As Mo Fan's murmur slowly settled over the empty cliff bottom—
The ceaselessly roiling grayish-white mist ahead was gradually being ripped apart by a violent storm.
Screeee——!!!
Along with several exceedingly shrill, bizarre screeches, those creatures flashing with piercing red light in [ Death Vision ] finally emerged into Mo Fan's field of view.
They were several subterranean moles, each as huge as a calf.
And the instant Mo Fan got a clear look at them in full, seasoned as he was by a hundred battles...
His pupils still couldn't help but contract violently, and his scalp went numb all over.
What the fuck... exactly are these things?
If the demon-beast mutations out on the fringe of the back mountain behind Hundred Forging Peak had merely amounted to eyes turning blood-crimson, reason lost, and a plunge into extreme bloodlust—
Then these demon beasts deep within the mist had, at the level of the flesh itself, undergone an exceedingly warped, stomach-churning deformation!
It was as if they'd gone through some kind of runaway "secondary growth."
But this growth wasn't a wholesale evolution at all—it was an exceedingly eerie, localized mutation!
Mo Fan could see it clearly: the mole charging out in front still had a normal-looking left foreleg.
But its right foreleg had grotesquely swollen dozens of times over, thick as a bucket-sized column of meat.
Another had a face utterly twisted out of shape—its left eye was only the size of a soybean...
While its right eye was as huge as a bronze bell. It was so huge the socket couldn't even contain it; that massive blood-red eyeball forcibly bulged out, laced with bloodshot veins.
But the one that made Mo Fan's blood run cold was the giant mole bringing up the very rear.
The left half of its body was as massive as an elephant's, its muscles knotted and gnarled...
But the right half of its body was still the size of a normal mole.
This extreme, lopsided imbalance of gravity meant it couldn't walk properly at all.
It could only rely on that huge left half of its legs to drag and lunge madly across the ground...
While the normal right half of its body scraped against the hard rock like a filthy rag.
Even though the right half of its body had already been ground bloody and raw, deep enough to bare the bone...
It seemed to feel no pain whatsoever.
In those two mismatched eyes—one large, one small—there remained nothing but absolute madness.
"Something seems off here..."
Looking at these several deformed freaks that utterly defied the natural laws of living things—as though they'd crawled straight out of a nightmare—Mo Fan fell into a moment of hesitation.
The Shadow Leopard he'd met at the edge of the mist back then, savage though it was, had been savage in the name of hunting and feeding.
But these deformed moles—this posture of theirs, charging forward even at the cost of grinding half their own bodies to pulp...
Held not the slightest shred of hunting logic.
In those blood-engorged eyes of theirs, there seemed to lurk an extremely fanatical death-wish.
It was as if they were, at any cost... guarding something?
Though he still couldn't make out just what was going on, now was clearly not the time to dig deeper.
Rumble, rumble—!
These several deformed moles, radiating Foundation Establishment pressure, had already come charging and slaughtering right up to them, bringing their uncanny bodies along.
"Engage the enemy!"
Mo Fan issued the command with utter composure.
The undead army, already spread into its perfect formation, transformed in an instant into a precise machine of slaughter.
BOOM——!!!
A deafening crash.
The mole charging out in front, the one with the huge right arm...
Swung that bucket-thick column of flesh and slammed it down with brutal force.
But what met it was an insurmountable white city wall.
Unit 004!
After Mo Fan's earlier shield reconstruction, Unit 004 had utterly cast off all its bulky, sluggish movements...
Pushing its defensive performance to the absolute extreme.
Its body, steady as Mount Tai, was nailed firmly in place...
And that enormous shield-face built up from demon-beast bone plating didn't so much as wobble...
Perfectly channeling every bit of the mole's monstrous strength down into the ground beneath its feet.
ROAR!
At the very instant the mole's strike missed and its momentum spent itself—
A white afterimage, trailing a shrill sonic boom, leapt out from above Unit 004's enormous bone shield!
It was Unit 003, which had seized control of the air.
Its bone wings snapped down, and its huge body plunged from the sky like a meteor...
Those two sharp claws slicing with pinpoint precision straight into the mole's fragile neck!
At the same time.
On the flank of the battlefield, a bolt of black lightning skimmed the ground and swept past without a sound.
Unit 001 (Mo Yan)!
This skeletal swordsman, ever more nimble in form, hadn't made so much as a whisper.
On the blade of that cold-iron longsword, nurtured day and night in the Necrotic Realm, the edge now coiled with faint, trailing wisps of gray, deathly corrosive qi.
Swish! Swish! Swish!
Sword-light flickered like a bolt of white silk.
Those several deformed moles, made clumsy by their unbalanced centers of gravity, were practically living targets before Mo Yan's exquisite, peerless swordsmanship.
Each time the cold-iron longsword came down, it not only sheared through their mutated flesh with ease...
That gray death energy clinging to the blade seeped into the wounds in an instant...
Like a rot lodged deep in the bone, madly corroding their nerves.
Severed limbs and hacked appendages flew, black blood spraying in every direction.
Boom! Boom! Boom!
And at the far rear of the formation.
Mo Fan even lounged there alongside the artillery mage Unit 005 (WTF), looking down loftily upon this one-sided curb-stomp of a battlefield.
WTF wielded the [ Pale Bone Scepter ], while Mo Fan's fingertips danced.
One highly compressed [ Death Missile ] after another, along with the [ Corpse Explosion ] he kept detonating on the demon-beast corpses...
Came down like precise artillery fire, blasting the surviving moles that tried to slip past the defensive line into bloody pulp.
And amid the wreckage strewn across the ground.
That huge-framed Necrotic Centipede was like the most conscientious battlefield sweeper of all.
Its densely-packed bone-white jointed legs skittered swiftly across the ground...
Its highly toxic mandibles mercilessly harvesting those deformed beasts that had fallen gravely wounded and still writhed in their death throes.
A rout, sweeping the withered and crushing the rotten.
From start to finish, Mo Fan hadn't even had to lift a finger himself, nor had he felt so much as a trace of pressure.
This pack of Foundation Establishment beasts—the kind that, out in the open, would give a whole Inner Sect elite squad a splitting headache—
Before this undead legion, armed to the teeth and coordinated to seamless perfection...
Couldn't even count as opponents for a single exchange, wiped out clean and easy like chopping melons and slicing vegetables.
So this is... the terrifying dominance of a fully developed Necromancer.
Seated on the bone back, looking over the wreckage strewn across the ground, Mo Fan could no longer suppress the smile that madly curled up at the corner of his mouth.
And as this pack of Foundation Establishment beasts fell.
On Mo Fan's retina, that familiar pale-blue System prompt began scrolling madly, like a waterfall.
[ System Settlement: ]
[ Mutated Mole slain (Early Foundation Establishment). EXP Gained: +... ]
[ Mutated Mole slain (Early Foundation Establishment). EXP Gained: +... ]
[ Severely Mutated Mole slain (Mid-Stage Foundation Establishment). EXP Gained: +... ] ...
Amid those exceedingly wonderful prompt tones, like heavenly music, ringing out one after another.
The fanaticism in the depths of Mo Fan's eyes grew ever more intense.
He stared fixedly at the experience bar at the edge of his vision, surging upward at a terrifying speed as it drank in that massive influx of high-tier experience.
19 (5850 / 7000)... 19 (6450 / 7000)... 19 (6900 / 7000)...
Come on! Break through for me!!!
Mo Fan let out a long-anticipated roar in his heart.
Ding——!!!
Along with an exceedingly crisp System prompt tone—one that even carried a kind of grand, planar echo...
It thundered and burst in the depths of Mo Fan's Sea of Consciousness!
That experience bar, once pulsing with an abyssal-blue glow, gave a sudden, violent shudder the instant it broke past the 7000 mark.
Then—
Just like when Mo Fan had broken through Level 10 at the perfection of Qi Condensation...
Its once-vivid color rapidly drained away, turning into a stretch of gray representing death-stillness and lockdown!
The experience points had been frozen solid!
[ Current Level: LV. 20 (Locked) ]
Mo Fan drew in a deep breath. He felt no anger or confusion whatsoever at being level-capped.
Because he understood.
The moment the experience bar turned gray, it meant he had finally touched that most cruel, most core watershed of the entire immortal cultivation world...
The threshold equivalent to the [ Golden Core ] stage of the Mystic Realm!
Hummm——!
Mo Fan wasn't kept waiting long.
At the very center of his retina, within that layer of grayish-white data stream...
A special quest window—exceedingly familiar, radiating a dark-gold light that set his heart pounding—slowly surfaced.
The Necromancer's Level 20 breakthrough quest.
At last, right on schedule—it had arrived.