Mo Fan stared at the massive centipede corpse collapsed before him—a mountain of chitin and flesh—and let out a long, slow breath.
A genuine wave of awe rose in his chest.
The Stygian Poison Centipede at early Foundation Establishment. The terrifying size.
The rock-dissolving toxic miasma. The grotesque, almost unreasonable vitality.
Even Eldest Senior Brother Wu Mang would have had to work for it—probably taking some damage in the process.
But with me and WTF working in perfect sync, I didn't lose a single point of HP.
A Foundation Establishment beast, left unchecked in the mortal world, was the kind of natural disaster that could wipe an entire village off the map.
And he—a bottom-tier cultivator that the orthodox cultivation world had written off as a Waste Spirit Root—had soloed it.
This was what it meant to play a Necromancer. Pure dimensional suppression.
Mo Fan steadied the excitement in his chest and walked to the centipede's ruined skull.
Devour
A pulse of sickly green light swept through the corpse.
The centipede's residual soul—saturated with fury and bitter defiance...
It was ruthlessly stripped away, converted into pure mental nourishment, and poured into Mo Fan's sea of consciousness.
He checked his panel after absorbing it. Both his EXP and Soul Strength had climbed by a meaningful margin.
"That was just the appetizer."
Mo Fan's gaze sharpened with heat.
A corpse this massive, this high-ranked—using it only for soul absorption would be a reckless waste of heaven's gifts.
The core philosophy of a Necromancer had always been: let war feed war.
As long as corpses kept coming, he could build an undying army!
His will surged. The vast reserves of Necromantic Mana inside him flooded outward like a tide, pouring into the centipede's remains.
Crack... crack crack crack...
A series of deeply unpleasant, tooth-aching tearing sounds filled the chamber.
The enormous corpse began to convulse violently.
The shattered purple-black carapace and reeking flesh sloughed away like crumbling stone, dissolving and peeling back in rapid succession.
Not long after.
A colossal centipede skeleton—built entirely of gleaming white bone—hauled itself upright from the bloody mire!
Hissss——!
It raised its head and let out a low, rasping, soundless shriek.
Stripped of its heavy flesh and armor, its silhouette was leaner than it had been in life—almost gaunt.
But every segment of bone radiated a pure, concentrated aura of death...
And the ghostly blue soul-fire burning in its hollow eye sockets gave it a presence that was, somehow, more threatening than the living creature had been.
Mo Fan swept it immediately with [ Death Vision LV. 2 ].
Load consumption... 40 points.
He looked at his panel and raised an eyebrow.
With Mo Yan, 003, and 004 idling in the Necrotic Realm, his original 175-point Soul Strength cap now had barely thirty points of headroom left.
"Expensive. But worth it."
Mo Fan studied the bone centipede's attribute profile carefully.
Unlike WTF—which retained a residual Spiritual Qi vortex in its chest cavity from its former life as a human cultivator...
The bone centipede's interior was completely hollow. No Spiritual Qi whatsoever.
It couldn't cast spells the way WTF could.
But.
Its bone density was extraordinary. The skeleton itself carried a faint, deep sheen.
And what genuinely surprised Mo Fan: along the dense, blade-like bone segments of its legs—row upon row of them, like ranks of steel knives...
The same acrid, corrosive venom from its living form still clung and dripped!
Sizzle... sizzle...
Drops hit the rock floor and ate through the surface, trailing white smoke.
I see it now. A realization clicked into place.
"For human cultivators, the Tier-2 breakthrough refines their control over Heaven and Earth Spiritual Qi—which is why WTF retained its spiritual energy vortex after being converted."
"For beasts, the Tier-2 breakthrough enhances physical strength and racial traits!"
These high-tier skeletons, when raised, retained some core aspect of what they were in life.
Which meant future team composition would need to be far more deliberate.
"Shame about the carapace."
Mo Fan glanced at the shattered purple-black shell fragments scattered across the floor.
He'd briefly considered salvaging them—sell them, or use them for armor.
But they were soaked through with corrosive venom and broken beyond any practical use.
He had to let them go.
"Move out. Keep going."
With WTF—a mobile self-propelled artillery platform—on one side, and the bone centipede—a massive close-range killing machine—on the other, Mo Fan's sense of security hit a new high.
The bone centipede's residual presence as a former apex predator did the rest.
Every low-tier mutant rat and poisonous insect in the surrounding tunnels that had been considering an ambush turned and fled in panic...
Saving Mo Fan the trouble of clearing trash mobs entirely.
The next several hours passed in focused, relentless work.
Riding the momentum, Mo Fan pushed through the mid-level mine with Death Vision's early-warning system running constantly, conducting high-intensity sweeps and kills.
He directed his undead forces in clean, efficient takedowns of several more early Foundation Establishment beasts...
Including one highly camouflaged mutant poison snake that had nearly gone undetected.
Until.
Beside a rapidly flowing underground river radiating a gloomy green fluorescence—
Mo Fan ran into the most difficult Tier-2 beast he'd encountered since entering the mid-level mine.
The Underground Blind Fish.
This fight was, without question, the most brutal and the closest he'd come to dying since descending.
The creature was nearly ten meters long, and it was an absolute nightmare to kill. A genuine tough and slippery customer.
It had spent its entire existence in the lightless underground river. Its skin had long since degenerated.
But in its place, a thick, slick coating of mucus covered every inch of its body.
That mucus gave it a grotesque dual resistance: water and fire both rolled off it, and its hide was dense enough to absorb punishment that would have caved in solid rock.
Even WTF's [ Corpse Explosion ]—powerful enough to crack stone walls—lost more than half its force on impact...
Absorbed and dispersed by the slime layer before it could punch through to anything vital!
The bone centipede's venom and blade-legs fared no better.
The size difference and the terrain of the underground river kept it from getting proper purchase, and the blind fish's massive tail sent it flying repeatedly.
Then came the mistake.
One wrong step in positioning—and the blind fish's jaws snapped open like a black hole, generating a suction force that pulled at Mo Fan's very soul.
He was halfway into that maw—surrounded by rows of inward-curving barbs—before he could react!
"Damn it—this slippery piece of—!"
Half-swallowed, on the edge of death, Mo Fan's mind went completely cold.
He didn't waste energy punching at scales.
His eyes snapped wide open. Something ignited behind them.
"[ Soul Strike ]!"
His most fundamental core weapon. His oldest trump card.
He compressed his Soul Strength into a single invisible spike and drove it directly into the blind fish's completely unguarded brain!
SKREEEEE——!!!
The blind fish's physical body was a fortress. Its soul was made of paper.
The strike detonated a full soul-storm inside its mindscape!
The agony that followed was unlike anything a fish should have been capable of producing.
Its enormous mouth wrenched open to its limit. The gill slits along its jaw flared wide in convulsive pain...
Exposing the soft, unprotected interior structures beneath.
Now!
Mo Fan seized the opening without a moment's hesitation.
He twisted his body and—like an eel forcing itself through a gap—shoved himself straight through the open gill slit and into the blind fish's body!
"DIE."
In that cramped, reeking interior space—
Mo Fan let go of every restraint.
Iron fists wrapped in [ Bone Armament ], driven by the full, berserk force of his blood and qi...
Hammered into the blind fish's soft brain tissue and nerve clusters in a sustained, savage, completely unhinged assault.
BANG. BANG. BANG. SPLAT.
Blood and gray matter sprayed in every direction.
He didn't stop until the entire interior of the fish's skull was churned to unrecognizable pieces and every trace of life had gone out of it.
Only then did Mo Fan—coated head to toe in slime, looking like an evil ghost that had crawled out of the underworld...
Squeeze himself back out through the gill slit with great difficulty.
"Hah... hah..."
He dropped his ass onto the riverbank and sat there, chest heaving, lungs burning like they were about to burst.
The exact moment the blind fish's life force extinguished completely—
A long-absent, brilliantly golden column of level-up light erupted brilliantly from Mo Fan's body, bright enough to illuminate half the dim underground river!
[ Experience overflow! ]
[ Level up! ]
[ Current Level: LV. 14! ]
The warm surge of the level-up washed through him instantly, knitting shut the minor scratches scattered across his skin.
And more importantly—the notification that appeared on his retina was the one he'd been dreaming of:
[ Skill Point (SP) Gained: 1! ]
"Finally... got a Skill Point again!"
Mo Fan stared at that single precious SP and felt something close to fanaticism. This was the key to his Tier-2 skill tree!
He looked at the blind fish's corpse drifting on the surface of the underground river and felt the lingering chill of that near-death experience settle in his bones.
The mid-level mine was not a place to get comfortable in. Having skeletons at his side didn't mean he could act without scruples.
Tonight's expenditure—the physical drain, the sustained mental tension pushed to its absolute limit—had brought his willpower to the edge.
If he pushed deeper now and ran into something stronger, he was genuinely at risk of a wipe.
Quit while I'm ahead.
Mo Fan recalled the bone centipede and WTF into the Necrotic Realm.
He retraced his path toward the outer mine shafts, preparing to head back to his quarters on Hundred Forging Peak...
To rest and recover before studying how to allocate that precious Skill Point.
But.
Just as Mo Fan stepped into the shallow mine section—less than half a li from home, preparing to wrap up the night's hunt—
Hum——!
Death Vision, running continuously this entire time, flickered.
Two red dots of light representing human cultivators flashed extremely abruptly!
People? Two Foundation Establishment cultivators?
Mo Fan's steps stopped dead. Every nerve in his body snapped back to full tension.
Through the grayish-white visual grid—
One of those two figures was someone Mo Fan recognized incredibly well.
The Senior Brother from Hundred Forging Peak who had tried to extort him.
Xiao Hai.