Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

”Damn it! Damn it! Are those women crazy!?”

Yan Xiao screamed at the top of his lungs, the raw, frantic sound of his voice tearing through the whistling slipstream of his own velocity.

His robes fluttered wildly against his ribs, whipped into violent motion by the shockwaves of his desperate run.

The cut on his left cheek was still weeping hot, fresh blood, stinging with a terrifying, numb coldness.

Right now, he didn’t dare look back, he just activated the Sunshine Steps to its limits!

ZAP! ZAP! ZAP!

His physical body ceased to obey the natural friction of the loam, and with every frantic pump of his legs, his flesh dissolved into a flickering, incandescent blur of golden white illumination.

He moved along the forest like a beam of light, ricocheting off tree trunks, refracting between moss-slick stones, and bypassing three thousand meters of terrain in the blink of a mortal eye.

The brilliant streaks of white gold afterimages left behind by his boots set the dry pine needles smoldering, carving a zigzagging path of luminous heat through the dark undergrowth.

Yet, despite his blistering speed, the sensation of an invisible, sharp blade hovering a millimeter behind his neck refused to dissipate!

’That woman is insane! She didn’t even let me speak!’

Indignation and petrified fury raged in his chest.

Earlier, when that woman Xu Xiansu asked him who he is, she didn’t even gave him a time to open his mouth to answer and just attacked directly.

The image was seared into his mind with nightmarish clarity: one second she was standing there, demanding his identity with that cold, unfeeling glare, and in the very next instant, before his lips could even part to stammer a response, that matte-black dagger had become a horizontal crescent of slaughter.

He realized then that she hadn’t wanted an explanation; she had wanted his throat opened and his corpse pinned to the loam so she could use soul search on his severed soul at her leisure.

What kind of person does that!?

What kind of psychopathic, bloodthirsty madwoman asks a question and immediately swings a lethal blade before the other person can draw breath to form even a single syllable?!

’Damn it! You crazy woman! And for you to have the same face as my master is an insult to her!’ Yan Xiao cursed inwardly, terror clawing at his throat as he felt the ambient temperature drop behind him—a sure sign that the demoness was closing the distance.

His cultivation base was burning hot, his dantian groaning under the frantic drain of maintaining the Sunshine Steps at full tilt.

He was a prodigy in his home province, a youth who had walked through dangerous beast domains with an easy swagger, but against a monster who could casually vaporize a Spirit Ascension elder and his spirit avatar with a spinning toy of plasma, he was as fragile as an eggshell facing a falling mountain.

Desperation overtook him entirely as he abandoned all his pride, focusing his divine sense inward, frantically pounding inside his ring.

’Master!’

He screamed internally, his mental voice cracking with sheer, unadulterated panic.

’If there’s a perfect chance to answer me, then it is now! Your disciple is really going to die! Wake up! Wake up, please! If you don’t step in right now, you’re going to have to find a new disciple because I’m about to be chopped into minced meat by a woman who wears your exact face! Master!’

For three agonizing heartbeats, only the frantic rush of his own blood and the whistling wind answered his desperate cries.

The interior of the ancient ring remained like a silent, leaden tomb, completely cold and unresponsive.

Yan Xiao’s stomach plummeted into an abyss of despair.

’This is it. I’m going to die in this godforsaken woods...’

Then, at that moment...

Haaaah...

A sigh echoed from his ring.

It was faint, weary, and seem to carry the unfathomable, dusty weight of millions of years of experience.

It was a sound that resonated not through the air, but directly against the core of his spiritual sea—gentle, noble, yet laced with an ancient, terrifying sovereignty that instantly stilled the chaotic churning of his meridians.

Yan Xiao’s eyes lit up.

”Master! You finally responded!”

*

*

*

Meanwhile, several thousand meters behind his fleeing streak of light...

Xia Mengyao was running a few steps behind Xu Xiansu, completely confused.

Her flowing robes snapped in the gale as she vaulted over the mossy roots with effortless, celestial grace.

Her short auburn hair trailed behind her like an ethereal mist, her deep blue eyes wide with bewildered concern.

Ahead of her, Xu Xiansu moved not with frantic exertion, but with a fluid, terrifying ease—her boots skimming the tops of the ferns, her hair pristine, her right hand still holding the dagger in a loose, casual reverse grip.

Xia Mengyao couldn’t understand it.

Throughout their time at the academy, Xiansu had always been haughty, sarcastic, and relentlessly aloof, but she was never a senseless butcher who struck down passing travelers without cause.

”Sister Xiansu, why did you attack him?” Xia Mengyao called out, her melodious voice laced with genuine distress as she matched her friend’s pace. ”No matter what, he still helped me. He didn’t show any ill intent, he didn’t draw a weapon against us, and he even tried to apologize! Attacking someone who offered assistance... this doesn’t feel right!”

Xu Xiansu didn’t slow her stride by a fraction of an inch.

She didn’t look back at Xia Mengyao, keeping her piercing gaze locked onto the distant golden streak darting through the trees.

”Help you? You foolish girl, you wouldn’t recognize a tiger in sheep’s clothing if it bit your arm off,” Xu Xiansu sneered, her voice dropping into a freezing clip that cut through the whistling wind.

She tilted her head slightly, her jaw clenched tight with an ancient, venomous fury.

”That was Sunshine Steps, a movement technique I personally created. No one else but me should know about it.”

The words struck Xia Mengyao like a sudden, icy downpour.

Xia Mengyao’s pupils dilated. Her breath hitched, her boots almost faltering against a thick branch as she processed the revelation.

Sunshine Steps... a personal creation?

Xia Mengyao finally realized the seriousness of the matter.

If only Xu Xiansu knew about this technique, then it’s really strange for a man from a lower realm to have learned it.

How could a ragged, ordinary youth wandering a backwater, lower plane forest use the unique, personal evasion art of a genius from the upper realm?

It defied all logical possibility!

Unless...

A dark, disturbing realization dawned in Xia Mengyao’s mind, sending a shiver of disgust down her spine.

Unless he is actually from the upper realm, and was stalking Xu Xiansu!

Her brow furrowed in deep, righteous indignation.

The idea was far from impossible; in fact, the Tian Yuan Empire were plagued by such insidious perversions.

There are countless scrying artifacts that allow anyone to spy on anybody.

High-grade Heavenly-Eye mirrors, Void-Tracing talismans, and Astral Divination Plates could easily pierce through ordinary distance and space, allowing a hidden voyeur to monitor the private courtyards, training grounds, and personal lives of peerless beauties even if they are from a different dimension!

If some wretched, obsessive cultivator had used a scrying artifact to observe Xu Xiansu, he could have watched her practice day after day, year after year, obsessively copying her footwork, transcribing her stances, and molding himself into a grotesque, imitating phantom of herself.

It was this very epidemic of scrying artifacts that had popularized the use of arrays to disrupt the scrying of artifacts in private places across every major sect and clan in the Prime Origin Realm!.

Every noble lady’s bathing pavilion and secluded grotto had to be fortified with three layers of anti-divination wards precisely to keep such vermin from peeping!

If that boy is a stalker who stole Xiansu’s private art through a scrying lens... Xia Mengyao’s hand dropped to her own sword hilt, her previous sympathy evaporating into cold revulsion. Then he deserves to be flayed alive!

And now that she thought about it, that boy seemed to have recognized Xu Xiansu, didn’t he?

He even called her ”master”.

”Damn it, I hate those type of perverts the most!” Xia Mengyao shouted, her tone shifting entirely. ”Sister Xiansu, we must make sure to capture him and cripple him!”

Xu Xiansu didn’t answer. Her orange eyes burned with the interlocking wheels of the sun and the moon, ready to unleash her temporal domain to freeze the boy’s light-steps mid-stride and pin him to the earth.

When suddenly—

BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM—!!!!!

A massive power erupted!

The primeval forest violently convulsed as if a dying star had crashed directly into the bedrock.

The towering, thousand year old iron-bark trees within three miles were instantly stripped of their foliage, their ancient trunks bending backward like blades of grass before a hurricane.

The atmospheric qi turned blindingly, suffocatingly dense, saturated with an ancient, primordial majesty that shattered the clouds above and drowned out the sound of the wind.

The sheer, unfathomable scale of that sudden presence was so overwhelming, so majestic, and so terrifying that the two were actually stunned!

Xu Xiansu and Xia Mengyao skidded to a violent halt atop a colossal tree branch, their boots digging deep into the wood, their protective auras flaring to maximum intensity just to keep their ribs from collapsing under the atmospheric gravity.

And as they looked up through the violently parted canopy—

They saw Yan Xiao.

He was no longer running, and he was certainly no longer using the clumsy, half-baked Sunshine Steps along the forest floor.

He was now enveloped in a towering pillar of incandescent, celestial silver and golden radiance.

Then, under their eyes, he shot straight into the upper atmosphere at a velocity that bypassed speed of even a Spirit Ascension expert, ripping through the sound barrier with hundreds of consecutive sonic booms, parting the clouds in a brilliant, luminous wake as he ascended into the sky.

In less than a single heartbeat, that pillar of light became a tiny, distant glint, completely disappearing into the horizon.

He was gone.

Vanished beyond the curvature of the world, leaving behind only the howling winds, the falling leaves, and the scorched smell of ozone.

The silence that followed was suffocating.

The whistling draft slowly settled.

Broken twigs and pulverized bark drifted down through the pale moonlight like dirty snow.

Xia Mengyao and Xu Xiansu stood there, still frozen.

Neither of them moved. Xu Xiansu’s dagger remained held loosely in her grip, but her knuckles had turned completely white.

And this is not just because of the massive power earlier.

Certainly, that level of power of belonged to an entity standing at the pinnacle of the world—a master who could treat the laws of the universe as their personal plaything.

But if it’s just that, they wouldn’t be stunned, especially Xu Xiansu, who stood at the pinnacle in her past life.

No, what really made them freeze was something else entirely...

Xia Mengyao slowly turned towards Xu Xiansu.

Her breath was caught in her throat. Her eyes were trembling with staggering disbelief, looking at the woman beside her as if she were seeing a ghost.

That cataclysmic power that had just erupted from the boy... that primordial majesty that had parted the firmament and carried him into the clouds...

”Sister Xiansu...” Xia Mengyao whispered, her voice shaking so violently it was barely audible above the rustling of the damaged trees.

”That qi signature... that’s definitely yours, isn’t it?”

The resonance had been identical.

It was not an imitation, and certainty not a copied technique viewed through a scrying mirror.

It was the exact same signature as Xu Xiansu’s very own soul!

Xu Xiansu remained silent.

She stood motionless on the swaying branch, her loose hair drifting across her pale, motionless face.

Her orange eyes stared into the empty, distant horizon where the light had vanished, the interlocking wheels of the sun and moon spinning within her irises in dark, fathomless, and terrifying stillness.