Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

Shen Haoran smirked and marveled at the appearance of his own avatar.

The manifestation of this one thousand meter tall gold and purple Spirit Avatar did not merely shake the earth; it ruptured the ancient balance of the realm.

Standing tall amidst the swirling tempests, the towering sovereign avatar looked directly into the colossal golden eye of the Heavenly Dao, radiating an oppressive, undisputed majesty that defied the very foundation of celestial order.

Seeing a mortal anomaly not only survive its divine judgment, but also subdue an outer god artifact and manifest a thousand meter spirit avatar that dared to look down upon the heavens, the Heavenly Dao erupted into an unprecedented, apocalyptic fury.

”BLASPHEMY!”

The deep, rumbling voice of the Heavenly Dao tore through the heavens, no longer sounding merely cold and indifferent, but vibrating with primordial wrath and raw, celestial killing intent.

The heavens moved to attack Shen Haoran, committing the entirety of the vast tribulation vortex to completely and utterly annihilate his existence from the fabric of reality.

BOOM! RUMBLE—!!!!!

The swirling pitch-black clouds, stretching hundreds of miles across the horizon, turned into a churning sea of pure, incandescent destruction.

The atmospheric pressure dropped to absolute zero as the ambient laws of reality bent to fuel the celestial execution.

From the churning depths of the dark vortex, thousands of thick, serpentine arcs of divine tribulation lightning coalesced into five catastrophic, primordial bolts—each one pulsing with a different heavenly hue.

Each bolt of lightning carried enough world-ending spiritual and conceptual force to vaporize an entire world, burn a continent’s worth of spirit veins, and erase the souls of a hundred Spirit Ascension masters simultaneously.

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH—!!!!!

With a deafening roar that shattered the sound barrier for a thousand leagues, the five apocalyptic lightning strikes detonated simultaneously, descending upon Shen Haoran and his towering Spirit Avatar like the wrathful claws of an enraged universe.

Down below, standing securely within the radiant forehead of his thousand meter spirit avatar, Shen Haoran looked up at the descending celestial execution.

His robes fluttered wildly in the howling vortex, his golden hair dancing like gold silk, his lips curling into a sharp, arrogant grin, his tri-color gaze burning with pure, unbridled combat thrill.

”Is that all the so-called great heavens can muster?” Haoran sneered, his voice cutting cleanly through the roaring thunderclaps. ”How disappointing. I was expecting more from the being who oversees the so-called order!”

Shen Haoran raised his right arm, his fingers tightening around the cold hilt of the black imperial sword, Azathoth!

Simultaneously, the one thousand meter gold and purple Spirit Avatar mirrored his exact movements with terrifying synchronicity and tightened its gripped on the pitch black spectral sword!

Then, the dark oily sludge of Azathoth violently surged up the blade, coating the gold and purple energy with writhing, eldritch runes and thousands of opening cosmic eyes!

The spatial fabric around the titanic blade fractured into spiderweb-like dimensional voids, emitting a low, reality shivering hum that drowned out the thunder!

SWIIISH—!!!!!

In that instant, Shen Haoran swung his sword upward in a single, flawless, and blinding diagonal slash!

The one thousand meter Spirit Avatar also unleashed an earth-shattering, horizontal sword arc of combined gold, purple, and chaotic void energy.

The colossal wave of sword qi stretched over ten thousand meters across the sky, sweeping through the clouds with the authority of a cosmic executioner!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM—!!!!!

The massive sword strike clashed directly against the five descending primordial lightning bolts mid-air!

The collision produced a blinding, supernova-like flash of light that illuminated the entirety of Leaf Green City and the surrounding territories as if it were broad daylight!

Shockwaves swept across the stratosphere, blowing away the outer rim of the tribulation storm in an instant!

Yet, the divine lightning was not merely deflected—it was actively being sliced apart!

The first lightning struck the blade, but under the cutting edge of this sword intent and the tri-color aura, the lightning bolt was cleanly bifurcated, splitting into two harmless streaks of falling plasma that dissipated into the atmosphere!

Next came the second and third lightning, the two cataclysmic bolts attempted to freeze and dissolve the giant avatar’s blade, but the writhing, black oily substance of Azathoth coating the steel opened thousands of tiny, razor-toothed mouths along the cutting edge, literally devouring and consuming the heavenly laws within the lightning as fuel for its own strike!

CRACK! SHATTER!

With a final, explosive surge of Haoran’s newly awakened Spirit Ascension qi, the colossal Spirit Avatar drove the massive blade straight through the remaining fourth and fifth lightning bolts!

The two final strikes shattered like brittle glass, bursting into millions of harmless, fading golden and black sparks that rained down across the ruined city like a celestial shower.

The sky went completely still for a fraction of a second.

Shen Haoran stood tall, his blade resting casually across his shoulder, his breathing steady, and his golden forehead eye locked directly onto the trembling golden eye of the Heavenly Dao above.

His thousand meter Spirit Avatar stood completely unblemished, bathed in the radiant glory of its own gold and purple radiance, having cleanly sliced through the absolute wrath of the heavens without giving up a single inch of ground!

The colossal golden eye embedded in the swirling vortex of the tribulation storm was completely and utterly enraged.

Its massive, divine iris burned with an incandescent, blinding fury that twisted the laws of nature themselves into chaotic knots.

Millions of new lightning serpents, pulsing with even darker, forbidden cosmic frequencies, began to violently writhe and weave together within the pitch-black cloud layers, preparing to gather an apocalyptic strike that would bypass all standard tribulation thresholds and wipe the entire territory off the mortal continent!

RUUUUMBLE—!!!!!

The heavens finally mobilized their execution decree, causing the atmospheric pressure to plummet, and the ground to cracked under the impending, final judgment!

But then...

Without any warning, the colossal golden pupils froze dead in the center of the firmament.

The roaring sea of five-colored lightning abruptly halted in mid-strike, its violent crackling sound cutting off into an eerie, suffocating dead silence.

An ancient, unseen constraint seemed to tighten around the celestial manifestation from beyond the mortal plane—an unyielding cosmic equilibrium, a higher decree of world laws that forcefully restricted the Heavenly Dao from actively remaining in the lower mortal realm once a cultivator’s legitimate tribulation trial had concluded!

Slowly, involuntarily, the dark, churning rumbling clouds spanning hundreds of miles suddenly started to unravel and dissipate into thin air!

The golden eye narrowed into a lethal, hateful slit, its divine gaze burning with venomous, ancient malice as it stared down at the young man standing tall within his spirit avatar.

A deep, bone rattling voice, heavy with primordial wrath and immortal condemnation, echoed directly through the atmosphere and into the depths of Shen Haoran’s mind.

”Do not celebrate your meager survival, anomaly. The grand laws of this lower plane stay my hand for this passing hour, but our reckoning has merely begun.”

The voice boomed like the collapse of ancient mountains, shivering through the bedrock.

”I am leaving for now, but mark my words: wherever you tread, under whatever sky you hide, I will find you. The cosmos has no corner deep enough to shield an entity not meant to be. When next we meet, there will be no tribulation rules to bind my wrath. I will tear your soul from your flesh, shatter that outer god blade into ash, and erase every memory of your lineage from the annals of existence!”

With that final, chilling threat reverberating through the heavens, the colossal golden eye slowly faded into the swirling mist, dissolving into scattered golden motes.

The dense, pitch-black storm clouds vanished away, peeling back to reveal a tranquil, moonlit midnight sky glittering with silent, undisturbed stars.

Yet, despite the sudden return of quiet night air, Shen Haoran did not let down his guard.

Haoran remained in his Spirit Avatar, floating motionless within the radiant, crystalline chest core of the towering giant even after the heavenly eye had completely vanished.

His robes fluttered gently in the rising thermal currents, his hand resting securely against the hilt of the black Tang Dao, Azathoth, as his spiritual sense swept across the ruined wasteland below.

Then, slowly, deliberately, he turned his gaze at a distance.

There, several leagues away atop a shattered stone ridge overlooking the smoldering crater, he saw Mu Gang.

The grand Faction Leader of the Botanist Faction was frozen in place, trembling uncontrollably from head to toe, staring at Haoran in sheer, paralyzing fear!

Mu Gang’s eyes were wide, bloodshot, and bulging out of his pale, dirt-covered face.

His dantians were utterly dry, his life essence severely burned from consuming the forbidden Grade 8 pill, and his proud, revered standing as a local sovereign was reduced to nothing more than a terrified, cornered rat watching an ancient god look down upon him!

He did not actually see the eye, nor the subduing of the will of an outer god sealed inside Haoran’s blade, but he did see the manifestation of a thousand meter spirit avatar, and the effortless cutting of five heavenly tribulation lightnings!

Normally, a Spirit Avatar is only around a hundred meters tall, but Haoran was a full thousand meters, maybe even more!

And the way he handled those tribulations was nothing like he had seen before! He remembered when he undergo his heavenly tribulation, he can only pray that he survived, but Haoran completely fought back.

And that appearance of the avatar... Does that guy really think of himself as invincible?

Every ounce of martial pride, every illusion of power, and every shred of sanity within Mu Gang had been brutally pulverized into dust.

High in the sky, Shen Haoran suddenly raised his hand.

”Mu Gang, thank you for letting me use you. Because of you, I finally broke through.” He said, his voice sounding serious and sincere, ”But, you no longer has any uses. So die.”

In perfect, terrifying synchronicity, the colossal one thousand meter Spirit Avatar also raised its massive right hand that was holding the giant spectral replica of the black sword, hoisting the titanic blade high above the ruined city, and brought it crashing down.

WHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH—!!!!!

The falling blade cut through the atmosphere with the apocalyptic weight of a descending star.

Mu Gang gritted his teeth in sheer, animalistic desperation as the primal urge to survive violently overtook his paralyzed limbs!

”DIE!? DREAM ON! I AM MU GANG! I WILL NOT DIE HERE!” Mu Gang shrieked in a high-pitched, ragged scream, burning through his blood and life force in one final stand!

BOOM!

He quickly summoned his own Spirit Avatar, and the massive ethereal emerald figure, materialized around him!

Yet, standing directly beneath the descending thousand meter figure of Haoran’s avatar, Mu Gang’s Spirit Avatar looked like a pathetic small doll that can be crushed with a single stomp!

Mu Gang raised his avatar’s arms high above his head, pouring every single remaining drop of his soul and marrow into a desperate, frantic barrier, trying to block the attack!

CRACK—!

But it was completely futile!

The blade struck the emerald avatar without the slightest hint of resistance!

SLASH!

The massive sword cut cleanly through his Spirit Avatar like a hot knife slicing through paper, effortlessly bypassing all defenses and cutting Mu Gang’s real physical body cleanly in half from the crown of his skull straight down through his dantians!

But...

The sheer, catastrophic spiritual and spatial force of the descending strike did not stop with the death of the Faction Leader.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM—!!!!!

The blade crashed directly into the earth!

A terrifying tectonic catastrophe erupted across Leaf Green City as the ground violently buckled and fractured as an earth-shattering wave of gold, purple, and black void energy tore through the landscape!

The area behind Mu Gang was cleaved completely apart for over a thousand miles, tearing through ancient stone palaces, fortified outer city walls, towering mountain ridges, and vast spiritual forests!

The cataclysmic strike ripped open a massive, bottomless chasm that stretched as far as the eye could see—a terrifying, thousand yard wide deep cliff that plunged straight into darkness, glowing with lingering purple flames and looking as if it led directly into the subterranean abyss!

The shockwave blasted millions of tons of pulverized granite, molten rock, and shattered structures high into the stratosphere, leaving behind a permanent, terrifying scar upon the face of the world!

Haoran stared at the devastation and slowly lowered his arms and relaxed.

Finally, after a few minutes, the deafening roar of the earth finally began to subside, replaced only by the quiet howling of the wind through the newly forged canyon.

Inside the glowing forehead of the avatar, Shen Haoran finally exhaled a long, heavy breath of warm vapor.

Just then, the incandescent golden third eye on the center of his forehead slowly closed and vanished beneath his skin, leaving no trace behind.

The dazzling silver radiance in his left eye and the deep purple fire in his right eye gradually receded, returning their irises to their natural, cold, and pristine shade of gold.

Slowly, the magnificent one thousand meter Spirit Avatar began to dissolve into scattered, shimmering particles of gold and purple light, fading gracefully into the midnight atmosphere.

TAP.

Shen Haoran descended through the cool night breeze and landed softly on the shattered ground near the edge of the newly formed abyss.

He staggered forward by half a pace, resting his hand against the hilt of Azathoth to steady himself, breathing heavily as the massive, overwhelming exhaustion of enduring a Heavenly Tribulation, taming an eldritch entity, and unleashing such apocalyptic destruction finally washed over his newly transformed body.

But, he quickly recollected himself and straightened his back, looking at the night sky.

Slowly, he closed his eyes.