Haoran physically shattered the cosmic runes into glowing dust!

The two spears of divine light snapped like dry twigs against his chest, their fragments dissolving into the cold wind!

Haoran took a deep breath, preparing himself for the final tribulation.

Eight tribulations had already fallen. Eight tribulations had been effortlessly trampled beneath his boots.

Just then, the ten thousand mile vortex violently contracted, shrinking down into a dense, bleeding eye of pure, unadulterated cosmic hatred.

Then, slowly... the ninth tribulation emerged.

It did not rush forward with speed, nor did it scream with thunder.

It simply descended as an unhurried, ten foot wide sphere of Primal Chaos Void Thunder—a roiling, colorless orb of anti-existence that erased the light, the space, and the fundamental concept of time along its downward path.

It was the ultimate, irreversible decree of annihilation, the celestial universe’s final attempt to purge an unnatural monstrosity from its flesh.

Watching the sphere descend, Haoran’s lips curled into a cold, cruel smile as he slowly lifted the Black Imperial Sword, Azathoth.

The blade, which had slept quietly through the storm, gave a sharp, metallic shriek that sounded like the weeping of a slaughtered god.

He stepped forward onto the empty air, meeting the world-erasing sphere head-on, and swung his blade upward in a single, clean, vertical crescent!

WHOOOOOM!

A wave of pitch-black severance, woven from the combined authority of his Supreme Trinity and the primordial void of Azathoth, cleaved straight through the center of the ninth tribulation!

There was no explosion, nor was there any thunderous clash of titans.

The Primal Chaos Void Thunder was simply sliced cleanly in half.

The two severed hemispheres hung suspended for a fraction of an instant before the insatiable, devouring laws clinging to the blade’s edge violently swallowed them whole, collapsing the ninth tribulation into absolute, hollow nothingness!

The sky fell completely, eerily dead.

The oppressive weight of the ten thousand mile vortex rapidly withered, its dark clouds fracturing into thin, wispy trails of gray mist that were swept away by the high-altitude winds.

The sunlight returned, pale and trembling, illuminating Haoran as he lowered his blade, his three eyes gleaming with untouchable supremacy.

He had withstood the full, nine-fold wrath of the heavens without shedding a single drop of blood, without tearing a single thread of his white robes.

Unfortunately...

The heavens do not surrender.

”Hm?” Haoran frowned and looked up.

The pale blue firmament did not settle into peaceful clarity.

Instead, at the very apex of the sky, where the storm had just dissolved, the dimensional fabric peeled backward like wet parchment torn by invisible, trembling hands.

The space warped, folded, and twisted into an agonizing, vertical chasm thousands of miles long.

Then... an eye opened in the sky.

It was vast beyond mortal comprehension, an entity carved from the very fundamental laws of reality, its iris burning with cold, celestial golden fire, its pupil an abyss of cosmic order that gazed down upon the entirety of the continent.

The golden gaze locked directly onto Shen Haoran.

Then, a voice, ancient, tectonic, and vibrating with an eternal, wounded fury that shook the mountains to their roots and caused the seas on the distant horizon to boil, reverberated directly through the fabric of the realm, shattering the sanity of every living being who heard it.

”Again and again, just how many times do you want to defy me, mortal!?”