Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

The dust and the copper tang of blood hung heavy in the air as Shen Haoran turned his head slowly, his golden gaze falling upon the final figure remaining on the white sands.

Shen Xinye stood at the periphery, her slender fingers white-knuckled as they gripped the hilt of the white blade.

She was wary, her body coiled like a high-tension wire, her breathing shallow and calculated.

She was the Fourth Crown, the woman who had spent a decade refining her intent into a weapon of surgical precision, but in the shadow of this man, she felt as though she were standing before a sheer cliff face that reached into the infinite.

But...

So what!?

She is also a genius!

In a flicker of movement that blurred the very light of the arena, she vanished.

There was no sound, no displacement of air—only a sudden, lethal presence manifesting directly behind Haoran’s blind spot.

She aimed a horizontal strike meant to sever the spirit, her sword glowing with a concentrated, crystalline sword intent that hummed with the frequency of a thousand blades.

It was a strike that should have been unblockable, delivered at a speed that transcended the perception of the Golden Core realm.

However, Haoran did not even turn his body fully, and with a languid, almost bored motion, he raised his right hand.

*Snap.*

The crystalline blade stopped dead in the air, caught firmly between his index and middle fingers.

The sheer force of the impact created a localized shockwave that rippled the sand beneath them, but Haoran’s hand didn’t tremble by so much as a millimeter.

Shen Xinye’s eyes widened, a flash of genuine horror crossing her ethereal features.

She had poured her entire foundation into that strike, yet it had been plucked from the air like a falling leaf.

Then, with a sharp twist of her wrist and a desperate surge of her Qi, she managed to wrench the blade free from his iron grip, using the momentum to vault backward, putting thirty meters of distance between them in a single breath.

’I miscalculated,’ she thought, her chest heaving as she sucked in the oxygen-rich air. ’I should have taken the pill given by Shwn Ying earlier. I should have increased my strength temporarily to bridge the gap. If I had just been even just ten percent faster...’

Haoran took a slow, measured step forward, his golden eyes seemingly reading the frantic script of her thoughts.

"Shen Xinye..." he began, a small, dark smile playing on his lips. "Let me guess what you’re thinking right now. You’re ruminating on the ’what-ifs’, aren’t you? You’re telling yourself, ’I should have probably taken that pill and increased my strength.’ Am I right?"

Her eyes widened further. How did he...!?

"But that is a foolish, peasant-like thought," Haoran said, his smile widening into something more predatory as he stood with his hands back in his sleeves, looking entirely unguarded. "Regret is for the weak who cannot handle the reality of their own limitations. If you believe a mere pill can change the outcome of that moment, then by all means... satisfy your curiosity. Take it. Swallow the pill and attack me once again. Don’t worry, I won’t attack you until you’re ready."

Shen Xinye hesitated for a heartbeat.

The pride of a Crown battled with the pragmatism of a warrior, but eventually, she reached into the folds of her robe, withdrew the blood-red Qi-Bursting Pill given by Shen Ying, and swallowed it.

The effect was instantaneous.

Her meridians roared as her Qi turned a violent, incandescent blood-red, and her aura exploded, shattering the bottleneck of the Golden Core realm and temporarily surging into the Nascent Soul realm.

The air around her began to crackle with static, and her sword intent turned from a crystalline white to a sharp, crimson fire.

Haoran smiled, "Impressive aura. Now come at me."

With a roar of defiance that echoed through the stadium, she lunged.

This time, she was twice as fast as before, moving as if she was a red streak of death, her blade carving a line through the very fabric of space.

However, this time, Haoran didn’t use his fingers and instead he raised his flat palm, and as the crimson blade struck, he simply caught the edge of the sword with his bare hand.

The golden qi on his palm flared with a subtle light, and the "unstoppable" strike was halted once more.

Impossible! Shen Xinye couldn’t believe her eyes.

She was sure that even if it was someone at the 3rd or 4th stage of Nascent Soul Realm, they wouldn’t be able to casually blocked her attack!

It might even threaten their life!

Just then, Haoran raised his other hand, his fingers curling as if he were about to deliver a decisive counter-strike.

The killing intent radiating from him was so thick it felt like physical ice.

Panicked, Shen Xinye immediately aborted her follow-up, kicking off the air and retreating all the way to the very edge of the arena wall, her sword shaking in her hand as she panted.

Haoran paused, before he slowly lowered his raised hand and tilted his head, his expression one of genuine confusion.

"Why are you putting so much distance between us, Shen Xinye? If you truly want to hit me, then you need to get closer."

Shen Xinye remained silent, simply remaining in a fighting stance, her muscles rigid, her mind reeling as the "gap" she thought she could bridge with the pill had only revealed how vast the ocean truly was.

"Ah, I see," Haoran said, a mocking edge entering his voice. "Are you afraid? Are you so terrified of my presence that you cannot bear to let even a part of me out of your field of vision? If that’s the case, then there is no need for such effort. Distance only has meaning when two people possess equal power. In other words, it is a variable for peers. And Between the two of us, it serves no purpose."

Just as the final word left his lips, he was gone.

In the next millisecond, Shen Xinye felt a cold, terrifying pressure around her throat.

Haoran appeared directly behind her, his hands already draped gently yet firmly around her neck.

She hadn’t seen him move.

She hadn’t felt any movement in the air.

He was simply ’here’.

"See?" he whispered into her ear, his voice feeling like a ghost’s caress. "If I wanted to, I could have easily crushed your neck and ended your life right now. Your distance meant nothing in front of absolute gap in power."

Shen Xinye felt her entire body grow cold, a paralyzing dread washing over her.

But her survival instinct, honed through years of cultivation, screamed for her to move.

Without thinking, she roared, a raw sound of desperation, and spun around with her sword in a wide, circular arc to decapitate the man behind her.

But Haoran was already gone again, and he reappeared behind her once more, his hands tucked back into his sleeves.

Then...

"Cough!"

A violent, racking cough tore from Shen Xinye’s throat as a fountain of bright crimson blood gushed from her mouth, splashing onto the white sand.

Her eyes widened in a mix of shock and utter confusion as dhe looked down at her chest, then back at Haoran.

She hadn’t seen a punch.

She hadn’t felt a palm.

She didn’t even know *how* she had been attacked, yet her internal organs felt as though they had been struck by a falling star.

The world began to spin, and her strength evaporated as she fell to her knees, her sword clattering to the ground.

Before she could even process the defeat, the spatial arrays of the arena glowed, and she vanished, transported to the infirmary to save her life.

Just as the crowd began to roar, a shadow fell over Haoran from above.

Shen Fei, the First Crown, had used the chaos of the last exchange to climb high into the air.

He had recovered just enough to launch a final, suicidal strike as he descended like a shooting star, his obsidian-tipped spear pointed straight at Haoran’s crown, his entire Nascent Soul essence condensed into the tip of the weapon.

Haoran didn’t even look up until the very last second as he simply raised a single finger toward the descending spear.

"Predictable."

Then...

He fired.

Not just one, not even dozens, but hundreds of Sword Intent bullets erupted from his fingertip, a golden barrage that met the descending spear head-on.

Shen Fei’s eyes widened in horror and he immediately switched from an all-out attack to a desperate defense, spinning his spear in a frantic circle to deflect the golden rain.

But the volume was simply too much! It was like trying to block a waterfall with a toothpick.

He was hit several times, and the sounds of impact were sickening.

One bullet grazed his cheek, taking a chunk of flesh with it.

One pierced the right side of his chest.

Another shattered his left shoulder.

One tore through his stomach, and the last one pierced his right leg, shattering the bone.

And with that, the momentum of his descent was broken, and he dropped to the arena floor like a bird with clipped wings, coughing up a violent spray of blood.

Haoran stared down at him as he slowly lowered his hand, the golden glow in his eyes receding into a cold, clinical indifference.

"So, that was your plan? You used Shen Xinye as a distraction for that one single, mediocre sneak attack? How stupid. How utterly beneath your title. You would have had a better chance at hitting me if you two had actually joined forces. It seems unlike me, your arrogance is your only talent."

He took a step forward, his boots crunching on the sand as he approached the struggling First Crown.

Shen Fei was trying to push himself up, his fingers digging into the sand, his face a mask of agony and shame.

"My evaluation of you?" Haoran asked rhetorically, his voice reaching every corner of the silent arena. "You’re worse than the rabbit and the turtle combined. You possess the flaws of both and the virtues of neither."

He raised his foot and slammed it down onto the back of Shen Fei’s head, grinding his face into the dirt. "Have you heard the fable of the race between the rabbit and the turtle? The rabbit was fast but arrogant; the turtle was slow but persistent. You, Shen Fei... you are slower than the turtle, and you are far, far dumber than the rabbit."

With a final, dismissive motion, he kicked Shen Fei in the side of the face.

The First Crown was sent flying, rolling across the arena floor like a sack of grain until he finally lost consciousness.

Then, a moment later, his body vanished into the spatial vortex.

Silence permeated the arena for one heartbeat.

Two heartbeats.

Then, a beat later, the entire star system seemed to shake.

The cheers of hundreds of millions of spectators erupted in a tectonic wave of sound.

It was a roar of worship, of terror, and of absolute acknowledgment.

The "Hegemon" had not declined; it had been reborn in a form more terrifying than ever before.

Just then, Xiao Nanan descended from the sky on her crystalline flying sword, her face was flushed, her eyes wide and sparkling with a light that bordered on fanaticism.

She landed ten paces from Haoran, her hands shaking as she raised her voice-amplifying artifact.

"LADIES AND GENTLEMEN! BEHOLD!" she screamed, her voice cracking with pure, unadulterated adoration. "The heavens have spoken! The stars have bowed! And the Crowns shattered! I present to you the undisputed King of the Heavens! The man who stands at the very center of the universe! The undisputed Heaven’s Chosen of the Shen Clan! SHEN HAORAN!"

She turned toward him, her posture almost one of prayer. "Young master! You’re so amazing! You made those crowns look like common weeds and stone on a sidewalk! Let’s see who dares to say to you don’t deserve to be the number one genius of the clan, I’ll be the one to smack them head first!"

Haoran simply smiled at her, and she swooned, hand on her forehead as she did a ’where’s my fainting couch’ kind of motion.

Haoran stood in the center of the arena, his black and gold robes fluttering in the wind, his expression as calm as a frozen lake.

He looked up at the high throne where his mother sat, and for the first time that day, a genuine, satisfied smile touched his lips.