### Chapter 1: The Flesh and Bone Separatory
The first thing that registered was the smell.
It was a thick, suffocating miasma that clung to the inside of his throat like oily sludge. It was the sickly sweet stench of coagulated blood mixed with the sharp, acidic bite of preservation chemicals, underscored by the unmistakable, cloying rot of decaying flesh.
Li Mo gagged, his eyes snapping open. He immediately squeezed them shut again as a searing, needle-like pain pierced his temples. It felt as though someone had taken a rusted iron chisel and hammered it directly into his frontal lobe.
*Where am I?* The last thing he remembered was the screeching of tires, the blinding glare of headlights on a rain-slicked intersection, and the crushing impact of metal against his ribs. He should be dead. He should be in a hospital morgue. He certainly shouldn't be lying on a freezing, damp stone floor, surrounded by a chorus of muffled weeping and terrified whimpers.
As he forced his eyes open again, the blinding pain in his head surged, accompanied by a flood of alien memories. They were disjointed, chaotic, and utterly terrifying.
*A drought-stricken village. A weeping mother. An uncle with cold, dead eyes handing over a pouch of low-grade silver. A brutal, agonizing march in chains across a desolate wasteland. Towering, jagged peaks that pierced blood-red clouds. The Netherbone Sect.*
The memories violently fused with his own, settling into a horrifying mosaic of reality. He was no longer the twenty-something office worker who had died in a mundane traffic accident. He was now Li Mo, a fifteen-year-old peasant boy who had been sold for three bags of moldy grain and a handful of silver to one of the most notorious Demonic Sects in the Southern Wastelands.
He hadn't been sold to be a glorious disciple soaring on flying swords. He had been sold as livestock. As a servant. As expendable labor.
Li Mo slowly pushed himself up from the wet stone floor, his frail, malnourished body trembling with exertion. He looked around. He was in a massive, cavernous hall carved directly into the belly of a black mountain. The walls were uneven obsidian, slick with moisture and lit by the eerie, flickering glow of green ghost-fires suspended in iron braziers.
Around him were dozens of other youths, boys and girls ranging from twelve to eighteen, all dressed in identical, coarse gray hemp robes that felt like sandpaper against the skin. Most were huddled together in shivering masses, weeping quietly. A few stared blankly at the walls, their minds already broken by the sheer terror of their circumstances.
"Get up, you miserable sacks of meat!"
A voice, booming and grating like grinding stones, echoed through the cavern. The weeping instantly ceased, replaced by the sound of terrified scrambling as the youths fought to stand at attention.
From the shadows emerged a towering figure. He wore the black and crimson robes of an Outer Sect Disciple. His face was gaunt, his skin a sickly, pale grey, and his eyes were completely devoid of the whites, replaced by solid, terrifying black pools. In his right hand, he casually twirled a whip. Li Mo's newly acquired memories recognized it with a jolt of horror: it was a *Spine Whip*, crafted from the vertebrae of a failed servant, held together by dark demonic tendons.
"I am Deacon Zhao," the man sneered, his gaze sweeping over the trembling youths like a butcher assessing cuts of pork. "Welcome to the Flesh and Bone Separatory. You are the newest batch of servant disciples. Actually, 'disciple' is a generous term. You are grubs. You are the lowest form of existence within the Netherbone Sect."
Deacon Zhao began to pace, the bone whip clicking softly against the stone floor.
"Our Netherbone Sect is built upon the foundation of death," Zhao continued, his voice echoing menacingly. "We cultivate the Dao of the Netherworld, manipulating corpses, blood, and bone to grasp immortality. But to forge an army of iron-corpse puppets, to refine pills of crimson blood, we require raw materials. And raw materials must be... processed."
He stopped and pointed a long, grey finger toward the far end of the cavern. Li Mo strained his eyes to see. In the gloom, there were rows upon rows of massive stone tables, each equipped with rusted iron shackles, deeply stained drainage grooves, and an array of horrifying, blood-crusted tools: saws, cleavers, hooks, and vats bubbling with noxious green liquid.
"This workshop is your new world," Deacon Zhao declared. "Every day, the sect generates casualties. Outer sect disciples who fail their trials. Enemies slain by our elders. Rogue cultivators hunted down for their resources. Mortal martial artists captured for experiments. When they die, their bodies are brought here. Your job is simple: you will separate the flesh from the bone. You will drain the blood into the containment vats. You will scrape the marrow. You will boil the fat."
Several of the younger girls screamed at the description. One boy vomited violently onto the stone floor.
Deacon Zhao didn't even blink. He flicked his wrist. The spine whip cracked through the air with a sound like a thunderclap. The boy who had vomited was struck cleanly across the chest. He didn't even have time to scream before his ribcage collapsed inward with a sickening crunch, and he was thrown backward, sliding to a halt as a lifeless, bloody heap.
The cavern fell into a silence so profound it was deafening. Li Mo stopped breathing, his heart hammering against his ribs like a trapped bird.
*He killed him. Just like that. Over nothing.* The reality of the Demonic Sect crashed down on Li Mo with the weight of a mountain. There were no laws here. There were no human rights. Life was literally cheaper than the dirt on his boots.
"Rule number one," Deacon Zhao said mildly, retracting the bloody whip. "Do not dirty the floor outside of the drainage zones. Rule number two: Every servant has a daily quota. You will fully process three corpses a day. If you fail to meet your quota, your own body will be used to make up the difference."
Zhao signaled with his hand, and two hulking, stitched-together abominations—Corpse Puppets—shambled out from the darkness. They grabbed the dead boy by his ankles and dragged him away toward the processing tables, leaving a thick smear of blood across the floor.
"You will now be distributed to your stations," Zhao barked. "There is a manual on your workbench. The *Nether Qi Gathering Manual*. It is the absolute lowest grade of cultivation art, but it will give you just enough Qi to keep you from passing out from the corpse poison, and enough strength to saw through a cultivator's femur. Learn it in your 'free time'. Now, to work!"
Li Mo was shoved toward Station 42. It was a massive slab of stained granite. The tools laid out before him looked like they belonged in a medieval torture chamber.
*Calm down. Think. Panic equals death,* Li Mo ordered himself, drawing on years of corporate stress management, though none of it applied to dismembering human bodies.
He needed to survive. He was thrust into a brutal, unforgiving world where the strong devoured the weak. He had no powerful backing, no exceptional talent, and a body so malnourished a strong gust of wind could knock him over.
*I need to lay low. I need to be invisible. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down... or in this case, refined into a blood pill.*
Two more Corpse Puppets lumbered over, unceremoniously dumping a heavy sack onto Li Mo's table. The sack reeked of iron and rot. The puppets retreated, leaving Li Mo alone with his task.
With trembling hands, Li Mo untied the coarse rope binding the sack and pulled it back.
It was a man, or what was left of one. He was heavily muscled, his skin covered in intricate, faded tattoos. His chest had been completely caved in by a massive, blunt-force impact, and half his face was missing, as if chewed off by a wild beast. He appeared to be a mortal martial artist, likely captured for sport or resources.
Li Mo swallowed hard, fighting down the bile rising in his throat. He reached out to grab the man's shoulder to position him over the drainage groove.
The moment Li Mo's bare hand made contact with the cold, dead flesh of the corpse, a mechanical, utterly emotionless voice chimed directly inside his brain.
***[Ding! Contact with deceased target detected.]***
Li Mo jerked his hand back as if he had been burned, his eyes darting around wildly. *Who said that?* He looked left and right. The servant at Station 41 was violently sobbing while trying to saw through a ribcage. The servant at Station 43 was staring blankly at the wall. No one was looking at him.
Cautiously, terrified that Deacon Zhao might be watching, Li Mo reached out and touched the corpse's shoulder once more.
***[Target: Deceased Mortal Martial Artist (Bone Forging Realm).]***
***[Cause of Death: Crushing trauma to the heart and lungs.]***
***[Original Lifespan: 85 Years.]***
***[Age at Death: 32 Years.]***
***[Remaining Unlived Lifespan: 53 Years.]***
***[Lifespan Looting System activated. Do you wish to extract the remaining 53 years of lifespan? Y/N]***
Li Mo's breath hitched. His eyes widened to the size of saucers.
*System? A golden finger?* He had read enough web novels in his past life to know exactly what this was. He wasn't just dumped into this hellscape to die as cannon fodder. He had a cheat!
*Loot lifespan?* He read the prompt again, his mind racing. The prompt implied that because this martial artist had been killed prematurely at 32, the remaining 53 years of his destined natural lifespan were just... sitting there, waiting to be taken.
"Yes," Li Mo whispered silently in his mind. "Extract it."
***[Extracting... Extraction complete. 53 years of mortal lifespan added to Host's reserves.]***
A sudden, incredibly soothing warmth traveled from the corpse, up Li Mo's arm, and settled into the center of his chest. It felt like standing in a ray of pure sunshine after being trapped in a freezing blizzard. He felt a phantom weight settle within his soul—a reservoir of pure, unadulterated time.
At the same time, the corpse on the table seemed to undergo a subtle change. It didn't decay faster, but it suddenly felt *empty*. The residual spiritual weight of a once-living human was entirely gone. It was now truly just meat and bone.
Li Mo immediately pulled up the interface in his mind.
**[Host: Li Mo]**
**[Age: 15]**
**[Cultivation Realm: Mortal (None)]**
**[Lifespan Reserves: 53 Years]**
**[Cultivation Method: None]**
**[Spells/Skills: None]**
*Lifespan reserves. What can I do with this? Can I live longer?*
As if answering his thought, the system provided a mental tooltip.
***[Lifespan Reserves can be injected into the Host's body to artificially accelerate time regarding Cultivation Methods, Spells, and Martial Arts. One year of injected lifespan equates to one year of flawless, uninterrupted, and bottleneck-free practice.]***
Li Mo's heart skipped a beat.
*Flawless, uninterrupted practice? No bottlenecks?* In the cultivation world, talent was everything. A genius might break through a realm in a month, while trash might take ten years to achieve the same result. But with this system, talent was entirely irrelevant. If a technique required fifty years of agonizing, grueling practice for a normal person to master, Li Mo could just dump fifty years of looted lifespan into it and master it instantly!
He was standing in the corpse processing workshop of a Demonic Sect. Dozens of cultivators, martial artists, and mortals died violently every single day and were brought right to his table. It was a factory of death, but to him, it was an infinite gold mine of time!
He forced himself to calm down. *Breathe, Li Mo. Breathe.* If anyone—*anyone*—found out he could steal the essence of time from the dead, he wouldn't just be killed. Demonic cultivators had a thousand ways to extract secrets from a soul. He would be refined into a living artifact, his soul tortured for eternity while they milked his ability.
*Low-key. I must remain absolutely low-key. I am a piece of trash servant. I am afraid, I am weak, and I am obedient. I will hide my strength until I am powerful enough to crush this entire sect with one hand.* Li Mo wiped the sweat from his brow and looked down at his workbench. Beneath a rusted bone-saw lay a thin, dog-eared booklet wrapped in cracked leather. *The Nether Qi Gathering Manual*.
He picked it up. The text was crude, written in hurried, blocky characters. It detailed how to sense the murky, death-aspected spiritual energy in the air and draw it into the body's meridians. The manual explicitly stated that it was a harsh, corrosive method. It forcefully widened meridians, causing immense pain and leaving hidden injuries, all for the sake of quickly producing a meager amount of Qi to resist corpse poison.
It was a garbage technique meant for expendable slaves.
*System,* Li Mo called out in his mind. *Can I inject lifespan into this manual?*
***[Target Technique: Nether Qi Gathering Manual (Low-Tier Mortal Grade). Cost to reach Qi Condensation Level 1: 2 Years of Lifespan. Do you wish to proceed?]***
Li Mo didn't hesitate. "Proceed."
***[Deducting 2 Years of Lifespan... Commencing accelerated cultivation.]***
Instantly, the world around Li Mo seemed to freeze. His consciousness was pulled inward. In his mind's eye, he saw a phantom version of himself sitting cross-legged. The phantom was cultivating the *Nether Qi Gathering Manual*. Days, weeks, and months blurred together in a fraction of a second.
He felt the agonizing burn as the phantom forced the corrosive nether-qi into its frail meridians. He felt the tearing, the bleeding, and the subsequent healing. Because the system guaranteed "flawless" practice, the phantom automatically adjusted the crude technique, minimizing the internal damage while maximizing the Qi absorption.
Two years of bitter, agonizing, non-stop cultivation were compressed into a single heartbeat.
*Boom!*
A muffled explosion echoed within Li Mo's dantian. A weak, but distinctly real stream of cold, grey energy began to circulate through his body. The lingering fatigue in his muscles vanished. The crushing pain in his head from the transmigration faded away. Even the suffocating stench of the workshop seemed less offensive, as the nether-qi in his body naturally repelled the ambient corpse poison.
He opened his eyes. He had broken through to the first level of Qi Condensation!
He was no longer a mortal. He had stepped onto the path of cultivation.
He quickly checked his status.
**[Host: Li Mo]**
**[Age: 15]**
**[Cultivation Realm: Qi Condensation Level 1]**
**[Lifespan Reserves: 51 Years]**
**[Cultivation Method: Nether Qi Gathering Manual (Initiate)]**
**[Spells/Skills: None]**
Li Mo clenched his fists. The physical strength of his frail body had doubled. He felt he could easily shatter a wooden board with a single punch. It wasn't much in the grand scheme of the cultivation world, but in this slaughterhouse, it was the difference between life and death.
He immediately forcefully suppressed his aura. The *Nether Qi Gathering Manual* had a basic concealment function to prevent the volatile nether-qi from leaking out and attracting hostile spirits. Li Mo pushed the grey energy deep into his dantian, ensuring that to anyone looking, he was still just a malnourished, terrified mortal with zero cultivation.
He looked at the corpse of the martial artist. His quota was three bodies a day. If he finished too quickly, it would look suspicious. If he dawdled too much, he would be whipped. He had to be exactly average.
Picking up a large, curved cleaver, Li Mo went to work. The process was sickening. He followed the crude diagrams drawn on the workbench. He drained the dark, coagulating blood into the green vat, which hissed and bubbled hungrily. He stripped the hardened muscles off the bones, tossing the meat into a refuse bin destined for the beast-taming peak. He carefully separated the bones, scrubbing them clean with a harsh acidic solvent before stacking them neatly in a wooden crate.
Despite the gruesome nature of the work, Li Mo found that his newly acquired Qi Condensation Level 1 strength made the physical labor trivial. The cleaver bit through bone cartiledge easily, and the heavy lifting didn't make him break a sweat. He made sure to mimic the heavy breathing and struggling of the servants around him, occasionally pausing to wipe fake sweat from his brow and adopt a pained expression.
Two hours later, he finished the first corpse.
Deacon Zhao strolled past, his solid black eyes locking onto Li Mo. Li Mo immediately hunched his shoulders, trembling slightly, and kept his eyes glued to the floor.
Zhao inspected the crate of bones and the vat of blood. He let out a grunt of mild approval. "Sloppy knife work on the femur, but the marrow is intact. Acceptable. Get your next batch, grub."
He cracked his whip against the stone, moving on to terrorize a young girl who was struggling to lift a severed torso.
Li Mo exhaled a breath he didn't realize he was holding. The facade was working.
Over the next twelve hours, the true horror of the Flesh and Bone Separatory revealed itself. Servants collapsed from exhaustion. Those who dropped their tools or ruined a prime bone were dragged away by the Corpse Puppets, their screams echoing in the dark until they were violently silenced. The miasma of death grew so thick that the green ghost-fires began to dim.
Li Mo received his second corpse. It was an old man, dressed in the tattered remains of a blue scholar's robe.
***[Target: Deceased Rogue Cultivator (Qi Condensation Level 3).]***
***[Cause of Death: Meridian Deviation leading to organ rupture.]***
***[Original Lifespan: 120 Years.]***
***[Age at Death: 98 Years.]***
***[Remaining Unlived Lifespan: 22 Years.]***
***[Loot lifespan? Y/N]***
"Yes," Li Mo thought.
***[22 years of Cultivator lifespan added to Host's reserves.]***
Li Mo noted a difference. The first corpse had yielded "mortal lifespan," while this one yielded "cultivator lifespan." He didn't know if there was a qualitative difference yet, but he happily accepted the 22 years.
His third corpse was a young Outer Sect Disciple of the Netherbone Sect itself, practically severed in half by what looked like a massive sword strike.
***[Target: Deceased Outer Sect Disciple (Qi Condensation Level 4).]***
***[Cause of Death: Bisection by Sharp Aura.]***
***[Original Lifespan: 150 Years.]***
***[Age at Death: 21 Years.]***
***[Remaining Unlived Lifespan: 129 Years.]***
***[Loot lifespan? Y/N]***
Li Mo's eyes widened. *129 years!* "Loot!"
A massive surge of temporal energy flooded into his chest. His reserves shot up to 202 years of lifespan. He was rich in the only currency that truly mattered.
As he was processing the severed disciple, his cleaver caught on a heavy bulge hidden inside the lining of the disciple's blood-soaked robes. Glancing around to ensure Deacon Zhao was nowhere near, Li Mo slipped two fingers into the tear and pulled out a small, gray jade slip.
Memories from the original Li Mo provided context. It was a *Transmission Jade*. Cultivators used them to record techniques, maps, or messages.
Li Mo wiped the blood off the jade and palmed it, slipping it discreetly into his own tattered boot. He would inspect it later, in the privacy of the dark.
By the time a massive bronze gong echoed through the cavern, signaling the end of the shift, Li Mo was physically fine but mentally exhausted from keeping up his terrified act. Out of the forty servants who had started the shift, only twenty-eight remained. Twelve had either collapsed from the corpse poison, failed their quotas, or made a mistake that earned them a fatal strike from Zhao's spine whip.
"Shift ends!" Deacon Zhao roared. "Take your ration pills and return to the pens! Anyone caught wandering the sect grounds will be refined into lamp oil!"
The Corpse Puppets lumbered forward, carrying large iron buckets filled with black, foul-smelling pellets. These were the 'ration pills'—essentially compressed nutrient paste mixed with mild stimulants and just enough medicinal herbs to keep the servants from dying of scurvy or corpse rot.
Li Mo took his single pill. It tasted like ash and rotten cabbage, but he forced it down. His body desperately needed calories, even vile ones.
The surviving servants, a procession of hollow-eyed ghosts, shuffled out of the workshop and down a long, winding tunnel that descended even deeper into the mountain. They arrived at the 'pens'—a massive, damp cave lined with rows of moldy straw mats. There were no doors, no privacy, and no warmth.
Li Mo found a mat in a dark corner, far away from the entrance. He curled up, his back against the freezing, damp stone wall, pulling his thin knees to his chest. He closed his eyes, mimicking the exhausted sleep of the others around him.
But internally, his mind was razor sharp.
He waited for an hour. The only sounds in the cavern were the hacking coughs of the sick, the quiet weeping of the traumatized, and the scurrying of massive, mutated centipedes across the stone floor.
Ensuring no one was watching, Li Mo carefully retrieved the gray jade slip from his boot. He didn't have divine sense to read it properly like a high-level cultivator, but at Qi Condensation Level 1, he could inject a tiny thread of his nether-qi into the jade to trigger its contents.
He pushed a fraction of his Qi into the smooth stone.
Instantly, a block of text projected directly into his mind.
*『 Corpse-Fire Condensation Art - Outer Sect Spell 』*
*A low-tier spell that utilizes ambient death energy to ignite a pale green flame. The flame does not burn hot; instead, it corrodes flesh, freezes blood, and eats away at spiritual energy. Extremely lethal to mortals and highly effective in stealth attacks against cultivators.*
Li Mo's heart raced. An actual spell! The *Nether Qi Gathering Manual* only gave him raw energy, but a spell gave him a way to use it. If he mastered this, he would have a hidden trump card.
He pulled up the system interface.
***[Target Spell: Corpse-Fire Condensation Art. Cost to reach Initial Mastery: 5 Years. Cost to reach Minor Completion: 15 Years. Cost to reach Major Completion: 30 Years. Cost to reach Flawless Perfection: 60 Years. Do you wish to proceed?]***
Li Mo analyzed his reserves. He had 202 years of lifespan banked. Spending 60 years to completely master an offensive spell was a no-brainer. In the cultivation world, reaching 'Flawless Perfection' in any spell was incredibly rare, usually reserved for old monsters who had spent a century practicing a single technique. Flawless mastery meant instant casting, minimal Qi consumption, and maximized lethality.
"Inject 60 years into the Corpse-Fire Condensation Art," Li Mo commanded silently.
***[Deducting 60 Years of Lifespan... Commencing accelerated spell comprehension.]***
Once again, the world froze. Li Mo's consciousness was dragged into a white void. For sixty perceived years, his phantom self practiced nothing but the Corpse-Fire spell.
He watched the phantom fail, burn its own fingers, and drain its Qi reserves thousands of times. But slowly, the movements became precise. The flow of Qi became optimized. Ten years passed. The green fire ignited instantly. Thirty years passed. The flame grew dense, sticky, and terrifyingly cold.
By the fiftieth year, the phantom didn't even need hand seals. A mere thought summoned a roaring, corrosive inferno of ghost-fire. By the sixtieth year, the phantom could control the temperature and properties of the fire with absolute precision, compressing it into tiny, invisible sparks or expanding it into a massive wave.
*Whoosh.*
Li Mo's eyes snapped open in the dark cavern. He raised his right index finger.
He didn't chant. He didn't move. He simply willed it.
A tiny, pea-sized bead of pale green fire appeared at the tip of his finger. It gave off absolutely no light and no heat. Yet, as Li Mo focused his gaze on it, he could feel the terrifying, corrosive power contained within. If he flicked this tiny bead at a mortal, it would instantly turn them into a puddle of foul-smelling liquid. Even an Outer Sect Disciple at a higher realm would suffer catastrophic damage if caught off guard.
With a thought, the flame vanished back into his dantian. The Qi consumption was practically nonexistent due to his flawless mastery of the spell.
He checked his status panel one last time before resting.
**[Host: Li Mo]**
**[Age: 15]**
**[Cultivation Realm: Qi Condensation Level 1]**
**[Lifespan Reserves: 142 Years]**
**[Cultivation Method: Nether Qi Gathering Manual (Initiate)]**
**[Spells/Skills: Corpse-Fire Condensation Art (Flawless Perfection)]**
A grim, humorless smile touched the corners of Li Mo's lips.
It was his first day in the demonic sect. He was a bottom-feeder, a piece of trash meant to die on the processing tables. The sect treated him as a disposable tool, entirely unaware of the absolute monster they had placed in the center of their slaughterhouse.
Every day, they would bring him the corpses of their enemies, their failures, and their victims. Every day, he would quietly loot the decades and centuries of lifespan they had violently severed.
He would smile at Deacon Zhao. He would act terrified of the Corpse Puppets. He would keep his head bowed and his voice trembling. He would be the most unremarkable, pathetic servant in the history of the Netherbone Sect.
*You cultivate demonic arts, sacrifice virgins, and refine blood pills to live a few decades longer,* Li Mo thought, looking up at the pitch-black ceiling of the cave. *I just have to do my job, chop some meat, and I can steal centuries of time.* He closed his eyes, pulling the thin, scratchy blanket over his shoulders.
He didn't need to fight for resources. He didn't need to explore dangerous ancient ruins. He didn't need to scheme against young masters or vie for the favor of sect elders.
He just needed to survive the daily quotas. He needed to *苟* (Gou)—to lay low, stay hidden, and accumulate power in the shadows. Let the geniuses kill each other. Let the demonic overlords fight the righteous sects.
When they all died, they would end up on his table anyway. And he would take whatever time they had left.
Li Mo allowed the steady rhythm of his perfectly controlled breathing to lull him to sleep. Tomorrow was a new day. And there were plenty of corpses waiting to be processed.