Once the thought took root in his mind,it grew wild like weeds,impossible to suppress any longer.
Mo Fan pushed open the window lattice,letting the cool night breeze wash over his face.He carefully scanned his surroundings and found nothing out of the ordinary.
No sooner said than done.
Without alerting a soul,his figure flickered and he arrived underground without a sound,heading straight for the bottomless abandoned mine pit.
Pushing aside the concealing stone wall he'd set up before,the mine entrance was as deathly still as ever,gusts of cold wind sighing through it.
The Undead Centipede that had always served as his vanguard and pathfinder had been ground to bone powder in that first clash with the Formless Demon Embryo at the bottom of Abandoned Sword Cliff.
It could no longer take point and scout ahead.
That said,Mo Fan wasn't in a hurry to summon Mo You,Mo Yan,and the rest of his undead legion out of the[Necrotic Realm]this time.
Having broken through to Tier-3 and stepped into the Undead Mentor realm,he'd been wanting an opportunity like this to get in the field himself and test out his current combat power.
By his earlier estimate,his overall combat strength had at minimum brushed the threshold of the Golden Core tier.
Golden Core...
Recalling Elder Liu Yun's heaven-shaking sword strike,Mo Fan couldn't help a flicker of longing in his eyes.
Still,exactly how much he was worth...
In the end,you only found out by fighting.
But that aside,for now,business came first.
Following the rugged mine tunnel deeper and deeper,the air around him grew colder and thicker.
Hisssss...
Just as Mo Fan was passing the corner of an abandoned crossroads chamber,an exceedingly faint scraping sound came from the rock wall overhead.
An instant later,a rank gust howled down!
A mutated rock spider,its body covered in stone-like scale plating and radiating the pressure of early Foundation Establishment,dropped like a bomb from the sky.
Swinging its razor-sharp forelimbs like spears,it stabbed viciously straight at the back of Mo Fan's skull!
Mo Fan's perception was nothing short of razor-keen.
The instant that sound of wind rose,he'd already sensed the killing intent.
He instinctively started to twist aside and counter,but in the very moment those sharp spider legs were about to touch his shoulder...
BANG!
An exceedingly muffled crash,like metal ringing against metal,echoed through the tunnel.
That mutated rock spider's claws,capable of punching through refined iron,landed on Mo Fan...
And beneath that seemingly ordinary blue robe on his body,a layer of fine,dense bone patterns surfaced with total naturalness,dark luster flowing across them.
Tier-3[Bone Armament].
Now permanently active,hidden in plain sight!
This Foundation Establishment demon beast's full-strength strike was forcibly repelled by that unassuming layer of bone plating!
Under the tremendous recoil,Mo Fan didn't even feel the beast's assault.
Instead,the beast itself was knocked back several staggering steps,several of its claws trembling.
He lowered his head and glanced at his robe.
Perfectly intact.
Not so much as a scuff left on it.
Mo Fan was silent for a moment,then raised his head again to look at the mutated rock spider before him,which had gone somewhat frantic at the failure of its attack.
This time,he didn't dodge.
ROAR!
The mutated rock spider let out a shriek,its eight thick jointed legs kicking hard off the rock wall as its massive bulk came slamming in again like a war chariot.
CLANG!CLANG!CLANG!
Several storm-like hacks and impacts rained down in succession,and Mo Fan stood like a reef amid raging waves,utterly unmoved.
That permanently active[Bone Armament]displayed a defense that was frankly despair-inducing.
No matter how madly the rock spider poured out damage,it couldn't actually breach it and reach Mo Fan's flesh.
Past Tier-3,there really is an obvious wall between me and ordinary Foundation Establishment.
Seeing how convenient this bone plating was,a satisfied glint flashed in Mo Fan's eyes.
He stopped wasting time and made a casual grasping motion in the air with his right hand.
Hum!
Freezing death energy instantly ignored the distance and clamped down over the mutated rock spider.
[Grave Chill]erupted.
The beast,savage beyond measure a second earlier,was instantly locked in fatal neural paralysis.
Then...
Mo Fan flicked a fingertip,and a highly compressed[Death Missile]became a streak of black light...
Tearing through the rock spider's prized skull plating with brutal,devastating penetration.
Squelch!
Green fluid sprayed.
The massive rock spider crashed to the ground,its eight legs twitching a few times before going completely silent.
Almost no effort at all.
He hadn't even needed to summon a single undead.
A Foundation Establishment demon beast that once would have demanded his full readiness had just been casually killed in one shot.
With the fight over,Mo Fan glanced habitually at the edge of his retina.
Soon...
The familiar System prompt surfaced.
[Mutated Rock Spider(Early Foundation Establishment)slain!]
[Experience gained:1]
Mo Fan stared at that lonely"1"and fell silent for a while.
"..."
"Fine."
Looks like now that I've hit LV.22 and stepped into Tier-3,life at the early Foundation Establishment level can't provide me even a shred of effective experience anymore.
The System's cold,unforgiving underlying logic was still ruthlessly forcing him toward the same conclusion.
Only by continuously challenging higher-tier prey could he keep climbing this Great Dao of the Undead.
But further up...
That meant Golden Core.
In Mo Fan's mind...
There involuntarily surfaced the image of the Blood-Red Python's snake molt,vast as a mountain range,coiled in the deepest reaches of the mist at the bottom of Abandoned Sword Cliff.
And that terrifying pressure in the depths of the mine pit that had set his very soul trembling.
He might now possess the qualifications to brush against the Golden Core tier.
But measured against these old monsters of the Mystic Realm who'd lived for who knew how many years...
He was clearly still nowhere near enough.
After all,Mo You,a single Formless Demon,had nearly driven Mo Fan into a dead end.
He stood silent in the dark tunnel for a moment,then shook his head with perfect rationality.
"Foundation Establishment isn't cutting it anymore.But the Golden Core level...still isn't something I can go picking fights with at will."
If he wanted to keep leveling,the road ahead was clearly only going to get harder.
Having dealt with the rock spider,Mo Fan didn't rush to press deeper in search of the[Nether River Bone Lotus].
Instead,his gaze fell to a corner of the tunnel.
Coming down this time,besides treasure-hunting,he'd intended all along to verify the new skills unlocked by his breakthrough.
Soon,following an abandoned side shaft,he found a miner's skeleton among a pile of collapsed rubble...
Weathered to a blackish tone,dead for many years.
"You'll do nicely for a test."
Mo Fan walked up to the bones,his gaze focusing slightly as a wisp of profound death energy seeped from his fingertips.
[Speak with Dead]
The instant the skill activated,a strange ripple of law enveloped the remains on the ground.
In the empty eye sockets of that once utterly lifeless skeleton,a ghastly green soul flame slowly,faintly kindled.
So weak it looked like a puff of wind would snuff it out.
Mo Fan considered briefly,then asked his first question as directly as possible.
"Who were you?"
The faint soul flame flickered once,and a broken,infinitely feeble ripple of consciousness transmitted straight into Mo Fan's mind.
"Mi...ner..."
It worked!
Mo Fan's eyes lit up,and he continued.
"How did you die?"
The soul flame in the sockets wavered violently,as if some instinct of absolute terror had been dredged up,and it responded with difficulty.
"Down...below..."
"There's...danger..."
Mo Fan's expression turned slightly more serious.
Danger down below?
Demon beasts,or was there some lethal mechanism hidden in the depths of this pit itself?
Only one question's quota left.
Mo Fan looked at the pitiful miner's remains and sighed.
"Do you have any last words?"
After he asked that question...
The corpse on the ground lapsed into a long silence.
A full half-minute passed,long enough that Mo Fan thought the skill's duration had run out.
Only then did that ripple of consciousness come again...
Forcing out a few words with immense difficulty and immense resentment.
"I..."
"never took a wife..."
"Bit of...a loss..."
Pop.
As that final aggrieved sigh finished transmitting,the faint soul flame in the skeleton's sockets seemed to exhaust its last shred of attachment...
Guttering out completely and returning to deathly stillness.
"..."
Mo Fan stood in place,looking at the miner who had once again become a pile of rotted bones...
And for a moment found himself with nothing to say.
Well damn.Turns out in this world,mortal or cultivator,the one attachment nobody can let go of at death is pretty much the same.
Still,setting aside those somewhat unexpected last words,this test at least proved[Speak with Dead]was practical.
It really could read a dead person's residual cognition and memories,like an alternative,gentler"soul search."
Only,this reading came with a massive limitation.
However much the dead man knew,that was all it could answer.
It couldn't conjure up some earth-shattering truth out of thin air for you.
"Support skill.Divine-tier."
Mo Fan offered a fairly fair assessment.
Having tested his defense and his new skill back-to-back,Mo Fan finally gathered his focus,ready to get down to business.
He stood at the mouth of the tangled crossroads tunnel and drew a deep breath.
"Death Vision LV.3...activate!"
Hummm!
His mental force spread out slowly.
The world before him shed its original colors.
However,this time...
What appeared before Mo Fan's eyes was no longer merely the familiar spectacle of life,souls,and the aura of death.
Between the cold,dead mine walls and rock strata...
Wisps of exceedingly faint gray-blue currents of light were flowing,unbelievably slowly...
Along the fissures in the strata and through the remnants of ore veins long since stripped bare.
Mo Fan didn't recognize them at first.
He observed quietly for a while.
Only as he felt the familiar heaven and earth energy contained within those currents did his gaze gradually shift.
"This is..."
"Spiritual qi?"
Mo Fan was a little taken aback.
LV.3[Death Vision]had,for the first time,genuinely let him"see"the existence and flow paths of heaven and earth's spiritual qi the way one sees with the naked eye.
The sensation was completely different from simply observing life force,soul flames,and the aura of death.
Mo Fan didn't rush to marvel at it.
Instead,he kept observing,tracing those currents of light carefully.
Soon...
His expression turned a shade more serious.
"That's not right."
The flow of spiritual qi in this mine pit...
Something was off about it.
Under normal circumstances,even influenced by spirit veins,heaven and earth's spiritual qi should distribute and circulate naturally along the ore veins.
But right now,in Death Vision...
All those minute threads of spiritual qi around him were converging along an exceedingly slow yet abnormally unified trajectory...
Toward some point deeper down in the pit.
The farther down...
The more pronounced the phenomenon became.
As if all the yin-cold spiritual qi accumulated in this entire abandoned pit over who knew how many years...
Was being drawn away,bit by bit,by something in the depths.
Mo Fan's gaze turned unfathomably deep.
He didn't hesitate.
Following the direction those currents converged,like a fish swimming upstream through darkness,he slipped deeper and deeper into the pit.
He lost count of how many collapsed tunnels he skirted,how many nests of venomous insects he avoided.
Finally,Mo Fan arrived in a tunnel in the middle-to-lower levels of the pit.
The terrain there was exceedingly hidden and tangled.
Through the sight of Death Vision...
He could clearly see enormous quantities of fine spiritual currents from all directions piercing through thick mine walls and rock strata...
All of them ultimately converging on some point in the deepest part of the stone ahead.
And at the very center where all those currents met...
Even through the heavy rock wall,Mo Fan could still faintly"see"it.
A mass of exceedingly pure ghostly cold radiance.
Yin-cold taken to the absolute extreme!
It was like a heart beating in the darkness beneath the earth,greedily drawing in the ultimate yin energy of this land.
Mo Fan halted,coming to a stop before the rock wall.
In his mind,the contents of that conversation between Xiao Hai and that inner sect Lord Li,the one he'd eavesdropped on through a skeletal rat,surfaced rapidly.
Middle-to-lower levels of the pit.
A place of ultimate yin and ultimate malevolence.
The[Nether River Bone Lotus]!
These few scattered pieces of information,previously existing only as fragments of overheard speech...
In this moment,with the heaven-defying penetrating sight of Tier-3 Death Vision...
Connected into a single crystal-clear line in Mo Fan's mind.
Mo Fan slowly crouched down,extended his palm,and pressed it lightly against the cold mine wall before him.
In Death Vision,wisps of yin-cold spiritual qi streamed continuously past his perception and between his fingers,finally sinking into the depths of the strata.
There...
Something wondrous of heaven and earth was indeed being gestated.
What's more,judging by the fact that the rock wall was perfectly intact,with no sign of recent excavation or formation protection anywhere nearby...
Xiao Hai and that Lord Li,despite searching this abandoned mine for so long,despite risking a push into the middle-to-lower levels...
Had never actually pinned down its exact location!
"They only know the general area."
"They can't find the specific spot."
Feeling that mass of pure yin-cold radiance behind the rock wall,Mo Fan's eyes gradually brightened,shining brilliantly in the dark.
And at the corner of his mouth...
An irrepressible smile slowly curled up.