Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM—!!!!!

An explosion occurred.

It was a concussive, apocalyptic detonation of power that pulverized the remaining foundations of the central throne room into microscopic soot.

The shockwave blasted outward in an expanding, supersonic ring of violent purple flame, shredding the gothic lancet arches, vaporizing the surrounding observation towers, and rolling down the palace walls like a volcanic avalanche.

A gargantuan, blackened mushroom cloud of sulfuric smoke and boiling ash billowed miles into the bruised crimson sky, blotting out the demonic moon entirely.

SHRAAAAK!

At that moment, fox spirit avatar breached the suffocating plume of ash in a desperate, earth-shattering leap.

Its nine titanic, semi-translucent tails thrashed violently through the boiling vapor, parting the smoke like a silk curtain as its crystalline claws tore through empty air.

It landed heavily upon an adjacent, jagged ridge of obsidian rock, the impact sending deep, spiderweb fissures racing across the mountain face, dislodging thousands of tons of stone that cascaded into the winding canals below.

The diamond-shaped spiritual sanctuary within the avatar’s skull flickered dangerously, its defensive runes groaning under the residual shock of the blast.

Da Xiaomi was slumped, her luxurious robes torn along the shoulders, revealing smooth, porcelain skin painted with grime, sweat, and soot.

Her plush fox ears were pinned flat against her tangled lavender hair, twitching with agonizing spasms.

From her hairline, a thick, warm ribbon of dark crimson blood leaked downward, tracing a slow, tragic path across her pale temple, over her high cheekbone, and dripping from the sharp curve of her jaw onto the shimmering floor.

Beside her, the cloaked shadow guard stepped forward to support her trembling elbow.

But Da Xiaomi did not lean on the guard but pushed herself upright and turned towards her guard.

”Go.”

Her voice was raw, raspy, stripped of all its former seductive charm, carrying only the desperate, unbending authority of a dying monarch.

”This man definitely wanted to annihilate everything related to Chen Feng. Inform the White Dragon Sect to flee.”

The guard was stunned, the milky-white pinpricks of light beneath the hood violently contracted, the shadow’s voice trembling with desperate, frantic loyalty.

”Mistress, let me stay behind instead! You go and leave!” The shadow threw itself onto one knee, clawing at the hem of Da Xiaomi’s torn robes, ”You are the Sect Master! You carry the ancient bloodline of the Nether Spirit Fox! I am merely a nameless tool you raised from the gutters of the marsh! My life is worth nothing! So let me—”

”Xiao Mei,” Da Xiaomi called out, the soft, tender use of the guard’s true name, a name that had not been uttered in over four hundred years, froze the shadow where it knelt.

Da Xiaomi looked down at the kneeling figure, her blood-streaked face softening into an expression of profound, quiet gentleness.

”I want to ask, was there a time when you felt like... it was your moment of glory?”

The guard was confused, her formless shoulders stiffening in bewilderment amidst the roaring storm of ash outside, but answered truthfully, her voice choked with ancient reverence.

”It was when I followed you as we conquered this demonic land, Mistress. It was three hundred years ago, when we bathed our daggers in the blood of the Southern Swamp Kings, raised the Black Lotus banner over this area, and forced thirty-six beast tribes to crawl upon their knees before your throne. That was the day I knew I was serving a true supreme.”

Da Xiaomi smiled, a faint, bittersweet curve of her lips that carried the weight of a thousand lost years.

”I see. As for me... this, is my moment.”

She turned her gaze away from the past, looking out through the translucent crystalline facet of the avatar’s brow, past the shattered spires of her burning city, toward the vast, untamed northern horizon where the distant mountains slept beneath the stars.

”So go. This is my final order to you.”

The guard stared at her, her milky eyes trembling with unshed tears, but seeing her resolute face—a countenance stripped of all fear, all hesitation, and all regret, standing tall as an immovable pillar against the encroaching dark—she slowly rose.

She bowed her head to the floor one last time.

SHUUUUU—

She dissolved into a streak of pitch-black smoke, slipping through an aperture in the avatar’s body and darting between the falling boulders and burning timbers, the dark wisp stayed low to the ground, tearing through the broken seams of the outer gorge, and flew towards the horizon, carrying the final warning of a doomed mother into the night.

Inside the avatar’s forehead, Da Xiaomi watched the tiny, fleeing streak of black smoke vanish into the distant mist and sighed in relief.

Her tense shoulders dropped slightly, a heavy, exhausted breath escaping her lips.

At least with this, Chen Feng’s sect can survive.

If Xiao Mei could reach White Dragon Sect before that devil finished his killing here, the White Dragon disciples could scatter into the four winds, abandon the ancestral peaks, and preserve the spark of his lineage in the hidden valleys of the world.

This is the most she can do now.

It was the final, meager offering of a woman who had given everything she possessed to the man she loved.

TAP.

A sound, lighter than a falling autumn leaf, clicked against the stone twenty paces before the giant fox’s nose.

It was Haoran.

He stepped out of the upper firmament as if descending an invisible flight of marble stairs.

The howling, sulfurous winds of the caldera flattened themselves beneath the hem of his sweeping midnight-black robes.

On his right hand, he was holding a pitch black tang dao sword, the Black Imperial Sword, Azathoth.

He tilted his head slightly, his golden pupils burning through the avatar’s spiritual facet, looking directly into her tired, bleeding eyes.

”Even in a moment like this, you still think about that man. You truly are loyal.”

There was no mocking venom in his tone this time—only the calm, clinical observation of someone who recognized the stubborn, foolish purity of his prey.

Da Xiaomi chuckled at that, her voice raspy, yet carrying a quiet, unshakeable dignity.

”Thank you.”

She leaned her back against the glowing core of her avatar, looking at the handsome, terrifying youth with a soft, melancholic gaze.

”I cherish loyalty the most. You know, I was born in the filth of the southern gutters. For centuries, my life was nothing but a sickening cycle of betrayals. My clan abandoned me when the righteous sects purged the wild forests; my masters treated me as an expendable furnace to absorb their cultivation backlashes; my allies sold my blood to underworld auction houses for bags of mid-tier spirit stones. In this world, every hand extended toward me is a hand holding a hidden dagger.”

Her voice trembled slightly, a soft, radiant light entering her tired eyes.

”Except for his. When Chen Feng found me pinned to the rocks of the Black Lake, bleeding to death with shattered meridians, he did not hesitate and simply drew his sword, slaughtered the thirty six bounty hunters tracking my scent, wrapped his own cloak around my shivering shoulders, and carried me three thousand miles across the northern region back to his mountain.”

”To the rest of the world, he may be an arrogant and overbearing dragon who hoards glory and tramples the earth. But to me... in a life that was nothing but pitch-black, suffocating darkness, Chen Feng became my light. He gave me a home. He gave me a purpose. He gave me the dignity to stand upon this mountain and call myself a queen. And at the very least..., in this final hour, I wanted to keep that light burning. Even if I must burn my own soul to ashes to shield the embers.”

Haoran listened.

He looked upon the bloody, beaten fox woman standing tall amidst the ruins of her empire, feeling the unyielding, tragic resonance of her conviction.

Haoran sighed, a quiet sound of genuine, rare lamentation.

”What a pity.”

He lowered his sword by a fraction of an inch, his golden eyes sweeping over her battered frame.

”If you were born in the upper realm... no, if your fate weren’t intertwined with that man, you would surely go down in history as a great empress.”

She had the cunning of a strategist, the ruthlessness of a conqueror, and the unbending loyalty that ancient monarchs spent lifetimes searching for in vain.

If she had been born under the grand firmament of the central heavens, unburdened by the parasitic, doomed destiny of a lower-plane protagonist, she could have climbed the peaks of the Supreme Emperor realm with her own two feet.

Da Xiaomi shook her head, a peaceful, resigned smile curling her blood-stained lips.

”No need to think about what if. The river of time flows only forward, and I chose my shore long ago. So, let us end this.”

Without hesitation, Da Xiaomi roared!

SKREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE—!!!!!

A deafening, bloodcurdling shriek of ancient beast wrath tore from her lungs, spraying crimson blood across the inside of the avatar’s.

Every drop of her remaining life-essence, her thousand-year-old demon fox core, and the very foundation of her soul violently detonated into pure, boiling energy!

Without another thought, the fox lunged forward with the blinding momentum of a falling mountain.

Its nine colossal tails snapped forward in a coordinated, piercing spear-formation, crackling with chaotic purple lightning, while its massive crystal claws swept across the plateau to tear the young sovereign into formless meat!

HUMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM—!

But Haoran just stared at her and raised his sword, the pitch-black blade lifting smoothly toward the sky.

And without hesitation, he slashed down...

TICK.

And the entire world lost its color.

In a fraction of a second, the purple glow of the burning lotus palaces, the fiery red of the clouds, the pale white of the moon, and the vibrant crimson of her blood were completely, violently wiped away from reality.

Everything turned into monochrome gray.

Space stopped vibrating; sound ceased to exist; the laws of physics bowed flat against the bedrock as a singular, conceptual truth was carved into the timeline!

SWOOOOOOOOOSH—!

Then, a pitch-black wave of sword intent swallowed Da Xiaomi and her avatar in an instant.

It was not a blast of kinetic force. It was an absolute, ontological erasure carved from the deepest void born from both Haoran and the sword!

The spirit avatar instantly ceased to have mass, volume, or existence.

The black wave washed over the giant fox’s brow, over its colossal limbs, and over its nine thrashed tails, devouring the purple light down to the fundamental spiritual atoms, passing cleanly through the mountain ridge and cleaving a bottomless, smooth-walled abyss ten thousand miles into the distant earth.

As the sword intent disappeared, the color slowly bled back into the bruised night sky.

Da Xiaomi’s Spirit Avatar slowly dissipated.

Like fine, glittering purple sand slipping through the fingers of a giant, the colossal construct unraveled into harmless, floating embers that were caught by the rising mountain draft, scattering into non-existence.

Meanwhile, she was falling to the ground.

Stripped of her avatar, her dantians shattered, her dantians cleaved cleanly down the center by the dark sword intent, Da Xiaomi’s broken, delicate body plummeted weightlessly through the empty air toward the jagged obsidian rubble below.

Her torn violet robes fluttered around her like the broken wings of a dying moth, her long hair whipping across her bruised, blood-smeared face.

Her eyes locked on Haoran.

Through the falling ash, through the swirling embers of her burning city, her pupils, dimming rapidly as the light of her soul was snuffed out, emained pinned to the unmoving young man hovering above the ruins.

But slowly, she closed her eyes.

The wind roared in her ears, but inside the quiet sanctuary of her falling mind, a deep, suffocating darkness rose to claim her.

Ah... so this is how it ends.

A bitter, freezing ache blossomed within the hollow cavern of her chest—an agonizing, drowning tide of self-reproach that tasted heavier than the blood pooling in her throat.

A failure.

The word echoed through her dying soul like an iron bell tolling for a pauper’s funeral.

What a miserable, pathetic failure I have been.

She had sat upon the grand bone throne of the Demonic Lotus Sect for centuries, calling herself a master of deception, priding herself on her cold cunning and ruthless survival instincts.

Yet look at what her brilliant intellect had wrought.

She had crowned an otherworldly demon as her sacred Saintess, and that same saintess handed the all information about her sect to this monster.

Thousands of disciples, slaughtered or enslaved in a single night.

The grand palaces she had spent three hundred years carving from the volcanic rock, reduced to burning slag and pulverized dust.

Her lineage was extinct, her banners trampled in the mud, and her name would only ever be remembered as the foolish fox who slept while the wolves climbed through the window.

And Chen Xu...

A sharp, phantom agony tore through her shattered ribs, worse than any sword strike.

Her sweet, noble boy.

The child she had carried beneath her heart, the boy who had inherited his father’s proud bloodline and her own gentle purple eyes.

She hadn’t been there when he was killed, she hadn’t been there to protect him, and now, she was dying without leaving a single scratch on his killer’s cheek.

She was a failure of a mother for not avenging her son.

She was falling into the dirt, leaving the murderer of her only child to stand triumphant upon her burning roof, while her boy’s death did not get justice.

What kind of mother died so helplessly, so pathetically, while her son’s blood was still warm on the floor?

And Chen Feng...

The memory of the White Dragon Emperor flashed before her dimming sight—tall, radiant, draped in white robe, looking out over the world with that unshakeable pride that had captured her heart many years ago.

’You gave me all what I dreamed of, Chen Feng,’ she mourned silently, tears finally leaking from beneath her closed lids, washing clean lines through the soot on her cheeks. ’And I couldn’t even protect what you cared for.’

She had spent centuries lingering in his peripheral vision, content to be the lover in the dark, the unacknowledged concubine who cleaned the grease from his armor while proud maidens like Bing Wuxian and Xun Xie’er wore the formal jade crowns of his legal wives.

She had told herself she didn’t care about titles, that being the secret warmth in his bed was enough.

What a cowardly lie.

Deep down, in the most selfish, desperate corner of her heart, she had wanted to be his true equal.

She had wanted him to look upon her not merely as a useful, loyal companion, but with that all-consuming, world-defying passion that poets sang of.

Yet she had remained a shadow to the very end.

A failure of a woman who can never earn the love of the man she had always admired.

She had given him her sect, her youth, her body, yet she died as she had lived: an unofficial concubine, a convenient stepping stone, an afterthought in the grand epic of a chosen one’s ascension.

’It’s fine,’ she thought, a final, hollow numbness creeping into her frozen marrow as the jagged basalt rocks rushed up to meet her spine.

A sect master who lost her sect.

A mother who couldn’t protect her child.

A woman who was never truly loved.

Yes...

This is a death, befitting of a failure like her.

CRASH.

Her broken body slammed heavily into the pulverized black slate at the base of the palace, bouncing once before lying completely still amidst the falling ash, the rain of dying purple sparks slowly burying her silent, smiling face.