However, in this nick of time, Mo Fan bit the tip of his tongue hard, borrowing that stab of sharp pain to forcibly recall his scattered consciousness.
His hands clamped onto the white jade railing beside him like iron pincers.
His knuckles turned white from excessive force, and his nails scraped an extremely ear-piercing friction sound against the hard jade.
He forcibly halted his downward plummet.
"That was close..."
Mo Fan lay sprawled on the steps, gasping heavily for air, cold sweat instantly soaking his back.
If he had really rolled down those thirty thousand steps completely defenseless, even if he had a hundred Summon No. 004s as meat cushions, he would have been smashed into meat paste.
Looking up at that inner sect guard who was as cold as a heavenly god...
Mo Fan didn't humiliate himself further by begging for mercy, nor did he argue with incompetent rage.
He merely gritted his teeth, and like an unlucky bastard who had just climbed to the top of Mount Everest only to be told "the attraction is closed today," silently turned around.
Dragging his legs that had already begun to tremble like sifting chaff, he shuffled down, step by step, along the path he came from.
Going up a mountain is easy; going down is hard. Especially a descent accompanied by an extreme psychological drop.
A long night.
Practically gritting his teeth and relying on the sheer obsession of wanting to "claim a mountain as king," Mo Fan forcefully finished walking down those Ascension Steps that seemed to have no end.
When he returned to the foot of the mountain, the sky was completely dark.
But he didn't stop to rest.
Taking advantage of the cold night wind, he felt his way in the dark and plunged headfirst into the small path leading to the barren mountain on the side.
There were no stairs paved with white jade, no smooth road blessed by array formations.
There was only a rugged, winding goat path overgrown with weeds and littered with crushed stones.
Even with his consummate Iron Bones Stage physical foundation, under this kind of almost non-stop, extreme forced march, he suffered tremendously.
The next day.
The sun was high in the sky, blazing hot.
After a day and a night of extreme torture, Mo Fan—whose legs were trembling uncontrollably—finally dragged steps as heavy as lead.
Panting heavily, he climbed to the summit of Hundred Forging Peak, looking just like a refugee who had fled a famine for three thousand miles.
"Huff... huff... finally arrived."
Mo Fan haphazardly wiped the sweat mixed with dust from his face using his mud-caked sleeve, trying hard to calm his heart that felt like it was going to jump out of his chest.
He desperately built up his psychological defenses in his mind, cheering himself on frantically:
"It's fine! The beginning of everything is hard! Although this place is a bit remote and the road up the mountain was a bit tough to walk, as long as I've reached the inner sect, everything will get better!"
"Didn't the fat elder say it? Profound heritage, secretive lineage, an otherworldly expert! This is absolutely a standard hidden map configuration!"
Carrying this beautiful anticipation, Mo Fan raised his head full of hope, looking toward his "new home" ahead.
However.
In the next second, the newly squeezed-out, hope-filled smile on his face instantly froze dead.
His entire being was as if struck by an immobilize spell, pinned dead in place.
His pupils constricted violently.
The visual impact brought to him by the scene before his eyes was ten thousand times stronger than those two inner sect security guards yesterday!
There was no sea of clouds wreathed in immortal mist, no magnificent white jade archway, no spirit cranes crying in unison.
There wasn't even a fucking flat plaza paved with bluestone slabs!
Presented before him was a broken dirt clearing overgrown with waist-high, wild weeds.
Right in the dead center of the clearing stood a solitary, dilapidated, teetering wooden door frame—barely two meters tall and not even cleanly stripped of its bark!
Above that crooked door frame that looked like it would collapse at any moment, a weather-beaten, broken wooden plaque hung precariously by a few rusty iron nails.
The red paint on the wooden plaque had long since peeled off for the most part. On it, one could vaguely make out the three large characters: Hundred Forging Peak (Bai Lian Feng).
But the most fatal part was that the left half of the character "Forging" (Lian),and the "Fire" radical had been snapped off by some evil gust of wind.
It left only the right half.
At first glance, the plaque clearly read: Hundred East Peak (Bai Dong Feng)!
"..."
Mo Fan stood blankly on the spot.
He mechanically turned his head, glancing at the Azure Cloud inner sect main peak in the distant sky—shimmering with iridescent divine light and thousands of auspicious auras under the sun.
Then he turned his head back, looking at this broken wooden frame before him that looked even worse than the door to the village widow's pigpen.
The ultimate online shopping: Expectation vs. Reality.
"This is so fucking..."
Under his hat, Mo Fan opened his dry lips, his soul issuing an extremely profound question:
"Am I even in the same world?"
A bleak autumn wind, mixed with shriveled dust, blew past extremely fittingly for the occasion.
It swept up a few withered, yellow fallen leaves, spinning them around Mo Fan's feet.
One fallen leaf even slapped onto his face—a face completely devoid of the will to live—with a smack.
Covered in large and small bundles of luggage, carrying the coarse-cloth-wrapped [ Pale Bone Scepter ] on his back...
Mo Fan looked like a stone statue that had been weathered for a thousand years, standing before this dilapidated mountain gate for a full half hour.
Half an hour later.
BANG!
Mo Fan's "corporate veteran" mentality, which he had maintained for so long through tumbling at the bottom rungs of society—that string named rationality—finally completely collapsed under this extreme disparity!
He viciously ripped the fallen leaf off his face and slammed the bundle in his hand heavily onto the ground!
"Fatty! I FUCK YOUR GRAND-UNCLE!!!"
Mo Fan's eyes were blood-red.
Pointing toward the high-and-mighty main peak, he cursed wildly at the empty barren mountain.
Saliva flew everywhere, his voice filled with the despair and grief of someone who had been scammed out of his underwear by a pyramid scheme organization:
"You dead fatty! Shady middleman! Is this what you call profound heritage?! Is this what you call an otherworldly expert?!"
"And 'quiet and elegant'?! This place is fucking worse than the servant district in the outer court!"
"At least the servant district has a roof that can block the wind! Look at this door frame, a gust of wind could blow it over and crush someone to death!"
"I acted so damn hard on the arena stage! I schemed so meticulously, keeping a low profile and groveling to drill my way into this inner sect, thinking I could have a private piece of turf, thinking I could make a fortune in silence!"
Mo Fan hopped madly in place, letting out an ultimate roar that struck straight at the soul:
"I came here to play the pig to eat the tiger! Not to fucking play the pig to eat PIG FEED!!!"
At this very moment.
Mo Fan's manic appearance—eyes red, hair disheveled, cursing the heavens and pointing at the earth—bizarrely overlapped across time and space with Lin Tian...
The number one seed who had vomited blood and roared in anger after being provoked by the paparazzi on the outer court finals stage.
The gears of fate always meshed so precisely. He who scams others, will eventually be scammed elsewhere.
"Huff... huff..."
Mo Fan cursed for a full fifteen minutes, greeting the fat elder's ancestors for eighteen generations.
Tired of cursing, he was like a deflated balloon, slumping his butt onto the weed-covered yellow dirt.
Looking at this godforsaken place, thinking about how the "inner sect designation" he had sought through untold hardships turned out to be this piece of trash, he wanted to cry but had no tears.
Just as Mo Fan was dejected, considering whether to let Mo Yan out to hack down this broken door frame first to vent his anger...
Rustle, rustle, rustle...
From the waist-high wild grass behind the broken wooden door frame, a rustling sound suddenly emerged.
Immediately after, there was a bout of extremely violent coughing, as if someone were trying to cough their lungs out.
"Cough, cough, cough... cough, cough..."
A living person?!
Mo Fan jolted in fright. In this barren mountain and wild wilderness, was there another living creature besides him?
He instantly bounced up from the ground, his hand already resting on the Pale Bone Scepter at his waist. His eyes turned cold, staring dead at the swaying patch of grass.
Swish.
The grass was parted.
A ragged, travel-worn figure drilled out from inside.
When Mo Fan saw that figure clearly, his eyes abruptly widened completely.
It was a young man who didn't look very old, but the clothes on his body were so tattered you couldn't tell their original color, covered in various scorched holes.
The most horrifying part was that this person's head and face were completely covered in pitch-black furnace ash and black smoke left by an explosion.
His hair stood straight up on end, as if he had been struck by lightning.
His face was so thoroughly caked in thick, greasy soot that he looked like a cartoon character who had just swallowed a stick of dynamite.
As his jaw dropped in shock, his widened eyes and teeth stood out with a comical, stark contrast against the grime.
He looked exactly like an unlucky bastard who had just been rescued after digging coal in an illegal black coal mine for three days and three nights!
"Holy shit! What the hell is that?!"
Startled by this highly visually impactful "soot demon" image, Mo Fan instantly bounced backward over two meters.
With a CLANG, he drew the Pale Bone Scepter, ready to face a formidable enemy.
And the soot-covered youth who had drilled out of the grass clearly hadn't expected someone to be outside either.
He looked at the guy outside the door—draped in beast skins, clothes tattered, face covered in mud and sweat, eyes even holding killing intent and despair—and was also given a massive fright.
"Ouch!"
The soot-covered youth cried out in alarm.
The pitch-black object he was gripping in his hand—which looked like unknown metallic wreckage—almost dropped to the ground, and he similarly jumped a large step backward.
The scene froze in this moment.
One was a vagrant who had tumbled up from the bottom rung, just experienced a day and night of hellish climbing, and was covered in a murderous aura.
The other was a soot-caked freak who looked like he had just tunneled his way out of a collapsed coal mine, blinking his overly conspicuous bright eyes rapidly through a thick mask of black ash.
The two of them just stood there, separated by that teetering "Hundred East Peak" broken wooden door frame, their eyes meeting.
Staring wide-eyed at each other.
An autumn wind blew past, sweeping up a fallen leaf between the two of them.
The atmosphere, amidst a suffocating terror and awkwardness, instantly solidified.