Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

Chapter 185: Chapter 185: Return

The initial tension that had gripped the cave when the blue flames erupted suddenly began to dissipate.

The Shadow Hall experts, trained to gauge the spiritual reserves and cultivation bases of their targets, scanned Huo Yue from head to toe.

They looked for the deep, resonant ocean of power that usually accompanied a Nascent Soul or Spirit Ascension master, but instead, they found a reservoir that, while incredibly dense and pure, was fundamentally limited in its capacity.

”Leave the rest to you?” Hei Yi snorted in disdain, a mocking sneer distorting his blood-stained face. ”A mere peak Golden Core realm actually said that to us? Are you still dreaming?”

The men behind him joined in his laughter, their voices echoing darkly off the cavern walls.

To them, the gap between the Peak of the Golden Core Realm and the Nascent Soul Realm was an unbridgeable chasm.

A Golden Core cultivator merely possessed a solid sphere of spiritual energy within their Dantian; a Nascent Soul expert had shattered that core to birth an immortal spirit, gaining the ability to manipulate the natural laws of the world.

To these seasoned killers, Huo Yue’s grand entrance was nothing more than the final, desperate struggle of a lamb walking willingly into the slaughterhouse.

But Huo Yue ignored them and just helped Ziyan rest, letting her lean back on the wall of the cave.

Her movements were gentle, completely contrasting the volatile, simmering heat that radiated from her skin.

She carefully adjusted Ziyan’s position so that her broken arm wouldn’t press against the jagged rock, ensuring the potent healing pill she had administered could begin its work without interruption.

Ziyan winced, coughing up a small bit of residual blood, but the warmth of the pill was already spreading through her meridians, knitting her fractured bones back together.

Finally, Huo Yue stood up straight and stared at Hei Yi and the others.

Her posture was rigid, her crimson hair shifting like living embers over her shoulders, while her red eyes tracked across the assembly of cloaked figures, counting them one by one with a terrifying, detached calmness.

”14 Nascent Soul realms,” she muttered, her voice dropping to a low, icy register that seemed to cut through the ambient heat of the cave. ”There’s less of you than I thought.”

Hei Yi snorted, his grip tightening on his weapon as his chuckle died down. ”So what? One of us is enough for you.”

Despite his words, he made no move to attack as his instincts, honed after hundreds of years of survival in the brutal, cutthroat environment of the Central Region, were screaming at him.

The hairs on the back of his neck stood on end, and a cold sweat broke out beneath his black cloak and every defensive reflex he possessed was telling him that this woman who stood before him was incredibly dangerous, regardless of what her apparent cultivation level indicated.

But how was that possible?

At that moment, Huo Yue suddenly took a deep breath, and the air in the cavern was drawn into her lungs, causing the surrounding atmospheric pressure to drop violently.

Then, four flames of different colors erupted from her body and the shadows of the cave were instantly obliterated by a kaleidoscope of supernatural light.

These were her four Heavenly Flames, mystical fires of legend that possessed the power to incinerate concepts and alter reality, the Blue Lily Earth Flame, the Green Spirit Flame, the Clear Heart Flame, and the Freezing Ice Flame left behind by her master.

The Blue Lily Earth Flame burned with a deep, oceanic azure, heavy with the weight of the terrestrial crust.

The Green Spirit Flame crackled with a vibrant, emerald vitality that could both give life and consume it.

The Clear Heart Flame shone with a translucent, blinding white light that targeted the soul and purified impurities.

And the Freezing Ice Flame defied logic, burning with a pale, frosted silver that emitted a paradoxical, absolute zero temperature capable of freezing even spiritual energy itself.

The pressure inside the tunnel became suffocating, and the rock beneath Huo Yue’s feet began to vitrify, turning into slick, black glass.

Then, those four flames were compressed at the tip of her finger, forming a small, four-colored flame lotus as she pointed it at them.

The four volatile, conflicting primordial energies were forced into a delicate, spinning equilibrium by her sheer willpower.

It was a masterpiece of control, a miniature star bound by silk threads.

Hei Yi’s eyes instantly widened to the size of saucers as the true nature of the threat finally registering in his mind.

The primordial terror radiating from that tiny lotus made his Soul tremble within his Dantian.

”Stop her!” he shrieked, his voice cracking with sudden panic.

Everyone immediately rushed towards Huo Yue, their dark spiritual energies erupting in a frantic, disorganized surge as they threw their most powerful defensive and offensive techniques forward.

Chains of shadow, blasts of corrupted qi, and poisonous miasmas converged on her position.

But before they could even touch her, Huo Yue spoke.

”Burn.”

The flame lotus exploded towards them.

It was a burst of flame so powerful it was as if the sun itself exploded inside the enclosed mountain as the brilliant, blinding flash of multicolored light consumed everything in an instant.

The sound of the detonation was so loud it surpassed human hearing, rendering the world completely silent for a fraction of a second.

The destructive wave of pure, unadulterated heat completely vaporized Hei Yi and the others along with the front section of the cave.

Their flesh, bones, robes, and souls were obliterated before they could even scream, reduced to fundamental particles.

The sheer thermal energy was so absolute that the parts of the cavern that weren’t directly hit by the flame melted and turned into bubbling, glowing lava that flowed like rivers down the hillside.

Zhu Ziyan stared at the devastation with wide eyes, her jaw slack as she shielded her face from the residual heat.

The entire landscape of the mountain had been permanently altered!

’A combination of four different Heavenly Flames were actually this powerful!?’ She knew Huo Yue was strong, but this level of destruction was something she had only associated with high-level Spirit Ascension or Nirvana Rebirth experts.

Of course, although that attack looked powerful, it wouldn’t actually be enough to completely vaporize standard 3rd stage Nascent Soul Experts and above under normal circumstances.

However, the Shadow Hall experts, to increase their numbers and strength across the Central Region had always used pills for quick breakthroughs.

These artificial advancements left their foundations unstable, making them ten to twenty percent weaker than their own realm would suggest, with their internal qi was turbulent and poorly refined.

Not to mention they were already exhausted and injured from fighting the tigers that were summoned by Zhu Ziyan, so their defensive barriers were compromised, and their stamina was depleted.

And most importantly, Shadow Hall cultivated dark and evil attribute cultivation techniques, drawing power from shadows, death, and corruption.

This made them severely weakened under an ultimate Yang attribute attack like the Heavenly Flames as the pure, burning, celestial heat of the four combined fires acted as a natural antithesis to their very existence, amplifying the damage by several folds which erased them from reality.

Huo Yue turned towards Ziyan, her expression hidden behind the shimmering heat distortion of her own body. ”Stay here.”

Ziyan nodded dumbly, still trying to process the fact that an entire squad of Nascent Soul killers had been erased in a single heartbeat.

Huo Yue turned towards the sky, where the massive Rainbow Scaled Divine Serpent was fighting dozens of Spirit Avatars, with their clash even causing visible tears in space.

It turned the sky as if it was a chaotic tapestry of dark phantoms and flashing rainbow light as Medusa’s gargantuan form was wrestling with the towering, hundred-meter-tall spirit manifestations, each collision producing thunderclaps that shook the infinite forest.

Without hesitation, Huo Yue manifested a pair of majestic crimson flame wings from her shoulder blades and flew towards them, launching herself into the air like a rising phoenix.

At the same time, she took out several pills to recover her qi from her storage ring, popping them into her mouth and swallowing them instantly, as that last attack almost emptied her reserves.

The compression of four Heavenly Flames was an immense burden on a Golden Core Dantian, and she needed every drop of energy for what was coming next.

In the sky, Medusa was struggling to keep up with the onslaught, her scales bleeding and cracking under the coordinated strikes of the remaining Spirit Ascension experts and the peak Nirvana Rebirth realm leader.

The giant shadow deity wielded its dark blades with lethal precision, carving deep wounds into the serpent’s iridescent armor.

At that moment, Huo Yue landed on her head.

Medusa was startled by the sudden presence, her massive body tensing, but feeling that familiar warmth radiating from the newcomer, she relaxed her coiled muscles. ”Huo Yue, you’ve broken through?”

”Hm.” Huo Yue nodded, her eyes narrowing as she frowned at the attacking Shadow Hall experts who were circling them like vultures.

”Wait...” Medusa opened her mouth and a rainbow-colored beam of light fired out.

The concentrated beam of this rainbow colored energy sliced across the heavens, forcing the Shadow Hall experts to immediately scatter and flee to dodge the lethal attack.

Soon, she felt her throat dry up, the immense drainage of her true form taking its toll, so she stopped the attack, her massive chest heaving as she breathed heavily.

”Medusa, lend me your Qi. Let’s end them in one go,” said Huo Yue, her voice steady despite the chaos surrounding them.

Medusa didn’t ask any questions, after all, having been traveling with her for so long, she trusted Huo Yue with her life.

Soon, her gargantuan, fifty-kilometer-long body glowed with a soft, fading light and shrank rapidly, returning to her human form to conserve what little energy she had left.

Her purple hair was a mess, sticking to her damp forehead, and her orange eyes seemed dull from exhaustion, and even her elegant dress had numerous tears, and she was bleeding all over from the shallow cuts inflicted by the dark blades of the Spirit Avatars.

”Here.” She extended her trembling hands forward.

Huo Yue clasped her hand firmly, acting as a conductor for the raw power.

Medusa closed her eyes, forcing the remaining reserves of her Nirvana Rebirth spiritual energy through her meridians and transferring her qi directly into Huo Yue’s body.

The influx of high-level energy caused Huo Yue’s veins to glow with a brilliant, golden-red hue, her Golden Core spinning at a velocity that threatened to tear her Dantian apart.

At that moment, the Shadow Hall experts, seeing the giant serpent vanish and realizing the two women were stationary, gathered again in a tight formation and rushed towards them, determined to crush them before they could recover.

Huo Yue simply gathered her four Heavenly Flames to the tip of her finger and formed a four-colored lotus like before.

But this time, fueled by the vast, high-tier qi of a Nirvana Rebirth expert, the lotus grew, its petals expanding and vibrating with a power that shook the fabric of the Central Region itself.

Then...

She fired.

It was as if the world was engulfed by the sun.

The resulting explosion didn’t just clear the battlefield; it turned the sky into an endless sea of white and blue fire, erasing the darkness of the Shadow Hall from the Veilwood Forest once and for all.

Not a single one of them remained, even their souls which could’ve escaped and allowed them to leave by inserting itself to another body, was burned from existence.

Seeing that, Huo Yue exhaled, her flame wings flickered out and she stumbled and almost fell to the ground.

Thankfully, Medusa managed to catch her, and used her spiritual sense to check her body, ”You fool. Your spirit circuits were burned, and even your blood are boiling, cooking your insides. It will take some time for you to heal.”

Huo Yue nodded, ”I know. Don’t worry, I have pills to help me heal quickly.”

As she said that, she took out several pills from her storage rings and popped them into her mouth.

”Let’s go down.”

Medusa nodded and carried her to the ground where Zhu Ziyan was resting.

There, she let Huo Yue rest her back on a fragment of the cave wall, letting the pill do its work.

Medusa stared at the two who were severely injured and sighed.

”We should lie low for now. The Shadow Halls have already intensified their search for us, we are lucky this time.”

But Huo Yue shook her head, ”Not now. Let’s go back to the Eastern Region first.”

”Why?” Medusa frowned, even Ziyan looked confused.

”I heard from wandering mercenaries that the Eastern Region has been conquered by some barbarians from the Vast Wilderness, I’m worried about my parents.” Said Hui Yue.

”What!?” Medusa’s eyes widened.

”Conquered?” Ziyan couldn’t believe it. How could an entire region be conquered? Didn’t the Imperial Family do anything to stop them?

Huo Yue nodded, ”I need to see them.”

”Very well.” Medusa immediately nodded, ”I’m worried about my tribe too.”

Zhu Ziyan frowned, ”Yeah. Although I don’t get along with my clan, I don’t want them to die too.”

Huo Yue leaned back, ”Alright. Once we’re healed, let’s go back.”

With that, their next destination has been set.

The Eastern Region.