That terrifying snake molt stretched on for several li, all but blanketing this entire region.
Mo Fan swallowed hard, worked up his nerve, and flew forward another few dozen meters, yet he still could not see the end of it at a glance.
Such a grand and vast body lay quietly across the mist, as though it had not died at all, but had merely fallen into a long slumber in this place.
Looking at its outrageous size, Mo Fan could not help recalling the records he had once seen in the Inner Sect archives.
A snake transforms into a flood dragon.
A flood dragon transforms into a true dragon.
This Blood-Red Python, coiled in the forbidden grounds of Azure Cloud Sect's back mountain, had shed nothing more than a layer of skin, yet it still carried a Peak Golden Core aura potent enough to make the current Mo Fan tremble.
Could it be that it truly transformed into a flood dragon, ascended into the sky, and is no longer bound by this dark, dreary Abandoned Sword Cliff?
Mo Fan lifted his head and gazed at the misty, seemingly fathomless sky overhead. A trace of heartfelt awe rose within him.
If it had truly gone from snake to dragon, that meant the cultivation of its main body had, in all likelihood, stepped into the legendary Soul Formation stage at the very least!
That was a realm the current Mo Fan would not even dare to dream of.
Still, awe was awe.
Once he had thoroughly confirmed that this colossus before him, despite radiating such terrifying pressure, was merely a discarded snake molt, the heart that had all but leapt into Mo Fan's throat finally settled slowly back into his chest.
Phew... good thing it isn't a living demon beast.
After all, no matter how terrifying a mere skin was, no matter how lifelike, it was still nothing but a dead object in the end.
Scared the hell out of me.
Grumbling inwardly, Mo Fan activated [ Floating Soul Wings ] and cautiously descended beside the snake molt.
But once he truly came before this vast snake molt and felt its texture up close, weathered by the ages yet still enough to stir the soul...
The fear and reverence in his heart were soon replaced by another, far more familiar emotion.
Greed!
This was a snake molt left behind by a top-tier demon beast!
Forget hauling the whole thing back. Even tearing off a palm-sized piece and taking it outside would, in all likelihood, fetch a sky-high fortune!
Those dark red scales, each fully the size of a tabletop, had endured who knew how many years of erosion, yet their surfaces were still hard as iron.
They even retained a faint layer of blood-red luster, almost as substantial as the real thing.
Mo Fan rubbed his hands together, extended his knuckles, and gave one of the scales a light rap.
Clang, clang.
The sound was dull and heavy.
It was as if what he had struck was not an air-dried snakeskin, but a heavy shield forged from the finest refined iron through a thousand hammerings.
Mo Fan's eyes instantly lit up like two great light bulbs, all but shooting green.
"I'm rich! I'm rich!"
"A snakeskin this big... If I could carry the whole thing off..."
Mo Fan worked the abacus madly in his mind.
"Forget upgrading Unit 004's armor. Even if I forged a full set of top-tier armor for every single member of the entire undead legion, there would probably still be plenty left over!"
At that thought, Mo Fan immediately took two steps back, gave a grand sweep of his hand, and directed Mo Yan forward.
Soul-fire flickered in Mo Yan's hollow eye sockets.
Without the slightest ripple of emotion, it drew the cold-iron longsword at its waist.
Thick death energy spread along the blade in an instant.
Gripping the sword in both hands, it brought the weapon slashing down hard against the edge of one of the scales!
CLANG!
A crisp, ear-piercing clash of metal against iron reverberated across the bottom of the cliff.
Sparks flew everywhere!
Under the immense recoil, the cold-iron longsword in Mo Yan's hands quaked violently, letting out the mournful wail of a blade pushed past its limit.
The jade bones in its entire right arm were jolted violently backward, nearly causing it to lose its grip on the hilt.
By contrast, the dark red scale before it...
Forget being cut open.
At the very spot where it had borne Mo Yan's full-strength strike, there was not even a slightly noticeable white scratch!
It maintained that same smooth, hard appearance, as if its mockery had been dialed to maximum.
"..."
Mo Fan stared at the whole and unblemished scale.
The fervor on his face instantly froze, and he fell silent for a good while.
"I refuse to believe I can't crack this thing!"
He gritted his teeth. Mana surged madly at his fingertips as he personally condensed a [ Death Missile ] and blasted it hard at that exact same spot!
BOOM!
The Death Missile exploded across the surface of the snake molt, its violent death energy kicking up a great cloud of dust.
However, once the dust settled...
That scale still had not budged in the slightest.
Not even the layer of blood-red luster on its surface had dimmed by a fraction.
"What the hell..."
The corner of Mo Fan's mouth twitched violently a couple of times. With the utmost gloom, he could only set aside any further notion of dismantling it.
This thing was hard to the point of being downright unreasonable!
And the whole snake molt was as vast as a mountain range. There was no possibility of cramming it whole into his Storage Pouch.
Yet with his current means of attack, there was no way to slice any part of it off either.
Priceless though this thing was, the current Mo Fan clearly still did not have the ability to carry it away.
Am I really going to have to sit on a mountain of gold and beg for scraps?
Deeply unwilling to give up, Mo Fan shuffled forward along the edge of the snake molt, trying to find even the faintest weak point he could exploit.
At that moment, he lifted his head and glanced at the sky above the bottom of the cliff.
Despite the layers of mist, the light filtering down from above had already taken on the faint grayish-white of dawn.
That meant the time left to him was nearly gone.
He had to resolve the source of the mutation at the bottom of this cliff before daybreak.
The mist here and the crazed demon beasts have absolutely got something to do with this thing.
As things stood, this massive snake molt lay right here in the deepest reaches of the mist.
All that dark red blood-mist around it, thick to the point of refusing to disperse, was likewise centered entirely upon it, shrouding the area near the molt.
No matter how he looked at it, this thing was inextricably linked to the large-scale mutation of the demon beasts on the fringe.
Mo Fan could only force down the greed in his heart for the time being and begin carefully inspecting the area around the snake molt.
This inspection soon led him to notice that the blood-red mist permeating the air around him was not radiating evenly from the entire surface of the snake molt.
The scales on the outer side of the molt likewise retained that thick Peak Golden Core aura.
However, the places truly spewing blood-mist outward in an unbroken stream...
Were the narrow gaps between the scales on the underside of the molt and that huge, dried gash extending all the way from head to tail!
Pinching his nose, Mo Fan edged a little closer to that gash.
The nearer he got, the thicker and more pungent the reek of blood in the air became.
Faintly mingled within that pure reek of blood was even a clammy, stomach-turning stench of decay.
That was absolutely not a smell a snakeskin ought to give off.
The greed on Mo Fan's face vanished in an instant, replaced by heavy wariness.
"[ Death Vision ], open!"
He activated his Tier-2 [ Death Vision ] once more, slowly probing his mental power into the murky depths of the snake molt.
At first, what met his perception was still that shade of blood-red aura, dense to the utmost extreme, as if it would drown him entirely.
The pressure that demon beast had left behind was far too intense.
Like an enormous source of interference, it all but obscured every last shred of the true situation within the snake molt.
Mo Fan could only clench his teeth.
Forcibly enduring the soreness and stabbing pain in his brain, he peeled away those chaotic and vast outer layers of aura bit by bit, like peeling an onion.
The range of his Death Vision had also been compressed to the extreme. He could scarcely probe a narrow area only a few meters in front of him.
Just as Mo Fan's mental power was about to run dry and he was preparing to give up for the time being...
At last.
Deep within that snake molt, vast as a blood-red mountain range...
He keenly caught a wisp of an exceedingly faint, yet genuinely present fluctuation!
That was not the aura the Blood-Red Python had left behind.
Nor was it the residual pressure that a dead snake molt ought to possess.
It was a cluster of exceedingly bizarre, twisted life fluctuations!
It did not possess the complete, bright, and stable soul-fire of a normal demon beast.
Instead, the feeling it gave Mo Fan was like countless tiny, faint, and chaotic souls that had been forcibly crushed to pieces through some exceedingly cruel method...
Then crudely stitched and squeezed back together!
That cluster of fluctuations flickered bright and dim, chaotic beyond measure and seemingly exceedingly unstable.
Within Mo Fan's minute perception, this cluster of mixed souls even carried the interwoven auras of many different kinds of demon beasts.
This feeling... Why is it so familiar?
Mo Fan's heart gave a sudden lurch.
What flashed through his mind was the [ Wraith ] he had once stitched together from the souls of Wu Feng and the other two back in Linshui Village!
That's right!
It was this exact, exceedingly similar sense of stitching and distortion!
In there... There's something alive?!