With Mo Fan's declaration still ringing in the air, the newly rebuilt Unit 003 let out a silent roar.
Its powerful hind legs drove into the ground with explosive force, launching its body skyward like a cannonball leaving the chamber.
The bat-king bone wings spread wide behind it with a thunderous crack!
WHOOSH.
Wind erupted in all directions.
Unit 003 carried Mo Fan into the vast night sky—a streak of shadow and dark light swallowed by the boundless darkness above.
Mo Fan could fly on his own with [ Floating Soul Wings ], technically.
But this was an entirely different dimension of experience compared to having a dedicated mount!
Other sword cultivators rode their blades through the wind, white robes billowing—elegant, poetic, insufferably refined.
The better-off ones had immortal cranes or spirit birds to carry them, practically dripping with celestial atmosphere.
Mo Fan, on the other hand, was riding a pitch-black skeletal flying leopard with enormous bat-bone wings, scythe-limbs on all four legs, and ghost-blue flames burning in its eye sockets.
The faint, deeply satisfying sense of looking absolutely unhinged was something he found extremely agreeable.
This is awesome.
Ten thousand meters up, the night wind rushing past him, Mo Fan patted Unit 003's solid cervical vertebrae with genuine satisfaction.
He set a rough heading, engaged a simple "cruise control," and promptly sprawled flat on his back across 003's wide, stable bone spine.
The wind howled past his ears. The stars wheeled slowly overhead.
His eyelids grew heavier and heavier, and somewhere between the rhythm of the wingbeats and the cold night air, he actually drifted toward sleep.
Hum—
Just as Mo Fan's consciousness was about to slip under entirely, his body passed through something.
It was barely perceptible—a soft, yielding resistance, like pushing through a thin soap bubble.
No force, no sound. Just a faint ripple, like a hand trailing through still water.
But that subtle sensation detonated in his mind like a thunderclap.
Oh no.
Mo Fan snapped awake and bolted upright on 003's back, his face draining of color.
Did I just wander into a restricted zone of the Sect?!
He activated [ Death Vision ] immediately.
Swish! The grayish-white grid unfurled below him—
And Mo Fan's breath caught in his throat.
The desolate wasteland of Hundred Forging Peak—the craters, the dead silence, the abandoned mines—was gone.
In its place, hundreds upon hundreds of blazing red dots packed the space below him, dense as a field of stars.
The sheer concentration of life signatures formed a vast, pulsing web of cultivator presence!
Mo Fan leaned over and looked down.
In the clear moonlight, there were no bare rocks. Instead, rare flowers and exotic plants bloomed in riotous color.
Ancient spirit trees rose in groves. Somewhere in the mist, a spring-fed waterfall cascaded down the mountainside.
The entire peak was suffused with a soft, rosy, enchanting haze. The air carried the scent of cosmetics and spirit blossoms—delicate, unmistakably feminine.
On a beautifully carved archway not far away, elegant characters shimmered faintly in the moonlight.
[ Sunset Peak ].
"Oh hell."
Mo Fan's scalp exploded instantly.
This was the Azure Cloud Sect's largest all-female enclave! The "Kingdom of Women"!
Cold sweat broke out across his entire body.
At the same time, he immediately understood how he'd gotten in without triggering a single alarm.
The Sect's mountain-protection grand array and each peak's barrier were designed to detect cultivators and monsters—specifically, anything with spiritual energy fluctuations.
Unit 003 was a pure skeleton. No life signs. No demonic aura. Nothing.
Mo Fan himself was a "mortal" with a Waste Spirit Root. He ran entirely on physical conditioning and death-qi.
To any standard detection array, he registered as a completely ordinary animal.
The formation had scanned them both, found zero spiritual fluctuations, and categorized them as a couple of harmless birds passing over the mountain.
And just like that, they'd waltzed straight in!
Mo Fan swept his gaze across the scene below.
Even at this late hour, Sunset Peak was far from quiet.
Female cultivators moved through the moonlit grounds in every direction—some playing zithers under the moon, some laughing and splashing at the edge of a spirit spring.
In the distant pavilions, silhouettes moved behind gauze curtains, the soft glow of candlelight outlining figures in various states of evening repose.
Any lecherous scoundrel stumbling across this view would have been bleeding profusely from the nose, exclaiming that the trip was not made in vain.
Mo Fan felt nothing but ice in his veins.
"Stop right now, 003! Turn around—if we go any further, neither of us is walking away from this!"
He knew exactly what this was. A male cultivator. The dead of night. Deep inside the hinterlands of Sunset Peak.
If he was discovered— Getting beaten to death would be the best possible outcome!
He urgently called 003 to turn back, intending to slip away quietly the way he'd come.
But just as he was about to reverse course, a group of female cultivators appeared in the distance, riding their swords in formation directly toward him.
They wore the uniform robes of Sunset Peak. Their faces were fine-featured, but their eyes were sharp and cold.
The synchronized pulse of their spiritual energy was unmistakable—these were elite disciples on the peak's standard night patrol.
Terrible.
Mo Fan's heart lurched into his throat.
The moment they got close enough, they would see Unit 003 with the naked eye—the massive bone wings, the ghost-blue soul-flames. There was no way to miss it.
003 cannot be seen!
He acted without thinking.
"Retract!"
Whoosh.
Unit 003's enormous frame vanished instantly, yanked back into the Necrotic Realm.
However, suddenly without a mount beneath him, Mo Fan dropped like a stone, plummeting toward the ground at high speed.
His instincts fired immediately. He subconsciously wanted to save himself...
Death-qi beginning to coalesce at his shoulder blades into the ghost-blue wings of [ Floating Soul Wings ]—
Then his brain went buzz, and he realized it.
Wait!
He was inside the Sect. His established persona was a talentless body-cultivator—no Spirit Root, no spiritual energy, pure physical strength.
Body cultivators couldn't fly!
If he was caught hovering in midair with a pair of ghost-blue death-qi wings sprouting from his back...
That would be infinitely harder to explain than riding a skeleton leopard.
That wasn't "suspicious cultivator." That was "evil path great demon who infiltrated the Sect"—the kind of thing that got you executed on the spot, no questions asked!
No time to think. No room for hesitation. Just commit.
"Risk it!"
Mo Fan killed the gathering death-qi, tucked his arms around his head, and let himself fall—a completely limp, completely ordinary human rock in free-fall.
THUD!
Accompanied by an extremely muffled sound, he crashed headfirst into a dense shrub with a deeply undignified impact.
He buried himself deeply in the dirt and dead leaves without moving a single muscle.
He forcefully suppressed his heartbeat to its absolute lowest frequency using the technique—slow, faint, nearly imperceptible.
Several breaths passed.
Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh.
The patrol cultivators swept overhead on their flying swords, passing directly through the spot where Mo Fan had been hovering moments before.
Sword-light carved clean arcs through the night sky.
Suddenly, the lead cultivator—possessing Foundation Establishment cultivation—stopped her flying sword.
Her brow furrowed. Her eyes swept the area with sharp, searching focus.
The junior sisters behind her halted as well, hands moving instinctively to their sword hilts.
"Senior Sister?" one of them asked in a low voice. "What is it?"
The lead female cultivator didn't answer immediately. She closed her eyes, extended her Divine Sense, and swept the area carefully.
Then she shook her head, looking faintly puzzled.
"Strange. When we passed the edge of the array just now, there seemed to be a trace of an extremely faint foreign object feedback. But that fluctuation vanished in a flash, and there were zero spiritual power fluctuations."
She looked down again, casting a glance at the peaceful, flower-covered slopes and the dark shrubs below.
Besides the rustling sound of the wind blowing through the leaves, there was nothing there.
"Perhaps I was overthinking it, or some blind night owl crashed into the mountain-protection grand array."