he night was deep and still.
After finishing the trials in the sealed chamber, Mo Fan dragged his exhausted body back to his quarters.
He sat cross-legged on the stone bed but didn't immediately collapse into sleep.
His mind was still running hot—turning over and over everything Lin Dong had said throughout the day, chewing on each piece.
The old lunatic may be erratic, even unhinged. But anyone who has spent centuries drilling into the secrets of the human body's potential has to have touched on something ordinary people can't reach.
As a Necromancer who could arguably claim to understand bone structure better than anyone else in the entire Mystic Realm, Mo Fan's instincts were telling him clearly:
Lin Dong's theory—that the Spirit Root was a bone—was not baseless rambling. There was something profound buried in it!
But where's the proof?
Mo Fan's brow furrowed hard. He turned the scattered fragments over in his mind, trying to force them into a coherent picture.
If a Spirit Root really was a bone hidden somewhere deep in the human body, why had no one in all of recorded history ever found it?
Unless the breakthrough lies in...
His breathing grew heavier. A faint light kindled quietly in the depths of his eyes.
[ Death Vision ]?
He remembered it clearly. It was that ability that had let him directly "see" A-Song's Spirit Root—that vivid, unmistakable image that had told him he was looking at a once-in-a-generation talent.
But at the time, Death Vision had only been LV. 1.
A first-tier scan could only detect the result—the presence of vitality and spiritual energy affinity. It couldn't directly observe the existence of a Spirit Root bone.
The trail seemed to dead-end there again.
Mo Fan rubbed his temples irritably and closed his eyes out of habit, activating Death Vision without thinking.
Hum——
The perspective expanded. He swept his gaze across the surroundings. Nothing unusual. Everything exactly as it always was.
But then he turned his attention inward—toward the location of his own Dantian.
Mo Fan's entire body jolted, as if an invisible bolt of lightning had just passed through him!
Wait!
His eyes snapped open. The look on his face was pure, unfiltered disbelief.
He had just realized there was a blind spot!
Ever since he'd been declared a Waste Spirit Root—and then confirmed it himself when he tried running the Azure Cloud Art and watched every scrap of absorbed spiritual energy drain away instantly, like water poured into a colander—he had given up completely.
He had abandoned the path of immortal cultivation entirely. Thrown himself into body tempering and leveling up instead.
Which meant—ever since [ Death Vision ] broke through to LV. 2...
He had used these upgraded eyes to examine demon beast weak points, to see formation arrays, and even to see underground ore veins...
But he had never once tried to cultivate again!
Even if Lin Dong is wrong, what's the harm in trying again?
Once the thought surfaced, it refused to leave. It pulled at every thread of his curiosity until he couldn't sit still.
Let's find out!
Mo Fan drew a slow breath and forced his racing heartbeat down.
He straightened his posture, crossed his legs properly, and formed a hand seal he hadn't used in a long time—then began running the Azure Cloud Sect's foundational cultivation technique.
At the same time:
"Death Vision—open!"
This time, he didn't look outward.
He looked inward—at his own body, and at the space surrounding it.
BOOM.
The moment the technique engaged, Mo Fan saw something completely different from anything before.
If the first-tier Death Vision had shown him only blurry outlines of energy, then the second tier was something else entirely.
He could see the spiritual energy.
Not abstractly. Not as a concept. The ambient Heaven and Earth Spiritual Qi drifting through the canyon air—what had always been invisible, intangible—now appeared before him as clearly as mist, as water vapor, as threads of silk genuinely floating through the void!
A piece of common cultivation knowledge surfaced automatically in his mind:
Whenever a cultivator ran their technique, their body would draw in the scattered spiritual energy of heaven and earth and retain it.
A Low-Grade Spirit Root—dull in aptitude—absorbs ten parts and keeps two or three. Already considered a rare blessing.
A Mid-Grade Spirit Root keeps five out of ten. The backbone of any sect.
A High-Grade Spirit Root keeps seven out of ten. The kind of talent peak elders fight over.
And the legendary Heavenly Spirit Root? A terrifying nine out of ten. Nearing flawless perfection.
As for him, Mo Fan?
The universal verdict—and his own long-held assumption—was that he couldn't even manage one-tenth of one percent. Whatever went in came straight back out. An existence like a colander. An absolute waste.
So he had stopped trying. He had accepted the premise and moved on.
But tonight, he was trying again!
Mo Fan held his breath. The cultivation route ignited inside him.
And in the instant it activated—observed through the lens of the Tier-2 Death Vision—
Mo Fan saw a jaw-dropping scene.
In his field of vision, the moment his technique engaged, the calmly drifting threads of spiritual energy in the surrounding space went absolutely berserk.
His physical body moved like a giant whale opening its mouth in the deep ocean—with a ravenous, almost violent hunger, it tore at the ambient Heaven and Earth Spiritual Qi across a radius of dozens of meters!
The absorption speed was too fast. The suction was too powerful. The concentration was incomprehensible!
The thin, mist-like spiritual energy that had been drifting lazily through the air—the moment it surged toward his body's surface, the sheer force of that pull forcibly compressed it!
It squeezed it from vapor into an extremely viscous liquid state.
Droplets of liquid spiritual energy, blazing with dense, pure light, poured into his body through every pore like a bursting dam—a flood with nowhere to go but inward!
And yet from the outside, there was nothing. Not a single sign of disturbance.
Because fluctuations in ambient spiritual energy at this scale were simply invisible to anyone below the Nascent Soul stage—or even the Soul Formation stage.
Besides, Mo Fan was only running a basic foundational technique. The effective radius was barely ten meters.
But even that was terrifying enough.
Watching it through Death Vision, Mo Fan sat completely dumbstruck.
Even with his fragmentary knowledge of orthodox immortal cultivation, he knew one thing with absolute certainty:
This absorption rate was not a commotion any normal Spirit Root could produce.
Not a Waste Spirit Root. Not a Low-Grade Spirit Root. Not even the Mid-Grade or High-Grade roots that cultivators praised to the heavens could come anywhere close to this speed!