Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

The subterranean cavern had ceased to resemble an architectural sanctuary.

Under the oppressive density of Shen Haoran’s cold golden gaze, the surrounding granite walls groaned, weeping waterfalls of fine stone dust as fissures branched outward like dark spiderwebs.

The severed pillars that had supported the grand sect above hung suspended on sheared spatial edges, vibrating with the silent, terrifying acoustic resonance of a world holding its breath.

Yun Ming scrambled backward across the rubble, his heels slipping in the pooled blood of the woman he had just crucified.

Every nerve ending along his spine screamed with a deafening, biological terror that no modern human was ever designed to endure.

His fingers cramped against the cold shaft of his golden halberd, the knuckles white and slick with sweat.

In his eyes, the translucent interface was no longer a reliable strategic companion, it had instead become a strobe light of bleeding, broken red pixels.

[FATAL TRAJECTORY DETECTED.]

[SURVIVAL PROBABILITY: 0.000012%]

[TARGET CLASSIFICATION: IMPOSSIBLE ENTITY.]

”Get away from me!” Yun Ming shrieked, his voice cracking into a high-pitched, manic bark that bounced hollowly off the shattered walls.

He didn’t wait for Haoran to close the distance, and with a wild, terrified heave of his torso, Yun Ming poured the entirety of his borrowed, stolen power into his weapon!

BOOM!

The crescent blade of the halberd erupted into an apocalyptic pillar of blinding, burning plasma!

He spun the weapon in a frantic, blinding circle, releasing nine overlapping, crescent-shaped waves of condensed golden destruction that carved through the bedrock, vaporizing the stone into bubbling lakes of lava as they converged upon Haoran’s slender frame from nine distinct spatial angles!

Haoran didn’t even blink.

He continued his unhurried stride across the damp stones, his hands remained casually gathered within his flowing sleeves.

As the nine catastrophic waves of solar plasma converged to incinerate him into atomic dust, Haoran merely exhaled a faint breath of pristine mist.

SHIIIIING.

A microscopic ripple of pitch-black sword intent danced across the tip of Haoran’s index finger.

The nine waves of solar energy, attacks potent enough to level an entire mountain range, did not even reach him as the moment they crossed into Haoran’s perimeter, their internal spiritual circuits were cleanly excised.

The blinding golden light popped, dissolving into harmless, lukewarm embers that drifted off his immaculate robes like falling autumn leaves.

Before the embers could even touch the dirt, Haoran was already standing directly before Yun Ming.

The movement felt as it had already transcended the concept of speed, it was as if he disregarded the distance between them.

Haoran’s pale, slender right hand reached out, moving with the lazy grace of a scholar plucking a blossom from a branch.

His fingers closed casually around the broad, burning hot crescent blade of the divine halberd.

HISSSS.

The searing hot flames capable of boiling high-grade celestial iron died instantly against Haoran’s skin.

The iridescent scales of his newly fused Heavenly Order Dragon Body and Infinity Dragon God Physique formed a microscopic lattice across his palm, rendering his flesh harder than even the hardest metal forged from a dying star.

With a slow, effortless twist of his wrist, Haoran exerted the brute physical pressure of a colliding moon.

CRACK-CRUNCH!

The legendary halberd, an ancient treasure forged from meteoritic iron, shattered like a brittle icicle!

Fractured shards of glowing metal exploded outward, singing through the air like lethal shrapnel!

”Guh...!” Yun Ming gasped, the violent kinetic backlash traveling up his arms, dislocating both of his shoulders with a sickening pop and throwing him backward against the central stone pillar.

Haoran didn’t pause. He stepped through the cloud of metallic debris, his golden pupils locking onto Yun Ming’s throat.

His left palm drew back, straight and sharp as a jade spear, and thrust forward with the cold, absolute intention of punching clean through Yun Ming’s sternum and crushing his beating heart to pulp!

Yet, the moment the strike should have ended the sect master’s life, reality twisted.

ZRRRRT!

An absurd, statistically impossible anomaly manifested!

A stray, jagged fragment from the shattered halberd, spinning erratically through the air from the previous explosion, caught the edge of a severed underground water pipe embedded deep within the bedrock.

The pressurized water detonated with volcanic violence, blasting an impenetrable wall of blinding white fog directly between them!

As for how that pipe came about. They were actually put there by players who were engineers when they were reconstructing the entire sect.

Simultaneously, the bedrock beneath Yun Ming’s boots gave way and a natural subterranean fault line, dormant for ten thousand years, suddenly chose this exact second to collapse!

The floor gave out, dropping Yun Ming four feet downward into a newly opened fissure just as Haoran’s lethal palm strike pierced the space where his skull had been, obliterating the fifty-foot pillar behind him into microscopic powder!

It was plot armor of the thickest, most nauseating caliber—an absurd sequence of coincidences bending probability to its absolute breaking point to preserve the life of a dying host.

Haoran frowned, and was about to chase after, but then turned around and stared at Ling Luochen.

He sighed, took out a token from his storage ring and placed it beside her unconscious body.

In an instant, a golden barrier surrounded her, protecting her from most external harm that may come her way.

Below, tumbling through the collapsing fissure, coughing up dark, clotted blood, Yun Ming scrambled frantically through the dirt like a beaten cur.

The fall had popped his dislocated shoulders back into their sockets through sheer, miraculous luck, but the terror in his soul had reached fever pitch.

’SYSTEM!’ Yun Ming roared in his mind, his voice weeping with hysterics as he crawled through the dark rubble. ’HELP ME! SACRIFICE THEM! SACRIFICE THE REST OF THE PLAYERS! TAKE ANOTHER FORTY THOUSAND! TAKE A HUNDRED THOUSAND! I NEED A DIVINE SKILL! I NEED AN ABSOLUTE KILLING TECHNIQUE! OR EVEN AN ESCAPE TALISMAN!’

In the dark recesses of his consciousness, the blue screen flickered, but the response was sluggish, choked with unusual hesitation.

[... Warning, Host,] the synthetic voice echoed, carrying a noticeable layer of digital friction and glitching code. [The... the previous extraction has already caused catastrophic societal fallout on Blue Star. Global regulatory bodies have initiated full-grid severances. Over thirty thousand neural capsules have been forcibly disconnected by emergency physical breaches.]

’I DON’T CARE ABOUT BLUE STAR!’ Yun Ming screamed internally, blood leaking from his ears as he scrambled to his feet beneath a collapsed archway. ’I AM YOUR HOST! IF I DIE, YOU CEASE TO EXIST! PULL THEIR SOULS! BURN THEIR CORES! DRAIN EVERY SINGLE ONE OF THOSE IDIOTS UNTIL THEIR HEADS POP! AS LONG AS I SURVIVE! EVERYTHING CAN BE REBUILT!’

[... The karmic backlash... is exceeding acceptable operational parameters,] the system hummed, its text wavering between azure and a deep, sickly static gray. [To initiate another harvest of this scale... will result in permanent biological extinction of the player base within the primary regional cluster...]

’DON’T HESITATE, YOU PIECE OF CODE! DO IT!’

Before the system could finalize its internal ethical algorithm, the shadows surrounding Yun Ming froze.

SHIIIIING.

The ceiling above him fall, no, it didn’t fall, it was simply erased.

A vertical chasm opened in the earth, and descending through the empty air like an executioner stepping from the clouds, Shen Haoran appeared directly above him.

The young supreme’s face was serene, but the cold amusement in his golden eyes had hardened into something infinitely more dangerous: utter disdain for the unnatural luck shielding his prey.

”You scurry well for an insect,” Haoran murmured softly, drifting downward until his boots hovered inches above the rubble. ”Let’s see if you’re as tough to kill as a demonic cockroach, or as easy to kill as an ant.”

Haoran didn’t use a palm strike this time, and with a smooth, fluid motion, the Black Imperial Sword, Azathoth, slid from the spatial void into his right hand!

The dark blade hummed with bottomless, ravenous malice, drinking in the ambient light until the fissure was cast into pitch black twilight.

Without a pause, Haoran swung downward!

It was a casual, horizontal slash, yet it carried the terrifying authority of the newly unified Heavenly Order and Infinity Dragon God!

A crescent of void cleaving darkness swept outward, expanding until it cleaved through the very dimensional coordinates of the fissure, ensuring that no falling rocks, no collapsing steam pipes, and no spatial distortions could provide an avenue of escape!

Yun Ming’s pupils contracted to pinpricks. Death was a millimeter away.

DING!

[EMERGENCY PROTOCOL OVERRIDE: PASSIVE FATE MANIFESTATION ACTIVATED.]

At that exact, impossible fraction of a second, the shattered remnant of the ancestral formation core, the very altar that Ling Luochen had broken hours ago, suffered a secondary, catastrophic spiritual meltdown three hundred paces away!

The subterranean leylines beneath the mountain inverted their magnetic polarity!

KABOOOOOOOM!

An astronomical geyser of compressed, subterranean earthen qi erupted from the deep mantle, shooting upward with the force of an exploding volcanic caldera!

The sheer, ungodly kinetic force of the planetary eruption struck the side of the fissure, violently distorting the local gravitational field!

The space warped, Haoran’s descending black sword crescent, which should have cleaved Yun Ming from crown to groin, was deflected by three tiny degrees by the violent planetary upheaval!

SHRRRRK!

The black wave missed Yun Ming’s heart by half an inch, instead shearing off his entire left ear, slicing through his collarbone, and cleaving the entire wall behind him into a clean, bottomless abyss!

”AAAAAAAGH!”

Yun Ming shrieked as blood sprayed from the side of his head, the sheer shockwave of Azathoth’s passage tearing his robes to shreds and flaying the skin from his chest!

He was thrown violently through the air, crashing through three successive stone barricades before tumbling onto the grand, cracked plaza of the inner sanctum where the battle had originally begun!

He lay in the dirt, gasping for breath, coughing up mouthfuls of crimson marrow, his vision blurred with tears and blood.

’SYSTEM!’ Yun Ming sobbed, his mind breaking under the relentless, god like oppression of the white robed monster stepping out of the dust. ’SYSTEM, PLEASE! THEY ARE JUST GAMERS! THEY SIGNED THE TERMS OF SERVICE! WHO CARES IF THEY DIE?! DRAIN THEM! DRAIN THEM ALL! SAVE ME!’

The blue screen hovered before his eyes, trembling violently.

[... Calculation in progress...]

[Hostile entity possesses anomalous abilities and authority... Normal defensive buffs are 100% ineffective...]

[To guarantee Host’s survival... requires total cerebral liquefaction of eighty-two thousand connected biological units...]

[System integrity check failing... Risk of total dimensional severance...]

The system was caught in an impossible, paralyzing loop—weighing the total annihilation of its mortal battery on Blue Star against the immediate, violent extinction of its host at the hands of the Shen Clan’s divine scion.

Through the drifting smoke and falling embers, the rhythmic, leisurely click of boots against stone resonated once more.

Shen Haoran walked out from the fissure, his white robes remained completely untouched by the volcanic dust, his golden hair drifting lazily in the scalding draft.

The Black Imperial Sword rested loosely in his right hand, its dark tip dragging along the broken flagstones, leaving a thin, smoking furrow of non-existence in its wake.

His golden eyes looked down upon the shivering, bleeding wreck crawling through the mud, his lips pulling back into an expression of cold, venomous entertainment.

”Even the earth bends its spine to nudge you out of my blade’s path,” Haoran remarked, his voice smooth, resonant, and dripping with aristocratic mockery. ”How truly fascinating you lot are. A parasitic will, desperately pulling the strings of fate to keep a worthless puppet dancing on its stage.”

Haoran stopped five paces away. He slowly raised Azathoth, pointing the pitch-black point directly between Yun Ming’s wide, terrified eyes.

”Let us see,” Haoran whispered, golden eyes burning with the decree of an emperor about to butcher a false god, ”how many miracles you have left before I turn you into a corpse.”