Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

The night air winding through the high, open-air corridors of the Saintess’s villa was intoxicatingly cool, carrying the faint, sweet scent of crushed night-lotuses and drifting mountain mist.

Below the arched stone ramparts, the vast city of the Demonic Lotus Sect slept beneath the pale luminescence of the demonic moon, its gargoyle spires and bell towers casting long, peaceful shadows over the quiet canals.

At this moment... Chen Xu was humming as he walked towards Su Xishi’s room.

His footsteps were light, almost weightless, clicking rhythmically against the polished flagstones.

He wore an unadorned robe of deep twilight silk, his hair loosely gathered at the nape of his neck, his handsome face illuminated by a soft, boyish radiance that he had never displayed before the elders of the court.

He couldn’t believe that the woman he loves had invited him!

For five long years, he had kept his distance, treating her like a sacred, untouchable fairy who had accidentally descended into their den of demons.

He had stood before his own mother in the grand throne room, bearing the brunt of Da Xiaomi’s matriarchal disappointment, lying through his teeth to reject the marriage alliance just so Su Xishi would never feel the suffocating weight of an unwanted cage.

He had expected to spend decades slowly earning her trust, content to simply watch her from afar as she cultivated her celestial Dao.

Yet, hours after they parted, his personal sound-transmitting jade talisman had buzzed, and the voice of the woman he had always longed for echoed from that small thing.

Her voice in the message had sounded so delicate, so hesitant, whispering that the night was cold and that she wished to speak with him about her true feelings regarding his sacrifice in the throne room.

His heart fluttered like a trapped sparrow beneath his ribs.

He had checked his reflection in the bronze mirror three times, adjusted his collar, and practically floated up the winding stone stairways of her villa, praying that this night would finally mark the beginning of something beautiful between them.

He reached the heavy sandalwood doors, taking a deep, steadying breath to calm his racing pulse.

Then, raising his hand, he pushed the carved lattice leaves open.

”Sister Su...?”

And as he entered, he saw Su Xishi dressed in a white evening gown, glowing, and looking so vulnerable.

The sight stole whatever breath remained in his lungs.

She sat upon the edge of the sprawling, velvet-draped bed, illuminated by the silvery moonbeams filtering through the high balcony screens.

She was clad in a sweeping, translucent gown of sheer white silk that clung delicately to the soft curves of her waist and thighs, leaving her porcelain shoulders and collarbones with faint red marks bare to the cool air.

Her white hair tumbled loose and slightly disheveled over her chest, her ruby lips parted in a trembling, fragile pout, while her purole eyes glistening with an uncharacteristic, dewy layer of tears, looked up at him as if she were a wounded fawn seeking shelter from an unforgiving storm.

She looked so defenseless, so breathtakingly pure, that every instinct in Chen Xu’s blood screamed to throw himself before her feet, to wrap his arms around her trembling frame and shield her from the entire cosmos.

He took an eager step forward, his lips curling into the gentlest, most reassuring smile he could muster.

He was about to greet her—

Sniff.

...when that familiar scent of man and woman hit his nose, and the words died in his throat.

The air inside the room was heavy, dense, and suffocatingly warm.

Beneath the faint, masking aroma of an incense lingering from the bronze censer, an unmistakable, pungent musk drifted across his senses—the thick, unmistakable fragrance of spent passion, mingled sweat, crushed flower petals, and the heavy, metallic heat of primeval yang essence.

He knew this scent all too well, after all, he had been exposed to this kind of thing since he was young, with his senior brothers and senior sisters doing it almost every day.

The Demonic Lotus Sect was, after all, at its very root, a lineage deeply entwined with the darker, unrestrained arts of emotional desire and demonic dual cultivation.

Growing up in the inner palaces, Chen Xu had walked past pavilions where the sounds of groaning breath and rustling silk leaked into the hallways; he had smelled this exact scent clinging to the robes of elders after their nocturnal retreats; he knew the unmistakable biological aroma of a bed that had just played host to the fierce, unrestrained collision of two bodies.

No...

No, that’s impossible. This is Sister Su’s room. She is someone who value her purity... She won’t give herself up to someone that easily...

A sudden, violent nausea gripped his gut as his eyes widened and he immediately appeared in front of Su Xishi.

SWOOSH!

His movement was a frantic, uncoordinated blur as he crossed the twenty paces of polished floor in a fraction of a millisecond, shattering all decorum, shattering the polite distance he had meticulously maintained for half a decade.

His fingers immediately clamped down like an iron vise around her delicate, porcelain arm, completely ignoring how his rough grip dug into her pale skin.

Without hesitation, he sent his senses to her lower half...

It directly dove straight through her meridians, bypassing her surface qi, racing directly toward the sacred core of her lower dantian.

...Gone.

Her primal yin was gone.

The pure, uncorrupted virginity that she had guarded with her life was completely eradicated.

In its place, swirling within the newly widened conduits of her spiritual veins, was a foreign, terrifyingly dominant ocean of blazing, golden fire—a thick, yang essence that had coated her inner walls, saturating her dantians so thoroughly that her very soul sang with another man’s lingering heat.

The world seemed to lose all color, all sound, and all gravity in a single, catastrophic heartbeat.

It felt as though an invisible, rusted blade had been driven straight through his sternum, slowly twisting, carving away his lungs, his heart, and his vocal cords, leaving behind only an icy, cavernous void that drowned his entire being in pure, sickening despair.

The woman he loved—the woman he had deified in the highest, most sacred altar of his soul, the woman whose chastity he had proudly defended before his own mother just a few hours ago—had been thoroughly, relentlessly conquered by someone else.

While he had been pacing in his lonely courtyard, someone else had been tearing off her clothes.

Someone else had pinned those delicate, porcelain wrists to the mattress.

Someone else had buried their face in that sweet, white hair, listening to the desperate, breathless whimpers that he had never even dared to imagine.

The lingering marks on her bare collarbone, the disheveled silk sheets behind her, the bruised, parted lips that looked up at him... they weren’t signs of a vulnerable maiden in distress.

They were the grotesque, mocking trophies of her surrender.

He hadn’t been her trusted confidant. He hadn’t been her noble guardian.

Instead, he was nothing more than an oblivious, pathetic clown—a blind fool dancing upon a stage while the woman he cherished laughed behind his back, giving the very treasure he had spent years protecting to an unknown shadow in the dark.

The humiliation was so profound, so suffocatingly agonizing, that his spiritual sea began to crack under the sheer weight of his heartbreak.

His blood felt like it had turned to ash in his veins; his stomach heaved as if he had swallowed a mouthful of rotting corpse eating worms.

He wanted to weep, he wanted to tear his own eyes from their sockets, he wanted the ground beneath his feet to swallow him whole so he would never have to draw another breath of this tainted, mockery-filled air!

His throat convulsed, his eyes bulging with bloodshot, horrified tears as he stared at the woman sitting calmly before him.

”Who is—”

Before he could finish his words—

SHIIIIIIIIICK!

A thin streak of cold, silver black light whispered through the dim room!

The space behind Chen Xu didn’t even ripple as the ambient shadows simply separated, and without a single breath of warning, an executioner’s edge carved a flawless, horizontal crescent through the moonlight!

The world spun.

Chen Xu’s vision cartwheeled violently through the air—the gothic ceiling, the tangled velvet bed, the flickering bronze censer, and the moonlit balcony rolling over and over in a dizzying, nauseating spiral.

Then ...he suddenly saw a headless body in front of him.

It was a tall, slender silhouette clad in twilight-blue silk, standing frozen before the bed, one hand still stupidly outstretched toward the woman’s wrist.

From the severed neck, a thick, pressurized geyser of crimson blood was pumping upward toward the rafters, painting the ceiling in a brutal, steaming arc.

...Ah, that’s my body.

That was his last thought before he lost all consciousness.

The darkness claimed him instantly, extinguishing the purple light in his severed eyes forever.

THUD.

Haoran appeared, holding a bloodied nameless sword.

He stepped casually out of the shadowy blind spot directly behind the falling torso, the plain, unadorned iron blade in his right hand hummed with a quiet, terrifying vibration, a single line of bright blood dripping from its razor-sharp tip onto the carpet.

His chiseled, jade-sculpted face carried that same relaxed, cruel smirk, his golden pupils looking down at the spinning, severed head as it tumbled into the folds of the fallen silk.

”Die, knowing that the woman you loved, has given herself to someone else.”

The psychological venom of those final words hung in the quiet room, a brutal, merciless epitaph for a boy whose only crime had been falling in love with a woman.

Haoran raised his left hand, the storage ring upon his finger pulsing with an ominous, hungry gleam.

He waved his hand, and the body and the head was immediately sucked inside his storage ring.

SWOOSH.

An invisible, spatial vortex swept across the floor, and in less than half a heartbeat, the headless torso, the severed head, and even the airborne spray of blood were completely vanished from reality, pulled directly into the dark void alongside the flayed faces of his grandparents, the head of Xun Xie’er, and the mangled form of Bing Wuxian

The carpet was left completely dry, untouched by a single stain, as if Chen Xu had never even existed beneath the sky.

Haoran flicked the nameless sword once, shaking off the traces of blood before taking back the weapon back into his storage ring.

He then turned towards Su Xishi.

The young woman had already pulled back her slender arm, having discarded that fragile, trembling mask the very instant Chen Xu’s head parted from his shoulders.

She sat upon the edge of the bed, her tail swaying slowly behind her back, and began wiping her wrist with a disgusted look.

She used a silk handkerchief to meticulously scrub the spot where Chen Xu’s fingers had clamped down, rubbing the pale skin until it was pink, as if the mere physical contact with the dying boy had left behind an unbearable, filthy grease.

Her ruby lips were curled in deep, unreserved disdain, tossing the soiled handkerchief into the bronze censer where it instantly ignited into black ash.

Haoran looked down at her cold, pragmatic indifference, ”You handle the elders and the rest, I will go and deal with that woman.”

Su Xishi raised her head and nodded.

”Understood, Young Master,” she replied, her melodious voice smooth, steady, and entirely free of hesitation.

Her purple eyes flashed with the sharp, ruthless ambition of an apex fox claiming her territory, her previous regrets buried beneath the cold calculation of the coming conquest.

She rose from the bed, the sheer white evening gown falling in elegant folds around her bare ankles, ready to paint her new sect in the blood of anyone who dared stand against their path.

Meanwhile, Haoran turned his gaze back to the main hall of the sect, where the presence of that woman can be felt.

’...you are the last one.’