Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

Tai Yuhao.

The name had once carried a magnificent, unyielding weight across the vast borders of the Eastern Region.

He was a former prince of a prosperous, high-tier border kingdom, a recognized, peerless martial genius who moved with an effortless aristocratic pride, and a premier core member of the legendary Ogre Seven.

The Ogre Seven were universally known by the masses as the seven most absurdly talented, record-shattering students of the prestigious Ogre Academy—a legendary group of youth who had single-handedly, completely dominated the martial landscape of the entire Eastern region with their raw affinities and terrifying structural talent.

They were supposed to be the future lords of the sky, the ones who would inherit the ancestral thrones and write the history of their era.

But everything changed Spirit Hall attacked.

At that monumental day, the entire Eastern Region was instantly, completely plunged into an abyss of absolute chaos, blood, and burning ash.

Driven by an intense, roaring surge of patriotic pride, dynastic loyalty, and generational arrogance, Tai Yuhao had stubbornly, fiercely refused to flee the domain.

He made the conscious, fateful choice to remain firmly behind the fortified walls of the Ogre Academy, standing alongside his fellow martial brothers to aggressively resist the marching armies of the Spirit Hall.

Unfortunately for him, his very own fiancée, Zhu Ziyan, did not share his stubborn, suicidal devotion to a failing kingdom.

The moment the outer scouts reported the approach of the vanguard, she had actually, pathetically packed her bags and ran away into the night to save her own skin!

For days, Tai Yuhao did nothing but violently curse her name into the open wind, publicly calling her a craven coward, a traitor to the region, and a worthless woman who had abandoned her sacred marital contracts just to flee from a temporary storm.

However, the harsh reality of the universe did not care about his pride.

When the true, unyielding main army of the Spirit Hall finally marched upon the gates of the academy, they did not engage in a clean diplomatic negotiation, but they instead single-handedly, ruthlessly slaughtered their way into the inner courtyards.

They tore through the protection arrays like wet paper, turning the sacred halls of learning into a literal river of bleeding flesh and broken bones.

It was only during that precise, terrifying moment of absolute destruction, as he watched his teachers and dean get casually decapitated by a high-tier commander, that Tai Yuhao’s arrogance was completely, thoroughly vaporized.

At that moment, a massive, choking wave of bitter regret flooded his chest; he regretted with every single fiber of his being that he hadn’t swallowed his fragile prince’s pride and gone along with Zhu Ziyan to escape academy while the Spirit Hall was still marching.

In the end, faced with the naked, freezing edge of an executioner’s blade pressing against his throat, the proud prince completely swallowed his dignity.

He fell violently to his knees in the dirt, used his own hands to forcefully, brutally cripple his very own cultivation pathways to prove he was no longer a threat, and pathetically wept as he begged the commanders for a single crumb of his life.

Thankfully for him, the invading commanders looked down upon his broken, blood-soaked form with an absolute, condescending pity and chose to spare him, treating him like a common worm beneath their boots.

But for the next few grueling years following that night of ash, Tai Yuhao lived a miserable, torturous existence that was far worse than common human shit.

At the very least, ordinary people actively look down and avoid stepping on shit to keep their boots clean.

But a fallen, crippled beggar prince in a conquered territory? The entire world took turns grinding their heels directly into his face.

That was the absolute, horrific price of his physical survival.

Although he had successfully managed to keep his breath inside his lungs, he wasn’t truly living; he was merely rotting in the open air.

He didn’t even possess the baseline courage required to crawl back to his own home kingdom to seek aid from the royal palace, because he knew with an absolute, calculated certainty that the very moment he crossed the border line, he would be instantly, silently assassinated by his ruthlessly ambitious older brother, who had already used the chaos of the war to permanently secure the throne for his own lineage.

So, stripped of his titles, his strength, and his future, Tai Yuhao just lived out his days in the absolute darkest slums of a peripheral border town.

He spent his mornings begging the lowliest merchant commoners for stale bread scraps, and spent his nights violently, desperately fighting other dirty mortals in the alleys for access to discarded, rotting food thrown carelessly into the trash bins.

He honestly thought that this pathetic, stomach churning existence would be his absolute reality until the very day his body finally gave out and he died in a ditch.

But who under the absolute laws of creation could have ever possibly thought that when he closed his eyes and fell asleep on his filthy straw mat last night... he would suddenly, miraculously wake up the next morning residing inside an entirely different man’s physical body!

He stood completely frozen in place, staring blankly at his new reflection within a massive, gold-trimmed obsidian mirror that adorned the luxurious bedroom walls.

The facial structure looking back at him was roughly one-third identical to his original, biological face, but it was vastly more refined, noble, and breathtakingly flawless.

The body possessed exceptionally long, flowing blond hair that cascaded past his shoulders like liquid gold, a pair of piercing, deep blue eyes that seemed to naturally command the space around them, and a remarkably tall, powerful, and heavily muscular physique that exuded a mountain-shaking kinetic density.

Not to mention the absolute most jaw-dropping variable of all: the moment his consciousness had integrated with this new body, he realized that the original owner of this body actually possessed the fully functional, unblemished cultivation base of a 9th Stage Nascent Soul Realm expert!

That was a terrifying, god-tier level of martial strength that the old Tai Yuhao could have only ever barely dreamed of achieving during his absolute peak years as a prince in the Ogre Seven!

Unfortunately for him, he did not inherit a single shred of the original person’s memories, experiences, or knowledge files!

Because of that, he was deeply, fundamentally afraid and paranoid.

An icy, paralyzing fear gripped his newly acquired heart; he was terrified that if he accidentally acted even a single fraction differently from the original host’s established behavioral patterns, or if the high-tier elders of the household found out that he was nothing more than an imposter soul occupying the shell, he would be instantly, violently killed on the spot.

And within the world of cultivation society, being killed wasn’t even remotely the worst possible outcome he had to fear, in fact, in some ways, death was even a release.

But what if they chose to use forbidden soul techniques to systematically and brutally torture his spirit for eternity inside a soul-refining cauldron to punish him for daring to take over the body of their young master?

Thankfully, through a week of absolute, silent vigilance, pretending to suffer from a sudden case of temporary internal qi-derangement to remain bedridden, and meticulously listening in on the private chatter of the low-level estate servants cleaning his chambers, he did finally manage to learn a few critical baseline facts regarding his new identity.

This magnificent, gold-clad body belonged to a young man named Yun Chi, the undisputed prime young master of the grand Yun Clan.

They are a highly prominent, immensely wealthy, and terrifyingly influential noble family that dominated the upper political sectors of the Central Region.

Right now, in terms of academic standing, Yun Chi was registered as an elite, high-tier senior student currently studying inside the prestigious boundaries of the Imperial Academy.

Tai Yuhao had been so thoroughly shocked when his mind first fully processed the sheer scale of this information that he had nearly lost control of his core qi.

But right after that initial wave of shock smoothly settled within his chest, an intense, intoxicating surge of pure, unbridled elation violently flooded his spirit!

His social status, his structural backing, and his raw martial output and talent were now positioned so incredibly, untouchably high up on the global ladder that he could effortlessly, casually look down upon the entire geography of the Eastern Region as if it were nothing more than a collection of backward peasant villages!

Which in the eyes of Central Region, they really are just that.

The sudden, intoxicating taste of absolute power was so overwhelming that he almost couldn’t resist the immediate psychological urge to summon his clan’s elders, command the patriarch to send a fleet of Spirit Ascension Experts and Nirvana Rebirth experts, and launch a total war of absolute revenge against the Spirit Hall and every single rogue cultivator who had ever dared to offend or trample his name in the dirt!

It was only because of his lingering, primal fear of being discovered as an outer soul that he forcefully prevented himself from executing the command.

After all, if he truly stepped forward and demanded the mobilization of an ancestral fleet, what in the world would he possibly say if the clan patriarch or the grand elders curiously asked why their elite young master suddenly desired to waste the family’s premium resources to launch an expert vanguard into a barren, peripheral territory like the Eastern Region?

It would instantly raise a hundred fatal red flags.

Not to mention that the other thing preventing him from that burning desire for vengeance, was his mind being so thoroughly and densely filled with a hundred structural worries and strategic complications that he ultimately decided to temporarily forget about his revenge for the time being.

What was he worried about?

Well, he was absolutely sure that his old soul had not actually experienced a clinical death, and based on the pristine condition of his new body, he was equally sure that the original owner of this body, Yun Chi, had also not suffered a physical demise.

So why had his spirit taken over this specific body?

He racked his brain for hours until his thoughts finally narrowed into a single, terrifyingly logical possibility.

He and Yun Chi had somehow, through a freak cosmic anomaly or a shifting of the world’s destiny or some other things, completely switched bodies.

He was sure that right now, at this exact second, the true, original young master of the supreme Yun Clan was likely waking up inside the freezing, tattered rags of his old, crippled body, lying face-down in the muddy dirt of that pathetic, disease-ridden border slum.

Tai Yuhao’s deep blue eyes slowly narrowed into a dangerously sharp, cold line, his gaze filling with a sudden, absolute wave of pure, murderous killing intent as he stared into the mirror.

No. If that was really the case and the two of them switched bodies, then he must find a way to track down his old body and ruthlessly kill the man before he can ever find a way to contact the Central Region and expose the absolute truth of the swap to the world.

He had finally, miraculously been granted a second, heaven-defying chance at life and glory by the universe.

There was absolutely, under no circumstances, a single way in hell he would ever be willing to let go of this jade throne or return to the alleyways.

”Yun Chi...” Tai Yuhao whispered through his teeth, a dark, cold smirk stretching across his blond features as he adjusted his silk sleeves. ”Just be a perfectly good, silent little cripple... and stay permanently dead in the mud of those slums.”