Within the grayish-white filter of [ Death Vision ], that dark purple shadow was no dead thing...
It was a frantically incubating, extremely twisted energy vortex!
Mo Fan stared. The hair on his scalp stood up.
He realized the shadow was emanating from Fang Tong's desiccated husk—and from Wu Feng and San Niang's broken remains not far away.
Their souls hadn't dissolved into the mindless, fragmented remnant-wisps of ordinary low-tier beasts.
Because they had experienced extreme terror, betrayal, greed, and despair before dying...
It was as if they had been drawn together by some profoundly evil magnetic field—twisting, tangling, and fusing in midair into something new!
I hate this...
I regret everything...
The resentment... it won't stop...
Without warning, layered, wailing whispers erupted inside Mo Fan's mind.
Soul-piercing. Soaked in bottomless malice and a refusal to let go.
Watching that dark purple mass swell and expand—beginning to devour the faint ambient light around it—a cold, sourceless dread rose in Mo Fan's chest.
But threaded through the dread was something else. Something deeply, inexplicably familiar.
As if the essence of this power had always belonged to him.
Mo Fan followed the instinct that rose from somewhere beneath conscious thought—some guidance that felt almost innate.
The death-qi-fueled fanaticism in his eyes crushed the fear flat.
Like a true Reaper, he raised his left hand, and let the words fall from somewhere cold and quiet inside him:
"Wraith. Rise."
Ding.
The System's mechanical chime had barely sounded in his skull before something drove a rusted iron spike straight through his brain.
"Ngh—!"
He grunted, and his knees buckled. He nearly dropped into the rubble.
Even with his second-tier breakthrough and the explosive surge in Soul Strength that came with it...
This brand-new high-tier summon—something that existed in an entirely different category from skeletal frames—drained a massive amount of his mental energy in a single instant.
His vision went black at the edges from the pain.
[ Tier-2 Undead: Wraith ]
[ Summon Successful! ]
[ Amplification Intensity: HIGH ]
Inside Death Vision, a form took shape—the kind that would give a person nightmares for the rest of their life.
It had no lower body. It floated.
A vast, dark purple silhouette draped in a shattered robe woven from pure condensed death-qi.
Its torso a writhing, churning mass of something that looked like rotting mud in slow motion.
And the most horrifying part was its head.
It had no fixed face.
Instead, three faces cycled across its surface in a continuous loop—Fang Tong's cowardly, vicious sneer; Wu Feng's manic, Qi-deviated madness; San Niang's hollow, grief-shattered despair.
They pressed into each other, replacing each other, merging and separating without end like a grotesque carousel.
Three faces twisted together, mouths stretched open into gaping voids, issuing soundless, miserable wails toward the sky.
The crucible of resentment was complete.
However, this horrifying image—capable of shattering a person's sanity—existed solely within Mo Fan's Death Vision.
In the physical perspective of reality, there was nothing to see.
Venerable Miasma Dust hovered in the air. He couldn't see the Wraith's form.
But he felt it—a bone-cutting, sinister yin wind that came from nowhere, howling through the ruins.
The temperature plummeted past freezing in an instant. Even the breath leaving his mouth turned to white frost.
It felt as if something extremely terrifying and unspeakable had descended upon these ruins!
"Parlor tricks!"
A century of surviving as an old demon head had honed Miasma Dust's combat instincts to a razor's edge.
He couldn't see it, but every instinct he had was screaming that a fatal crisis had just entered the equation.
He was done wasting time. He rejected all indecision.
"Die for me!"
He gathered every drop of mid Foundation Establishment Qi he'd just recovered in his body and drove both withered hands forward violently.
An extremely vicious blood-colored killing move—a compressed sphere of blood-force the size of a millstone, radiating pure annihilation—launched straight at Mo Fan's face.
He intended to instakill!
But the instant the technique fired—
The sinister yin wind in the physical world surged violently!
That blood-force sphere—powerful enough to obliterate Mo Fan, Bone Mecha and all—hit something invisible while traversing midair.
Something that swallowed it whole.
The blood-red light warped and dimmed out of thin air, as if invisible giant hands had seized it and wrung it like a wet cloth.
And then, without a sound, it simply dissipated.
Not even a single spark remained!
This was the absolute interference of extreme yin-force against spiritual energy.
The Wraith's massive negative-energy field had directly distorted the technique's trajectory and structure!
"This is impossible!"
Miasma Dust's eyeballs nearly popped out of their sockets.
He hadn't even recovered from the shock of his spell inexplicably fizzling out...
When suddenly—
Something cold and wet pressed against his back. He spun around on instinct.
"Master... it hurts so much..."
A shriveled face left with only a layer of skin, its eye sockets sunken to black hollows, was inches from his nose.
Fang Tong! The man he had personally drained into a mummy!
Fang Tong was clinging to his back, staring dead at him through those empty black voids.
His mouth stretched into a wet, chillingly gruesome grin!
"Scram!"
Miasma Dust's cold sweat broke instantly. He slapped a blood-palm strike backward.
BANG. It hit empty air. A shockwave burst outward.
He looked closely. Nothing there. Just the howling night wind.
A hallucination?! The thought hit him like ice water.
In that fraction of a second—that 0.1 seconds of flinching, of his guard dropping—
Mo Fan's bone-armored fist was already screaming upward through the air.
Miasma Dust turned pale with fright. He tried to draw his Qi to forcefully elevate his altitude and counter.
But the moment he pushed— His lower body suddenly went weightless.
A sensation of absolute reality—a sharp blade severing his spine—tore through his entire body from waist to skull!
He looked down in absolute terror.
His waist had actually been cleanly chopped in half!
Loops of warm intestine spilled out with fresh blood, splashing across the ground below.
And his lower body was currently lying all alone in the rubble dozens of meters away!
"MY LEGS—MY LEGS—!!!"
The extreme psychological horror completely pierced through every defense he had.
Scared out of his wits, he turned and tried to flee frantically through the air.
Two steps later, he stopped. Wait.
"That's not right."
"I don't fucking have legs anymore, how am I running?! This is impossible—it's a hallucination—it's ALL a hallucination!!!"
He acted like a drowning man dragged up from the deep sea, gasping heavily.
He madly bit the tip of his own tongue, attempting to use the stinging pain of essence blood to forcefully steady his mind and break this terrifying demonic barrier.
But the next second.
Cold. Not the cold of physical flesh.
Something was dead-locking his soul—freezing it, biting into it. Something utterly merciless and glacial was tearing at it from the inside!
From the outside, in the physical ruins of reality, the scene was extremely absurd.
The grand mid Foundation Establishment Venerable Miasma Dust was currently hovering like an idiot a few meters in the air.
His hands were flailing wildly at empty air, his face a mask of pure terror.
His entire body shuddering violently as if he had the shivers, unable to even chant a single coherent spell.
But within Mo Fan's grayish-white [ Death Vision ], the reality was an entirely different, incredibly tragic scene:
The massive dark purple Wraith had already wrapped its mud-like death-qi tentacles dead tight around Venerable Miasma Dust's head like an octopus!
The three faces—Fang Tong, Wu Feng, and San Niang—had opened their void-like, bloody maws, frantically tearing and chewing at Miasma Dust's weakened soul!
A dimensional strike—delivered entirely on the mental level!
Forcibly enduring the splitting agony in his skull, Mo Fan dragged in a ragged breath and issued the kill command in his mind:
"Mo Yan. Strike."
SWISH!
Two figures—one black, one white—launched from opposite sides simultaneously.
Mo Fan and Mo Yan formed a perfect pincer attack.
Although Miasma Dust had fallen into an extremely deep terrifying illusion and his soul was being devoured by the Wraith...
He was still an old Foundation Establishment demon after all.
The residual Spiritual Qi in his body was still making a final resistance, relying on pure instinct.
Stimulated by the life-and-death crisis, that layer of blood-colored protective Astral Qi was astonishingly hard.
"Shatter for me!"
Mo Fan roared.
His fists, wrapped in bone armor, smashed against the Astral Qi like a violent storm—each strike shaking the blood-light.
Mo Yan was even more merciless; under the buff of [ Death Frenzy ], the cold-iron longsword became a whirlwind of black blade-force.
The two hacked and hammered frantically!
CRACK—
After continuously enduring hundreds of high-intensity physical impacts...
That layer of Spiritual Qi—which had lost the guidance of its master's consciousness—finally let out an overwhelmed, crisp snap, ground to dust like shattering glass!
Defense broken.
Squelch.
The tooth-aching sound of a sharp blade piercing flesh.
Mo Yan's rusty, beast-blood-stained cold-iron longsword met no further resistance.
Following an extremely smooth, utterly pitiless trajectory, it pierced straight through Venerable Miasma Dust's left chest!
Clean through the heart.
The tip of the sword exited his back, drawing out a long string of warm red droplets.
Miasma Dust's wildly thrashing body stiffened abruptly.
In those eyes bloodshot from extreme terror, the horrifying illusion finally receded slowly like a tide going out, temporarily restoring a brief, final moment of clarity.
He lowered his head.
Looked somewhat blankly at the sword blade protruding from his chest, and then looked at Mo Fan standing before him, still catching his breath.
He seemed to want to say something. But that shriveled old face couldn't even manage to open its mouth.
He was dead.
Thud.
Losing the support of spiritual power, Miasma Dust's corpse plummeted from midair.
Like a piece of dead wood, it hit the rubble-strewn courtyard, kicking up a small ring of dust.
His eyes were still wide open. Only now, there was absolutely no light left inside them.
Checkmate. The curtain falls.
Venerable Miasma Dust—who had relied on this ancient illusion array to veil the world in false beauty, who had lured in rogue cultivators to kill and drain their essence blood...
Ultimately died amidst the biting and tearing of hallucinations and inner demons.