Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

”Once the others arrive, we can start the slaughter.”

The frozen, monochromatic stillness that had settled over the mountain basin cracked under the sudden, deafening statement of falling thunder.

The air grew heavy with the sharp, coppery scent of freshly drawn blood and the bitter stench of scorched celestial marrow.

Just as the Four Sacred Masters and the terrified, trembling players thought the horrifying parade of monsters had finally reached its peak, the upper firmament violently split open once more!

”There is no need to wait, we’re here!”

A booming, barbarous shout detonated from the high clouds, carrying a raw, tectonic vibration that rattled the teeth in the defenders’ jaws.

Then....

KABOOOOOOOM!

...Shen Tao plummeted like a chunk of condensed celestial iron torn from an exploding planet, slamming directly into the outer marble plaza of the Rising Dragon Sect!

The kinetic shockwave was catastrophic.

The concrete street below shattered into billions of jagged, flying projectiles, tearing outward in a three hundred meter crater of pulverized rock.

Shen Tao rose to his full, towering height amidst the swirling curtain of smoke, his calm, stoic gaze tracing every opponents he sees.

”Hey, we’re here as well!”

At that moment, six distinct, terrifying streaks of lethal light plummeted through the clouds in tight, predatory formation, landing in a sweeping arc around the crater’s edge!

Shen Fei descended with the grace of an executioner bird, planting his boots upon the stone without making a sound.

In his hands, the seven-foot crimson spear forged from the indestructible fangs of an ancient beast hummed with catastrophic, piercing intent, its barbed tip leaving glowing trails of red-hot plasma in the air.

Beside him, Shen Jian stepped out of the dust, clad in immaculate black robes that bore not a single droplet of the thousands of lives he had extinguished on Nine Stars Mountain.

He loosely held his slender dark-iron rapier, its tip pointed lazily toward the dirt, his eyes hollow and dead as an unlit tomb.

To his left, Shen Ji let out a low, guttural growl that sounded like a starved wolf.

His silver armor was battered, dented, and practically dripping with the dark, foul gore of the southern battlefields.

His fingers twitched compulsively against the curved hilts of his twin sabers, his bloodshot eyes darting across the ranks of the defenders, barely able to contain the berserk madness threatening to burst from his core.

Behind them, Shen Cai and Shen Bai arrived side by side.

Shen Cai tossed a golden surveying compass into his spatial ring with a bored sigh, his eyes already calculating the value of the spiritual marrow flowing through the mountain’s shattered leylines.

Shen Bai, holding a handful of cracked defensive formation flags he had stripped from fallen provincial cities, smiled with cold, academic detachment, his gaze already dissecting the auxiliary architectural supports of the sect’s remaining palaces.

And finally, sliding out from the dark, jagged shadows cast by the crater’s rim, Shen Hei materialized.

He stood draped in a shifting mantle of light-devouring void mist, his pale, thin hands casually spinning heavy chains of soul-suppressing iron, his pupils reflecting the terrified faces of the crowd like a spider watching flies tangle themselves in its web.

The entire core vanguard of the Imperial Academy was assembled.

Scions, prodigies, commoners, all stood shoulder to shoulder, forming an insurmountable, suffocating wall of pure, unadulterated apex violence.

”Good,” Shen Xun’er murmured softly.

Standing gracefully in the open air above the shattered plaza, her robe fluttering gently in the rising thermals, Shen Xun’er looked upon the gathered prodigies with a tranquil, elegant nod of approval.

The time for leisure, for posturing, and for games had officially expired.

The young master currently busy; it was the duty of his attendants to ensure that when his eyes reopened to the physical world, not a single grain of dirt remained untainted by the blood of these insolent insects.

Shen Xun’er then clasped her hands together, her movement was languid, possessing the delicate, rhythmic beauty of an immortal maiden opening a lotus blossom at dawn.

Then slowly, her pale, slender fingers uncurled, parting by mere inches.

And suspended between her fair palms was a sphere no larger than an infant’s fist.

It possessed no reflection, no color, and no tangible surface—it was a tear in the fundamental fabric of existence, a speck of pure, absolute nothingness carved directly from the primordial abyss.

The moment it was exposed to the atmosphere, the sound died.

The wind, the screams, the crackle of fire—all auditory reality was violently dragged into the microscopic singularity!

The ambient light bent sharply inward, spiraling around her pale wrists in distorted, weeping rings of gravitational agony!

Her cold, crystalline voice cut through the localized silence, vibrating directly within the souls of every imperial cultivator.

”Then, let us start. Kill them all.”

Shen Xun’er casually overturned her palms, and the tiny bead of abyssal void fell through the air with agonizing, weightless leisure, tumbling down toward the grand courtyard where thousands of players and native disciples stood paralyzed with horror.

WHOOOOOOOOM!

The instant the miniature sphere touched the ground, reality inverted!

The fist-sized black hole detonated—not with fire, not with kinetic concussive force, but with an astronomical, catastrophic gravitational eruption!

It expanded in the fraction of a millisecond, swelling into a fifty-meter sphere of churning, lightless event horizon that violently seized the local coordinate grid!

The stones were sheared off their bedrock and sucked inward, disintegrating into microscopic gravel as they crossed the dark threshold!

Massive marble pillars, three-story defensive towers, and dozens of heavily fortified supply pavilions groaned, snapped from their foundations, and were pulled like loose paper into the yawning maw of the singularity!

Hundreds of players screamed in sheer, unadulterated terror as their bodies were violently hoisted off the ground, their limbs stretching like hot wax before snapping into bloody ribbons, their equipment, talismans, and bones crushed into dense, pressurized meat that vanished into the lightless void!

”Hold the center! It’s pulling the whole district in!”

”My character is clipping through the floor! I can’t move! Holy shit, how can these people create black holes!?!”

The entire sect was sliding toward the devouring abyss, as if the very world itself threatening to fold in upon itself like a crushed tin cup!

”Brothers of the Grand Heaven Sect! With me!”

An aged, bearded Grand Elder with bloodshot eyes and a severed left arm roared, his voice cutting through the gravitational howling!

Recognizing that the black hole would swallow the entire sect and pulverize everything into dust, five surviving elders of the fallen orthodox sect stepped forward, abandoning all hope of life!

Their faces were etched with desperate, tragic fury!

”For our fallen disciples! For the heritage of our world!”

The five elders ignited their cores simultaneously!

Blinding, incandescent pillars of pure, golden Nirvana Rebirth essence erupted from their chest, burning their lifespans and souls into pure, volatile power!

They did not retreat; they dove directly into the swirling perimeter of the black hole, locking their arms together to form a living, sacrificial pentagram around the event horizon!

”Close, you demonic gate! DETONATE!”

KABOOOOOO-BOOOOM!

Five complete Nirvana Rebirth cores, containing centuries of condensed worldly comprehension and spiritual oceans, detonated in unison directly against the throat of the singularity!

The counter-shockwave was blinding, an apocalyptic explosion of holy golden fire and spatial friction that violently clashed against the inward pull of the abyss!

The dimensional fabric shrieked as the immense, outward concussive force forced the borders of the black hole to violently destabilize, collapsing the singularity in upon itself in a blinding flash of silver spatial sparks that scorched the stone into black glass!

The five elders were gone, their bodies, souls, and ancestral artifacts vaporized without leaving a single speck of ash behind.

But the yawning void had been sealed, saving the surviving defenders from absolute annihilation.

A collective, ragged gasp swept through the defenders, their chests heaving with the fleeting, desperate hope of men who had narrowly cheated the executioner’s block.

But before they can celebrate, standing atop the broad, molten basalt shoulder of the magma titan, Huo Yue looked down upon the smoking crater where the elders had perished, her eyes burning with intoxicating, sadistic amusement.

She threw her head back, her voluminous crimson mane flaring outward like a roaring corona of solar flares, her rich, commanding voice ringing across the heavens like the trumpet of an ancient war goddess.

”Stand tall, before the eternal flame!”

Huo Yue thrust her pale, slender hand downward, her entire body catching fire as her pure flame qi detonated!

ROOOOOAAARRRRR!

Beneath her boots, the gargantuan magma titan raised both of its mountainous, obsidian fists, clasped them together, and brought them crashing down onto the earth like two falling asteroids!

A tectonic fissure, ten miles long and hundreds of feet wide, violently ripped through the heart of the sect!

Rivers of liquid volcanic fire erupted from the subterranean mantle, shooting thousands of feet into the air like geysers of molten wrath!

The scalding magma cascaded across the battlements, instantly melting the iron armor of the vanguard players, turning the stone watchtowers into slag, and incinerating hundreds of screaming cultivators into bubbling, liquid grease!

Simultaneously, Augusta, the Chief of the Sun Tribe, raised her massive blade, and the thousands of sun tribe warriors dove from the sky like an avalanche of midday suns, their burning spears skewering the defenders and turning the courtyards into an inferno of unyielding solar slaughter!

Following her, everyone attacked.

The brief stalemate break, no, it did not merely break, it dissolved into an apocalyptic tempest of total war!

Zhu Ziyan leaned forward atop her primeval storm gryphon, her long, violet-tinted black hair whipping in the wind, her purple eyes flashing with untamed cruelty!

”Tear them apart!” she roared, her cat ears twitching as she pointed downward!

SKREEEEECH!

Tens of thousands of primeval avian beasts, along with thousands of beast kin riders on their back, roared and dove like a localized hurricane of razor-sharp talons and qi!

They swooped through the defense lines, their steel-like claws snatching players and elders off the ground, carrying them into the sky before ripping their torsos in half and raining their intestines down upon the retreating survivors!

From the western flank, Shen Xinye did not shout; she simply drew her blade by three inches.

SHIIIIING!

Behind her, three hundred silent, lethal swordsmen of the forgotten sword clan drew their iron swords in mechanical synchronicity!

Then, a horizontal, purple wall of three hundred overlapping sword intents descended like a guillotine across the sect’s western residential district!

Tens of thousands of buildings, along with the thousands of defenders attempting to fortify them, were cleanly sheared in half at the waist, the cut so smooth that the upper halves of their bodies slid off their legs before a single drop of blood could fall!

From the shadows, Shen Ying hummed as she took out several more pills from her storage ring and began throwing them like bombs.

And as they exploded, vast, rolling tsunamis of emerald neurotoxic miasma swept through the streets, dissolving the flesh of everyone it touched, turning the players’ resurrection points into festering, bubbling pits of necrotic sludge!

Luo Mingye stood calmly amidst the howling carnage, her slender fingers blurring across the silk strings of her ancient wooden zither.

A rapid, frantic tempo rippled outward in visible, crescent sound-blades that vibrated through the air, shattering the eardrums, the meridians, and the internal organs of thousands of defenders simultaneously, causing entire ranks to collapse into the mud, clutching their bleeding ears as their hearts burst within their ribcages!

Qian Yunxi’s six golden wings blazed with blinding celestial authority as she dove from the heavens like a falling seraph, her divine blade flashing with righteous, executioner’s fury, decapitating high-tier sect leaders with effortless, blinding speed!

BOOM!

Ivaraune, the demon god, swung his gargantuan arm and leveling the grand library into fine dust while Gu Xunyi and Ning Xueli laughed upon his shoulder, raining down attacks of their own that pinned fleeing cultivators to the burning earth!

Shen Tao charged, swinging his fist like that of a whirlwind that sheared through bodies, shields, and stone alike, splattering brains and shattered armor across his bare chest!

Shen Fei’s spear danced like a venomous dragon, piercing clean through five gamers experts in a single thrust and incinerating their bodies from within!

Shen Jian walked like a phantom, his rapier delivering a thousand precise, lethal punctures to the throats of charging players, his face manic and thrilled!

Shen Ji, completely surrendered to his berserk slaughter, swung his twin sabers with rabid, frothing ecstasy, hacking screaming men into dog food!

Shen Cai took out several spirit canon and fired fhem, triggering chain reactions that blew entire mountain ridges into the sky!

Shen Bai went around creating killing formation, dragging hundreds of gamers and native experts into it and killing them.

Meanwhile, Shen Hei’s daggers reaped the fleeing souls of the elders like wheat before the scythe!

The Sword Saint, the Wind Emperor, the Xuan Yuan Saint, and the Nine Lives Demon King fought back with wild, desperate frenzy, their weapons clashing against the imperial tide, their blood mixing with the dirt as they watched their world’s final sanctuary be systematically, mercilessly ground into dust!

Above the roaring inferno, the blood-soaked sky, and the screaming graveyard, Shen Xun’er floated in serene, immaculate beauty, her cold eyes watching the slaughter unfold, waiting patiently for the moment her young master would awaken to claim the ashes of a broken world.