Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

Black Iron Forest, an old forest known for trees as hard as iron and leaves as sharp as blades, thus the name.

And at this moment, the towering iron-bark trunks, ancient bastions that had withstood the elemental tempests of the wilderness for ten thousand years, groaned under a kinetic violence that was tearing through the upper branches.

SWOOSH—! CRACK!

Xu Xiansu jumped from trees to trees, her orange eyes bright with an untamed, luminous fire that cut through the perpetual gloom of the forest.

Her slender frame moved with the effortless, preternatural agility of a celestial phantom.

Every time the sole of her embroidered combat boot brushed against a branch, the kinetic displacement was barely enough to dislodge a single drop of dew, yet the rebound propelled her fifty paces forward like an arrow released from a master’s recurve bow.

Her loose silky black hair trailed behind her in the whistling draft like a banner of liquid night, her pale, jade-like face entirely devoid of panic.

Behind her, dozens of Nascent Souls and one Spirit Ascension realm powerhouse were chasing after her.

The pursuit was relentless, like a surging pack of lethal wolves tearing through the night.

Their dantians burned hot, their spiritual sense locked onto the girl’s fleeing silhouette with rabid intensity.

High-tier movement techniques detonated in rapid succession, shadow blurs, gale leaps, and earth-vaulting strides, snapping ancient timber and leaving trails of crackling spirit lightning in their wake.

”Don’t let the little wench reach the valley!” a lead hunter barked, his voice laced with the cold fury of a predator whose prey refused to drop. ”Her movements are slowing! Pin her down!”

Above the tree line, gliding effortlessly across the cold sky like an ominous thundercloud, was the true terror of the hunt, the Spirit Ascension powerhouse.

The man was colossal, his broad shoulders draped in heavy, dark iron armor etched with jagged defensive talismans.

He did not deign to leap between the branches; instead, he stepped upon the empty air itself, each heavy stride accompanied by the muffled boom of breaking sound barriers.

The terrifying gravitational aura of the Spirit Ascension realm rolled off his imposing frame in suffocating, invisible waves, crushing the treetops below and sending thousands of nocturnal spirit beasts fleeing in blind terror through the undergrowth.

His eyes, sunken and ruthless beneath thick, graying brows, tracked Xu Xiansu’s nimble trajectory with the cold detachment of an executioner eyeing a condemned criminal.

”You have run long enough, junior,” the Spirit Ascension elder growled, his deep baritone vibrating through the forest canopy like rolling thunder.

With a brutal flick of his wrist, the elder signaled the vanguard.

SWISH! SWISH! SWISH!

The hunting formation adapted instantly.

Breaking into three flanking echelons, the Nascent Soul immediately took out some pills and ate them for a burst of velocity.

Ten cultivators surged to the left, ten broke to the right, while the remaining dozen vaulted directly over the highest branches, diving downward like black meteors.

BOOM!

They landed upon the interlocking branches with thunderous coordination, forming an unbroken, thirty-pace perimeter around Xu Xiansu.

Broadswords of cold star-iron, serrated halberds, and poison-tipped daggers were drawn in unison, their edges gleaming with lethal spiritual intent.

The ambient qi in the air was forcefully locked down by thirty interlocking qi, freezing the surrounding leaves in mid-air and sealing off every possible avenue of retreat.

High above them, hovering twenty feet in the air with his arms crossed over his chest, the Spirit Ascension powerhouse looked down at the trapped girl like a mountain looking down upon a pebble.

”Give us the map and the phoenix pearl,” the elder commanded from above, his voice flat and devoid of compromise. ”At least then, we can make your death painless.”

Surrounded by more than thirty elite killers whose collective killing intent could have paralyzed an ordinary genius with sheer dread, Xu Xiansu did not draw a defensive posture.

She simply stood atop a slender, swaying branch of iron-bark, her weightless grace keeping the twig from dipping even a fraction of an inch.

And as she gaze at these people, Xu Xiansu’s eyes released a brilliant golden and silver light.

HUMMMMMMMMM—!

The radiant burst did not blind the eyes; it saturated the fabric of reality itself!

From the depths of her orange irises, two interlocking wheels of cosmic illumination rotated into existence—the left eye blazing with the blinding majesty of the primeval sun, and the right eye shimmering with the cold, abyssal stillness of the eternal moon.

TICK.

TOCK.

And instantly, the whole world seems to turn gray as everything moved slowly, the clicking sound of clocks echoing through the boundless expanse of the forest.

The vibrant emerald green of the ancient canopy, the warm crimson glow of the blood-moon insignias, the silver glint of polished blades, and the deep blue of the night sky all drained away in a single second, washed over by a desaturated, monotone slate-gray.

The howling night wind ceased its roar, transformed into a faint, petrified sigh that hovered motionless between the leaves.

Droplets of sweat flying from the brows of the surrounding cultivators hung suspended in mid-air like static, floating glass beads.

A severed twig, snapped during their landing, froze at a forty-five-degree angle halfway toward the ground.

Every single Nascent Soul expert remained locked in the momentum of their final step, their eyes wide, their muscles bunched, their mouths open in half-formed shouts—their body, their spiritual senses, and their very thoughts dragged down into an agonizing, glacial crawl that was practically indistinguishable from absolute paralysis.

Above, through the desaturated gray firmament, the rhythmic, hollow chimes of an invisible, primordial cosmic timepiece echoed in the ears of the damned.

TICK.

TOCK.

TICK.

Sun Moon Divine Physique, the physique that holds dominion over time.

It was not a borrowed parlor trick, nor an illusionary formation woven from spatial deceit.

It was the primeval, forbidden authority of the two supreme celestial body of the cosmos—the sun that drives the march of eras, and the moon that freezes the river of mortality into silent ice.

To possess this physique was to stand outside the grand tapestry of causality, looking down upon the passage of moments with the cold, untouchable detachment of a creator.

Of course, right now, Xu Xiansu has no abilities to pause time or even interfere with the past.

What she’s doing now is merely creating a domain where time itself slowed down as if the world itslef seem to stop.

Her lips, untouched by the gray wash of the domain, curved into an elegant, venomous smirk that was breathtakingly beautiful and casually cruel.

Her footsteps made no sound as she stepped off the swaying branch, walking across the empty, frozen air as if it were a flight of polished jade stairs descending into a tranquil garden.

With a casual, almost lazy flick of her slender wrist, she reached into the embroidered sleeve of her robe and took a dagger.

The weapon was unassuming—barely seven inches long, crafted from dull, matte-black celestial meteorite with a simple leather wrap around the hilt.

It carried no grand inscriptions, no glowing spirit gems, and no theatrical flourishes.

It was an implement forged for only one singular, uncompromising purpose: the swift, clean harvesting of mortal lives.

Holding the hilt loosely between her pale, elegant fingers, Xu Xiansu strolled into the heart of the frozen circle of killers.

She approached the first Nascent Soul expert, a hulking swordsman whose blade was frozen an inch from completing an overhead cleave.

Xu Xiansu didn’t even look him in the eye.

SWISH.

With a delicate, effortless sweep of her arm, the matte-black blade whispered across the exposed flesh of his throat.

The skin parted like warm butter, a razor-thin line appearing across his windpipe.

Because for her, time was stretched to an agonizing standstill, not a single drop of blood spurted from the wound; instead, a thick, dark bead of crimson began to slowly, imperceptibly swell along the severed carotid artery.

Then, her index and middle fingers glowed with the incandescent, concentrated silver light.

With surgical, merciless precision, she drove her fingertips straight through his leather armor, piercing directly into the center of his heart.

CRACK-POP!

Within the man’s spiritual sea, his nascent soul shrieked in soundless horror as the silver light washed over it.

Then, the light violently tore it apart in a single millisecond, ripping its spiritual essence into brittle gray dust before crushing it into non-existence!

Without even a pause, she stepped to the second hunter.

SWISH.

A clean horizontal slash severed the jugular.

POW.

A palm strike to the heart pulverized the nascent soul into scattered embers.

She moved to the third, a female archer whose fingers were locked halfway through releasing a spiritual arrow.

Xu Xiansu tilted her head, stepped beneath the bowstring, dragged the dagger across the soft curve of the woman’s neck with an elegant pirouette, and casually drove the pommel of her dagger through the archer’s navel, snuffing out the soul within.

TICK.

TOCK.

The invisible clock counted down the seconds of unhurried slaughter.

Xu Xiansu walked between the frozen figures like a harvest maiden strolling through a field of ripe wheat.

Four.

Seven.

Twelve.

Twenty.

One by one, more than thirty Nascent Soul experts were slaughtered where they stood like petrified cattle.

Their throats were opened with delicate, artistic strokes; their nascent souls were thoroughly dismantled in their chest, stripped of any possibility of karmic reincarnation, demonic possession, or spiritual resurrection.

Around them, tiny, frozen plumes of dark crimson blood hung suspended in the gray, motionless air like an eerie gallery of macabre crimson jewels.

”Now, all that remained was that one above.”

Xu Xiansu flicked the tip of her dagger, wiping the single drop of blood from the matte-black steel, and turned her glowing orange eyes toward the sky.

She took a step upward, ascending the frozen currents of the air, moving casually towards the Spirit Ascension powerhouse hovering twenty paces above the canopy.

Her gaze was cool, calculating, and even slightly bored.

In the hierarchy of the lower realms, the Spirit Ascension realm was considered the dividing line between common practitioners and true overlords.

A Spirit Ascension expert had bridged the gap between mortality and the ethereal, condensing their dao into a transcendent spiritual avatar capable of manipulating the ambient laws of heaven and earth.

To a standard Nascent Soul cultivator, facing such a monster was an act of guaranteed suicide.

And to prove that, as she moved towards the Spirit Ascension expert, despite being slowed, the man moved.

KZZZZZZZZT—BOOOOOOOOOOM!

The gray fabric of the temporal domain violently shuddered.

The elder was not like the fragile juniors beneath his feet, his centuries of profound comprehension, coupled with the vast, oceanic sea of refined spiritual qi inside his transformed soul, granted his consciousness an immense, terrifying density that can ignore this temporal drag.

His sunken eyes flared with blinding, bloodshot fury as his vocal cords tore through the temporal friction, and he roared.

”LITTLE BITCH! YOU THINK YOU CAN KILL ME WITH THIS!? YOU UNDERESTIMATE A SPIRIT ASCENSION EXPERT!”

The roar was like a deafening shockwave that cracked the gray space around his body like brittle glass.

HUMMMMMMMMMMMMM—!!!!!

From the crown of his skull, an ocean of blinding, sapphire-colored spiritual essence erupted into the night sky.

The ambient qi of the forest was forcefully torn from its stagnation, swirling into a gargantuan, roaring vortex that parted the clouds and shattered the canopy below.

Within that vortex of transcendent power, the elder’s trump card manifested.

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!

The firmament groaned beneath an ancient, crushing weight as a thirty-meter-tall ethereal figure of an ancient warrior appeared.

The colossal Spirit Avatar was breathtaking in its terrifying majesty.

It was a gargantuan colossus forged from condensed, crystalline spiritual energy, semi-translucent and shimmering with deep-blue and gold celestial armor.

The ancient warrior held a massive, ninety-foot war halberd dripping with ethereal lightning, its armored shoulders broad enough to bridge a canyon, its face obscured behind a fearsome, horned war-mask that radiated the ancient, unyielding slaughter of a forgotten dynasty.

The spatial laws within a radius of three miles groaned and buckled under the sheer, tyrannical presence of the avatar.

The air became so dense that even falling pebbles disintegrated into dust before touching the earth, and the faint ticking of the temporal clock was drowned out by the thunderous energy leaking from the avatar.

And high atop the avatar, bathed in the blinding aura of his supreme manifestation, the elder was standing on the forehead of it.

His iron armor clanked violently in the howling winds, his hair whipping like a nest of serpents.

Looking down from thirty meters in the air, standing atop the brow of his majestic celestial avatar, the elder looked like an ancient war-god who had descended from the higher heavens to pass divine judgment upon an insolent ant.

”Witness the gap between heaven and earth, girl!” the elder’s voice boomed through the avatar’s throat, an earth-shattering dual-tone that rattled the teeth in Xu Xiansu’s jaw. ”Your parlor tricks are meaningless before the true might of a Spirit Avatar! In the face of absolute spiritual authority, even time itself must bow to my halberd!”

The colossal thirty-meter ancient warrior raised its titanic halberd high into the clouds, the tip crackling with a storm of blue lightning that illuminated the forest in violent, strobing flashes, preparing to erase the entire forest, and the girl within it, from the face of the continent.

Yet...

Beneath the towering shadow of the thirty-meter spirit avatar, floating weightlessly in the gray, frozen air with her dagger loosely held at her side...

Xu Xiansu just stared at that with a nonchalant look.

Her expression was entirely unchanged, ber brow did not furrow, her pulse did not accelerate by a single beat.

There was no awe, no terror, and not even the slightest flicker of respect within her vibrant, glowing orange pupils.

She looked up at the colossal war-avatar, with its ninety-foot lightning halberd and its roaring elder, with the exact same casual, indifferent expression one might use when looking at a noisy, oversized toad croaking in a garden pond.

She was not treating a Spirit Ascension and his Spirit Avatar seriously at all.

To her, who had stood at the pinnacle of an era and witnessed the cosmic, world shattering horrors of the Immortal Road, a mere lower realm cultivator who had barely crawled into the Spirit Ascension realm and summoned a crude, brittle lump of condensed mist was nothing more than an arrogant child waving a wooden sword.

Slowly, Xu Xiansu raised her left hand, brushing a stray lock of hair behind her delicate ear.

Her orange eyes narrowed slightly, the golden sun and silver moon within her irises rotating in opposite directions, locking onto the forehead of the giant with absolute, sovereign disdain.

”A thirty meter doll woven from dirty qi...” Xu Xiansu spoke, her melodious voice soft, relaxed, and cutting through the elder’s thunderous roar like an icy needle. ”Is this what you spent hundreds of years of your pathetic life begging from the heavens?”

Her lips parted into a small, chilling smile as the ticking of the cosmic clock resumed its cold, mocking rhythm in the dark.

TICK.

TOCK.