Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

The golden thunder of his triumphant declaration gradually rolled across the distant horizons, scattering the heavy cloud banks and leaving behind a hollow, ringing silence.

Bathed in the radiant warmth of the natural sun, Chen Feng stood upon the precipice of the high cliff, his newly forged Saint physique thrumming with raw, intoxicating power.

For eight long, agonizing years, he had been severed from everything he held dear.

He had missed the sunlight, seasonal harvests, grand clan assemblies, and the quiet warmth of his family’s embrace.

So at this moment, he first decided to immediately go to Glorious Heaven City, wanting to check on his parents.

His heart swelled with intense, impatient longing.

In his memory, the Glorious Heaven City was an empire unto itself, an unshakeable bastion of wealth, culture, and might nestled in the heart of the fertile plains.

He envisioned the towering vermilion city gates, the endless caravans of exotic spirit beasts hauling treasures from the far borders, the bustling markets filled with the shouts of merchants and cultivators, and, above all, the proud, loving smiles of his father and mother waiting to welcome their prodigal son home from his prolonged tribulation.

With a slight shift of his weight, the space beneath his boots liquefied into ripples of pure spatial law.

In a single breath, he folded tens of thousands of miles of terrain beneath his stride, tearing through the atmospheric barriers like a silent streak of shooting starlight.

*

Glorious Heaven City.

Hovering thousands of feet above the city’s grand perimeter, Chen Feng looked down, his soaring excitement crashing into a wall of icy, sickening dread.

He didn’t sense them.

Not even a trace.

His Saint-realm divine perception, capable of penetrating deep into the subterranean veins of the earth and isolating a single heartbeat among ten million mortals, swept across the vast urban expanse.

There was no trace of his father’s, nor was there any whisper of his mother’s aura.

Not to mention the once bustling city now seems to be a ghost town.

The grand metropolis that had once housed billions of vibrant lives lay draped in a bizarre, rotting stillness.

The vast marketplace avenues, typically packed shoulder-to-shoulder with roaring crowds, were littered with abandoned carts, shattered jade jars, and tattered shop banners flapping mournfully in the dry wind.

Over ninety percent of the mortal residences were dark, their doors barred from the inside or kicked violently off their iron hinges.

A thin layer of autumn dust blanketed the grand thoroughfares, untrodden by foot or carriage.

The occasional figure scuttling through the alleys was hollow-cheeked, pale, and terrified, scurrying like a hunted rodent between the shadows before vanishing behind barricaded basements.

Chen Feng’s heart pounded against his ribs with heavy, violent thuds as he drifted down through the palace gates, bypassing the broken courtyard wards, and strode through the echoing, marble corridors of the imperial residence.

The customary legions of heavily armored guards and bowing maidservants were gone.

The air was heavy with the smell of stale spirit oil and unburned sandalwood.

Following a faint, flickering heartbeat deep within the grand study, he pushed open the heavy double doors carved from mahogany, and found their family’s loyal servant, Elder Hu, with bloodshot eyes, mountains of paperworks surrounding him.

The sight was heartbreaking. The ancient desk of blackened jade was barely visible beneath chaotic avalanches of parchment, imperial decrees, distress dispatches, and unsigned casualty rolls.

Elder Hu, who had served the Chen family for three full generations and had always maintained an impeccable, stately appearance in crisp silk robes, was a shadow of his former self.

His silver hair hung in greasy, uncombed strands across his weathered temples.

His skin was gray and sunken, carrying the sickly pallor of severe spiritual exhaustion.

His eyes were violently bloodshot, the fine vessels strained to the brink of bursting, yet his trembling, ink-stained fingers continued to frantically stamp seals and scratch cinnabar characters onto document after document, fighting a desperate, losing war against the encroaching collapse of the realm.

As if sensing him arrive, the elder spoke.

”I told you already... place the casualty reports from the southern grain routes on the floor...” the old man rasped, his voice cracked and bone-dry, not even lifting his head all the way. ”If it is another dispatch demanding spiritual stones from the empty treasury... tell them the Chen clan... the Chen clan has nothing left to give...”

He raised his chin with immense effort, his rheumy, exhausted gaze drifting toward the figure standing in the doorway.

...and the ink brush slipped from his numb fingers, clattering onto the parchment and splattering fresh cinnabar like a drop of wet blood.

”Young... Young Master?!”

Elder Hu’s voice broke into a high, hysterical sob, his frail, trembling legs gave out beneath him, and he stumbled forward, hitting the hard marble floor on his knees.

Hot, scalding tears carved trails through the grime on his hollow cheeks as his weathered hands reached out, clutching desperately at the hem of Chen Feng’s robes as if terrified the youth before him was a cruel mirage conjured by his dying mind.

”Young Master Chen Feng! Heavens above... the ancestors have not abandoned us! You’re alive! You’ve returned!” the old man wailed, his forehead striking the stone floor in a series of desperate, trembling prostrations.

Chen Feng felt a sharp, suffocating pain seize his chest.

He grasped the old retainer beneath the shoulders, gently lifting him from the cold stone with an effortless surge of Saint-realm spiritual vitality.

A thread of pure, warming energy coursed from his hands into Elder Hu’s withered meridians, stabilizing the old man’s fractured breathing and clearing the toxic miasma of exhaustion from his heart.

”Elder Hu, get up! Look at me, I am back!” Chen Feng’s voice was steady, yet an undercurrent of desperate urgency vibrated through every syllable. ”Tell me what happened! Where is my father? Where is my mother? Why is the city like this? Who did this to our home?!”

Elder Hu trembled violently, leaning heavily against the young master’s arm, his tears soaking into his tattered lapels.

”It was eight years ago, Young Master...” Elder Hu choked out, his throat spasming with sorrow. ”The lord and lady... they organized the opening of the Celestial Dragon Vault, but the very day the gates were unsealed... all communication ceased! We sent three search parties of experts into the mountains... not a single information about them! Since then, there has been no news, no messages, no bodies... nothing! They vanished as if erased from the world!”

Chen Feng’s jaw clenched so hard that the bone audibly groaned, his pupils contracted.

”And what of the others?” Chen Feng asked through gritted teeth, his mind racing to another figure who had promised to guard his family during his absence. ”Where is Xie’er and Wuxian?”

”Miss Xun was with them, while Miss Bing received word of the lord and lady’s disappearance,” Elder Hu wept, his voice shrinking into a whisper of pure dread. ”She brought her entire sect to search for them, but in the end, they also disappeared!”

A suffocating, furious storm of spiritual energy began to brew within the study.

The mountains of paperwork rustled wildly as the surrounding air grew heavy enough to warp the sunlight streaming through the windows.

The Chen clan’s pillars were gone.

His brilliant wives were gone.

His city was starving, crumbling beneath administrative chaos, and hovering on the brink of total destruction.

”Elder Hu, you have suffered enough,” Chen Feng said, his voice dropping into a low, terrifyingly calm register that promised blood and ruin. ”Please, hold on for a bit. Reorganize the guards, open the emergency grain reserves, and execute anyone who dares cause riots in the streets. Keep Glorious Heaven City steady. As for my parents, Xie’er and Wuxian... I will find them.”

With that, he turned towards the distance, and with a single step, he vanished.

There was no sound, no burst of wind, space folded like a piece of silk, and his physical form was thoroughly erased from the grand study.

*

High up on the sheer face of the central summit, carved directly out of the abyssal mountain rock, rested the ancient Gate of the Celestial Dragon Vault.

And Chen Feng appeared here, his divine sense covering the entire place.

And he found no one.

The mountain pass was barren.

There were no remnants of a battle, no defensive lingering qi that remained into a rock, and no discarded weapons.

Worse, there was not a single speck of living breath.

The entire valley was an empty, echoing tomb of cold stone.

Chen Feng descended before the massive gate, his eyes flared with manic, golden divine radiance as he placed both hands flat against the cold, carved stone.

”Open! Open for me!” he roared.

His Saint-level physical strength detonated!

The muscles beneath his sleeves expanded, veins bulging like writhing dragons along his forearms as billions of pounds of pure kinetic force smashed into the ancient mechanisms.

The ground beneath his feet buckled, sending massive fractures tearing through the granite bedrock for miles around.

Silver celestial light erupted from his dantian, attempting to brute-force the primordial runes and burn away the cosmic locks.

But couldn’t.

The gates did not budge by a single millimeter.

The ancient gate flashed with a dull, mocking gray luminescence, effortlessly absorbing his Saint energy and redirecting the shockwaves deep into the tectonic mantle below.

It was a gate designed to withstand the assaults of Saints; against a newly ascended Saint like him whose foundations were shallows, it stood as immovable as the laws of the universe themselves.

”DAMN IT!”

A volcanic eruption of unbridled rage shattered Chen Feng’s composure as he stepped back, his right arm drawing back before unleashing a catastrophic, sweeping backhand slash of pure spatial annihilation across the surrounding peaks!

KABOOOOOM!

A crescent of blinding silver sliced through the landscape.

The adjacent three-thousand-meter mountain was neatly severed from its base, and before the peak could even begin to tumble into the valley below, Chen Feng’s aura detonated in a secondary shockwave, pulverizing the millions of tons of rock into microscopic dust!

In less than three seconds, an entire mountain was thoroughly erased from the geography of the world, leaving behind only a swirling vortex of scorching ash and a massive, hollow crater that reached down into the magma layers of the earth!

Panting slightly, the qi around his body slowly receded into his pores as the violent destruction cleared the red haze from his vision.

Standing on the edge of the newly formed abyss, Chen Feng took a long, cold breath.

Raging at stone and destroying barren landscape was the behavior of a child.

For now, he decided to head towards the White Dragon Sect.

Relying on his spatial mastery, he tore open the fabric of the void once more.

A silver rift parted before him, and he stepped through, crossing tens of thousands of miles of northern territory in the span of a single heartbeat.

Rumble...

Chen Feng stepped out of the spatial tear, expecting to see the majestic, snow-capped peaks of the White Dragon Sect, the floating jade pavilions, and the thousands of proud disciples riding flying swords through the clouds.

Instead, his boots hovered over an apocalyptic nightmare.

There were no disciples.

There were no pavilions.

The entire ancestral sanctuary of the White Dragon Sect had been hollowed out from the inside, scraped down to its blackened bedrock as if an astronomical celestial body had slammed directly into the earth.

Towering fissures, hundreds of feet wide, snaked through the scarred stone like gaping wounds.

The defensive arrays, which had stood proud for years, were completely annihilated, reduced to smoking piles of molten slag.

And scattered across the scorched rim of the massive basin were thousands upon thosuands of mangled, mutilated bodies.

They were not merely slain; they had been subjected to horrific, clinical massacres.

Chen Feng drifted downward, his boots stepping onto stones slick with black, clotted blood.

He saw junior disciples pinned to broken pillars by invisible, residual sword intents that continued to sizzle and prevent their flesh from decaying normally.

He saw venerable elders, men who had commanded respect across the entire continent, lying in the dirt with their sternums caved inward, their souls hollowed out, their faces contorted into masks of unspeakable agony and terror.

The smell of burnt flesh, liquefied organs, and lingering energy permeated the icy mountain wind.

The White Dragon Sect, the sect he founded, the undisputed ruler of the world, had been butchered like cattle in a slaughterhouse.

Chen Feng knelt beside the tattered corpse of a senior elder whose chest had been pierced.

He reached out with two fingers, touching the lingering spiritual residue frozen upon the wound.

Instantly, his consciousness picked up the faint, lingering imprint left behind by the murderer.

It was an aura he could never forget in ten thousand lifetimes.

It was pure, haughty, and arrogant—a sickeningly pristine celestial energy that carried the pride of the high heavens, treating all living beings beneath it as disposable dust.

It was an aura that reeked of the upper realm.

At that moment, the memories of past humiliations, the whispered threats from the sky, the cold, mocking eyes that had once looked down upon him as if he were an insect writhing in the dirt—all of it rushed back into his mind like an avalanche of pure venom!

A vein bulged violently on Chen Feng’s temple, his eyes turning entirely bloodshot as a suffocating, demonic killing intent erupted from his soul, setting the sky above the ruined crater ablaze in wild, apocalyptic thunder!

”SHEN HAORAN!”