Hummm—
Along with that exceedingly crisp System prompt tone...
The special quest window, radiating its glow, slowly unfurled at the very center of Mo Fan's retina.
Mo Fan held his breath, bracing himself to face any twisted challenge that might come.
But when that quest window unfurled completely, Mo Fan was left stunned.
There was no lengthy background exposition, nor any harsh additional conditions.
Within the entire window, only two exceedingly brief lines of text hung, all alone:
[ Tier-3 Breakthrough Quest: Where Does the Body Return? ]
[ Quest Objective: Comprehend the essence of death. ]
"..."
Mo Fan stared at these two lines for a full half-minute.
His first reaction wasn't shock, nor fear, but... that he didn't get it.
"Comprehend... the essence of death?"
Mo Fan's brows knotted tightly together. He slowly lifted his head and swept a glance around him.
Everywhere his eyes fell were severed limbs and hacked appendages, black blood flowing across the ground.
The whole place was strewn with the mutated moles his undead army had just slaughtered...
That thick reek of blood and the aura of death impossible to ignore.
He lowered his head and glanced at the quest again.
What's that supposed to mean? Isn't everything around here already dead as hell? What more does it want me to comprehend?
Somewhat dubiously, Mo Fan stuck out his foot and gave the corpse of a mutated mole by his foot a kick.
Roll, roll.
The corpse tumbled half a turn across the rocks, a deformed, swollen foreleg—thick as a bucket—flopping down limply.
Dead as dead could be. No suspense there.
Yet the quest window on his retina still radiated that lofty, aloof dark-gold light, without so much as a flicker of a progress bar.
Mo Fan refused to buy it.
"Death Vision—open!"
Mo Fan concentrated his spiritual power, staring fixedly at that mole corpse...
Trying to see some so-called "essence of death" through its bloody, mangled remains.
He stared for a full minute, and apart from finding this deformed skeleton somewhat disgusting, he comprehended nothing at all.
The quest still didn't react in the slightest.
The irritation in Mo Fan's heart began to rise, bit by bit.
He was a textbook pragmatist.
His past quests—whether they had him slay same-tier cultivators or absorb complete souls...
No matter how dangerous they got, at least the objective was clear, something he could actually go and do.
But now? What the hell kind of standard is "comprehend"?!
The more he thought about it, the more muddled he got; the more he thought about it, the angrier he got.
In this oppressive mist, Mo Fan's nerves long stretched taut on the razor's edge between life and death—finally snapped.
He tilted his head back, jabbed a finger at the empty air, and hurled a demand at that System playing deaf and dumb:
"Come on, could you at least give me a direction?!"
"Comprehend what exactly?! You want me to sit here next to this pile of rotten meat and meditate on Zen, or do you want me to go back and write an eight-hundred-word reflection essay on death?!"
Mo Fan bellowed, beside himself with frustration:
"Even when I'm writing a paper, my advisor at least tosses me a few keywords!"
"This crap quest of yours won't even lay out the topic clearly how the hell am I supposed to comprehend a single damn thing?!"
Across the empty cliff bottom, only Mo Fan's furious cursing echoed.
The System naturally gave no reply. Those two lines of text even seemed to carry the faintest hint of mockery.
Hands on his hips, panting heavily, Mo Fan waited a while.
Facing this impervious, mute System, after a long while, he'd well and truly run out of temper.
"Fine. You're aloof, you're magnificent. I don't have time to deal with you right now."
With utter helplessness, Mo Fan closed that quest window hovering before his eyes.
After all, compared to this baffling "comprehend the essence of death"...
Now, The source of the back-mountain demon-beast mutations—was the truly life-or-death matter at hand.
If he didn't dig out the root of this whole affair and clean it up thoroughly...
The village where Old Lü and the others lived would never truly know peace.
"Forget it. No rush. Let's get this mist scouted out clearly today first."
Mo Fan swept aside all those messy, tangled thoughts, vaulted once more onto Unit 003's broad, steady bone back...
Gave a simple gesture, and tidied up the formation that had grown slightly loose.
"Continue advancing."
The vast undead legion, once again like a precise war machine, went crushing onward toward the depths of the mist.
Only, the Mo Fan of now no longer had that thrill he'd felt when first entering the mist.
The System's mystical, profound line—"Comprehend the essence of death"—was like an exceedingly fine fishbone, lodged tight in the depths of his mind.
He couldn't figure it out, couldn't pull it out, yet always felt something was somehow off—a bone stuck in his throat.
They hadn't traveled far.
From the thick mist ahead came, once again, a burst of exceedingly chaotic, heavy footsteps carrying a certain slimy, clammy quality.
"Here we go again."
Mo Fan gazed down loftily.
What came charging out of the mist this time was no longer moles...
But several demon beasts over two meters in body length, shaped like rock lizards.
But the degree of these rock lizards' mutation was, quite simply, ten times more severe than the moles before...
Utterly beyond the physiological limits of any living thing!
The one charging on the far left had its once-smooth back scales completely shattered...
Replaced by a mass of chaotic, jagged bone spikes that had grown out.
Those bone spikes were like tumors growing out of control—several had even curved directly inward, cruelly piercing straight through its own abdomen.
Its organs and intestines dragging along the ground, yet it seemed wholly unaware.
The one in the middle had its hind limbs swollen madly, muscles knotted and gnarled like tree roots...
But its front half had grotesquely withered, leaving little more than a thin layer of skin and flesh wrapped over bone.
When it ran, it drove entirely off those two deformed, thick hind legs...
All but dragging its withered upper body forward across the ground like a tattered sack.
And the one on the far right was more blood-curdling still.
Its mouth had been forcibly torn open from the lower jaw, that horrific split running all the way down to the position of its chest!
Within that huge, air-exposed gash of raw flesh grew hundreds of ghastly-white teeth...
Densely packed and utterly without pattern—like a terrifying abyss grown full of teeth.
"These ghastly things..."
Forcibly holding down his nausea, Mo Fan issued the kill command with a cold, hard look in his eyes.
The outcome, of course, held no suspense whatsoever.
Before this fully-armed, seamlessly coordinated undead legion...
These deformed monsters—stripped of reason, left with nothing but savage instinct—were no more than sacrificial lambs awaiting the slaughter.
In barely a moment.
The several mutated rock lizards were torn to shreds by Mo Yan's sword-light and Unit 003's sharp claws, falling into pools of blood.
But looking at the corpses strewn across the ground, Mo Fan's mood was somewhat gloomy.
Since he was now stuck at the Level 20 bottleneck, the System's level cap had locked his experience bar down tight.
These Foundation Establishment demon beasts, which would originally have provided a handsome sum of experience...
Produced no "+XP" prompt tone at all once slain.
That empty feeling of working for free left Mo Fan with an indescribable discomfort.
"Whatever. A mosquito's leg is still meat—can't let it go to waste."
Mo Fan heaved a sigh, and with his nose pinched, he swept every one of the still relatively intact deformed beast corpses into his Storage Pouch.
Having swept the battlefield clean, the undead legion continued pushing on toward the deepest reaches of the cliff bottom.
As their steps carried them ever deeper, Mo Fan keenly sensed that the surrounding environment had begun to undergo a deeply unsettling change.
The mist here was no longer that ordinary grayish-white of the fringe.
Amid the roiling vapor, an exceedingly faint dark red had begun, most abruptly, to mingle in.
At first, this dark red appeared only as an occasional wisp—like a red thread accidentally staining a swath of gray cloth.
But as they walked deeper and deeper, that dark red gradually multiplied and thickened.
They were like slender little threads of blood, suspended in the air, eerily mixed into the vapor, giving off a stomach-turning stench of rust and blood.
More terrifying still.
The surrounding environment was growing quieter and quieter.
Before, advancing through the mist, though it too had been full of unknown dangers...
At least he could still hear the demon beasts' frenzied screeching, the crawling scrape of scales against rock, and the occasional distant thud from afar.
But upon reaching this region of mist drifting with threads of blood.
There was no sound at all.
No cry of subterranean venomous insects. No wind-sound of the high-mountain gale pouring down into the cliff bottom.
Even Unit 004, its body like an armored vehicle—that ear-shattering echo produced when its exceedingly heavy bone-white feet trod upon the hard rock...
The instant it spread outward, it was as if this thick blood-mist devoured and absorbed it whole and raw...
Swiftly dissolving away into nothingness, eerie to the utmost extreme.
Absolute death-stillness.
"..."
Riding on Unit 003's back, Mo Fan's brows knotted tight together, a layer of cold sweat already seeping from his palms.
It wasn't only he who felt the oppression.
Even the undead creatures under his command now, unexpectedly, showed a kind of instinctive "flinching"!
That huge-framed Necrotic Centipede, which had all along been dutifully roving the outermost edge of the formation on sentry duty—
At this moment, its densely-packed bone-white jointed legs were trembling beyond its control...
Its entire huge body beginning, involuntarily, to contract and draw in bit by bit toward the position where Mo Fan was.
Mo Fan knew perfectly well this absolutely wasn't because they felt afraid—the undead had no such emotion as fear.
It was because, within this surrounding blood-red mist, there lingered some exceedingly terrifying aura of an extremely high rank!
That aura was, from the level of Law itself, instinctively and most brazenly bearing down upon the soul-fire in these low-tier undead's eye sockets, making them feel submission and trembling!
"We can't go any further forward."
The range of normal, naked-eye vision was already severely obstructed here—he couldn't even make out the scene beyond ten meters.
Mo Fan decisively raised his hand, signaling the entire undead legion to halt.
He drew in a deep breath of the frigid air laced with the reek of blood, and concentrated all of his spiritual power, holding nothing back, upon his two eyes.
"Death Vision—open!"
Hummm——!
The grayish-white god's-eye view, like an unseen ripple, ripped apart the layered blood-mist before him in an instant...
And went scouting madly toward the deepest reaches of the cliff bottom.
However.
The instant that energy-world—which ought to have been death-still gray and white—presented itself in Mo Fan's mind.
Mo Fan's movements came to a complete halt.
He was like a stone carving suddenly weathered by a thousand years, his very breath and heartbeat frozen in that single instant.
Because, within his [ Death Vision ].
In the endless depths of the mist ahead, there had not appeared the densely-packed demon-beast points of light he'd anticipated.
He saw only a single shade of color.
An exceedingly dim, yet extreme-to-the-utmost, shade of blood-red!
That was no point of light at all! Nor was it an ordinary cluster of life-fire representing some high-tier demon beast!
It was too vast.
So enormous it nearly occupied the entirety of the field of view in the Death Vision ahead of Mo Fan!
Under that grayish-white filter, it was like an unbroken, colossal blood-red mountain range...
Soundlessly and immovably coiled, deep in the very depths of this cliff-bottom mist!
Even though the aura radiating from that "blood-red mountain range" was already exceedingly faint—faint as a candle guttering in the wind.
Even though he now stood who-knew-how-far a distance from that terrifying existence.
Nonetheless.
The instant his Death Vision truly brushed against that lingering wisp of surviving aura...
An ultimate horror shot through Mo Fan's entire body like an electric current!
There was no way he could forget this aura.
This was precisely—back when he'd first opened his Tier-1 Death Vision—
The one coiled in the deepest depths of that mass-grave mist...
The Blood-Red Python!
"..."
The expression on Mo Fan's face, in this moment, froze completely solid.
He'd kept feeling, all along, that his strength had shot up by leaps and bounds these past few months...
That not only was his foundation deep, but he now commanded an undead army armed to the teeth.
He'd originally assumed that with his current paper strength, on par with Peak Foundation Establishment...
Even if he encountered that monster lurking at the cliff bottom all those years ago again, he'd at least have earned the right to fight it head-on.
But not until now—when his Tier-2 Death Vision had truly glimpsed even a single wisp of the aura leaking off that terrifying existence—
Did he despairingly discover just how absurdly wrong he'd been.
That aura's energy tier and its Law pressure had long since far, far surpassed the so-called Foundation Establishment stage!
Gulp.
Mo Fan's Adam's apple rolled up and down with difficulty as he swallowed a mouthful of exceedingly parched saliva.
A judgment that plunged him into despair slowly surfaced in his mind, like a heavy hammer blow.
"Golden Core..."
"...Peak?!"