Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

The pulverized ceiling of the subterranean cavern continued to shower down in a blinding storm of crystalline dust and glowing jade embers.

High above, where the solid limestone crags of the mountain ridge had once stood, the sky was torn wide open, exposing the bruised twilight firmament.

At the center of that ruined cave, the colossal pavilion of the Sun Moon Refinement Tower’s first floor glowed.

Its ancient solar and lunar runes spun across the air in grand, interlocking rings of molten gold and liquid silver, forcing the surrounding spatial fabric to buckle and bow.

Slowly, from the pagoda, a figure emerged.

The air around his stepping boots rippled and eventually smoothed out, as though the frantic turbulence of reality was eager to flatten itself into a pristine rug beneath his soles.

He was clad in sweeping, opulent golden emperor robes embroidered with soaring celestial dragons whose scales shifted between the blinding radiance of the noon sun and the abyssal frost of a midnight moon.

Across his broad shoulders rested a mantle of primordial chaos mist, and behind his dark hair, loosely tied with an unadorned ring of celestial jade, orbited two perpetual miniature celestial bodies: a blazing golden sun and a shimmering silver crescent.

He carried no weapon. His hands were tucked comfortably into the wide sleeves of his sovereign robes, and on his handsome, sculpted face rested an easygoing, careless smirk, smiling nonchalantly at Spirit Xu Xiansu.

”Master!” Xu Xiansu exclaimed in delight.

The cold, desperate arrogance that had tightened the young girl’s jaw vanished in an instant, replaced by the unrestrained, buoyant joy of a disciple whose backer had just stepped onto the battlefield.

She scrambled backward from the rubble, her ragged breathing steadying beneath the warm, protective light washing over her frame.

The man nodded at her, acknowledging her presence with an affectionate tilt of his chin, but didn’t take his eyes off Spirit Xu Xiansu.

His eyes were identical to the two women standing before him—vibrant, fathomless pools of orange fire harboring the ancient, rotating wheels of the Sun and Moon.

He swept his gaze across the spectral woman’s translucent, cosmic starlight robes, whistling softly through his teeth in sheer, genuine appreciation.

”You are the alternate self of my disciple, are you not? Man, to think I actually have a disciple that is just half step away from breaking past the Immortal Emperor realm, I might have the talent for teaching.”

The self-satisfied, humorous remark hung in the shattered cave, so absurdly relaxed in the face of an existential anomaly that even the falling dust motes seemed to pause in confusion.

Spirit Xu Xiansu frowned, her starlight-woven brows knitting together as she looked upon the man.

Her ancient, fathomless hazel eyes darkened with complex, unreadable ripples of memory.

”Sun Moon Immortal Emperor... to think in this timeline, you became my master.”

The name rolled off her tongue not with the deference of a disciple, but with the chilling, heavy familiarity of an ancient peer who had walked past his tomb a lifetime ago.

The Sun Moon Emperor chuckled, rubbing his clean shaven chin with an amused glint in his pupils.

”What happened to me in that your timeline?”

The spectral woman did not blink. Her translucent form drifted half a pace forward, her voice flat, cold, and entirely devoid of remorse.

”I killed you and took your legacy.” Said Xu Xiansu.

The confession was as quiet as falling snow, yet it carried the brutal, bloody reality of the primordial era.

In her past, there had been no gentle master-disciple bond, there had only been a desperate, blood-soaked hunt across the void, an ambitious girl carving her way to the apex, and an ancient emperor who fell beneath her blade so his Dao could feed her ascension.

Sun Moon Emperor blinked, his easygoing smile twitching slightly as he tapped his own nose.

”Man, that’s harsh.” He shook his head, sighing with theatrical, wounded melancholy. ”And here I thought I’d at least get a decent burial with some incense and wine.”

Spirit Xu Xiansu remained silent.

She did not indulge his playful banter. Her blade, held loosely at her side, hummed with a quiet but lethal frequency, waiting for the opponent to reveal his hand.

Then, the Sun Moon Emperor turned serious.

The lazy, humorous smirk melted from his features. In its place, the terrifying, untouchable majesty of an ancient supreme emperor descended like an iron hammer upon the clearing.

His golden robes ceased their idle fluttering, hanging straight and heavy as mountain ranges.

His orange pupils sharpened into two sovereign lances of light, piercing straight through the spectral woman’s translucent silhouette, tracing the thin, almost imperceptible threads of silver karma stretching out of the cavern toward the outer valley.

”Although I have abandoned the Sun Moon Divine Physique after I ascensed, I still comprehended the Dao of Time. And in my eyes, it seems you weren’t meant to be here. I can feel that the world in its entirely is rejecting you...”

He took a slow, deliberate stride forward, the pagoda’s first floor rumbling in harmony with his footstep.

”You are using that kid outside to maintain yourself, do you not?”

The words struck like an arrow through the dark.

Xu Xiansu immediately perked up hearing that, her sharp, calculating mind, honed across two lifetimes of ruthless slaughter, synthesized the truth in a fraction of a millisecond.

’...so if the boy dies, she will lose her anchor in this world! And without an anchor, she will definitely be rejected by the world!’

A venomous, feral smirk erupted across the young girl’s lips, and without hesitation, bowed at Sun Moon Emperor.

”Master, please distract her!”

She didn’t waste a single breath waiting for permission as she darted outside the cave.

BOOM!

Her boots detonated against the rubble as she threw herself into the open air, her hair trailing like a shooting star as she vaulted through the shattered gorge, tearing toward the valley where Xia Mengyao had dragged the boy.

Spirit Xu Xiansu frowned and tried to follow her, her spectral silhouette blurred into a beam of pure celestial starlight, moving with a velocity that mocked the physical constraints of distance, aiming to obliterate the younger girl before she could clear the ridge, but....

HUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM—!

The space before her nose violently curdled.

A wall of solar flame and lunar frost slammed down between the cave entrance, severing the path entirely.

Sun Moon Emperor smiled at her, ”Not so fast.”

He stood in the center of the air, arms casually folded inside his voluminous golden sleeves, his posture as immovable as the cosmic axis itself.

”The youngsters have their squabbles to settle. As the elders, shouldn’t we sit down and exchange some pointers instead?”

Spirit Xu Xiansu frowned at him, her brows dipping low with cold, dangerous impatience.

”You cannot defeat me. The difference between an Immortal Emperor and someone who is half step beyond that is as vast as heaven and earth.”

It was not an arrogant boast; it was an unalterable cosmic fact.

An Immortal Emperor ruled the highest reaches of the immortal planes, commanding the laws of the universe.

But that ’half-step beyond’ was the threshold of absolute transcendence—a realm where an entity began shedding the constraints of the universe itself!

To someone who had touched that boundless boundary, an ordinary Immortal Emperor was merely an advanced student of the Dao.

Sun Moon Emperor chuckled, unbothered by the crushing disparity in their peak realms.

”Maybe, but we’re both souls now, aren’t we?”

He raised his translucent, glowing palm, showing the subtle, flickering edges of his manifestation.

”You are an exiled remnant clinging to a boy to remain, and I am a fragment soul sleeping inside the basement of a broken tower. Neither of us possesses our physical bodies and our true strength. Besides... I wanted to see just how powerful someone who already took that step really is. It’s not every day a man gets to spar with his own student from an alternate future.”

Spirit Xu Xiansu shook her head, her eyes casting a fleeting glance down toward the lush green valleys and ancient mountain ranges below.

”If we fight, this entire realm will be reduced to nothingness.”

Even as mere spiritual remnants, the collision of their conceptual laws would generate energy ripples dense enough to shatter the time and space of continent, boil the oceans into steam, and disintegrate every mortal and disciple in this trial into fine cosmic dust.

”Yeah, so how about we fight up there?”

Sun Moon Emperor pointed at the sky, his finger tracing a line straight past the clouds, past the atmospheric barrier of the realm, and into the cold, infinite blackness of the astral sea. ”In the vast Outer Space. We can go all out there, can’t we?”

The two stared at each other.

For one suspended, breathless second, the air between them turned so quiet that the heartbeat of the cosmos seemed to halt.

Two pairs of orange eyes, one holding the ancient sorrow of a destroyed universe, the other burning with the carefree brilliance of a primeval monarch, locked in silent understanding.

And without hesitation, they flew to the outside!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM—!!!!!

A pillar of incandescent, dawn-gold solar fire and a pillar of deep, twilight starlight shot straight through the clouds, piercing the world’s firmament as if they were wet parchment.

They accelerated past the speed of light, shattering dimensional barriers and tearing through the astral void in consecutive leaps, bypassing stars, asteroids, and solar winds, until they were hundreds of light-years away from the Ancient Heaven Star, ready to unleash an apocalyptic clash amidst the silent graveyard of ancient supernovas.

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Down below...

The peaceful silence of the secluded outer valley was entirely shattered.

Deep within a narrow, mist-shrouded gorge lined with weeping willow trees and jagged limestone boulders, violent sparks of refined sword qi lit up the shadows in strobe-like flashes.

CLANG! CLANG! SHING!

Xia Mengyao moved with breathtaking, lethal elegance, her hair whipping through the wind, her robes snapping with every fluid pivot of her waist.

She was using a sword, with every thrust being like a work of art, aiming for vitals with the precision of a master duelist.

And Yan Xiao was using a dagger, brandishing it with his teeth were bared, his eyes wide with desperate, feral survival instinct, his breathing coming in ragged, panting wheezes.

CLANG!

The blade descended in a sweeping, decapitating horizontal arc!

Yet, with am unnatural twitch of his heel, Yan Xiao’s body dissolved into a shimmering blur of white gold light—executing the Sunshine Steps with instinctive, terrifying efficiency.

He slipped beneath the arc of the blade by a fraction of an inch, his dagger flashing upward in a vicious, counter-slashing arc aimed directly at Xia Mengyao’s throat.

CLANG!

Xia Mengyao snapped the crossguard of her sword down, deflecting the iron blade into the dirt, but the sheer, uncanny timing of his evasion forced her to vault backward three paces to reset her footing.

Her brow was soaked in light sweat, her pupils contracting in mounting frustration and disbelief.

Xia Mengyao was a recognized prodigy of the Imperial Academy, a genius who stood comfortably at the Nascent Soul realm, possessing deep sword foundation.

Yan Xiao, by contrast, was merely a Golden Core cultivator from a backwater border realm, his meridians battered and his breathing chaotic.

But despite being at a higher cultivation base, Xia Mengyao couldn’t gain any upper hand at all!

It was maddening. It felt as though she were sparring with a phantom that had studied her personal sword art for a hundred years!

Every time she unleashed a feint, Yan Xiao had already tilted his shoulder to evade the strike before the sword intent even left her blade.

Every time she tried to lock his movements down with her domain, the boy executed an evasion angle that precisely targeted the blind spot in her footwork.

His movements were clumsy, his spiritual reserves were far inferior to hers, and his execution lacked polished refinement—yet his tactical anticipation was so terrifying that every clash ended in a stalemate.

’This is absurd!’ Xia Mengyao gritted her teeth, her sword flashing into seven overlapping blossoms. ’His instincts are like... like he’s being guided by someone who knows every flaw in my forms!’

”Die, damn it!” Yan Xiao roared, lunging forward with his dagger, burning another drop of his vital essence to force a mutual kill.

But then...

TICK.

A cold, familiar sound clicked directly against his ear canal.

The world turned gray, the air behind his neck turned into pure, absolute zero.

And before he realized it...

SHIIIIIIIIICK!

Xu Xiansu materialized directly against his blind spot as if she had stepped out from his very own shadow!

Her orange eyes burned with pure, merciless killing intent.

In her right hand, the dagger was held in a two-handed downward grip, completely coated in a swirling, hyper-accelerated vortex of temporal decay.

Before Yan Xiao’s nervous system could even send the signal to dodge, before his eyes could register the sudden shift in light—

CRACK-SQUELCH!

The black dagger drove cleanly through his spine, the blade penetrating through his ribs, and burst directly out through the front of his sternum in a horrifying spray of dark, steaming crimson!

Yan Xiao’s body violently seized.

His dagger slipped from his paralyzed fingers, clattering uselessly against the stones, his bloodshot eyes bulging in sheer, unadulterated agony as the temporal fire within the blade began to systematically dissolve his heart.