In the dim stone room, Mo Fan's eyes gleamed with a feverish green light in the darkness.
His mind was completely consumed by one singular, magnificent obsession:
Dismembering this premium corpse piece by piece and reassembling it into something terrifying.
Crack...
But just as his Mana was about to bite into the bone marrow, Mo Fan's hand froze.
The fever in his eyes cooled a few degrees. He turned his head and thought about the crew currently recuperating in the [ Necrotic Realm ].
"No." "No."
Mo Fan rubbed his chin and shook his head.
"This kind of heteromorphic assembly—my CPU Load is high enough now, sure, but it'd be my first attempt."
"And what I'm looking at right now is a genuine Foundation Establishment corpse. The absolute highest-grade material I have. Tearing it apart for spare components would be an absolute, reckless waste of God's given treasures."
He ran the calculations in his head at full speed.
He was sitting on over a hundred points of free Soul Strength.
And in the days ahead—whether dealing with sudden crises or pushing into more dangerous territory—he desperately needed something that could dominate a situation the moment it appeared.
Dismantling it is a huge loss. A direct, full-body revival gives the highest Return on Investment .
Decision made. No more hesitation.
Mo Fan shelved the dissection impulse, slammed both palms onto Venerable Miasma Dust's chest, and unleashed the full weight of his Mana reserves without holding anything back.
"Wake up."
What happened next caught him completely off guard.
Hum——!
Reviving a standard Qi Condensation corpse with his current Mana pool was like pouring a glass of water—trivial.
But the moment his Mana flooded into this peak Foundation Establishment shell, it felt like trying to fill a bottomless pit!
The shriveled meridians and dense bones resisted and consumed his Mana at a rate that was frankly offensive.
[ Mana: -50... -150... -300... ]
Cold sweat broke across Mo Fan's forehead in an instant.
He watched helplessly as more than half his Mana was ripped away before he finally heard the sound he'd been waiting for—the grinding of bone against bone, sweet as heavenly music.
Crack... crack... crack...
Amidst the deeply unsettling sound of metamorphosis, Miasma Dust's withered skin and flesh flaked away like weathered plaster, dissolving into ash.
From the gray remains, a skeleton rose.
It radiated a deep, muted luster. Even the surface of its bones carried a faint, soul-chilling coldness.
And it was white—a stark, forest-white that put Mo Yan and the others to shame. The bones were thick and dense, like the finest cold jade carved by a master craftsman.
In the hollow depths of its eye sockets, the flames that burned were not the ordinary pale green of a standard undead.
They were deep, cold, and tinged with ice-blue. High-grade ghost-fire!
"That is one hell of a skeletal frame."
Mo Fan wiped the cold sweat from his face and immediately activated [ Death Vision LV. 2 ], eager to inspect his newest recruit.
Hum.
The grayish-white data grid swept over the skeleton.
Then Mo Fan's pupils contracted to pinpoints. Because what he saw made his jaw drop.
Under the penetrating X-ray clarity of Death Vision, deep within the skeleton's chest cavity...
Where the dantian would have been in life, which should have been completely empty—a faint vortex of energy still lingered, undissipated!
Not death-qi. Not ghost-fire. Spiritual energy!
"What the—?!"
Mo Fan couldn't stop himself from swearing out loud. He practically pressed his face against the skeleton, staring hard at that faint cyan swirl.
The intensity had been drastically reduced by the skeletal transformation—probably knocked down to mid Qi Condensation levels. But that didn't matter.
This was a miracle.
Mo Fan himself, within the Mystic Realm's traditional cultivation framework, was still a "Waste Spirit Root" with zero spiritual sensitivity.
And yet here, inside this skeleton, spiritual energy persisted.
What did that mean?
It meant this skeleton didn't just possess the terrifying physical defense of a Foundation Establishment body.
It could cast spells. Actual, orthodox Mystic Realm cultivation techniques!
Mo Fan started pacing the room, his mind surging like a storm.
With that spiritual energy core, it can act like a normal cultivator, activating and using cultivation-world artifacts that require spiritual power to drive!
And further down the line—if I ever encounter ancient inheritance secret realms or sect trial gates that require "a bearer of spiritual energy" to enter... Combined with the Moon-Veiled Gauze, this skeleton could entirely serve as my body double. Walk right through the front door, no questions asked!
The euphoria lasted about ten seconds.
Then a deeply awkward, very practical problem surfaced.
"Even the cleverest housewife cannot cook without rice..."
Mo Fan looked at his premium skeleton and scratched his head with mild exasperation.
Miasma Dust had been a proper spell cultivator in life—he killed people with formations and techniques. He was nothing like Mo Yan, who'd been a sword cultivator.
Even as a bag of bones, Mo Yan had the slashing instincts of a swordsman carved into every bone—the muscle memory of a blade-fighter.
And Mo Fan himself knew absolutely nothing about Mystic Realm spellcasting.
He had death-qi in abundance. But he had absolutely no idea how those cultivation spells were channeled or fired off.
I can't have a Foundation Establishment spell-cultivator skeleton go around punching people in the face in melee combat. That's embarrassing. It insults gentility.
Mo Fan muttered to himself, stroking his chin.
Then his eyes lit up.
His gaze drifted to the pile of loot he'd stripped from Miasma Dust's storage pouch.
A slow, deeply mischievous smile spread across his face.
He dove into the pile of loot and started rummaging with great enthusiasm.
A moment later, he pulled out two items: a wide, slightly worn but still ethereal cyan Daoist robe, and Miasma Dust's personal grayish-white horsetail whisk.
"Here. Try this on."
With tremendous personal satisfaction and wicked humor, Mo Fan draped the oversized Daoist robe over the bare white skeleton.
Then, with complete seriousness, he pressed the horsetail whisk into the skeleton's right hand—positioning the bony fingers around the handle in a loose, elegant grip.
Mo Fan stepped back two paces and took in the full picture.
In the dim stone room—
A skeleton with not a shred of flesh, draped in a wide, empty Daoist robe that billowed faintly in the night breeze.
One arm hanging stiffly at its side. The other bone hand holding a horsetail whisk with an air of absolute, unironic dignity.
And in the deep hollows of its skull, two cold blue ghost-flames burned in perfect stillness—exuding a dead silence that seemed to see through all worldly illusions.
The scene was horrifying. Deeply, profoundly horrifying.
If Mo Fan let this thing loose on Hundred Forging Peak's mountain path in the middle of the night...
He was willing to bet it would make even Ziwei wet his pants on the spot.
This was, in the most literal, physical sense of the phrase— Immortal bearing. Daoist bones.
"Tsk, tsk, tsk..."
Mo Fan stood with his arms crossed, studying his "masterpiece." Not a trace of fear. Just deep, nodding satisfaction.
He had to admit—the further he walked down the Necromancer's path, the more his sense of aesthetics had drifted somewhere genuinely bizarre.
"The presentation is there. Now let's test the combat performance."
Finished admiring his deranged fashion choices, Mo Fan reined in his thoughts and sent the skeleton its first practical combat directive through the mental link, full of anticipation:
[ Directive: Attack the wooden table in front of you! ]
In his imagination, this Foundation Establishment skeleton—with its built-in spiritual energy—would, even without knowing a single hand seal, shatter that table to powder with one casual swing of the whisk on the strength of its bone density alone.
One second passed. Two seconds passed.
The robed skeleton stood exactly where it was. Completely motionless.
Let alone casting some earth-shattering spiritual power spell, it didn't even perform the most basic undead behavior—raising a fist and hitting something.
It stood there like a machine with its power cord pulled, or a process that had crashed and locked up, completely unresponsive.
"...Hm?"
Mo Fan stared. His brow furrowed immediately.
Refusing to believe it, he pushed a rapid sequence of basic directives through the link:
[ Directive: Forward. Back. Turn left. Turn right. ]
Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh.
Flawless execution.
The wide Daoist robe fluttered as the skeleton moved—and surprisingly, it barely made a sound of bone friction.
It moved with a strange, uncanny lightness that carried an echo of the spell cultivator it had once been. Almost graceful.
Mobility: completely normal.
Mo Fan's frown deepened. He sent the directive again:
[ Directive: Attack! ]
"..."
Crash.
The skeleton that had just been gliding around the room froze the instant it received the attack command.
The ghost-flames in its eye sockets flickered and stalled—like something caught in a fatal logic loop, spinning endlessly with no way out.
It could do everything. Except fight.