Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

The atmospheric boundary between heaven and earth seemed to shatter under the apocalyptic weight of Chen Feng’s unbridled fury.

His qi scorched the surrounding air into a suffocating vacuum, boiling the clouds and bending the visual spectrum into violently warping rings of heat distortion.

Every thought of strategic retreat, every memory of his companion sects, and every instinct of rational self-preservation had burned away, leaving behind only the howling, primal beast within his soul.

”Give her back to me!” Chen Feng roared as he rushed towards Haoran.

The sound of his voice was not merely a shout; it was a physical battering ram that fractured the dimensional strata.

He stepped across the sky with terrifying, violent speed, crossing dozens of leagues in the fraction of a single heartbeat.

His right arm was drawn back, muscles coiling like ancient horned dragons beneath skin radiating incandescent crimson radiance.

The space around his advancing fist collapsed into a howling singularity, primed to cave in Haoran’s chest and pulverize the imperial youth down to the marrow of his bones.

But with one fluid, maddeningly leisurely grace, Haoran’s slender wrist rotated, and the Black Imperial Sword, Azathoth, cleaved through the empty firmament in a sweeping, theatrical diagonal arc.

Then, an astronomical crescent of pitch-black luminescence detached from the edge of the dark blade, ballooning outward until it spanned over three thousand meters across the sky.

It roared with the simulated fury of a dying star, kicking up hurricane-force winds that howled with terrifying acoustic resonance, painted in colors that suggested an absolute, world-ending cataclysm.

Seeing the colossal, pitch-black wave bearing down upon him, Chen Feng’s forward momentum abruptly halted.

He could not afford to let a dark strike of that scale envelope him and potentially obliterate whatever remained of Bing Wuxian’s mutilated frame lingering in Haoran’s grasp.

His jaw locked, and thrusting both palms forward, he channeled the purest qi he could master.

”Don’t think that will stop me! Heavenly Dragon Light!”

SHRAAAAAAA!

From the centers of his palms, a powerful and blindingly bright beam of concentrated silver qi erupted.

It was a spear of pure, unadulterated holy radiance, dense as condensed stellar matter and hot enough to boil oceans.

It tore through the atmosphere with an ear-piercing sonic shriek, laser-focused on piercing through the incoming black crescent and incinerating the smiling devil standing behind it.

But Haoran simply smirked.

The cold curvature of his lips was sharp as a freshly honed executioner’s scalpel as his eyes danced with sadistic amusement as he watched the brilliant silver beam surge toward him.

Truthfully, the massive, terrifying crescent of black energy that had looked like a world-cleaving strike was nothing more than an empty, hollow shell of superficial spiritual mist—a theatrical display of optical distortion and harmless acoustic resonance, woven with barely enough spiritual qi to extinguish a common tallow candle.

It carried no cutting edge, no spatial-cleaving law, and no harmful intent.

To use a certain Uncle’s words, ”It was all show, no substance.”

The blinding silver beam struck the center of the colossal black wave with the effortless ease of a red-hot iron needle piercing through wet paper.

The dark crescent did not even fight back; it simply popped, dissolving into wisps of harmless, fading black smoke that were instantly blown away by the rising thermals.

Having encountered zero resistance, the full, devastating magnitude of Chen Feng’s silver beam surged forward unhindered, carrying billions of pounds of kinetic and holy destruction straight toward Haoran’s chest!

But Haoran simply mused, his fingers released their tight grip on Bing Wuxian’s hair, and with a careless, dismissive flick of his wrist, as though tossing an empty wine jug into a roadside ditch, Haoran hurled the mutilated, limbless torso of the woman directly into the path of the incoming silver devastation.

Simultaneously, his left index finger snapped forward, and from the tip of his pale finger, a tiny, compressed bead of silver sword intent shot out like an invisible lightning bolt, arcing around the side to strike the helpless body from behind at the exact moment she met her husband’s attack.

BOOM!

The collision was instantaneous and catastrophic.

From the front, the scorching, catastrophic silver beam generated by Chen Feng’s own power slammed directly into her chest.

From the back, Haoran’s hyper-compressed sword intent bullet burrowed through her spine, detonating within her lower abdomen.

Chen Feng’s eyes widened until the corners tore, blood leaking down his cheeks as his vision locked onto the horrific tableau.

The world seemed to grind to a torturous, agonizing halt as he saw his own radiant, holy light illuminate the vacant, drooling, mindless face of his beloved second wife.

And at last, he saw the flash of comprehension that never came to her hollow, shattered eyes.

Then, the dual detonations met in the center of her mutilated frame.

An explosion of conflicting holy radiance and sword intent tore through the empty sky, generating a thick, churning cloud of white smoke and boiling spiritual mist.

The heavy silence that followed was suffocating.

Through the drifting plumes of white vapor, gravity claimed the aftermath of the collision.

It was pieces of flesh and skin from the body of Bing Wuxian that was completely torn apart by two attacks.

There was no body left to catch.

The opposing forces had violently shredded the remaining torso into ragged, unrecognizable fragments.

Shreds of pale, delicate skin bearing the faint fluttered down like grotesque, bloody leaves.

Chunks of pulverized muscle, splinters of shattered bone, and a warm, fine rain of vaporized blood drifted down through the cold mountain air, descending toward the barren earth below.

”Ah... ah...”

A strangled, breathless wheeze escaped Chen Feng’s throat. His mouth hung open, his chest caving inward as if an invisible mountain had crushed his lungs.

His aura flickered wildly, threatening to implode under the sheer, incomprehensible shock of what his own hands had just wrought.

”AAAAHHHHH!”

He abandoned his guard entirely as he dove through the empty air like a madman, his hands clawing frantically at the sky, trying desperately to gather the falling, bloody scraps into his arms.

”Wuxian! Wuxian! No, no, no!” he sobbed, his voice cracking into high-pitched, pathetic shrieks of pure, unadulterated agony.

He caught a ragged strip of her pale skin against his chest, clutching the wet, warm gristle to his heart, completely uncaring that her blood was soaking into his skin.

Tears and snot poured freely down his face, mixing with the gore as he drifted in circles, weeping and howling like a mortally wounded animal, clutching fragments of charred bone and shredded flesh as if he could somehow piece her back together through the sheer force of his grief.

Haoran looked down at him coldly.

Hovering twenty paces above the weeping Saint, Haoran stood with his hands resting lightly behind his back, his garments entirely untainted by the bloody mist drifting through the wind.

His expression was detached, analytical, and devoid of the slightest flicker of human empathy.

He watched the legendary White Dragon Emperor, a man who once hailed as the strongest expert on land, furled into a trembling ball, sniffling and crying over scraps of wet meat.

Haoran shook his head. He had originally prepared elaborate psychological attacks to wear down Chen Feng’s mental defenses before delivering the killing blow.

But looking at the broken, sniveling wreck groveling beneath his boots, Haoran realized that the grand hero of this world was far more fragile than he had anticipated.

Breaking a man’s heart was so effortless that complex schemes felt like an unnecessary waste of effort.

So with a soft flicker of qi from his storage ring, he stored away his sword, while three gruesome trophies materialized in the open air before him.

Dangling from his left hand were two wet, limp sheets of preserved flesh—the torn facial skins of Chen Feng’s father and mother, their hollow eye sockets and frozen, terrified expressions preserved in sickening detail.

Tucked under his right arm, held by a clump of tangled, blood-caked hair, was the severed head of his first wife, Xun Xie’er.

Her once-radiant countenance was pale as chalk, her lips parted in a silent, eternal scream of terror, the stump of her neck cleanly severed and stained with dried, dark crimson.

”Hey. Chen Feng,” Haoran spoke, his voice mild and conversational, as if calling to a companion across a courtyard.

His fingers uncurled, and the two wet, flapping sheets of cured facial skin drifted downward through the cold air.

Hearing his name called, Chen Feng raised his tear-stained, blood-smeared face upward in a reflex of unthinking confusion.

And at that exact moment, the wet, leathery surfaces struck him squarely across the bridge of his nose and cheeks.

The cold, clammy skin slapped against his warm flesh, temporarily blinding his vision with the stench of embalming spirit-herbs and old, dried blood.

Blinded by grief and burning with humiliation, Chen Feng assumed it was merely another petty insult—perhaps a filthy rag or a poisoned talisman tossed down by the imperial scion to torment his sorrow.

So with a furious, disgusted snarl, his hands shot up, tearing the sticky, wet objects from his features, and he violently hurled them away into the empty sky, sending them tumbling toward the distant sandy winds.

Haoran chuckled, his voice echoed like the chiming of a funeral bell as he leaned forward slightly.

”My, how filial of you, White Dragon Emperor,” Haoran remarked with a soft, patronizing click of his tongue. ”Tossing the faces of your own mother and father into the dirt like common garbage? If they were still breathing, they might just disown you on the spot for such ungrateful conduct.”

The words bypassed his grief like an icy needle plunged straight into his brainstem.

A violent, sickening shudder rippled through Chen Feng’s spine.

The air in his throat seized, and, moving with stiff, robotic terror, his neck cranked to the side, his eyes tracking the two fluttering pieces of leathery flesh drifting through the air several yards away.

And his eyes widened... it was the faces of his parents!

The unmistakable curve of his father’s proud brow, etched with the familiar ancestral scar he had known since childhood... the soft, gentle arch of his mother’s cheekbones, still bearing the faint mole near the corner of her lip...

It was them.

The skin had been flayed whole, preserved to look exactly like the faces that had smiled at him before he entered the dimensional void.

And he had just ripped them from his own face and thrown them into the filth!

”NOOO!”

A shriek of pure, soul-shattering horror ripped from Chen Feng’s chest as he rushed towards the faces as if his life was on the line.

He didn’t care about his defenses; he didn’t care about Haoran hovering above him and just threw his entire body forward, burning through his spiritual essence to generate a burst of desperate speed, his trembling hands reaching out to catch the tumbling skins of his beloved parents before the mountain wind could tear them apart or let them fall into the dirt below.

But, at that moment, Haoran spoke.

”Ah, my apologies,” his voice drifted down, dripping with insincere, theatrical courtesy. ”My hand slipped. I seem to have dropped something else of yours.”

Chen Feng paused for a second, the mocking tone forced his head to jerk upward mid-flight, his perception involuntarily sweeping across the space above him.

And his eyes widened.

Tumbling through the air, her hair spinning in the turbulent wind, was the severed head of Xun Xie’er.

The woman who had stood beside him through his earliest trials, who had supported him since the time when he was an impoverished rogue cultivator, and whose laughter had kept him sane through countless brushes with death.

Her lifeless, dead eyes seemed to look directly at him as her severed neck trailed thin wisps of freezing mist.

Two horrors. Two directions. The faces of his parents falling toward the left; the severed head of his first wife plunging toward the right.

The cruel, agonizing dilemma lasted for a fraction of a millisecond within his shattered mind.

With a ragged, weeping sob, Chen Feng chose filial piety as he twisted his body toward the left, lunging across the sky with outstretched arms.

His trembling fingers caught the wet, cold skins of his parents, pulling them gently, desperately against his chest, tucking them beneath his robes against his bare, beating heart as he wept into their hollow eye sockets.

Having secured his parents’ remains, Chen Feng spun around instantly, extending his right hand toward the falling head of Xun Xie’er, his spiritual qi reaching out to wrap her in a gentle, protective spatial bubble.

PANG!

A streak of silver light sliced through the intervening distance with impossible, cruel velocity.

It was Haoran, who shot a hyper-dense sword intent bullet that immediately struck Xun Xie’er’s severed head squarely between her dead, glassy eyes!

The kinetic shockwave did not merely pierce the skull; it violently detonated her cranial cavity, fracturing the bone and sending the desecrated head rocketing downward like a discarded cannonball.

What remained plummeted through thousands of feet of empty air before violently smashing into the jagged, jagged rocks of the mountain basin below, bursting into a wet, sickening splatter of crushed bone and gray matter that stained the cold stone forever.

The last physical trace of his first love had been annihilated before his very eyes.

The sky turned pitch black as the clouds above them violently caught fire.

A pillar of crimson, demonic wrath erupted from Chen Feng’s soul, splitting the tectonic plates of the earth thousands of feet below!

His eyes were no longer those of a righteous cultivator; they were burning pits of demonic, bottomless bloodlust!

”SHEN HAORAN! YOU ANIMAL! YOU VILE, DISRESPECTFUL BASTARD!” Chen Feng screamed, his vocal cords tearing as blood sprayed from his lips with every furious syllable.

”SHE WAS ALREADY DEAD! THEY WERE ALREADY SLAIN! HOW DARE YOU DESECRATE THE DEAD?! HOW DARE YOU INSULT THEIR CORPSES?! I WILL PEEL YOUR SKIN STRIP BY STRIP! I WILL DRINK YOUR BLOOD UNTIL YOUR CLAN IS EXTINCT! DIE! DIE! DIE!”