After a tedious sequence of assembly operations, Mo Fan once again extracted Summon No. 001 from his storage pouch.
On the bright side, all this trial-and-error had made him significantly faster at the whole "deploying-and-retrieving-a-hideous-bone-monster" process.
Perhaps this counts as a skill? he mused. Useless-sounding, yet strangely practical. Like being really good at folding fitted sheets, or parallel parking in a post-apocalyptic hellscape.
He surveyed his creation—a grotesque puppet of mismatched bones and corpse-stitched sinew—and felt something dangerously close to pride.
"Move out," he commanded, injecting as much gravitas as he could into his voice. "Destination: the top of the world!"
The final syllable hadn't even left his lips when Summon No. 001 moved.
The skeleton lurched into motion with zero hesitation, scooped Mo Fan up mid-sentence, and began scaling the cliff face in the wrong direction—straight down toward the abyss.
"—ooooorld!" Mo Fan's dramatic declaration stretched into a yelp as gravity and skeletal limbs conspired against his dignity.
CRRNCH.
The modified [Crude Rat-Fang Knuckles]—four curved claws harvested from the oversized rodent—demonstrated terrifying grip strength. Each necrotic spike punched into the rock face like a hot knife through butter, the residual corpse-poison softening the stone just enough for the bone to bite deep.
No. 001's elongated ape-arm clamped onto the cliff wall with hydraulic precision. Every pull left a streak of gouged stone in its wake, the skeleton ascending the vertical surface with the unsettling grace of a giant gecko on amphetamines.
The mobility was absurd. Completely broken.
And Mo Fan hated every second of it.
Because in order to protect its fragile, broken-legged master, Summon No. 001 had not opted for the dignified "piggyback" configuration.
No.
It had chosen the stable low-center-of-gravity option.
The princess carry.
The scene was beautiful.
Absolutely hideous.
Picture this: a two-meter-tall skeleton with mismatched limbs, one arm grotesquely elongated, its entire frame leaking the faint miasma of grave-rot—
—tenderly cradling a dead-eyed young man in its arms, scuttling up a sheer cliff face like an oversized wall-crawling insect.
"The speed is... impressive," Mo Fan admitted through gritted teeth, his fingers white-knuckled around one of No. 001's exposed ribs. He angled his face into the shadow of the skeleton's ribcage, desperately hoping the darkness would swallow his shame.
But this aesthetic...
Thank the heavens this is the middle of nowhere. If anyone saw this, my reputation would be dead before my career even started.
The Necromancer Who Got Bridal-Carried By His Own Minion.
Legendary.
The mountain wind screamed past his ears.
With one final explosive pull, No. 001 vaulted over the cliff's edge and landed—gently, the bastard—on the rocky platform beside that same crooked tree.
"Put me down."
The command left Mo Fan's mouth before his brain had fully caught up.
The moment his feet touched solid ground, a sliver of his "client-facing" dignity returned.
He moved fast.
With practiced efficiency—an efficiency that should have been concerning, given he'd only been a Necromancer for less than a day—he pressed No. 001 flat against the ground. The elongated arm folded. The leg bones detached. The whole assembly collapsed into a compact bundle of parts, which he stuffed into his storage pouch like a man aggressively packing an uncooperative folding bicycle.
"Good work. Back in the bag."
He patted the bulging pouch at his waist and exhaled slowly.
But he didn't leave. Not yet.
Mo Fan was, at his core, a man of logic. A science-track graduate. A former corporate drone who understood that surviving was only Step One.
Step Two was explaining why you survived.
Right now, he needed to complete the task that had originally belonged to "Lu Xiaoqi"—the poor bastard whose body he was now wearing. Otherwise, returning empty-handed would raise questions. Questions led to investigations. Investigations led to someone eventually noticing that the nervous kid who fell off a cliff had come back... different.
So, despite the screaming agony in his leg, Mo Fan dragged himself toward the herb-gathering site at the cliff's edge.
Just as expected.
A few bundles of low-grade spirit herbs remained—unplucked, exactly where the original owner had abandoned them before his fatal tumble.
Perfect.
Mo Fan gathered them one by one, wincing with every movement. But he wasn't done.
He deliberately threw himself into the mud.
Rolled around.
Scraped his arms against the thornbushes until fresh blood welled up.
Tore his already-ragged servant robes into an even more pathetic state.
By the time he was finished, he looked exactly like a man who had slipped off a cliff, gotten snagged on a tree branch, spent a night dangling in terror while wolves howled below, and then clawed his way back to the surface through sheer desperate willpower.
Presentation is everything.
He tossed the remaining herbs into his gathering basket.
"The Art of the Corporate Grind," he muttered to himself, a self-deprecating smirk tugging at his lips. "Chapter One: Even when you're half-dead, you clock in."
He shouldered the heavy basket and began the long hobble down the mountain.
The descent was, mercifully, uneventful.
The Demon Wolf pack from the previous night seemed to have learned its lesson. Not a single furred shape appeared among the trees. Whatever they had sensed emanating from that corpse pit—death Qi, necromantic energy, or simply the primal wrongness of Summon No. 001—it had been enough to make them abandon their territory entirely.
Mo Fan let out a breath he hadn't realized he'd been holding.
As the altitude dropped, so did the oppressive aura of the death-zone. The yin-heavy air gradually thinned, replaced by something warmer.
Smoke.
Voices.
Life.
The Outer Sect Servant Quarters of the Azure Cloud Sect.
A ramshackle collection of wooden shacks clung to the mountainside like barnacles. Crude. Drafty. But at this hour—just before dusk—thin plumes of smoke rose from nearly every chimney. The air smelled of cheap spirit-grain porridge and pickled vegetables. Somewhere, a dog barked. Chickens clucked.
The residents here were the lowest rung of the cultivation world's ladder.
Half-grown children still waiting for their Spiritual Roots to awaken.
Or worse: adults whose talent had proven too mediocre, cast out from the Outer Sect and relegated to a lifetime of hauling rocks and weeding fields.
Mo Fan limped into view.
A cluster of old women mending clothes under a tree looked up—and froze.
"Xiao Qi?!"
Near the village's communal stone mill, a hunchbacked old man dropped his tobacco pipe with a clatter.
Old Lü.
Mo Fan's inherited memories supplied the context: the elderly caretaker of this servant district. A man with a kind face and more wrinkles than a dried apricot, responsible for managing the sect's bottom-tier laborers. He'd always looked out for the original Lu Xiaoqi.
"Xiao Qi! You're alive?!"
Old Lü stumbled forward, disbelief etched across his weathered features. "Last night—everyone heard wolves howling up on the back mountain—we all thought you were—we thought you'd already—"
Mo Fan blinked.
For a split second, staring at the old man's reddened eyes, he almost forgot to respond. The name "Xiao Qi" didn't feel like his.
But he recovered quickly.
He adjusted his facial muscles the way one might adjust a mask, slipping into the role of "Lu Xiaoqi" like pulling on a familiar jacket.
"Uncle Lü... I got lucky."
He forced a weak, hollow smile—the perfect expression for a traumatized teenager who'd just cheated death.
"Seventh Bro's back!"
"I told you guys! Seventh Bro's got nine lives!"
A swarm of children—ranging from seven or eight to twelve or thirteen, all dressed in patched rags—materialized around him. They jostled and chattered, eyes bright with unfiltered joy. A few reached out to steady him, then hesitated, afraid of aggravating his injuries.
Old Lü grasped Mo Fan's arm.
The warmth of that calloused palm—the raw, unguarded concern radiating from it—hit Mo Fan like a physical force. After hours spent among the cold dead, communing with bones and corpse-energy, the simple sensation of human touch felt almost alien.
Memories stirred. Not his own.
The original Lu Xiaoqi had been a pushover. A gentle soul. The kind of guy who gave his dinner rations to hungry kids, who climbed onto rooftops to patch leaks for neighbors who couldn't afford repairs.
So this is what it feels like, Mo Fan thought, watching the children's smiling faces. Human warmth. "Living" energy.
Something cold inside him—the part that had grown comfortable treating corpses as inventory items—thawed, just a fraction.
"Alright, alright, stop crowding him! Can't you see his leg's broken?"
Old Lü shooed the children away and helped Mo Fan limp further into the village. As they walked, the old man kept glancing at him with worried eyes.
"What happened up there? Nobody goes to that part of the mountain."
Showtime.
Mo Fan let his injuries do most of the acting. The pallid complexion. The visible tremors. The thousand-yard stare of a man who'd glimpsed the abyss.
"I... slipped." His voice wavered convincingly. "There was a crooked tree growing out of the cliff face—I caught myself on it. But below me... wolves. Everywhere. I think I passed out from fear. When I woke up, they were gone. I don't know how long I hung there. Hours. I just... crawled back up. Somehow."
"Heaven's mercy. Heaven's mercy."
Old Lü shook his head, attributing the miracle to ancestral blessings and sect karma.
He escorted Mo Fan to a small, isolated shack at the edge of the settlement, then pressed two still-warm black-flour buns into his hands.
"Rest. I'll handle your herb quota for today—I'll talk to the supervisor, tell him you need time to heal."
The old man lowered his voice conspiratorially.
"The Outer Sect Tournament preliminaries are coming up soon. We won't be competing, obviously, but the sect always needs hands to set up stages, haul equipment... the pay's decent. You need to be walking by then. Gotta earn your keep."
Mo Fan nodded and accepted the buns.
"Thank you, Uncle Lü."
He watched the old man's hunched silhouette disappear around the corner.
The moment Old Lü was out of sight, the "grateful survivor" expression slid off Mo Fan's face like water.
What replaced it was a grimace of pure, unfiltered agony.
He turned and shoved open the creaky wooden door.
His shack.
It had been assigned to him because he was technically a "senior" servant—which really just meant he was technically a "senior" failure. The sect's "reward" for seniority was the most remote, most decrepit hut in the district.
No neighbors.
Just the wild mountain at his back and the occasional rat for company.
Perfect for privacy.
Click.
Mo Fan shut the door. Slid the bolt home.
Only then—finally, finally—did he let himself collapse.
His back hit the door. His legs gave out. He slid down to the floor like a puppet with its strings cut, every muscle screaming in delayed protest.
The adrenaline crash hit like a freight train.
Pain—real pain, not the muted battlefield version—came roaring back. The fractured leg. The torn muscles. The countless micro-abrasions. It all surged up at once, drowning him in white-hot sensation, blackening the edges of his vision.
[ WARNING: Adrenaline levels critical. ]
[ Multiple soft-tissue contusions detected. Severe hemorrhaging around left tibial fracture site. ]
[ RECOMMENDATION: Cease all physical activity. Consume high-calorie sustenance immediately. ]
[ FAILURE TO COMPLY: Estimated time to unconsciousness — 10 minutes. ]
The System didn't offer a healing buff.
No magical regeneration. No convenient "Restore HP" skill.
Just cold, clinical data, scrolling across his retinas in angry red text like an ICU monitor delivering bad news.
"Yeah... I figured."
Mo Fan laughed weakly, sweat dripping down his temples.
He raised the two black-flour buns with trembling hands.
They were cold now. Dense. Slightly stale.
He bit into one like it was wagyu steak.
Chew. Swallow. Repeat.
The coarse texture scraped his throat raw. Each mouthful sat heavy in his stomach. But every calorie was a lifeline, a trickle of fuel to keep this broken machine running for another few hours.
As he ate, his free hand drifted to the storage pouch hidden beneath his robes.
Carefully—almost reverently—he slipped it off his belt and tucked it into a gap between the loose bricks beneath his bed frame.
His first treasure.
His first secret.
His nest egg in this brutal new world.
The last of the bun disappeared.
Mo Fan stared at the ceiling, chest heaving, body finally surrendering to exhaustion.
Day One, he thought. Survived.
Inventory: one Skeleton Knight, three storage pouches full of dead men's loot, a broken leg, and exactly zero allies who know what I really am.
Could be worse.
Could be dead.
His eyes drifted shut.
The darkness took him—not the cold void of the corpse pit, but the warm, dreamless black of hard-earned rest.
Outside, the sun dipped below the mountain ridge. Chimney smoke curled into the evening sky.
And somewhere deep in the storage pouch beneath the floorboards, a jumbled pile of bones waited patiently for its next deployment.
A few minutes later, Mo Fan crawled onto the wooden plank bed.
The mildewed straw mattress creaked beneath him like a dying animal, and the cotton blanket smelled like it had been used to smother someone's dreams for the past century. The boards dug into his spine in at least three different places.
Paradise.
No golden light descended from the heavens to announce his level-up. No orchestral swell celebrated his survival. Just the occasional bark of a village dog echoing through the night, and a spider in the corner of the room, spinning its web with the quiet diligence of someone who actually had their life figured out.
Mo Fan stared at the cobwebs draped across the ceiling beam. His body ached in places he didn't know could ache. The phantom sensation of undead claws still lingered on his skin, and he was fairly certain some part of that ghoul was still stuck under his fingernails.
And yet—
I'm alive.
The thought hit him with unexpected weight. Not the triumphant "I survived!" of a protagonist's victory lap, but the exhausted relief of a man who'd just finished a double shift on a Friday, only to remember he had to come in Saturday too.
His eyelids grew heavy. The spider kept spinning.
"Sleep first," he mumbled to no one. "Figure out how to grind this godforsaken level tomorrow..."
Tomorrow, I'll optimize.
Tomorrow, I'll plan.
Tonight, I just need to exist.
In a forgotten corner of this village—where mortals cooked their evening meals and argued about grain prices, blissfully unaware of the undead nightmare lurking in the mountains—the future Lord of the Undead pulled his threadbare quilt up to his chin, curled into a position that avoided the worst of the wooden slats, and surrendered to unconsciousness.
The spider finished its web.
The dogs stopped barking.
And somewhere in the darkness, a Status Panel flickered, patient and waiting.