CRACK.
Venerable Miasma Dust's body—already unstable from forcibly suppressing his own cultivation...
It buckled under the terrifying penetrating force of that single punch.
He sprayed blood from his mouth and went flying like a broken kite with its string cut, launched backward by that monstrous strength.
He sailed dozens of meters through the air, smashed through two surviving stone pillars in succession.
He finally hit the rubble at the far edge of the courtyard like a sack of wet mud, throwing up a cloud of dust.
As it happened— He landed right in the corner where Fang Tong was hiding.
Fang Tong had already been scared half to death by the catastrophic exchange of ultimates moments ago.
He was pressed flat against the wall, not daring to breathe, shaking like a startled quail.
Watching his all-powerful master come flying over spitting blood, Fang Tong's eyes went wide with pure terror.
He couldn't even think about helping. His mind had exactly one thought: run.
While the immortals were busy killing each other, he needed to disappear.
He turned on his heel, creeping along the shadow of the broken wall, ready to slip away.
"And where do you think you're going... my loyal servant?"
A voice. Ice-cold and raspy, like wind scraping up from the bottom of the Nine Underworlds. It rose from somewhere near Fang Tong's feet.
Fang Tong went rigid. He turned his head mechanically.
In the rubble, Venerable Miasma Dust was dragging himself upright, hair hanging loose and wild. His robes were in shreds. Blood stained the corner of his mouth.
But those clouded old eyes were burning with something that had gone completely past fury.
A feverish, unhinged madness that had left reason far behind.
He was staring at Mo Fan—who had leapt out of the crater not only unbroken, but visibly more vital than before...
His Qi and blood blazing a hundred times stronger than they'd been.
Something clicked in Venerable Miasma Dust's twisted mind. The image of Mo Fan slitting his companion's throat replayed itself.
"Heheheheh... now I understand."
He started laughing like a man who had lost it entirely, convinced he'd seen through Mo Fan's secret.
"You vicious little thing! You actually know a blood sacrifice technique—killing your own ally to restore your power!"
"If you can do it, then this old man's demonic arts are certainly no different!"
He turned his head. Those bloodshot eyes locked onto Fang Tong.
"No—Master, no—!"
Fang Tong's soul nearly left his body on the spot.
He'd spent years helping Miasma Dust hunt wandering cultivators. He knew exactly what that look meant. That was the look of a man staring at food.
His legs gave out. He dropped to his knees with a thud, kowtowing frantically.
"Master, spare me! I've served you like an ox, like a horse—I've suffered for you! I'm still useful, I can help you—"
"Your contribution is becoming the nourishment that returns this one to his peak."
Miasma Dust didn't give him another word. His withered right hand clenched in the air.
Whoosh.
A terrifying suction force erupted.
Fang Tong's stocky body was yanked into Miasma Dust's palm like a dead fish off a cutting board, utterly helpless.
Five fingers like iron hooks clamped down on the crown of his skull.
"AAAAAAH——!!!"
The shriek tore through the sky.
When Fang Tong realized begging was completely useless, the terror in his eyes curdled into venom and hatred.
He thrashed wildly, spending his last breath on a torrent of curses:
"You undying old freak! You parasite hiding underground sucking people dry! Even if you drain me you still can't beat him!"
"You're nothing but a squatter who stole someone else's nest, you worthless demonic trash—!"
The cursing stopped dead.
The blood, the Qi, the very life-essence inside Fang Tong's body was being forcibly extracted—like a high-powered pump had been jammed into his veins.
It poured up through Miasma Dust's arm in a torrent.
Visibly, before anyone's eyes, Fang Tong's solid muscle shriveled. His skin lost its color and pulled tight against his bones.
In the span of a few breaths, a living late-stage Qi Condensation cultivator was reduced to a desiccated husk.
"Ahhhh..."
Having absorbed the full blood essence of a late-stage Qi Condensation cultivator, Venerable Miasma Dust tilted his head back.
He let out a long, deeply satisfied groan that made the skin crawl.
The internal injuries from Mo Fan's punch healed instantly under the flood of blood-qi.
More than that—his aura, which had been erratic and unstable, inflated like a balloon being pumped full of air.
He was back. Fully. [ Mid Foundation Establishment — Absolute Peak Condition. ]
Mo Fan stood at a distance and watched the whole thing in silence.
Before, a scene like this—a living person drained into a dried corpse—would have turned his stomach. Pure biological revulsion.
But now.
With the death-qi of the second-tier breakthrough still saturating him, there wasn't a trace of fear in Mo Fan's eyes.
What rose in its place was something almost feverish. Something that felt dangerously close to hunger.
Beneath his hood, the corner of Mo Fan's mouth curved into a slow, brutal smile.
He looked at Fang Tong's husk, discarded on the ground like garbage.
"Fine by me. You took his blood—I'll take his bones. Let's neither of us waste a thing."
Mo Fan's left hand snapped out toward the corpse. The pale blue soul-flames in his eyes flared violently.
"Skeleton. Rise."
Hmmmmm—
The Necromancer's summoning force—carrying the irresistible law of death—crossed the distance in an instant and descended on what remained of Fang Tong.
Crack... crack crack...
Something deeply unsettling happened. The corpse—drained dry as kindling—began to convulse violently.
Then, as Venerable Miasma Dust watched with wide eyes, a sound of tearing flesh filled the air.
A skeleton—pale white, trailing a few scraps of shriveled skin...
Its bones still carrying a faint residue of the resentment from its former owner's final moments...
It tore its way out of Fang Tong's own skin. Violently. Brutally. It ripped through the husk and crawled free.
Poor Fang Tong.
A lifetime of scheming. Years of cheating and trapping people for a handful of spirit stones. And in the end—dead, his path extinguished.
Worse still: between one demonic cultivator and one Necromancer...
He had been wrung out with perfect efficiency—blood and bone both, not a drop wasted.
A true masterclass in the art of picking someone completely clean.
"What... what kind of sorcery is this?!"
Even Venerable Miasma Dust—a century-old practitioner of demonic arts—felt his eyelid twitch watching a skeleton claw its way out of a freshly-dead man's skin.
But his cultivation was back at its peak. His confidence was back with it.
The shock in his eyes was replaced almost immediately by murderous intent.
"Whatever you are—I'll reduce you to ash." "KILL."
The all-out brawl erupted across the ruins.
Venerable Miasma Dust, restored to his full power, moved like an unstoppable demon god.
He held nothing back—sweeping AoE blood-force techniques in wide arcs, his figure leaving afterimages across the sky as he moved at blinding speed.
Mo Fan threw everything he had.
Mo Fan himself moved along the edges in his heavy bone exoskeleton, Pale Bone Scepter in hand.
He was kiting and alternating between [ Death Frenzy ] and [ Grave Chill ], trying to disrupt Miasma Dust's rhythm.
Strangely, neither of those skills had upgraded alongside [ Bone Armament ]—both remained stuck at first tier.
Summon No. 004 held the front line with its shattered bone shield, tanking dead tight. Mo Yan became a black sword-shadow, hunting for an opening to get inside. The freshly-summoned Fang Tong skeleton prowled the flank like a hyena, harassing from the side whenever it found a gap.
However.
The depth of a mid Foundation Establishment cultivator was something else entirely.
The gulf between major realms, once the old monster stopped holding back and committed fully, revealed a gap that felt like despair in the face of absolute stat-checking.
BANG.
The Fang Tong skeleton—a substandard frame drained of its essence to begin with—attempted a backstab on Miasma Dust and caught a casual backhand blood-palm strike for its trouble.
No contest. The cheap cannon fodder didn't last a single second. It was blasted into drifting bone powder.
BOOM.
Miasma Dust followed up with a kick straight into 004's bone shield.
Foundation Establishment spiritual force poured out like a dam breaking.
004's already-cracked composite armor let out a shriek of fracturing bone and shed another massive section.
The enormous frame was sent skidding backward again, plowing two deep trenches into the ground.
CLANG.
Mo Yan tried to cut in from the side, but when the rusted cold-iron sword met Miasma Dust's blood-light Qi barrier, it didn't break through.
It was thrown back with a shower of sparks, a fresh ugly notch splitting the blade.
And Mo Fan himself had become Miasma Dust's primary target.
Blood-red wind blades and fireballs rained down on him like a storm.
Even throwing himself into full evasion, the second-tier bone mecha he'd worked so hard to form was being stripped away layer by layer under the relentless carpet bombing, teetering on the edge of total collapse.
"You little animal! Let's see how much longer you can hold out!"
Venerable Miasma Dust hovered above, watching Mo Fan scramble below with the casual cruelty of a cat toying with a mouse.
The tide—which had briefly turned—was sliding irreversibly back toward the abyss.
The suppression of a major realm gap really can't be papered over just by stacking summons.
Mo Fan crouched behind a half-standing section of wall, gasping, wiping blood from his mouth.
His mental energy had been stretched to the absolute limit due to high-APM micro-management and constant spellcasting.
At the very edge of that limit, barely holding on, bordering on despair—
Mo Fan's [ Death Vision ]—running at full power the entire fight—pulsed violently as it swept across a section of ruins near the center of the battlefield.
"...Hm?"
His pupils contracted sharply.
Through the grayish-white filter of Death Vision, he had caught something. Something strange. Something almost perfectly hidden.
It was near where Fang Tong's emptied skin had fallen. And now that he looked—similar traces clung to Wu Feng's body too. And San Niang's.
It was nothing like the pale blue soul-flames burning in his skeletons' eye sockets—cold, mechanical, hollow.
This was something that floated in the air.
Something that seemed to pull the grayish-white of his vision inward around it, like it was swallowing the light.
Deep. Twisted. Hungry. A shadow the color of dark violet.