Ashen Dragon - Chapter 532 - 5 Festivals

Anton is a great-grandfather. He is living quite a happy life, despite his advanced age and declining health… until a group of cultivator bandits moves into the area. The nearby guardians of the area, the Order of Ninety-Nine Stars, are unable to track them down as they continue to ravage nearby towns. During one desperate winter Anton is out on a hunt when his family- his entire village- is killed or taken as slaves by the bandits. He lacks the strength to fight them, and he wasn’t even present for their arrival to die with his loved ones. At the pit of his despair, he wonders if he ever had any chance to change things. What could he even do? He cannot even pull his best bow, and his eyesight is failing. If he had been a cultivator… perhaps there might have been a chance, but he was decades- perhaps even most of his life- too late.Participant in the Royal Road Writathon challenge (2022)Notes on cultivation levels:There are five general stages of cultivation, though the fifth is extremely rare. Each cultivation style might have their own name for the stages.1. Body Tempering2. Spirit Building/ occasionally System Creation (Ninety-Nine Stars)3. Constellation Formation (Ninety-Nine Stars)4. Life Transformation/Galaxy Construction (Ninety-Nine Stars)5. Ascension

One day, I woke up only find out that I’d become a Demon Lord, an individual responsible for protecting a dungeon. The world I’d been spirited away to was one filled with violence. Gigantic monsters wandered through it and competed with each other each and every day for the right to survive. I had no choice but to strengthen my dungeon’s defenses in hopes of living another day—or at least that was what I’d thought. For some odd reason, I instead ended up spending my days in relaxation and bliss.

What happens when you survive seven hellish years on an alien planet in the ultimate battle of the strongest in the universe—as a human?What happens when you give everything you have and more to defeat the final boss in a battle to the death… only to wake up the next second, back at day one?Going through it all over again?But something is wrong.The game in his hands isn’t Nyxfall 6: Dark End, the world he spent over seven years surviving. It’s Nyxfall 7: The Veilbreakers—the next installment.He won? So now he’s been given another game to play?And he’s not alone. There are others like him in every alien civilization. This time, it’s not just survival—it’s about who can lead their people best.That is… if they even care about their people at all.Why bother leading at all? With everything they have learned, why not exploit the system, amass unimaginable wealth, and live like a king in a game that pays in real money?