After the two cultivators' footsteps faded completely into the distance, the deep mine shaft returned to dead silence.
Mo Fan still didn't relax his vigilance.
He summoned another tiny skeleton rat and swept the area around the passage entrance twice over—methodically, thoroughly—until he was certain there were no other eyes and ears lurking in the mine.
Only then did he completely conceal his figure.
Like an insubstantial shadow, he quietly melted into the night and slipped safely back to his quarters on Hundred Forging Peak.
He shut the door behind him and exhaled a long, slow breath.
The close-range surveillance had given him something beyond just information. It had given him a realization.
Skeletons carried no living aura. No blood-qi, no breath, no warmth—nothing that passive spiritual sense could latch onto.
Unless a high-tier cultivator deliberately extended their divine sense in a targeted, carpet-sweeping search, a Necromancer's low-tier undead were effectively invisible.
To anyone's passive perception, they registered the same as a weed growing out of a crack in the rock. A dead stone. Nothing.
That's one hell of an advantage.
Mo Fan rubbed his chin.
In the cultivation world, where information was power, this kind of near-perfect reconnaissance capability was a strategic trump card of the highest order.
He washed the blood and grime off his body, changed into clean clothes, and settled cross-legged on his stone bed.
His mind kept replaying fragments of what he'd overheard: Elder Sun. Lord Li. The mysterious [ Nether River Bone Lotus ].
This was clearly something with deep roots—a conspiracy with extremely wide-reaching implications.
But he shook his head and forcefully pushed the thoughts down.
What's the point of thinking about it?
He knew exactly where he stood. Right now, I'm just a Tier-2 Necromancer. Getting involved in a power struggle between Golden Core cultivators? That's just volunteering to be cannon fodder.
Overreaching was how people got killed. Steady, methodical progress—that had always been his approach.
Build the strength first. Everything else comes after.
After resting and recuperating, Mo Fan opened his System panel.
He stared at the single precious Skill Point (SP) sitting there—the one he'd earned from killing the blind fish—and fell into deep thought.
How do I spend this 1 SP?
The obvious candidates were learning a Tier-2 skill or upgrading an existing Tier-1 skill to LV. 2.
Both had proven their value—the soul wings and the upgraded [ Death Vision ] had each delivered transformative, qualitative improvements.
Fill out the skill pool first, then optimize.
He pulled up the dazzling skill tree in his mind and began scanning through it.
Though, honestly, he'd actually already made up his mind before he started looking.
His gaze skipped past the flashy summoning skills entirely and locked dead onto one he'd hesitated over before.
[ Death Bolt ].
A completely unpretentious active attack spell.
The principle was simple: highly compress and concentrate death-qi into a projectile, fire it at a target, and deal single-target piercing damage.
Up until now, Mo Fan had operated on a philosophy of hitting things very hard with his fists—forcibly playing the Necromancer class like a melee brawler.
But after watching WTF hover serenely in midair and carpet-bomb everything below it into ruin with an extremely comfortable combat style, Mo Fan had done some genuine self-reflection.
Standing in the back and playing an artillery mage actually sounds significantly more comfortable.
[ Death Bolt ]'s raw damage per shot didn't match [ Corpse Explosion ]—which required an actual corpse as a medium and hit like a freight train. But its advantages were impossible to ignore.
Instant cast. No windup animation. Precise target lock-on.
That combination made it extraordinarily flexible in actual combat, and it perfectly filled the gaping hole in Mo Fan's toolkit: he currently had almost no ranged capability whatsoever.
You're the one.
Mo Fan didn't hesitate further and decisively allocated the point.
[ 1 SP consumed. ]
[ Skill Learned: Death Bolt (LV. 1) ]
A pulse of dim, dark light swept across his retina.
An extremely clear and vivid spell-casting memory flooded into his brain—as natural as if he'd practiced it a thousand times.
He slowly raised his right hand, extended his index finger, and said softly:
"Death Bolt."
Hum!
The air around him dropped to near-freezing in an instant. A thread of dense, almost tangible black light erupted from his fingertip.
Thwip.
A soft sound—barely audible, but deeply unpleasant in a way that set the teeth on edge.
That black bolt punched through the thick, refined iron-rock wall of his quarters in a fraction of a second...
Leaving behind a charred hole no larger than a thumb—but perfectly smooth-edged and bottomless.
Mo Fan walked over, ran his finger along the rim of the hole, and nodded with genuine satisfaction.
Penetration is excellent. Damage is solid. Against a cultivator's protective astral qi barrier, this would have a very interesting effect.
Test complete.
Mo Fan turned his attention to WTF, standing motionless nearby.
He walked over and took the [ Pale Bone Scepter ] from its bony grip.
If you're going to commit to the artillery mage role, let's go all in.
To maximize WTF's output capacity as a ranged spell platform, Mo Fan made a decisive change to its skill loadout.
He uninstalled [ Bone Armament ] from the scepter—a skill that leaned toward close-range defense—and replaced it with the freshly learned [ Death Bolt ], a skill built purely for dealing damage.
(Current WTF Loadout: [ Floating Soul Wings ], [ Corpse Explosion ], [ Death Bolt ])
To field-test the new firepower configuration, Mo Fan took WTF down to the basement.
After a thorough round of bombardment, he reached his conclusions:
Running on the mid-Qi Condensation Spiritual Qi vortex stored in WTF's bone cavity, supplemented by the Mana Mo Fan had sealed into the scepter...
WTF could fire approximately six consecutive instant-cast Death Bolts while still maintaining full mobility.
With Mo Fan's Mana reinforcement factored in, each of those six shots landed roughly at the level of a casual strike from an early Foundation Establishment cultivator.
Six instant-cast burst shots at early Foundation Establishment power...
Mo Fan ran the numbers quietly in his heart.
That fire density is enough to instantly kill any unprepared Qi Condensation beast in a flash. Against an early Foundation Establishment cultivator, it would at minimum cause serious problems.
"Not bad at all."
Mo Fan slid the scepter back into WTF's hands and gave its shoulder bone a firm pat.
His expression carried the unmistakable warmth of a father watching his son succeed.
Gradual upgrades. Phasing out the old for the new.
With WTF's configuration sorted out, Mo Fan's gaze gradually drifted toward the [ Necrotic Realm ].
In that silent space wrapped in grayish-white mist—
Summon No. 003 lay quietly on the ground.
Its hind legs had stopped deteriorating under the constant nourishment of death-qi, but the mangled damage that remained was still a sorry sight.
Mo Fan patted the bulging premium storage bag at his waist.
It was packed full—the fruits of tonight's high-intensity hunt through the mid-level underground mine. A massive collection of top-tier Tier-2 beast bones.
"You're next, old friend."