The howling mountain wind flooded his ears once more, but this familiar sensation of weightlessness no longer felt like death's embrace.
Just days ago, Mo Fan had plummeted from this same clifftop. Back then, he'd been nothing but a discarded rag the world had thrown away—convinced his isekai experience was about to end before it even began.
But this time was different.
"Hold steady, 001."
Mo Fan lay flat against the skeleton's broad back, eyes cold as he watched the darkness rushing up to meet them.
The 001 beneath him was no longer that clumsy bone-pile that could only scream. Its modified gibbon arm shot out, four claws tipped with [ Crude Rat-Fang Knuckles ] raking across the cliff face in a shower of brilliant sparks.
Friction became precision. The fall became controlled.
It moved like some massive, bone-white gecko—weaving and leaping across the vertical rock face with practiced ease. Every drop was a calculated tactical maneuver.
This was a Necromancer's control.
BOOM—!
With one final leap of faith from ten meters up, No. 001's powerful Spirit Beast hindlegs slammed into the soft humus of the valley floor.
The massive impact bent its knees to their limit before they sprang back like coiled steel, perfectly dissipating every ounce of falling momentum.
Mo Fan unbuckled the belt strapping him to the skeleton's back and slid off. This time his landing was normal—no sprawling face-first, no starfishing onto his back.
The air still reeked of that nauseating cocktail of mold and rot. Strangely, he'd almost missed it.
Yes, this was the bottom of Abandoned Sword Cliff—a death zone that never saw sunlight. But to Mo Fan's nose right now?
That's the smell of money and experience points.
"Time to clock in."
No wasted words. No time to marvel at the oppressive gloom. He was a worker on assignment. Every wasted minute meant delayed progress on his level-up.
The valley floor was too treacherous to explore freely, so he stuck to the area around his original crash site.
Reality, however, was quick to slap this ambitious "trash collector" across the face.
Squeak!
Several startled Corpse-Eating Rats burst from a pile of rubble. They barely managed two steps before No. 001's absurdly long ape-arm snatched them up, crushing them like overripe tomatoes.
Fluid motion. Peak violence aesthetics.
But Mo Fan's face went dark as coal when he saw the numbers flickering across his vision.
[ Killed: Corpse-Eating Rat (Common Beast). EXP +1 ]
[ Killed: Rot-Bone Worm (Common Beast). EXP +1 ]
"..."
Mo Fan sat on a moss-covered boulder, chest heaving, glaring at the experience bar that seemed designed to mock him:
2 (30/1200)
An entire hour of commanding No. 001 to rampage like a rabid dog. Corpses scattered everywhere. And the bar had crawled from 5 to a whopping 30.
At this rate, reaching LV. 3 would require slaughtering over one thousand rats in this sunless hellhole. And that wasn't even accounting for stamina drain or mental fatigue.
"The outer mountain's been picked clean, and down here... plenty of mobs, but the quality is garbage."
Mo Fan wiped cold sweat from his forehead—the trembling aftermath of prolonged mental strain.
"System, you're literally forcing me to 996 myself to death..."
A bone-deep exhaustion washed over him. This wasn't just tiredness. It was despair for the future.
Is this what cultivation looks like? Day after day, grinding through garbage heaps, fighting rats forever? Even if his liver could take it, his hairline certainly couldn't.
Mo Fan slumped against the frigid rock wall, his gaze growing unfocused.
Out of instinctive caution—this was still a danger zone—he activated the skill that cost 1 Mana per minute.
[ Death Vision: ON ]
Hummm—
The world drained of color, collapsing into familiar shades of black, white, and gray.
In his vision, the freshly killed Corpse-Eating Rats had wisps of pale gray smoke drifting from their bodies—the fading traces of souls too pathetic to even register.
Garbage. Not even worth calling souls.
Mo Fan was about to deactivate the skill when his gaze snagged on something half-buried in a nearby pile of rubble.
A partial human skeleton. From the scraps of cloth still clinging to the bones, probably some unlucky servant who'd fallen to their death, or maybe some bottom-tier rogue cultivator.
But in Death Vision, hovering above those ancient bones...
A tiny green glow. Fingernail-sized. Flickering.
It was far weaker than No. 001's soul fire—translucent, wavering, like a candle flame about to be snuffed by the slightest breeze. But it existed, stubbornly pulsing in that gray field of death.
This soul fire... it's different from the kind I use to summon skeletons?
Mo Fan blinked.
Muscle memory flooded back—countless times channeling Mana to ignite bones, calling forth the undead. Some instinct, sharp and sudden, pulled him to his feet. He walked toward the skeleton.
No incantation. No hand seals.
Just his finger, extending almost unconsciously. A wisp of pale blue Mana gathered at its tip. Gently—like touching a soap bubble—he pressed it against that green candlelight.
Sssszzz—
No resistance.
The faint remnant soul shot up his Mana channel like iron filings drawn to a magnet, drilling straight into his consciousness—
"Ngh!"
Mo Fan's entire body shuddered. A low groan escaped his lips.
Not pain.
The opposite.
An indescribable sensation—like his soul was being flushed with ice-cold spring water, then pressed smooth with warm wind. Like finally sleeping after three consecutive all-nighters. Like pouring high-grade lubricant into a rusted machine.
A crystalline lightness rose from his marrow, and the dull ache in his temples—the price of prolonged skeleton control—melted away instantly.
The System panel, dormant for so long, erupted:
[ Unbound Soul Fragment detected. ]
[ Talent "Undead Sovereign" passive triggered: Absorption. ]
[ Gained significant EXP: +87 ]
[ Soul Strength (Permanent): +0.1 ]
[ Current Soul Strength: 27.1 ]
"..."
Mo Fan stood frozen, finger still touching bone.
Five full seconds passed.
His expression shifted from blank shock to disbelief to something twisted with fury.
"System..."
Mo Fan yanked his hand back and slapped his own thigh hard enough to sting, voice trembling:
"You absolute bastard!"
"Why the hell didn't you tell me I could absorb souls at Level 1?! Huh?! You just let me fumble around blind?!"
"If I hadn't picked [ Death Vision ] at Level 2 to save Mana—if I hadn't glanced over here just now—was I supposed to grind rats in this godforsaken pit until Level 5 or 6, until my mind broke, before accidentally discovering this?!"
The delayed terror hit him like ice water dumped over his head. His whole body went cold.
One rat = 1 EXP.
One remnant soul = 87 EXP. Equivalent to rolling around in filth killing 87 rats. And it permanently boosted his Soul Strength—that stat that refused to budge no matter what he did.
This wasn't a shortcut.
This was the highway to heaven.
And the System had never mentioned it. Not even a tutorial pop-up.
"You broken piece of shit... are you trying to help me, or are you playing me?"
Mo Fan gasped for air, emotions flickering like a dying lightbulb. Then a far more terrifying thought slithered into his mind like a venomous snake.
The day of transmigration.
Lu Xiaoqi—the original owner of this body—"accidentally" falling into the spacetime rift.
The System had brushed it off as "network fluctuation."
"Was it really... an accident?"
Mo Fan stared at the skeleton before him, now drained gray-white, its remnant soul completely absorbed. A chill shot straight to the crown of his skull.
"Or did you deliberately cut him out? So a more 'compatible' foreign soul—me—could seamlessly take over this body?"
"That so-called rift... was it just like what I did to these remnant souls? Swallowed whole by whatever high-and-mighty existence runs this System?"
Cold sweat soaked through his back instantly.
This was the first time since transmigrating that Mo Fan felt genuine, soul-deep fear toward the golden finger grafted onto his existence.
This wasn't some rigid program that just spat out numbers.
It operated on some underlying logic he couldn't see—cold, calculating, utterly ruthless.
"Hah... hah..."
Mo Fan forced himself to breathe deep, dragging his mind back to calm as fast as possible.
Not the time for this. He was the fish on the cutting board. Whatever conspiracy this "System" was running, he was far too weak to resist—he didn't even have the right to resist.
"Just... just finish absorbing. Think later."
Mo Fan gritted his teeth, eyes hardening again. "You gave me this cheat. Not using it would be stupid. Resources are limited. Can't waste them."
He reactivated [ Death Vision ], gaze sweeping across this mass grave like a searchlight.
The rat and insect corpses? Ignored. The experience penalty made them worthless. His targets were singular: human skeletons with that faint green glow.
In this man-eating cultivation world, the dead were often worth more than the living.
Mo Fan lunged toward the next corpse like a junkie chasing his fix.
[ Absorbed Soul Fragment. EXP +65 ]
[ Absorbed Soul Fragment. EXP +120 ] (Low-rank Qi Condensation cultivator remains)
[ Absorbed Soul Fragment. EXP +90 ] ...
The progress bar rocketed upward.
30 → 117 → 237 → 450...
Each absorption deepened that sensation of clarity. His murky thoughts sharpened to crystalline precision. His mind moved like it was flying. Every rustle of wind, every shifting shadow in his periphery registered with perfect acuity.
That featherlight feeling from his Soul Strength ticking upward...
More addictive than any drug.
Finally, after draining every identifiable skeleton in the vicinity—over a dozen—his experience bar settled at:
850/1200
One foot from LV. 3.
And his Soul Strength had climbed a full point.
"...God, that's good."
Mo Fan leaned against a slab of broken stone that looked like a tombstone, eyes closing involuntarily as he drew a deep breath. His expression was almost... rapturous.
That feeling—like his soul had been ironed smooth for the first time in his existence—was intoxicating beyond words.
As if he was born to feed on this.
His eyes snapped open.
Pupils contracted violently.
With dawning horror, he realized what had just flickered through his mind in that blissful moment—a thought so dangerous, so insane:
He'd been wondering...
If I absorbed a living person's soul... would it be even stronger?