Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

The wind howling through the jagged crags of a ridge carried a bitter, petrifying frost, scraping against the ancient stones like dull blades.

High above the jagged peaks, the firmament was perpetually choked with bruised, dark indigo storm clouds that swirled in a slow, ominous vortex.

At the epicenter of this desolate mountain basin, a collosal stone gate stood majestically. It is the dimensional gate leading to the Celestial Dragon Vault.

Right now, the gate rippled with an impenetrable, iridescent membrane of chaotic spatial tides.

And on this mountain, a group of female disciples have gathered, walking around as if searching for something

They moved with disciplined, noiseless precision across the wind scoured mountain.

Dressed in sweeping, double-layered daoist robes of deep cerulean silk trimmed with flowing, silver wave embroideries, they resembled fluttering blue petals drifting over a desolate sea of dark gray slate.

Each disciples carried a slender, water-attributed spirit rapier strapped across their back, their spiritual sense pushed to the maximum limit as they swept the area.

Some were using a bronze divination compasses, jade soul-seeking needles, and scrying crystals over every fractured boulder, every frozen fissure, and every patch of calcified earth.

Yet, despite their tireless efforts, their faces were pale, their brows knit tight with a solemn, suffocating tension that had hung over their lineage for far too long.

And amongst this groupd of disciples, an incredibly beautiful woman stood motionless on the edge of a shattered promontory, barely fifty paces from spatial gateway, her silhouette cutting through the howling blizzard like an unsheathed celestial blade.

Her snow white hair was breathtaking—pure, unblemished as first-fallen snow on a mountain glacier, cascading freely past her slender waist in thick, silken ribbons that fluttered with the icy mountain gale.

On her brows rested a delicate, crescent-shaped circlet pinning back a few stray bangs to reveal a countenance of peerless beauty.

Her skin possessed the translucent, pristine luster of carved mutton-fat jade, while her blue eyes held an ancient, freezing depth that could still the blood in an ordinary cultivator’s veins with a single glance.

She is Bing Wuxian, the second wife of the White Dragon Emperor, Chen Feng, and the Sect Master of Mystic Water Sect.

As a renowned master who had sat upon the throne of the Mystic Water Sect for over six centuries, Bing Wuxian commanded the absolute respect and fearful reverence of the entire northern territory.

Her water arts had long transcended the simple liquid state, touching the profound threshold of absolute zero and spatial fluidity.

When she took the White Dragon Emperor as her husband, the union had united the peerless might of the White Dragon Sect with the bottomless, unfathomable spiritual foundations of the northern lakes, forging a golden age of peace and absolute dominion across the region.

But...that peace and dominion, is being threatened.

Her sapphire eyes swept slowly across the scorched ground beneath her boots, darkening with an ocean of cold, tightly restrained grief and mounting suspicion.

”...It has been three years.” She whispered.

For thirty-six long, agonizing months, the ancestral halls of the White Dragon Sect had been drowned in an eerie, horrifying silence.

Three years ago, the White Dragon Sect and the Glorious Heaven City had opened up the Celestial Dragon Vault to the public.

Because the opening of the vault was an epoch defining event, the city lord of Glorious Heaven City—Bing Wuxian’s father-in-law—alongside his wife, some high ranking Elders and talented disciples, and even Chen Feng’s first wife Xun Xie’er had marched to this basin in full ceremonial regalia to oversee the entire procedure.

After all, this event is very important because it includes various powers who had made great contributions, and hundred of other cultivators.

Her husband, Chen Feng, couldn’t oversee the entire thing because of the invasion of those foreign demons, and there hasn’t been news of them yet.

But it was fine, after all, with Xun Xie’er and Chen Feng’s father, nothing could go wrong, right?

But... something did go wrong!

For three whole years, there has been no news of them!

Worried, Bing Wuxian had personally led an elite strike force of the Mystic Water Sect to the ridge a week earlier, and they found the encampment completely empty.

Even the Profound Ark they used as a ride had completely disappeared.

Her in-laws, whose cultivation had long stood at the peak of the region; the elders who had commanded legions; the promising young disciples; and even her friend and fellow wife, Xun Xie’er—all had evaporated into thin air without leaving behind a single clue of where they have gone.

For and entire week, Bing Wuxian had personally mobilized every resource at her command.

She had turned the intelligence networks of the Mystic Water Sect upside down, deployed shadow-scouts into the neighboring provinces, interrogated rogue merchant guilds, and drained the bottom of frozen lakes searching for leads.

Yet, all their investigations led right back to this place.

Bing Wuxian slowly crouched down, her pristine white sleeve sliding back to reveal a pale, slender wrist as she pressed her fingertips against a jagged, glassy trench cutting through the bedrock ten paces from the bone pillars.

Her qi seeped into the stone, reading the microscopic vibrations preserved in the mineral marrow.

The evidence of conflict was faint, yet unmistakable to a master of her caliber.

Beneath the three years of heavy snow and howling gales lay deep, pulverized shockwave signatures that only the clash of a great battle could produce.

The basalt bedrock had been melted into smooth obsidian glass by a terrifying, unnatural heat, then violently crushed into powder by a concussive, catastrophic gravity.

Several subterranean veins beneath the ridge had been forcibly redirected, their spiritual qi completely drained, as if someone had deployed a colossal, continent-spanning killing formation to forcefully suppress the entire mountain range in an instant.

Whoever had struck had done so with overwhelming brutality—silencing hundreds of expert cultivators before they could even activate their transmission talismans or detonate their nascent souls to send a warning to the rear.

And yet, what terrified Bing Wuxian the most was the unnatural, meticulous cleanliness of the aftermath.

There were no severed limbs frozen in the snow, and there were no shredded robes that normally would’ve scattered if a fight did break out.

The assailants had swept the battlefield into perfection, leaving behind only the cold, mute stone.

Her knuckles tightened against the dark rock, the cold frost rolling from her palm freezing the stone until it cracked with a sharp, brittle snap.

”Three years...” Bing Wuxian whispered to the empty wind, her voice a cool, melodious murmur that carried an undercurrent of trembling heartbreak. ”Father, Mother... Sister Xie’er... where did you go? What kind of monster fell upon you here?”

A soft, rustling sound broke through the howling gale as a tall, senior disciple clad in a deep azure cloak stepped forward.

”Sect Master,” the disciple spoke, bowing deeply, her hands trembling slightly from the cold. ”The residue of the battle has faded by another thirty percent, and the spiritual tracks of the elders cannot be traced beyond the outer boundary... It is as if they stepped off the cliff and dissolved into nothingness.”

Bing Wuxian did not look, keeping her gaze pinned to the frozen ground.

”Has there been any response from the soul calling formation?” she asked softly.

The disciple lowered her head further, tears of frustration glistening in her lashes.

”None, Sect Master. Even the blood tracking compass that Master Chen Feng provided before entering fails to catch a single trace of them... We...have no more clues.”

The disciple swallowed the bitter lump in her throat, looking toward the roaring, iridescent tear in the sky.

”The only clues we can have is from the people that entered the Celestial Dragon Vault dimension to come out.”

The truth was an agonizing, suffocating iron weight that had hung over Bing Wuxian’s chest for three thousand days.

The outside world was a dead end. The killers had left no tracks, and further investigations would just waste manpower and resources.

If there was any surviving witness to that slaughter, if there was anyone alive who had seen even the silhouette of the attackers, or if the elders had managed to throw a single surviving disciple through the gate before they died, then they were all on the other side of that spatial rift!

The Celestial Dragon Vault was an isolated cosmic bubble, a pocket dimension governed by ancient celestial laws that operated on an immutable, unbending temporal cycle.

Once the gate locked, no power beneath the heavens could force the portal open from the outside without triggering a catastrophic planar collapse that would incinerate the entire realm.

Although they tell the outside world that the Celestial Dragon Vault has just been discovered, that was far from the truth at all.

Chen Feng had discovered this hundreds of years ago, and most resources they used to expand their sect came from this place.

The only reason why they opened it is because it was already running out of resources, so they decided to use this to gain favor.

And so, they know full well the rules of this dimension.

It only opens once every five years.

That is still two years from now.

Two more years of waiting in the freezing dark.

Two more years of sleepless nights inside the quiet halls of the Mystic Water Sect, listening to the hollow wailing of wind against the eaves.

Two more years of holding back the predatory, circling hyenas of the neighboring demonic sects, who had already begun testing the borders of the White Dragon Sect’s territory, sensing that the ancient dragons had lost their claws.

A sharp, painful tremor ran through Bing Wuxian’s chest.

She stood up slowly, her white robes snapping in the rising mountain draft as she looked at the gate.

Her husband was still dealing with those foreign demons, so right now, she was the pillar that will hold this family together.

After all, She was the second wife.

Bing Wuxian was worried.

The anxiety was not a frantic, weeping panic; it was a cold, venomous dread that coiled around her heart like an iron serpent.

What if the enemies who had ambushed the elders were not a local power?

What if they were an ancient, shadowy entity that remained hidden?

What if they had sent their own killers into the vault alongside the disciples, hunting down the surviving bloodlines inside the trial grounds while the world watched from outside?

And what if... when the two years ended, when the gates finally open... only mountains of bones and corpses remained?

A terrifying, incandescent chill flared to life within Bing Wuxian’s sapphire pupils.

The soft, gentle beauty of the loving wife receded entirely, swallowed by the majesty of a master who had ruled the frozen lakes with an iron fist.

She turned her back to the spatial rift, facing her senior disciples who stood shivering in the snow.

Bing Wuxian raised her right hand.

CLINK—HUMMMMMMM!

Her wrists suddenly ignited with a blinding, crystalline blue radiance!

Then, a token carved from pure, ten thousand year celestial ice floated out from her palm, shooting into the storm clouds above and detonating into a massive, shimmering glyph of an eight-pointed snowflake intertwined with a coiled water dragon!

This is the decree of the Mystic Water Sect, belonging only to the sect master, and used only to give absolute commands to the sect members that they must follow no matter what.

It tore through the sky, its spiritual resonance vibrating across three hundred thousand miles of mountains and lakes.

”Send my decree to the Nine Peaks of Mystic Water Sect,” Bing Wuxian commanded, her voice ringing out across the frozen basin like the clear, uncompromising chime of a silver bell, ”Mobilize the sect elders, summon the three thousand elite disciples, assemble the members of Water Dragon Legion, and deploy the Nine-Fold Glacial Array directly across this mountain.”

She stepped forward, her white combat boots planting themselves firmly into the frozen ground at the threshold of the bone pillars, her crescent jade hairpin catching the pale mountain light.

”For the next two years, this place is the territory of the Mystic Water Sect. And anyone who approaches within a hundred miles without my token shall be treated as an enemy of our blood.”

”We will wait here. In the snow, in the wind, beneath the storm. And when that gate opens... whether it reveals the survivor, or the killers who dared touch our clan... I will personally see to it that the blood is repaid in full.”

The female disciples knelt in unison across the frosted slate, their hands snapping to their swords, their voices roaring against the blizzard in unbending loyalty.

”WE OBEY THE SECT MASTER’S DECREE!”

And so, beneath the dark, swirling clouds of the Heavenly Dragon Ridge, the white-robed woman stood as an eternal, frozen sentinel before the gateway of the Celestial Dragon Vault, her eyes burning through the howling snow, waiting for the ticking of time to deliver the answers that fate owed her.