Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

Haoran slowly walked from behind Lin Che, his footsteps were entirely silent against the ancient, dark stone tiles of the apex platform.

He moved with an unhurried, majestic grace, his dark robes fluttering gently in the stagnant void wind.

The phantom blade of pure, dark sword intent in his right hand hummed with a quiet resonance.

He stopped just a few paces behind the kneeling, broken figure of the transmigrator.

”Any last words?” asked Haoran.

His voice was calm, level, and entirely devoid of malice or hatred. To him, this was simply the final execution of a dangerous variable that did not belong in his world.

Lin Che closed his eyes, as if remembering a distant memory.

As the cold darkness crept into the edges of his failing vision and the life bled out from his pierced heart, the chaotic noise of the trial dimension began to fade away into an absolute, ringing silence.

The terrifying image of the supreme young master, the shattered fragments of his system, and the useless pile of dirt before him dissolved into nothingness.

In their place, a long-buried, suppressed life flooded back into his fading consciousness.

Before he was Lin Che, the Spirit Ascension cultivator hiding in the shadows of the Imperial Academy, he had been just a nameless, unwanted boy in a cold, grey, concrete city.

He remembered his adopted parents.

They had taken him in from the orphanage not out of love, compassion, or a desire to nurture a child, but because an extra mouth brought government subsidies, and a growing pair of hands offered free, uncomplaining labor.

From his earliest memories, his home had not been a sanctuary, but a cage filled with cold, harsh rejections and endless, cruel demands.

He was constantly neglected and abused.

While their biological children wore warm, clean clothes and sat at the dinner table laughing, he was relegated to a tiny, windowless storage room beneath the creaky wooden stairs.

He was given only the meager leftovers that were about to spoil, and any minor mistake—a dropped plate, a missed chore, or a grade that wasn’t absolute perfection—was met with harsh, stinging slaps and verbal belittling that cut deep into his fragile, young soul.

Yet, despite the relentless abuse, his young, naive heart had clung to a desperate, pathetic hope: ’If I just work harder, if I just prove my worth to them, they will finally love me. They will finally call me their son.’

Driven by that foolish, heartbreaking desire for acceptance, he gave up his education.

While his peers were preparing for college entrance exams and dreaming of bright futures, he dropped out of school at seventeen.

He threw himself into the unforgiving, grueling gears of society, taking on several separate, exhausting jobs.

He woke up at four in the morning to deliver heavy stacks of newspapers through the freezing winter snow, spent his afternoons washing greasy dishes in the back of a suffocating, overcrowded restaurant kitchen until his hands were raw and bleeding, and spent his nights hauling heavy concrete bags at construction sites until his spine screamed in agony.

He didn’t keep a single penny for himself.

Every hard-earned money was handed directly over to his adopted parents, who took the money without a single word of thanks, using it to pay for their biological children’s expensive tuitions, branded clothes, and lavish vacations.

He lived on stale bread and tap water, sleeping barely three hours a night, his young body slowly breaking down beneath the unbearable weight of a burden that was never his to bear.

And then came that rainy, fateful night.

Blinded by exhaustion after working a double shift, his body numb from cold and lack of sleep, he stepped onto a slick pedestrian crossing.

The blaring horn of a speeding, out-of-control sedan cut through the heavy rain a fraction of a second too late.

*BOOM!*

The impact was cataclysmic. His fragile body was hurled dozens of meters through the dark, wet air, crashing violently onto the hard asphalt like a broken ragdoll.

He didn’t die instantly. Instead, he was rushed to the emergency room of a sterile, underfunded public hospital.

He was left in a hospital bed, completely unable to move a single muscle below his neck, his spine shattered into countless fragments, his internal organs severely ruptured.

The pain he felt in those final, agonizing weeks was beyond human description.

Every single breath felt like inhaling a thousand red-hot, jagged needles into his crushed lungs.

Every minor twitch of his nerve endings sent a blinding, agonizing shockwave through his broken frame, as if a massive, invisible hydraulic press were slowly, continuously crushing his bones into fine dust day and night.

He lay there in the sterile white room, drowning in an endless, suffocating ocean of agony, unable to even cry out because his throat was tube-bound and torn.

And through all that torturous, agonizing hell, the most painful blow came not from his broken body, but from his heart.

His adopted parents came to the hospital room only once.

They didn’t come to hold his hand.

They didn’t come to weep or offer a single word of comfort to the boy who had given up his entire life and youth for them.

They stood at the foot of his bed, looking down at his broken, tube-covered body with cold, disgusted, and deeply annoyed eyes.

”The doctor says he’ll be a paralyzed vegetable forever if he survives,” his adopted father had said, his tone flat and entirely devoid of emotion. ”He can’t work anymore. He’s completely useless to us now.”

”We aren’t paying a single cent for these life-support machines,” his adopted mother sneered, turning her back on him without a second thought. ”Let’s go home. We have to prepare for our son’s graduation party. The compensation given by that driver is enough for us to live comfortably for years.”

They signed the release forms to abandon him, walking out of the sterile room and out of his life forever, leaving a dying, paralyzed nineteen-year-old boy completely alone in the dark, cold hospital room to rot.

As he lay there in the quiet room, listening to the slow, rhythmic *beep... beep... beep...* of the heart monitor fading into silence, hot, bitter tears had silently streamed down his bruised, motionless cheeks.

In those final, agonizing moments of his first life, as the darkness swallowed his soul, he had carved a fierce, blood-soaked oath into the very core of his being:

’If I ever get the chance to live again... if the heavens ever grant me a second life... I will live entirely for myself. I will never bow to anyone. I will never work for someone else. I will never let anyone use me, hurt me, or break me ever again.’

When he transmigrated into this vast cultivation world and bound the system to his soul, he had believed with all his heart that the heavens had finally answered his bitter, dying prayer.

He had chosen the life of a quiet, lazy janitor, hiding his power, avoiding all drama, and seeking only a peaceful, unbothered existence where he answered to no one.

Yet... in the end... despite all his caution, despite his secret cultivation, and despite his cheat... the cold, unyielding reality of the universe had still tracked him down, crushing his simple, quiet dream into dust.

The dark flashback faded away, dissolving back into the cold, silent reality of the subterranean trial platform.

Lin Che’s chest heaved with one final, weak breath, a single, clear tear escaped his left eye, cutting a clean track through the dried blood and red dust on his pale cheek before dripping onto the small pile of dirt before him.

Then, slowly, he opened his eyes, smiling painfully at the cold stone floor beneath him.

His eyes held no more fear, no more rage, and no more desperate struggle.

There was only a profound, heartbreaking weariness—the look of a tired soul who had fought so hard in two different worlds, only to realize he was never meant to win.

”Please make it painless...” Lin Che whispered, his raspy voice trembling slightly as he looked back toward the dark void. ”I... I don’t like pain.”

He had suffered far too much pain in his previous life, and he didn’t want his end in this world to hurt like that again.

”Understood.”

Haoran nodded, his expression remaining completely serious and solemn.

He raised his sword intent blade high into the air, channeling a thread of absolute, frictionless sharpness into the edge.

*SWISH—!*

The dark, luminous blade descended in a single, flawless arc, cutting off his head cleanly.

The strike was so impossibly fast and precise that it severed the spinal column and spirit before a single pain receptor could fire.

Lin Che’s head detached smoothly from his shoulders, tumbling lightly onto the ancient stone platform, his eyes closing peacefully as his life force vanished entirely into the air.

His headless body slouched forward, coming to a quiet, undisturbed rest beside the pile of dirt.

Haoran lowered his hand, the dark blade of pure sword intent dissolving into tiny, fading motes of light.

He stood silently on the high platform above the abyss, looking down at the quiet corpse of the transmigrator for a long moment, before turning his back to face the dark horizon, waiting for the arrival of his partner.