Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!-Chapter 73: Diary

In a massive, vaulted war room draped in the crimson and gold banners of thirteen nations, the atmosphere was not one of imperial triumph, but of suffocating, bone-chilling dread.

The air was shrouded with the scent of bitter tea and the cold sweat of men who had realized they had just gambled away the foundations of their empires.

"What!? Wiped out!?" the King of the Azure Sun Kingdom roared, his voice cracking as he slammed his jeweled scepter onto the obsidian strategy table.

They were just waiting here, expecting a good news, but who knew that the news delivered to them would be so devastating and unbelievable.

After all, anyone would find it hard to believe that a clan full of paper tigers can annihilate a near ten million army, right?

"All nine million soldiers... and two Spirit Ascension Realm experts... and none of them survived!?" the Queen of the Silver Frost Kingdom echoed, her face as pale as her namesake. "How is this possible? Even if they ran into an ancient forbidden array, there should have been messengers! There should have been a survivor that can tell us the result immediately! But they all went out in a single, collective heartbeat!" 𝐟𝚛𝕖𝚎𝕨𝗲𝐛𝚗𝐨𝐯𝐞𝕝.𝐜𝗼𝗺

Indeed. In fact, if it wasn’t for one of them deciding to send scouts to check the situation, they wouldn’t have known that their army was already completely annihilated.

"Damn it! Didn’t you all say that it would be easy!?" a younger monarch snarled, his eyes darting around the room in a panicked search for someone to blame. "You said the Ning Clan was a support-type family! You said their spirits were not worth mentioning and is only good for buffing others, not for combat! You said their defensive walls were old and brittle!"

"Maybe they received assistance from the Spirit Hall?" one of the elder generals whispered, though his own voice betrayed his lack of conviction.

"Impossible!" the High King of Iron Blood Kingdom countered, his fist trembling. "Not even the Spirit Hall, with all their hidden elders and demonic forbidden arts, has the power to completely annihilate almost a million soldiers and two Spirit Ascension experts without letting them send a single emergency message!"

This ...this kind of thing was no longer a war nor a battle, but a conplete and total annihilation.

The room fell into a heavy, uncomfortable silence, feeling the weight of the loss and lamenting at how staggering it was.

Almost ten million cultivators represented the martial backbone of their collective middle-tier strength, and to lose them in a single afternoon was like trying to invite the vultures to the feast.

"What should we do now?" the youngest King asked, his voice small. "Should we continue attacking the Ning Clan? If we don’t finish them, the survivors will surely seek vengeance."

"We are severely weakened now," the Queen of Silver Frost said, her gaze fixed on the borders of the Spirit Hall’s territory. "So once the Spirit Hall decided to use this chance to launch a massive counterattack... we might lose more than just our dignity. No, we might lose our land, our territory, and our lives."

"...Damn it! Who even suggested that mission!?" a voice cried out, but no one moved, after all the blame was a hot coal that no one wanted to touch.

"We must attack!" the King of Azure Sun Kingdom suddenly barked, his desperation turning into a dangerous, irrational zeal. "We need to show more strength now that we have lost so much power! If we stop now, we admit we are broken!"

"Indeed," another added, nodding frantically. "If we retreat now, it would simply make the Spirit Hall think we’re weakened. It would just accelerate their expansion without giving us time to breathe. We must strike the Ning Clan again to prove the first loss was a fluke! A freak accident of nature!"

"I don’t know about this," a lone voice of reason attempted to interject. "Shouldn’t we probably stabilize the situation first? Shore up our defenses?"

"Impossible! We must go to war!"

"Yes! We must destroy the Ning Clan!"

The war room descended into a chorus of frantic, bloodthirsty shouting—the sound of men who knew they were drowning and were willing to burn the world down just to stay afloat for one more hour.

*

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*

At this moment, high above the Eastern Region, a silver streak descended from the clouds with the grace of a falling star.

Shen Haoran finally arrived above the Seven Treasure City.

Looking down, he saw the scars of what seemed to be a massive explosion in the distance—completely titanic, glassed-over crater that served as a silent monument to his fiancée’s newfound ruthlessness.

He guided his sword downward, landing with a soft, metallic ring in the center of the Ning Clan’s inner manor yard.

He jumped down, the celestial blade shrinking and returning to his storage ring with a flick of his wrist, and almost instantly, the shadow at his feet rippled like water under a stone.

Just then...

’Welcome back, young master,’ Qing’er’s voice echoed through their shared soul-link, her presence a cold, comforting weight in the back of his mind.

"Ah, I’m back, Qing’er. I trust the ’cleaning’ went well?" Haoran said aloud, his voice cool and undisturbed by the carnage that had preceded him.

Just then, the heavy mahogany doors of the main manor swung open as Ning Xueli, her blue dress fluttering, led the way, followed closely by a weary but relieved Ning Xiao.

Behind them, the newly-bodied Old Jian and the bandaged Old Hu followed like loyal hounds.

"Haoran!" Xueli smiled brightly, her previous coldness as a "mass-destroyer" vanishing the moment she saw him.

She skipped down the jade steps, discarding her dignity as a Young Miss to throw her arms around him in a tight hug.

"Young master," Ning Xiao said, his voice thick with emotion.

He cupped his hands in a gesture of profound respect while bowing his head low and the two elders behind him did the same, their previous arrogance toward "Central Region brats" having been thoroughly incinerated by the events of the past few days.

"Greetings. It has been a while, Mr. Ning," Haoran said, gently patting Xueli’s head. "I see the city is still standing. Mostly."

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away across the continental divide, the atmosphere of the Central Region was vastly different.

In the Blue Wind Kingdom, a place of drifting mists and eternal spring, the Luo Clan’s estate was a picture of tranquil perfection.

Luo Mingye sat alone on an elegant white pavilion, her slender fingers dancing across the strings of a jade zither.

The music was melancholy, a reflection of the two years that had passed since the Supreme Inheritance had first opened its gates.

In those two years, much had changed for the "Zither Goddess" of the Luo Clan after she had successfully reached the 1st Stage of the Golden Core Realm, a feat that solidified her status as the kingdom’s premier genius.

Her sword intent had sharpened into a lethal, invisible edge, and her zither mastery had reached a level where she could influence the very weather with a single chord.

But power brought its own headaches.

Two years ago, after the disaster at the inheritance realm, the Royal Family had been pushed into a state of manic fury, instead the theft of their ancestral techniques was an insult they could not bear.

They had ordered a total purge of the Yun Clan.

At that time, the Yun Clan and Yun Li had reached out to her and the Luo Clan, begging for intervention.

But Luo Mingye had no intention of getting involved in that blood-soaked mess.

’Yun Li stole the technique,’ she had told her father. ’He created that mess, so let him bear the consequences.’

Due to her descendant’s action, the Yun Clan was razed to the ground overnight, and even their newly ascended Saint Elder, who had supposedly been their savior, didn’t survive the Royal Family’s elite executioners.

Surprisingly, Yun Li had managed to survive and escape, likely through some hidden life-saving treasure.

He was now a wanted man with a bounty on his head, a ghost hiding in the dark corners of the four regions.

She sighed, the music of her zither trailing off into a tired discordance, remembering those boring political squabbles always made her feel older than her years.

She placed the zither to the side and summoned her sword—the white "Yin" half of the Married Swords as she stared at the blade, its surface as clear as mountain water.

Another thing that had changed was her relationship with her "good friend" Xia Mengyao.

Because of these twin swords, the two of them were constantly being pulled into each other’s orbits that it was beyond annoying.

She loved Mengyao as a sister, but these swords seemed convinced they were a pair of star-crossed lovers!

We really need to find a third person to marry quickly, she thought with a wry smile. Ideally someone strong enough to suppress both of us.

Two years had passed. Surely, Young Master Shen should have emerged from the Eastern Region by now? All she needed to do was wait for her opportunity to reconnect.

She stood up, waving her hand as the sword vanished into her dantian and she reached for her zither, but as she did, her eyes caught sight of something that shouldn’t have been there.

"Huh?" she murmured. "I don’t remember bringing a book. I don’t even like reading."

Resting on the stone bench was a small, leather-bound volume that looked remarkably mundane, yet carried a strange, heavy aura.

Curious, she picked it up.

The title on the cover was written in a handwriting that felt eerily familiar, yet foreign.

[Ye Feng’s Diary: Luo Mingye’s Copy]

"A diary?" she whispered, her brow furrowing. "Who the hell writes a diary in this age? And who... who is Ye Feng?"

As she opened the first page, the air around the pavilion grew strangely still, as if a new thread of fate was beginning to weave itself around her soul.