"WHERE DID MY TWO GIANT SKELETONS GO?!"
The howl—soaked in despair and pure disbelief—echoed across the empty ruins for a long, long time.
Mo Fan looked like a miser who'd just lost his entire life savings, wife's emergency fund included. He hurled the limp, high-grade storage bag at the ground.
Eyes bloodshot, resembling a feral boar that had completely lost its mind, he threw himself into the exact spot where 004 and Mo Yan had been standing.
"Impossible. Absolutely impossible. Did they go invisible?!"
He tore through the rubble like a man possessed—didn't even spare the scorched cracks beneath Venerable Miasma Dust's corpse.
He felt along every inch, hunting for a bone fragment, an invisible outline, anything.
Reality was merciless. Summon No. 004 and Mo Yan had vanished as though they had never existed in this world at all.
After half an incense stick's worth of frantic searching, Mo Fan collapsed back onto the ground, face gray with dust, both hands buried in his hair, blood pressure somewhere in the stratosphere.
"Calm down. Calm DOWN. Mo Fan, get your act together."
He dragged in two deep breaths of blood-tinged air and forced his hammering heart to slow.
Then he stood up. Dusted himself off.
Walked back to the exact spot he'd been standing before, moving like a very clumsy detective reconstructing a crime scene.
"I finished clearing the battlefield, walked over here..."
He extended his right hand, mimicking the gesture of reaching for the storage bag at his waist, brow furrowed, replaying the memory frame by frame.
"My hand moved toward the pouch... and I looked at them..."
"And then I thought: Mo Yan, 004—come back and rest..."
His hand froze mid-air. A violent tremor ran through his fingers.
Blind spot breakthrough!
"The thought. The intent."
Mo Fan slapped his thigh so hard the crack rang out across the ruins.
"I never even opened the storage bag! My intent made them disappear?!"
"If they vanished in response to my intent—they weren't destroyed. They were collected. Pulled somewhere specific!"
The moment that clicked, the heart that had been lodged in his throat finally dropped back into his chest.
It was replaced immediately by a furious, nameless rage shooting straight up through his skull.
He drew a slow breath. Then, inside his mind, he screamed at the System with the unhinged energy of a man who had been pushed past his last nerve.
"System. Get out here. NOW."
"After the Tier-2 breakthrough—besides Wraith summoning and skill upgrades—is there something ELSE you forgot to mention?! TALK."
Silence. Nothing but an awkward quiet inside his head.
Just when Mo Fan was certain this useless thing was going to play dead again—
After a long pause, a few lines of pale blue text materialized on his vision—slowly, as if deeply reluctant:
[ Tier-2: Undead Scholar Permissions Updated ]
[ Unlocked: Wraith Summoning ]
[ Unlocked: Skill Advancement ]
[ Unlocked: Necrotic Realm ]
Mo Fan stared at the last two words.
He went silent. He broke down. He lost it.
"SYSTEM, GO F*** YOURSELF—!"
Mo Fan stood in the ruins, jabbing a finger at the sky, screaming himself hoarse, even stomping his foot in pure rage.
"Something THIS important! A feature THIS broken! And you couldn't have mentioned it EARLIER?!"
The System flickered twice in a thoroughly perfunctory manner, then promptly resumed playing dead.
"Fine. Fine. You win."
Yelling at the System was a waste of time and he knew it.
Mo Fan reined in his breathing, sat back down cross-legged in the rubble, and forced himself to focus.
"Necrotic Realm..."
He closed his eyes.
Drawing on the same instinct he used to pull up the System panel—and the strange, fleeting sensation from the moment the skeletons had vanished...
He reached inward with his consciousness, feeling for some unknown node buried deep inside.
At first, nothing. Just void.
But as he pressed deeper, toward the furthest reaches of his [ Sea of Consciousness ]—
Hmmmm—
His consciousness plummeted.
Like gravity had been ripped away. Like he'd stepped off a ledge into a bottomless black abyss.
The sensation was viscerally real—the weightlessness, the vertigo—and his instinct screamed at him to cry out.
It felt like punching through a thick wall of icy, dark water.
When the freefall stabilized and he slowly "opened" his mind's eye— His jaw nearly came off.
He stood in the void, dumbstruck, and managed only one completely inelegant sound:
"...Holy crap."
What stretched before him was a vast, lightless space—no sky, no ground, no horizon, no end. No gravity, no direction.
Only a silence so absolute it made the soul tremble.
And what filled that silence was the thing that stole the breath from his lungs.
Death-qi.
Pure, condensed, solid death-qi—so dense it had taken on physical weight, churning and roiling through the darkness like a black ocean in a storm.
Mo Fan had been quietly pleased with himself after the Tier-2 breakthrough. He'd thought he was finally touching the threshold of the laws of death.
Looking at this now—this tidal wave of death-qi crashing through the dark, vast enough to swallow worlds—
The Mana he'd been so proud of felt like a single grain of dust in the cosmos. No—it was the difference between a bacterium and the universe itself.
This is not a power I can control.
The awe was real. But Mo Fan was quick to notice the more immediate problem.
The overwhelming majority of this boundless space was sealed.
The death-qi there was packed so dense it was opaque—his consciousness couldn't penetrate it at all.
The moment he drifted too close, a tearing agony shot through him, like his soul was being shredded on contact.
Except for one place.
Directly beneath where his consciousness had landed.
A small pocket of space—roughly a hundred square meters. The death-qi there was gentle, almost tender, like a sheltered harbor carved out of a hurricane.
Mo Fan steered his consciousness toward it immediately.
004's massive, battered frame was crouched in the center of the space, still as a sleeping fortress.
Beside it, Mo Yan stood in its swordsman's posture—both hands resting on the chipped cold-iron sword—silent and motionless.
The soul-fire in their eye sockets hadn't gone out. It burned with a slow, steady rhythm.
Then Mo Fan noticed something that made his heart leap.
Within this hundred-square-meter pocket, the high-purity death-qi from the surrounding space was seeping inward—thread by thread, impossibly gentle—and filtering into both skeletons' frames.
It was visible. Tangible. Enhancement and repair, happening in real-time.
The massive, scorched crater blown through 004's back plate by Miasma Dust's strike—the one that had gone deep enough to see through—was slowly closing.
The shattered bone fragments seemed to have regained life, knitting back together, growing, weaving themselves whole.
And Mo Yan's fractured sternum wasn't just reconnecting.
The surface of its jade-white bones—already exceptional—was being tempered by the high-purity death-qi into something deeper and tougher, a dark luster spreading across the bone like a forge-quench.
At this rate...
In less than two days, they won't just be back to peak condition—the death-qi will have pushed the quality of their bone density to an entirely new level.
"That's..." Mo Fan murmured, almost to himself. "That's insane."
With this space, his undead forces had effectively gained unlimited sustain and continuous evolution.
He tilted his consciousness upward, "looking" at the vast, sealed expanse of the Necrotic Realm stretching beyond sight in every direction.
Somewhere in that endless black ocean of death-qi, it seemed countless terrifying behemoths slumbered.
Or perhaps something waited—a power that could overturn the very laws of the cultivation world, incubating and patient in the dark.
Mo Fan's heart hammered.
An unprecedented ambition and anticipation grew madly like wild grass in the depths of his soul.
My future... What kind of existence am I going to become?