As the mass of Nine Heavens Clear Dew steadily dissolved into fine threads of spirit liquid and seeped into his body—
Changes that looked distinctly un-promising were the first things to manifest on Mo You.
Nourished by death energy, Mo You had barely managed to maintain a stable human shell.
But now that shell began to slacken, bit by bit.
The flesh beneath the skin seemed to have something crawling slowly within it.
Where bone and flesh had once fit together seamlessly, unnatural swellings began to rise and fall.
Then, threads of grayish-black, viscous impurity with a sharp, rancid stench began oozing out of the pores across his entire body.
The instant those impurities met the open air, they rapidly became billows of murky gray mist, drifting through the white bone palace.
And the change didn't stop once the impurities had been expelled.
As the Nine Heavens Clear Dew penetrated deeper, the volume of impurities Mo You expelled only grew.
His whole body looked like a clay figure slowly melting—flesh sagging, even his outline faintly losing its former stability.
Mo Fan stood to the side watching, brow furrowed, unable to stop a flicker of unease from rising in his gut.
"Are you sure... this state is normal?"
Mo You still sat quietly cross-legged on the white bone throne, no great sign of pain on his face.
"It's fine."
He slowly opened his eyes and glanced down at his somewhat slackened arm, tone still calm.
"This body was forcibly pieced together to begin with. Its foundation is far too impure."
"Now that qi of heaven has entered and the Earth's ultimate yin is anchored in the dantian, the three qi of Heaven, Earth, and Man are gradually aligning."
"Naturally, everything that can never truly fuse has to be sorted out and forced out."
Mo Fan still wasn't entirely reassured.
"And this look-like-you're-about-to-fall-apart-any-second thing you've got going on..."
"Normal."
Mo You cut him off flatly.
"It's only expelling what didn't belong. Once these impurities are more or less cleared, the body will stabilize again on its own."
He paused.
"Right now, this has only just begun."
Having heard the explanation, Mo Fan finally set down a bit of the worry in his chest.
Mo You said nothing more, closing his eyes again and sinking his full attention inward.
Deep in his dantian, the pallid Nether River Bone Lotus continued its slow rotation.
Clear, pure qi of heaven poured continuously in from the crown of his head...
While the cold, fathomless ultimate yin of the earth seeped out bit by bit from the bone lotus.
One clear, one shadowed—two utterly different auras drew on one another and converged within the formless body.
Like a slowly turning millstone grinding away, pass after pass, at everything impure within this body.
Mo Fan observed quietly for a while.
Seeing that although Mo You looked wretched, the qi within him remained steady enough, Mo Fan stopped speaking and quietly withdrew from the [ Necrotic Realm ].
Mo You had entered a long conditioning phase for the time being.
Which left Mo Fan, aboard the spirit ship, suddenly with nothing to do.
The return voyage from Cangqing City to the Azure Cloud Sect still required several days of sailing through the cloud sea.
With nothing else going on, Mo Fan simply pulled the Hundred Forging Artifact Pattern Record jade slip he'd bought at the auction out of his Storage Pouch.
This was also the first time since arriving in the Mystic Realm that he'd genuinely engaged with this world's orthodox forging methods.
Mo Fan pressed the jade slip to his forehead, closed his eyes, and extended a thread of consciousness into it.
The next instant, a flood of information spread through his mind like running water.
There were none of the fog-shrouded, mystical platitudes he'd expected.
It read more like a forging master had organized and distilled years of his own experience into a set of personal notes.
Mo Fan read for a while and quickly formed a rough understanding of forging in the Mystic Realm.
One of the most important elements of Mystic Realm forging was the artifact pattern.
And artifact patterns weren't something forging masters conjured out of nothing.
Mountains and rivers, grass and trees, birds and beasts, and even certain spirit-things nurtured by heaven and earth could all naturally gestate special textures and powers within themselves.
These, forging masters collectively termed artifact patterns.
A forging master's job was to find suitable materials, extract the natural artifact patterns contained within them bit by bit...
Then guide and combine them with divine sense and spiritual power, finally fusing them into whatever artifact he intended to forge.
Take the snake molt Mo Fan had consigned to auction.
The reason it was worth so much wasn't just the potent residual Golden Core might clinging to it—the scales had naturally gestated exceedingly heavy defensive artifact patterns.
Beyond that, a lingering aura of ferocity still clung to it.
If a skilled forging master refined it into armor, it would not only vastly increase defense, but might even, upon being struck, exert a measure of intimidation on low-tier cultivators with weaker souls.
And if the forging master's own attainment was high enough, he could add further artifact patterns atop the existing ones.
Supplementing it with a few metal-attribute patterns to make the treasure more durable, for instance.
Or blending in wind-attribute patterns to reduce the treasure's own weight and sluggishness.
A seemingly simple artifact was, in actual practice, far more complex than Mo Fan had imagined.
As for the cross-domain spirit ship he was currently riding, that went without saying.
The artifact patterns involved numbered in the hundreds, if not thousands.
Levitation, flight, defense, spirit-gathering...
Patterns of wildly different purposes combined with and echoed off one another, typically requiring many forging masters working in divided roles over an extremely long span of time to truly complete.
Mo Fan clicked his tongue in amazement as he read.
Especially since the jade slip preserved quite a few concrete scenes of forging in action.
A mass of blazing white spirit flame suspended in midair.
The forging master guided with divine sense, wrapped materials in spiritual power...
Melted and kneaded together things that had originally had nothing to do with one another, then drove the previously extracted artifact patterns into them one by one.
The whole process looked profoundly mystical.
Threads of spirit light circulated within the flame, finally converging into a blinding white orb of light.
Until the radiance gradually dispersed.
And the originally chaotic jumble of materials had become an artifact with spiritual energy flowing through it.
Sitting cross-legged on the bed in his cabin, Mo Fan found it all rather novel.
Though the process sounded mystical, it wasn't actually that hard to grasp.
At bottom, it came down to using spiritual power as the foundation and divine sense as the guide, supplemented by flame, hand seals, and various artifact patterns...
To forcibly refine a pile of unrelated things into an artifact capable of carrying spiritual power and unleashing might.
The Golden Core forging master who'd left behind this Hundred Forging Artifact Pattern Record had clearly steeped himself in the artifact Dao for many years.
The latter half of the jade slip, beyond the fundamental forging methods...
Recorded quite a few artifacts he'd personally forged, along with a number of rather ingenious artifact pattern pairings.
For anyone genuinely intent on stepping onto the forging path, this material held considerable reference value.
But the further Mo Fan read, the more subtle his expression became.
Because whether it was the initial extraction of artifact patterns, the fusion of materials midway, or the final condensation into form—
Every single step.
In the end, came back to one core thing.
Spiritual power.
Without spiritual power, even the most basic extraction and fusion were impossible.
Never mind the divine sense guidance that followed, the hand seal activation, or actually getting those artifact patterns to stabilize.
Mo Fan stared at the contents of the jade slip in silence for a good long while.
At last.
He let out an exceedingly resigned sigh.
"Fine."
Mo Fan rubbed his brow.
"Spiritual power again."
He lifted the jade slip away from his forehead.
He'd honestly expected as much, so he couldn't claim to be all that disappointed.
At least he'd already bought the thing.
Not being able to learn it now didn't mean he'd never learn it.
And getting an early look at what forging actually was in the Mystic Realm, broadening his horizons—eighty Mid-grade Spirit Stones hadn't been wasted.
Mo Fan casually slid the Hundred Forging Artifact Pattern Record back into his Storage Pouch.
Since this road was blocked for now, he couldn't be bothered to keep butting his head against it.
He just flopped onto the bed, closed his eyes to rest, and stopped wrestling with brain-intensive material.
Several days later.
The massive cross-domain spirit ship cut through the cloud sea and finally arrived smoothly at the Azure Cloud Sect's skyport.
Mo Fan disembarked with the flow of the crowd and made his way back to Hundred Forging Peak with practiced ease.
He'd only been gone a handful of days.
That dilapidated stone hut deep in the mountain gorge looked exactly as it had when he'd left.
Desolate.
Quiet.
Mo Fan pushed the door open and wasn't in any rush to do anything.
Over the following days, he rested properly and sorted the things he'd brought back from Cangqing City into their respective categories.
When he had free time, he'd sink his consciousness into the [ Necrotic Realm ] to check on Mo You.
After several days of recuperation.
The changes in Mo You had clearly stabilized considerably.
The grayish-black impurities seeping continuously from his pores were growing scarcer...
And the murky stench that had once filled the white bone palace was gradually thinning.
As for that slackened formless body that had seemed on the verge of melting...
Under the ceaseless harmonization of qi of heaven and the Earth's ultimate yin, it was steadily reconsolidating.
Though clearly some time remained before the metamorphosis would truly be complete.
At least that initial teetering sensation—like he might come apart at any second—had vanished entirely.
Mo You assessed himself for a while and offered a verdict.
"A while longer."
"Then it should be fully stable."
Hearing that, Mo Fan finally set his worries down completely.
Now that Mo You was on track and didn't need constant supervision, Mo Fan's thoughts returned to a place he'd shelved for quite some time.
The abandoned mine pit.
Between one thing and another, he'd never actually managed to push deeper into the vein.
Now that he was back, and with nothing else pressing on his plate—
It was time to go down and look again.
So, after five or six days of recuperating on Hundred Forging Peak, Mo Fan changed into a set of tight, functional clothes and headed once more toward the mining district.
This time, he didn't enter through the hidden passage beneath his own stone hut.
He'd already mapped out most of what could be explored from that direction.
To go deeper, he'd need to find another entrance.
The weather today was somewhat overcast.
Heavy cloud cover pressed down between the mountains, and the trails were so desolate not a single figure could be seen.
Mo Fan followed the rugged mountain path forward.
Until, nearing the outer edge of the abandoned mine pit—
His steps suddenly paused.
Mo Fan lifted his head.
On the narrow mountain path not far ahead, a figure—somewhat familiar, yet exceedingly out of place—was hunched over, staggering unevenly out of the mine pit.
The man's hair was tangled into a filthy mess, like a withered bird's nest.
His clothes were so grimy their original color was nearly unrecognizable, caked with thick layers of mine dust and mud.
Disheveled, filthy, worn down to skin and bone.
He looked for all the world like a wild man who'd been lost in the deep mountains for half a month.
This appearance.
Compared to the arrogant, scheming inner disciple in Mo Fan's memory, he might as well have been a different person.
Mo Fan stopped where he stood.
And at that moment.
The figure across from him—moving like a walking corpse—seemed to sense something too.
He slowly raised his head.
Those bloodshot eyes, exhausted to the point of twitchiness, met Mo Fan's dead-on.
The two of them stood across the desolate mountain path.
Neither spoke.
Mo Fan's gaze narrowed slightly.
Xiao Hai.