Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

The wind on the rocky ridge had stopped completely.

The air felt thick, cold, and hard, like standing under a stone ceiling that could drop at any second.

”Qing’er, help out that woman,” Haoran transmitted through their private link, his thought calm, steady, and flat.

”Understood, young master,” came the swift, sweet whisper right in his mind.

Down in the crater, the Sword Emperor still had his rough, calloused fingers locked around Wei Zhingyi’s pale wrist, squeezing so hard the bone made small clicking sounds.

Ye Fan was still sitting in the dust, gasping for air, clutching his knees like a lost dog.

Then the dirt moved.

A pitchnblack darkness, darker than the night sky, slid over the shattered stones without making a single rustle.

It moved like cold water pouring through a crack, rushing straight between the old swordsman’s boots and the kneeling fox woman.

SHK-SHK-SHK!

Seven long, jagged spikes of solid darkness shot straight out of the ground!

They were thin as sewing needles at the tips, but thick as bull horns at the base, whistling upward with a vicious hiss that smelled of old graves and cold iron.

The Sword Emperor’s eyes went wide.

He didn’t even try to block them with his bare skin, and with a sharp grunt, he let go of the woman’s arm and kicked off his heel, sliding ten paces backward across the gravel.

The shadow spikes stabbed clean through the empty air where his elbow had been sitting half a breath earlier, buzzing with dark, freezing light.

As the dust settled, the black pool on the dirt rose up, forming the slender shape of a young woman standing right beside Wei Zhingyi.

She wore tight, dark silk that clung close to her frame, with long black hair and a pair of

Before the old swordsman could open his mouth to bark a question, the air cracked again.

WHOOSH!

Haoran moved like a hawk swooping on a field mouse as he stepped right in front of Ye Fan, his arm shooting down faster than a striking viper, his fingers clamping right over the boy’s nose, eyes, and jaw!

”Mmph—?!” Ye Fan choked out, his scream smothered inside his own mouth.

Haoran didn’t give him a second to think, let alone call on his strange tool.

With a twist of his heel, Haoran kicked off the broken rock, lifting the kicking, squirming youth clean off the ground by his skull.

The white robes caught the high draft, and in a blink, the young scion shot up into the dark clouds, carrying the boy away into the night sky like a bag of dirty grain.

Silence fell back over the crater.

Wei Zhingyi rubbed her bruised wrist, her silver ears twitching atop her tangled hair as she stared up at the spot in the clouds where the white figure had vanished, her breath still coming in short, uneven gasps.

The scent of pine and clean frost from those cold pills still lingered in her throat, reminding her of the cold, arrogant face that had saved her from total ruin.

She turned her head to look at the silent figure standing beside her.

She looked at the tight black clothes, and the strange, freezing aura that ran through the woman’s veins.

It was an aura that held no wild heat, no showy sparks, only a quiet, deadly weight that felt like an iron door shut tight in a deep cellar.

”That qi...” Wei Zhingyi murmured, her voice still rough from the screaming, her nine silver tails curling close to her legs for warmth. ”And that suit...are you part of Shen Clan’s Shadow Guard?”

Qing’er did not even look at her, her hands rested easy at her sides, her eyes fixed entirely on the brown-robed man standing across the gravel.

Seeing that cold wall of silence, Wei Zhingyi’s eyes widened a fraction, taking that silence as a yes.

Among the immortal clans of the Tian Yuan Empire, only those modified killers of that particular bloodline have this feeling in their qi and acted like stone statues when their work was underway.

Across the cracked stones, the old swordsman heard the name.

His cheek twitched. His boots, which had been planted firmly in the gravel, dug in just a bit deeper.

The hard, mocking look on his wrinkled face froze, turning into something tight, guarded, and sour.

The Shen Clan.

Even for an old rogue who called no sect his home, even for a man who had cut down kings and robbed ancient graves without looking back, that name was a mountain he had never dared to lean against.

Those people didn’t trade words when their blood was crossed.

If you took the arm of one of their dogs, three elders would descend from the high stars before nightfall to burn your ancestral tombs to gray powder.

”Little girl,” the Sword Emperor said, his voice dropping into a low, grating rasp, like iron scrapers working on dry leather. ”I have no quarrel with your family. This fox took a relic that belongs me, so this is our feud. She is not of your blood, and she has nothing to do with you. Step aside and leave this place. This is none of your clan’s business.”

Qing’er didn’t say a word, but simply shook her head once, a short, sharp motion that cut off his words clean.

Her young master had told her to help the woman.

That single line was the only law that mattered in this world, in the world below, or in the stars above.

If the sky itself cracked and fell toward her scalp, she would still stand in this exact spot until that young man returned.

The old man’s jaw clicked shut. His brows drew down until they nearly touched his nose, a nasty, venomous sneer pulling at his scarred lips.

”So be it,” he spat, his hand reaching behind his hip. ”I have roamed the four seas for three thousand years. I have washed my clothes in the blood of saints! If you want to throw your small life away for a fox, do not blame this old man for being impolite!”

SHING!

A dull, grey gleam lit up the cold air.

In his right palm, iron coalesced out of thin air, forming a heavy, wide-bladed dadao sword.

It had no gold engravings, no fancy red tassels, and no gems set into the guard.

It was a simple, flat-headed chopper with a thick spine, made of dark, unpolished pig-iron, the edge notched in three places from hacking through bone.

Yet the moment his calloused fingers closed around the hemp-wrapped handle, the entire mountain shook.

A heavy, suffocating pressure rolled off the steel, cutting deep lines into the solid granite beneath his boots without the blade even moving an inch.

Beside Wei Zhingyi, Qing’er’s arms blurred as a pair of bladed tonfa, curved slightly like the ribs of an ancient beast, materialized into her hands.

She gripped them by the side handles, the matte-black metal showing no shine under the moonlight.

The tips were hooked and sharp as crow beaks, wrapped in a thin, humming film of shadow that drank in the light around her wrists.

Seeing the two stand ready, Wei Zhingyi took a deep, steadying breath.

Her cracked meridians still burned with dull pain, but the cold medicine had done its work.

The shame in her chest had cleared away, leaving only the hard, stubborn pride of a high palace mistress who refused to die in the dirt.

She lifted both hands, snapping her wrists forward.

Clack!

Two wide bladed war fans snapped open in her grip, their iron ribs painted black as coal, the silk between them dyed a deep, dark blood-red.

Along the curved outer rim of each fan, nine razor-sharp steel teeth caught the moonlight, humming with a high, dangerous ring that stirred her nine silver tails into a wide, threatening arc behind her back.

The old swordsman lowered his stance, his dadao sword pointed at the dirt, while the two women held their ground beneath the ruined peak, waiting for the first breath of wind to break the silence.

*

*

*

The biting mountain gale whipped across the barren plateau, carrying the harsh tang of dry dust and crushed stone.

Hundreds of miles away from where Qing’er and the others are, the quiet night sky fractured with a dull, rushing whistle.

CRASH!

A solitary shape came hurtling out of the clouds like a discarded sack of wet grain as Haoran threw Ye Fan down on the ground, causing the earth to crack!

The collision sounded like a boulder dropped from the clouds.

The solid bedrock groaned and split apart in jagged, black spiderweb lines that stretched thirty paces in every direction, throwing up a choking cloud of pulverized grey dirt and sharp gravel.

Ye Fan groaned in pain, spitting out a mouthful of dirt mixed with dark crimson blood.

His ribs felt as though a team of heavy iron oxen had trampled across his ribs, his breath whistling in wheezing, ragged gasps.

His vision swam with blinding yellow sparks, but the raw terror driving his beating heart forced his trembling elbows to dig into the broken stone.

He slowly got up, scraping his palms raw against the sharp scree, his knees knocking together as he tried to pull his legs underneath his torso to scramble away into the dark.

He didn’t even make it half an inch as a soft flutter of immaculate silk cut through the swirling dust.

Haoran slowly descended down from the sky and drifted through the air without making a sound, his robes hanging straight, untouched by the dirt or the howling draft.

His face was an unmoving mask of cool indifference, devoid of anger, excitement, or haste.

Before Ye Fan could push his chest off the rock, Haoran raised his foot.

THAM!

And slam it down on Ye Fan’s chest, pressing him back to the ground!

The sole of Haoran’s boot struck squarely against the center of Ye Fan’s sternum.

The impact drove the youth back into the stone ditch with sickening force, the bedrock beneath his spine caving in another three inches, knocking every last scrap of air clean out of his lungs with a choked, wet wheeze.

Ye Fan clawed desperately at the cuff of the white boot pinning him flat, his fingers scraping uselessly against the fine cloth, completely unable to budge the crushing weight pressing his lungs flat.

Haoran stood tall above him, his hands folded comfortably behind his back, looking down into the boy’s bloodshot eyes with the bored, clinical gaze of a butcher inspecting a flea on a cutting block.

”So, what do you have?” Haoran spoke, his voice quiet, clear, and rolling smoothly across the desolate plateau like the steady chime of a cold bronze bell.

”Are you a reincarnation? Transmigrator? An expert from the past? A trash from the future? Or maybe a system user?”

Every single word landed like a frozen spike driven straight through Ye Fan’s eardrums.

Ye Fan froze.

His clawing hands went dead limp in the dirt, his jaw dropped slack, a trickle of red trailing from his cracked lip, his pupils shrinking to the size of pinpricks as pure, paralyzing horror gripped the marrow of his bones.

The secret he had guarded with his very life, the memories of metal carts, the glowing screens, the foreign soul nesting inside an adopted boy’s shell, the hidden blue boards that fed him pills and shields...it had all been laid bare in five casual breaths by a man who had never even spoken to him before tonight.

His teeth began to chatter violently, his voice cracking into a ragged, pathetic stammer.

”You... You... could it be, you’re also...”

CRACK.

Haoran pressed his foot harder, causing him to cry out in shrill, agonizing pain!

The bones of Ye Fan’s ribs bent inward under the slow, deliberate grind of the boot heel, a sharp, suffocating scream tearing out of his raw throat, fresh blood bubbling over his teeth and running down his pale neck into the dust.

”Don’t lump me with you trash,” Haoran cut him off, his voice flat, icy, and dripping with pure, unadulterated contempt.

He didn’t raise his tone, yet the sheer arrogance woven into his bones made the empty night air feel heavier than lead.

To compare the noble bloodline of the highest skies, tempered through ancient wars and forged through fragments of dragons, to an unhinged parasite crawling around in stolen dirt was an insult that deserved nothing less than complete erasure.

Haoran looked down at the squirming youth one final time, having seen everything he needed to see.

The small tricks, the cheap talisman, the stolen luck—it was all just an annoying insect that had buzzed near his ear for five minutes too long.

Then, he raised his hand to the side, his fingers opened wide toward the empty night, the pale skin catching the faint light of the distant moons.

HUMMMMMM.

A sound that did not belong to the mortal world tore through the firmament.

The air within ten miles twisted violently, rotting away into pitch-black void as a jet-black hilt slid out from the fractured seams of the sky, settling neatly into Haoran’s open palm.

The Black Imperial Sword, Azathoth.

The moment his fingers closed around the dark leather wrapping, the blade fully emerged and drinking in every speck of warmth, life, and breath around it.

The orange glow of the distant city fires vanished.

The pale blue of the night clouds turned dull and ash-grey.

The green moss on the stones withered into charcoal, and the silver light of the three moons was wiped clean from the sky, leaving the entire plateau locked within a flat, suffocating canvas of monochrome stillness.

There was no sound.

There was no wind.

The rustling dust froze in mid-air, suspended like dead motes of soot, while the fabric of reality groaned under the unbearable weight of the dark steel resting in Haoran’s hand.

Beneath the boot, Ye Fan stared up at the black blade, his soul shivering in absolute, bottomless despair.

The blue system screens inside his mind flickered wildly, flashing red error codes across his sea of thought, before sputtering out into dead, cold darkness.

Against the ancient authority resting in that black iron, every foreign rule broke like dry straw.

Haoran raised the dark blade casually with one arm, the obsidian tip pointing straight down toward the center of the boy’s trembling throat.

A faint, indifferent breath left his lips.

”Well, I guess it’s time to end this.”