The long, chaotic day finally came to a close.
But Mo Fan didn't walk toward the hard wooden bed to catch up on sleep.
His mind hadn't fully recovered—he knew that. But he also knew that on Hundred Forging Peak, a mountain populated entirely by freaks, he wouldn't sleep soundly until he'd mapped out every inch of the terrain around him.
Mo Fan slipped back through the hidden passage and descended ten meters underground, back to the undead base.
To avoid making too much noise during excavation, he didn't summon Summon No. 004—that armored-vehicle-sized bulldozer.
Instead, he called up only Summon No. 003: the most agile of his summons, with its razor-sharp beast claws.
"003. Follow this rock seam and keep digging down."
Mo Fan issued the order.
Summon No. 003's blade-like claws—built for killing—became, in this moment, the most efficient excavation tools imaginable.
It worked like a tireless pangolin, boring silently through the dense rock layer, while Mo Fan followed behind, packing the broken stone and loose earth into the tunnel walls to prevent collapse.
Man and leopard. Underground, lightless, relentless. Three-plus hours of brutal earthwork.
RUMBLE——
Without warning, a deep, muffled crack sounded from ahead.
Summon No. 003's claws drove into the solid composite rock face—and with a violent splintering groan, the entire wall shattered like broken glass and caved inward.
A cold wind surged through the breach—stale, heavy, carrying the thick smell of Yin energy and ancient rot, the breath of something that had been sealed away for an age.
It hit Mo Fan's robes and sent them snapping.
"We're through?!"
Mo Fan's focus sharpened instantly. He waved the billowing dust aside and stepped carefully to the edge of the opening.
His pupils contracted.
What lay beyond was not some narrow natural cave.
It was a main mining shaft—wide enough for five horse-drawn carts to travel abreast, its ceiling soaring dozens of feet overhead.
In the faint ambient light, Mo Fan could make out the shaft walls clearly.
They were scarred with age and erosion, but the clean-cut faces left by axes and chisels, the massive metal support pillars driven deep into the rock to anchor formation arrays—all of it spoke silently of the era when Azure Cloud Sect had mined this place at full scale...
When they had split mountains and bent the earth to their will.
"So this is the abandoned main vein shaft beneath Hundred Forging Peak..."
Staring into that deep, unknown passage—a throat that seemed to lead straight into the abyss—Mo Fan's finely-tuned survival instincts immediately seized control.
He stopped himself cold. Pressed down the urge to jump in and explore.
My level is too low. Going in person is just asking to die. If there's a mutated high-tier beast down there, I won't even have a back door to run through.
While he was calculating how to scout the area, a faint rustling drifted up from below the breach.
Several large, low-tier Mine Rats—their eyes degenerated to mere slits—were climbing up the rock face, drawn by the sound of the wall collapsing, poking their heads through to investigate.
"Ready-made scouts."
Mo Fan's eyes went cold. His wrist flicked—fast.
Thwk!
A poison-coated bone dagger buried itself precisely in the skull of the fattest Mine Rat, pinning it to the rock wall. One hit, one kill.
The rest scattered instantly, vanishing into the dark like a splash of black ink.
Mo Fan walked forward, pulled the dagger free, and looked down at the fresh corpse. He pulled up the System panel.
[ Current CPU Load: 51 / 55 ]
Four points of spare capacity... Mo Fan set his jaw.
Running this close to the limit is going to be miserable. But I need to map this place. Worth it.
He carved two points out of that remaining four.
"Rise."
He pressed one finger to the Mine Rat's corpse.
Hmmmm——
A small grayish-white summoning array flickered to life beneath the body. Flesh dissolved and fell away in seconds.
When it was done, a palm-sized Skeleton Rat—its bones faintly luminescent with green light—clicked and rattled to its feet.
"Go."
Mo Fan sat cross-legged at the edge of the breach, in the relative safety of the upper tunnel.
He drew a slow breath, closed his eyes, and forced a visual link with the low-tier construct—two points of CPU Load, barely enough to hold a connection.
[ WARNING: Soul Strength approaching critical threshold (53/55) ]
The moment the mental link snapped open, a tearing, bloated pain detonated through Mo Fan's skull—like someone had crammed a tangled ball of wire directly into his brain.
He clenched his jaw until his teeth ached, veins rising on his forehead, and held on.
The image slowly resolved.
Through the Skeleton Rat's ground-level perspective, the already-vast mining shaft expanded in Mo Fan's perception into something enormous—a subterranean city, crushing in its scale.
Massive boulders loomed like inverted mountains. The rat moved on all fours, silent and swift, threading through the gaps between rocks.
As the Skeleton Rat pushed deeper, Mo Fan began reading the ecology of the outer shaft.
Through the black-and-white-gray of [ Death Vision ], the outer zone was surprisingly clean.
Occasional piles of discarded ore lined the walls—faint glimmers of star-iron slag, fragments of purple mica—but aside from a few low-tier poisonous insects crawling past, there were almost no life signatures from anything large.
Too clean...
Mo Fan puzzled over it briefly—then something Zhao Ziwei had mentioned clicked into place, and the ecological logic assembled itself in his mind.
Of course. This outer shaft gets visited regularly by the senior brothers and sisters.
Cultivators didn't have experience bars. Killing monsters didn't level them up.
For Foundation Establishment disciples exiled to this back mountain, the pelts and bones of low-tier Spirit Beasts were worthless. They came down here to scavenge unmined ore deposits, or harvest Yin-grown spirit herbs.
As long as the beasts didn't actively attack, they couldn't be bothered wasting precious Mana on a slaughter.
That regular foot traffic kept the high-tier beasts pushed back from the outer zone—and paradoxically created a strange micro-ecosystem where the lowest-tier creatures could still eke out an existence.
Outer zone is manageable. Keep going.
Mo Fan ground through the headache and directed the Skeleton Rat deeper.
Gradually, the marks of human excavation thinned and disappeared. The tunnel gave way to jagged, irregular natural caverns.
The Yin energy in the air grew thicker—in [ Death Vision ], it looked almost solid, like gray water flowing through the dark.
The Skeleton Rat slowed.
In this zone where the living had no business being, Mo Fan began to see things through the rat's eyes that made his stomach tighten.
Cave-in craters, wide and deep.
Half-buried in the earth: the remains of cultivators, their bones blackened by ancient toxic miasma, their tattered robes still clinging to them.
Whatever had happened here when Azure Cloud Sect was mining at full operation—it had been catastrophic.
It also provided a solid, sobering piece of logic:
Even inner sect disciples were still flesh and blood before reaching Golden Core and achieving true bigu (freedom from mortal needs).
In the oxygen-starved depths, or breathing a millennium-old toxic miasma potent enough to blacken bone—they died just as badly as anyone else.
No wonder even Lin Dong the Madman, even Li Banxia the poison specialist, won't go deep into this place.
Mo Fan felt a chill move through him.
And yet—in this place that even cultivators avoided—life had found a way. A twisted, wrong kind of way.
The Skeleton Rat's vision picked up several massive life signatures: deep red, shading into purple.
A mutated giant centipede, dozens of feet long, coiled against the rock face. A venomous human-faced spider, nearly indistinguishable from the surrounding dark.
These were the true rulers of this underground world.
Then something strange happened.
The Skeleton Rat scurried directly beneath the mutated centipede's antennae—click, click, click—and the creature, which could kill a Qi Condensation cultivator in a single strike, didn't move.
Didn't even twitch.
The absolute stealth of the undead...
Back in the base, Mo Fan felt the corner of his mouth pull into a quiet, relieved smile.
These creatures had spent their entire lives underground. Their eyes were nearly useless. They hunted entirely by heat signature and scent—the warm, blood-rich smell of the living.
And a Skeleton Rat had no body heat. No blood. Not a single trace of a life signature.
To the senses of these underground apex predators, what had just scurried past was nothing more than a pebble rolling in the wind.
With a scout like this, mapping is going to be absolutely broken.
The Skeleton Rat ran on tirelessly—how far, Mo Fan couldn't say—until the shaft ahead simply ended.
It had reached the edge of a massive pit. Bottomless. Yawning.
Hmmmm——!
The instant it drew close, a spike of pain drove through Mo Fan's skull.
[ Death Vision ] only showed black, white, and gray—but even through the Skeleton Rat's faint, limited perception, Mo Fan could feel it: something rising from the bottom of that pit.
Something deeply wrong. A presence that seemed to warp the light and space around it, bending them inward like a drain.
That was not ordinary Yin energy. That was a mutated toxic miasma—one that had been accumulating and festering for millions of years.
And at the bottom of that abyss, barely visible—countless writhing shapes, their auras monstrous and frenzied, crawling over each other in the dark.
The sight of it was like looking at a living, breathing hell made of flesh.
This place is absolutely, categorically beyond anything I can touch right now.
Mo Fan's scalp went cold. The visceral, bone-deep sense of mortal danger hit him so hard he felt like he couldn't breathe.
Without a moment's hesitation, he fired the highest-priority command through the link.
"Retreat. Turn around. Come back the way you came. NOW."
But— Before that palm-sized Skeleton Rat could turn its fragile little neck—
No sound. No warning. No visible attack trajectory.
CRACK.
In the visual feed, one moment: gray darkness, the abyss. The next moment: absolute black. Total, annihilating nothing.
The Skeleton Rat—along with the soul-fire burning in its eye sockets—was erased in less than one-thousandth of a second. Reduced to ash. Gone.
"AAARGH——!!"
Mo Fan—sitting safely in the upper tunnel—felt it as if a ten-thousand-pound iron hammer had been swung directly into the back of his skull, full force, no mercy.
The mental link was severed by something that could not be resisted.
He screamed. Both hands flew to his head. His entire body curled inward like a shrimp, convulsing against the cold stone floor.
Two streams of blood—uncontrolled, unstoppable—poured from his nostrils and dripped into the dust.