He stood in the ruins, watching the dazed, hollow-eyed villagers of Linshui Village peer out from behind their broken wooden doors.
With the hallucinogenic grand array destroyed and Venerable Miasma Dust dead and his Dao erased...
The thick false filter that had blanketed their minds was finally torn away completely.
They saw the collapsed houses. They saw the blood soaking the ground.
They saw the old village chief and the "Immortal Master"—both crumpled in the mud, shriveled husks.
By any reasonable expectation, people waking from a decades-long nightmare—realizing they'd been penned up and drained like livestock...
They should have reacted with shock, terror, wailing, or at the very least a volcanic hatred for the dead monster who'd done it to them.
But there was nothing. Nothing at all.
The villagers drifted out of the ruins in small clusters.
They looked at Miasma Dust's tragically dead corpse on the ground, and in those sunken eyes there was no fear, no cathartic relief at avenging a great wrong.
Only a hollow, skin-crawling blankness.
Then—
Like an ant colony that had lost its queen—after a brief, confused pause—they seemed to follow some instinct carved into their very bones. As one, they turned.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
Hundreds of villagers—men, women, old, and young—dropped to their knees before Mo Fan, who stood blood-soaked at the center of the ruins like some descended demon god.
They pressed their foreheads deep into the muddy water and began an extremely devout, almost mechanical, three kneelings and nine kowtows.
"We beg the Great Immortal's protection..." "Great Immortal, have mercy..."
No one mourned the fall of the old god. They were simply in a hurry to welcome the descent of the new one.
Decades of hallucinogenic conditioning and slow, insidious exploitation had completely destroyed whatever independent will these mortals had once had to survive.
Even with the cage door open, they instinctively needed a leash tied around their necks. They needed a spiritual totem to cling to and worship.
As long as someone put food in their mouths. As long as they could go on living in that numb, comfortable haze.
It completely didn't matter to them whether the figure sitting on the altar was a bloodsucking demon or a blood-stained boy.
Mo Fan looked down from a commanding height at the herd of domesticated lambs prostrating themselves in the mud.
Behind the shadow of his hood, something passed through his eyes—a flash of profound sorrow, and beneath it, deep, cutting irony.
He wasn't the kind of ruthless, cold-blooded monster who would casually slaughter a village just to cover his tracks. He found killing these harmless mortals dirtied his hands for nothing.
But he was equally far from being any kind of radiant, all-saving Holy Mother.
He had no time and no obligation to stay in this godforsaken place to play their "New God"—to slowly rehabilitate and rebuild their broken personalities bit by bit.
His own Great Dao was already a tightrope walk over thin ice. He had no energy to spare to meddle in other people's karma.
"Get up. All of you."
Mo Fan's voice was hoarse and flat—carrying no Mana behind it—but in the quiet ruins, it carried clearly.
The villagers raised their heads with trembling caution, but still didn't dare stand fully upright.
Mo Fan's gaze swept the crowd and settled on a young man whose blood-qi deficit didn't look too severe, still retaining some solidity to his frame.
"You. Come here."
The young man flinched full-body, scrambling and crawling on hands and knees to Mo Fan's feet.
Mo Fan reached into his robes and pulled out a few fragments of silver from the confiscated storage bags, along with some mundane dry rations Wu Feng's group had left behind.
He dropped them in front of the young man without ceremony.
"Take these people and head east. About fifty li out, there's a town. Azure Cloud Sect has a garrison there—proper human civilization."
He pointed toward the direction of the rising sun beyond the mountains. His tone carried no warmth, no charity—acting as if he were merely stating an objective fact.
"Don't stay here anymore. This place is ruined. Anyone who stays will find a dead end. Take these things and look out for yourselves."
With that, Mo Fan considered his final obligation discharged.
He turned, slung the Pale Bone Scepter across his back, and prepared to flick his sleeves and leave for the ruins outside the village to find Summon No. 003.
The moment he turned—
"Immortal Master, please wait!"
The sturdy young man clutching the broken silver and rations suddenly acted as if he had mustered the greatest courage of his entire life.
He lunged forward with extreme awe, even desperation, and grabbed the hem of Mo Fan's robe—the part stained black with dried blood—with both hands, holding on tight.
Mo Fan's brow furrowed. He stopped and looked back, cold-eyed.
Terrified, the young man immediately released his grip and shrank back—but he stayed kneeling on the ground, raising his head.
In those hollow eyes now burned something desperate, an almost pathological devotion.
"Might this one dare ask... the Immortal Master's Dharma title?"
His voice trembled, but the fixation behind it was absolute.
"We are ignorant people, but even we know the Immortal Master's life-saving grace! When we return, we will definitely carve a longevity tablet in the Immortal Master's honor, burning incense day and night, praying for the Immortal Master to enjoy eternal blessings!"
Mo Fan paused.
He looked at these people—still refusing to stand, insisting on finding a "God" to kneel to—and the last trace of sorrow in his chest completely transformed into a highly absurd dark humor.
You insist on worshipping, huh...
Mo Fan lowered his head slightly in the morning mist. The wide hood fell across the upper half of his face.
The corner of his mouth moved—slowly, bit by bit—until it blossomed into an extremely playful, cold sneer.
"Since you insist on worshipping..."
His voice shed its hoarseness. What replaced it was something that struck straight to the soul—glacial, arrogant.
He turned his head and looked at the crowd of mortals, spitting out a few words, pausing after each syllable:
"Then from now on... call me—" "[ Lord of the Underworld Souls ]."
Leaving the title hanging in the air—commanding, grandiose, and just a little bit chuunibyou—he didn't spare them another glance.
Taking large, meteor-like strides, Mo Fan stepped into the breaking dawn mist.
His cyan robes fluttered, his retreating back dissolving into the interplay of sunlight and fog—mysterious, unfathomable...
Leaving behind only a courtyard full of villagers still devoutly kneeling in the mud.
As for whether an elusive, morally ambiguous figure known as the "Lord of the Underworld Souls" would truly emerge in the future mortal legends of the cultivation world because of this?
He would let time slowly verify that.
Leaving the ruins of Linshui Village behind, Mo Fan followed the faint pulse of the soul-link and found Summon No. 003 several li outside the village, amid a field of wreckage.
The bone leopard that had once embodied a certain violent aesthetic was currently tragic to the extreme.
Its spine had been blasted in half by the residual shockwave of Miasma Dust's spell.
The reinforced hind legs Mo Fan had so carefully modified were pulverized—shattered into bone dregs all over the ground.
Most fatally, the soul-fire in its eye sockets was so dim that only two sparks the size of rice grains remained. A light breeze felt like it could extinguish them completely.
"Good work, buddy."
Mo Fan crouched down. A trace of heartache flashed through his eyes.
Without any hesitation, with a shift in his mind, he directly communicated with the [ Necrotic Realm ] deep within his sea of consciousness.
Retrieve.
Whoosh.
Following a faint spatial fluctuation, 003's broken body instantly disappeared from the spot, safely teleported into that exclusive space filled with high-dimensional pure death energy.
Feeling the rich laws of death within the space begin to slowly nourish and repair 003's dried-up, broken shell like spring rain...
Mo Fan's hanging heart finally settled completely.
"This Necrotic Realm truly has endless miraculous uses."
He praised it genuinely. Then his gaze dropped to the bulging premium storage bag at his waist, and an impulse for a test surfaced in his mind.
Since the Necrotic Realm can store undead creatures, then... what about ordinary dead objects?
To verify this mechanic, Mo Fan reached into his storage bag and directly yanked out True Lord Miasma Dust's shriveled corpse, which he had stowed earlier, tossing it onto the ground.
Retrieve.
Mo Fan stared at Miasma Dust's corpse, issuing the command to the Necrotic Realm once again.
One second. Two seconds.
The corpse on the ground didn't move an inch.
"Failed."
Mo Fan rubbed his chin, drawing an extremely precise conclusion:
"It seems the Necrotic Realm cannot be used as a conventional storage warehouse. It only accepts undead creatures."
"Ordinary dead objects, magical artifacts, or even ordinary corpses that haven't yet been converted into skeletons cannot enter that high-dimensional space."
"This means that for a very long time to come, the storage bags of the cultivation world will still be my indispensable 'essential gear'."
"Alright. Loose ends tied up. Next up..."
Mo Fan turned around. His profound gaze pierced through the morning mist, casting toward the rolling, gloomy, eerie barren mountains behind Linshui Village.
That was the direction pointed out by the memory fragments forcibly instilled into his mind when he absorbed Miasma Dust's remnant soul.
He didn't hesitate in the slightest.
His figure turned into a streak of cyan, skirting the village ruins and sprinting all the way toward the most hidden cliff on the back mountain of Linshui Village.
Relying on the precise navigation of the memory fragments.
Half an hour later, Mo Fan stopped his steps in front of a sheer cliff face.
This place was extremely remote, blanketed in thorns and toxic vines, seeing no sunlight year-round, and the air around it biting with damp chill.
"Found it."
Mo Fan looked into the profound darkness before him. The corner of his mouth hooked into an excited smile.
This was exactly Venerable Miasma Dust's secluded retreat for the past century.