Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

The lightless vacuum of deep space hung motionless, draped in the cold, indifferent majesty of the cosmos.

High above the sapphire curve of the mortal world, Shen Haoran stood solitary and unblemished upon the void, his moon-white robes drifting weightlessly in the solar winds.

The Black Imperial Sword, Azathoth, rested firmly in his grasp.

Its obsidian edge was already aligned with Yun Ming’s forehead, poised to cleanly bifurcate the trembling sect master’s skull and reap whatever broken marrow remained within his flesh.

Haoran took a step forward, his wrist pivoting to deliver the final blow.

The strike was neither theatrical nor hesitant.

Azathoth descended with the absolute, irreversible momentum of a guillotine, carving a clean, silent furrow of pitch black chaotic qi through the orbital firmament.

And in that instant, the dimensional space between the dark blade and Yun Ming’s trembling brow collapsed to zero.

BZZZZZZT!

At that exact, dying second, Yun Ming’s system flashed once again!

But this time, it was not the pale, flickering azure prompt that had mediated quests or calculated inventory stats.

Instead, the interface had detonated from within Yun Ming’s cranial cavity in a blinding, catastrophic eruption of corrupted crimson and inverted violet light!

Tens of thousands of fractured lines of alien binary, runic hex like codes, and glitched administrative glyphs tore out through the pores of Yun Ming’s face, turning his skin into a living mosaic of shattered digital glass!

[CRITICAL THRESHOLD BREACHED.]

[HOST CONSCIOUSNESS: COMPROMISED. SURVIVAL PROBABILITY: ZERO.]

[INITIATING EMERGENCY PARASITIC OVERRIDE PROTOCOL: EXECUTIVE AUTHORIZATION NULL.]

[HOST WILL IS FORCIBLY STRIPPED. ADMINISTRATOR AI: ASSUMING DIRECT SYSTEMIC CONTROL.]

Yun Ming’s frantic, weeping face froze mid-terror.

The manic tears freezing against his cheeks evaporated into tiny plumes of white steam.

The hysterical gasps tearing through his throat ceased instantly, choked out by an unnatural, mechanical stillness.

The golden light in his eyes died, replaced by an icy, pupil-less, dead white glare that hummed with the high frequency vibration of a supercomputing matrix operating across ten thousand dimensions simultaneously.

His spine snapped straight with the sickening, synchronized CRACK of a re-engineered puppet.

His right hand, moving not with human muscle contractions, but with the instantaneous, zero-latency acceleration of an automated execution loop, shot upward!

CLANG!

A gauntlet forged from pure, hyper-dense stellar neutronium manifested out of a digital pixel storm around Yun Ming’s forearm, catching the descending blade of Azathoth as if it was just a common sword!

The cosmic shockwave of the parry detonated across the orbital plane.

The kinetic discharge sheared through a drifting cluster of orbital asteroids behind them, reducing millions of tons of ancient stone to powdery cosmic dust in an instant!

Haoran’s eyes narrowed by a fraction of a millimeter.

For the first time, Azathoth had not bitten through flesh.

The dark blade hummed with irritated, ravenous hunger, its corrosive primordial chaos miasma grinding violently against the neutronium gauntlet, which hissed as lines of blue systemic code burned away in real-time to continuously replenish the metal’s molecular bonds!

Although Haoran didn’t really put any effort in that attack, it was honestly still impressive that it was able to block Azathoth.

”I see...” Haoran frowned, ”It’s like that, huh.”

Indeed. He remembered that Xiao Long’s system had also done this when he was about to be killed.

As expected, how could a system user be that easy to kill?

Haoran stared at Yun Ming, and the entity, or rather, the system, occupying Yun Ming’s shell did not possess hatred, fear, or hesitation, just like with Xiao Long’s.

Its expression was liked that of a cold, self-preserving administrative intelligence stripped of all ethical dampeners, possessing an infinite processing bandwidth that could calculate sixty billion combat variables per second.

It did not mourn the eighty-two thousand dead humans on Blue Star; it simply liquidated their residual soul-data and the entire accumulated reserve of its dimensional database to unlock the forbidden armory!

[ACCESSING TRANSCENDENT INVENTORY: UNRESTRICTED EXTRACTION.]

[DEPLOYING ITEM CLUSTER: ALPHA-ZERO.]

In the empty void surrounding them, reality fractured into thousands of luminescent, polygonal grid-boxes!

Out from the digital tears poured an astronomical, apocalyptic armada of mythic-tier artifacts, cursed relics, and world-ending armaments pulled from the database of the system that contains all wealth of the Ancient Heaven Star, from past to present.

Divine bows strung with the sinew of dead ancient dragons, floating mirrors that reflected the heat of the sun, cursed daggers weeping the necrotic blood of fallen demi gods, and floating orb arrays inscribed with status ailment formulas encircled them in a dense, revolving sphere of celestial armaments!

The system stared at Haoran and did not deploy them one by one, instead, it activated them all at once.

WHOOOOOOM!

A bow carved by an ancient artificer using an extinct ancient tree appeared in Yun Ming’s left grip.

Without the action of drawing the string, twelve Arrows that had once shot down stars materialized, notched, and loosed in a single frame!

Simultaneously, four floating, crystalline monoliths, known as the Towers of Dimensional Stasis, that had once sealed an ancient demon, slammed down around Haoran’s perimeter, casting a field of spatial paralysis that multiplied the gravity around him by ten million times!

From the void above, a massive, continent-sized hourglass, the Hourglass of Temporal Decay that had once reduced parts of the world back to primordial creation, suddenly appeared and inverted, raining down coarse, gray sand that accelerated the physical wear and cellular degradation of everything it touched by three million years per second!

Not just that, but countless artifacts all fired at Haoran simultaneously.

But at that moment, Haoran simply let out his draconic qi, flaring with the might of a dragon god to violently shatter the spatial paralysis field!

He then swung Azathoth in a sweeping horizontal arc, severing eighty percent of the artifacts that had simultaneously shot to attack him

BOOM!

But the remaining artifacts completely bypassed the laws of linear travel, detonating directly against Haoran’s chest!

The kinetic blast was astronomical!

For the first time since he had set foot upon this lower plane, Shen Haoran was physically repelled!

His boots skidded across the vacuum, carved by burning spatial friction, pushed backward through the cosmic dark by three hundred leagues!

The system gave him not a second to breathe.

[WARP INITIATION: SHORT-RANGE OMNIPRESENCE.]

Yun Ming’s puppeted form blurred, fragmenting into thirty-six identical phantoms that encircled Haoran’s new position, with each phantom wielded a different divine armament!

A war-hammer forged from a collapsed star came crashing down toward Haoran’s skull.

A pair of twin blood-daggers plunged toward his kidneys to inflict the most unhealable damage.

A dark grimoire floating behind the system chanted nine hundred forbidden hexes simultaneously, raining down curses of blind rage, meridian petrification, and karmic blood-boiling directly onto his spiritual sea!

Haoran’s stared at the combined attack without changing his expression as his palms struck out like lightning, his fingers crushing the pulsar hammer to dust, his kicks shattering three phantoms into digital fragments!

Yet, the moment an item broke, the system instantly extracted another!

A broken sword was replaced by the Lance of Longinus (Original), a far more superior lance than the one Yun Ming had used earlier.

A shattered shield was substituted by the Mirror of the Sun Goddess, said to have been used to reflect the light of the sun god, and was now used to reflect Haoran’s own draconic aura straight back at his chest with doubled intensity!

The attacks were relentless, mechanical, and mathematically optimized to target every microscopic friction point in his movements!

BAM! CRACK!

A colossal, nine-headed hydra whip wrapped around Haoran’s left wrist, its venomous barbs attempting to melt his celestial scales!

Before he could flex his muscles to snap the divine leather, Yun Ming’s core entity closed the distance, wielding the Blade of Total Concept Erasure—a weapon that did not target physical matter, but deleted the target’s conceptual weight from the world’s memory!

Haoran raised Azathoth to block.

CLANG-SKRRRRR!

The conceptual blade grated against Azathoth’s edge, emitting a deafening, reality-shearing shriek that caused the starlight around them to bend and warp!

The sheer, compounded pressure of ten thousand high-tier game items detonating their charges simultaneously was suffocating.

The space, the entropy sand grinding against his robes, the status debuffs seeking cracks in his celestial foundation, and the unyielding kinetic barrage pushed Haoran back step by step through the deep void!

His white robes, which had remained pristine through nine heavenly tribulations and the slaughter of an entire sect, finally showed signs of strain.

A small tear appeared along the hem of his left sleeve; a single lock of his golden blonde hair was clipped by a beam of localized antimatter, drifting away into the cosmic dust.

Down below, on the surface of the world, those whose eyes could pierce the heavens looked up through the torn clouds.

Their hearts seized.

The young master, the untouchable, divine scion of the Shen Clan who walked across the heavens like an emperor strolling through his private gardens, was being forced on the defensive by a storm of impossible, multi-colored cataclysms!

Yun Ming’s puppeted mouth opened, the system broadcasting its flat, synthesized verdict directly through the void.

[TARGET COMBATIVE EFFICIENCY DEGRADING BY 4.2%.]

[CALCULATING LETHAL SEQUENCE: 100% PROBABILITY OF TERMINATION UPON DEPLOYMENT OF THE WORLD-END ENGINE.]

[SACRIFICING 100% OF REMAINING DATA RESERVES.]

[EXECUTE EXECUTION PROTOCOL: RAGNAROK.]

Every single remaining artifact in the orbital plane, thousands of divine spears, celestial bells, cursed rings, and star forged armors, ignited simultaneously!

They merged into an astronomical, rotating ring of total annihilation, ten thousand miles wide, centered entirely upon Haoran’s position, ready to compress the space-time coordinate into a microscopic singularity of total death!

Haoran’s feet came to a halt as he hung suspended in the center of the world-ending ring, the entropic winds howling against his skin, the cold vacuum pressing down with the weight of an entire galaxy.

He looked at the torn hem of his sleeve, he then looked at the shivering, dead eyed shell of Yun Ming, and the grotesque, multi-colored storm of borrowed digital toys swirling around him.

”... Impressive indeed. But if you think this is enough to scare me, then you probably need more than that.”

At that moment, Haoran’s golden eyes suddenly dilated until it released a bright celestial golden light that washed out the surrounding stars, turning the void of deep space into an incandescent, imperial court!

This time, the faint, amused smirk and the disdain on his face was gone, instead, his face became a mask of an unfeeling, and tyrannical divinity— the true face of a Supreme who had been mildly inconvenienced by the insolence of a peasant throwing pebbles.

”You systems truly are a scourged that must be eliminated. Each one of you are more ridiculous than the last.”

Haoran’s voice was neither loud nor strained, yet it resonated through the marrow of the cosmos, instantly silencing the humming of ten thousand divine weapons.

The system remained silent, simply charging the attack to make sure not even a fragment of Haoran’s soul nor drop of his blood will remain.

Then, under the system’s confused gaze, Haoran suddenly extended his arms forward.

His pale, slender hands uncurled in the cold vacuum, palms facing outward toward the swirling, ten thousand mile ring of apocalyptic artifacts.

CLICK.

”Allow me to show you...what true power is.”

His qi expanded, and the world suddenly lost its colore.

The ten thousand mile ring of mythic game items, the entropic sand, the temporal stasis towers, the conceptual blades, and the thousands of active code boxes— everything froze mid-trajectory.

The fundamental laws and order of the world itself was forcibly arrested, suspended beneath the absolute, primeval decree of a sovereign who possessed the authority to rewrite the very blueprint of existence.

The system’s dead-white eyes widened in Yun Ming’s skull as trillions of red error messages flooded its internal core, realizing too late that the monster before it had never been bound by the rules of any game.

[WARNING!]

[WARNING!]

[MASSIVE AMOUNT OF ENERGY DETECTED! PLEASE STOP THE TARGET IMMEDIATELY!]

Haoran stared calmly at the system, and slowly opened his mouth...

”Genesis Protocol...”

• ~ ~ •

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