Villain System in a Cultivation World-Chapter 19: Shattered Pride

The air above Backridge City quivered with the waning echoes of clashing energies, a tumultuous storm of raw power now dissipating like fragile mist beneath the unyielding glare of a merciless sun.

Xu Hao and his fellow Xuantian Sect disciples stood rooted to the jagged, cracked cobblestones of the bustling market square, their breaths shallow and uneven, their faces glowing with an uncontainable exhilaration that danced on the edge of rapture.

Their eyes shimmered with a reverence so intense it verged on worship as they beheld Qin Ting. To them, he was no mere cultivator bound by mortal constraints—he was a deity cloaked in human flesh, a living tempest given shape, a celestial force descended from the ethereal heights to bless their humble, mundane world with his presence.

Across the expanse of the plaza, the disciples of the Yuanshi Gate Sect, including Song Tong, bore a grimly contrasting demeanor. They stood as if mourners gathered at a somber funeral, their once-proud shoulders drooping heavily, their spirits fractured like brittle reeds crushed beneath the unrelenting fury of a typhoon's gale.

Yan Han—their invincible champion, the radiant, blazing star who had illuminated their sect's glory—lay sprawled in defeat, his robes torn asunder and his body bared by Qin Ting with a single, effortless gesture that seemed almost casual. It defied all comprehension, a jagged tear in the fabric of their understood reality, leaving them grasping at the ruins of their shattered beliefs.

From the splintered edges of the square, a throng of onlookers—weather-worn merchants with calloused hands, rogue cultivators cloaked in tattered robes, and wide-eyed townsfolk clutching their children—watched in stunned, breathless silence, their faint murmurs barely audible over the mournful wind that carried the mingled scents of blood, ash, and scorched stone.

Yan Han was no ordinary figure in their tales. Among the Eastern Wilderness's younger generation, his name etched deep into legends of valor and indomitable might. Ordinary masters of the divine arts crumbled after mere moments in his awe-inspiring presence, their techniques unraveling like frayed, threadbare cloth before his might.

Whispers even circulated that he'd once clashed with an actual demon—a hulking, horned monstrosity birthed from the abyssal clans—and emerged unscathed, his blade dripping with the creature's dark, foul ichor. His strength had solidified into a cornerstone of myth, unassailable and enduring.

Yet today, that mighty legend crumbled into oblivion. Yan Han, felled by a single finger.

"Defeated with one finger... He's beyond the bounds of mortality," a grizzled spectator rasped, his voice quaking with awe and a hint of fear, his weathered hands trembling as he gripped his staff.

"Indeed," another replied, a wiry woman with sharp features clutching a merchant's ledger, her knuckles whitening around the leather binding. "The Yuanshi Gate Sect's pride has been pulverized into dust this time, scattered to the winds."

A ripple of nervous, cutting laughter broke through the crowd. "Ha! Their reputation's soared these past years—arrogant enough to covet the title of the Eastern Wilderness's supreme holy land. Now? They'll be the laughingstock from here to the mist-shrouded Emerald Peaks!"

"That Yan Han was a prodigy, no doubt about it," a young cultivator muttered, shaking his head in disbelief. "What a pity he dared to cross blades with Young Master Qin Ting."

The words swelled into a relentless chorus, each syllable a stinging lash against the battered souls of Song Tong and his fellow Yuanshi disciples. Shame coiled around them like a venomous serpent, its fangs sinking deep into their pride, poisoning their resolve. They had no retort, no defense—skill had weighed them in the balance of this brutal confrontation and found them utterly wanting.

'Who among the Eastern Wilderness's youth can stand against Qin Ting?' The question seared through every mind.

Yan Han staggered to his feet, his naked body doused with crimson streaks that glistened wetly in the sunlight. His face was a twisted mask of disbelief, his dark eyes wide and uncomprehending as he stared at Qin Ting, searching for some hint of weakness in that unyielding figure.

"How... how can this be?" he muttered, his voice a fractured, pitiful whisper that barely carried over the wind. "I, too, am at the Divine Spirit Realm. A peerless talent honed by the Yuanshi Gate's sacred teachings. How is this possible?"

Qin Ting's gaze swept over him, cold and unyielding as a winter gale tearing through barren peaks. "You forget your place," he boomed, his voice resonating through the square like the deep, ominous tolling of a war drum, shaking the ground beneath their feet. "You dare insult the Xuantian Sect with your petty arrogance. Kneel and beg for clemency, you worthless insect!"

The air thickened oppressively, a suffocating pressure descending like an invisible mountain forged from the void itself. It was vast, unyielding, a force woven from Qin Ting's dense, violet-hued aura—an energy so potent it seemed to twist and warp the light around him into shimmering, unnatural distortions.

Song Tong and his companions buckled first, their knees striking the cracked stone with a dull, resounding thud, their heads bowing in involuntary submission as the weight crushed their spirits. Only Yan Han resisted, his body trembling violently as he summoned every ounce of his cultivation to defy the relentless, crushing force bearing down upon him.

'Madness!' Yan Han's mind screamed, his eyes blazing with a feral, desperate light amid the chaos of his thoughts. Not a few moments ago, it had been he who forced Xuantian Sect disciples to kneel, their faces pressed into the cold, unyielding dirt beneath the heel of his boot. Now, the tide had turned with vicious irony, and the reversal burned his pride like molten iron poured over bare flesh.

'I cannot kneel!' he roared inwardly, his spirit raging against the inevitable. 'I am a True Disciple of the Yuanshi Gate Sect—my honor is the sect's honor, its very lifeblood. If I bow, our legacy becomes a jest whispered mockingly across the Eastern Wilderness! I will not kneel! I cannot kneel!'

His meridians flared to life, golden light pulsing beneath his skin like molten rivers as he channeled the full might of his Divine Spirit Realm cultivation, a desperate, flickering bulwark against Qin Ting's suffocating dominion.

"Hmph. Stubborn, are you?" Qin Ting's lips curved faintly, a fleeting flicker of amusement glinting in his eyes before they hardened once more into icy indifference. "A pity—even a celestial sovereign would kneel before me today, trembling in awe of my might."

The pressure surged abruptly, doubling in an instant, a honed blade of intent slicing through the air to target Yan Han alone with surgical precision. His bones groaned under the strain, faint cracks splintering them like brittle porcelain.

His skin split open, rivulets of blood seeping forth until he stood as a crimson silhouette, a ghastly monument to futile defiance. It was incomprehensible—a Divine Spirit Realm expert, a True Disciple forged in the crucible of the Yuanshi Gate Sect's advanced techniques, yet he couldn't even hold his ground against this overwhelming force.

"I won't submit!" Yan Han snarled, blood dripping from his gritted teeth, staining his chin a vivid red as his voice rasped with defiance. "I'm an immortal—countless years of triumph stretch before me. I won't die here, not like this!"

"Senior Brother Yan! Don't kneel! You mustn't!" Song Tong's voice cracked with raw desperation, tears streaking his dust-smeared face, cutting pale trails through the grime, as he gave voice to the collective anguish of his fellow disciples. Their cries echoed his plea, raw and anguished, rising like a mournful dirge over the ruined square, a lament for their fading pride.

They had knelt, yes—but they were mere Outer Disciples, lowly grunts in the grand hierarchy of the Yuanshi Gate Sect. Their submission could be dismissed as the inevitable yield to an overwhelming, unstoppable force.

Yan Han was different. As a True Disciple, meticulously sculpted by the sect's elders, he was their pride, their banner. In rank, he stood equal to Qin Ting. If he knelt, the Yuanshi Gate Sect's dignity would fracture irreparably, and mocking laughter would echo from the icy Frostfang Cliffs to the sun-scorched Emberfall Deserts.

Pain tore through Yan Han's core—his organs twisted in agony, his veins burst under the strain, and the foundation of his Dao quaked violently, teetering on the brink of collapse. To resist further was to court utter annihilation. With a guttural, anguished gasp, his knees buckled, and he crashed to the ground, the impact sending a plume of dust curling into the air like a fleeting specter.

"A good dog knows when to lie down for its master," Qin Ting said, a cruel glint flashing in his eyes like lightning across a storm-darkened sky. "Now, face your retribution." His aura flared once more, the violet tempest striking with sudden, merciless precision.

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Yan Han had no time to brace himself—he was hurled backward, crashing into the splintered remains of a market stall with a sickening, bone-shattering crunch.

His flesh tore apart, skin peeling back to reveal raw, quivering muscle and jagged, splintered bone. His Dao Foundation—the crystalline core of his cultivation—shattered like fragile glass beneath a hammer's blow, its fragments dissolving into motes of fading light that drifted away on the wind.

Blood gushed from him, pooling beneath the rubble in a grotesque, crimson parody of a fountain. The crowd gasped, a collective intake of breath that shivered through the square like a ripple across still water. Even the Xuantian disciples flinched, their reverence momentarily eclipsed by a visceral horror at the carnage before them.

"An immortal you were, indeed," Qin Ting said, his voice laced with a casual, chilling mirth that sent shivers down the spines of all who heard it. "A proud Divine Spirit Realm expert who couldn't discern heaven from earth. Now, you're nothing but a defiant corpse."

The chuckle that followed was a blade of ice, cutting through the stunned silence with ruthless clarity. To the onlookers, he seemed less a man and more a demon lord plucked from the depths of the Nether Abyss—ruthless, untouchable, and utterly devoid of mercy.

Humiliation. Destruction. Death's doorstep. Qin Ting had delivered the ultimate disgrace to an enemy cultivator, all before a gawking, horrified crowd. Song Tong and his companions stared at Yan Han's broken, lifeless form, their spirits collapsing like punctured bellows, deflated and empty. Their eyes were hollow, their minds adrift in a boundless sea of despair, lost to the weight of their defeat.

But Qin Ting wasn't finished. He strode toward the remaining Yuanshi disciples, who knelt or sprawled amid the wreckage, some whimpering pitifully for their fallen Senior Brother. His shadow fell over them, dark and foreboding, a harbinger of doom that loomed like a storm cloud.

"Look at you—pathetic wretches," he spat, his sneer dripping with disdain so thick it seemed palpable. "Do you even deserve to call yourselves disciples of a holy land? I'll correct that mistake once and for all." With a flick of his wrist, as casual as one might swat a bothersome fly, he unleashed a wave of violet energy that shimmered with malevolent intent.

The blast engulfed them, a tide of raw, unstoppable power they couldn't hope to resist. Their robes disintegrated, reduced to ash in an instant, scattering like dust on the wind. For some, their Dao Foundations—painstakingly built over years of grueling meditation and sacrifice—crumbled like dry clay beneath a relentless fist, their spiritual cores snuffed out like candles extinguished by a gale, while others clung to life, broken and prostrate.

No matter how fortified they'd believed themselves to be, before Qin Ting's supreme might, they were mere chaff thrown into a roaring furnace. They burned, and they broke, their cries swallowed by the void.

The crowd recoiled, a ripple of shock and terror surging through them like a tidal wave. Never had they witnessed such cold-blooded ruthlessness, least of all from a youth of Qin Ting's age.

Whispers stirred among them—what kind of monster had the Xuantian Sect birthed in its shadowed halls? What dark, forbidden arts had forged this unfeeling executioner who wielded power like a god?

The Yuanshi Gate Sect's defeat was absolute, its remnants strewn across the square like shattered idols of a forgotten, forsaken faith, toppled and abandoned.

Qin Ting turned his gaze to the onlookers, his expression serene and unruffled, as if he'd merely swept aside a trifling annoyance rather than obliterated a sect's pride. The surviving Yuanshi disciples—those who hadn't fainted or perished under his onslaught—lay prostrate, their bodies trembling like repentant sinners before a vengeful deity.

Song Tong's whimpers rose above the rest, a pitiful, animalistic squeal akin to a butchered swine echoing through the silence. Qin Ting shook his head, a cold snort escaping his lips, tinged with the faintest trace of boredom, as though the carnage had barely stirred him.

"Too weak," he murmured, his voice low and disdainful. "Far too weak to spark even a flicker of excitement in my heart."

With a subtle, almost imperceptible gesture, he reined in his aura, the violet haze vanishing as if it had never existed. The air lightened instantly, and the crowd exhaled in unison, a collective relief washing over them despite never having been his intended targets.

"Let's go," he said simply, turning on his heel with an air of indifference.

Neither toppling Yan Han with a finger nor reducing the Yuanshi Gate disciples to rubble stirred the slightest ripple in his heart. To him, it was a trivial chore, a fleeting footnote in an endless saga of unchallenged dominance that stretched before him like an eternal horizon.

"Yes, Senior Brother Qin!" Xu Hao and the others snapped to attention, their eyes blazing with zealous, unwavering fervor. They hurried after him, trailing in his wake like devoted acolytes shadowing a divine prophet, their steps quick and eager.

Behind them, the Yuanshi Gate Sect remained—a tableau of broken glory frozen in time. Some knelt in stunned, hollow silence, others lay lifeless amid the debris, their dreams of supremacy extinguished like embers under a deluge.

The onlookers began to disperse slowly, their minds reeling from the spectacle they'd witnessed, their tongues already itching to spread the tale. Word of this day would spread like wildfire through Backridge City, igniting stories that would blaze across the Eastern Wilderness like a relentless inferno.

And Qin Ting's name, they knew deep in their bones, would thunder through the land once more—a herald of unrivaled power, a whisper of dread that would linger in the hearts of all who heard it.