Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

Cough! Cough!

Huo Yue coughed violently, her small hands frantically fanning away the billowing, superheated plumes of dark smoke and sulfurous dust that had gathered over the scorched earth.

The air was thick with the suffocating stench of melted iron and ionized plasma.

And slowly, as the smoke and dust from the explosion finally receded, it revealed a planetary sized, glassed crater where the majestic obsidian metropolis of the Shadow Hall had stood only moments prior.

The bedrock itself had been liquefied into a boiling sea of obsidian slag, bubbling with lazy, iridescent heat.

But Huo Yue landed on that scorching, melting land as if it didn’t affect her, and honestly? It really didn’t.

She just feel like her feet was getting a hot bath.

Behind her, Medusa shifted fluidly out of her gargantuan serpentine form and was now in her human guise.

She stood tall, casually patting the microscopic flecks of grey ash from her elegant purple dress before she crossed her arms across her chest, her slitted orange eyes scanning the apocalyptic wasteland with a mix of clinical detachment and mild disappointment.

”Nothing remained, huh,” Medusa muttered, her voice echoing hollowly in the vast, hollow vacuum left by the blast. ”A clean erasure. Your flames have truly evolved past the natural constraints of the mortal elements.”

”Yep. Honestly, even I can’t believe that attack was that strong,” said Huo Yue, wiping a streak of black soot from her cheek as a fierce, proud smile tugged at the corner of her lips. ”It’s like a literal supernova exploded right in the center of their geographic coordinate.”

But, at that exact moment of apparent triumph, a cold, mocking laughter suddenly echoed through the dead silence of the crater.

It didn’t come from any physical direction; rather, it vibrated straight out of the empty air itself, layered with a sickening, spatial friction.

”Hahaha! Splendid! A spectacular show of fireworks, little girl! But do you truly, honestly think you can kill the apex masters of the Central Region with a mere parlor trick of compressed heat?!”

At that instant, the space directly above the boiling magma began to warp and twist like a melted mirror.

Dozens of silhouettes emerged from the invisible ripples, stepping out of the dimensional folds completely uninjured.

Their robes were immaculate, their hair undisturbed, and their weapons unsheathed.

Hei Xi stood at the very front of the hovering vanguard, a manic, predatory grin stretching across his pale face.

He looked down at Huo Yue with the absolute, crushing disdain of a higher being looking at a crawling insect.

”You modern juniors underestimate the divine weight of a Saint far too much,” Hei Xi sneered, his hands resting behind his back as his First Stage Heavenly Saint aura began to systematically compress the surrounding atmosphere. ”You should know what fundamentally separates a Saint from a mere Nirvana Rebirth practitioner, right? It is not just the volume of their spiritual qi, nor is it the quality of their physical techniques. It is their absolute, innate power to manipulate space itself! A true Saint exists on a completely different spatial dimension than ordinary mortals! Unless your attack can effectively affect, tear, or rewrite space itself, then you will never be able to harm us—no matter how planet-shattering or powerful your fire is! To us, your little sun was nothing more than an image playing on a screen across a locked door!”

Huo Yue’s brow furrowed into a sharp line.

Looking at their untouched armor, her mind involuntarily flashed back to the battle in the Eastern Region—to that Saint-rank Giant Chief, Korgar, whom Shen Haoran had humiliated, dominated, and defeated so thoroughly that he made the entire concept of a Saint look like a joke.

Because Haoran had handled it so casually, she had subconsciously assumed that Saints could still be crushed by raw, overwhelming elemental force.

But it seems she was wrong, or maybe Haoran was just built different?

Hei Xi smirked, reading the sudden shift in her expression. ”I heard from our intelligence network that you traveled to the backwaters of the Eastern Region and witnessed the fall of a Saint-rank Giant, right? Are you truly comparing us, a true, complete, and legacy-backed Saint of the Nine Immortal Clans’ shadow faction, to that incomplete, blood-starved barbarian chief who forced his ascension through a flawed ritual?! Don’t make me laugh! Those primitives have an incomplete cultivation system! Aside from their superior physical strength and raw mass, they are absolutely nothing!”

Huo Yue’s grip on her dark crimson ruler tightened.

’He’s right,’ she realized bitterly.

Comparing the wild, unrefined giants of the outer wastes to the highly sophisticated, space-weaving experts of the Central Region’s elite under-world was a catastrophic tactical miscalculation.

The giants didn’t understand spatial folds, they just punched hard, and these men, however, were true elites backed by thousands of years of complete cultivation legacy.

Now, Hei Xi took a heavy step forward, his shadow expanding over the melted ground below his feet. ”Obediently hand over the Imperial Flame Transformation Technique right now! And your two lovely friends behind you! They will serve as excellent compensation for the utter ruin of our regional headquarters! Do this, and we can let you leave this valley with your life intact, if only to give a sliver of face to the Shen Clan’s young master.”

However, as those arrogant words left his lips, Hei Xi suddenly paused and his eyes scanned the small group below, and a look of genuine confusion crossed his features.

He blinked, his divine sense frantically darting around the glassed perimeter.

”Speaking of... where exactly is that annoying cat-woman who was traveling with you? Did she evaporate in your own foolish explosion?”

*ROAR!*

At that precise microsecond, the majestic, thunderous roar of a winged white tiger violently ripped through the upper atmosphere.

The great beast plummeted down from the higher clouds like a white meteor, its massive wings cutting through the dark smoke before landing with a heavy, earth-shaking thud right beside Huo Yue and Medusa.

Sitting securely upon its broad back was Zhu Ziyan.

Her animalistic eyes were burning with a sharp, triumphant light as she immediately jumped down onto the glassed rock.

She didn’t waste a single look on the hovering Saint; instead, she sprinted straight to Huo Yue’s side and opened her pale palm.

Hovering right above her skin was a small, translucent jade orb pulsing with a frail, flickering blue light.

”Sister Yue! I did it!” Ziyan panted, her voice trembling with an equal mix of relief and horror. ”While you drew their main forces to the sky with the sun, I used my tiger’s special camouflage skill to infiltrate deep within their palace and managed to locate and retrieve Mistress Liu’s soul-container. But she’s... she’s in terrible shape...”

Huo Yue’s gaze locked onto the floating orb. Inside the fragile jade shell, the wispy, beautiful soul of Liu Ruyan was curled up into a tight, shivering ball.

Her spiritual form was translucent to the point of near-invisibility, her face twisted in a lingering expression of immense agony.

The edges of her soul-avatar were actively fraying, a direct, horrific consequence of the excessive, non-stop soul torture she had endured at the hands of the Shadow Hall’s inquisitors.

”Y-You!” Hei Xi’s face completely contorted with a sudden, violent rage as he realized he had been thoroughly tricked.

His spatial defense had hidden his body, but it had left the subterranean vaults exposed to a stealth extraction.

”How did you find the hidden mechanism to enter the deep abyss?! You miserable thieves!”

But no one answered him, treating him as air.

Seeing her master’s broken, fading state, a violent, suffocating wave of fury erupted from Huo Yue’s core.

Her crimson hair flared upward like a literal corona of fire, her teeth grinding together so hard they threatened to shatter.

But amidst the raging anger, a deep, profound sense of relief washed over her heart.

She hadn’t arrived too late, her master was still alive, and her soul was now finally in her hands.

Huo Yue slowly turned her head back towards Hei Xi and the dozens of hovering Shadow Hall elders.

The rage in her eyes crystallized into a cold, terrifyingly confident smirk.

”Well, old dog,” Huo Yue spoke, her voice dropping into a low, melodic purr that carried the unmistakable weight of a predator who had just closed the trap. ”It seems like you no longer have a single chip left to bargain with me. The hostage is gone.”

Hei Xi glared down at her, his saint-qi erupting in a violent, purple storm that caused the surrounding magma to violently erupt. ”We still have the ultimate chip, brat! And it is your own miserable life! Do you truly think you can leave this valley alive just because you stole a dying soul?!”

His eyes flashed with a psychotic, absolute malice as he looked at his elders. ”Forget the Shen Clan! As long as we activate the Void Erasure Array and completely erase every single trace of their vitalities, their karma, and their blood-qi from this valley, who in the outer world would ever know who killed them?! The universe will just think they died to the residual fires of the Wilderness!”

The elders looked at each other, feeling uncertain.

However, thinking that what Hei Xi said made sense, they nodded and prepared to kill them.

”Besides,” Hei Xi sneered, his voice full of a desperate, historical arrogance, ”would the supreme Shen Clan truly go to total, apocalyptic war with our Hei Clan for the sake of a mere eastern woman who doesn’t even carry a single drop of their ancestral blood?! I, Hei Xi, doesn’t believe that for a single second! Kill them! Leave nothing but ash!”

But at that exact moment, Huo Yue didn’t draw her heavy ruler, but instead, with a slow, deliberate motion, she reached into the deepest, most secure compartment of her spatial ring and pulled out a small, completely ordinary-looking iron knife.

The metal was dull, completely unadorned, and looked like a common kitchen tool.

Yet, the moment her fingers wrapped around the hilt she directly poured every ounce of her remaining qi into the iron blade, activating the hidden, slumbering command that Shen Haoran had sealed within.

*Clang.*

At that absolute instant, the mortal world didn’t just lose its color—it completely broke.

The entire fabric of reality within the Dark Valley went dead silent.

The bubbling magma froze mid-erupt, the floating ash suspended in the air like dust caught in ice, and the very flow of time slowed down to a stagnant, agonizing crawl.

It was as if a supreme, primordial eye had just opened from the highest heavens, looking down at the valley with a cold, absolute mandate of erasure.

Even the First Stage Heavenly Saint, Hei Xi, froze mid-air, his hands locked in a half-formed spatial seal.

His eyes widened into circles of pure, unadulterated horror as he stared at the ordinary knife in her hand.

His soul was screaming, his saint-foundation cracking from the sheer conceptual weight radiating from the dull iron.

”W-What... what the hell is that... that presence...” Hei Xi stammered through his locked jaw, his voice sounding thin and fragile against the silence.

”Nothing a dead man would ever need to know,” Huo Yue chuckled softly, her voice the only thing moving normally within the frozen space.

She turned her body, fluidly jumping onto the back of the winged white tiger alongside Ziyan and Medusa, the beast’s wings already coiling for a spatial leap.

She looked back at the paralyzed Saint, her smirk widening into a beautiful, cruel line. ”After all, you don’t have a man as outstanding as mine standing behind your back.”

She raised the dull iron knife high above her head, the blade suddenly radiating a thin, thread-like line of absolute, light-absorbing blackness.

”Farewell, oh proud Shadow Hall,” Huo Yue smiled brilliantly, her eyes reflecting the dawn of a new era. ”May you never find peace in the yellow springs.”

Huo Yue swung the knife downward in a clean, casual arc.

”NO!” Hei Xi shrieked, a sound of pure, unbridled terror that was instantly cut short.

*SHATTER.*

The moment the blade completed its trajectory, the Supreme Emperor’s sword intent sealed within the knife detonated.

It didn’t release an explosion of fire or a wave of energy; instead, a vertical fissure of absolute null-space, miles wide, opened directly across the center of the valley.

The event was apocalyptic.

The very concepts of space and time within the coordinates were violently distorted and sheared away like wet parchment.

The obsidian mountains didn’t crumble like it normally would, instead they turned into flat, two-dimensional geometric lines before completely dissolving into a grey, lifeless ash.

The dozens of Shadow Hall elders, along with the Heavenly Saint Hei Xi, didn’t even have the time to scream or activate their spatial evasion; the moment the black line passed through their coordinates, their physical flesh, their hidden dantians, their ancestral souls, and their very names written within the book of karma were cleanly, systematically erased from existence.

The chasm of the Dark Valley itself was violently squeezed by an invisible, cosmic hand, the spatial dimensions folding in on themselves until the entire geographical territory collapsed into a microscopic, gravity-locked point of absolute nothingness.

The sky above the Central Region cracked open, a massive spatial scar bleeding purple lightning as the universe scrambled to patch the void where a mountain range had stood a microsecond ago.

When the light finally snapped back into reality, the Dark Valley was completely gone.

There was no smoke, no rubble, and no bodies—just a flawless, smooth plateau of gray stone beneath a silent sky, as if the Shadow Hall had never existed in the history of the world.

And far away, leaping through the shattered spatial rifts toward the safety of the central plains, the white tiger roared, carrying the victorious Flame Empress toward her ultimate reunion.