Creak—
The worn stone door swung open from the inside.
The first faint chill of morning sunlight spilled across Mo Fan's face, flooding the quiet, secluded valley with light.
And in the very instant the door opened, a stocky figure with a head of wild, explosive bedhead came swaggering into his courtyard without a care in the world.
Zhao Ziwei.
At the sight of this boisterous Second Senior Brother, something warm stirred in Mo Fan's chest—a feeling he hadn't realized he'd been missing. For a moment, his composure almost slipped entirely.
He stepped forward, threw his arms wide, and pulled Zhao Ziwei into a full-force, enthusiastic bear hug the second he crossed the threshold.
What Mo Fan had catastrophically failed to account for was one small detail.
He was no longer Lu Xiaoqi—the guy who'd collapse after climbing thirty thousand steps. The raw physical compression force of that full-strength embrace was…
CRACK.
A sharp, teeth-grinding sound of bone-on-bone rang out through the quiet valley.
"OW—! Cough! Cough cough cough!"
Zhao Ziwei, who had been beaming and opening his arms to welcome his junior brother's enthusiasm, had his eyes bulge clean out of his head.
Mo Fan's grip crushed the air out of him in an instant—he felt like he'd been seized by a full-grown Earth-Rending Giant Bear, his spiritual energy nearly shaken loose from his core, every last molecule of oxygen squeezed from his lungs in a tenth of a second.
"Let—let go—Xiaoqi—you're going to kill me—!"
Zhao Ziwei forced the words out of his throat one syllable at a time, tongue practically hanging out.
"Ah—Senior Brother! Sorry, sorry!"
Mo Fan's expression went rigid. He released him like he'd touched a live wire and scratched the back of his head with an awkward grimace.
He'd genuinely forgotten about his own destructive capability.
"Hah—hah—hah—"
Freed, Zhao Ziwei doubled over with his hands on his knees, gulping air like a fish that had just been pulled back from the edge of suffocation.
He stared at Mo Fan with undisguised alarm.
"What in the... what did you eat while you were home? Some kind of legendary ten-thousand-year tonic? You feel stronger than when you were trading blows with Senior Brother Wu Mang. You nearly snapped my Foundation Establishment bones in half with a hug."
"It's... it's nothing. Old Lü found a couple of old mountain ginseng roots I'd stashed under the bed and made a stew out of them."
Mo Fan deployed his well-practiced look of innocent obliviousness and redirected all blame toward the ginseng and Old Lü.
"Mountain ginseng? You ate a refined iron deposit, more like."
Zhao Ziwei rubbed his aching ribs, but didn't think too hard about it. In his mind, Lu Xiaoqi had always been a freak who walked the unorthodox body cultivation path. This tracked.
He clapped Mo Fan on the shoulder, eyes gleaming with conspiratorial energy, and flashed a wide grin.
"Doesn't matter—stronger is better! Today, big brother is taking you to make some serious money."
He slung an arm around Mo Fan's neck and steered him toward the gate, talking a mile a minute:
"The Main Peak's Forging Hall just received a massive shipment of refined ore—top-grade material for crafting Inner Sect flying swords. But raw ore like this? Those sword cultivators are all soft hands, not a callus between them; they can't handle the labor. So the Forging Hall steward is paying extremely well—Contribution Points by the hour."
"The second I heard that, I thought—this job was made for you. Come on, let's get to the Main Peak and cash in before someone else does!"
Mo Fan stood there with his pack in hand, completely blank.
Then he rubbed his temple and quietly sighed to himself.
Well. I came all this way. Might as well go look.
But a problem immediately presented itself.
"Senior Brother Ziwei." Mo Fan eyed the Ascension Steps stretching endlessly toward the Main Peak with mild distress. "My legs are fine, but I'm a Waste Spirit Root. I can't ride a sword up. How exactly are we getting there?"
He certainly couldn't pull out those invisible spectral wings in front of Zhao Ziwei.
"What's the problem? Ride shotgun!"
Zhao Ziwei laughed and slapped his hand against the Storage Pouch at his waist.
Shing—!
A massive sword erupted from the pouch—jet black, half a meter wide, nearly two meters long, landing with a heavy thud.
"Get on! Big brother's taking you for a ride!"
Zhao Ziwei vaulted onto the blade with a flourish and patted the empty space behind him.
Mo Fan's eye twitched. Twice.
But beggars couldn't be choosers. He gritted his teeth, expression deeply complicated, and stepped on.
"Hold tight!"
Whoosh—!
Zhao Ziwei poured mana into the blade. The great red sword became a streak of blinding crimson light, launching skyward with a low, shuddering chug-chug-chug of displaced air.
High above, the wind screamed.
Mo Fan stood on the narrow blade, both arms locked around Zhao Ziwei's not-particularly-wide waist.
In the morning sunlight, the scene was absolutely, profoundly unhinged.
From a distance, this looked nothing like two cultivators soaring through the heavens.
It looked exactly like two large, rough-edged, completely unkempt men crammed onto a battered red electric scooter with a dying battery, throttle twisted to maximum, barreling through rush-hour traffic.
All around them, Azure Cloud Sect's inner sect disciples drifted through the clouds in flowing white robes—elegant sword-riders and white crane passengers moving with effortless grace through the morning mist.
When they saw a garish, aggressively red flying sword making a chug-chug-chug racket while carrying two young men in a posture of profound indignity go screaming past—
Every single one of them developed a severe facial tic.
"What are you looking at?! Never seen a body cultivator tandem ride before?!"
Zhao Ziwei was not only unashamed—he was thriving. He actually turned his head mid-flight and let out a long, piercing wolf-whistle at a pretty female cultivator riding a spirit crane nearby, nearly startling her off her mount entirely.
Mo Fan said nothing.
He silently, methodically, pulled his leopard-head hood down as far as it would physically go.
Every second this face remained unrecognized on the Main Peak was a second worth preserving.
CRASH.
With a landing that was less "arrival" and more "controlled impact"—kicking up a cloud of dust from the stone plaza—the aggressively red flying sword finally came to a stop at the edge of the Main Peak's outer square.
The sword-light died.
"Urgh... hah... hah..."
The moment Zhao Ziwei's feet touched the ground, his legs gave out.
He grabbed a nearby pine tree, face drained to a sickly white, gasping like a man who'd just survived something genuinely traumatic.
He pointed a trembling finger at Mo Fan.
"Xiaoqi... be honest with me... how much do you weigh?"
Mo Fan's body, hammered and tempered through relentless cultivation, had bones and flesh with the density of solid refined steel.
Carrying this human-shaped iron ingot for over ten li had nearly drained Zhao Ziwei's—a mid Foundation Establishment cultivator's—spiritual core completely dry mid-flight.
Meanwhile, the "passenger" dusted himself off, looked around with bright eyes and rosy cheeks, and had the audacity to appear refreshed.
Azure Cloud Sect's Main Peak was something else entirely.
Spirit mist drifted through endless corridors threading between the clouds. Waterfalls crashed down from floating islands suspended in the sky.
Jade towers and golden halls materialized and dissolved in the violet haze like something out of a dream—extravagant as a celestial palace.
"This really is... on a completely different level from our Hundred Forging Peak, where the sign above the gate is half-rotted off."
Mo Fan couldn't help but say it with genuine feeling.
"Obviously—your Senior Brother used to run this place back in the day..."
Zhao Ziwei straightened up with some effort, maintaining what dignity he had left, and led Mo Fan down a wide corridor heading deeper into the Main Peak.
Before long, a wave of scorching heat rolled toward them, accompanied by the rhythmic crash of iron on iron.
At the end of the corridor stood a magnificent hall forged entirely from crimson refined iron, built at the edge of a magma pool fed by a deep-earth fire vein running beneath the mountain.
Above the main entrance, carved in strokes like iron hooks and silver threads—bold, sharp, radiating an almost tangible edge—was a single massive ancient character:
[ FORGE ]
"Ziwei, you made it."
A rotund steward holding a roster stood at the entrance. He looked Mo Fan over—the cold bronze skin, the unnervingly steady eyes—and smiled with satisfaction.
"Good. This is the 'hardened body cultivator' you recommended? That build, that blood energy—excellent raw material for manual labor. Come inside. Today's ore shipment has been giving the regular disciples trouble."
Mo Fan left Mo Yan waiting outside the gate and followed the steward and Zhao Ziwei into the Forging Hall.
The heat hit like a wall. Inside, the earth-fire blazed. Dozens of shirtless inner sect disciples swung iron hammers in rivers of sweat.
The steward led Mo Fan past the outer forging stations, through the main floor, all the way to the deepest part of the hall—the highest-temperature section, where a massive heavy-gravity forging platform dominated the space.
Mo Fan looked at what had been assigned to him.
His expression, previously calm, went completely, utterly blank.
There, resting in the center of the enormous forging platform, was a raw sword blank—over three meters tall, a full five cubic meters in volume, surface rough and uneven, radiating a dull crimson glow from the impurities packed throughout its mass.
That wasn't a piece of material.
That was a mountain.
"Xiaoqi."
The steward walked over with a warm smile and held out a hammer—pitch-black, gleaming, at least a hundred jin of refined iron in the head alone.
He patted Mo Fan on the shoulder with great paternal affection.
"Ziwei tells me you're a body cultivator of exceptional talent."
"Today's task is simple."
"Using the hammer in your hands, before the sun sets today, take this five-cubic-meter raw sword blank—"
He gestured toward the crimson ore mountain.
"—and compress and hammer it down to the size of a standard flying sword. Purge the impurities, keep the essence. Don't let that fine physique of yours go to waste."
Mo Fan stared at the hammer in his hands. Then he turned and looked at the five-cubic-meter iron mountain.
Hammer. Mountain.
He looked back at the steward's face—that expression of warm encouragement and deep faith in his abilities.
Mo Fan's lip twitched. Hard.
"...You're joking."