Mo Fan nearly jumped out of his skin.
He looked at the dim chamber packed wall-to-wall with skeletal remains.
Then he looked at Lin Dong's eyes, glinting with that strange fanatical light in the darkness.
His skin crawled.
Gulp.
Mo Fan swallowed hard with extreme difficulty.
Both arms flew up to cross over his chest, covering it tight.
He backed away several steps, forcing out the most pained, ugly dry laugh he could manage.
"E-Elder... why do I need to take my clothes off? I'm a proper person, and I'll have you know I'm still a virgin! Could you maybe... go easy on me?"
"Get out of here with that nonsense!"
Lin Dong's face went dark immediately. He snapped back without a shred of patience.
"What kind of filthy garbage is rattling around in that head of yours all day?! I said remove your upper garment!!"
"Oh... so that's what you meant. You could've led with that—you scared me half to death."
Mo Fan rubbed his nose sheepishly and let out a long breath of relief.
He walked to the center of the chamber, where a jade meditation seat radiated a warm, gentle energy.
He stripped off his upper robe in a few quick motions, revealing a lean, well-muscled torso, and settled onto it cross-legged.
"Clear your mind and calm your qi. Do not resist."
Lin Dong moved behind him.
His expression shifted—the erratic, half-mad energy he usually carried fell away entirely, replaced by something focused and severe.
He raised both hands slowly.
Hum——!
A surge of spiritual energy detonated inside the sealed chamber—vast and overwhelming, yet controlled with extraordinary precision.
Not a single thread of destructive force leaked outward.
Instead, it coalesced instantly into something almost physical: a serpentine swimming dragon of cyan light.
The cyan dragon spiraled downward and wrapped itself around Mo Fan completely.
Then it began to move—threading through his eight extraordinary meridians, his limbs, his bones...
Probing every gap between muscle and skeleton with meticulous, almost ruthless thoroughness.
Mo Fan kept his eyes closed.
He could feel the warm current moving through him clearly enough.
But the Necromancer System—that existed in an entirely different dimension. It wouldn't show up on any scan.
Half an incense stick's worth of time passed.
The cyan dragon slowly dissolved.
Lin Dong withdrew his hands and opened his eyes.
His brow was deeply furrowed, his expression caught somewhere between confusion and disbelief.
"Strange..."
He circled Mo Fan slowly, muttering to himself.
"Your interior is exactly as dead as still water—not a single ripple of spiritual energy."
"And yet this musculature, these bones... tempered, dense, full of latent potential. Faintly possessing the momentum of a hidden dragon coiled at the bottom of an abyss, waiting."
He stopped in front of Mo Fan and spoke with absolute conviction.
"My 'Bone Reading' technique is not guesswork. Over the years, I have used every position available to me to quietly examine countless confirmed top-tier talents within this Sect."
"The current Sect Master. That kid named Luo Yu. At the deepest structural level, their root bones share unmistakable characteristics."
"And your foundation—even if a Heavenly Spirit Root never manifested—is absolutely the raw material of a supreme spirit root. There is no possible way you are an ordinary Waste Spirit Root."
He paused, as if something had just occurred to him, and sighed.
"As for that brother of yours—A-Song—I haven't had the chance to examine him yet. I don't know whether his bone structure is identical to yours."
Mo Fan sat on the jade seat and pulled his robe back on, nodding quietly to himself.
He'd actually run the same analysis on A-Song before, using Lin Dong's framework as a reference.
The result had been consistent—A-Song's bones were luminous and clear, the kind of quality that didn't even need [ Death Vision ] to identify. The signs were obvious.
This old lunatic... has he actually touched on some unknown essence the cultivation world doesn't know about?
The thought unsettled him, but he kept his mouth shut.
The last thing he needed was to drag A-Song into this mess.
But if Lin Dong's Bone Reading is actually accurate... why did the original owner, Lu Xiaoqi, test as a Five-Element Waste Spirit Root?
Does this body have some kind of unspeakable secret buried in it?
Mo Fan closed his eyes and reached inward, trying to excavate Lu Xiaoqi's earliest childhood memories.
He wanted to find what had happened before the Sect entrance exam—who his parents were, where he'd come from.
But the deeper his consciousness pushed, the more he found nothing.
Beyond the blurry fragments surrounding the spirit root test, everything before that was like a clay ox entering the sea.
No matter how hard he searched, not a single image surfaced.
Fine. If I can't figure it out, I won't force it for now.
Across the room, Lin Dong had been turning the problem over for a while without arriving anywhere useful.
He waved a hand with mild irritation, cutting through Mo Fan's thoughts.
He began to pace the chamber, hands behind his back, and finally explained what he'd actually brought Mo Fan here to do.
"I've been trapped in a fundamental error all this time. Every subject I've studied has been a spell cultivator—someone who already had a Spirit Root."
"It's like the old saying: you cannot recognize Mount Lu's true face when you're standing within the mountain. Studying only those who already have Spirit Roots, trying to find the laws of how they form—that's looking at the shadow instead of the light!"
He spun around, eyes blazing.
"So I've decided to reverse the approach entirely! Start from the most pure and fundamental source—body cultivators, who rely entirely on physical blood-qi."
"I originally intended to find a few ordinary cultivators with strong constitutions to practice on first. Instead, fate handed me you by a freak combination of factors. Your physique—powerful, uncontaminated—is exactly the perfect entry point I need!"
He reached into the storage bag at his waist.
Smack.
An archaic book landed in Mo Fan's lap.
Its edges were yellowed with age, its cover worn. The title was written in bold, almost wild brushstrokes across the beast-hide cover:
[ Form-Intention Fist ]
"Form-Intention Fist?"
Mo Fan blinked. Why did that name sound so familiar?
"Do not underestimate it!"
Lin Dong caught the look on his face and snorted proudly.
"This is not some flashy martial arts routine from the mortal realm meant for building muscle."
"I spent years dismantling the movements, postures, and bone structures of countless exotic beasts and rare animals—studying the 'intent' behind how they generate force—and synthesized everything into a single martial art designed to unlock the absolute limit of the human body's potential."
"Its core purpose is not to kill enemies. It is to give you complete, one-hundred-percent conscious control over every inch of your flesh and every single bone in your body."
He paused, his tone shifting toward something more cryptic.
"I've heard that somewhere in this vast Mystic Realm, there exists a mysterious branch of 'Transformation Path' cultivators—those who can take the form of primordial beasts in battle and sanctify the physical body entirely."
"I've never seen them with my own eyes. But the deductive logic behind this fist technique coincides with theirs without ever having met."
"Try it."
Mo Fan opened the book with moderate skepticism.
He got through a few pages of diagrams. His brow locked into a hard knot.
...Are these movements even physically possible for a human being?!
The force-generation postures illustrated were aggressively anti-anatomical.
Some required the spine to twist in reverse. Others demanded joints to generate power at angles that had no business existing.
If an ordinary person tried to follow these literally, let alone hurt anyone else—they'd forcefully snap their own limbs on the very first move.
"Idiot."
Lin Dong watched Mo Fan contort himself awkwardly and smacked him on the back of the head without ceremony.
"What did I just say? Do not be constrained by the human form!"
"Picture yourself as the wild beast in your mind. Then attempt to change the way your bones generate force—change their fundamental structure!"
"When your bones adapt to that shape, the power will burst forth naturally as water flows in a channel!"
Change the structure of the bones?!
The words hit Mo Fan's brain like a bolt of lightning through a pitch-black sky.
...I see.
He closed his eyes.
In his mind, he called up one of the [ Form-Intention Fist ] techniques—the one modeled after a demonic tiger pouncing on its prey.
He stopped trying to force his flesh into the shape.
With a shift of his mind, a trace of faint Necrotic Mana quietly stirred and wrapped itself around the bones of his right arm.
Under the manipulation of the Mana, the bone connections inside his arm shifted—subtly, briefly, just barely out of their natural alignment.
BOOM!
He threw the punch.
No blood-qi behind it. No muscle power amplified.
And yet the strike tore a shockwave through the sealed chamber with a sharp, cracking sonic boom, smashing out a berserk gale!
This wasn't a simple increase in muscular output.
This was a qualitative change generated fundamentally from the lowest-level method of exerting force!
This fist technique created by a Golden Core stage cultivator... it really does have some profound methods.
Mo Fan's heart surged with wild joy.
In this moment, he felt something click—not just on the physical level, but his understanding of what a Necromancer could be seemed to have deepened another layer.
Watching Mo Fan grasp the method almost immediately, the old man Lin Dong looked faintly surprised—though mostly it was a sense of self-satisfaction.
He turned and walked toward the chamber door, hands behind his back.
"Stay here and practice. Truthfully record every minute change, every sensation in every inch of your body for this old man..."
His silhouette gradually disappeared into the dim corridor.
Only his voice lingered, drifting back through the empty stone hall—quiet, somewhat bewildered.
"This old man has always felt..."
"That what we call a 'Spirit Root' may not be some illusory Heavenly and Earthly qi mechanism."
"It may also be... something hidden deep within the human body."
"A bone."
"And yet, for so many years, I have searched everywhere without finding it, its traces hard to locate..."
His voice grew fainter. Then disappeared entirely.
"Could it be that in this world... the existence of a 'Spirit Root Bone' truly does not exist?"
Inside the chamber, Mo Fan slowly lowered his swinging fist.
He stood still, listening to those last words fade into silence.
And fell into deep thought.
A Spirit Root... is also a type of bone?