He rubbed his chin, staring at the option floating in the void, his mind steadily coming alive.
Come to think of it, Mo Fan was no stranger at all to the business of "making equipment."
Way back when he'd first fallen to the bottom of Abandoned Sword Cliff with absolutely nothing to his name, he'd done a stint as a craftsman.
Back then, he'd managed to cobble together a set of Crude Rat-Fang Knuckles through sheer force of will.
The thing may have been crude and ugly, but it had genuinely earned the System's recognition.
Later, as his level rose, he'd used [ Bone Armament ] to personally forge the Pale Bone Scepter.
And that scepter had gone on to turn WTF into an independent, mobile spell turret.
At that thought, Mo Fan couldn't help lifting his head and glancing through the palace gates at WTF, standing outside with the Pale Bone Scepter in hand.
A few lines from the System panel—the ones that had popped up the first time he'd created the Pale Bone Scepter—suddenly flashed through his mind:
[ Forging Successful! ]
[ Basic Weapon: Pale Bone Scepter ]
[ Quality: Common ]
[ Skills not loaded... ]
[ Attributes unactivated... ]
[ Unactivated (Data Corrupted / Insufficient Authority) ] █████
Of those, the [ Skills not loaded... ] entry had long since been resolved through WTF's skill inscriptions.
After Mo Fan reached Tier-2, that final garbled line had even revealed itself as [ Unactivated Set: Pale Bone ]. But he still hadn't known how to forge the missing pieces, and the attributes had remained inactive.
Mo Fan pulled his gaze back and settled it once more on the throne interface before him.
Don't tell me...
Could [ Forge ] finally be the key?
With a mix of curiosity and anticipation, Mo Fan stopped hesitating. A thought moved, and he opened the [ Forge ] option directly.
Hummm——
As the Gray Mist Bone Material was recognized by the System, the previously dim forging interface finally lit up completely, displaying function branches utterly different from ordinary [ Bone Armament ].
In Mo Fan's field of vision, two core sub-options surfaced, plain and simple:
[ Attribute Forging ]
[ Set Forging ]
Mo Fan raised an eyebrow and focused on [ Attribute Forging ] first.
As the descriptive information unfolded, he quickly grasped the whole mechanism behind it.
Previously, when he'd used [ Bone Armament ] to craft equipment, it had essentially been a crude physical assembly and fusion.
The Rat-Fang Knuckles, for instance, carried trace corpse poison purely because Ghoul-Rat incisors retained that toxic property to begin with.
And the Pale Bone Scepter could cast spells only because he'd actively inscribed the skill into it, paying the price of permanently sealing off a portion of his own Mana cap.
But the [ Attribute Forging ] offered by the bone throne was something else entirely!
It could directly extract the special power contained within exclusive necro materials and solidify it into a stable, permanent "attribute entry" on the equipment itself!
Of course, there were exceedingly clear and strict rules attached.
First, any activated attribute had to have a definite material source.
Take the Gray Mist Bone Material in his hands—it inherently contained refined death energy and toughness, so what could be extracted from it was limited strictly to related necro attributes.
There was absolutely no conjuring up some raging inferno or ninefold heavenly thunder out of thin air.
Second, the number of attributes an ordinary piece of equipment could carry was limited.
Fortunately, though, an attribute wasn't a one-shot deal.
If he later obtained higher-tier, better-suited materials, Mo Fan could simply invest them again and overwrite the old attribute outright, replacing it!
Replacement, not endless stacking.
Which also killed any possibility of piling up low-grade materials to stack dozens of attributes on a single piece.
Lastly, this function neither conflicted with nor was equivalent to the Pale Bone Scepter's "skill inscription."
Equipment attributes were permanent passive bonuses—not active spells.
Activating an attribute wouldn't let an undead freeload off the skills Mo Fan had mastered; the Pale Bone Scepter's mana-cap-sealing mechanism remained independently in effect.
Having worked through all these rules, Mo Fan didn't feel restricted in the slightest—he was practically rubbing his hands together in excitement.
"Not bad at all!"
Mo Fan's eyes lit up.
Before, crafting equipment came down entirely to whatever state the materials happened to be in—pure dumb luck.
Now, with [ Attribute Forging ], he could not only select and extract attributes with intent, but even upgrade and replace them whenever better goods came along!
This approach... actually has a fair bit in common with the Mystic Realm artifact-refining methods I read about in the Hundred Forging Artifact Pattern Record.
Mo Fan mused privately. Mystic Realm artifact refiners used spiritual energy to extract natural artifact patterns, while he relied on the bone throne to directly extract the origin properties of necro materials!
With this, the growth ceiling for undead equipment was now in a completely different league.
But what really got Mo Fan's heart racing wasn't the attribute extraction function.
His gaze shifted slowly, landing on the far more unfamiliar option beside it—
[ Set Forging ].
Mo Fan remembered the [ Unactivated Set: Pale Bone ] entry that had appeared on the Pale Bone Scepter's panel after he reached Tier-2. Back then, he'd known the set existed, but had no idea how to complete it.
He opened [ Set Forging ] without a second's delay.
Line after line of rule descriptions spread out before him.
In the past, when he made equipment, one piece was just one piece.
Even if he forged a longsword for Mo Yan today and cobbled together a set of bone armor for it tomorrow...
Those two pieces would each do their own thing, with no intrinsic connection between them whatsoever.
But [ Set Forging ] shattered that limitation completely!
At the very start of forging the first piece, Mo Fan could anchor an entire "exclusive armament blueprint."
Afterward, as long as he continued crafting strictly according to that same blueprint's design philosophy, he could gradually fill in the components for the remaining slots.
And once the number of set pieces worn by a single undead reached a certain threshold...
It would trigger a qualitative change, activating powerful combination effects that individual pieces could never possess!
Immediately after, the System displayed an extremely straightforward progress breakdown:
[ Set Blueprint Creation Available ]
[ Standard Set Component Count: 5 ]
[ Set linkage may be established upon completion of the first piece ]
[ Set bonus effects will activate progressively with component collection progress (2/5, 3/5, 5/5)! ]
Reading that breakdown, Mo Fan's breathing quickened despite himself.
With a single piece (1/5), you had only base attributes.
Gather two (2/5), and the first-stage set attributes activated.
Three (3/5) activated the second stage.
And if he could assemble the full five-piece set (5/5), it would unleash the complete set's might in full!
Of course, components from different sets couldn't be randomly mixed and matched to pad the count.
And each undead could currently only be deeply bound to one exclusive armament set—no wearing several complete sets at once.
But even so, this was unquestionably an epic-tier leap for the undead legion's armament system!
Having studied it this far, Mo Fan could no longer suppress the itch in his hands.
His gaze passed through the palace gates and landed naturally on Unit 001—Mo Yan—standing silently outside.
As the one who'd been with Mo Fan the longest, and currently the most technically refined fighter in the legion—
Mo Yan had gone from a broken skeleton at the bottom of Abandoned Sword Cliff to wearing a cultivator's jade bones, grasping death sword-qi and swordsmanship instinct.
Its service had been nothing short of meritorious.
But apart from that cold iron longsword it had carried for so long, its equipment had never come together into a complete system.
First exclusive armament set—let's test it out on Mo Yan!
Mo Fan made the call on the spot.
He didn't intend to discard the cold iron longsword in Mo Yan's hand, though.
After all, that blade had accompanied Mo Yan through countless life-and-death fights...
And after so long being nurtured by the death energy in the [ Necrotic Realm ], it had already become extraordinarily attuned to him.
Mo Fan planned to use the cold iron longsword as the core base material, then invest the newly obtained Gray Mist Bone Material and use the throne to reforge the blade's structure...
Transforming it directly into the starting point of his first exclusive undead equipment set!
Soon, he'd rapidly sketched out a complete five-piece armament blueprint in his mind and formally named it—
Netherbone Sword Guard!
The full blueprint was divided into five slots:
Weapon — Netherbone Sword
Vambraces — Netherbone Arm Guards
Chestplate — Netherbone Cuirass
Legguards — Netherbone Greaves
And headgear — Netherbone Faceplate.
Of course, with the modest amount of Gray Mist Bone Material he currently had on hand, there was no way to bang out all five pieces in one go.
For now, he only needed to forge the main weapon and verify the effect.
A thought stirred.
Outside the hall, Mo Yan immediately strode in and offered the mottled cold iron longsword up before the throne with both hands.
Mo Fan didn't hesitate. He portioned out several units of Gray Mist Bone Material and placed them, along with the cold iron longsword, into the forging vortex before the throne.
[ Set Blueprint: Netherbone Sword Guard ]
[ Core Equipment: Cold Iron Longsword ]
[ Forging preparations complete! ]
[ First set forging—BEGIN! ]