Villain: Manipulating the Heroines into hating the Protagonist

Chapter 924: Wang Jian Saves Sect Mistress Lianhua

The dust settled slowly in the Grand Cauldron Arena, coating the blood-soaked ground in a grim, grey shroud. Sect Mistress Lianhua lay broken amidst the wreckage of her sect’s honor, her white robes torn and stained with the mud and gore of her fallen loyalists.

Fu Yan hovered above her, his chest heaving slightly from the exertion of the battle, but his face was a mask of pure, unadulterated triumph. He had won. The sect was his.

Yet, the old fox remained cautious. He had seen cornered beasts lash out with lethal finality before. He would not take that risk with a Core Formation expert, even one as battered as Lianhua.

He didn’t immediately descend to gloat. instead, he reached into his sleeve and withdrew a sinister artifact. It was a long, impossibly thin needle, forged from abyssal black iron and steeped in soul-corroding poisons for a century. The "Soul-Severing Meridian Nail."

"A precaution, my dear Lianhua," Fu Yan sneered, his voice echoing in the silent, subjugated arena. "Just to ensure you don’t do anything... foolish."

With a casual, almost dismissive flick of his wrist, he sent the needle flying. It was a blur of black light, moving faster than sound.

Lianhua, lying half-conscious in the dirt, barely even saw it coming.

THWACK.

The needle struck true, piercing her lower abdomen, driving straight into her dantian—the spiritual core of every cultivator.

Lianhua’s body convulsed violently, arching off the ground in a silent scream of absolute agony. It wasn’t just physical pain; it was the sensation of her very soul being shattered. She felt the needle strike her core, and then, with a horrific, grinding crack that echoed only in her mind, her dantian shattered.

Shockwaves of destructive, corrosive energy ripped outwards from the impact point. They tore through her meridian network like wildfire through dry grass. She felt them snapping, one by one—the main pathways, the delicate sub-channels, all of them rupturing and dissolving under the onslaught of the vile artifact.

Her cultivation, the immense reservoir of Core Formation power she had spent centuries building, instantly began to dissipate. It leaked from her pores like steam, a visible, tragic cloud of azure energy that drifted away into the air and vanished.

Within seconds, it was gone. The majestic ocean of her power had been drained dry, leaving behind only a cracked, empty vessel. She collapsed back onto the bloody dust, gasping for air, feeling a horrifying, alien hollowness spreading through her entire being. She was weak. Weaker than she had been since she was a child. She was mortal.

Fu Yan watched the azure steam dissipate, his smile widening into a grotesque grin. "There," he purred, finally lowering himself to the ground and walking towards her with a confident, arrogant swagger. "Now you are truly harmless, my dear. Just a beautiful, broken vase waiting to be filled with whatever I choose."

Lianhua lay still, tears of pure, undiluted despair mixing with the blood on her face. The physical pain was agonizing, but it was nothing compared to the crushing spiritual void inside her. She tried to summon even a wisp of Qi to stop her heart, to bite her tongue with lethal force, but she couldn’t. She didn’t even have the strength to commit suicide. She was completely, utterly at his mercy.

High above in the shadowed alcoves of the arena stands, Wang Jian watched this final cruelty with cold, calculating eyes.

’Perfect,’ he thought, feeling no pity, only the satisfaction of a master strategist seeing his plan reach its critical juncture. ’She is broken. Cultivation gone. Hope gone. Her allies are dead, her dignity stripped away. She has hit absolute rock bottom. If I save her now, I am not just a rescuer; I am her only lifeline in a universe of darkness.’

He didn’t wait for Fu Yan to reach her. He didn’t want the old lecher to even lay a hand on his new property.

Wang Jian’s spiritual sense latched onto the hidden backdoors he had programmed into the grand array. He didn’t try to seize full control—that would alert Fu Yan too quickly. Instead, he activated the specific "chaos" sub-routines he had planted for this exact moment.

Simultaneously, his hands moved in a blur, retrieving a dozen high-grade talismans he had prepared. "Cloud-Burst Talismans" for visual cover, and "Spiritual Interference Bombs" to scramble their senses.

He threw them down into the arena with perfect precision.

BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!

The talismans detonated in rapid succession, not with destructive force, but with a massive, expanding wave of thick, impenetrable white fog. It rolled over the arena floor like a tsunami, swallowing everything in seconds. At the same time, the interference bombs released chaotic pulses of untamed spiritual energy, creating a static ’noise’ that blinded spiritual senses, turning the grand arena into a confusing, grey void.

"What is this?!" Fu Yan roared, stopping dead in his tracks as the fog swallowed Lianhua from his view.

"An attack? Are there still loyalists left?!" Elder Song hissed, his shadow serpent thrashing blindly in the mist.

"Secure the area! Don’t let her escape!" Fu Yan bellowed to his confused disciples. "It’s a loyalist trap!"

While chaos erupted above, Wang Jian became a ghost. He activated his "Void-Merging Breath," his aura vanishing completely, his physical form blending perfectly seamlessly into the swirling white fog.

He leaped from the stands, landing silently on the arena floor. The chaos was absolute. He could hear Fu Yan roaring orders, hear the Azure Sword Clan disciples shouting to each other, trying to maintain formation in a blinding fog that dampened sound and scrambled their spiritual perception.

"Form a perimeter! Nothing gets in or out!" Deacon Jiao’s rough voice barked from somewhere to the left.

"My spiritual sense... it’s useless in this fog!" a disciple cried out in panic.

Wang Jian moved through them like a fish in water. He didn’t need spiritual sense; he knew exactly where she was. He had memorized her position to the inch.

He reached Lianhua. She was lying in the dust, barely conscious, her eyes open but unseeing, lost in the fog and her own despair. She didn’t even react to the chaos around her; she was just waiting for death.

He scooped her up in his arms. She was shockingly light now, her body devoid of the heavy, reinforcing power of cultivation. She felt fragile, like a porcelain doll that had already been shattered and glued back together poorly.

She flinched violently at his touch, a weak, pathetic sound escaping her throat. She expected Fu Yan’s rough, grasping hands.

"Shh," Wang Jian whispered, his voice magically altered to be unrecognizable, a soft, calm sound in the terrifying fog. "Quiet now. I am getting you out of here."

Lianhua stared up into the grey void, unable to see his face, her mind unable to process his words. Rescued? Now? Why?

Wang Jian didn’t have time to explain. He moved with blinding speed, carrying her through the swirling mist. He didn’t head for the main exits, which he knew Fu Yan would have already sealed. He headed for a specific section of the crimson energy barrier that loomed overhead.

Behind them, Fu Yan was losing his patience. "Enough of this! ’Gale Blast’!"

A massive wave of pure wind Qi exploded from the center of the arena, momentarily blowing a huge hole in the fog.

But Wang Jian had anticipated this. The array nodes he had tampered with were already reacting, feeding more spiritual energy into the fog generation, causing it to roll back in almost instantly, thicker than before.

"Curse it! Find her!" Fu Yan shrieked, his fury mounting. "She has no cultivation! She can’t have gone far! Crawl on the ground if you have to!"

Wang Jian reached the edge of the barrier. To anyone else, it was a solid wall of lethal crimson energy. But he knew the exact spot, the tiny, coin-sized flaw he had engineered into the rune sequence.

He pressed his hand against the barrier, channeling a specific frequency of his Stellar Qi. The red wall didn’t break; it simply... parted, opening a hole just big enough for a man carrying a woman to slip through.

He stepped through, out of the arena, and into the dense forests that surrounded the sect’s main peak. Behind him, the barrier sealed seamlessly.

He didn’t stop. He couldn’t. Fu Yan would realize she was gone soon enough and expand the search.

He ran, his physical strength immense even without using flashy techniques. He moved like a shadow through the trees, carrying the unconscious Sect Mistress deeper into the wilderness, away from the sect she had just lost.

He reached his extraction point—a secluded, nondescript cave hidden behind a thicket of thorny vines, miles away from the sect. Inside, inscribed on the floor, was a single-use, long-distance teleportation formation he had set up days ago for this exact contingency.

He placed Lianhua gently in the center of the formation. She was completely unconscious now, her body overwhelmed by the trauma of her crippling.

He wasted no time. He threw a handful of high-grade spirit stones into the array’s power nodes. The formation hummed to life, a brilliant, silvery light filling the cave.

"Goodbye, Crimson Pill Sect," he murmured, a cold smile on his face.

The world blurred, twisted, and vanished.

They reappeared instantly in another cave, hundreds of miles away, deep in an uncharted, untamed mountain range far from any sect’s territory.

Wang Jian immediately stepped off the receiving platform and, with a single, powerful stomp of his foot, shattered the stone runes, reducing the formation to unrecognizable dust. The spiritual trail was severed. They were gone. Completely untraceable.

He carried her to a prepared stone slab in the corner of the dry, secure cave, laying her down on a soft beast fur he had placed there earlier. He lit a few luminous pearls, casting a soft, gentle light over the stark cave walls.

He sat beside her, waiting. He composed his face, replacing the cold, calculating predator with the concerned, slightly overwhelmed young hero.

It didn’t take long. The pain of her shattered dantian was a constant, jarring stimulant.

Lianhua stirred, a low groan escaping her pale lips. Her eyelids fluttered, then opened.

For a moment, there was only confusion. The stone ceiling of the cave was not the sky of the arena. The quiet drip of water somewhere nearby was not the roar of battle.

Then, memory returned. The betrayal. The deaths of her elders. The needle.

She gasped, her hands flying to her abdomen. It was true. The empty, aching void where her ocean of power used to be. It was gone. All of it.

Tears welled in her eyes, hot and stinging. She tried to sit up, but her body was agonizingly weak, heavy as lead. She barely managed to prop herself up on one trembling elbow.

"Where..." she rasped, her voice cracked and dry.

She saw him then. A young, handsome man sitting quietly nearby, watching her with an expression of deep, respectful concern. He wore simple, unmarked cultivator robes.

"Who... who are you?" she asked, fear mixing with her despair. "Why... why am I here? Why did you save me? Why didn’t you just let me die?"

Wang Jian stood up immediately and offered a deep, formal bow, perfectly respectful.

"This junior is Wang Jian, Sect Mistress," he said, his voice calm, steady, and soothing. "I am a humble cultivator, a Dao Companion of Deacon Yue Lingshan of the Mystic Peak Sect."

Lianhua blinked, her sluggish mind trying to make the connection. "Mystic Peak... Yue Lingshan... Ruyan’s friend?"

"Yes," Wang Jian nodded earnestly. "I was a guest at your sect today. Junior Sister Ruyan invited me to watch her compete in the Grand Competition. She wanted her friends to see her triumph."

He let a look of pain and frustration cross his face. "I was in the stands. I watched her magnificent victory. I saw... I saw everything that happened after. When Elder Fu sprung his vile trap... I was fortunate. I was hidden in a deep alcove and the initial suppression array missed me for a moment, allowing me to use a concealment talisman."

He clenched his fists, looking down at the ground, acting the part of the frustrated, powerless junior perfectly. "I... I wanted to do more, Sect Mistress. I wanted to fight. But... I am only at the Initial Stage of Foundation Establishment. Against Core Formation elders, against that massive, terrifying array, against the armies of traitors... I was powerless. Completely powerless to save your loyal elders or your faction. For that, I am truly, deeply sorry."

Lianhua listened, her despair deepening with every word. It made sense. He was just a guest, a weak junior caught in a war of titans.

"But then," Wang Jian continued, looking up, his eyes burning with a feigned, earnest sincerity, "that strange fog appeared. I don’t know where it came from—perhaps a final contingency from one of your brave elders? But it distracted them. Just for a moment."

"I saw you fall," he said softly. "I saw what that monster did to you. And I couldn’t... I couldn’t just sit there and watch Ruyan’s revered teacher, a woman she loves like a mother, fall into the hands of that animal Fu Yan. I used every escape talisman I had. I rushed into the fog, found you, and used a random, unstable teleportation scroll I’d been saving for an emergency. It brought us here."

His story was a masterpiece of half-truths and logical consistency. It explained his presence, his inability to save the sect, and his miraculous rescue, all while painting him as a brave, loyal friend of her disciple.

Lianhua didn’t doubt him. In her state, she had no energy for suspicion. She just felt the crushing weight of her reality.

"You risked your life for a cripple, Wang Jian," she whispered, her voice hollow, dead. "It was a waste. A noble waste, but a waste nonetheless."

She closed her eyes, tears leaking out from beneath her lashes, tracking through the dirt on her beautiful, ruined face.

"My cultivation is gone," she murmured, the words a litany of ultimate despair. "My meridians are shattered. My sect has fallen to traitors and wolves. My elders are dead because of my weakness. There is no reason for me to live. None."

She opened her eyes again, looking at him with a haunting, desperate intensity. "Boy... if you have any mercy in your heart... if you truly respect me... end it now. Kill me. Do not let me live as this... this empty husk."