Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

”Shen... Hao... Ran!”

Hei Xuan gritted his teeth, his voice a guttural, agonizing hiss that ripped from the deepest recesses of his throat.

The raw, cataclysmic force magnifying through Shen Haoran’s single hand was simply too overwhelming, too logically defying for his physical vessel to withstand.

Despite the frantic, burning ignition of his Qi, his bones let out a terrifying, localized screech, his boots slid backward, and with a heavy, humiliating thud, his knees violently crashed directly into the shattered stone floor, kneeling submissively before the golden-haired youth.

Haoran smirked, ”Yes. Just like this. You were forced to kneel like this before, yes? No, it’s even more pitiful. I directly wiped the floor with your face.”

Just then...

”Let go of the Young Master right now, you arrogant bastard!”

The six elite Hei Clan main lineage members who had been standing as a protective formation behind him instantly lost their calculated composure.

Seeing their glorious heir forcefully pinned to the ground like a common slave, their eyes turned bloodshot with pure, unadulterated fury.

They violently drew their dark blades, their figures blurring as they immediately rushed forward in a synchronous, murderous line to tear Haoran’s arm from his shoulder.

But before their weapons could even clear their scabbards, a solid, catastrophic wall of absolute elemental fire and crushing physical aura violently materialized directly in their path, intercepting them with flawless precision.

Huo Yue’s knuckles erupted into a blinding storm of her flames, the intense heat instantly warping the air molecules, while the top five of the Ten Crowns shifted their positions with fluid, military fluidity.

”A pathetic bunch of low-grade weaklings actually harbor the delusional, brainless dream to skip directly to the final boss?!” Shen Ji grinned fiercely, his knuckles popping with a sound like thunderclaps as his fighting spirit flared to its absolute maximum output.

He stepped squarely into their field of vision, his broad shoulders blocking the path. ”Who on earth do you think you are!?”

Shen Haoran didn’t even bother to glance back at the chaotic clash occurring behind his frame.

His piercing golden eyes remained perfectly, clinically locked onto the trembling, angry and humiliated face of the kneeling Hei Xuan beneath his grip.

”The next time you gather your courage, ensure you do not use it to come and brainlessly provoke me in any way, Hei Xuan,” Haoran whispered smoothly, his deep voice carrying a chilling, absolute weight that echoed through the silent lecture hall. ”It is an incredibly difficult task to carefully step on an insignificant ant, without accidentally crushing it to death.”

With that final, highly patronizing declaration, Haoran casually, effortlessly released his iron grip, tossing the heir’s shoulder aside as if he were discarding a piece of worthless cloth.

Without a single second of backward hesitation, he immediately turned his back on the broken youth and walked with slow, majestic, and immensely authoritative strides straight toward the unobstructed rows of seats situated at the absolute front of the room.

”Young Master!”

The six Hei Clan members, realizing the sheer power disparity between them and of the Crowns blocking their path, wisely abandoned their forward attack.

They broke through the perimeter, ignoring the mocking glints in the Crown’s eyes, and hurriedly rushed forward to assist Hei Xuan, carefully lifting his trembling, bruised body off the cold stones and checking his fractured meridians.

Huo Yue just cast a brief, deeply cold look over her shoulder at their pathetic huddling, before she hurried her steps to catch up to Haoran’s side, the rest of the top five Crowns naturally trailing behind them like an imperial escort.

Gu Xunyi, completely unbothered by the sudden shift in the room’s atmosphere, offered a brief, casual wave of her hand to a few silent, wide-eyed Gu Clan members who were all at the side, watching the show, before she gracefully slided into the seat directly to the left of Haoran, her purple braids swaying over her shoulder.

At that exact second, as the supreme young master of the Shen Clan officially marked his territory at the front of the hall, the remaining students in the room—including the arrogant seniors and the other heirs and descendants of Immortal Lineages—instantly quieted down.

The ambient murmurs vanished entirely, replaced by a suffocating, absolute silence as they realized who truly ruled Grade A.

*

*

*

Meanwhile, far away from the quiet tension of the Nascent Class lecture hall, the pristine figure of Ye Hongyan walked slowly through the grand, marble-lined corridors of the upper administrative towers.

Her hands were folded neatly beneath her elegant sashes, her sharp purple eyes hidden behind her silver-rimmed glasses, completely lost in a deep, agonizing vortex of internal thoughts.

Elder Mu...

The name of her very first, deeply buried love echoed through her heart like a melancholic melody.

Normally, a Rank 9 Master Teacher and peak Earthly Saint powerhouse like him was originally preordained to act as a supreme, highly revered director guiding the monstrous prodigies of the elite Nirvana Class this semester.

However, due to his highly public, completely irrational, and utterly shameless actions against Shen Haoran in the Academy City street a week prior, his entire career had been brutally demolished by the governing council.

He had been aggressively, forcefully demoted to teach at Nascent Class.

Not only that, but to ensure he couldn’t leverage his strength to exact a petty, underground revenge against the youth, his vast Earthly Saint cultivation level had been tightly, conceptually sealed to only the baseline First Stage of the Profound Realm through the academy’s ancestral wrist seals.

To add to the humiliation, a massive portion of his ancient administrative authorities, resource access, and teacher points had been permanently and ruthlessly revoked.

In all objective honesty, his final administrative punishment was supposed to be infinitely more severe than a simple demotion; the higher court elders had been actively preparing to strip him of his titles entirely and exile his body to the desolate boundary mines for a century to appease the wrath of the Shen Clan.

It was only because Ye Hongyan herself had secretly and desperately intervened behind the scenes—utilizing her massive political capital as the youngest Sage to beg for his life—that his core essence had been spared.

And because of that heavy, under-the-table political intervention, the Venerable Sky Cloud had seized the golden opportunity to corner them.

He had ruthlessly forced both of them to teach at the Nascent Class level, explicitly, strictly ordering them to take extra specialized care of Shen Haoran’s academic path to properly compensate the primordial clan for the administrative slight.

Ye Hongyan had almost completely lost her absolute composure and sanity when the decree was finalized.

She, a venerable, peerless 6th Stage Heavenly Saint Realm absolute expert, one of the ten highly revered, god-like Sages who dictated the very destiny of the Academy City Grand Library, was actually being commanded to babysit a bunch of green, unpolished kids?

Not to mention being explicitly ordered to give a specific, golden-haired brat a specialized, coddled treatment to smooth over a political blunder?

However, despite her immense pride, she didn’t dare to utter a single word of

argument or defiance to the Venerable.

She knew the brutal mechanics of the world. This absolute sacrifice, this degradation of her high-born status... it was all willingly executed for the sake of her silent, foolish love!

She would carry the world if it meant keeping him within her line of sight.

Besides, now, both he and Elder Mu will be working together.

A coworker romance... isn’t that also...very romantic?

Almost as romantic as a student and teacher roma— No! What am I thinking?!

She shook her head, trying to rid her mind of those naughty thoughts that she definitely didn’t learn from books.

Just then, her boots instantly ground to a halt right in front of the grand entrance of the Nascent Class, Grade A.

She smoothed down her white and pink dress, took a sharp breath to lock her heavenly emotions behind a mask of absolute professionalism, and pushed the heavy double doors open.

The exact second she stepped through the threshold, her sharp perception immediately noticed that the entire colosseum-style lecture hall was wrapped in an unusually thick, suffocatingly tense silence.

The desks were fractured, the floor tiles were cracked, and several students were currently applying healing salves to their bruised faces in the back rows.

But she didn’t even bother to waste a single watt of her mental energy thinking about the petty, juvenile violence.

She had bigger fish to fry.

As she gracefully walked toward the central podium, her purple eyes naturally swept over the front row, instantly spotting the immaculate, golden-haired figure of Shen Haoran sitting calmly with his fingers intertwined, looking like an emperor waiting for a court report.

She let out a soft, near-audible sigh within her heart, stepping up to the wooden podium and placing her administrative scrolls down with a crisp click.

She looked out at the sea of anxious faces and spoke, her voice carrying a perfectly modulated, deep authority.

”Greetings, students of the intermediate tier. My name is Ye Hongyan, a peak Profound Saint Realm expert, and I shall be officially serving as your primary homeroom teacher for the duration of this semester.”

She lied cleanly, without a single flicker of hesitation in her eyes.

After all, she knew with absolute certainty that an absolute, catastrophic commotion would violently occur across the entire academy continent if these students ever discovered that one of the supreme, untouchable Ten Sages was actually sitting in front of a wooden chalkboard teaching them basic meridian theory.

Thankfully, the deception was perfectly sustainable; whenever she walked out into the public sectors as one of the elite Ten Sages, she would always exclusively go by her mythic title of Fairy Ye, and her face would always be completely hidden behind a dense, high-grade spiritual veil that blocked even a Supreme’s perceptions.

To these kids, she was just an exceptionally beautiful, high-ranking professor from the inner courts.

She cleared her throat, her expression turning sharp as she launched into an intensely pressurized explanation of the institution’s core operational mechanics to ignite their competitive drives.

”Do not ever dare to harbor the childish, soft-hearted delusion that this academy is a peaceful sanctuary for study,” Ye Hongyan announced coldly, her voice echoing like a battle drum. ”This dimension is a meat grinder. Within these walls, Dao Points dictate the absolute fabric of your reality. Points can quite literally buy absolutely everything your soul desires—be it a Rank 8 Divine Pill to repair your broken talent, a private session inside the ancestral cultivation chambers, or the literal life and compliance of a fellow student. If you lack points, you are nothing more than modern slaves waiting to be cleared out by the system.”

She leaned forward against the podium, her purple eyes flashing with a sudden, competitive light as she scrolled through the operational calendar.

”To ensure your martial instincts remain sharp, the academy utilizes four grand operational pillars of conflict. First, once every single year, the administration office will launch the grand Faction Wars. This is a highly calculated, brutal simulation designed to perfectly mimic the real world’s cutthroat sect wars over a newly discovered ancestral treasure. Your classes and factions will be deployed into closed war zones, and you will be legally permitted to use any underhanded method, poison, or violence to plunder each other’s resources.”

The disciples in the rows gripped their desks, their breathing shallow as they listened to the savage rules.

”Second,” Ye Hongyan continued smoothly, her fingers tapping against the scroll, ”every five years, the academy’s formation masters will open a cross-dimensional rifts. The entire student body will be formally sent down into a designated Lower Realm, and you will be given the absolute, unmonitored administrative freedom to plunder, loot, and conquer that primitive territory to your heart’s absolute content, shipping the world’s wealth back to increase your clan’s luck.”

Huo Yue’s eyes instantly lit up with a brilliant, highly avaricious glint at the prospect of unrestricted world-plundering, while the Crowns smiled darkly.

”And finally,” the professor concluded, her voice dropping to a low, intensely serious tone, ”every ten years, the ultimate test of survival will commence. The grand Imperial Academy Competition. The absolute finest, most terrifyingly monstrous geniuses of our institution will be gathered together to wage an all-out, bloody war against the elite prodigies representing the other major Academies across the territory of the Empire. It is an arena where legends are carved in bone, and the losers are permanently forgotten by history.”