[ Checking recruitment conditions... ]
That line hung in the void for all of two seconds before dissolving into motes of light.
Then several terse messages surfaced before Mo Fan's eyes:
[ First Expansion successful! ]
[ Recruit function activated! ]
[ Recruitment attempts available: 10 ]
As the notification faded, a recruitment interface steeped in ancient necro aesthetics slowly unfurled before the bone throne.
Mo Fan looked closer and found that the entries for the types of skeletons he'd just fought in the gray mist region had already been clearly recorded in the interface.
And behind those illuminated entries lay a vast swath of dim silhouettes, completely unviewable, sealed tight behind heavy shadow.
But Mo Fan's attention had no room left for those dark shapes right now.
His eyes were locked onto that last line—"Recruitment attempts available: 10." He froze for a moment, then his expression turned exceedingly strange.
"Holy shit?"
"A ten-pull?!"
Looking at that all-too-familiar number and interface layout, a flood of agonizing memories from gacha games in his previous life surged through Mo Fan's mind.
Hitting hard pity, losing the 50/50, ten-pulls full of nothing but trash... every blood-pressure-spiking memory was vivid as ever.
"You've got to be kidding me. I transmigrated and I still have to suffer this garbage?"
Mo Fan grumbled, his mouth twitching.
His body, of course, remained perfectly honest.
Faced with a freebie like this, not pulling would be the real crime!
Who knew? One lucky pull could change everything!
"Come on! Let's see what these drop rates look like!"
Mo Fan rubbed his hands together, drew a deep breath, and pressed the [ Recruit ] button.
Hummm——
In the open space at the center of the hall, a formation array abruptly lit up.
First pull: a mass of grayish-white light flickered.
Then, with a clack, a familiar-looking Ordinary Gray Mist Bone Soldier came staggering out of the glow, a ghostly blue soul flame dancing in its eye sockets.
Mo Fan nodded. Reasonably satisfied, all things considered.
The individual strength was on the weak side, but at least it spared him the trouble of scouring the world for corpses himself.
The array's light continued flashing.
Second pull: grayish-white flash, another ordinary bone soldier.
Third pull: still an ordinary bone soldier.
Fourth, fifth, sixth...
As the grayish-white light kept lighting up over and over in the hall, Mo Fan's once-hopeful expression visibly darkened, bit by bit.
"Hold on—"
Mo Fan looked at the row of skeletons lined up below the throne, a vein ticking faintly on his forehead.
"Why the hell are they ALL these busted-up rejects?!"
These Gray Mist Bone Soldiers he'd pulled were all around early Foundation Establishment in strength, sure, but their presentation left a great deal to be desired.
Some moved as stiffly as rusted clockwork toys.
Some had leg bones of mismatched lengths with wildly disproportionate builds.
One had barely taken its first step out of the array before tripping its own left foot over its right, nearly treating Mo Fan to a live faceplant on flat ground!
They weren't completely useless garbage—they'd pass muster as cannon fodder—but compared to the imposing, awe-inspiring undead legion in Mo Fan's mind, they fell staggeringly short!
And just as Mo Fan's blood pressure was steadily climbing—
Eighth pull.
Inside the recruitment array, a silver-gray light suddenly blazed up, noticeably brighter than before!
Mo Fan's eyes snapped wide, and he couldn't help sitting up straighter.
"We got something?!"
The light faded, and a tall undead figure stepped out.
Enhanced Gray Mist Bone Soldier!
Mo Fan took one good look, and the smile froze on his face.
This thing—apart from a frame one size bulkier than the ordinary bone soldiers beside it and a reasonably intact bone saber in hand—was fundamentally no different whatsoever.
"..."
"Fine. Great. Wonderful."
Mo Fan clapped expressionlessly.
"So after all that buildup, the so-called rare drop is just a bigger skeleton, huh?"
Then the ninth pull flashed grayish-white without the slightest suspense, adding another ordinary bone soldier.
Looking at the nine recruits lined up neatly below—eight ordinary soldiers and one enhanced—Mo Fan had thoroughly accepted his fate and slumped back against the throne with a long sigh.
Apparently, whether in his past life or this one, his cursed-luck constitution was never going to change.
As for the last remaining pull, Mo Fan held zero hope whatsoever, treating it as nothing more than rounding out ten trash mobs.
However.
When the tenth recruitment activated—
The array, which should have immediately flashed white, this time showed no reaction at all!
A brief dead silence fell over the hall.
A full three breaths passed.
Then, at the very center of the array, an extremely faint thread of golden light abruptly flickered to life.
At first, that gold was as weak as candlelight.
But the next second, it erupted, instantly becoming a dazzling pillar of gold that lit the entire gloomy bone hall bright as day!
RUMBLE——!!!
At the same moment, the bone throne beneath Mo Fan began shuddering violently without a shred of warning!
Mo Fan froze, then his eyes bulged wide, and he nearly leapt right off the throne.
"Holy shit?!"
"GOLD?!"
But before his euphoria could fully crest, he sharply registered that something seemed off.
As the golden light kept expanding, the death energy in the hall—which had been circulating docile and steady—suddenly began boiling and churning wildly, as though violently provoked by something.
The throne beneath him shook harder and harder.
Even the array on the ground, with its brilliant gold radiance, began showing pronounced distortion, flickering between bright and dim.
The feeling wasn't anything like a normal summoning.
It was more like some utterly terrifying existence was trying to force its way out from the deepest reaches of the [ Necrotic Realm ] through the recruitment channel.
The smile gradually faded from Mo Fan's face, and he instinctively gripped the throne's armrests.
"...Uh, hold on?"
"It's just a gacha pull. No need for this big a production, right?"
Just as he was quietly tensing up, the outline of a slender, willowy human figure finally emerged slowly from deep within the golden light.
Amid the boiling, twisting death energy and gold, a pale, slender hand—so flawless it might have been carved from white jade—suddenly reached out from inside the radiance.
The hand gave a light flick in the void.
Shhhwaa——
The death energy coiled around the array, so thick it was nearly solid, was forcibly parted by that hand as casually as if it were a layer of thin gauze!
Then the crisp sound of high heels striking the shadowed floor echoed slowly through the hall.
A woman draped in a dark, luxurious robe, her beauty so absolute it bordered on uncanny, finally stepped out of the brilliant gold.
She had waterfall-long silver-gray hair, skin pale and utterly bloodless, exquisite features carrying a cold, arrogant elegance that belonged to no mortal world.
The instant she appeared, a flicker of confusion—like someone just roused from a long sleep—passed through those abyss-deep eyes.
Then she lifted her head slightly, her gaze crossing the empty hall and landing with unerring precision on Mo Fan, seated high upon the bone throne.
A brief silence.
The corner of the woman's pale yet vivid lips suddenly curved upward.
Her voice was soft, magnetic, carrying a trace of amusement:
"A new master?"
"Heh... how interesting."
Mo Fan sat on the throne, staring at this stunning woman whose entire art style clashed violently with the pile of skeletons around her, momentarily dazed.
But before he can even get in a second good look—
BOOM——!!!
A vast, immense, utterly indescribable mental pressure came flooding into Mo Fan's brain through the soul link without any warning whatsoever!
Mo Fan's entire body locked rigid on the throne!
Then, as though countless red-hot steel needles had stabbed into his brain all at once, the violent agony nearly collapsed his consciousness on the spot!
He realized with horror that his Soul Strength, measured against hers, was as fragile as a single skiff slamming into a sky-swallowing tsunami!
His Load was climbing at a terrifying rate, as if it would rupture him completely in the next second!
"Gah..."
Mo Fan clamped both hands over his forehead, teeth grinding audibly, cold sweat soaking through his robes in an instant.
And just as he was about to give out entirely, the stunning woman below the throne suddenly knit her lovely brows.
She seemed to have sensed the signs of collapse on the other end.
The woman glanced down at her own pale palm, then looked up at the bone throne behind Mo Fan, and finally settled her gaze on Mo Fan's agonized form.
"...I see."
She let out a soft sigh, her tone carrying what sounded like regret and resignation.
Then, through Mo Fan's blurring vision, the woman slowly raised her right hand, pressed two slender fingers together, and touched them lightly to the center of her brow.
Hummm——
The next moment.
That unimaginably vast and terrible death power within her began collapsing inward and contracting at tremendous speed!
Layer upon layer of intricate, obscure dark patterns surfaced across her pale skin, interweaving into the shape of chains, then swiftly sank back beneath it.
As that invisible seal finished taking shape, the terrifying aura that had set the entire hall trembling receded rapidly, like a tide going out.
The tearing agony in Mo Fan's sea of consciousness finally began to subside along with it.
Until at last—
The woman lowered her hand and opened her eyes again.
That suffocating pressure about her had vanished without a trace. Right now, she looked like nothing more than a slightly unusual undead.
And at the same time, a simple line of System information finally arrived, fashionably late, in Mo Fan's vision:
[ Name: Celeia ]
[ Race: Lich ]
[ Current Level: LV.20 ]
"Haa... haa..."
Mo Fan sagged limply against the bone throne, gasping in huge lungfuls of air. It took him a long while to finally recover from that near-brain-death experience.
He wiped the cold sweat from his forehead, his eyes impossibly complicated and brimming with wary suspicion as he looked at the woman below.
Even an idiot could see it: this lich woman called Celeia was absolutely a massive problem!
That so-called LV.20 wasn't her actual strength at all—it was the result of her voluntarily sealing and weakening herself!
Seeing that Mo Fan had finally come around, Celeia didn't put on any sort of lofty airs.
She lightly lifted the hem of her dark robe with both hands and gave a slight, exceedingly graceful and textbook-perfect bow toward Mo Fan on the throne:
"A pleasure to meet you, my esteemed master. I am Celeia. From this day forward, I am at your command."
Mo Fan watched her docile, courteous manner, the corner of his eye twitching, and asked with lingering fear, "What... exactly are you?"
Hearing that, Celeia only smiled faintly and didn't answer directly.
She glanced down at her current state, then shot a sidelong look at the nine Gray Mist Bone Soldiers standing crooked and askew beside her, and spoke in a soft, slightly helpless tone:
"Whatever I may have been before, with Master's current strength... if I were to exert even a little of my real power, I'm afraid the first one to fall would not be the enemy, but you."
"So it seems that, for quite some time, all I can do for now is tidy up this palace for you."
Mo Fan blinked. "Tidy up the palace? You mean... as a housekeeper?"
"If Master would like to call it that."
Celeia covered her mouth and laughed softly, her beautiful eyes curving. Her voice remained gentle and pleasant, though the words carried a certain amount of venom:
"After all, someone has to help you shoulder the daily chores. And I... am at least rather better at management than those soldiers you just recruited, who can't even walk straight. Wouldn't you agree?"
Mo Fan followed her gaze to the Gray Mist Bone Soldier beside her still shuffling in place with both arms swinging in sync with the same leg, and was instantly speechless.
Still, after that exchange, the tension in Mo Fan's chest had largely dissipated.
Whatever horrifying existence this lich had once been, at least under the System's rules, she was currently on his side.
Celeia then surveyed the somewhat empty bone hall and asked mildly, as though making idle conversation:
"Speaking of which, Master. How much territory does this [ Necrotic Realm ] currently hold under your authority?"
At that question, Mo Fan perked up a little.
After all, he'd just tripled the space's area via his first expansion today, and had been pretty pleased with himself about it not long ago.
So without overthinking it, Mo Fan straightened his back and answered quite naturally:
"Just finished expanding. It's three thousand square meters now."
Hearing that, Celeia's elegant smile faltered slightly.
She blinked, seeming to doubt she'd heard correctly, and asked again with rare hesitation:
"...How much?"
"Three thousand square meters."
Mo Fan repeated it with total confidence.
A brief silence suddenly descended over the hall.
Celeia glanced at Mo Fan, then turned her head to look out the doors at that so-called "vast territory."
After a moment, an exceedingly subtle expression surfaced on that stunning face—the look of someone who wanted to say something and thought better of it.
In the end, she merely gave a polite little nod and forced out an appraisal:
"...It is rather quaint."
Hearing that, Mo Fan was instantly displeased, one eyebrow shooting up.
"Hey, what's that look supposed to mean? You think it's small? I'll have you know this is territory I just conquered. It started out at barely a hundred square meters!"
Celeia looked at Mo Fan with his hackles up and couldn't help shaking her head, a complicated glint of amusement passing through her eyes.
"Master, I mean no offense."
She spoke softly, her tone carrying a distant quality.
"It's only that you likely don't yet know what this [ Necrotic Realm ] once—"
However.
Her words had barely reached halfway when her voice cut off abruptly!
The next moment.
Pffff——!!!
Without the slightest warning, a huge mouthful of blood with a dark, eerie sheen erupted from Celeia's mouth, staining the shadowed ground before her red!
Mo Fan's expression changed violently and he shot up from the throne. "Celeia?!"
Before he could even process what had happened, Celeia's slender frame convulsed violently.
She let out a muffled groan, staggered a step, and braced one hand hard against a nearby pillar.
Her already pale face was now frighteningly white, her lips drained of the last trace of color.
Fortunately, this terrible backlash didn't last long.
Moments later, the invisible, dreadful force gripping her slowly receded.
Dead silence returned to the hall.
A long while passed.
Only then did Celeia slowly release the bone pillar and force herself upright.
She raised a hand, lightly wiping the blood from the corner of her lips with the back of it...
Then turned her head, gazing at the bone throne behind Mo Fan with an exceedingly complicated look.
Then she looked back at the thoroughly stunned Mo Fan, and a rather resigned, bitter smile appeared on her pale face:
"It seems..."
"With Master's current strength..."
"...there are certain things I cannot so much as mention."
She bowed slightly, her voice returning to that distinctive softness and docility:
"Until you have truly grown, I really can do nothing for now but play the obedient housekeeper."