Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

Deep within the jagged, fractured geomorphology of the Central Region lay a chasm that the sun had long since forsaken.

This was the Dark Valley, an abyssal tear in the earth where the atmospheric pressure alone was enough to crush the lungs of an ordinary mortal.

Hidden within this perpetual twilight was a massive metropolis forged from black iron and obsidian—the absolute sovereign territory of the Shadow Hall.

This city completely eclipses several planets alone, and did not operate under the laws of the Tian Yuan Empire; it was a law unto itself, anchored to reality by the terrifying presence of an old monster who sat in the shadows of the world: a First Stage Heavenly Saint Realm ancestor.

In the highest tier of the central black ziggurat, inside a grand audience chamber lit only by the flickering, violet flames of soul-burning torches, sat Hei Xi, the current Grand Master of the Shadow Hall, and the 1st Stage Heavenly Saint guardian of the Hall.

He was a man draped in robes woven from starlight and shadow, his pale skin contrasting sharply with the dark abyss of his crown.

At this moment, his thick brows were furrowed into a sharp, lethal line, his fingers tapping against the armrest of his bone throne with a rhythmic, deafening thud.

In front of him, kneeling upon the cold stone floor, a high-ranking Elder of the peak Nirvana Rebirth Realm trembled in absolute, primal fear, his forehead pressed so hard against the obsidian tiles that blood was beginning to seep from his temples.

”So you mean to tell me,” Hei Xi spoke, his voice dropping into a low, terrifying register that caused the violet flames to shrink in submission, ”that even after all this time, with all the specialized soul-torture arrays of our hall at your disposal, you completely failed to extract the core information from a weakened, shattered soul? And on top of that colossal failure, you let one little girl slip through your net in the peripheral regions?”

”Master, I’m sorry, I’m sorry! It’s entirely my fault!” The Elder bowed frantically, his voice cracking with desperation as he felt the ambient gravity in the room begin to solidify around his neck. ”The soul of Liu Ruyan is completely stubborn, even enduring the cruelest torture we know, and that girl—Huo Yue—she had the backing of the Shen Clan! I beg for your mercy, Master!”

”Mercy? Since you know it’s entirely your fault, then there is no need for words,” Hei Xi said, his expression completely flat, devoid of any human empathy. ”Go to the yellow springs and repent.”

Hei Xi casually pointed his slender finger forward.

*SPIT.*

The space directly surrounding the kneeling Elder suddenly twisted and collapsed in on itself like a crushed tin can.

A sickening chorus of snapping bones and rupturing flesh echoed through the silent chamber as the Elder’s body was violently bent, compressed, and broken beyond all human recognition.

Before his spirit could even attempt to flee the ruined flesh, his very Nascent Soul was completely shattered into glowing blue particles by the localized spatial vacuum, giving him absolute zero chance of reincarnation or revival.

”Clean up the mess,” Hei Xi commanded, not even looking at the pool of gore.

At that exact moment, several silent silhouettes materialized from the deep shadows of the pillars, efficiently sweeping away the crushed corpse and scrubbing the blood from the tiles with a practiced, chilling speed before vanishing back into the darkness.

Hei Xi stood up from his throne, his hands resting behind his back as he walked toward the balcony overlooking his dark city. ”The Clan Head of the main Hei lineage is getting incredibly impatient with our progress. He wants us to acquire the Imperial Flame Transformation Technique immediately so the ancestors can break through their bottleneck. We can no longer afford to play hide-and-seek with a couple of rogue remnants.”

He turned back toward the remaining shadow commanders kneeling in the dark corners of the room. ”Everyone, bring Liu Ruyan’s soul-container out from the deep abyss and chain her to the sacrificial pillar on the central square. Once your scout networks find any fresh traces of Huo Yue and her little group, inform them immediately that if they do not appear in our headquarters within three days to surrender the technique, we will publicly execute her master and scatter her fragments across the waste.”

”Understood, Grand Master!”

A chorus of raspy, absolute voices echoed throughout the hollow room, the killers already shifting their weight to depart.

However, at that exact, monumental fraction of a second, the entire iron city suddenly trembled.

It wasn’t a minor tectonic shift; it was a violent, catastrophic vibration that caused the massive obsidian skyscrapers to groan under a sudden, kinetic force.

The protective wards surrounding the ziggurat flared into a bright purple brilliance, crackling with unstable energy as the foundations of the valley itself shook.

Hei Xi’s brows snapped together, his eyes flashing with a cold fury. ”What was that? Has some righteous force dared to launch an unannounced raid on our borders?”

His immense Spiritual Sense suddenly expanded outward like an invisible, sweeping wave, tearing through the structural walls of the fortress and blanketing the entire metropolis in a microsecond.

What he saw in the exact middle of the central grand square made his pupils shrink to pinpricks, before expanding with a manic, greedy delight.

Thrusting out from a massive spatial rift that had been violently torn open in the middle of the sky was the gargantuan, majestic form of the Rainbow Scaled Divine Serpent.

Her iridescent scales, each larger than a war galley, gleamed with a brilliant, prismatic light that completely cut through the perpetual gloom of the Dark Valley.

Her fifty-thousand-meter body was coiled tightly around the grand defensive towers of the city, effortlessly crushing the black iron structures into scrap metal as she wreaked complete havoc, her massive tail swatting away the flying gargoyles and shadow guardians like bothersome flies.

Hei Xi grinned, a dark, deep laugh bubbling in his throat. ”Hahaha! Splendid! I was just racking my brains trying to find a way to hunt these people, and now they actually has the absolute stupidity to deliver themselves straight to my doorstep!”

With a loud explosion of dark saint-qi, Hei Xi’s silhouette dissolved into a streak of purple lightning.

In the next heartbeat, he appeared high in the open air above the central square, hovering at the exact same level as the massive, prismatic head of the Divine Serpent.

He crossed his arms over his chest, his Heavenly Saint aura flaring out to push back the crushing weight of the serpent’s primal presence.

And as he locked his eyes onto the snout of the great beast, his smile turned into a massive excited grin.

Standing confidently upon the iridescent scales of Medusa’s snout was a young woman.

Her long, lustrous crimson hair fluttered wildly within the chaotic, ash-laden winds of the valley, and her iconic, battle-worn red dress danced beautifully with every heavy movement of the serpent beneath her feet.

Her posture was that of a sovereign conqueror, not a fleeing remnant.

”Shadow Hall!” Huo Yue smirked, her wine-red eyes burning with a terrifying, unyielding fire that made the ambient temperature of the valley sky skyrocket within seconds.

She rested her hand casually on the hilt of her heavy dark crimson ruler. ”It has been a full, grueling year since your dogs dragged my master into this dark hole. I’d say it’s not too late to take back what belongs to me and get my absolute revenge, is it?”

Hei Xi threw his head back and laughed loudly, the sound echoing across the panic-stricken streets below where thousands of shadow disciples were scrambling into battle formations.

”Hahaha! No! Of course it’s not too late, little girl! In fact, your timing is quite immaculate! If you truly want your master’s soul to remain intact, then obediently drop your defenses, hand over the secrets of the Imperial Flame Transformation Technique right now, and I might consider letting you and your sisters leave this valley with your limbs attached!”

”Sorry, you arrogant old dog,” Huo Yue’s smirk turned entirely cold, her eyes flashing with a wicked amusement that mirrored Haoran’s signature style. ”I don’t do negotiations with parasites.”

Huo Yue extended her slender, pale hand forward into the open sky, her palm completely open to the heavens.

Then, with a slow, deliberate movement that carried the absolute finality of a judge delivering a death sentence, her palm flipped, pointing directly down toward the center of the black iron city.

”Fall,” she declared softly.

The single word was a spark dropped into a powder keg.

At that exact microsecond, Hei Xi’s internal saint-level danger instincts suddenly screamed in absolute, unprecedented terror.

His skin prickled, and his soul felt as if it were about to be crushed by an unimaginable gravitational weight.

He quickly snapped his head upward, looking past the dark canopy of the valley, and his jaw nearly dropped to the floor.

Tearing through the upper atmospheric barriers of the Central Region was a colossal, artificial celestial body—a massive, roaring, four-colored miniature sun that was falling down toward the valley like a rogue meteor.

This wasn’t a standard fire-type technique; it was a localized apocalypse.

It was the terrifying combination of all Four Heavenly Flames currently residing deep within Huo Yue’s soul, systematically powered, refined, and compressed over months of continuous, non-stop cultivation by the collective qi of Huo Yue, Medusa, and Zhu Ziyan.

To make the weapon even more devastatingly intense, they had utilized Medusa’s length and height to hunt down several Three Legged Golden Crows and plunged entire area the size of planets into eternal darkness and throwing the essence of multiple suns into the heart of the flame during its compression stage.

It was a weapon of absolute thermal erasure, months of grueling, secret preparation all for this single, glorious moment of architectural vengeance.

The air in the valley instantly turned into a scorching vacuum.

The black iron buildings below began to literally melt into liquid slag before the sun even reached the mountain peaks, the weaker disciples turning to ash from the mere ambient radiation.

”Y-You’re absolutely insane!” Hei Xi exclaimed, his face turning a ghostly shade of white as his saint-qi barrier began to sizzle and evaporate around his shoulders. ”You’re going to burn down the entire valley! You’re sick! Sick I tell you!”

Huo Yue looked down at the trembling Grand Master, her crimson pupils flashing with a wild, manic delight as the roaring light of her four-colored sun bleached the entire valley into a blinding white canvas.

She adjusted her dress, took a deep breath, and let out a funny, mocking laughed.

”Hahaha! Don’t worry about the property value, old man! I checked the forecast this morning, and it said there’s a one hundred percent chance of a solar storm, and everything in this valley will be evaporated!”

With that final, mocking cry, the four-colored miniature sun officially collided with the central ziggurat of the Shadow Hall.

The explosion was total.

A blinding, planetary-tier flash of white, crimson, azure, and gold fire erupted from the center of the chasm, creating a mushroom cloud of pure thermal energy that reached twenty thousand meters into the sky, completely erasing the Shadow Hall from the face of the Central Region in a single, beautiful second of absolute conflagration.