The words Heavenly Spirit Root made the corner of Mo Fan's mouth twitch violently.
He looked at the fervent old man in front of him and quietly sighed inside.
The memory loss was apparently quite severe.
Not wanting to agitate him further, Mo Fan kept his awkward smile in place and gently offered a correction.
"Elder... I think you might be misremembering."
He pointed at his own nose.
"The Spirit Testing Stone was perfectly clear about it. I'm a Waste Spirit Root—not even a trace of qi sensitivity. Where would a Heavenly Spirit Root come from?"
That, somehow, made things worse.
Lin Dong reacted like a cat whose tail had just been stepped on.
He lunged forward and seized Mo Fan's arms with both hands—thin, dried-out hands that closed like iron clamps...
Hard enough to make Mo Fan wince.
"Impossible!"
His sunken eyes were shot through with red. His voice cracked with something close to hysteria.
"I have spent centuries studying the human body's potential! My Bone Reading technique does NOT make mistakes!"
"Your bone structure is absolutely the foundation of a legendary Heavenly Spirit Root—the highest tier that exists!"
"That stone was broken! Something went wrong—it had to!"
But as he kept shouting, his voice began to lose its edge. It dropped. Quieted. The fire went out of it.
He released Mo Fan's arms and seemed to deflate entirely—a balloon with the air let out.
His gaunt face settled into something that looked, improbably, like wounded sulking.
He muttered to himself in a low, repetitive murmur.
"There had to be... something wrong somewhere..."
Watching this towering figure of the cultivation world pout like a child who'd been told his favorite toy was broken...
Mo Fan felt something unexpected stir in his chest.
Something almost like sympathy.
After all, the root cause of all this was the original owner of this body—Lu Xiaoqi.
Mo Fan cleared his throat.
"Ahem... Elder Lin. Don't take it too hard."
"The way I see it, the world is like opening a mystery box—full of variables no one can control."
"Even in the mortal world, every parent dreams their child will become a dragon or a phoenix. And yet?"
Mo Fan slapped his knee.
"Most of them end up perfectly ordinary. That's just how it goes."
"So... is there any chance... that my so-called Heavenly Spirit Root is the same type of situation?"
"Like, it was growing along just fine, and then one day it decided cultivation was too much work—or maybe it wasn't getting enough nutrients..."
"And it just kind of... fizzled out and disappeared?"
Silence.
A cold draft moved through the empty stone hall.
Lin Dong's muttering lips went completely still.
He raised his head and fixed Mo Fan with a look of profound, unreadable strangeness.
Mo Fan felt the temperature of the room drop several degrees.
That analogy did not land well.
He broke into a cold sweat and immediately pivoted.
"Anyway! Elder! You mentioned back at the assembly that you needed my help with some kind of brilliant research project, didn't you?"
"Shouldn't we get to it? I'd hate to waste your time!"
The word research reignited something behind Lin Dong's eyes instantly.
"Indeed!"
He straightened his robes, his expression shifting into something grave and focused.
"My line of inquiry actually shares a certain... accidental resonance with that absurd little theory of yours."
He began to pace across the stone floor, hands behind his back, his voice building with intensity.
"Every cultivator dreams of being born with a supreme Heavenly Spirit Root. But how does a spirit root form? How does it develop?"
"Why are some people born as heaven's chosen, while others are born as waste? The workings of heaven and earth in this matter are so profound they border on the incomprehensible."
"I have spent a great many years studying spirit roots. I believed I had developed a mature and reliable Bone Reading system..."
"And then I encountered you, and suffered the greatest defeat of my entire career."
He paused.
"I thought fate was simply cruel. That you would waste away in the servant quarters, and I would never have my answer."
Lin Dong spun around and grabbed Mo Fan by the shoulders.
"But fate is a strange and winding road! And here we are—brought together again!"
"I cannot let this gift from heaven pass me by. Today's research requires you. There is no substitute."
Mo Fan stared into those blazing eyes and felt his skin crawl from the back of his neck all the way down his spine.
He's going to use me as a test subject. That's what this is.
"This disciple is... not very bright," Mo Fan said quickly, edging backward. He swallowed.
"Could the Elder perhaps explain exactly what this research... involves?"
Lin Dong didn't answer directly. He smiled—a mysterious, private smile—and beckoned.
"Follow me."
He led Mo Fan through the empty front hall and deeper into the stone structure...
Toward a concealed side chamber at the rear.
BOOM.
The heavy stone door ground open.
Mo Fan looked inside—and his pupils contracted sharply.
The chamber was vast. But there was no luxury in it, no ornamentation. The lighting was dim to the point of gloom.
And lining both walls, arranged with meticulous precision, were skeletons.
Dozens of them. Bears. Dogs. Wolves. Tigers. And towering above the rest, the skeletal frame of a giant ape several stories tall.
Every skeleton had been stripped of flesh with surgical precision.
The bones had been treated with some kind of solution that left them gleaming with a pale, cold luminescence...
Each one mounted on heavy iron frames, posed incredibly lifelike.
What the...
Mo Fan stared. If I didn't know better, I'd think this old man was a Necromancer like me.
Lin Dong kept walking. Mo Fan followed. The deeper they went, the colder the air became.
And when they reached the innermost section of the chamber, what greeted them was no longer the bones of demon beasts.
They were human remains.
Unlike the beast skeletons outside, these were not mounted on iron frames.
They had been laid out with extraordinary care—with what could only be described as reverence—on individual wooden beds lined with soft silk.
There was no damage on any of them. No fractures from spell bombardment, no blast marks, no signs of violence.
Every skeleton was complete and intact, arranged with a stillness that made them look simply... asleep.
"Elder, these..."
Mo Fan's voice came out slightly unsteady.
Even for someone who worked with bones professionally, finding this many human remains in the hinterlands of an orthodox Sect made his scalp prickle.
"Don't overthink it, child."
Lin Dong stopped walking. The manic energy had left him entirely.
His voice was quiet now—measured, and carrying something heavy underneath it.
"I may be unconventional in my methods. But I am not the kind of demonic cultivator who takes human lives carelessly and slaughters the innocent."
He gestured toward the remains. Something complicated moved through his eyes.
"These were all ordinary mortals from the villages below the mountain. People with terminal illnesses, or injuries beyond any hope of survival, who were carried up here seeking medical treatment as a last resort."
"I am well-versed in medicine. But I cannot defy the heavens and rewrite fate."
"I did everything I could to save them, but I was ultimately powerless to reverse the situation."
He paused.
"Before each of them passed, I spoke with them personally. I obtained their consent. I made arrangements for their families. Only then did I keep their remains."
When he finished speaking, this Elder—the one the upper echelons of Azure Cloud Sect considered a heretic and a madman...
Quietly straightened his robes and crown.
Then he turned to face those rows of mortal remains without any cultivation, and bowed.
Deep. Slow. Completely sincere.
Mo Fan stood still for a moment.
He hadn't expected this. Not from this old lunatic. Not a physician's reverence for life, genuine and unperformed.
Without a word, he turned to face the remains as well. And bowed alongside him.
After the bow, Lin Dong led Mo Fan further—past the remains, toward a sealed inner room at the very end of the chamber.
BOOM.
The stone door opened slowly.
The space inside was smaller, but the layout was extremely exquisite.
Formation arrays had been laid into the floor itself, maintaining both temperature and spiritual energy concentration.
And what filled this room was not bare skeletons.
It was coffins. Coffin after coffin, each one crafted from extremely rare materials Mo Fan couldn't immediately identify, each one faintly radiating a soft, precious light.
Mo Fan stared at them. He truly couldn't hold back the curiosity in his heart.
His eyes dropped. Quietly, without a sound, he activated [ Death Vision ].
Hum—
The grayish-white god's-eye view punched straight through the heavy lids.
One look was all it took!
Every single coffin held the remains of a cultivator. Real ones. Powerful ones.
Several sets of bones gleamed like lustrous jade, radiating dense, concentrated energy signatures...
The unmistakable corpses of Foundation Establishment powerhouses!
And at the very back of the room, in the largest sarcophagus of all—
A skeleton that glowed with an extremely elegant golden luster.
Dead for who knew how many years, and yet still radiating a terrifying outward pressure that made Mo Fan's soul flinch instinctively just from looking at it!
[ Golden Core Remains ]!!!
Oh my good lord.
Mo Fan frantically swallowed his saliva, his mental abacus firing at maximum speed, beads flying.
If I summoned all of these while he wasn't looking... I'd ascend on the spot.
He was still deep in this extremely pleasant daydream when Lin Dong's voice drifted over—perfectly calm, completely unhurried.
"Alright. Stop staring."
A beat.
"Come on then. Take your clothes off."