That sense of fulfillment was the most potent drug imaginable—and Mo Fan was completely hooked, drowning in the simple joy of watching his numbers climb steadily upward.
For someone who had spent his days teetering on the razor's edge of death, the feeling of getting stronger through nothing more than mechanical, rhythmic slaughter was nothing short of paradise.
On top of that, every level gained brought a small but meaningful expansion of his Mana pool and a modest boost to his Qi and blood—the best stamina supplements he could ask for right now.
And so he pushed on.
Soul Strength load pressing near its limit, a dull throb behind his eyes, both eyes shot through with red from sheer overstimulation...
He worked like a tireless machine, sweeping the outer mine tunnels almost completely clean of Netherstone Bats.
The ground was carpeted in shattered stone scales and desiccated demonic beast corpses.
"Almost there... just a little more!"
Mo Fan leaned against the cold cave wall, staring at the experience bar on his System panel—already past LV. 8, bearing down hard on the LV. 9 threshold.
Two or three more Tier-1 mid-grade kills and he'd hit another qualitative breakthrough.
Then—
He wiped the sweat from his forehead, ready to push through to Level 9 in one final surge.
SKREEEEE——!!!
A shriek—ear-splitting, carrying a dense metallic resonance—detonated without warning from the deepest darkness of the cave.
This was nothing like the chaotic squealing of ordinary Netherstone Bats. It had a penetrating quality that drove into Mo Fan's eardrums like a sharpened spike.
BOOM.
A howling gust of wind tore through the tunnel. Several massive stalactites were sheared clean from the ceiling and crashed to the ground.
An enormous shadow—so vast it blotted out the faint phosphorescent glow of the cave ceiling—descended from the depths, trailing a suffocating pressure that pressed down on everything beneath it.
[ Target: Netherstone Bat Lord (Peak Tier-1, LV. 10) ]
Through the lens of [ Death Vision ], the creature's entrance was nothing short of horrifying.
Its wingspan stretched nearly five meters—a small glider made flesh.
Unlike the dull gray of the common bats outside, its entire body was armored in dense black scales like compressed obsidian.
The talons that had once been used for gripping cave walls now gleamed with a dark green metallic sheen—unmistakably venomous.
Most unsettling of all were its eyes.
Not the degenerate slits of an ordinary underground beast. These were two enormous rubies, burning with cruelty and unmistakable intelligence.
"Peak Tier-1?!"
Mo Fan's pupils contracted sharply. He cursed under his breath.
His scorched-earth grinding had finally done it—he'd roused the true apex predator of this outer zone from its depths.
The Bat Lord hovered in midair, surveying the carnage below—the bodies of its subjects strewn across the cave floor. The ruby eyes ignited with towering fury.
HMMMMM——!
It didn't dive immediately. Instead, it opened its barbed maw wide and unleashed a visible pulse of high-frequency sonic waves.
Unlike the scattered noise attacks of the common bats, the Bat Lord's ultrasonic emission wasn't just a weapon.
It was a precision instrument, conducting detailed echolocation and battlefield mapping simultaneously.
The sound wave crashed outward like a tide. The rock surfaces around them shed a fine layer of stone dust from the vibration alone.
"004—hold the line!" Mo Fan bellowed.
BOOM.
Summon No. 004 drove all four limbs into the ground and raised the broad bear-skull back-plate like a city wall between them and the incoming wave.
The sonic pulse slammed into the bone armor with a grinding screech.
But 004's absurdly thick plating—reinforced by Mo Fan's quietly applied [ Bone Armament ]—absorbed a wave that would have liquefied the internal organs of a late-stage Qi Condensation cultivator.
It didn't move a single step.
Standing behind 004's massive frame, Mo Fan felt nothing but a mild breeze.
"God, that thing makes me feel safe." He couldn't help giving 004 a mental thumbs-up. Hands down the most successful meat shield he'd ever assembled.
But a peak Tier-1 demonic beast possessed intelligence that far exceeded anything in the outer zone.
After the echolocation sweep and that initial exchange, the Bat Lord had already detected something wrong.
The enormous bone creature blocking its path had extraordinary defensive capability—but the sonar feedback was telling it something else entirely:
That thing was a complete dead object. A hollow, lifeless construct with no vital signature whatsoever.
A flash of cold cunning crossed the ruby eyes. The Bat Lord made its decision.
It wasn't going to waste time on 004's unyielding shell.
Both wings snapped open with a thunderous crack.
The massive body executed a dive that was shockingly agile for its size—and the instant 004 began adjusting its angle to intercept, the Bat Lord twisted in midair with a sudden lateral spin.
Like a fighter jet pulling a tight banking maneuver, it carved an arc through the air and swept around 004's heavy bone-shield defense entirely, coming in hard from the flank.
"NOW—003!"
Mo Fan had been waiting for exactly this.
The moment the Bat Lord cleared the shield, Summon No. 003—which had been pressed flat against the cave wall like a lizard, utterly motionless—erupted.
A black afterimage tore through the air.
The Heavy-Armored Bone Leopard's claws—fusing the traits of demon tiger and hunting leopard—raked across the Bat Lord's completely unguarded abdomen with a sound like tearing metal.
SHHK.
Sparks flew. Then came the wet sound of flesh parting.
Even the obsidian-dense scale armor split under 003's full-force strike, leaving a deep gash across the Bat Lord's belly—bone-deep, weeping black blood.
"Good hit! Mo Yan—go for the throat!"
Mo Fan's command chain was seamless.
Mo Yan materialized from the shadows like a wraith, jade-bone frame erupting with explosive force.
The cold iron blade became a ribbon of pale light aimed directly at the Bat Lord's throat as the creature dropped from the pain.
A perfect tactical execution.
And yet—
A peak Tier-1 demonic beast was not something that died so easily.
Facing that killing thrust, the ruby eyes flashed with vicious resolve.
The Bat Lord's body produced a series of sickening crack-crack-crack sounds—joints deliberately dislocating—as it wrenched its wings into an impossible angle and folded its massive frame in midair in a direction that flatly defied physics.
SHHHK.
The cold iron blade grazed the underside of its jaw and shaved off a handful of black scales.
By a hair's breadth—it had dodged Mo Yan's killing blow.
"Not good." Mo Fan's chest tightened.
The Bat Lord climbed back to altitude, and now it was truly furious.
The repeated setbacks had made something clear to this underground apex predator: those three bone constructs below were unkillable, unflinching, and felt no pain whatsoever.
Its gaze cut through the darkness. Past 004's bone shield. Past Mo Yan's blade. And locked onto the figure standing at the very back of the formation.
Under its heat-sensing and scent-tracking, the three skeletons were cold stone.
But that two-legged creature in the corner—it blazed with a rich, surging crimson aura of Qi and blood.
That one. That's the mastermind.
Superior intelligence, making itself known.
The Bat Lord abandoned any thought of continuing to brawl with these unreasonable undead constructs on the ground.
Its wings beat hard, carrying its massive body rapidly upward—all the way to the stalactite clusters hanging thirty-plus feet above the cave floor.
"What is it doing?" Mo Fan's brow furrowed as he looked up.
The next second, he found out exactly what "fire superiority" felt like.
The Bat Lord hung upside down from the ceiling and transformed itself into a precision long-range bomber.
CRACK. CRACK.
Its dark-green-gleaming talons swung in furious arcs, shearing thick stalactites clean from the ceiling.
Then it opened its maw and coated each falling pillar of rock with a mouthful of dark green corrosive venom.
Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh.
Venom-soaked boulders, accelerated by gravity, rained down like a volley of toxic meteors.
And the creature was infuriatingly precise about it.
It deliberately avoided the dead angle directly behind 004's wide bone shield.
It filled the air with sharp sonic pulses to scramble Mo Fan's hearing and spatial awareness—and then directed the entire dense barrage of rock-and-venom, with what seemed like guided accuracy, exclusively at the one target sheltering at the back.
"You absolute son of a——!"
Mo Fan barely got the curse out before he was moving.
There was no way to have 004 raise its shield overhead—the construct was too large; lifting the shield would expose its undercarriage entirely.
BANG. BANG.
Mo Fan threw himself into a desperate, rolling scramble through the rubble, dodging and weaving through the chaos.
His Iron Bone Stage-perfected body handled the fist-sized rock fragments fine—they hammered into his back and stung, but couldn't break his defense.
But the venom-coated stones were a different problem entirely.
Each one that detonated nearby sent corrosive liquid spraying in all directions.
Even with his rudimentary corpse-toxin resistance, the venom that splattered across his face and body ate through his clothing with an audible sizzle, burning badly enough to make him hiss through his teeth.
One basin-sized chunk came in too fast to fully dodge.
It clipped his scalp on the way down—he managed to deflect it with his forearm, but the shockwave from the impact rattled his skull and left his vision swimming.
A vivid red line opened across his forehead.
"I swear to——"
Mo Fan pressed himself against a protruding section of cave wall, wiped the foul-smelling venom from his face, and stared up at the Bat Lord—which was shrieking with what could only be described as taunting glee while it continued hurling its biochemical payload downward.
He ground his teeth. Glared up at the increasingly insufferable creature.
The howl building in his chest was almost physical.
"In my entire life... I'm being kited by a BAT?!"