I Only Summon Villainesses

The summoning circle should have glowed a safe, clean gold. Instead, it went blood-red.

Cade Marlowe walked into the academy’s ritual hall knowing exactly who he was: the bottom of the rankings, an F-Rank Spirit Summoner in a society that survives by binding itself to shining legends. His classmates called forth knights in gleaming armor, serene saints wrapped in light, champions carved straight out of history’s victories.

Cade called forth a disaster.

When the smoke thinned, she stood there barefoot on the rune-carved stone, chains of old magic snapping like brittle glass: the Tyrant Empress, the Calamity who had almost ended the world eight centuries ago. Her first breath in this age tasted of incense and fear. Every teacher recoiled. Every ward hummed like a warning siren.

They branded Cade cursed, a walking catastrophe that ought to be erased before his second spell.

But the Empress only smiled at him.

Because the ritual hadn’t just misfired—it had revealed something forbidden. Cade’s gift doesn’t resonate with heroes at all. His call reaches those history named monsters: women crowned in ruin, villainesses erased from holy textbooks and locked away in legend. And when he forges a bond with them, it isn’t through prayers or oaths on the battlefield, but through intimate, dangerous dual cultivation that feeds his power and theirs alike.

Every night he grows stronger. Every night the boundary between summoner and summoned thins.

If heroes are the pillars holding this world up, then Cade has chosen to stand with the ones who once tried to burn those pillars down—and he’s learning, touch by forbidden touch, that sometimes the only way to survive a holy lie is to weaponize the sins it condemned.