With the "auto-grind" command issued, the world before Mo Fan's eyes transformed.
There was no flashy transition animation—only a sound like static from an old black-and-white television powering on. Then, within his previously dark field of vision, a grainy gray-white image flickered into existence.
It was Summon No. 001's perspective.
The sensation was peculiar, like playing an extraordinarily immersive RTS game, except his only unit was a skeleton that walked with a pronounced limp, and the image quality was a pitiful 360p infrared night-vision mode.
[ Command: Search ]
Mo Fan lay on his broken bed, issuing the thought-command through his consciousness.
On screen, No. 001 clumsily pushed through the underbrush. Its movements were stiff, but under Mo Fan's micro-corrections, the skeleton still displayed the cold efficiency characteristic of undead creatures.
A gray-backed field mouse had just poked its head out to forage. Before it could even register the approaching mass of white bone, No. 001's long gibbonesque arm—now equipped with its [Crude Rat-Fang Knuckles]—came whistling down.
Splat!
No fancy techniques. Pure brute force.
[ Gray-backed Field Mouse (Common Beast) killed. Experience +1. ]
[ Current Experience: 84/1000 ]
Watching the pale blue text appear at the edge of his vision, Mo Fan's heart lurched.
Pathetically small. Absurdly inefficient. But it represented a possibility—the possibility of growing stronger while lying in bed, without personally crawling through mud or fighting beasts to the death.
"Keep going! There's movement in those bushes over there!"
Like a miser who'd just discovered buried treasure, Mo Fan greedily directed his puppet to harvest every scrap of experience.
But the price soon made itself known.
As the grinding hours stretched on, the static in his vision multiplied. The image began to shake and stutter.
Mo Fan felt as though a rusty wire was being twisted through his brain. The sensation of spiritual exhaustion grew so intense he could hear his own temples throbbing, blood vessels pounding like drums.
But he didn't stop. He couldn't bear to stop.
Only when the first pale light of dawn touched the horizon—and No. 001 had wobbled into a concealed tree hollow to hide—did Mo Fan finally sever the connection.
Morning.
Mo Fan was awakened by a splitting headache. The sensation was a hundred times worse than pulling three consecutive all-nighters revising his thesis during graduate school. It felt like being hungover and then having someone crack him across the back of the skull with a brick.
His face deathly pale, he sat up in bed. He'd barely thought about getting up for water when the rickety wooden door creaked open.
"Little Seven, I brought you some—"
Old Lü walked in carrying a bowl of hot porridge. The moment he saw Mo Fan's ghastly appearance, he nearly dropped it.
"Heavens above! Your face is whiter than a corpse! Has your wound gotten worse?"
Mo Fan opened his mouth to say he was fine, but his throat was so parched no sound came out. He could only wave his hand weakly.
Old Lü spun in anxious circles. He fumbled through his clothes for a long moment, then, with gritted teeth, reached into the innermost pocket against his chest and pulled out a worn cloth bundle still warm from his body heat.
With trembling hands, he opened it. Inside lay a few fragments of silver and a handful of copper coins.
"This won't do... this won't do at all."
Old Lü's eyes reddened as he stuffed the money pouch beside Mo Fan's pillow. "This is my coffin fund—everything I've saved. It's not much, but it should be enough to beg Steward Liu from the Outer Sect to bring in an alchemist..."
Looking at those bits of silver, still carrying the old man's warmth, Mo Fan felt something slam hard against his heart.
He was a pragmatist. A Necromancer. But he wasn't an animal.
Wrecking himself for a few experience points, then making a stranger—someone with no obligation to him whatsoever—sacrifice his funeral savings? That arithmetic didn't balance. Not against his conscience.
"Uncle Lü, put it away."
Mo Fan drew a deep breath, forcing down the vertigo flooding his skull. He reached out and pressed his hand over the old man's. His fingers were cold, but his voice was steady.
"This is just a normal reaction—old injuries flaring up. Toxins purging from my system. If we brought in an alchemist, it would only expose everything. If you really want to help me, just cover my work duties for a few more days."
It took considerable persuasion—Mo Fan even had to force himself out of bed to walk a few steps as proof—before he finally convinced the worried old man to leave.
After seeing him off, Mo Fan leaned against the doorframe, looking at the wild vegetable dumpling in his hand. A bitter smile crossed his face.
"So the price of AFK leveling... isn't just headaches. It's emotional debt too."
The Second Night.
Despite the lingering ache in his skull, Mo Fan logged on right on schedule.
This time, he was far more practiced. If last night he'd been a fumbling novice, tonight he'd evolved into a seasoned operator. He learned to predict prey escape routes. He learned to exploit the rhythm difference between No. 001's mismatched legs to execute sharp turns.
The once-bustling outer reaches of the mountain fell deathly silent.
If the forest's small creatures had a social media feed, today's trending headline would certainly read: SHOCKING! White Terror Strikes at Night! Forest Ecosystem on Brink of Collapse!
The squirrels, rabbits, and venomous snakes couldn't speak, but the panic of "pack up the family and flee in the night" permeated every corner of the woods. Wherever No. 001 passed was like a locust swarm's aftermath—even earthworms were dug up to check if they were worth experience.
Efficiency was improving.
No. 001's frame was now festooned with dead snakes and rotting mice. Mo Fan didn't let these trophies go to waste. He directed the skeleton to find a massive hollow dead tree and established [Supply Point #1], stockpiling the inedible but parts-rich corpses.
But this golden age lasted only two days.
On the third night, a problem emerged.
No prey.
Mo Fan controlled No. 001 through the outer perimeter for a full half hour without seeing so much as a whisker. The low-level creatures nearby had either been killed off or long since fled.
"The experience bar's only half full..."
Mo Fan stared at the system display: LV.1 (520/1000). Frustration gnawed at him.
The starting zone's resources were depleted.
"Fortune favors the bold."
Mo Fan gazed toward the edge of his vision, where thicker mist shrouded the deeper forest. Steeling himself: "001, move inward."
The moment they crossed that invisible safety line, the very air seemed to thicken.
The sounds in the undergrowth were no longer small, skittering noises—but something heavy. Oppressive. The sound of slow, deliberate breathing.
Suddenly, the bushes ahead of No. 001 thrashed violently.
A crimson blur burst out, trailing the stench of blood.
It was a rabbit. But sized like a medium dog, its body knotted with muscle like a bodybuilder's, and most terrifying of all—those eyes. Red enough to drip blood.
[ Demon-Eye Rabbit (Low-Rank Spirit Beast) ]
[ Danger Level: High ]
"You're the one!"
Mo Fan felt excitement rather than fear. This was a genuine Spirit Beast—the experience would be substantial.
[ Command: Strike left flank! ]
Mo Fan's thought-command fired instantaneously.
But just as No. 001 raised its bone fist to strike, the Demon-Eye Rabbit whipped its head around. Those blood-red eyes locked onto the empty sockets of No. 001's skull.
THRUM—!
An invisible wave of psychic force detonated.
Mo Fan felt like his brain had been slammed with a sledgehammer. The once-clear connection dissolved instantly into a screen of dancing black-and-white snow.
[ Warning: Psychic interference detected! ]
[ Signal delay spiking: 300ms... 1500ms... 3000ms! ]
Three-second delay.
In combat, that meant death.
On screen, No. 001 stood frozen like a disconnected idiot, still executing the "attack" command from three seconds ago. The Demon-Eye Rabbit had already dodged nimbly aside. Its powerful hind legs coiled and launched, smashing directly into No. 001's sternum.
CRACK!
No. 001 flew backward like a kite with its string cut, slamming into a tree trunk. Several freshly-reattached ribs shattered on impact.
"Damn it! Dodge!"
Mo Fan thrashed on his broken bed, drenched in cold sweat. He frantically issued [Evade] and [Counter] commands through his mind, but the No. 001 on screen was still executing its previous "collapse and stiffen" animation.
The Demon-Eye Rabbit didn't waste the opportunity. It coiled again, launching itself like a crimson cannonball toward the downed skeleton—aiming directly for the soul-flame flickering in No. 001's eye sockets.
It's over.
If that flame extinguished, No. 001 would be finished. His only employee. All his effort.
"MOVE!"
Desperation and fury made Mo Fan forget this was merely remote operation.
It was an instinctive physical compensation response—like how your body unconsciously leans when playing a racing game. Lying on his bed, watching that red blur about to shatter the soul-flame, Mo Fan reflexively threw himself into a violent roll to the left.
He wasn't trying to roll his own body. He was trying to make that damned skeleton roll.
"MOVE, YOU PIECE OF—!"
In that instant, his spiritual power concentrated to a needle point. That overwhelming will to control the body underwent a qualitative transformation in his extreme rage.
A sensation of violent tearing.
Mo Fan felt his soul being ripped from his body as if by some enormous vacuum, sucked along that invisible psychic tether. It bypassed all delay and interference, slamming headlong into the distant battlefield.
[ Warning: Spiritual threshold breached... ]
[ Forced synchronization detected... Safety protocols failed. ]
[ Override Mode — Passively Activated. ]
The System's cold notification blared like an afterthought, but Mo Fan could no longer hear it.
In the small hut in the real world, Mo Fan's body went limp on the bed. His breathing grew faint.
And several kilometers away, deep in the forest—
No. 001, cornered by the Demon-Eye Rabbit, its ghost-flame guttering toward extinction—something changed in those hollow eye sockets. The feeble green flicker that had been wavering on the edge of death suddenly blazed as though doused in gasoline.
WHOOOM!
The dim ghost-fire exploded outward, transforming into something deep, cold, and filled with calculating intelligence—a piercing icy blue.
No. 001 raised its head.
This was no longer the mindless gaze of a low-level undead.
These were Mo Fan's eyes.