Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

Chapter 561: Chapter 331: Planning

The grand throne room of the central palace in Sky Reaching City was dead silent.

The high stone walls, cut from smooth white jade and dark mountain granite, kept out every whisper of wind from the upper sky.

Thin trails of clean grey smoke rose from a bronze bowl set on a carved pedestal, filling the vast chamber with the dry, bitter scent of mountain pine.

Sitting atop the raised dais on his dark dragon-bone chair, Lin Yun rested his cheek against his knuckles.

His long black hair was loose over his white silk robes, his deep blue pupils watching the empty flagstones with a lazy, distant gaze.

Swish.

Just then, the heavy velvet curtains at the far end of the hall shifted.

A young man wearing the neat grey robes stepped out into the open room.

His boots made no sound against the polished floor as he hurried down the wide central carpet.

When he reached the foot of the raised stone steps, he stopped, dropped down to one knee, lowered his head until his brow nearly brushed the cold stone, and bowed before Lin Yun.

“Master Lin,” the scout called out, his voice trembling slightly in the heavy, empty quiet of the hall.

Lin Yun didn’t shift his posture. He didn’t take his hand away from his cheek and simply let out a low, flat breath and said,

“Speak.”

“Master Lin, it’s like this…”

The student described the rapid, unnatural growth of that floating metropolis.

He spoke of how the residents had driven massive iron anchors into the bedrock, linking three surrounding floating islands with heavy chains to expand the living wards.

He described the wide, eighty kilometer avenues paved with spotless stone, the clear waterways diverted from mountain springs to feed medicinal gardens, and the four-story pavilions of white jade and fragrant cedar that had popped up across the residential wards in a matter of days.

The trade hubs were already open, and caravans from the neutral merchant associations of the lower provinces were already lining up at the cloud docks to buy rare herbs harvested from the lower realm.

Lin Yun listened with half-closed eyes, his face completely flat.

A rich young master from an ancient clan using his knowledge to pave streets with pretty stone was nothing new.

Gold could buy timber, and lineage could command labor.

It was common, boring, and held no interest for him.

He tapped his index finger against his cheek with a slow, bored rhythm.

Geniuses were cheap in the upper realm.

Every thousand years, the great sects birthed a crop of young monsters who could split hills and leap across rivers.

But in the end, flesh was flesh, and bones were bones.

If any of those proud youths stepped across the outer gates of Sky Reaching City and entered his ten million square kilometers of safe ground, Lin Yun could crush their skulls into powder with a single idle blink.

Talented killers meant nothing to an invincible turtle sitting inside an iron shell.

“…Is that all?” Lin Yun asked, his tone dry, almost disappointed. “A rich boy who brought home some tough dogs and pretty flowers. If this is all your scouts could dig up after seven days, you are wasting my time.”

The scout’s back stiffened, cold sweat beading on the back of his neck.

“N-no, Master Lin! There is one more thing!” the scout stammered, hurrying to bring out his final report. “The most bizarre matter concerns the new residents who have moved into the lower wards of that city!”

Lin Yun frowned slightly. “Refugees from the lower realm, or just some natives?”

“That is the strange part, my lord!” the scout said, looking up with wide, bewildered eyes. “They wear crude leather and carry dull iron blades, but they act like madmen! They do not bow to the elders or seniors and they walk through the markets poking at stalls, waving their hands at the empty wind, and talking in strange tongues! They keep asking the street vendors for ‘quests’! They shout across the avenues about their ‘status panels’, their ‘attribute points’, and their ‘level caps’! They laugh when they are threatened with beatings, and when the city guards gave one of them five lashes for touching an array post, the fool just stood there grinning, shouting that the ‘pain sliders were set to ten percent’!”

The hall went dead still.

Lin Yun’s finger stopped mid-tap.

His blue eyes, which had looked sleepy and uncaring for the past hour, snapped wide open.

The bored, relaxed posture vanished in the fraction of an instant.

He couldn’t help but stand up, his white silk robes rustled violently as he rose to his full height from the chair.

His hands gripped the smooth stone armrests so hard that his knuckles showed pale white through the skin.

His tall frame cast a long, dark shadow down the steep steps of the dais, his blue pupils burning with sudden, frantic alarm!

‘Gamers!’ he thought, his heart hammering hard against his ribs like a panicked beast. ‘Those are gamers! That terminology… quests, level caps, status panels, pain sliders… that belongs only to one kind of creature!’

His mind raced through eighty years of quiet memories, flashing all the way back to his past life on that mundane, iron-covered world where people plugged their minds into machines to escape their dull days.

‘Does Shen Haoran control gamers?!’

The cold thought dripped into his brain like ice water poured down his spine.

How can an native young master from an ancient clan have anything to do with gamers?!

Did he find a world gateway? Did he get his hands on a recruitment tool? Or… does he carry a tool just like mine?!

The more he turned the idea over in his head, the colder his hands became.

He knew gamers better than anyone in this world!

Cultivators were dangerous, but cultivators had fear!

A proud elder feared losing his five hundred years of cultivation!

A talented disciple feared having his dantian punctured!

A great king feared having his lineage wiped out!

Because they feared death, you could threaten them, you could poison their wells, you could bribe their friends, or you could trap them in arrays until their spirits broke!

Gamers had none of that!

Gamers were an army of unhinged, shameless locusts!

They didn’t care about dying! If you cut off a gamer’s head, he would laugh in your face, wait three minutes for his respawn timer to tick down, and come sprinting back through the mud with a rusty knife, eager to see if he could poke out your eye before you killed him again!

They didn’t need salaries; they would dig through filthy ditches for twelve hours straight just to earn a shiny blue rock with a funny description!

They would throw their bodies into meat grinders ten thousand times just to figure out the attack pattern of a formation!

And if they carried the blessing of a system… if their stats could grow without bottleneck limits, if they could level up by killing common beasts, then giving them four or five years to grind would turn that rabble into an endless swarm of unkillable locusts that would strip the heavens bare!

If an arrogant, cold-blooded monster like Shen Haoran held the leash to an army like that, the entire balance of the dimension was finished!

‘I cannot let them farm,’ Lin Yun thought, his eyes darkening with vicious intent. ‘I cannot let them touch high-level beasts. I cannot let them figure out the mechanics of this world. If they reach the higher realms, even my ten million square kilometers of safe ground won’t be enough to hold off millions of suicidal maniacs throwing themselves at my walls day and night!’

He looked down at the kneeling student, his voice dropping into a cold, sharp whisper that cut through the silent hall like a razor.

“Send word to the Secret Service Command,” Lin Yun commanded, his jaw clenched tight. “Infiltrate the outer borders of the Boundless Sky City. Do not touch Shen Haoran or his women, and do not cross blades with the Ten Crowns either. Just focus entirely on those strange vagrants! Wherever they try to set up camps, burn their tents! Poison the low-tier monster dens where they hunt for meat! Hire natives to buy out all the basic iron weapons, cheap healing salves, and beginner manuals from the outer markets! If they leave the city gates in small groups to explore the ruins, ambushing them from the shadows! Break their legs, ruin their gear, and steal their gathering bags! Starve them of experience, starve them of resources, and tie their feet in the mud! I want their progress choked off before they can even condense a single drop of true spiritual energy!”

“Understand, Master Lin!” The student bowed his head three times against the stone, rose swiftly to his feet, and slipped through the heavy velvet curtains, vanishing into the dim corridors of the palace to carry out the ruthless decree.

Lin Yun sat back down.

He sank into the cold chair, letting out a long, shuddering breath through his teeth.

His blue eyes stared out through the high, arched windows toward the distant sea of clouds, where the faint, golden outlines of the Boundless Sky City hovered on the far horizon.

He rubbed his temples with his thumbs, his thoughts turning over and over as he began to plan to eliminate Haoran.

‘I cannot let this anomaly breathe,’ Lin Yun thought, his brow furrowing into deep, ugly creases. ‘The pavilion told me to observe, test, and restrict. But restriction is not enough. A weed with roots like that will crack my stone walls the moment it grows tall. He has to die.’

Yet, carrying out an assassination on the sole heir of the Shen Clan was a task that bordered on madness.

It is probably impossible to force him to come here in his domain.

Lin Yun knew his own limitations all too well. His great strength, his sole divine gift, was tied entirely to the earth beneath his feet.

Inside his ten million square kilometers, he was an untouchable king. But outside that invisible line, he was just an ordinary, hundred year old cultivator who had spent his life hiding in a room, lacking the terrifying combat instincts and blood-soaked experience of the upper realm’s true killers.

And Shen Haoran was no fool.

He was cold, calculating, and surrounded by layers of protection.

He would never step into an unknown, neutral fortress like Sky Reaching City without an ironclad reason.

You could send invitations, you could wave golden banners, you could offer rare wines, and Haoran would merely sneer and send an attendant to burn the letter.

Haoran had no reason to walk into someone else’s slaughterhouse.

So his only chance was the faction wars four years from now.

Lin Yun leaned his head back against the carved stone, his eyes narrowing into cold, scheming slits as the grand blueprint took shape in his mind.

Every five years, the Imperial Academy held the Faction Wars.

It was an ancient, mandatory trial established by the founders to prevent the student forces from growing fat and lazy behind their palace walls.

When that war began, the neutral wards were sealed.

The defensive barriers of private cities were forcibly powered down by the academy’s grand formations, and all factions and their territories were linked together into one colossal war zone!

Every major faction had to put their banners on the line.

Territory had to be conquered, central array towers had to be seized, and the faction leaders were required by ancient martial oath to step onto the grand arena of the central floating continent to settle the final scores!

‘Four years,’ Lin Yun calculated in his head, his fingers tapping a slow, deadly rhythm against the stone armrest. ‘That is forty-eight months. Just enough time.’

The plan began to unfold, piece by piece, like an intricate clockwork mechanism.

First, he would use the Secret Service Command to wage a war of attrition against Haoran’s gamer vanguard.

By constantly disrupting their hunting grounds, killing their low-level parties, and sabotaging their supply lines, he would keep them weak, frustrated, and under-leveled.

When the faction wars arrived, those hundreds of gamers would not be an elite strike force, instead they would be nothing more than disorganized, under-geared cannon fodder that would crumble the moment real pressure was applied.

Second, he would use the vast treasures he had accumulated over eighty years of city tolls to build a secret coalition.

Sky Reaching City had stayed neutral for decades, which meant every other major faction in the academy—the old scions who resented Haoran’s sudden rise, the disciples of the Ten Sages whose pride had been trampled, and some other coalitions who hated the Shen Clan’s dominance—would jump at the chance to ally with him.

He would supply them with high-grade defensive formations and siege engines, uniting four or five major factions into a single, overwhelming hammer aimed straight at Haoran’s throat.

And third… the final stroke.

Lin Yun looked down at the glowing blue screen hovering near his knee, checking the expansion rate of his system.

‘Ten million square kilometers right now,’ he noted, a cold, dangerous smirk pulling at his lips. ‘In four years of deep meditation, with the extra energy pumped from the city’s spirit leylines, my domain will expand by another three million square kilometers.’

He didn’t need to leave his safe circle to kill Haoran.

During the faction wars, to completely conquer a territory, you must replace the territory token which they have hidden.

And the Sky Reaching City’s token is hidden in this chair of his.

“When the final horn blows,” Lin Yun whispered into the cold shadows of the hall, his blue eyes flashing with venomous certainty, “Haoran will step onto that stage, believing he is fighting a standard duel under the academy’s rules… little did he know, that everything he has is useless before me.”

‘I will strip his cultivation with a thought,’ Lin Yun resolved, his fists closing tight in the darkness. ‘I will crush his knees into the dirt, rip that gamer system from his soul, and feed his remains to the void.’

Four years.

Enjoy your peace while it lasts, young master of the Shen Clan.