Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

The silence hanging over the scorched crater of the White Dragon Sect was suffocating, fraught with an uncanny, hair-raising dread that paralyzed the gathered players.

The sheer, terrifying weight of Shen Haoran’s piercing golden gaze felt like an invisible razor pressed directly against their real-world minds.

His casual declaration, acknowledging that they hailed from another world entirely, had shattered their perceived boundary between the digital realm and objective reality, leaving their hearts pounding with genuine, primal horror.

At this moment, a man with the name ThickThighsSaveLives shouted, ”BallsDeep! Use taunt and aggro him! Everyone! Run and grab anyone from the White Dragon Sect and use TP back to the sect!”

The frantic roar broke the petrifying spell like a bucket of freezing water thrown over their heads.

ThickThighsSaveLives, a heavily armored vanguard with a jagged iron shield strapped to his left arm, didn’t hesitate for a fraction of a second.

His virtual interface was flashing deep crimson with danger alerts, the threat levels of this young man registering entirely off the measurable charts.

Experience and instinct forged across dozens of virtual reality campaigns kicked in; when an encounter entered an unscripted, catastrophic phase, survival dictated immediate, ruthless triage.

”Move! Fucking move!” ThickThighsSaveLives bellowed, his voice cracking through the local chat channel. ”Stop staring at his face! Hit your teleport scrolls the moment your hands touch an NPC! Don’t let the quest chain fail!”

Everyone followed his orders.

The panic instantly transformed into chaotic, coordinated motion.

Dozens of players abandoned their combat stances and threw themselves forward across the cracked flagstones, diving toward the battered, half-conscious remnants of the White Dragon Sect.

Hands reached out, grabbing bruised disciples by their silk collars, hoisting limp bodies over armored shoulders, and yanking elderly survivors from beneath piles of pulverized stone.

From their inventories, luminous blue scrolls of spatial transfer were yanked out, their protective wax seals ripped away with desperate teeth and trembling fingers.

Amidst the mad scramble, a heavily built warrior bearing the glowing, absurd green moniker of ’BallsDeep69’ stepped forward, plant-stepping his iron greaves into the scorched earth, veins bulged along his neck as he triggered his class-exclusive aggro skill.

”Hey, you pale-faced, pretty-boy fairy bastard!” BallsDeep69 roared, slamming his greatsword violently against his buckler with an ear-splitting metallic clatter. ”Look over here! Your mother didn’t love you, and your cultivation smells like wet dog! Come get a piece of this, you overgrown cutscene prop!”

A bizarre, unnatural ripple of psychic energy cascaded from the warrior’s vocal cords, radiating through the air like a distorted pink shockwave designed to forcibly override an opponent’s target acquisition.

Haoran suddenly frowned and turned his gaze to that one player shouting at him, for some reason, he finds him incredibly annoying.

It was an entirely foreign sensation. As a supreme scion of an immortal clan, he consider himself above everyone else, and insults from lower mortals were usually nothing more to him than the buzzing of distant flies, unworthy of even generating a single ripple within his calm spiritual sea.

He would punish them, yes, but it wouldn’t even affect his emotions.

Yet, the moment those crude, vulgar words struck his ears, an inexplicable, irrational spike of pure irritation flared in his chest, urging him to focus exclusively on that solitary, bellowing ant.

His eyes narrowed into icy slits, and the ambient temperature plummeted below freezing.

But as quickly as he felt that, he also quickly snapped out of it.

He frowned. To think that a mere bug barely straddling the threshold of the Golden Core realm could command an art capable of temporarily affecting him—it was unnatural, violating every law of spiritual hierarchy.

’...A conceptual level mental interference, huh?’

A faint, chilling smirk returned to Haoran’s face.

”No matter, just one is enough,” Haoran murmured softly.

Haoran raised his hand, his pale, slender fingers curling inward in a slow, grasping motion.

The physical laws around BallsDeep69 ceased to function entirely. Before he could even raise his shield or take another breath, an invisible, gravitational vise locked around his spine and limbs.

With a sickening groan of warping atmospheric pressure, the man taunting him suddenly floated and flew towards him that his body bent backwards.

”Gah—! What the—?!”

BallsDeep69’s body arched into a grotesque, agonizing crescent, his heels nearly touching the back of his helmet as he hurtled helplessly through the air.

The sheer velocity sucked the air from his lungs, his armor groaning under the stress until he hovered suspended in midair, barely two feet away from Haoran.

”You... must be a gamer, right?” Haoran smiled.

The words were spoken with a melodic, cultured cadence, yet they dripped with a terrifying, alien certainty.

BallsDeep69 shuddered.

A cold, greasy terror slithered down the player’s spine.

”You...how do you...”

”Now, show me...”

Haoran’s eyes flashed, shifting from gold into a violent, blinding prismatic radiance as he extended his index finger, pressing the cold pad of his flesh directly onto the center of BallsDeep69’s forehead.

Without a shred of hesitation, he used soul search to completely dismantle his soul and look into his memories.

BallsDeep69 struggled for a few moments before he went limp, his eyes in a daze, his mouth wide open, his tongue sticking out.

”...just where did you come from...”

Yet, just as Haoran’s consciousness touched the deeper foundation of the man’s soul—searching for the origin of his miraculous revival, his parent lineage, and the coordinate anchor of his true realm—an anomaly occurred.

Bzzzt.

A bizarre, mechanical resonance hummed through the space.

The fractured, disintegrating soul beneath Haoran’s fingertip suddenly flickered like a dying candle, turning translucent before dissolving into a scattering cloud of iridescent blue data-pixels.

The soul... completely disappeared.

He frowned and dropped the man down.

The empty, discarded shell of armor and mundane flesh fell limply to the scorched bedrock with a dull, hollow thud, devoid of any spirit, vitality, or life-force.

”I guess I need another one.” Haoran turned around, sweeping his gaze across the decimated crater.

There, he saw Shen Xun’er holding a few unconscious players.

The petite Crown stood gracefully atop a pile of shattered jade masonry, and beneath her foot lay four captured players, completely paralyzed by slender needles that pinned their meridian nodes to the ground.

”The others escaped, Young Master, apologies,” said Xun’er, her head bowing slightly in self-reproach.

Across the wider basin, faint residual ripples of spatial distortion were rapidly fading.

Blue pillars of light had shot into the clouds seconds ago, carrying away ThickThighsSaveLives, dozens of other players, and the surviving remnants of the White Dragon Sect before she could catch them all.

”No, this is just right,” Haoran replied, his voice returning to its calm, measured poise.

He had never cared about the surviving disciples of an obliterated lower-realm sect.

Whether they fled to the ends of the world or hid beneath the roots of the earth, they were merely stray dogs stripped of their home, incapable of altering the grand chessboard.

These four living, breathing specimens captured by Xun’er, however, were of infinite value.

Just then, Qing’er suddenly dropped from the sky like an autumn leaf, landing without a single whisper of sound.

Her form-fitting black suit bore several fresh splatters of dark red blood that hissed as they dissolved into faint purple smoke.

Behind her, in the upper firmament, the mutilated corpses of Grand Elder Zhao Ming and his peers fell like lead weights, crashing into the abyss below.

”Young Master, the task is complete,” Qing’er whispered, her crimson eyes gleaming with pristine, unhesitating obedience as she dropped to one knee before him.

Haoran nodded. He cast one final glance at the barren, erased expanse of the White Dragon Sect, his mind firmly set on dissecting the cosmic secrets lying dormant within the bodies of these strange trespassers.

He then closed his eyes...

”Genesis Protocol...”

The two words fell from his lips not as mere syllables, but as an ancient, primal resonance that struck the fundamental strings of the void.

And, in that very moment, the world changed.

The scorched granite crater, the cold northern mountain wind, the ash-choked atmosphere, and the sky dissolved away like wet paint running down a canvas.

Reality twisted inward, collapsing into a kaleidoscope of swirling, primeval colors before solidifying into an entirely new dimension.

They were now in Haoran’s inner world.

Qing’er had stayed here for awhile and was familiar with the place, but this is the first time that Xun’er had been here and she looked around in wonder.

Haoran stepped toward the four unconscious players lying upon the pristine jade floor.

Then, he stared at the players, his voice vibrating with absolute, divine authority that shook the very foundations of the realm.

”I now declare, without my permission, nothing shall escape here.”

The world obeyed.

Golden chains of celestial law erupted from the jade ground, wrapping invisibly around the souls and bodies of the captives.

The spatial boundaries hardened into unbreakable adamantine walls; the cycle of life and death within the domain was forcibly halted, severing all external cosmic connections, unseen systemic threads, and foreign spatial ejections.

Within this private world, even the Heavenly Dao of the outside world had to bow its head.

Once done, Haoran knelt gracefully, extending his palms toward the foreheads of two captives simultaneously.

His golden pupils expanded and glowed, his spiritual denses flooding their minds with an overwhelming, surgical torrent of spiritual power.

Because their souls were locked within his domain, their protective disconnect protocols failed to trigger.

Layer after layer of their true consciousness was carefully pried open, decrypted, and displayed before his divine mind.

And as the torrent of memories rushed into his spiritual sea, Haoran was profoundly surprised.

He discovered that unlike his useless cousin, a transmigrated fool who wasted his first life babbling about anime, harem fantasies, and trivial mortal indulgences, these people were entirely different.

They were university graduates and were highly knowledgeable.

Their minds were not cluttered with delusional fantasies of grandeur. Instead, their memories were densely structured, filled with rigorous academic disciplines, vast libraries of empirical thought, and complex methodologies of observing the universe.

They were educated scholars, engineers, and researchers from an orderly, advanced civilization that had unlocked the profound mysteries of existence without possessing a single strand of spiritual qi.

Through their dissected memories, he learned everything about the world called ”Blue Star” from them, its history, its technology, etc.

Just like the previous world of his cousin, he saw vast, glittering cities of steel and glass that pierced the clouds, illuminated by harnessed currents of raw lightning.

He witnessed iron birds carrying millions of mortals across oceans without the aid of flying swords.

He observed thinking machines capable of calculating billions of mathematical permutations in a nanosecond, global networks of invisible information webs binding an entire planet together, and weapons capable of splitting the fundamental core of matter to unleash the destructive fury of a miniature sun upon their enemies.

He traversed millennia of their bloody, brilliant history—from primitive tribes striking flint to an industrial titan mastering the physical elements through the sheer power of mortal intellect.

He perceived concepts that completely subverted the traditional cultivation doctrines of the immortal realms: the Big Bang, the primordial singularity expanding into infinite space-time, the thermodynamic laws governing energy conservation and entropy, the formation of stars through nuclear fusion, the intricate dance of gravitational curvature bending the fabric of reality, and the atomic blueprints of matter constructed from quarks, leptons, and quantum fields.

In the cultivation world, the creation of an inner domain was an agonizing, mystic trial of trial-and-error.

Cultivators relied on vague, poetic scriptures about ”chaos giving birth to yin and yang” or ”the five elements cycling through spiritual balance.”

Their domains were often fragile, erratic, and inherently limited by their personal comprehension of spiritual Daoist philosophy, frequently crumbling into ruin when faced with higher heavenly tribulations.

At that moment, a blinding, breathtaking inspiration ignited within Shen Haoran’s soul, illuminating every corner of his consciousness like a newly birthed star.

His breath hitched slightly as he stood up, his gaze lifting toward the nascent, somewhat chaotic sky of his own inner world.

The starless sky, the dark earth of chaos, the unrefined pillars of law—all of it suddenly looked incomplete, like a masterpiece painted by a blind artisan who understood color but knew nothing of light.

What if he used their scientific logic to complete his own inner world?

What if, instead of relying solely on the erratic, poetic whims of the ancient Heavenly Dao, he structured his universe using the mathematical precision of their cosmic physics?

What if he forged gravity through the curvature of space-time rather than vague laws?

What if he replaced the volatile spiritual suns with self-sustaining spheres of nuclear fusion governed by atomic equilibrium?

What if he systematically eliminated the conceptual flaws of traditional immortal cultivation by anchoring his inner cosmos to the unbreakable thermodynamic principles?

A quiet, terrifying smile spread across Haoran’s face, his eyes gleaming with an ambition that transcended sects, empires, and even the heavens themselves.

These strange, colorful invaders were no longer mere bugs to be squashed—they were the blueprint for his ascension to a true creator.