But the humiliation didn't last long.
After rolling across the floor a dozen times and slamming his back into a wooden table hard enough to knock it over...
Mo Fan's brain finally forced out the residual neurological desync and snapped back into perfect sync with his human shell.
He planted one hand on the ground and sprang upright like a coiled spring releasing.
Wu Feng, driven by his deranged frenzy, had burned through both his stamina and spiritual force at a catastrophic rate.
His slashes were still vicious—but completely without structure or form. It was pure, desperate button-mashing.
Mo Yan seized the opening.
The cold-iron sword became a wall of black iron, locking Wu Feng's rabid hacking outside a three-foot perimeter.
Mo Fan circled the edge of the fight like a patient, coiled viper.
The death-qi of [ Grave Chill ] was already gathering at his fingertips—cold and quiet—waiting for the exact moment Wu Feng's blood and breath gave out, ready to deliver a fatal counter-kill.
The reversal was almost within reach.
And then the sky above the courtyard tore open.
A crushing, suffocating pressure descended—the kind that didn't just weigh on the body but made the lungs forget how to work. It hit like a physical thing.
BOOM.
The courtyard's already tottering archway was ground to powder by a surge of raw, berserk gale.
Venerable Miasma Dust's desiccated, driftwood frame dropped into the courtyard with a heavy thud.
His eyes swept the scene.
The old village head—crumpled in a pool of blood, leg bone wrenched clean off. San Niang—a fatal, transparent hole punched through her chest. The ancestral hall destroyed. The village in ruins.
And now the carefully laid trap in this side courtyard had been reduced to a slaughterhouse.
"AAAAAAAAHHH——!!!"
Fury erupted through him like magma breaching a broken dam, drowning every last trace of reason.
"You destroyed my Dao foundation! You cut off my path to immortality! DIE! YOU ALL DIE!!!"
Venerable Miasma Dust let out a shriek like a ghost tearing through the dark.
He stopped suppressing it—stopped trying to hold together the crumbling, wildly fluctuating wreck of his cultivation base.
He drove his fist viciously into his own chest.
A thick mouthful of natal essence blood sprayed out, dense and dark, wreathing him in a crimson mist.
He did not hesitate to risk the agonizing price of severe internal organ damage, using that blood as a seal...
To forcefully and irreversibly hard-lock his leaking, sieve-like cultivation at the terrifying level of mid Foundation Establishment!
"DIE FOR ME!!!"
He launched himself skyward. Those dried, eagle-talon hands pressed downward through the void.
A dark red torrent of spiritual force—the weight of a falling meteor, the heat of something that incinerated everything it touched...
It came crashing down directly onto the entire guest room where Mo Fan stood.
An absolute AoE nuke.
Mo Fan had zero time to dodge. Zero time to cast anything.
In that fraction of a second between living and dying, Mo Fan ripped open his high-grade storage bag.
And hurled Summon No. 004 out.
The massive frame—the size of an armored vehicle—slammed down in front of Mo Fan and Mo Yan like an indestructible wall of bone to tank the hit.
BOOM——!!!
The detonation was deafening.
The entire room ceased to exist—reduced to airborne powder under a mid Foundation Establishment cultivator's full-force, resentful strike.
Berserk blood-red spiritual energy rampaged through the area, plowing scorched craters several feet deep into the surrounding ground.
The smoke and dust settled slowly.
In the center of the devastation, 004's frame—once a source of pride, once seemingly indestructible—had a massive, scorched cavity blown clean through it.
The composite bone armor was riddled with dense fractures. Bone fragments were scattered across the ground.
The soul-flames in its eye sockets had dimmed to almost nothing.
But beneath the desperate shelter of that enormous body, Mo Fan and Mo Yan were on one knee in the rubble—covered in ash, blood at the corners of their mouths—alive.
Wu Feng was not so fortunate.
He had been at the outermost edge of the battle, completely unguarded, still raving madly at the empty air.
The shockwave from the Foundation Establishment AoE spell caught him head-on.
His body—which had been reasonably sturdy moments ago—dissolved in the red light like a candle melting.
The lower half of one leg and his entire left arm simply ceased to exist, replaced by a spreading pool of scorching blood.
And even then—even reduced to a tragic state with only half a life left, a sight that would give ordinary people nightmares for years—Wu Feng showed no sign of returning to his senses.
His one remaining hand still clutched the poisoned blade in a death grip.
He dragged his ruined internal organs through the bloody mud toward Mo Fan, mouth bubbling with bloody foam and fragments of things that shouldn't be outside a body...
Still frantically murmuring:
"Treasure... mine... San Niang... snatch the treasure..."
That image—greed that refused to rest even as the body died—laid bare the ancient illusion array's cruelty to a hair-raising extreme.
Venerable Miasma Dust floated in the air above the wreckage like a blood-bathed demon god.
He glanced down at the dying "mad dog" on the ground with cold indifference, then fixed his falcon-sharp gaze on Mo Fan, who was slowly rising from the ruins.
Those bloodshot old eyes burned with monstrous hatred.
He had spent over a hundred years drifting through the Mystic Realm—a nameless demonic cultivator with ruthless methods and no backing.
A century ago, at the critical moment of breaking through to the Golden Core Grand Dao, enemies had ambushed him.
The Golden Core never formed. His peak Foundation Establishment cultivation was entirely shattered, his foundation severed inch by inch.
He had fled here like a stray dog and stumbled upon something buried beneath Linshui Village—an incomplete ancient array that even he couldn't fully decipher.
But he understood one thing about it: it possessed a terrifying effect of twisting the human mind.
So he had usurped the nest.
He dressed the village up as a Xanadu, hijacked the array, and used it crudely.
Manufacturing an "ignorant nightmare" to lure in low-tier wandering cultivators, then converting them into blood essence to patch his dilapidated cultivation and linger on with his last breath.
He had thought that if he stayed patient, kept his head down, and made a fortune in silence—one day he would claw his way back to his peak.
But today happened.
A century of forbearance and plotting, and this random boy who popped out of nowhere had pushed him into a premature, violent rupture.
His cultivation for this lifetime was now completely and thoroughly hard-locked at mid Foundation Establishment.
He wanted to pull Mo Fan's tendons out, strip his bones, and subject him to the death of a thousand cuts.
But he didn't attack immediately. His eyes were filled with deep apprehension.
Because in his perception, this dirty, ash-covered boy still possessed absolutely no spiritual energy fluctuations—only the faint traces of a body cultivator.
Yet this "mortal" had not only survived his resentful mid Foundation Establishment strike without taking fatal damage...
But had even casually pulled a formidable "skeletal behemoth" out of a storage bag in the span of a lightning flash to tank the disaster for him!
To prevent the other party from having some terrifying backup plan for mutual destruction, Venerable Miasma Dust, despite being mad with rage, did not act rashly.
The icy night wind moaned through the ruins of the side courtyard.
The entire space plunged into an extremely oppressive, bizarre dead silence, as if time itself had frozen.