Villain: Manipulating the Heroines into hating the Protagonist

Seventy leagues west-southwest of the shattered coral ring of Crimson Reef, the ocean floor dropped into a jagged, lightless ravine five thousand feet beneath the waves. Along the bottom of this ravine ran a fractured fault line where rivers of molten earth-fire pushed up against the freezing abyssal water, creating the Boiling Earth-Fire Fissure.

For two weeks following the four-way rout at Crimson Reef, Red-Scale Matriarch had dragged her bleeding body through the deepest, darkest canyons of the seabed to reach this isolated ravine.

At the bottom of the fissure, hidden behind a curtain of scalding bubbles and dense yellow brimstone-ash, lay a dry, air-filled cavern carved into the underside of an overhanging basalt cliff. A natural rock ledge sloped upward out of the water, leading to a thirty-foot pool of bubbling, crimson earth-fire magma that heated the cavern air like a brick kiln.

SPLASH.

The dark water at the mouth of the submerged entrance parted. Red-Scale Matriarch hauled herself up onto the dry black basalt ledge, her thirty-foot scarlet serpent tail shifting back into a pair of long, shapely human legs as she collapsed onto one knee against the hot stone.

Even in her weakened, battered state, the Early Grade 8 Scarlet Flood-Serpent sovereign possessed a wild, untamed beauty that would steal the breath of any mortal man. She stood tall and statuesque, her lush, hourglass frame covered only in the tattered, blood-soaked ribbons of her crimson sea-silk chest-wrap. Her waist-length hair, the color of flowing magma, clung wetly to her broad, creamy shoulders and trailed over the wide, rounded flare of her hips.

Yet the healthy pink-gold flush of her porcelain skin had turned as pale as bone ash.

Lodged four inches deep into the upper swell of her massive left breast—just half an inch above her revolving Early Grade 8 Demon Core—protruded the tail end of the six-inch, dark-blue Soul-Corroding Frost Spike fired by Heavenly Tide True Monarch.

Over the fourteen-day flight from Crimson Reef, the three-hundred-year cold poison inside that icicle had spread like a web of black-blue spider veins across the entire left side of her chest, freezing the flesh of her left breast into hard, numb ice and creeping up the side of her slender neck. Every breath she drew rattled in her throat, venting puffs of gray frost-mist instead of her natural serpent heat.

”Damn that one-armed old dog Heavenly Tide...” Red-Scale Matriarch hissed through clenched, pearlescent fangs, her vertical golden-red slit pupils trembling with pain as she crawled on her hands and knees to the edge of the bubbling earth-fire magma pool. ”If I let this Soul-Corroding Frost Spike sit inside my chest for another seven days, the cold rot will pierce the outer shell of my Grade 8 Demon Core and freeze my Infant Soul inside my own ribcage!”

For an Early Grade 8 Scarlet Flood-Serpent, there was only one way to purge a life-burning Nascent Soul frost weapon without having a trusted peer help draw out the poison: an emergency Blood-Fire Molt.

By immersing her lower body in raw earth-fire magma to boil her blood, she could force her physical vessel to shed its entire outer layer of skin and protective ruby scales—expelling the embedded frost spike along with the old husk. However, during the six hours required for the new skin to harden after a forced molt, her natural defensive scales would be as soft as wet silk, and her cultivation base would drop to less than thirty percent of its normal strength.

Red-Scale Matriarch swept her weakened mental awareness three leagues outward through the ravine outside the cavern.

She detected only a few schools of blind Grade 1 trench-fish and the steady, natural rumble of the earth-fire vents. The nearest human port—Abyssal Pearl City—lay eighty miles to the north, and in her mind, that port held nothing stronger than a few Late-Stage Core Formation women who had needed two weeks just to kill a stray Grade 6 wyrm.

”Once I push this frost spike out and swallow a mouthful of earth-fire marrow, I will return to the southern trench and tear three of Shifting-Tide Patriarch’s mineral reefs away for leaving my flank exposed,” Red-Scale Matriarch muttered darkly.

She reached up with her trembling right hand and tore away the last shredded strips of her crimson sea-silk wrap, leaving her tall, voluptuous body completely naked in the red glow of the magma pool.

Sliding down the stone bank, she submerged her long legs and her wide, curvy hips into the bubbling crimson earth-fire magma up to her waist.

”Hssss—AAAAH!”

Even for a fire-and-blood attribute Demon Beast, lowering a frost-poisoned body into raw earth-fire was agonizing torture. As the molten stone lapped against her bare thighs and buttocks, drawing scorching heat up through her lower meridians to clash with the freezing blue veins in her chest, Red-Scale Matriarch threw her head back and bit her own lower lip until scarlet blood dripped down onto her collarbone.

For four grueling hours inside the stifling cavern, she circulated her remaining Grade 8 essence through her boiling blood vessels.

Slowly, a translucent, parchment-like layer of old skin and dull red scales began to peel away from her neck, her shoulders, and her heaving breasts. Like a cicada emerging from its shell, the old, frost-blackened outer dermis split down her spine and peeled off her chest—bringing the outer two inches of the dark-blue Soul-Corroding Frost Spike out with it!

Only the deepest two inches of the frost spike’s barbed tip remained wedged inside the tender, newly exposed pink flesh of her left breast, held fast by a knot of frozen blood vessels wrapped around her heart meridian.

Panting heavily as she climbed out of the magma pool onto the warm basalt ledge, Red-Scale Matriarch lay back against a smooth boulder, her entire naked body glistening with a sticky, fragrant layer of clear molting fluid. Her newly revealed skin was softer than fresh bean-curd, glowing with a delicate, luminous rose tint, and the faint ruby scale-markings along her collarbones and wide hips were completely soft and unhardened.

Raising her right hand, she hooked two trembling fingers around the protruding blue ice-stub on her left breast, preparing to grit her teeth and yank the barbed tip out by force.

She never got the chance to pull.

CLANG—HUMMMMMM!

Outside the submerged mouth of the cavern, forty-eight heavy iron spikes slammed five feet deep into the basalt ravine walls in the same heartbeat!

Six overlapping curtains of silver-black spatial light flared across the cavern entrance, sealing the rock pocket tighter than an iron tomb and cutting off the earth-fire vein flow beneath the magma pool!

Red-Scale Matriarch’s vertical golden-red pupils contracted in sudden terror. She tried to roll off the boulder and dive back into the magma pool—only for the water in the entrance channel to part without a sound.

Four figures stepped out of the dark water onto the black basalt floor of the cavern.

Walking in front was a tall, broad-shouldered human man in gold-trimmed black robes, his handsome face calm and his dark, starlit eyes fixed directly upon her glistening, freshly molted body. Flanking him on the left and right were two human women radiating the vast, unmistakable spiritual domains of Early-Stage Nascent Soul Grandmasters—one draped in translucent glacial-silk with a halo of silver-white ice flame behind her back, the other clad in crimson alchemical robes with a wisp of deep-blue phoenix fire dancing over her palm. Behind them stepped a fourth woman in midnight-black silk, her hand resting on the hilt of an icy silver longsword at the Peak Great Circle of the Late-Stage Core Formation Realm.

Wang Jian, Su Binglan, Mu Lianhua, and Shen Mengqi had arrived.

”Three... three human Nascent Soul Grandmasters?!” Red-Scale Matriarch gasped, pressing her right arm across her bare, heaving breasts as she scrambled backward up the sloped basalt ledge, her bare heels slipping slightly on her own slick molting fluid. ”You are the ones who ambushed Iron-Pincer Demon King in the western basin! How did you find this fissure?!”

Wang Jian stopped twenty paces from the magma pool, looking up at the six-foot-tall Scarlet Flood-Serpent sovereign backed against the cavern wall.

Without her old scale husk, Red-Scale Matriarch’s physical form was a breathtaking sight of raw, feral sensuality. Her waist-length magma-red hair spilled over her wide, curvy hips and round, creamy buttocks; her massive breasts—heavier and fuller than even Lin Wanyue’s—rose and fell rapidly with every ragged breath, the tender skin glistening pink with warm molting dew save for the dark-blue frost spike still sticking out of the upper curve of her left globe.

”Who else do you think dropped that crimson scale-sphere into the Boiling-Kelp Shoals two months ago to make sure you and Shifting-Tide Patriarch walked into Crimson Reef?” Wang Jian asked calmly, his voice echoing off the low stone ceiling.

Red-Scale Matriarch’s eyes blazed like twin pools of molten gold as the truth hit her like a thunderbolt.

”It was you!” she snarled, baring her sharp white fangs as ferocious scarlet blood-qi erupted from her pores despite her weakened state. ”You tricked Heavenly Tide True Monarch, Blood-Bone True Monarch, and Shifting-Tide Patriarch into tearing each other apart at Crimson Reef just to separate me from the main Demon Beast host!”

”A Peak Grade 8 Kraken with eight arms is ugly and only good for stew,” Wang Jian said, unclasping his outer black cloak and tossing it to Shen Mengqi as he stepped up the basalt slope toward her. ”An Early Grade 8 Scarlet Flood-Serpent who has shed her beastly husk for a body like yours, however, is worth keeping alive.”

”Keep This Matriarch alive as your captive?! Dream on, human dog!”

Even with her cultivation suppressed to thirty percent by the unfinished molt and the Soul-Corroding Frost Spike in her breast, Red-Scale Matriarch possessed the ferocious, unyielding pride of an apex Grade 8 predator who had ruled the southern trenches for three hundred years.

She did not beg or try to parley. Knowing that hesitation meant slavery or death, Red-Scale Matriarch slammed her bare left foot against the stone ledge and transformed her lower body from the waist down back into her true thirty-foot Scarlet Flood-Serpent Tail—covered in soft, newly molted blood-red scales as thick as a water barrel!

”Scarlet Serpent Bloodline Art: Coiling Blood-Sea Whip!”

WHIRRRR—BOOM!

Coiling the thirty-foot serpent tail like a giant crimson spring against the cavern wall, Red-Scale Matriarch lashed the massive tail horizontally across the narrow cavern at Wang Jian’s chest while simultaneously opening her mouth to spit a twenty-foot fan of boiling, corrosive Scarlet Serpent Venom-Fire toward Su Binglan and Mu Lianhua!

In the heat of close-quarters combat, Wang Jian suppressed all stray thoughts.

As the twenty-foot fan of boiling Scarlet Serpent Venom-Fire surged toward the left and right flanks, Mu Lianhua stepped forward half a pace and struck the air with both palms.

”Azure Sky Heart Phoenix Flame: Fire-Swallowing Curtain!”

A roaring wall of deep-blue Nascent Soul phoenix fire erupted from Mu Lianhua’s hands, colliding head-on with the scarlet venom-fire in a blinding flash of blue and red steam! Because the Azure Sky Heart Phoenix Flame ranked higher in purity than beastly blood-fire—and because Red-Scale Matriarch was operating at less than a third of her full strength—Mu Lianhua’s blue flame swallowed the corrosive venom-fire cleanly in mid-air before it could scorch a single stone!

At the center of the cavern, the thirty-foot scarlet serpent tail—carrying over ten thousand catties of raw whipping momentum—slammed straight toward Wang Jian’s ribs!

Wang Jian did not draw Blood’s Thirst from its scabbard; slicing the Matriarch in half with an eighty-one-folded Grade 8 blade would ruin the prize he had spent six months engineering.

Instead, Wang Jian sank his hips into a low horse stance upon the basalt ledge, channeled the gravitational starlight of his Stellar Demonic Nascent Infant and the fifteen catties of Ten-Thousand-Year Golden Dragon Marrow into his bare forearms, and thrust both open hands forward to catch the thirty-foot whipping serpent tail with his bare palms!

SMACK—BOOOOOOM!

The wet, thunderous impact of the barrel-thick serpent tail slapping into Wang Jian’s braced palms sent a concussive ring of air blasting across the cavern, blowing the bubbling magma in the pool backward into a six-foot wave!

Beneath Wang Jian’s boots, the black basalt rock cracked into a web of fissures two inches deep—yet his feet did not slide back a single hair’s breadth!

”What?!” Red-Scale Matriarch’s slit eyes widened in shock as she felt her ten-thousand-catty tail strike stopped dead in mid-air, held fast inside the iron vise of Wang Jian’s bare hands! Because her newly molted tail scales had not yet hardened, the bruising grip of Wang Jian’s calloused fingers sank half an inch deep into her soft, warm serpent flesh, sending an unfamiliar, electric jolt straight up her spinal cord!

Before Red-Scale Matriarch could wrench her tail free, Wang Jian twisted his waist and shoulders with explosive physical leverage, lifting the thirty-foot serpent tail off the ground and slamming her entire body downward against the flat basalt floor!

THUD-CRACK!

”Guh—!” Red-Scale Matriarch coughed up a mouthful of scarlet blood as her bare back hit the stone, knocking the wind from her lungs.

Yet the ferocious serpent sovereign refused to submit. As Wang Jian stepped forward along the length of her pinned tail, Red-Scale Matriarch arched her supple spine off the floor like a striking cobra, her ten fingernails lengthening into three-inch scarlet talons infused with the last fiery burst of her Early Grade 8 Demon Core as she clawed straight for Wang Jian’s throat!

”Binglan—resonate the frost spike!” Wang Jian barked.

Standing ten paces behind him, Su Binglan raised her left hand and pointed two jade-white fingers directly at the dark-blue icicle protruding from Red-Scale Matriarch’s left breast.

”Grand Yin Ice Flame: Cold-Marrow Echo!”

Su Binglan did not attack the Matriarch with a lethal spell. Instead, she fired a thin, invisible thread of absolute-zero Grand Yin Ice Flame that struck the butt of Heavenly Tide True Monarch’s Soul-Corroding Frost Spike!

ZZZZZT—CHIME!

Stimulated by a pure Nascent Soul ice flame of the same elemental root, the two inches of barbed blue ice still wedged inside Red-Scale Matriarch’s left breast flared with blinding blue light, sending a sudden, piercing wave of soul-numbing cold straight into the outer shell of her spinning Grade 8 Demon Core!

”AAAAAH—!”

Red-Scale Matriarch’s claw strike froze three inches short of Wang Jian’s neck. Her entire upper torso went rigid in mid-air as the sudden frost spasm locked up her heart meridian, causing the thirty-foot scarlet serpent tail beneath her waist to involuntarily dissolve back into a pair of long, trembling, naked human legs!

Wang Jian moved in that exact tenth of a breath.

Stepping between her trembling, newly transformed human thighs as she collapsed backward onto the smooth basalt slab, Wang Jian caught both of her clawed wrists in his left hand, pinning her arms high above her magma-red hair against the stone floor, while his right hand—glowing with sixty-four dark-gold sealing runes of the Stellar Demonic Meridian Scripture—slammed flat down onto her bare lower abdomen right over her navel!

”Stellar Demonic Origin Lock—Seal the Core!”

HUMMMMMM!

Sixty-four chains of black-gold starlight bored straight through the soft, warm skin of Red-Scale Matriarch’s flat stomach, wrapping around the frost-numbed Early Grade 8 Demon Core inside her chest and locking her remaining spiritual power down to a harmless trickle!

Pinned flat on her back beneath Wang Jian’s heavy, muscular frame—with both wrists locked above her head in his single left hand and his knee wedged firmly between her slick, newly molted thighs—Red-Scale Matriarch thrashed her wide, curvy hips wildly against the stone, her massive, bare breasts heaving and rubbing against Wang Jian’s chest as she glared up at him with venomous hatred.

”Kill me then, human!” Red-Scale Matriarch spat, a drop of scarlet blood on her lip trembling as she strained uselessly against the iron grip holding her wrists. ”Cut open my chest and take my Grade 8 Demon Core! If you think the Matriarch of the Scarlet Flood-Serpent Clan will ever bow her head to serve as a human’s mount, I will bite my own tongue and shatter my soul first!”

Before she could snap her jaws shut on her tongue, Shen Mengqi stepped forward and slipped a smooth rod of five-hundred-year cold-jade between the Matriarch’s pearlescent teeth, locking her jaw from biting down, while Mu Lianhua placed four gold-ink Soul-Calming Talismans across her temples and shoulders.

Wang Jian looked down at the thrashing, magnificently curvy serpent sovereign pinned beneath him. With her newly molted skin flushed bright pink from exertion and her massive breasts pressed tight against his ribs, the heat radiating from her lower body felt like a furnace of wild dragon-fire.

”Take your core?” Wang Jian chuckled darkly, shifting his right hand up from her stomach to firmly cup her uninjured, colossal right breast—squeezing the soft, newly molted flesh in his rough palm until Red-Scale Matriarch let out a muffled, humiliated gasp around the jade bit. ”I already have an Early Grade 8 Demon Core sitting in the hilt of my saber. What I lack is a fiery, long-legged Grade 8 Flood-Serpent warming my bed and guarding my southern waters.”

Wang Jian stood up, lifting the bound, naked Grade 8 Matriarch effortlessly over his broad shoulder like a captured bride while her round, silky buttocks pressed against his chest.

”Retrieve the forty-eight Profound Iron Array Anchors and bring the stealth galleon to the fissure mouth,” Wang Jian ordered Su Binglan, Mu Lianhua, and Shen Mengqi. ”We have three months before the eastern superpowers finish licking their wounds from Crimson Reef—more than enough time to pull that frost spike out of her breast and teach this wild serpent who her new master is.”