Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

The subterranean agreement was struck in the dark, but the currency was paid across the surface of the sect in an instant, turning the battlefield into a chamber of pure, unmitigated horror.

Up until this very heartbeat, the gamers had fought with the detached, reckless swagger of men who knew death was nothing more than an interface reset.

When a spear pierced their lungs, it had registered as a dull, localized vibration, a red vignette around their peripheral vision, and a brief countdown screen before they were spat out of a resurrection pillar with a fresh canteen of water and unbroken bones.

They had treated the severed limbs of their comrades like dropped gear, laughing through the carnage, hurling taunts at the descendants of imperial bloodlines because the concept of mortality was a joke told in an alien language.

Then, before they realized it, the parameters were forcibly rewritten.

A sudden, sharp shudder passed through the digital network running beneath the skin of every registered player.

The faint, translucent blue text floating in the corners of their vision flickered violently, glitching into rows of dark, blood-red code that dripped down their retinas like liquid rust.

[...Gamers, my sincerest apologies.]

Before any of them could comprehend the words, the imperial coalition surged forward with renewed, merciless fury.

In the eastern courtyard, a hulking player who had spent the last twenty minutes tanking blows with a greatshield was struck directly in the gut by Shen Fei’s spear.

Under normal settings, he would have grunted, made a joke in the party chat about the enemy’s critical hit multiplier, and collapsed into blue light.

Instead, the cold, barbed bone head tore through his abdomen, severing his intestines and grinding against his lumbar vertebrae.

SPLAT.

The man’s eyes widened until the capillaries in his sclera detonated in unison, turning his eyes completely crimson.

The breath left his lungs not in a gasp, but in a wet, animalistic shriek of raw, unadulterated agony that silenced the entire squad behind him.

”AAAAAAAAAAAGH! IT BURNS! IT BURNS! OH GOD, MY STOMACH! PULL IT OUT! PULL IT OUT!”

He clawed desperately at the seven-foot crimson shaft, vomiting bile, half-digested rations, and hot arterial blood across his own forearms.

He thrash-rolled against the ground, kicking his legs like a dying dog, his fingernails peeling completely backward as he clawed at the stone, desperate to find a logout prompt that simply didn’t exist.

”What? That’s it? How pathetic.” Shen Fei sneered, twisting the spear forty-five degrees within the wound before yanking it upward, splitting the player’s torso open to the sternum.

The man’s final, gurgling scream choked on his own shredded trachea as his entrails spilled out across his boots, steaming in the cold northern air.

But this time, the death was different.

There was no clean blue light.

There was no instant dissolution of the avatar.

The body remained there, twitching, weeping blood, and dying slowly, agonizingly, piece by biological piece.

Across the ruined avenues, the nightmare multiplied ten-thousandfold.

”My leg! My fucking leg is gone!” a player screamed from atop a shattered parapet as Shen Jian’s slender rapier cleanly lopped off his right thigh.

The youth collapsed onto his stomach, clutching the spurting stump with hands that shook so violently he couldn’t form words, sobbing hysterically as the agony overwhelmed his nervous system, his body convulsing in rhythmic, violent seizures until his heart gave out under the sheer shock.

Beside the dried fountain, a female mage was caught by Shen Tao’s fists. The powerful jab of his arm splitting her shoulder and sawing diagonally down into her lung.

The pain was so unimaginably great, so far beyond the threshold of human endurance, that she didn’t even have the breath to scream.

She simply clutched her broken shoulder, her teeth shattering against each other as she bit her own tongue in half, blood pouring from her mouth and nose as she twitched beneath the man’s weight.

”LOG OUT! LOG OUT! WHY ISN’T THE SYSTEM SETTINGS OPENING?!”

”IT HURTS! MOM! MOMMY, PLEASE! IT HURTS SO MUCH!”

The gamers who had mocked the upper-realm prodigies moments ago were now reduced to a sniveling, weeping rabble.

They dropped their weapons, falling to their knees not out of tactical surrender, but because the sheer, unbridled agony of broken bones, scorched flesh, and severed arteries was something their modern, protected minds were fundamentally incapable of processing.

They curled into fetal positions in the dirt, vomiting, defecating in their armor, and screaming until their vocal cords tore into bloody ribbons.

The Imperial Academy students and the warriors on their side didn’t show an ounce of mercy.

Sensing the total psychological collapse of the defenders, they swept through the ranks like an unholy thresher.

Augusta’s warriors plunged their solar spears through the chests of weeping youths.

Zhu Ziyan’s avian monsters and the tribe she lead tore screaming men limb from limb while they were still fully conscious, listening to the agonizing crunch of their bones being swallowed whole.

And Shen Ying’s toxic green mist seeped into open wounds, dissolving the nerve endings of writhing players who begged for death with their faces buried in the mud.

The battlefield became a slaughterhouse of screams, an auditory hell where thousands of young souls experienced the absolute maximum limit of human suffering before their avatars finally expired in pools of their own steaming waste and gore.

*

*

*

At the exact same moment, in another world entirely.

A world known as Blue Star.

A realm of towering concrete monoliths, endless highways choked with electric transport pods, and gray skies washed out by perpetual smog and artificial neon.

A world where millions of citizens lived mundane, orderly lives, insulated from the brutality of war, escaping the dreary grind of modern society by strapping themselves into state-of-the-art virtual reality immersion pods to conquer fantasy lands in the year’s greatest entertainment phenomenon: Rising Online.

Inside a dimly lit, narrow apartment in a crowded residential district of a massive eastern metropolis, the air was warm and smelled faintly of instant noodles.

HISS.

The pneumatic seal of a sleek, white titanium gaming capsule abruptly disengaged with a violent burst of pressurized air.

The curved glass lid slammed open, bouncing against the safety stops with a loud metallic clang.

Inside the gel-lined interior, a nineteen year old college student jerked upright like a corpse struck by lightning.

His mouth was stretched wide in a silent scream that tore his throat raw, his fingers, stiffened into rigid, claw-like hooks, scratched frantically at his own temples.

”Guh... aaagh...”

He tried to push himself out of the capsule, his bare feet hitting the laminate floor, but his motor functions were already dissolving.

The moment his weight touched the ground, his knees buckled.

THUD.

As his skull cracked against the wooden floorboards, thick, dark crimson blood began to pour in steady, horrifying streams from his eyes, his nostrils, and both ear canals.

The neural feedback loop, forced through his cranial interface without the protective biological buffers, had cooked his brainstem like an overloaded circuit.

He convulsed three times, his heels drumming violently against the floor, and then went entirely limp, his wide, blood-filled eyes staring unblinkingly at the ceiling fan spinning lazily above him.

At that moment, the door of his room swung open as his mother walked in to his room holding a steaming bowl of beef soup, smiling as she prepared to scold him for playing past midnight again.

”Xiao Lin, dinner is getting cold, you need to—”

The ceramic bowl slipped from her fingers, shattering against the tiles, splashing hot broth and porcelain shards across her slippers.

”Xiao Lin?! XIAO LIN!”

Her voice cracked into a piercing, glass-shattering shriek of terror as she fell to her knees, slipping in the expanding pool of her son’s dark blood, pulling his limp, cooling head into her lap, screaming until the neighbors began pounding on the thin drywall.

Across the continent, in the affluent suburbs of a western capital, a father walked into his daughter’s bedroom to drop off laundry.

He found the girl half-spilled out of her luxury immersion pod, her silk pajamas soaked in black, coagulated blood dripping from her nose and lips, her pulse fading into an imperceptible flutter as she sank into an irreversible, vegetative coma.

Within ten minutes, the emergency response networks of every major country on Blue Star collapsed under the sheer, unprecedented volume of panic.

WEE-WOO-WEE-WOO-WEE-WOO.

The night was torn apart by the hysterical sirens of tens of thousands of ambulances and police cruisers racing through the streets.

Paramedics kicked down apartment doors, only to be met with the sickening stench of iron and bodily fluids.

Hospitals were overwhelmed within thirty minutes; emergency rooms ran out of stretchers, forcing doctors to treat bleeding, seizing young men and women directly on the cold linoleum hallways.

”We have another five hundred cases in the northern sector!” an emergency dispatcher screamed into her headset, her hands shaking so hard she dropped her pen. ”All of them are suffering from catastrophic intracranial hemorrhaging! Brain death within minutes of disconnection!”

”What is the source?! Is it a biological attack?! A neurotoxin in the water supply?!” a police captain barked, slamming his fist onto a tactical operations desk inside the city’s central precinct.

”No, sir!” a technical investigator shouted back, his face chalk-white as he pulled up synchronized data logs from the city’s telecommunication grid. ”Look at the telemetry! Every single victim, all forty seven thousand of them confirmed so far, were actively synchronized to the neural link of the new Gen-4 Immersion Capsules manufactured by the Rising Dragon Corporation! The hardware didn’t fail... the software sent an unmetered, high-voltage neural surge straight into their cerebral cortexes! It completely liquefied their central nervous systems!”

Within two hours, the global crisis reached the highest levels of governance.

Emergency broadcasts interrupted television feeds, radio channels, and internet streams across every continent.

The President of a certain country sat behind a mahogany desk, his knuckles white, his expression grim as the ticker at the bottom of the screen tracked the soaring casualty counts into the tens of thousands.

”By executive order of the Central Security Council, effective immediately, all models of virtual reality immersion pods, neural headsets, and deep-dive simulation hardware are classified as Level-One Lethal Hazards. All commercial servers hosting the application known as ’Rising Dragon Online’ are to be permanently severed from the global grid. Possession or operation of these units is now an act of treason. Military police are authorized to use lethal force to seize and destroy every operational capsule on the market...”

The world of Blue Star descended into an ocean of grief, candlelight vigils, and burning hardware thrown out into the rain, the citizens weeping over a slaughter they would never comprehend.

*

*

*

Back in the subterranean dark of the Rising Dragon Sect.

Down beneath the shattered stone and the ruined altars, the sacrifice of thousands of human lives on an alien world finally funneled into its singular, horrifying conduit.

BOOOOOOM!

The blade of Ling Luochen’s dark red demonic sword was still buried deep in Yun Ming’s chest, pinning his spine to the cracked bedrock.

Her black-and-red eyes were wide with sadistic glee, her lips parted to whisper another mocking insult—

When an explosion of pure, ungodly force detonated from within Yun Ming’s ribs!

CLANG!

The demonic blade was violently ejected from his flesh!

The sheer kinetic backlash tore the hilt clean from Ling Luochen’s grasp, spinning the dark steel through the air as she was thrown backward by twenty paces, her boots skidding across the wet stone, carving deep trenches into the granite.

Yun Ming’s body rose.

He didn’t stand up; he floated, hoisted into the air by an invisible, suffocating column of incandescent, golden-crimson spiritual radiation.

The gaping, fatal stab wounds across his lower abdomen and chest did not merely heal; the flesh stitched together with violent, unnatural speed, the severed muscle fibers weaving back together with bright threads of divine code!

His disheveled robes were incinerated into ash by the friction of the raw energy pouring from his pores, replaced by an ethereal armor of condensed, blinding light!

At this moment, his entire body was filled with power, so much so that he feels like he was about to burst!

It was too much. It was an astronomical, ocean-like reservoir of pure, stolen life-force, converted through the system’s merciless algorithms from forty thousand dying mortal brains and pumped directly into his mortal meridians!

His veins bulged against his skin like thick, glowing golden serpents, pulsing with such violent internal pressure that his skin began to tear in fine, hairline fractures, weeping mist made of pure, pressurized spiritual marrow!

His heart didn’t beat—it hammered like a divine forge, every pulse sending shockwaves through the bedrock that pulverized the surrounding stone pillars into powder!

The golden halberd lying on the ground leaped into his right hand, its cracked shaft absorbing the foreign divinity, swelling in size until its crescent blade blazed with the heat of a falling star!

Yun Ming threw his head back, his eyes completely washed out by blinding, pupil-less golden light, his jaw trembling under the unbearable, crushing agony of bearing the life-force of an entire world.

A roar—not of a man, not of a cultivator, but of an overloaded, dying engine burning its own soul to survive—shook the subterranean depths to their very foundations.

”MORE! GIVE ME MORE!”