I Am the Fated Villain Chapter 1276:

1637. The Night of Annihilation

The atmosphere tonight is exceptionally heavy. For Han Feng, the burden of survival feels like a crushing weight upon his skull, leaving him breathless with a sense of impending doom.

The imperial capital, usually a beacon of prosperity and noise, has fallen into an eerie silence. No travelers walk the streets, and no merchants cry out their wares. It is highly probable that those witnesses have already been eliminated. This entire location is slated for total erasure tonight, ensuring that the history of what transpires here remains buried forever.

“The Champion Marquis provoked the wrong individual. For the time being, he must remain ignorant of the capital's fate, which means all of you must perish here in silence. Do not hold a grudge against me.”

“Since the dawn of time, the shift of power and the cycle of glory and decay have always been this merciless.”

Suspended in the sky, the masked figure peered down at the group below. His tone was freezing and devoid of any human warmth. Behind him, several silhouettes continued to intone ancient scriptures. The prayer beads clutched in their hands radiated a blinding light, shrouding the area in a supernatural mist that seemed to consume the very fabric of time and space.

These beads were infused with the power of a Grand Dao realm expert, creating a restricted domain that even the masked man himself could not breach.

Chu Bai and his companions had not yet reached the Dao realm. Despite their desperate struggles, they found themselves trapped with no hope of escape.

“The Champion Marquis has spilled blood and sweat to expand the borders of the Immortal Chuhao Earth. To be backstabbed and targeted by a scoundrel at a time like this is truly repulsive,” Wu Xuan remarked venomously. He had already deciphered the hidden meaning behind the masked man’s words.

The Immortal Chuhao Earth is fractured into various cliques. The Martial faction, spearheaded by the Divine General and the Champion Marquis, has been locked in constant friction. The sovereign, Chu Gucheng, has traditionally maintained a delicate balance between these powers without taking sides directly.

In days past, the Divine General’s camp and the Champion Marquis’s followers fought bitterly over the geniuses of the Capable and Extraordinary Mansion. Wu Xuan was convinced that the assassins currently hunting them were sent by the Divine General faction.

With the Heavenly General’s recent demise on the front lines, the remaining Divine Generals were without a leader. They would undoubtedly seek to appoint a successor soon. The Champion Marquis, being away from the capital, was the perfect target for sabotage. Suppressing his influence now was the most logical move for those seeking to seize power.

Thus, it was clear that the various Divine Generals were seizing this chance to crush the Champion Marquis’s faction to clear their own path to the top. Still, Wu Xuan felt a nagging doubt. Once a member of the Capable and Extraordinary Mansion reaches the Dao realm, they are typically granted an imperial seal by the Immortal Chuhao Earth, securing a prestigious and peaceful post.

In a desperate move, Wu Xuan attempted to activate the imperial decree of the Immortal Chuhao Earth, hoping to harness the collective will of the capital's citizens to repel the foe. To his horror, the decree remained dormant. He could not summon even a shred of the people’s will. His heart sank instantly.

“The Duke remains the Duke; that hasn't changed. The only necessity is that he must be kept in the dark regarding the capital's events for the duration.”

“Your existence only serves to disturb the order of the imperial city and the stability of the Immortal Chuhao Earth.”

The masked man’s eyes were cold as he looked over Han Feng and the others. Their expressions of rage, hopelessness, and defiance meant nothing to him; he viewed them as mere obstacles to be cleared away.

The Duke’s network of spies within the city had been systematically dismantled over the past few days. Although many officials sensed the shift in the wind, they remained silent out of fear. They realized a massive power within the capital was hunting the Duke, a move that likely had the quiet blessing of the ruler, Chu Gucheng.

In the current climate of the Immortal Chuhao Earth, it appeared Chu Gucheng felt forced to look the other way. To prevent a full-scale internal collapse, he had to allow this suppression to happen, or the entire nation might fall into chaos.

Chu Bai and Han Feng trembled, their complexions turning ghostly pale. They had assumed that with the backing of the House of Celestial Experts, their path would be smooth. They never dreamed that the capital's internal factions would be so bold in their plot against the Duke.

The masked man didn't wait any longer. As soon as he finished speaking, he struck. His expansive robes flared, channeling the raw power of the Great Dao. It felt as though the heavens were collapsing onto Chu Bai and his comrades, intending to grind them into nothingness.

Beyond his own strength, he unleashed a weathered, rusted ancient mirror with jagged edges. As it took flight, the mirror exhaled a peculiar fog that mimicked a vast galaxy. Beams of light shot forth, turning the surrounding reality into a blurred, flickering shadow.

“An authentic Dao-level ancient mirror... they even brought such a bizarre relic. They truly mean to leave no survivors,” Wu Xuan said, his face twisting in shock. A wave of profound terror washed over him.

The overwhelming aura of the mirror was suffocating. Its surface pulsed with a starlight glow—the essence of the Dao refined to a lethal degree, capable of erasing all existence.

Everything touched by its light vanished without a sound, simply deleted from reality. Wu Xuan felt the cold touch of death upon his soul.

At that moment, Wu Xuan realized his plan to buy more time was futile. He lacked the power to shield Chu Bai, Chu Kui, and the others from such a devastating force.

“The heavens wish for our end...”

Despair clouded the faces of Han Feng, Chu Kui, and Bi Xin. Chu Bai was no different; he was frantically trying to wake the spirit of the Sun-shooting Bow, praying its power could intercept the killing blow.

“It is too late. Had you entrusted the Sun-shooting Bow to Wu Xuan earlier so he could manifest its true potential, there might have been a glimmer of hope,” the spirit of the bow remarked with a hint of sorrow.

Chu Bai’s spirit broke at those words. The crisis had spiraled far beyond his control, and he was consumed by regret. If he had known his impulsiveness would lead to this, he never would have acted. Now, his choices had doomed everyone alongside him.

The sky appeared to be fracturing. Indifferent to the carnage, the masked man’s robes billowed like a miniature cosmos, filled with swirling stars and rivers of radiance.

A crushing pressure descended, causing the void to buckle. Chu Bai and the rest felt their skeletons groaning under the weight; it felt as though their meridians and Dantians were about to burst, and their very souls were being pulverized into a bloody mist.

Wu Xuan, being the strongest, bore the brunt of the force. He coughed up blood as he was hurled backward, smashing through astral projections. A jagged hole was ripped through his torso by the mirror’s light. Even a Dao-level master could not endure such a strike. Dark blood poured from the wound, resisting all attempts at healing. In a heartbeat, he was crippled and stripped of his ability to fight.

Meanwhile, in a serene garden within the imperial capital, Gu Changge sat before a flawless, jade-like mirror. A faint smile touched his lips as he set down his wine cup.

With a casual flick of his finger, the image in the mirror blurred, as if the very laws of the universe were shifting. The mirror's surface cracked into large shards, and he reached his hand into the space beyond the glass.

“Things are certainly lively tonight,” he murmured with a light laugh.

He extended his palm into the hazy depths of the mirror's dimension, reaching for something far away. Nearby, the spirits of the Eternal Spirit and the Scavenger Book took form as misty figures, watching his actions with profound shock.

Simultaneously, in the mist-shrouded outskirts of the capital, the midnight sky seemed to cave in. A slender, jade-colored finger, wreathed in chaotic Qi, emerged from the abyss of the void. Compared to this finger, the stars themselves looked like mere grains of sand.

It was as if the hand of a god had reached down to touch the world, threatening to shatter the universe with a single contact.

The masked man’s stoic mask crumbled as he witnessed this. His eyes widened in sheer terror.

“Which senior has deigned to interfere?”

He shouted, redirecting the force of his sleeve away from Chu Bai and toward the descending finger. However, an explosion of boundless energy met his resistance.

The translucent finger, bathed in chaos, continued its descent. The masked man’s sleeve was vaporized instantly, followed by his entire arm, which disintegrated into a spray of blood and bone. The world itself seemed as fragile as a paper sketch, tearing apart at the finger's presence.

The figures chanting behind the masked man were hit by an invisible force. Blood leaked from their eyes and mouths. The prayer beads in their hands fractured and then detonated, turning into a cloud of fine dust.

The explosion of the beads released a violent surge of energy that caused the figures to vanish instantly. They didn't even have the chance to cry out before being erased from existence.

In that heartbeat, the unnatural mist vanished, and the restrictive domain dissolved like retreating shadows.

Chu Bai, Chu Kui, Bi Xin, and the others from the Extraordinary Sages House stood frozen, unable to process the scene. It felt like a hallucination. Even the dying Wu Xuan watched in trembling disbelief.

“Who is the senior that saved us?”

With one arm gone, the masked man’s face was a mask of agony and terror. His previous arrogance had vanished completely.

In that brief clash, he realized he was facing someone far beyond the Ancestor Dao level. He couldn't fathom which Ancestor Dao expert would step in like this.

The prayer beads had been specifically reinforced by an Ancestor Dao being to mask the aura of this battle. How had this mysterious entity detected them? And why would they care to help?

The masked man’s pleas went unanswered. The crystalline finger, like the limb of a supreme deity, did not waver. It continued its slow, inevitable path downward.

The sheer power of the descent warped the Great Dao and caused the river of time to boil. The damaged ancient mirror was pulverized into nothingness in an instant.

For the first time, the masked man understood true hopelessness. He was paralyzed, unable to move a single muscle.

As the pressure intensified, his skull began to splinter with a sickening crack. The blood-soaked mask shattered, revealing a pale, clean-shaven face twisted in absolute horror.

“Is it him?”

From a distance, Wu Xuan and the others were jolted from their stupor. When they saw the masked man’s exposed face, they were paralyzed by shock.

“How can this be?”

As members of the Extraordinary Sages House, Chu Kui and Bi Xin held high status. Though they lacked Dao-level Cultivation, they were familiar with the prominent figures of the realm.

Recognizing the man behind the mask filled them with a new kind of dread and confusion.

The finger in the sky reached the end of its journey. Regardless of the masked man’s internal terror or silent resistance, it pressed down on his head. With a soft sound, the entire space was purged, leaving absolutely nothing behind.

Once the masked man was gone, the jade-like finger retracted and vanished as quickly as it had appeared. The world returned to its natural state. The night was pitch black, and the silence was heavy as a tomb.

“Simply terrifying...”

The ease of the act—crushing a master like a common bug—left Han Feng and Chu Bai shaking. They felt a deep, primal fear of such power.

Minutes ago, the masked man had made them feel like helpless ants. Yet, before that ethereal finger, even that powerful man was nothing more than a gnat to be flicked away.

Before Wu Xuan and the others could recover, the sky blurred once more. A massive hand reached out from the darkness, plucking them from the ground and pulling them into the void.

The world spun for Chu Bai and his group. Before they could blink, they found themselves standing in a tranquil, private courtyard.

Nearby, rare immortal bamboo and divine plants grew, with purple mist dancing around ancient pines under the fading light of the sun.

A young man dressed in white sat at a stone table, his back turned to them. He seemed to be enjoying a quiet drink, one hand holding a wine cup while the other rested on an ancient scroll he was reading.

Bathed in the silver moonlight, the young man seemed to radiate a soft light, appearing almost translucent as if he belonged to a higher plane of existence. He carried an air of supreme, detached elegance.

The entire group, from the Dao-level Wu Xuan to the younger Chu Bai, stood in a daze, their minds still reeling from the night's horrors.

“We thank the senior for our lives.”

Wu Xuan was the first to find his voice. He bowed deeply, realizing the man before them was the one who had intervened.

The image of that slender hand effortlessly destroying the masked man was burned into his memory.

Chu Bai and the others followed suit, bowing in gratitude. However, they couldn't help but feel a sense of recognition. The young man’s silhouette felt strangely familiar.

Suddenly, Wu Xuan’s eyes widened. “Could it be... Young Master Gu?”

Having attended Chu Gucheng’s birthday feast, Wu Xuan had seen the high-profile guests. He recognized Gu Changge, the enigmatic leader of the Fating Alliance—a man whispered about with fear throughout the Xiyuan civilization.

Wu Xuan was stunned that Gu Changge would be the one to save them from certain death.

“There is no need for such formality. It was a trivial matter,” Gu Changge said smoothly, turning to face them as he set aside his golden scroll.

“I can hardly believe it is truly Young Master Gu...”

Chu Kui and Bi Xin had heard the terrifying legends of the Fating Alliance's leader. To see that the man feared as a harbinger of disaster was actually this refined, elegant youth who had just saved them felt surreal.

Chu Bai, ever observant, noticed the golden scroll Gu Changge had been reading. It wasn't filled with text, but rather shifting images.

Though the pictures were faint, Chu Bai recognized familiar faces within them. A realization hit him.

Had Gu Changge been watching their struggle through this scroll and decided to step in?

Before he could confirm his theory, Gu Changge moved the scroll out of sight, ending any further inspection.