Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

The ancient stone hall was cool, quiet, and weighed down by centuries of slow, accumulating dust.

Shafts of pale afternoon sun fell through high-arched slits in the stone, cutting through ribbons of rising incense to illuminate a massive central dais.

Zhu Ziyan stood at the foot of that dais, staring at the statue in front of her.

The monument was carved from a colossal block of polished black basalt, its surface slick as oil despite its obvious age.

The figure possessed the lithe, dangerous grace of an apex huntress, seated upon an obsidian throne draped in stone panthers.

Her feline ears were angled slightly back, sharp and alert, and her carved stone eyes seemed to follow every subtle shift of the dust motes in the air.

Around the statue’s neck hung garlands of dried desert lilies and heavy copper torcs, their metal turned green with age.

’Gods huh. Do they really exist?’

Out in the mortal territories, people knelt before anything that was taller than a house and breathed lightning.

To weak villagers, a cultivator who could split a river was a god.

To a Qi Gathering cultivator, an old monster who lived for one thousand years was an immortal divinity.

But true gods? Entities that sat above the firmament, weaving the threads of fate, listening to the groveling prayers of starving primitives?

She doubt they exist.

But she shook her head, deciding not to think about it and looked around, trying to find a chance to escape.

She’s not really planning on staying here after all.

But, leaving without being noticed would be hard, her sharp eyes flicked across the temple perimeter.

The side corridors were labyrinthine, winding into living quarters, granaries, and the private courtyards of the tribal elders.

Beyond the temple walls lay the canyon—a harsh, wind-scoured gulch hemmed in by sheer sandstone bluffs that baked under a merciless sun.

When the spatial rift had spat her out into this barren valley three days ago, she had been bruised, disoriented, and nearly parched to death.

The tribe had found her unconscious in the sand, carried her into their sacred sanctuary, and immediately lost their minds.

The moment they saw her pointed feline ears protruding from her dark hair, the elders had thrown themselves onto the ground, sobbing, chanting, and hailing her as the returned bloodline of their patron deity.

At first, she had played along.

A warm bed, roast antelope meat, and jars of sweet cactus wine were far better than sleeping in a cave with desert scorpions.

But hospitality in the cultivation world always came with a hidden price tag, and Zhu Ziyan had no intention of becoming a permanent relic on a primitive altar.

She needed to slip away, reach the boundary markers of the realm, and find the others.

Shen Haoran, Huo Yue... they were certainly out there, likely causing catastrophes or tearing through trial formations while she was stuck eating dried fruit in a mud-brick temple.

Her muscles coiled as she took half a step toward the western gallery, aiming for a low window that opened out onto the shadow of the canyon wall.

However, just as she was preparing to leave, the heavy cedar doors of the inner sanctum banged open with a hollow, echoing crash!

The High Priest suddenly appeared.

The old man stumbled over the threshold, his ceremonial linen robes trailing through the dust, his weathered face pale as bleached bone.

His gnarled hands shook violently, the copper amulets around his neck clattering against his chest as tears of raw panic and exhaustion tracked through the deep creases of his cheeks.

He saw Zhu Ziyan standing by the statue and fell forward, his knees slamming hard against the cold flagstones as he crawled three paces across the floor, looking worried and knelt before her.

”Honored Descendant, please help us!” the old man gasped, his voice cracking with sheer desperation, his forehead pressing flat against the stone at her boots. ”The sky has fallen upon our people! Blood calls for blood in the sands!”

Zhu Ziyan’s brow furrowed, her instincts screaming that whatever had thrown this old man into such hysterical terror was about to completely ruin her quiet afternoon.

”Stand up and speak plainly, High Priest. Who attacked you? What happened out there?”

”The Jackal-Fang Clan,” the priest wept, his voice shaking the quiet air of the sanctuary. ”The southern waterhole... our youths went to draw water for the sacred rites. The Jackal hunters ambushed them from the dunes. It was a slaughter! Our children fought like trapped lions, tearing the throat from their chief’s second son before they fell! But now... now the Great Jackal has summoned the entire tribe from the iron ridges! Their scouts have already crossed the dry wash! Honored Descendant! They are coming to burn our homes, butcher our elders, and wipe our bloodline from the valley!”

Zhu Ziyan froze.

The cold air of the temple suddenly felt suffocating, her eyes narrowed into sharp, dangerous slits.

She didn’t care about tribal squabbles or water rights, but she understood the mechanics of border massacres.

When a clan marched with the intent to wipe an enemy from the map, they didn’t stop to ask who was a guest and who was a local.

”How many cultivators do they have?” Ziyan asked, her voice dropping into a hard, measured clip. ”What are their realms?”

”Their chief, Gula the Bone-Breaker... he crossed the threshold of Nirvana during the last eclipse,” the priest shuddered, his hands clutching the hem of her dark coat like a drowning man clutching driftwood. ”His flesh has been reborn in the sacred pyre! And behind him march twenty-six captains of the Spirit Ascension realm, commanding three thousand warriors armed with blood-iron! We have only five elders who have reached the Spirit Ascension, and our highest is merely at the second step! We have no wall that can stop a Nirvana expert! Only you... only the blood of the divine huntress can deliver us from this extinction!”

Nirvana Rebirth.

More than two dozen Spirit Ascension experts.

Without a shred of hesitation for even a fraction of a second, her words came out smooth, cold, and entirely devoid of heroic posturing.

”I’m sorry,” she said, looking down at the groveling old man with flat, uncompromising clarity. ”Old priest, open your eyes and look at me properly.”

Ziyan stepped back so his trembling hands slid off the leather of her clothes. ”I am not your goddess. I am not the daughter of your Bastet, or whatever ancient spirit you paint on these walls. I am a cultivator from an empire you have never heard of, and I am just at Nascent Soul realm. Do you understand what that means? It means if your ’Gula the Bone-Breaker’ steps into this room and sneezes in my direction, my bones will turn into dust before I can draw a single dagger. I am an ordinary mortal girl who values her own neck above all things. Your ancestral feuds, your dead hunters, and your incoming army have nothing to do with me. I will not die for a lie.”

With that, Zhu Ziyan turned around and walked away, her steps were swift, light, and decisive.

She did not look back at the grand altar, nor did she spare another glance at the black basalt statue.

She moved with the cold, self-preserving pragmatism of a wild cat that smelled fire in the wind—her only objective was to find the highest window, slip out into the canyon ridges, and put five hundred miles of desert sand between herself and this doomed valley before the slaughter began.

The old man remained collapsed on the dusty stones, his breath coming in ragged, hollow wheezes.

He watched her dark clothing move, watched as she vanish around the curve of the western pillar gallery.

He tried to call out.

His mouth opened, his dry, cracked lips parting to scream one final, desperate plea—to beg her by the heavens, to promise her the tribe’s entire treasury, their sacred relics, anything to buy a sliver of salvation.

But he decided to remain silent.

His jaw slowly closed, and his hands dropped limp against his lap.

In fact, he knew that Ziyan was not related to their Goddess.

The old man lowered his head, staring at the worn cracks in the stone floor.

He was not a fool blinded by superstition; after all, he is the high priest of the Goddess Bastet.

For seven hundred years, he had tended the sacred black flames on the dais.

For seventy years, he had meditated upon the holy scriptures carved into the temple foundations.

If Ziyan was truly a descendant or somehow related, he would’ve felt it.

The divine resonance between a true avatar and the temple’s altar was an undeniable, world-shaking phenomenon.

The sacred fires would have roared to life, the stone panthers at the base of the statue would have wept golden oil, and the ancient wards would have sung across the canyon.

But when Zhu Ziyan had walked into the temple three days ago, the altar had remained cold.

Not a single spark of divine grace, and not a whisper of ancestral authority.

She was merely a wandering mortal girl whose bloodline happened to carry the traits of a feline spirit beast.

He had known it from the very first breath.

But their entire tribe was already on the verge of destruction, with declining resources and people.

The wells were drying into bitter salt, the desert herds were migrating north into enemy lands, and every winter, more elders died of the biting cold, and fewer children survived the fever season.

The Jackal-Fang Clan had been tightening their noose around this oasis for three generations, chipping away at their hunting grounds, waiting for the final moment to strike the fatal blow.

The people were weary, broken, and living in constant, suffocating dread.

So he desperately needed a figure for them to cling to, to place their hope in.

When a dying man is drowning in the sand, even a mirage of water is enough to give his feet the strength to take another step.

The priest had manufactured the miracle himself—declaring her the divine daughter of the heavens, parading her before the weeping tribesmen, watching the hollow, despairing eyes of his people light up with the wild, desperate fire of hope for the first time in twenty years.

He had known it was a fragile, hollow glass house, but it was the only shelter he had left to offer his flock.

In the end, he sighed, a long, mournful sound that echoed into the rafters of the empty temple, and returned back.

Slowly, painfully, using his staff to lever his aching knees off the stones, the old man turned toward the inner sanctum to gather the elders, prepare the sacred funeral urns, and ready their meager spears for the end.

Meanwhile, Ziyan was hiding behind a pillar, breathing heavily.

She pressed her spine flat against the cool, rough sandstone of an exterior column, tucked away in the deep, violet shadow of the temple’s upper terrace.

The desert wind whipped around the parapet, hot and smelling of ozone and distant burning brush.

Down in the valley, faint drums were already beginning to rumble—heavy, brutal, rhythmic thuds that sounded like the footsteps of a colossal beast marching across the salt flats.

Nirvana Rebirth...

The words tasted like cold iron on her tongue.

She was not Haoran who can casually fight a Nirvana Rebirth like they were Qi Gathering stage.

Her hands, usually so steady with her hidden daggers, were trembling slightly against her knees.

She cursed quietly under her breath, her feline ears pinning flat against her dark hair in pure frustration.

Shen Haoran was a cosmic aberration—a freak of the universe draped in golden dragon sovereignty, a monster who could casually crush the laws of space and time beneath his boots and tear apart elders as if he were snapping dry kindling in an alleyway.

When Haoran fought, the rules of cultivation simply ceased to function.

’But I am not him,’ she thought fiercely, her teeth grinding together. ’I am Zhu Ziyan. I am just a small time Nascent Soul. How could I fight someone one realm below a saint.”

She will really die if she interfered with this war.

A First Stage Nirvana expert possessed the physical constitution of a reforged god.

Their meridians had survived the heavenly fire, their vitality was inexhaustible, and a single wave of their domain could flatten an entire city block into red paste.

Against twenty-six Spirit Ascension cultivators and an army of three thousand blood-hungry warriors, her speed, her stealth, and her twin daggers were entirely meaningless.

Stepping onto that battlefield was not courage; it was an unadulterated suicide.

’Just walk away,’ she told herself, staring down at the narrow path winding along the canyon cliff. ’It’s not my fight. I don’t know these people. They lied to themselves, and they tried to use me as a shield. I don’t owe them my life.’

She braced her boots against the stone ledge, preparing to leap across the gap to the outer cliffside.

Just then, a voice seem to call out to her.

It was not the hoarse, weeping voice of the High Priest, nor was it the howling wind blowing through the dry gorge.

It resonated directly from the ancient stone of the temple itself—soft, velvety, purring like a great black leopard lounging in the twilight, yet carrying a weight that bypassed her physical ears and struck directly against the marrow of her soul.

”Are you just going to watch them die?”

Zhu Ziyan froze mid-leap, her boots anchored to the sun-baked stone, her eyes widening in the desert light.