Watching Venerable Miasma Dust's body go completely still, Mo Fan felt the nerve that had been stretched to its absolute limit—already hairline-cracked—snap clean with a boom.
"It's over..."
His legs gave out all at once, like someone had yanked every bone from his body.
He toppled straight backward, spread-eagled, and hit the muddy, blood-soaked, bone-littered rubble with a heavy thud.
Huff... hah... huff...
His chest heaved violently. Mo Fan gulped down air in ragged, greedy mouthfuls.
Every breath came with a tearing, fire-like pain in his lungs—but the air, thick with the smell of blood, tasted impossibly sweet.
Being alive feels good.
Only now, in the silence after, did the delayed terror wash over him like cold floodwater.
This was the most terrifying, most suffocating, most death-adjacent fight he'd had since crossing into this cultivation world.
If Wu Feng hadn't handed him the opening to land that finishing rank-gap kill.
If he hadn't had two lifetimes of stubborn, weathered memory to hold himself together through that terrifying hallucination array...
Any single one of those threads snapping, and he'd be a drained husk like Fang Tong right now. Or a gibbering lunatic with his mind eaten hollow by his own inner demons.
But fortunately, in this slaughterhouse, the one left standing at the end was him.
The relentless high-intensity combat, the punishment he'd absorbed, the mental warfare—it had all ground him down to nothing.
He wanted nothing more than to close his eyes right there in the ruins and sleep until the world ended.
Then—
Hssss—!
From somewhere deep in his skull, a sensation like hundreds of steel needles driving in simultaneously—and twisting!
The agony blasted every trace of drowsiness out of him. His brain frantically issued a shrill red alert: Mental Load was teetering on the edge of collapse!
Forcing himself through the splitting pain that felt like his head was going to explode...
Mo Fan followed the massive, oppressive weight of the connection, looking toward the space directly above Miasma Dust's corpse.
In the grayish-white field of [ Death Vision ]—
The enormous, terrifying high-tier Wraith floated in silence.
Its body—formed from rotting, mud-like death-qi—shifted and writhed slowly, radiating a soul-freezing yin chill.
It was just like when he'd first crossed over and nearly suffered brain death from "mental overload" by forcing control over dozens of skeletons.
This brand-new Tier-2 summon—one that operated directly on the level of the soul and mind—was draining his mental load at a catastrophic, exaggerated rate!
If he kept it up, he would genuinely lose his mind and become an idiot.
"Must dismiss it."
Mo Fan looked at the three faces continuously switching across the Wraith's head in their endless loop.
Fang Tong's cowardly, vicious sneer. Wu Feng's Qi-deviated madness. San Niang's hollow, grief-shattered despair.
As if sensing his gaze, all three faces turned toward him at once.
The savagery and roaring were gone. In the quiet of the ruins, with the grudge finally settled, they held something strange—something almost ethereal and weightless.
"Alright. Stop staring."
Mo Fan lay in the rubble, looking up at the floating phantom, and let out a quiet breath.
His voice carried the calm of someone who had looked death in the face too many times to pretend otherwise.
"I'd say we used each other. You got your revenge."
"Walk the road to the underworld properly. Next life, keep your eyes open."
"I won't be keeping you around anymore."
He closed his eyes. His will sharpened like a blade, and he cut the incredibly heavy mental thread—clean and without hesitation.
Whoosh.
With the severing of the link, the massive dark purple Wraith lost the maintenance of Mana.
It came apart into wisps of yin wind, dissolving into the cold night air like snow melting—slowly, then all at once.
In the final instant before it vanished entirely—
In a daze, Mo Fan thought he saw it.
Those three continuously agonizing, twisted faces finally lost their ferocity.
Carrying a trace of relieved release and peace, they thoroughly turned to nothingness with the wind.
Dust to dust. Earth to earth.
The moment the Wraith was dismissed, it felt like a ten-thousand-foot mountain had been lifted off Mo Fan's skull!
The suffocating pressure evaporated instantly.
What replaced it was an unprecedented clarity—clean and sharp, like the air after rain, his mind lighter than it had any right to be.
Mo Fan rubbed his temples.
He discovered in surprise that although he was still exhausted, his consciousness had become sharper than ever before.
Break and rebuild.
He understood it now.
Having experienced the high-pressure mental torture over the past two days—akin to a gravity training chamber...
And weathering the baptism of forcefully resisting Venerable Miasma Dust's mental strangulation...
His Soul Strength and load-bearing resilience had been forged into something harder and more terrifying than before.
He rested for a full incense stick's worth of time before he finally felt something resembling strength return.
He forced himself to sit up from the muddy, blood-soaked ground, looked out over the devastated ruins of the side courtyard, and exhaled a long breath.
"Time to count the loot."
Mo Fan licked his dry, cracked lips. A hungry, fanatical gleam lit up his eyes.
He pulled up the System panel—the one he hadn't had a second to look at properly since breaking through in the middle of that desperate fight.
Now, finally, it was time to enjoy the harvest!
Hum!
The moment the panel opened, a massive cascade of pale blue notifications that had been queued in the background flooded his vision all at once like a waterfall:
[ Killed cultivator of the same tier (Qi Condensation — Peak) ]
[ Auto-advanced to Tier-2 (LV. 11) ]
And then, the luxury grand prize package belonging to Venerable Miasma Dust.
[ System Settlement: Rank-Gap Kill — Peak Foundation Establishment Cultivator: Venerable Miasma Dust! ]
[ Massive EXP Reward: +5000 XP ]
"Cough—cough, cough—WHAT?!"
Mo Fan choked on his own spit and broke into a violent coughing fit, his eyeballs nearly popping out of his head.
"Foundation Establishment... peak?!"
He stared dead at that row of notifications, his face full of disbelief.
He'd assumed the old monster, crippled by the array's backlash, was at best a mid Foundation Establishment cultivator holding on forcefully.
But according to the System's "True Rank" judgment, this old demon had actually been a bona fide, full-circle peak Foundation Establishment cultivator!
"5,000 Experience Points!"
Mo Fan slapped his thigh excitedly.
"How the hell is this free loot? This is practically robbing the cultivation world's central bank!"
The massive wave of experience hit his freshly broken-through LV. 11 progress bar like a golden torrent, shoving it forward with brutal force!
[ Current EXP: LV. 12 (2000 / 3500) ]
Two levels at once!
And he was actually already over half of the way to Level 13!
The sheer rocket-launch speed of it made Mo Fan feel like he was dreaming.
He calmed his excitement and pulled up his detailed personal panel.
[ Basic Info ]
Name: Mo Fan
Class: Necromancer (Tier-2)
Realm: Peak Qi Condensation (Body) / Undead Scholar
"Undead Apprentice changed to... Undead Scholar?"
Mo Fan noticed this minor title change, the corner of his mouth lifting slightly. It seemed that in the System's settings, Tier-2 was indeed an extremely important watershed.
He scrolled down to the core attributes.
[ HP: 600 / 600 ]
[ Mana: 2000 / 2000 ]
[ Soul Strength (CPU): 150 ]
[ Mental Load: 51 / 150 ]
Hssss—
Looking at this luxurious data, Mo Fan sucked in a sharp breath of cold air, his heart blooming with joy.
After breaking through to Tier-2, his HP directly skyrocketed to 600!
Even without relying on Bone Armament, just with this health bar alone, he was tanky enough to make an ordinary Qi Condensation cultivator hack at him for half a day before getting anywhere.
And Mana had reached an astonishing 2,000 points!
This was the long-tail dividend brought by that damn "Transmigration Bug Double Compensation." He was basically a tireless perpetual motion machine at this point.
But what excited Mo Fan the most was that high Soul Strength of 150 points!
Previously, to maintain the actions of a few skeletons, he pinched pennies every day, terrified that computing power overload would fry his brain.
Now, with a CPU cap of 150, even pulling up a medium-sized skeleton army was more than enough!
This is a true qualitative leap...
While Mo Fan was still sighing over the dimensional strike brought by Tier-2 attributes, his gaze slowly moved down, landing on the Skill Tree panel below.
[ Skill Tree (5/10) ]
[ Death Vision ] (LV. 1)
[ Bone Armament ] (LV. 2)
[ Grave Chill ] (LV. 1)
[ Corpse Explosion ] (LV. 1)
[ Death Frenzy ] (LV. 1)
"The slots went from 5 to 10. I can understand that, I ranked up, after all..."
Mo Fan rubbed his chin, but his gaze stared dead at the skill in the second position.
"But... what the hell is this [ Bone Armament (LV. 2) ] doing here?"
He clearly remembered—before this battle, all his skills had been sitting at their initial LV. 1 state.
Recalling carefully, it seemed that in the life-or-death instant when Venerable Miasma Dust's destructive blood-colored storm smashed down...
To save his life, in that near-instinctive and unconscious state of pure survival, he had forcefully condensed that extremely ferocious Tier-2 white bone exoskeleton mecha.
"I didn't actively click any 'Upgrade' button."
Mo Fan's brows furrowed tightly, a trace of doubt flashing in his eyes.
Staring at the flashing "LV. 2" on the panel, he tentatively knocked on the System in his mind, issuing the question that had been sitting at the center of everything:
"System. This skill LV. 2—what exactly is the mechanic here?"