Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

Chapter 58: Chapter 58: Zhu Ziyan(2)

Haoran watched as Ziyan stood completely still, her frame trembling so slightly it was almost imperceptible to the naked eye.

One of her hand had already turned white from grasping her other arm as if trying to hold her own soul inside her body.

Her gaze remained pinned to the floor, and her cat ears were flattened so tightly against her skull they were nearly buried in her dark hair.

Silence permeated the room.

But for Ziyan, the silence was filled with the screaming of ghosts she had wanted to escape from.

Ziyan had always believed she never made the wrong choice.

When the Spirit Hall’s army began to march through the Ogre Academy and wanted to burn it to the ground, and when her classmates and teachers all stayed to fight, she had tucked her tail and ran.

She had abandoned the teachers who taught her, the classmates who laughed with her, and a fiancé she had used as a shield.

She was a coward, and she knew it.

But, is that wrong?

She only wanted to live, to grow strong enough to break free from the suffocating grip of her family, and to see another sunrise.

She did not want to die.

But...

The price of that survival was a mind that never found rest, and for two long years, she had suffered nightmares almost every night.

Every time she closed her eyes, she saw them—the rotting, bloodied corpses of the Ogre Seven and the academy faculty.

They would reach out with their rotting fingers, their voices a discordant chorus of wet gurgles, blaming her for their agony, trying to drag her down into the cold earth with them.

The only reason she had reached the 7th Stage of Foundation Establishment—a feat that defied her mediocre innate talent—wasn’t because she was incredibly hard working or because of some noble pursuit of strength, it was insomnia.

She cultivated because the rhythmic flow of Qi was the only thing that kept the nightmares at bay.

Perhaps, ever since she had abandoned them, she became a hollow shell held together by the terror of her own memories.

Haoran stared at her for a long moment, his eyes devoid of even a shred of pity before he hummed softly, the sound vibrating through the silent throne room.

”Are you feeling guilty?” he asked.

Ziyan flinched as if he had struck her, but she said nothing, her head sinking even lower until her chin touched her chest.

”You shouldn’t be,” Haoran said, his voice cold and clinical. ”There is nothing wrong in choosing your own life over the lives of others. In fact, it is the only logical conclusion a sentient being should reach.”

He patted Huo Yue’s arm as she got up from his lap before he stood up from the throne, and looked down at Ziyan with the detached gaze of a scholar examining an insect.

His words were blunt, completely bypassing the messy, emotional trauma she was drowning in.

”The universe is governed by the law of the jungle and survival,” Haoran continued, his tone conversational yet brutal. ”Those teachers and students you mourn? They died because they were weak and lacked the foresight to flee. Their deaths were already a statistical certainty the moment they chose to stand against a superior force. By staying, they didn’t prove their bravery; they only proved their incompetence at basic self preservation.”

After all, it is wanting to confront another force if they are equal in power, but to confront another knowing full well victory and death is certain...what could that be aside from plain stupidity?

He tilted his head, watching her as a tear hit the sandstone floor.

”To feel ’guilt’ is to suggest that your life has less value than a collective of corpses,” he said, his voice flat. ”If you had stayed and died with them, what would have changed? The Spirit Hall would still rule, the academy would still be ash, and there would simply be one more rotting body in the dirt. Your survival is the only tangible profit from that entire disaster. To regret it is to insult the very instinct that makes you a cultivator.”

Ziyan trembled harder, her breath hitching as every words from him hammered her soul.

She wanted comfort, or perhaps a justification that she was ’doing what they would have wanted.’

Instead, Haoran was stripping away the sanctity of her grief and replacing it with cold, hard mathematics.

”You are useful because you are alive,” Haoran added, indifferent to her hitching breath. ”A dead genius is a tragedy but a living coward is a resource. Stop wasting your mental energy on ghosts that can no longer provide you with spirit stones or cultivation progress. They are gone, and the world has already forgotten them. You should do the same, not out of kindness, but out of efficiency.”

He turned back to Huo Yue, dismissing Ziyan’s internal collapse as if it were nothing more than a minor inconvenience.

For Haoran, feelings were the baggage of the mundane. In his world, there was only the path forward, and the bodies used as stepping stones to reach it.

Without another word, Haoran turned towards the door and walked out the room, leaving behind Huo Yue and Ziyan.

Huo Yue watched Haoran’s retreating back as he exited the throne room, his footsteps echoing with a cold, unwavering certainty.

The air always seemed to grow a few degrees warmer the moment he left—not because his presence was cold, but because the sheer, frozen logic he carried with him was enough to chill any heart.

She turned her gaze to Ziyan. The cat-girl looked as though she had been stripped bare, her shoulders shaking as she processed the blunt, surgical words Haoran had left behind.

Huo Yue hopped down from the throne and walked over, her movements soft and fluid.

”Forgive him,” she said softly, her voice like a warm breeze after a winter frost. ”He’s like that. He’s incredibly blunt and cares nothing for what other people feel. To him, the world is just a series of paths and obstacles, and he doesn’t see the baggage that others carry, he only sees the direction we’re moving. And if he thinks we’re wrong, he will say it, no excuses.”

Ziyan let out a shaky, half-broken breath as she shook her head.

She didn’t look up, but her voice was filled with a strange, hollow resonance. ”No... no, he... he has a point. If I had stayed, I would be a corpse. I chose to live, and my guilt doesn’t change the fact that they are gone and I am here. It’s... efficient, just like he said.”

”Not entirely.”

Huo Yue smiled sadly as she reached out, gently taking Ziyan’s trembling hands in hers.

Finding them ice-cold, she didn’t hesitate and stepped forward, pulling the girl into a firm, warm hug.

At first, Ziyan was stiff, her body unaccustomed to such simple, human warmth, but as Huo Yue held her, radiating the gentle heat of her internal flames, the tension began to leak out of Ziyan’s frame.

”Haoran is right that you shouldn’t let the past hold you,” Huo Yue whispered into her ear, her voice steady and kind. ”But he’s wrong to say those lives were just statistics. You didn’t survive because you were being a cold-hearted coward, Ziyan. You survived because you believed that your life is precious and shouldn’t be wasted on an inevitable outcome. And that’s okay.”

Huo Yue pulled back just enough to look Ziyan in the eye, her hands resting on the other girl’s shoulders.

”Moving on doesn’t mean forgetting,” Huo Yue continued. ”Haoran thinks memories of the dead are just ’wasted mental energy,’ but I think they’re something to be remembered. Those teachers and friends... they are a part of why you are standing here today. If you cast them aside like trash just to be ’efficient,’ then you really would be losing yourself.”

She reached up and tucked a stray strand of black hair behind Ziyan’s feline ear.

”Don’t let the nightmares pull you down, but don’t turn your heart into stone to escape them either. You can live for yourself, and you can be happy, all while carrying a small part of them with you. Don’t think of your survival as something cursed, but think of it as a second chance. So, don’t just cultivate because you’re afraid to face your nightmares. Cultivate so that one day, you can stand in the sun and feel like you’ve earned the life you chose.”

Ziyan looked at her, stunned.

Earn the life I chose?

Me? The coward who will abandon everyone for the sake of my selfish desire of survival?

Do I also....deserve it?

For the first time in two years, the screaming of the ghosts in Ziyan’s mind grew quiet.

They didn’t disappear, but they stopped reaching for her throat.

She looked at Huo Yue, and for a fleeting moment, she saw not just a powerful cultivator or a Demon King’s fiancée, but a girl who understood the weight of a soul.

Ziyan’s eyes welled up, and this time, when she cried, it wasn’t out of fear or regret.

She leaned her head onto Huo Yue’s shoulder and let out a long, shuddering sob of relief.

”Thank you,” Ziyan choked out. ”Thank you, Sister Shen.”

Huo Yue just held her, stroking her hair as the desert sun began to set outside the sandstone windows, casting long, golden shadows across the room.