[ WARNING: Structural integrity of Summon No. 001 has fallen below 5%. ]
[ WARNING: Soul Flame approaching extinction. Countdown: 29... 28... ]
The crimson numbers burned across Mo Fan's retinas like a screaming alarm clock he couldn't shut off, each tick hammering panic directly into his skull.
"Shut UP! Stop counting! I KNOW!"
At the bottom of the ravine, sprawled across a field of shattered stone, Mo Fan ignored the white-hot agony radiating from his broken leg.
He crawled through the garbage like a wounded dog, fingers tearing through decades of accumulated filth.
This was the floor of Abandoned Sword Cliff—the Azure Cloud Sect's garbage dump.
The ground was carpeted with fractured artifact shards, rotting medicinal dregs, and bones. Layer upon layer of bones, stacked so deep nobody could guess how many centuries of corpses had been tossed down here to be forgotten.
Mo Fan's [ Stitching Vision ] was running at full power, but in scanning mode, his display was a wasteland of gray disappointment.
[ Weathered Human Phalanges — UNUSABLE ]
[ Pulverized Demonic Beast Ribs — UNUSABLE ]
[ Unknown Human Femur — UNUSABLE ]
"Dammit, why is EVERYTHING unusable?!"
The countdown hit 10.
Summon No. 001 lay motionless among the rubble. The soul flame flickering in its eye socket—never particularly bright to begin with—had dwindled to a single dying ember.
One more gust of the valley's corpse-cold wind and it would wink out forever.
"Screw compatibility—if it fits, it ships!"
Mo Fan's fingers closed around something solid.
A long bone, still relatively intact. It was half an arm from some unidentified ape-type demonic beast—the flesh had long since mummified into leather, but the bone itself gleamed with a faint cyan luminescence.
Clearly far denser than anything human.
[ Component Detected: Gibbon Arm Bone (Inferior Quality) ]
[ Compatibility: 45% ]
"Forty-five percent? If I can jam it in, that's a hundred percent in my book!"
No hesitation.
Mo Fan dragged the grotesquely long limb back to No. 001's side, leaving a trail of blood from his own shattered leg.
[ Mana -15 ]
[ Mana -15 ]
Azure light poured from his palms like luminescent glue.
With a teeth-grinding CRACK, the ape's arm was forced onto the shoulder socket that had once belonged to a sword cultivator.
The bones didn't match—not even close. The joint flared with an angry red rejection glow, the magical equivalent of an organ transplant going wrong.
But Mo Fan had Mana to burn. He flooded the connection with raw power, essentially welding the mismatched pieces together through sheer brute force.
Next: legs.
No intact human legs anywhere in reach. Mo Fan's gaze landed on a nearby wild dog carcass, half-buried in debris. He ripped out both hind leg bones and jammed them together like a kid forcing incompatible LEGO pieces.
[ Stitching Complete. ]
[ Summon No. 001 Status Update: Reassembly Finished (ABERRANT-TYPE). ]
As the final trickle of Mana flowed in, the soul flame in No. 001's skull flared once—then stabilized.
It staggered upright.
The thing standing before Mo Fan would make children scream and grown men cross the street.
Its left arm was an empty socket. Its right arm was a gorilla-length monstrosity that dangled past its knees.
Its left leg was bleached human bone; its right was two mismatched dog bones jury-rigged together, forcing it to stand at a permanent diagonal tilt like a broken compass.
"Okay... aesthetically challenged..."
Mo Fan wiped cold sweat from his brow, staring at what looked like a rejected prototype from Dr. Frankenstein's trash bin.
"But at least it's alive."
Crisis averted. Reality check: still screwed.
Mo Fan tilted his head back. The cliff walls rose above him in an almost vertical ascent, vanishing into clouds so distant they might as well have been in another dimension.
Then he looked at No. 001, hobbling in place, its mismatched legs making every step look like controlled falling.
"This cripple can barely walk. Forget carrying me up—it'd fall apart climbing two meters on its own."
I need a mobility upgrade.
His eyes locked onto a massive skeleton half-buried nearby.
A Thousand-Legged Centipede. Dead for who knew how long. Its armored carapace had shattered, but hundreds of razor-sharp leg segments remained intact, jutting from the ground like rows of steel spears.
A dangerous idea detonated in Mo Fan's brain.
Why limit myself to humanoid forms?
What if I grafted four—no, SIX—of those insect legs onto No. 001's spine? It would become an all-terrain vehicle! It could scale vertical cliffs like they were flat ground!
The concept was so exciting he temporarily forgot his broken leg. He dragged himself to the centipede carcass, pried loose several hardened leg segments, and eagerly held them up against No. 001's vertebral column.
Green holographic guidelines materialized in his vision.
[ Component Detected: Hardened Insect Limb ]
[ Modification Scheme: Multi-Limb Climbing Configuration ]
"YES! That's the one! Install it!"
But the moment he mentally confirmed the action, the green wireframe shattered.
Blood-red warning windows exploded across his vision, accompanied by a piercing alarm tone:
[ ERROR: OPERATION DENIED. ]
[ WARNING: Host Soul Strength insufficient! ]
[ Current Capacity: 25. Minimum Requirement for Multi-Limb Coordination: 100. ]
[ Forced modification will result in summon logic collapse and Soul Flame self-destruction. ]
Mo Fan's hand froze in midair.
The centipede leg clattered to the ground.
He stared at that merciless red error message the same way he used to stare at his old laptop when it told him: "Insufficient VRAM. Cannot run this application."
A cold gust swept through the ravine. Mo Fan slumped against the rocks, finally understanding the system's most infuriating core mechanic.
In this world, Mana was currency. It was power supply. Thanks to his compensation package from the system, he was sitting on 400 points—a literal fortune. An unlimited battery.
But Soul Strength? That was processing power. That was CPU.
And right now, his brain was running on a Pentium II.
A basic humanoid skeleton with four limbs? His budget processor could barely handle that.
Add two more legs to make a six-limbed creature? The motion-coordination algorithms would instantly fry his brain—or turn No. 001 into a twitching pile of scrap that couldn't do anything but seize on the ground.
"So that's how it is..."
Mo Fan laughed bitterly, surveying the field of high-tier corpses surrounding him.
"It's like having a black card with unlimited credit, but every store only sells games my garbage PC can't run."
Want to build a giant mech? Want to stitch together a Golden Core patriarch into some kind of unholy colossus?
Keep dreaming. Upgrade your CPU first.
Cultivators defied the heavens for immortality. Mo Fan's motivation for cultivation had just become something far more pragmatic—almost pathetically nerdy:
Level up so my system can handle better graphics cards.
Skreee...
A faint scratching sound shattered the silence.
Mo Fan hadn't noticed when night had fallen completely. The yin energy at the bottom of the ravine was rising like cold fog, and in the shadows between the boulder piles, pairs of red eyes—small as beans, bright as embers—flickered to life.
Corpse Rats.
Cat-sized rodents that served as the garbage collectors of mass graves. They spent their lives gnawing on cultivator corpses, and their teeth carried enough venom to rot living flesh.
The scent of Mo Fan's blood—fresh, warm, alive—was a dinner bell they couldn't ignore.
Three of them crept forward, black fur slick with grave-filth.
First fight already? Fine—field test time.
Mo Fan didn't panic. He leaned back against the rock and linked his consciousness to Summon No. 001.
"No. 001. Don't let them near me."
The three rats clearly didn't consider the crooked, lurching skeleton a threat. They shrieked in unison and launched themselves forward—three black blurs aiming for Mo Fan's throat.
"LEFT SIDE! SWING ARM!"
The command fired through their mental link instantaneously.
No. 001's legs were garbage, but that grotesquely oversized gibbon arm turned out to be a tactical masterpiece.
The skeleton didn't even need to move. It simply wound up that absurdly long right limb and swept it horizontally like a caveman swinging a club.
The shoulder joint shrieked—a grinding, bone-on-bone screech that made Mo Fan wince. He half-expected the arm to fly off entirely.
SPLAT.
The first rat was still mid-leap when the massive bone palm caught it dead-center. The impact launched it sideways into a boulder with a sound like a rotten tomato hitting concrete.
It didn't get back up.
The other two rats flinched, then split apart, trying to flank from behind.
"DON'T TURN AROUND! ELBOW STRIKE BACKWARD!"
Mo Fan barked orders like a backseat gamer screaming at his screen.
No. 001 obeyed with mechanical precision. That elongated arm bent at an impossible angle and jabbed backward, the elbow spike driving directly into the second rat's belly.
What followed was brief, chaotic, and extremely messy.
Within seconds, three Corpse Rats had become three puddles of biological matter that no longer resembled anything that had once been alive.
"Nice work!"
Mo Fan exhaled, then eagerly checked the experience bar in the corner of his vision.
First victory! Surely that's worth a level-up?
The system's response was disappointingly stingy—almost mocking:
[ Killed: Corpse Rat (Common Beast). EXP +1. ]
[ Killed: Corpse Rat (Common Beast). EXP +1. ]
[ Killed: Corpse Rat (Common Beast). EXP +1. ]
[ Current Level: LV.1 — 83/1000 ] (Note: The Demon Wolf provided minor EXP as a low-tier monster.)
Mo Fan stared at the progress bar. It had barely twitched.
"One point each? You want me to kill a THOUSAND rats to level up ONCE?!"
The system, as if determined to crush any remaining hope, helpfully added:
[ NOTICE: Level Suppression active. Reward Modifier: 0.01%. ]
[ Current EXP efficiency: EXTREMELY LOW. ]
"Oh, screw you..."
Mo Fan ran the math in his head.
If he stayed down here and played it safe, sure—he'd survive. But reaching LV.2 would require months of sleepless rat-hunting in this pit. And these trash-tier monsters offered nothing useful. No harvestable bones. No extractable souls.
This was garbage time—the system's way of telling him the tutorial area had nothing left to offer.
It was forcing him out of the newbie zone. Forcing him to leave. To risk death.
...Or as the system probably saw it: to go on an adventure.
"Fine. You asked for it."
Cursing under his breath, Mo Fan grabbed a sharp rock from the ground and dragged himself toward the rat carcasses.
"If you won't give me EXP, I'm not walking away empty-handed."
He was a scavenger now. And scavengers lived by one sacred rule: never leave a scene without taking something.
He grabbed the first dead rat and examined it. The meat was rancid. The bones were too brittle to use. But those teeth...
Two incisors jutted from the rat's jaw like miniature chisels, wickedly sharp.
Mo Fan glanced at No. 001's skeletal fingers—bare bone with zero grip strength.
"If I pull these teeth out... mount them as finger spikes... maybe craft some kind of claw attachment or brass knuckles..."
In the darkness at the bottom of the abyss, a pale young man sat hunched over a pile of dead rats. By the feeble blue glow of a flickering ghost flame, he began—expressionlessly—extracting teeth from the corpses.
One by one.
His mind calculated how to transform this garbage into weapons.
If I want to survive—if I want to crawl out of this pit—I need to master this new profession.
Junkyard Necromancer.
And I intend to be the best one who ever lived.