Drip. Drip.
Crimson blood struck cold stone, splattering into tiny red flowers.
Mo Fan lay curled at the edge of the dusty mine tunnel like a dying shrimp, fingers clawing into his own scalp, a strangled, barely-contained scream tearing from his throat.
"AAARGH——!"
Pain. Pain beyond the reach of words.
He knew this feeling. Back at the Abandoned Sword Cliff, a dying Tier-1 Demon-Eye Rabbit had hit him with a mental shockwave—nearly shattered him on the spot.
But compared to what had just been sent screaming through that faint psychic link to rip him apart from the inside, that rabbit's mental retaliation was a newborn's gentle pat on the cheek.
And that had been a low-tier summon. Two points of CPU Load.
By all rights, losing it should have given him nothing worse than a brief dizzy spell.
But whatever lived at the bottom of that abyss hadn't just annihilated the Skeleton Rat in under a thousandth of a second.
It had detected the link. Sensed the connection reaching through the dark toward it.
Without showing itself. Without moving.
With nothing more than a reflexive, instinctive pulse of mental pressure sent across the distance—
It had nearly torn Mo Fan's sea of consciousness apart.
Hmmmm hmmmm hmmmm——
A thousand great bells rang simultaneously inside his skull. Everything in his vision spun and warped.
Blood seeped from all seven orifices, soaking a wide patch of his chest dark red. His consciousness was sliding, irreversibly, toward the edge.
What saved him was distance—the shockwave had lost most of its force traveling that far.
And Li Banxia's medicine, it seemed, had done more than restore Qi and blood.
Whatever was in that purple-green nightmare brew, it had fortified his spirit and sea of consciousness, and now it clamped down on both like a vise, dragging him back from the threshold by sheer pharmacological force.
Hah... hah...
Half an incense stick's time passed before the skull-grinding agony finally receded like a tide.
Mo Fan lay flat on the cold ground, spread-eagled, a fish hauled gasping from the water. He drank in the stale underground air in desperate, greedy gulps.
He dragged a trembling hand across his face, smearing the blood.
His back was soaked through with cold sweat, clothes plastered to his skin.
"That thing is terrifying."
He stared at the dark breach in the rock wall, and something cold and deeply shaken moved through his eyes.
Thank god. Thank every god there is that I used the Skeleton Rat.
If he'd walked in there himself—just strolled in, curious, to have a look around—
What would be lying at the edge of that pit right now wouldn't be a pinch of ash.
It would be a corpse with its soul eaten clean.
"Curiosity killed the cat. The deep reaches of this underground kingdom are completely off-limits. Not my level. Not even close."
Mo Fan was fully, soberly awake now.
No more illusions. Face the reality.
He didn't even have the strength to stand up, and his brain felt like it had been running three consecutive all-nighters.
He forced the last dregs of his focus together and dragged his storage bag open with stiff fingers.
"Mo Yan... come out..."
Silently, without a sound, Mo Yan materialized at his side.
"Go... seal that breach. Block it completely."
Mo Fan slumped against the wall, breathing hard, issuing the order in a ragged voice.
"Use the heaviest stones you can find. Pack the gaps with earth. Make it look like a natural dead end. Leave no trace."
The soul-fire in Mo Yan's hollow eye sockets flickered once.
No words. Mo Yan turned and walked toward the collapsed rock face without hesitation.
Those long, powerful bone hands lifted boulders weighing hundreds of pounds as if they weighed nothing, stacking them seamlessly across the breach.
Loose stone and soil were spread across the floor, the surrounding rock surface carefully aged and textured to match.
In moments, the entrance to the underground abyss was sealed. Hidden.
From the outside, it looked no different from any other dead-end wall in the tunnel.
The moment it was done, the last taut thread holding Mo Fan together snapped.
His vision went black. His body gave out completely.
In the final second before unconsciousness took him, he felt a pair of cold, utterly steady arms slide beneath him and lift.
Silent Mo Yan—the most loyal, most reliable guardian he had—settled Mo Fan's limp body across its broad back, and walked.
One steady step at a time, through the tunnel they had dug together with their own hands, upward, toward the stone dwelling above the canyon.
Total shutdown.
A sleep so deep it had no texture, no dreams, no sense of time passing at all.
Spirit, body, and soul—all three had been pushed past their limits simultaneously.
The triple overload hit the moment the back of Mo Fan's head touched the pillow on that hard wooden bed, and his brain activated its deepest emergency self-preservation protocol.
No dreams. No awareness of time. Only pure dark, and repair.
He had no idea how long it lasted.
Tweet. Tweet. Chirp chirp——
A few bright, clear bird calls pierced the stone dwelling's thick walls and found his ears.
Mo Fan's eyelashes trembled. He forced his heavy eyelids apart.
Harsh sunlight slanted through the gaps in the window, cutting a clean column of light through the air, dust motes spinning lazily inside it.
Hss——
He tried to roll over.
His stomach let out a sound like a thunderclap—followed immediately by a violent, twisting cramp.
Hunger.
The kind of hunger where your front and back walls are touching, where you feel like your own stomach acid is eating you alive.
It hit him like a bucket of cold water and dragged him the rest of the way to consciousness.
Mo Fan pressed a hand to his abdomen and hauled himself upright. He looked at the painfully bright daylight outside the window.
Then he looked at the layer of dust in the corner of the room—noticeably thicker than he remembered.
Something cold dropped through his chest.
How long was I out?
He grabbed his storage bag immediately, pulled out several hard, dry spirit-grain flatbreads and a water skin...
And—dignity entirely abandoned—tipped his head back and started shoveling food in like a starving wolf.
Three times his usual portion. Only then did the burning, gnawing hunger finally subside.
Mo Fan let out a long breath and leaned back against the headboard, patting his very round stomach.
Judging by the degree of physical depletion and the severity of the hunger—he had slept for two full days and two full nights.
Thank god.
He looked around the quiet stone room and felt a wave of genuine relief.
Thank god Li Banxia had issued that ironclad medical order—Wu Kuan and Zhao Ziwei were banned from dragging him anywhere for half a month. Mandatory rest.
Because if they hadn't been, those well-meaning freaks would absolutely have broken his door down when he didn't respond for two days.
And then his entire underground base would have been exposed.
Fed and watered, his brain finally rebooted.
Mo Fan sat cross-legged and began a calm, methodical post-mortem of the night's expedition.
The pit at the deep end of the underground kingdom—absolute no-go zone. Don't touch it. Don't look at it. Don't think about it.
He rubbed his chin, eyes gradually clearing.
But the outer and middle sections of the main shaft... that's a goldmine.
He replayed the Skeleton Rat's footage in his mind.
Cultivator remains scattered throughout. Mine Rats everywhere. All manner of poisonous insects that had never seen daylight.
As long as he stayed well away from the abyss, the place was essentially a wild, self-replenishing resource farm.
A stable long-term grinding zone.
He rapidly revised his strategic approach.
Next time I go down there, I move carefully. No more reckless full-map scouting runs—that's exactly the kind of thing that triggers a response. I go in like a patient hunter. Chip away at the outer edges. Take only what I can safely reach.
Post-mortem complete.
Mo Fan sat with the still-faintly-aching nerves in his skull, and suddenly went still.
He looked down at his hands—calloused, crossed with small scars—and let his mind drift back across everything since he'd arrived in this body.
He'd thrown himself off a cliff to prepare for the Outer Court Tournament.
Spent an entire night as a one-man construction crew digging an underground base.
Traded full-force blows with a Foundation Establishment cultivator.
And then, before he'd drawn a single proper breath of recovery, overclocked his CPU to scout a literal abyss.
What the hell is this?
This isn't cultivation. This is trading his life for progress points.
He'd been worked to death by his thesis advisor in his previous life—dropped dead at the edge of a cliff.
And now he'd transmigrated into a world where people could move mountains and fill seas, and he was voluntarily grinding himself into the ground at an even faster pace?
"What's the point?"
The words came out of him like a punch to his own gut.
"I'm already a Necromancer. What exactly am I still grinding myself to death for?"
At this rate, he wasn't going to make it far down the path of immortality. He was going to die of overwork again before he even got started.
No. Absolutely not.
Mo Fan threw himself off the bed, grabbed the sour-smelling robe off his body, and swapped it for a clean, fresh cyan changshan.
He crossed the room in three strides, grabbed the heavy wooden door, and shoved it open with a bang.
Warm, generous sunlight poured over him without reservation.
The canyon wind swept in carrying the scent of wildflowers from somewhere up the slopes.
Mo Fan breathed it in—deep, slow, free.
He spread his arms wide, tilted his face toward the sun, and stretched—a full, shameless, bone-cracking stretch that popped every joint in his body like a string of firecrackers.
"To hell with grinding! To hell with underground abysses!"
He looked up at the blue sky and made his announcement to no one in particular, loud and clear:
"Today is a full rest day. I'm going outside. I'm going to take a walk."
"I'm going to touch some grass."