Mo Fan swallowed the frustration and let it fuel him instead.
He had no other choice. He channeled every last drop of bitterness into his fingers and kept the micro-management cranked to its absolute limit...
Driving 003 along the razor's edge of survival, grinding down the old man's already unstable spiritual force one exchange at a time.
Bang.
Another streak of blood-red energy grazed 003's hind leg.
Barely dodged. But the rear leg bone—transplanted from a Demon-Eye Rabbit, already riddled with hairline fractures—finally let out an overwhelmed groan of structural failure.
003's speed visibly dropped by a beat.
The soul-flames flickered violently, as if they might gutter out at any moment.
In the guest room, Mo Fan's face had gone paper-white.
The oppressive pressure of running dual-thread operation (dual-boxing) was blurring his vision. He was starting to experience auditory hallucinations.
I really don't want to give up on you, 003...
The thought came out bitter, half-formed. But the next instant, that gambler's madness and stubbornness in his eyes crushed the rational impulse to sever the link.
The footsteps in the courtyard were bizarre—but they were still some distance from his door.
That meant he still had a margin. A sliver of room to squeeze out the last shred of his mental energy to stall!
Since you're afraid to bomb with your hands untied, don't blame me for playing dirty!
Back at the ruins near the village entrance, Mo Fan gritted his teeth against the soul-tearing agony and pushed his micro-management past any reasonable, humane limit.
BOOM.
A spell from Venerable Miasma Dust's furious barrage swept across 003's body.
Even with Mo Fan's desperate evasion, the modified left hind leg snapped clean off at the root under the violent spiritual impact with a sharp crack—dissolving into a shower of drifting bone powder.
"Beast! Let's see where you can run now!" Venerable Miasma Dust's eyes flashed with savage satisfaction.
In his experience, any speed-reliant demon beast with a broken leg was tantamount to meat on the chopping block.
He'd miscalculated one point.
003 was not a demon beast at all. It was pure undead! No nerves. No blood vessels. And certainly none of the pain receptors a living creature should have.
Lost a leg? Then crawl with your claws!
Under Mo Fan's near-manic control, the three-legged 003 didn't collapse and whine.
It drove both massive demon tiger forelimbs directly into the dirt and kept moving—body hugged low to the ground, frame twisted into something grotesque and wrong...
Scuttling through the rubble at startling speed like an enormous, many-limbed insect!
It made straight for the load-bearing walls of the best-maintained buildings—the ones most likely to be array nodes.
It wedged itself into the dead corners of the ruined ancestral hall. It made itself impossible to hit cleanly.
"YOU—!"
Venerable Miasma Dust nearly choked on his own rage.
A large-scale AoE spell he was preparing to bombard down was forcefully held back in his hands, almost causing him internal injuries.
He, a grand old monster with a peak Foundation Establishment foundation, was actually being stonewalled and thoroughly disgusted by a crippled bag of bones.
He was constrained from throwing his spells freely, possessing immense strength but feeling as if he were punching a sponge.
While 003 ran its frantic aggro-pulling operation at the village entrance, the threat inside the side courtyard was closing in step by step.
Tap... tap...
The deliberately suppressed footsteps had reached the room next door!
Mo Fan lay on the bed, his complexion pale to the extreme.
He knew exactly where his limits were. Dual-boxing was already the absolute ceiling of his current Soul Strength.
If he forcibly split his focus again to control his main body or direct Mo Yan behind the door to deal with an emergency, the instantaneous mental overload would cause brain death on the spot.
Rationality made the call without hesitation.
Mo Fan shut his eyes and severed his real-time perception of the side courtyard's environment.
In his mind, he issued a single, stripped-down command to Mo Yan, who had been hiding in the blind spot behind the door all along:
Stay concealed. Hold the line. Anyone who crosses this threshold... Kill without mercy!
Command issued. Mo Fan drew a slow breath and prepared to sink his full consciousness back into 003's guerrilla fight at the village entrance.
But even with his eyes closed, the terror of the unknown spread through his heart like a bone-attached maggot—clinging, relentless, eating at the edges of his focus.
Who exactly is out there? The one-armed Fang Tong returning? Or Wu Feng and San Niang, driven mad by the illusion?
The fear of the unknown was often the most fatal flaw; it picked apart rational thinking from the inside, one paranoid guess at a time.
I can't do this. If I don't take a look and confirm the enemy situation, there's no way I can concentrate fully on controlling 003!
Mo Fan's jaw clenched—and he bit down viciously on his recently healed tongue tip, shattering it again!
Searing pain, accompanied by the strong rusty taste of blood, exploded in his mouth.
Borrowing this instant of sharp clarity, Mo Fan did something incredibly insane.
He wrenched a microscopic thread of awareness from his already-stretched-to-breaking mental energy and connected it to Mo Yan's vision behind the door!
His main body. 003. Mo Yan.
In that moment, Mo Fan crossed the absolute red line of a Qi Condensation cultivator's mental capacity, forcibly initiating a heaven-defying triple-thread operation!
Hum!
Through Mo Yan's hollow eye sockets, Mo Fan's vision pierced the gap in the guest room's door panel.
Just a one-second flicker of an image was enough to leave him shocked. Because it wasn't who he expected.
Outside the door crack, under the cold pale moonlight. The owner of those footsteps was not the sinister Fang Tong. Nor the crazy Wu Feng.
It was a hunched, shuffling figure with a deeply wrong gait. The old village head! The man Mo Fan had written off as a completely unthreatening mortal!
At this moment, the old village head's face—originally covered in kindly wrinkles—presented an extremely stiff, even somewhat wooden, dead-gray color.
What made Mo Fan's heart skip a beat even more was that the old man didn't walk straight toward his room.
Instead, he stopped first at the room next door—right in front of Wu Feng and San Niang's door!
The village head?! What is he doing over there?!
Before Mo Fan's brain could even begin to deduce the deeper meaning...
PFFT—!
The terrifying load brought by tri-boxing finally and completely broke through Mo Fan's physiological limits!
A large mouthful of crimson blood sprayed directly from Mo Fan's nasal cavity.
His brain instantly fell into a brief blankness, as if a vacuum had been drawn. His vision went black, and an intense sensation of fainting crashed over him like a tsunami.
Cut!
In the last fraction of a second before losing consciousness completely, Mo Fan used all his remaining strength to sever the thread connecting him to Mo Yan.
He lay there gasping, chest heaving in violent spasms. Large drops of cold sweat rolled down his forehead, smashing onto the cold bedboards.
Although it was only a single glance, stormy waves churned in Mo Fan's heart, leaving his thoughts in extreme bewilderment.
Why was it that old man? Why would a mortal appear in the side courtyard at a time like this? What exactly was he doing stopping in front of Wu Feng and San Niang's door?
Could it be... had a situation already arisen on Wu Feng's end?