The grand, awe-inspiring thought swirled in Mo Fan's mind for only a moment before it faded.
He was nowhere near qualified to be thinking about things that lofty. Not yet.
Rather than looking up at the abyss from here, it was better to understand what this so-called [ Necrotic Realm ] actually did.
Mo Fan reined in his thoughts and began probing along the edges of his hundred-square-meter "private plot."
He extended his consciousness outward, trying to push through the ink-black ocean of death-qi surrounding the space.
The moment his awareness touched that dark boundary, it was like kicking a Wall of Sighs poured from reinforced concrete barefoot.
Hssss—
A sharp, piercing pain shot back through the connection straight into his brain—the sensation of his soul being grazed by a micro-bolt of electricity.
Mo Fan pulled back immediately, extremely rationally choosing not to engage in pointless, suicidal probing.
So a hundred square meters is my absolute boundary at Tier-2. Expanding the territory will have to wait until my level climbs higher in the future.
The territory was restricted—fine. But the core mechanics still needed verifying.
If I could pull Mo Yan and 004 in with intent alone, what's the distance limit?
Mo Fan closed his eyes and reached through the mental link, trying to lock onto Summon No. 003, currently lying dormant in the ruins outside the village.
Retrieve! He willed it silently.
Inside the Necrotic Realm, dead silence. Not a single ripple.
No familiar bone-white silhouette appeared in the clearing.
"No response?"
Mo Fan opened his eyes, brow furrowed, mind already spinning rapidly.
He thought back to where he'd been standing when he'd pulled in Mo Yan and 004, then roughly estimated the distance between his current position and the ruins outside the village.
After several rounds of conscious probing and coordinate calculations, a number crystallized.
"Fifty meters."
Mo Fan licked his lips. A fanatical light flashed in his eyes.
The Necrotic Realm's telekinetic storage and retrieval radius—centered on my physical body—is approximately fifty meters!
And what did that mean?
This was not a glorified "Upgraded Storage Pouch." This endowed him with an extremely terrifying tactical mobility!
Before, summoning his skeletons meant pressing his hand to the pouch and dumping them out one by one like emptying a bag of trash—conspicuous, slow, and obvious to anyone watching.
But now?
Within fifty meters, he could make an enormous bone beast vanish into thin air at will.
Or he could drop 004—built like a tank—directly onto an enemy's head or into their blind spot without a single second of warning!
Instant Cast Summoning. Seamless Recovery.
Mo Fan clenched his fist slowly. "Appear from nowhere, vanish without a trace."
With the basic mechanics mapped out, Mo Fan didn't linger in the consciousness dimension any longer. There was still a massive mess waiting for him in the real world.
He snapped his awareness back like a receding tide, slamming back into his physical shell.
Whoosh.
His eyes flew open. A cold wind hit him—thick with blood and scorched earth—flooding his nose instantly.
Before him: the same desolate, shattered courtyard. Broken brick, collapsed walls, rubble soaked in blood.
The wreckage of a life-or-death battle silently reminded him of the tragic struggle that had just occurred here.
Mo Fan climbed to his feet from the muddy water, shook the grime off his clothes, and activated [ Death Vision ] with practiced ease.
But when his grayish-white gaze swept across the area where Wu Feng, San Niang, and Fang Tong had died—
He stopped.
Empty.
Aside from the desiccated husks and scattered limbs drained of essence on the ground...
The remnant souls that should have been drifting above the corpses—the ones that marked a cultivator's passing—were completely gone.
Not even a faint shred of soul fluctuation remained.
Mo Fan thought about it for a moment, then understood.
I see. He let out a short, rueful laugh.
"That Tier-2 Wraith wasn't conjured from nothing. Its summoning medium was the extremely twisted, resentment-soaked souls of these three guys before they died!"
Wraith summoning was, at its core, a consumption of remnant souls.
Which means in future fights, if I choose to summon a Wraith, it's equivalent to giving up the option to absorb that portion of remnant souls for EXP and Soul Strength.
A multiple-choice question. You couldn't have your cake and eat it too.
Then again—trading three Qi Condensation remnant souls to pit a peak Foundation Establishment old monster to death across a major realm gap? Absolutely wasn't a loss at all.
Mo Fan adjusted his mindset quickly.
He pulled his gaze away from the useless empty husks and slowly turned his head until it locked dead onto the center of the ruins.
Miasma Dust's body lay there, still and silent as dead wood.
The old monster had died in humiliation—mind shattered by the Wraith's torture, run through the heart by Mo Yan's sword. A suffocating end.
But through the grayish-white filter of Death Vision, what hovered above that corpse made Mo Fan's breathing instantly grow heavy.
It was an extremely eye-catching, almost glaring mass of energy.
Every remnant soul Mo Fan had seen before—from Qi Condensation demonic beasts—had looked like a blurry smear of fog, floating and scattered, ready to blow away in a breeze.
But Miasma Dust's remnant soul was incredibly condensed.
"A peak Foundation Establishment cultivator's... remnant soul."
Mo Fan stared at it. His Adam's apple bobbed up and down with extreme difficulty. His pupils contracted slightly, involuntarily.
An uncontrollable craving—originating from the deepest part of his soul—crawled crazily into his heart like a bone-attached maggot.
He couldn't help but recall the feeling when he absorbed his first beast remnant soul at the bottom of Abandoned Sword Cliff.
That feeling was too wonderful.
For someone who perennially lived under high pressure—nerves wound tight, brain aching with a dull throb from chronic overexertion...
The instant he inhaled the remnant soul had been like a stream of icy, sweet spring water poured directly onto dry, cracking earth.
His originally turbid, exhausted brain had cleared instantly.
His thinking had sharpened to an agile razor's edge, fast enough to feel like flying—like he could slow down the movement of wind through grass and take it apart piece by piece in his mind.
That extreme sensation of lightness, of his soul being smoothed out, ironed flat, and even elevated...
It was simply more addictive and impossible to stop than any top-tier hallucinogen known from his past life.
And what made his skin crawl even more was the memory of the thought that had surfaced right after.
The one he'd had in the immediate aftermath of that first absorption, while the ultimate pleasure was still burning through him:
If the beast soul of a mere low-tier spirit beast is this satisfying... what would the soul of a human cultivator feel like?
At the time, he'd treated it as the whisper of a devil. Locked it down. Buried it deep in his heart.
And now fate—with the sense of humor of a particularly sadistic dealer—had placed the most premium, most luxurious possible "ingredient" directly in front of him.
The remnant soul of a peak Foundation Establishment cultivator! Within easy reach.
Mo Fan stood motionless. The shadow of his hood fell across most of his face.
Under the interplay of light and dark, his eyes were terrifyingly profound—fixed dead onto that incredibly condensed mass of soul-energy.
Beneath the wide sleeves of his robe, his fingers spasmed. Curled slightly.
To siphon, or not to siphon?