Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

The ancestral peaks of the White Dragon Sect stood shrouded in perennial frost, their jagged spires piercing through thick blankets of crystalline cloud like the slumbering horns of primeval beasts.

For hundreds of years, these grand mountains had represented an insurmountable sanctuary of orthodoxy and sacred pride of the Ancient Heaven Star.

Vast spirit springs burbled beneath carved jade courtyards, ancient guardian formations hummed with quiet vigilance, and the legacy of ancient cultivators cast a long, protective shadow over the lands below.

Yet today, inside the grand hall of the main peak, the air was neither serene nor proud.

It was suffocating, stale, and steeped in an ominous gloom that seemed to seep straight out of the ancient stone walls.

At this moment, the Grand Elder, Zhao Ming, sat motionless upon the grand dais, perched atop a throne sculpted from whole-block spirit jade.

His snow-white hair fell like frozen silk over broad, aged shoulders, and his long white beard cascaded down toward his lap, trembling ever so slightly with the labored, restrained rhythm of his breathing.

His flowing white robes bore the intricate silver embroidery of a coiled serpentine dragon, the supreme emblem of their lineage.

His eyes, typically sharp as flying swords, were deeply shadowed, their corners lined with profound exhaustion.

Arranged in concentric tiers beneath him, dozens of sect elders sat across wide prayer mats.

Every single face in the hall was carved with grave solemnity.

The usual haughty calm of elders who ruled millions of mortal lives was nowhere to be seen. Instead, nervous twitches, rapid spiritual murmurings, and anxious glances darted between the pillars.

”Brother Zhao, has there been any response from our informants?” asked an elder seated to the left, his voice hushed and trembling with dread.

A heavy, suffocating silence fell upon the assembly before the keeper of the ancestral hall slowly stood up, his aged hands clutching a carved spirit tablet with knuckles drained of all color.

”Nothing,” the grand elder reported solemnly, his voice shaking with restrained panic. ”Not to mention Lord Chen Shan and his wife, our sect master’s wife, Lady Xun Xie’er was also missing. Lady Bing Wuxian had gone to search for them but still no news.”

Murmurs of utter dismay broke out across the tiers of elders.

”How could they simply disappear?!” another elder exclaimed worriedly, striking the stone floor with his palm.

”... there’s more bad news,” muttered an elder in gray robes, unrolling an intelligence scroll inscribed with fresh cinnabar runes, his fingers shook violently as he held the parchment to the dim light of the hall.

The assembly held its breath, the collective weight of their anxiety pressing down upon the hall like an iron vault.

”...tell us.” Zhao Ming commanded, his deep voice carrying a gravelly edge of authority, though beneath his tranquil exterior, a storm of unease was violently gathering.

The gray-robed elder swallowed hard, his throat dry. ”The remnants of the Four Sacred Grounds...they were being hunted by the otherworldly demons, and the four masters has yet to be found.”

”Yet to be found?” an elder gasped, her face pale. ”They are the four strongest beings in the world beside our Sect Master, surely they weren’t being hunted down as well and went into hiding, right?”

Every elder in the room felt the blood drain from their faces.

The entire region was collapsing.

Lineages that had ruled supreme for tens of thousands of years were falling like rotting wheat before a divine scythe.

The disappearance of the sect master’s parents, the annihilation of the Four Sacred Grounds, every single piece of news pointed toward an impending, apocalyptic catastrophe that was swiftly closing around their mountain gates.

”Grand Elder Zhao!” an elder cried out, rising to his feet with wide, bloodshot eyes. ”The storm is coming here! We cannot wait for the sect master to return!”

Grand Elder Zhao Ming closed his eyes for a moment, taking a slow, measured breath to calm the turbulent churn of spiritual energy in his chest, his long white beard shifted as he raised his weathered head.

Just then, just as Elder Zhao was about to speak, but at that moment, a terrifying pressure descended like a planet pressing down on them.

The grand hall groaned.

The ancient pillars of stone developed hairline fractures, spiderwebbing upward toward the high ceilings.

The very fabric of the surrounding atmosphere condensed into an agonizing, physical weight.

Dozens of elders were instantly driven down onto their bellies, their chests slammed mercilessly against the stone floor, their breaths violently squeezed from their lungs as if an entire celestial world had been dropped straight onto the roof of their sect.

Lesser elders spat out mouthfuls of visceral blood, their cultivation bases cracking under the sheer, incomprehensible gravity of the aura.

Elder Zhao frowned and released his aura, and a magnificent white dragon phantom erupted from his back.

Then, a surge of peak Nirvana Rebirth spiritual majesty cascaded through the room like an expanding silver barrier, pushing back the foreign spatial compression and wrapping around the suffocating elders.

His long hair whipped violently about his face, and his deep gaze flared with fierce ancestral fury.

”Insolence! Who dare be so arrogant before the White Dragon Sect!” Elder Zhao roared and flew out of the hall.

Riding a furious streak of silver dragon radiance, he tore through the grand doors and soared straight into the open sky above the mountain peak, ready to smite whatever impudent trespasser had dared insult their ancient gates.

But the very moment he did so, he froze in shock.

The silver dragon aura surrounding his body flickered violently, then withered into nothingness.

The arrogant fury that had burned in his chest turned to pure, paralyzing ice in a single microsecond.

His breath caught in his throat, his jaw fell open, and his old eyes stretched to their absolute limits in utter, trembling disbelief.

There, standing in the sky, was a thousand meter tall humanoid spirit avatar made up of golden energy.

It was colossal beyond sanity. The colossal giant of radiant gold pierced through the clouds, its head grazing the upper vault of heaven.

Its limbs were carved from pure, condensed supreme law, burning with celestial flames that set the surrounding horizon ablaze in blinding hues of auric gold.

Massive rings of divine runes orbited its broad shoulders and waist, rotating with the grinding roar of an active world millstone.

The ambient clouds for hundreds of miles had been incinerated into nothingness, leaving only the endless, blinding silhouette of the golden titan casting an apocalyptic shadow that swallowed all nine mountain peaks of the White Dragon Sect in eternal twilight.

The other elders froze in shock as well.

Streaming out of the grand hall behind Grand Elder Zhao, the dozens of elders came to an abrupt, staggering halt upon the open plaza.

They looked up, their hands falling numbly to their sides, their weapons clattering onto the jade pavement.

Their bodies shook uncontrollably, knees quivering beneath their robes as their minds completely broke under the visual horror of the entity looming over them.

”What... what is that?” one elder whimpered, his voice shrinking into a high-pitched squeak as he grabbed his own hair in hysteria.

”God... is that a god?” another wept, collapsing directly to his knees on the stone, his eyes glassy with unconditional despair.

To lower-realm cultivators who had spent their whole lives believing that a Saint was the pinnacle of existence, the manifestation before them was not a cultivator’s technique—it was an ancient deity from the immortal heavens, descended to enact divine judgment upon mortal vermin.

They wouldn’t believe that it was a Spirit Avatar, after all, no avatar could be that big!

High up in the golden firmament, nestled within the radiant forehead of the spirit avatar, two figures stood peacefully upon a platform of crystallized divine light.

Shen Haoran looked down upon the terrified elders scurrying like ants upon the mountaintop.

His pristine robes fluttered softly, untouched by the immense gravitational distortions radiating from his own avatar.

His handsome features were entirely composed, devoid of anger or excitement, bearing only the amused, patronizing smile of a nobleman watching street insects squirm beneath his gaze.

Just then, Haoran smiled, ”Xun’er, why don’t you go and try that technique at them?”

Shen Xun’er, who was standing beside him, blinked, and immediately grinned, as a look of delighted, wicked amusement lit up her refined face.

The demure, quiet demeanor she had maintained earlier vanished in an instant, replaced by the sadistic thrill of being given permission to play with disposable mortal toys.

She took a dainty step forward, resting her hands against her slender waist for a fleeting moment before stepping out onto the empty air beside the giant’s forehead.

”Since Young Master commands it,” she chuckled, her voice melodious yet laced with chilling malice. ”I have just comprehended this. And I was wondering what kind of flesh would serve as the best sacrifice for it.”

Then, she clasped her hands together, the space bending around her.

The moment her delicate fingers intertwined, the sky within ten miles violently warped.

Pristine celestial light bent and fractured into strange, jagged angles as if the sky were made of thin, brittle glass.

Spatial fissures, jet-black and humming with chaotic anti-matter, snaked through the air around her slender silhouette.

The surrounding winds ceased entirely, instantly drawn toward the vortex forming at the center of her palms.

Grand Elder Zhao Ming, still hovering thousands of feet below, sensed the terrifying law of destruction coalescing above and felt every hair on his body stand on end.

”Stop her!”

His frantic screams were completely useless.

Before they can move, she slowly separated her hands, and a small black hole appeared between her two palms.

It was no larger than an infant’s fist.

Completely pitch-black, it held no light, no reflection, and no tangible form—only an absolute, terrifying absence of reality.

The space around this miniature singularity twisted in agonizing circular spirals, pulling in the ambient golden radiance of the titan, the clouds, and even the natural sound waves of the universe.

Looking directly at it made the eyes of the elders below bleed from spiritual vertigo.

Then, Shen Xun’er’s crystalline chuckle rang out across the heavens like the tolling of a funeral bell as her pale wrist snapped downward, tossing the dark sphere casually, as though she were merely discarding a worthless stone into a garden pond.

It slowly descended.

Silent, weightless, and dreadful, the marble-sized black sphere drifted down through the freezing mountain air.

Grand Elder Zhao Ming drew his ancient dragon sword, his teeth grinding to dust as he roared, attempting to channel thousands of years of his pure cultivation into a magnificent crescent slash to sever the anomaly in half.

But it was already too late.

The small dark marble swelled into the size of a carriage, then a mountain pavilion, and then an entire palace hall!

Its gravitational pull exploded exponentially with every meter it fell.

The majestic peaks of the White Dragon Sect began to tear apart.

Towering ancient pine trees were violently uprooted from the rocky soil, rocketing upward toward the expanding void.

Ornate pavilions, thousands of tons of carved jade masonry, ancestral dragon statues, and ancient formation barriers were ripped from their foundations like dried straw, screaming through the air as they were dragged into the yawning black maw.

”NO! WHAT’S HAPPENING!?!”

”Save me! Grand Elder, save—”

Dozens of elders and disciples who have no idea what was going were swept off their feet, their spiritual shields popping like fragile soap bubbles the moment they came within a thousand yards of the singularity.

The gravitational force twisted their bodies, snapping their bones and tearing their limbs apart into fine ribbons of flesh and bloody mist before they even touched the event horizon.

The mountain spires themselves fractured.

Entire granite cliffs cracked, splintered, and disintegrated into billions of pebbles that swirled in a massive, terrifying spiral around the hungry, expanding darkness.

Ancient spirit veins beneath the ground were forcibly unearthed and sucked into the swirling void, bursting into blinding white light before vanishing completely into non-existence.

The grand hall of the White Dragon Sect, the centuries of cultivation heritage, the priceless libraries of jade scrolls, the defensive formations, and the scores of screaming elders—everything was ruthlessly consumed, swallowed whole by the insatiable, roaring abyss of the descending black hole.

Grand Elder Zhao Ming could only watch in broken, weeping horror as the sect, and the people were unceremoniously erased from the face of the world, all beneath the cold, amused smiles of the two figures perched atop the forehead of the golden giant.