Villains Aren't Stepping Stones!

Chapter 267 - 35: Time

Shen Haoran and the others stood at the side, watching as Xu Xiansu and Xie Ji stood face to face.

Haoran even took out a bowl of roasted peanuts and began eating.

Huo Yue stared at that bowl and began to take a few and ate them as well.

Eventually, almost everyone was slithering their hands towards that bowl of roasted peanuts, much to Haoran’s annoyance.

Just then, the continuous rain of soft pink peach blossom petals seemed to violently freeze mid-air for a single instant as the dense, refined spiritual energy of a 1st stage Nirvana Rebirth expert began to rapidly, fluidly compress inside Xie Ji’s physical frame.

The ancient, sprawling courtyard of the Falling Blossom Villa hummed with a heavy vibration as the senior cultivator manually adjusted the primary valves of his internal meridians, forcing his massive reservoir of qi to completely dive back into the hidden chambers of his lower dantian.

He closed his eyes, his breathing slowing to an absolute, calculated crawl as he locked down his channels with a series of complex internal restriction arrays.

"Since you are a newly arrived freshman and is only at the Golden Core realm, it would be an absolute, disgraceful insult to my own pride to use my full, unbridled strength against you," Xie Ji spoke out loud, his voice perfectly steady as a brilliant, silver-blue light flared briefly across his gray robes before vanishing. "Therefore, to ensure a completely fair, balanced, and structurally sound evaluation of your talent and strength, I will completely suppress my active cultivation level down to that of a 1st stage Golden Core Realm expert. Come, junior! Show me the absolute weight of your resolve!"

Xu Xiansu stood firmly upon the polished stone pathway of the courtyard, her distinct orange eyes instantly clearing into a line of absolute, icy focus.

The immense, burning embarrassment she had just experienced from Haoran’s fabricated mining-slave story was completely vaporized, replaced entirely by the razor-sharp martial instinct that she honed for hundreds of years in that other life.

Then, she slowly, fluidly slid her right foot backward, her simple, unadorned silk dress fluttering softly as she raised her hands into an immaculate combat stance.

"Then, senior... I am officially going to start," she whispered smoothly.

*BOOM!*

The exact instant the final syllable cleared her lips, Xu Xiansu’s physical form violently exploded forward, her kinetic velocity tearing a massive, deep gouge across the stone path as she transformed into a blur of pure white light.

She did not carry a traditional sword nor any kind of weapon, instead she aggressively channeled the power of her legendary Sun Moon Divine Physique!

This the physical constitution that granted her absolute, unyielding domain over the highly volatile, microscopic flows of localized Time.

Although it’s only at the Minor Completion, it’s more than enough to for her to fight even across an entire cultivation realm above her!

Of course, Xie Ji, despite his active cultivation being heavily suppressed to the 1st stage of the Golden Core Realm, still possessed the immense, century-long tactical reflexes and deep combat wisdom of a veteran lone wolf.

The moment her silhouette vanished from his visual line, his eyes narrowed sharply, and he instinctively thrust his right palm forward.

"Wind Vacuum!"

He roared, and from his palm, a roaring wave of compressed elemental wind-qi designed to instantly pull her towards him blasted out.

However...

Right before the crushing wind-qi could even touch a single thread of her hair, Xu Xiansu’s orange eyes violently flashed with a blinding, binary luminescence of solar gold and lunar silver.

She immediately executed one of the techniques granted by her physique, Time Foresight.

In a single instant, her conscious mind completely broke past the limitations of the present plane, allowing her to clearly and flawlessly see exactly three seconds into the immediate, unwritten future timeline.

Within her mental canvas, she saw the exact trajectory, width, and kinetic displacement of Xie Ji’s incoming wind palm before it had even finished forming in the material world.

Armed with this absolute, future-breaking data, she didn’t waste a single fraction of a motion as she fluidly shifted her balance by a single inch to the left, and simultaneously activated her second, far more reality-bending ability: Time Skip.

*SNAP.*

To the eyes of Haoran and the others who were watching at the side, the physical space around her coordinate completely skipped forward in time by a full two seconds.

In a flash of pure, logic-defying spatial dislocation, she completely bypassed the entire trajectory of the incoming wind blast, instantly appearing directly inside Xie Ji’s absolute blind spot, her right fist already coiled back like a striking viper.

"Earth Eruption!" A burning volcanic power immediately bursts out of her fist.

However, Xie Ji’s century of hard-fought experience re-asserted itself beautifully.

The moment his palm strike hit nothing but empty air, his survival instincts violently screamed of an immediate, terminal danger behind his left shoulder.

Without turning his head, he forcefully spun his entire torso around on a single heel, his suppressed qi flaring into a thick, protective shield of armor that completely covered his chest.

Xu Xiansu smirked at that. "Too slow, senior."

Then, she aggressively channelled her physique once more, unleashing Time Acceleration directly onto the kinetic arc of her own striking arm.

The temporal laws within a three-inch radius around her fist were violently, completely rewritten; the velocity of her punch was accelerated by a staggering tenfold margin, her small fist breaching the distance and slamming directly into his qi protection before the Xie Ji’s neural pathways could even finish sending the command to fortify the shield.

*CRACK!*

The localized kinetic impact was thunderous, the sheer, accelerated force of the punch violently shattering Xie Ji’s qi armor into millions of flying gray stone particles.

Xie Ji’s eyes widened as he let out a short, muffled gasp of pain as the raw momentum threw his physical form backward across the courtyard, his boots dragging deeply through the dirt as he scrambled to stabilize his footing beneath the peach trees.

But Xu Xiansu was a relentless combatant who had experienced first hand to never grant an opponent a single second of operational recovery.

As her boots touched the ground, she immediately thrust both of her palms forward, firing a massive, highly dense barrage of gold and silver qi arrows towards Xie Ji.

"Time Arrow!"

Although she can use her control over time on herself, but any advanced temporal technique designed to directly target an enemy required her to successfully fire the attack and achieve a physical hit on their vessel.

The temporal curse could not be cast through empty space; it needed a material bridge.

She can’t just control the time of others. Of course, this weakness would disappear once she reached Grand Completion, and cultivated to Supreme Emperor realm.

By then, the temporal laws of the universe will already be under her control.

Xie Ji, his chest aching from the previous impact, saw the incoming barrage of gold-and-silver arrows.

"Shadow Perplexing Steps!" He unleashed his movement technique, transforming into a series of fluid gray shadows as he desperately leaped across the courtyard to dodge the projectiles.

*Thwack! Thwack!*

He successfully dodged the vast majority of the arrows, but because Xu Xiansu was also continuously utilizing her Time Foresight to perfectly calculate his exact landing coordinates before he even touched the ground, one single, stray silver arrow managed to cleanly graze the outer sleeve of his gray robes, cutting a small line into his shoulder.

The exact second that silver arrow made physical contact with his flesh, Xie Ji’s brown eyes violently widened in an absolute, primitive horror.

He felt a bizarre, terrifyingly alien energetic frequency instantly latch onto his primary channels through the small wound.

It was the effect of Xu Xiansu’s Time Arrow.

Within his body, the localized rate of his internal biological clock was forcefully, aggressively accelerated by several margin.

Every single second that passed in the material world felt like a grueling, exhausting hour of non-stop, high-intensity martial combat to his muscles and his dantian.

His suppressed qi began to drain away from his reservoir at an absolutely terrifying, logic-defying speed, and his physical stamina plummeted into an abyss of pure, leaden fatigue within a single breath.

His legs grew heavy, his breathing turning ragged and desperate as a thick sweat instantly drenched his gray robes.

Realizing that he was being cleanly bled dry by some sort of a curse or technique, Xie Ji let out a fierce roar, desperately channeling every single drop of his remaining, suppressed qi into a final, cataclysmic strike.

He leaped into the high sky, his hands gathering a massive, fifty-meter storm of sharp and diamond-like bamboo leaves that threatened to shred the entire courtyard into fine dust.

"This is the end, junior!" he shouted, throwing the storm downward. "Diamond Leaf Hurricane!"

Xu Xiansu stood directly beneath the descending apocalypse, her expression remaining entirely calm, loose, and completely unbothered.

The various usage of time attacks, especially those arrows have almost depleted her qi reserve, but she simply channelled her physique inwardly, executing the Internal Time Acceleration.

Within her own dantians, her self-healing parameters and qi-recovery loops were accelerated by several folds.

In a single fraction of a mortal breath, her stamina was instantly recovered, and her spent spiritual energy was completely, beautifully restored to its absolute maximum capacity.

Unfortunately, she can only use this once a day.

This is because what she was doing isn’t really healing, instead she just accelerates her natural body regeneration by forcing her body to experience days, months, or even years of natural recovery in a few moments.

A stamina would recover instantly, qi would be filled up in a blink, and even wounds will recover in seconds, however the body has actually lived through that recovery period.

The problem is that every living being possesses a ’Temporal Stability Cycle’.

After being accelerated once, her flesh, blood, meridians, and soul become saturated with temporal energy.

Until the next cycle begins, which is one day to a weak depending on the seriousness of her recovery, the body’s timeline cannot be safely accelerated again.

Attempting a second acceleration causes severe consequences.

She stared at the attack falling down on her, and without hesitation, she skipped time one final time.

The fifty-meter storm of sharp leaves exploded violently against the empty stone path, completely missing her coordinate as she skipped past the entire event horizon.

She materialized dead in front of the airborne Xie Ji, her palm resting gently, perfectly against the center of his chest before he could even begin his descent.

"You have lost, Senior," she whispered softly, raising her palm towards him.

*BOOM!*

A clean, concentrated blast of accelerated qi erupted from her palm, throwing Xie Ji’s physical body backward through the air.

He flipped gracefully three times before landing firmly on his feet on the koi pond, his suppressed restriction arrays violently shattering as his true, massive Nirvana Rebirth aura automatically flared out to stabilize his momentum.

The courtyard went completely, deathly silent for a long three seconds.

Xie Ji stood on the crystal-clear water, staring down at his trembling, sweat-drenched hands in an absolute, stunned silence.

Then, slowly, his chest began to heave, and a massive, booming laugh of pure, unadulterated appreciation and genuine joy violently vibrated through his throat, echoing across the entire residential district.

"Hahaha! Marvelous! Absolutely, thoroughly magnificent!" the 150-year-old senior disciple laughed out loud, completely and willingly accepting his technical defeat as he looked at her with a gaze full of profound respect.

"To possess such a flawless mastery over the sacred laws of Time at such a young age... you are a true, undeniable monster of this era, junior! I completely, happily accept this loss! The Falling Blossom Villa is officially yours to rule!"

Xu Xiansu breathed a sigh of relief as she descended down to the ground.

However, the moment she did so, she stumbled, but at that moment, Haoran appeared beside her and caught her.

She raised her head, "... I’m not thanking you."

Haoran chuckled, "Whatever. But isn’t it great? You finally have a home. I’m sure your grandfather in heaven will be very happy."

Her lips twitched.

Fuck you Haoran.

Fuck you.