Wu Kuan's heartfelt cry of awe and admiration echoed through the canyon on the morning breeze.
Sunlight pierced the thin mist and fell across Mo Fan's immovable frame.
Had a painter been present, they could have captured a timeless portrait of the ultimate body cultivator in his finest moment.
The problem was—
What Wu Kuan didn't know was that Mo Fan had already lost consciousness.
The moment the invisible armor of [Bone Armament] dissolved, his body staged a full and catastrophic mutiny.
He'd spent days climbing mountains back to back, slept only one night, then dug tunnels for an entire second night without rest.
And then, without a single moment of recovery, he traded a full-force punch with a Foundation Establishment cultivator whose physical constitution was outright abnormal.
His HP bar still had something left in it. His muscles, however, did not care.
The deep tearing sensation across every muscle fiber, the bone-deep ache radiating from his skeleton, the complete and utter collapse of his mental reserves.
It all hit at once, a dam bursting, flooding out every last scrap of his consciousness.
Mo Fan's cold, sharp eyes rolled back in his head, leaving nothing but white.
And then—
Without even managing a single parting line, he toppled forward like a felled tree stump and hit the flagstone face-first with a flat, definitive thud.
Out cold.
A gust of wind drifted through the canyon and deposited a dead leaf on the back of his head.
Silence.
The kind of silence that pressed down on the ears.
"..."
Wu Kuan, still leaning against the rock wall with his numb right arm cradled against his chest, felt the fanaticism and awe freeze solid on his face.
He stared at the junior brother lying face-down and completely unresponsive on the ground.
His brain crashed.
"...What the—?!"
Three full seconds passed before Wu Kuan let out a strangled, pitch-broken shriek.
"WHAT JUST HAPPENED?! HOW DID THE ONE WHO WON END UP ON THE GROUND?!"
He scrambled over, dropped to his knees, and pressed his left hand under Mo Fan's nose.
The breath he found there was faint—barely there—and Wu Kuan's back went cold with a sheet of instant sweat.
"Did I just... did I kill him with one punch?!"
"He just moved in YESTERDAY! He's that genius A-Song's older brother! What have I DONE?!"
The canyon filled with the Eldest Senior Brother's panicked, grief-stricken wailing.
Some indeterminate stretch of time later.
In the boundless dark, Mo Fan's consciousness drifted upward from the abyss like a thread of smoke.
He forced his heavy eyelids open. His vision swam, then slowly sharpened.
Above him: a rough, grayish-black stone ceiling, marked with the unmistakable gouges of blade and sword work.
"Heaven's interior design... has really gone rustic lately, hasn't it?"
His brain was still buffering. He muttered to himself in a daze.
Then the hard surface against his back and the faint smell of earth and soil hit him, and he snapped back to reality.
This wasn't heaven.
This was the stone dwelling he'd built last night, deep in the canyon.
Zzzzz—hrrrrk—zzzzz——
A thunderous, bellows-like snoring erupted from somewhere beside the bed.
Mo Fan turned his head with effort.
Slumped over the edge of the bed, dead asleep, was a young man—drooling so enthusiastically the saliva was nearly reaching the wooden frame.
Zhao Ziwei.
The perpetual layer of soot had been washed from his face. He'd changed into a clean cyan Daoist robe, and without the grime, his features were actually quite pleasant—youthful, even a little sunny.
The dark circles under his eyes and his disheveled hair told the story clearly.
He'd come running the moment he heard something was wrong, kept watch for hours, and only passed out at the bedside when he simply couldn't hold on any longer.
Mo Fan looked at this completely unguarded "Senior Brother" and felt something warm move through his chest.
Hundred Forging Peak is full of freaks. But the people... aren't bad.
He was about to reach over and wake Zhao Ziwei when voices drifted through the stone dwelling's thoroughly non-soundproof wooden door—hushed, but audible.
"Junior Sister Li... please, I'm begging you, you have to fix him..."
Wu Kuan's voice.
But the Wu Kuan speaking now bore no resemblance to the battle-crazed man who'd been roaring about "pure flesh and blood" an hour ago.
This Wu Kuan sounded wretched—teetering on the edge of tears, voice soaked in guilt and barely-contained panic:
"I swear I didn't mean it! He won the spar—I was the one still standing—and then he just went straight down like a plank of wood..."
"If word gets out that I, Wu Kuan, bullied a junior brother to death, I'll be fighting heart demons for the rest of my cultivation life!"
A second voice cut in immediately—cool, crisp, carrying the effortless authority of someone who had never once suffered fools gladly:
"And you call yourself the Eldest Senior Brother?"
"A Foundation Establishment cultivator. Going hand-to-hand with a mortal who has no Spirit Root and nothing but body tempering. Is your skull packed with iron shavings from your broken swords?"
"Junior Sister is absolutely right! Every bit of this is my fault!"
Wu Kuan's self-flagellation outside the door was so thorough it was almost impressive.
"As long as Junior Brother Xiaoqi wakes up in one piece without any lasting damage, I'll give you every last [Sect Contribution Point] I've saved up over the years—all of it!"
"And if that's not enough, I'll be your test subject for half a year!"
"Please."
A cold snort.
The woman's voice thawed by approximately one degree.
"Keep your Contribution Points. I have no use for that pittance. And as for being a test subject—you're too thick-skinned. The data wouldn't be precise enough."
A brief pause.
"He's not going to die. Extreme fatigue and Qi-blood exhaustion—he just fainted. His foundation is considerably more solid than I expected."
Another pause.
"The medicine should be taking effect by now. He's probably waking up. Let's go in."
Creak.
The wooden door swung open.
Morning light spilled through the gap.
Wu Kuan entered first, followed by a tall woman in a plain white apothecary's robe. Her bearing was cold and composed—the kind of composure that came not from effort but from simply being built that way.
The sound of the door woke Zhao Ziwei with a jolt. He sat up, hastily wiped the drool from the corner of his mouth, and looked around in bleary confusion.
Three pairs of eyes turned toward the bed.
Zhao Ziwei—freshly awoken, face full of guilt.
Wu Kuan—frozen in the doorway, expression a masterwork of remorse.
The Senior Sister—standing straight, holding a medicine bowl, expression glacially neutral.
All three stared at Mo Fan, who had just pulled himself upright against the headboard.
Mo Fan recognized the two men immediately. The woman beside them, however—tall, composed, carrying herself with the air of someone who had long since stopped tolerating nonsense—was new.
She was holding a medicine bowl. The conclusion was obvious.
This Senior Sister saved me.
He pressed a hand against the bed and started to push himself up to offer proper thanks.
"Oh thank the heavens, my dear Junior Brother——!"
Wu Kuan saw Mo Fan's eyes open and moved like a man who had just been granted a pardon.
He crossed the room in two steps—there may have been a slight sliding-on-knees component—and planted both large hands firmly on Mo Fan's shoulders, pinning him down.
"Don't move! Don't you dare move!"
Wu Kuan's face was crimson. For a man of his stature, his eyes were looking dangerously wet.
"You have no idea what it was like watching you drop like that—I thought my soul had left my body!"
"Thank every ancestor I had the sense to send a sound transmission talisman to your Senior Sister Li, otherwise I would have been out there in the canyon falling on my own sword to atone!"
"Enough. Stop your wailing, you're giving everyone a headache."
The woman addressed as "Senior Sister Li" pressed her brow into a slight frown and reached out without ceremony, shoving Wu Kuan aside with one hand.
She walked directly to Mo Fan's bedside and held out the medicine bowl.
Up close, Mo Fan finally got a proper look at what was inside.
The liquid was a color that defied easy description—a murky, swirling purple-green, its surface continuously producing thick, viscous bubbles.
As each bubble popped, a smell escaped: part herbal, part something else entirely, something sharp and unidentifiable that had no business being in a healing draught.
By every visual metric available, this was not medicine.
This was what the witch in a children's story brewed when she wanted someone dead.
"Drink this, Junior Brother."
Senior Sister Li extended the bowl toward him, her tone as matter-of-fact as if she were offering a cup of plain water.
"I've been developing this recently—a combination of several mutated spirit plants and Spirit Beast essence blood. It's specifically formulated for restoring the foundation and replenishing Qi and blood after extreme exhaustion."
She added, almost as an afterthought:
"Don't worry about the taste. The efficacy is leagues beyond whatever those hidebound, by-the-book pill refiners on the Main Peak manage to produce."
Mo Fan stared at the bowl.
The liquid was still bubbling.
He swallowed once.
He looked at Wu Kuan—watching with desperate, hopeful eyes.
He looked at Zhao Ziwei—frantically mouthing "just drink it, don't make her mad" from across the room.
The fish doesn't argue with the knife.
She had saved his life. And on Hundred Forging Peak, getting on the wrong side of the resident healer was categorically worse than getting on the wrong side of a sword cultivator.
Live fast, die never. Just do it.
Mo Fan recited this internally, closed his eyes, pinched his nose, tipped the bowl back, and downed the entire thing in one go.
Glug.
The liquid hit his stomach.
He braced for fire. He had already mentally prepared to tank whatever toxicity rating this concoction carried using his HP bar.
Instead—
Something extraordinary happened.
The moment the liquid reached his stomach, there was no burning. No pain. No corrosion.
It dissolved instantly into a surge of pure, warm, vast energy that flooded outward through every channel in his body.
Like spring rain soaking into cracked earth.
The muscles shredded by a night of excavation, the hairline fractures along his bones from the impact—they drank it in desperately, hungrily, the way parched ground drinks the first rain after a drought.
The marrow-deep exhaustion that had been crushing him simply vanished.
In its place: something that felt like being returned, whole and new, to the very beginning.
Mo Fan's eyes snapped open.
He felt the Qi and blood surging through him—fuller than before, stronger than before—and the shock on his face was impossible to conceal.
Hundred Forging Peak really doesn't keep deadweight.
He was genuinely stunned. His body felt like it could put down a bull right now.
He pushed the blanket aside, straightened his slightly rumpled collar, and sat up properly on the bed.
He looked at this Senior Sister—cold exterior, extraordinary skill—and his expression became entirely serious.
He brought both fists together and delivered a formal sect salute, clean and without flaw:
"I am deeply grateful for Senior Sister's life-saving grace. That medicine... the effect is nothing short of miraculous."
He paused.
"I am Lu Xiaoqi. May I ask Senior Sister's name?"