Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

Above the ground, the battle was still as intense.

The leaders of the Four Sacred Grounds were being suppresed by Augusta and the others, while those other Nirvana Rebirth were being hunted down by the people brought by Ziyan and Xinye.

The players and the weaker natives, on the other hand, was being butchered like cattles by the students.

Just then, without a single herald or warning drum, the battle was suddenly interrupted.

Across the vast expanses of the central plazas, along the broken buildings and statues, and inside the burning ruins of the lower pavilions, tens of thousands of players suddenly stiffened.

It was as if an invisible, electrified steel cable had been threaded through their spines and pulled taut by a celestial winch.

Their limbs locked at horrific, unnatural angles, their weapons clattered from uncurling fingers, tumbling across the bloody flagstones.

”AH...AAAAAHHHH!”

The sound that tore from their throats was not a human battle cry; it was an apocalyptic choir of sheer, agonizing biological torment.

The unmetered neural feedback that had already liquefied forty thousand brains on Blue Star returned with a catastrophic, multiplied vengeance!

”AAAAAAAGH! MY HEAD! MY BRAIN IS ON FIRE!”

”STOP IT! IT HURTS! IT HURTS! MOM! DAD! HELP ME!!”

Men, women, seasoned guild leaders, and terrified newcomers collapsed into the dirt simultaneously, their bodies thrashing like freshly landed fish on a hot deck.

Capillaries beneath their skin detonated in endless spiderweb bursts, turning their flesh dark purple and black.

Thick, boiling streams of blood poured from their ears, nostrils, and tear ducts, pooling across the cold stone.

Their eyes rolled completely back into their skulls, showing only veined, hemorrhaging whites as their mouths foamed with a foul mixture of saliva, bile, and liquefied brain matter.

The system was not merely taking their operational stamina; it was systematically harvesting every volt of bio-electric vitality, every scrap of soul fragment, and every thread of cerebral consciousness from thousands of living humans connected across dimensions, forcefully converting their mortality into a desperate fuel tank!

The imperial students stepped back, their faces twisted in disgust as the players’ avatars violently disintegrated—not into clean, digital blue particles, but into dry, gray husks of shriveled skin and brittle bone that crumbled into dust beneath the howling northern gales.

But before they can think why this was happening....

KABOOOOOO-BOOOOOM!

The bedrock of the central plaza detonated into an astronomical pillar of incandescent, golden-crimson plasma that was three hundred meters wide!

The shockwave sheared off the tops of three adjacent mountain ridges, vaporizing thousands of tons of ancient rock into drifting ash in less than a millisecond!

Then, Yun Ming bursts out from underground, his power rising steadily as he soared to the sky.

He rode the epicenter of the divine explosion like a maddened war deity!

The ragged, blood-soaked blue robes he had worn in the dark had been entirely incinerated, replaced by a radiant, translucent war-panoply woven from millions of lines of golden, scrolling administrative code.

All injuries he had suffered from his earlier confrontation with Haoran had now completely healed.

His eyes shone like two blinding suns that burned with the stolen lifespans of an entire generation of mortals.

Every heartbeat pulled another thousand human brains into irreversible vegetative death on Blue Star, funneling astronomical energy into his meridians, pushing his cultivation to a terrifying, artificial zenith that forced the clouds above the continent to boil away into an empty, scorched vacuum!

He did not look back at his ruined mountain, he did not look at the ashes of his followers, he simply propelled himself straight upward, shattering the sound barrier, breaking through the atmospheric mantle, and piercing through the outer spiritual leylines of the realm!

But then, a streak of silent, pristine white light detached from the smoking crater in the earth as Haoran ascended without the frantic, violent thrashing of wings or plumes of propulsion; he simply translated his physical presence upward, matching Yun Ming’s desperate trajectory with effortless, terrifying leisure.

Within seconds, the chaotic sounds of the mortal world died into absolute, dead silence.

They hovered in the lightless void of deep space, suspended high above the curved, blue-and-green horizon of the lower realm.

Down below, the continent where the Rising Dragon Sect stood looked like a tiny, emerald leaf floating in an ocean of clouds.

Above them hung the cold, indifferent majesty of the cosmos—distant star systems, nebular dust clouds of deep violet, and the vast, empty canvas of non-existence.

Haoran floated barefoot upon the cosmic vacuum, his moon white robes drifting weightlessly around his tall, slender frame.

The Black Imperial Sword, Azathoth, rested loosely in his right grip, drinking in the faint, distant starlight.

Fifty paces away, Yun Ming tried to gasped for air, his chest heaving as he activated a golden barrier that covered his entire body.

He then gripped a newly synthesized, two-handed greatsword forged entirely from pressurized system code.

”You... you monster!” Yun Ming screamed, his voice transmitted through pure spiritual vibration that rippled across the cosmic void. ”You think you can just crush me like an insect?! I am the chosen one of this world! I have an entire world backing my existence! You will never defeat the concept of my destiny!”

Haoran’s lips curved into a thin, sharp smile that held less warmth than the absolute zero of the void around them.

”Don’t fret,” Haoran replied, his voice calm, clear, and perfectly modulated, echoing directly inside Yun Ming’s cranial cavity. ”It only makes you seem weak and desperate.”

SHIIIIING.

Haoran did not waste another breath and took a single, weightless step forward upon the cosmic void.

And within an instant, the distance between them folded.

Haoran appeared directly above Yun Ming’s left shoulder, and Azathoth cleaved downward, carrying with it his intent to kill!

At that moment, a crescent of pure, pitch black wave of sword intent detached from the blade, wide enough to split a minor moon in half!

Yun Ming’s pupils contracted to microscopic dots. Against that strike, his newly power felt as frail as dried paper!

[WARNING! FATAL TRAJECTORY! EXECUTING EMERGENCY SACRIFICE PROTOCOL!]

[12,000 BIOLOGICAL UNITS HARVESTED ON BLUE STAR.]

[UNLOCKED: PRIMORDIAL AEGIS OF THE ANCIENT BLACK TORTOISE!]

CLANG!

At the exact second Azathoth’s edge should have cleaved Yun Ming’s collarbone to his waist, an ancient, spectral phantom of a continent-sized celestial tortoise materialized out of thin air!

The shell was carved from emerald starlight, inscribed with cosmic trigrams that had supposedly been lost since the creation of the heavens!

Azathoth struck the emerald shell, and the impact fell silent in the vacuum, but the kinetic shockwave blew away an approaching cluster of asteroids, reducing them to cosmic powder!

The celestial shell cracked, shattering into millions of glittering shards, but it absorbed the entirety of Haoran’s strike, buying Yun Ming a fraction of a heartbeat!

Yun Ming was stunned, but quickly recovered and lunged forward, his eyes burning with hysterical madness!

”DIE!”

He thrust his blade straight toward Haoran’s heart, pouring the life-force of thousands of freshly dead humans from Blue Star into the strike!

Haoran’s left hand casually rose to meet it.

He didn’t summon a shield or a barrier, his Unbreakable Diamond Sacred Technique ensures that he possessed the highest possible defense and durability as he simply pinched his thumb and forefinger together, catching the point of the divine, code-woven greatsword between two pale fingertips!

CRACK!

The blade could not advance by even a millimeter as the sheer, insurmountable physical superiority of Haoran’s physique stopped the thrust dead in its tracks.

”Impossible!” Yun Ming’s eyes widened.

But with a subtle twitch of his wrist, Haoran shattered the blade into fragments, his right hand bringing Azathoth around in a lightning-fast horizontal backhand, aimed straight at Yun Ming’s exposed throat!

[HOSTILE VELOCITY EXCEEDS REACTION LIMITS!]

[SACRIFICING 15,000 BIOLOGICAL UNITS!]

[DEPLOYING ABSOLUTE ARTIFACT: PROVIDENCE SUBSTITUTE PUPPET!]

SHHK!

Azathoth sliced clean through flesh and bone!

A severed head, spraying dark crimson blood into the vacuum, tumbled into the void!

Yet, as the head spun into the darkness, its features dissolved—transforming into a crude, wooden straw doll stuffed with human hair and talismanic paper, which instantly combusted into ash!

Three hundred paces to the right, Yun Ming rematerialized out of a spatial vortex, clutching his throat, his face pale as chalk, coughing up mouthfuls of glowing, golden blood!

”Hahaha! You can’t kill me!” Yun Ming wheezed, his laughter ragged, wet, and utterly unhinged. ”The system will rewrite reality as many times as it takes! You cannot pierce through the armor of a true protagonist!”

SYSTEM! MORE! GIVE ME AN ANCIENT WEAPON! GIVE ME SOMETHING THAT CAN PIERCE HIM!

[... CONFIRMED. HARVESTING REMAINING POPULATION OF EASTERN SECTOR: 20,000 UNITS.]

[FORGING TEMPORARY REPLICA: SPEAR OF LONGINUS (CONCEPTUAL PIERCING).]

A tear in the cosmic firmament opened beside Yun Ming’s right arm.

Reaching into the red, weeping spatial crack, his fingers wrapped around a colossal, blood-red lance that coiled like twin intertwining serpents.

The weapon hummed with the absolute, conceptual rule of Inevitability—a weapon designed to pierce through divine flesh regardless of the target’s defensive stats or physical density.

”Let’s see you take this! Die!” Yun Ming screamed as he hurled the spear with the entirety of his might!

WHOOOOOOM!

The blood-red lance tore through the vacuum, distorting the starlight around it, bending the dimensional fabric of space into a funnel that locked onto Haoran’s forehead!

It moved outside of conventional time, arriving at the target before the act of throwing had even fully concluded!

Haoran tilted his head slightly, and for the first time, a flicker of genuine curiosity crossed his golden pupils.

”A conceptual weapon that actually alters fate and destiny... Impressive.”

But even so, Haoran did not dodge, but simply raised his left palm, facing the incoming spear of inevitability.

THUMP.

”Let’s test this new power of mine...”

As those words left his mouth...

FREEZE.

The world froze as the concept of ’Inevitability’ collided head-on with the concept of ’Order.’

The spear, which was fated to pierce all things, encountered a reality where the very coordinates of space-time refused to permit its arrival.

The blood-red lance slowed, grinding to a halt barely three inches from Haoran’s open palm, vibrating violently, screaming as its conceptual programming was systematically unraveled and rewritten by the superior, despotic authority of Haoran’s newly acquired physique!

Haoran’s fingers closed around the shaft of the legendary spear.

Then, with his other hand holding Azathoth...

He destroyed the weapon!

CRUNCH.

The Spear of Longinus fractured into dust, its blood-red conceptual code dissolving into the cold vacuum of space like smoke.

Yun Ming’s jaw fell slack. His knees trembled in the void, his mind completely shattering against the impossible sight.

Conceptual weapons, substitute puppets, ancient defensive artifacts, every single thing that his system had pulled from the annals of multiverse lore had been discarded, broken, and swallowed by this monster before him as if they were cheap trinkets bought from a street vendor.

Haoran stepped forward through the drifting dust of the shattered spear.

His pace was measured, elegant, and devoid of the slightest exertion, his white robes fluttered against the solar winds, his golden eyes looking down upon the shivering, frantic sect master with the calm, pitiless gaze of an executioner who had allowed his prey to exhaust its final, pathetic tricks.

”Is that all?” Haoran asked, his voice ringing like a funeral bell through the silence of the stars. ”It seems rather underwhelming.”

And he was not joking.

Truthfully, for a child of destiny with a system, he expected this fight to be more troublesome, just like when he was killing Xiao Long back then.

Compared to that guy, this one seems... Low tier.

”Shut up!” Yun Ming roared.

’SYSTEM!’ Yun Ming shrieked internally, his soul weeping in absolute, hysterical terror as he scrambled backward through the void. ’WHAT ELSE DO WE HAVE?! SACRIFICE THE WESTERN SECTOR! SACRIFICE THE ENTIRE PLANET OF BLUE STAR! I DON’T CARE! GIVE ME SOMETHING THAT CAN STOP HIM!’

The blue screen hovered before his eyes, but it was no longer stable, but was now bleeding, torn by hundreds of error lines, its borders smoking with black, digital corruption.

[... CRITICAL SYSTEM OVERHEAT.]

[CASUALTY COUNT ON BLUE STAR EXCEEDS 95,000 BIOLOGICAL UNITS.]

[GLOBAL GRID PERMANENTLY SEVERED BY LOCAL MILITARY FORCES.]

[REMAINING BIOLOGICAL CONNECTIONS: 0.]

[POINT BALANCE: 0.]

[DEBT CEILING REACHED. SYSTEM SHUTDOWN IMMINENT...]

Yun Ming’s heart stopped.

Then, before he can blink, the golden ethereal armor wrapped around his frame flickered violently three times before dissolving into nothingness, leaving him naked, shivering, and entirely exposed in the freezing vacuum of space, clutching only the broken stump of his pride.

Haoran came to a halt five paces away as he slowly lifted the Black Imperial Sword, Azathoth, its obsidian edge pointing directly between Yun Ming’s wide, hollow, and despair-filled eyes.

”It seems,” Haoran whispered softly, the coldness in his voice freezing the very vacuum between them, ”your miracle has finally run out.”