Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

Chen Feng hovered in the freezing air, his chest heaving violently, his face distorted into a mask of pure, primal agony.

Clutched desperately against his bare, blood-streaked torso were the two thin, leathery sheets of skin carved from the faces of his mother and father.

His knuckles were bone-white; his breath emerged in ragged, hitching sobs that shook his entire muscular frame.

The luminescence of his newly forged Saint cultivation was flickering wildly, polluted by the thick, vein-like cords of dark crimson fury that coiled outward from his heart, hissing as they corroded the pure draconic qi he had refined through eight grueling years of dimensional torment.

Standing above, perfectly balanced upon the invisible currents of the upper firmament, Haoran watched the weeping protagonist with the detached, unhurried curiosity of a scholar studying an insect pinned beneath glass.

Slowly, he raised two slender fingers before his chest, lightly tracing the space between his brows.

Within the depths of his spiritual sea, an ancient imperial art stirred, sending a ripple of profound, primordial perception through his physical eyes.

For a brief, dazzling second, his bright golden pupils vanished, replaced by an intricate, revolving mandala of radiant kaleidoscope brilliance.

And instantly, what met his divine sight was a spectacle of catastrophic decline.

As the heaven-anointed Protagonist of this world, Chen Feng’s head should had been crowned with a towering, glorious halo of brilliant seven-colored karmic fortune—a pillar of divine luck that bent probability to his will, ensured fortuitous encounters in every ancient ruin, and turned even fatal, near-death disasters into stepping stones for miraculous realm breakthroughs.

Now, that glorious pillar was in utter ruins.

Under the ruthless annihilation of everything he loved—the slaughter of his White Dragon Sect, the horrific mutilation and death of his first and second wife Xun Xie’er and Bing Wuxian by his own hand, the desecration of his parents’ faces, and the death of his lover and son, Chen Feng’s divine halo had fractured.

The vibrant colors had drained away like dye washed out by torrential rain as the seven radiant hues were shrunk, withering into a dull, sickly gray that was rapidly losing its luster, turning so muted and lifeless that they started to look monochrome.

It was the visual representation of a Protagonist whose karmic favor had been severed, abandoned by the very Heavenly Dao that had once birthed him.

He shook his head. A faint, audible sigh slipped past his lips, carrying a profound sense of anticlimactic boredom.

”Isn’t this protagonist way too pathetic?”

Haoran murmured the thought aloud, his tone mild, dry, and lacking the slightest trace of mockery—which made the observation infinitely more cutting.

This man before him, who had climbed to the absolute pinnacle of this lower world, who had crowned himself the White Dragon Emperor and seized the title of a living Saint, was crumbling like wet sand simply because a few mortal attachments had been severed.

A true supreme of the cosmos understood that parents, lovers, and sects were mere fleeting waypoints along the eternal, lonely road toward the supreme Dao.

To allow the destruction of mere mortal to crack one’s spiritual foundation, to weep and wail like a beggar over scraps of preserved skin—it proved that Chen Feng’s spirit had never truly transcended the mud of his birth.

His cultivation was a grand, gilded tower built atop a foundation of brittle glass.

Of course, this is just Haoran being a hypocrite, because he himself seek and acknowledged that he wanted someone who can stand beside him as he walked that lonely road to supremacy.

The reason why he was always trying to motivate the people around him to improve was simply because he doesn’t want to abandon them.

Because deep in his heart, he knew that he will never stop moving forward, no matter what he has to abandon, that’s why, for those who fell behind, he will not come back for them.

Just then, with a subtle twitch of his fingers, the fabric of the surrounding space twisted into a narrow, dark crevice.

Out of the void slipped the straight, slender hilt of the Black Imperial Sword.

The blade slid into Haoran’s pale grip with a soft, hungry hiss that drank in the ambient light.

It was cold, dark, and utterly devoid of reflection, vibrating with the silent, patient malice of an ancient god waiting to carve away another piece of reality.

”...Chen Feng, it’s time to have a reunion with your family.”

But, at that very moment, the very geometry of the three-dimensional plane around Haoran warped violently.

The distance between the points of space collapsed inward, folding like thick parchment being forcibly crushed into a tight, microscopic ball.

Then, a colossal, invisible gravitational pressure—measured in billions of tons of concentrated spatial force—slammed into Haoran from every direction simultaneously.

The atmosphere crystallized around his silhouette into an impenetrable block of distorted space, attempting to compress his flesh, his internal organs, and his spiritual sea into a single point of pulverized matter.

The hem of his robes stiffened, resisting the violent tectonic shear that was grinding against his outer barrier.

But even as the immense spatial vice tightened around him, Haoran’s features remained largely undisturbed.

He did not gasp for air; his bones did not creak under the kinetic stress, and his golden pupils merely turned toward the maddened man twenty paces away, studying the chaotic, ragged way the Saint was burning his qi to sustain the innate technique.

”Space manipulation is indeed powerful,” Haoran remarked calmly, his voice easily cutting through the localized spatial screech. ”To grasp the invisible strings of reality and use them as a butcher’s wire is the mark of a true Saint. But if you rely solely on this, you won’t be able to beat me.”

Haoran slowly adjusted his grip on Azathoth’s hilt, his posture straight, unyielding as a mountain of divine jade.

”You could’ve stuck to your physique, at least then you’d have a chance.”

The words were an objective, merciless critique.

Chen Feng was born with one of the fragment of the legendary Dragon God Physique—the very Physique that governs over ”order”.

Had Chen Feng charged forward, relying on the conceptual weight of his physique, he might have forced Haoran to expend a shred of effort.

Instead, blinded by his newfound ascension, Chen Feng had abandoned his greatest innate advantage to rely on the crude, newly comprehended spatial manipulation of an early-stage Saint—a realm where he was nothing more than an infant clumsily swinging a wooden sword.

”Shut up!”

The sound tore from his throat in a bloody spray, his vocal cords shredding under the strain of his hysteria!

Veins bulged along his neck and temples like knotted purple serpents, his blood igniting into a blinding, suicidal inferno within his dantian!

Chen Feng thrust both arms forward, his clawed fingers hooking violently into the empty air, twisting them in opposite directions!

SKRRRRRR!

He did not merely want to crush Haoran; he sought to rip his physical coordinates apart!

He attempted to twist the upper half of Haoran’s space three hundred and sixty degrees to the left, while spinning the lower half to the right, intending to shear his torso from his waist and spiral his limbs into unrecognizable ribbons of mangled meat and bone!

The space surrounding Haoran shrieked like tearing metal, the visual reality around him bending into grotesque, dizzying spirals of refracted gray light!

But for some reason, Haoran’s body remained completely still.

Not a single crease of his robes twisted.

Not a single strand of his hair shifted out of place.

Haoran stood suspended within the epicenter of the spatial maelstrom as if he were standing inside a quiet, sunlit courtyard on a windless afternoon.

The catastrophic shear that should have torn a mountain range into atomic dust simply slid across his form, dissolving into harmless, gentle ripples that dissipated into the atmosphere without leaving a single scratch on his porcelain skin.

Chen Feng stared in shock. His ragged breathing seized in his throat, his bloodshot eyes stretched to their absolute, tearing limits, his clawed hands freezing mid-twist as his mind completely broke against the impossible sight.

”Just... just how is this possible?!”

A choked, breathless wheeze escaped Chen Feng’s lips.

He was a Saint! He had broken the mortal shackles! His spatial manipulation was an absolute law bestowed by the heavens themselves!

How could an unmoving youth, someone who hadn’t even broken through Nirvana Rebirth, stand completely impervious to a direct spatial tear?!

”See?” Haoran smiled, ”I told you...you should’ve stick to your Physique.”

In truth, the reason he remained unscathed is due to the fact that Qing’er, who remained in his shadow, was nullifying all spatial manipulation to protect him.

She was an Earthly Saint.

Cultivators of Qing’er’s caliber had already mastered the manipulatiom of space to such a high degree that it was no longer an exercise of violent pulling, but an effortless, micro-level authority that could weave, unravel, and rewrite the physical dimensions with a flick of a finger.

To Qing’er, Chen Feng’s wild, desperate attempts to twist space were as laughably clumsy as a toddler trying to drown an ancient whale with a cup of puddle water.

Every thread of spatial distortion he threw forward was intercepted, dismantled, and flattened into stillness by her superior spatial manipulation before it could even register as a threat.

Of course, if it was Chen Feng at his prime as a protagonist, he would surely be able to overpower Qing’er

Under ordinary circumstances, the Heavenly Dao would have intervened on behalf of its chosen child.

A sudden spatial tremor, an unexpected atmospheric alignment, or a miraculous backlash from an ancient relic would have manifested to disrupt Qing’er’s interference and grant Chen Feng a narrow chance to win.

Yet, looking at the faded, monotone gray mist clinging to his crown, that protection was entirely gone.

The cosmic scales had tipped. His fortuitous encounters had dried up; his destiny was spent, and the universe no longer cared whether he lived or died.

”This seems a bit too easy.”

Haoran shook his head, his voice dropping into a tone of quiet, genuine disappointment.

He had crossed thousands of miles, brought an army of imperial prodigies, and orchestrated a psychological slaughter, half-expecting the legendary ruler of this lower world to unleash some hidden, earth-shattering ancestral trump card that would provide a momentary thrill.

But standing here, watching the man gasp for breath with exhausted meridians and a shattered spirit, Haoran realized that an abandoned protagonist was nothing more than an ordinary ant endowed with a slightly louder voice.

”Fine. I guess there’s no point in prolonging this.”

As he said that, he instantly vanished.

There was no spatial distortion. There was no flash of movement technique, no rush of wind, and no sound.

Haoran simply ceased to occupy his coordinate in the firmament.

And before the sensory nerves in Chen Feng’s eyes could even register the empty space where his enemy had stood, a whisper of cold silk brushed against his bare, blood-streaked chest.

Chen Feng’s pupils contracted to fine pinpricks, his breath freezing in his lungs.

Shhhk!

A sound as soft and clean as a hot needle piercing cold silk rippled between them.

The straight, pitch-black blade of the Black Imperial Sword, Azathoth, slid effortlessly through Chen Feng’s sternum.

His saint level physique offered no more resistance to the dark blade than rotten wood before a razor.

The obsidian steel burrowed through skin, cracked cleanly through the breastbone, and pierced straight into the center of his golden, pulsating Saint Core, pinning his beating heart to the tip of the weapon.

”Guh...!”

A violent, sickening spasm ripped through Chen Feng’s frame as a thick, dark torrent of visceral blood erupted from his mouth, splattering across Haoran’s pristine white lapels, only to hiss and slide off the enchanted fabric without leaving a single stain.

Chen Feng’s hands, still weakly clutching the severed skins of his parents, fell limply to his sides.

The leathery sheets slipped from his numb fingers, caught by the cold mountain wind, tumbling down into the abyss below to join the mangled remains of his wives.

He looked down with trembling, paralyzed eyes at the black blade buried to the hilt in his chest.

A terrifying, icy coldness was spreading from the wound, freezing his meridians, and severing his connection to his spiritual sea.

Haoran stepped closer, until his handsome, sculpted face was barely inches from Chen Feng’s hollow, dying eyes.

His left hand reached out with slow, fluid grace, his slender fingers pressing firmly against the center of Chen Feng’s forehead.

A faint, golden rune flared upon Haoran’s palm, sending millions of microscopic, parasitic threads of soul-binding qi burrowing directly into the dying Saint’s cranial cavity, locking onto the ancient, coiled draconic marrow residing within his skeletal structure.

Haoran’s lips parted, curling into an intimate, merciless smile that carried the absolute finality of an emperor stripping a conquered king of his crown.

”Your Dragon God Physique... I’m taking it.”