The familiar Abandoned Sword Cliff.
The familiar figu...
Actually,not so familiar.
The one standing here now wasn't the youth of days past.
It was a slender skeleton.
As for that familiar youth?
Well.
He was lying on the ground,with a large smear of blood still left at his throat.
Mo Fan lowered his head and looked at his own corpse,eyes still frozen open in death.
Then he turned his head and glanced at Unit 003,Unit 004,and WTF holding the Pale Bone Scepter,all standing quietly around him.
A wave of absurdity welled up in him.
"Great.So you all used to be my subordinates,and now..."
Mo Fan let out two dry clacks from his hollow mandible,helplessly.
"Now we're'undead coworkers'in the truest sense of the word."
Jokes aside.
There were thornier problems to handle at the moment.
Amid the wreckage strewn across the ground lay two identical human shells.
One was the Formless Demon Embryo he'd just beheaded with his own hands.
The other was the body that truly belonged to him,"Mo Fan."
Except its chest had now been run clean through,all life gone from it entirely.
"Can't exactly leave them lying up here on the cliff to feed the eagles."
Mo Fan sighed.
He'd intended to walk over and stow both corpses in the Storage Pouch first.
But habit made him subconsciously link up with the[Necrotic Realm]instead.
"Store."
He intoned silently in his heart.
Whoosh!
Accompanied by a ripple of spatial fluctuation.
Unit 003,Unit 004,and WTF instantly turned into streaks of light and vanished from where they stood.
But the scene that followed immediately after made the two motes of ghostly blue soul-fire in Mo Fan's sockets jolt to a halt.
Those two flesh-and-blood corpses on the ground,the ones that had originally belonged to humans...
Actually vanished into thin air right along with the undead legion!
"Hm?!"
Mo Fan froze in place.
His skull tilted somewhat stiffly.
He remembered it perfectly clearly.
Back in Linshui Village,he'd personally run the experiment.
The Necrotic Realm accepted only undead creatures.
Ordinary dead objects,magic implements,even ordinary corpses that hadn't yet been converted into skeletons...none of them could be stored inside!
But now...
How had these two flesh-and-blood bodies gotten in?
Mo Fan stood there and pondered for a moment,but genuinely couldn't come up with a definite answer.
"Whatever.Better that they fit inside.Saves room in the Storage Pouch."
He shook his head and pressed the question down in his heart for the time being.
The biggest problem at hand was how he was supposed to get back.
The sky was still dark.
But he could hardly walk back into the servant district sporting a skeletal frame like this,could he?
That wouldn't be called coming home.
That'd be called an undead apocalypse invading the starter village.
Only one thing for it.
With a thought,Mo Fan activated the illusion-type treasure now draped over Mo Yan's skull,the[Moon-Veiled Gauze].
As Necrotic Mana poured in,a layer of soft light rippled across the veil.
Soon...
Light and shadow twisted and reassembled.
On that pale white skull,a face belonging to"Lu Xiaoqi"slowly surfaced.
Around the bone frame,a hazy outline gradually filled out as well,clothed in a set of ordinary human robes.
"It looks like a person,at least..."
Mo Fan raised a hand and examined it,sighing helplessly.
"But in the end,it's just an illusion."
He had no body heat.
No breath.
No heartbeat.
His joints still went a bit stiff when he walked,and his face couldn't manage those minute shifts of expression unique to the living.
But he'd just have to grit his teeth and go for it.
Outside the servant district.
Cooking smoke had only just begun to rise.
Mo Fan kept his steps as light as he could,controlling his bones so they wouldn't let out that clack of grinding...
And walked into that familiar little courtyard like a ghost.
In his current state,he actually looked somewhat similar to the Mo Fan the Formless Demon had turned into earlier.
Old Lü,chopping firewood in the courtyard,heard the movement and looked up.
"Xiaoqi,where've you been so early in the mor...eh?"
Old Lü's words cut off halfway.
Those old eyes,cloudy but rich with experience,looked Mo Fan up and down,and his brows gradually knit together.
The old man sensed it keenly.
This"Xiaoqi"in front of him seemed to be giving off some indescribable strangeness.
"Xiaoqi...are you all right?"
Old Lüset down his axe and edged closer,a little worried and a little hesitant.
Mo Fan's heart gave a lurch.
He knew perfectly well his current state absolutely could not withstand close-range questioning or contact.
He dared not open his mouth to speak at all.
Skeletons had no vocal cords.
The moment he let out that hollow,bone-grinding sound,Old Lüwould be scared to death on the spot.
All Mo Fan could do was wave a hand,exceedingly stiffly.
Then he pointed at his own throat,then his head,putting on an expression of extreme suffering.
He waved his hand over and over,mouthing soundlessly:
"Caught a chill...headache...need rest..."
Then,without giving Old Lüany chance to press for details...
Mo Fan turned right around and,arms and legs moving awkwardly out of sync,fled into his own room as though running for his life.
Bang.
The door slammed shut tight.
"That boy...why's he been acting so odd lately?"
Old Lüstood in the courtyard,looking at the tightly shut door,and sighed.
But he didn't press further.
He simply assumed the boy had truly caught a chill wind on the rear mountain and come down with a serious illness.
Deep in the night.
All was utterly silent.
Mo Fan sat on the bed with his legs crossed.
After confirming there wasn't a sound outside,his consciousness sank like an ebbing tide...
Once again descending into that vast,boundless[Necrotic Realm].
Within the ink-dark ocean of death energy...
Mo Fan's consciousness form sat quietly in midair.
Below him...
Two identical human shells floated quietly in the region that belonged to him.
Like two specimens.
And all around,the skeletons stood in silence.
Only Mo Yan was missing.
Of course.
After all,Mo Yan was the one he was currently using.
Looking at all of this,Mo Fan said nothing for a long while.
Only now,after that whole harrowing string of events,did he finally have the time to settle down and give his current situation some proper thought.
An exceedingly cold and cruel reality lay before him.
He...
Was already dead.
That gaping hole through his chest had been pierced by the cold-iron longsword in Mo Yan's own hand.
And his consciousness,his soul...
Were now lodged,whole and intact,inside a skeleton.
"The Moon-Veiled Gauze can fool Old Lü,can fool mortals without cultivation,and maybe it can even fool some low-level cultivators..."
Mo Fan murmured to himself amid the death energy.
"But what about a Golden Core?"
"What about a Nascent Soul?"
"The moment I run into a cultivator of that level,they'll see through this illusory hide at a glance and see the white bones underneath."
Did that mean from here on out...
He'd truly have to wear this skeletal frame forever,living inside a disguise for the rest of his existence?
Mo Fan looked at"himself,"his gaze gradually deepening.
But he didn't regret the choice he'd made.
At the top of Abandoned Sword Cliff...
What he'd faced was,in truth,a dead end.
If he hadn't voluntarily given up his body,dodged the blade's edge,and hidden inside Mo Yan's body...
His soul would likely have been utterly devoured and erased by that monster long ago.
Between body and soul...
He could only choose the latter.
At least...
"I"am still here.
At that thought,the anxiety and bewilderment within Mo Fan gradually quieted.
Physical body...
And soul...
His gaze fixed once again on that corpse belonging to"Mo Fan."
A saying he'd heard countless times back on Earth suddenly surfaced in his mind without any warning.
A person dies three times in their life.
The first is when the body stops functioning and the heart stops beating.
That is death in the biological sense.
The second is at the funeral,when that person vanishes entirely from their web of social relations.
That is death in the social sense.
And the third...
Is when the last person in this world who remembers them forgets them too.
That is true,total death.
Back on Earth...
Mo Fan had only ever thought of it as a romanticized interpretation of death.
A philosophical theory for self-consolation.
But...
This wasn't Earth.
This was the cultivation world.
This was the Mystic Realm!
Here...
The soul genuinely existed.
It could be perceived.
It could be cultivated.
It could even leave the body behind and continue to exist!
Mo Fan suddenly thought of those Nascent Soul cultivators he'd heard about in rumors.
A-Song had once told him about them in the corridors of the Dao Asking Palace,brimming with longing.
Once a cultivator shattered their core and formed an infant,completing the Nascent Soul...
Then even if their body were destroyed,hacked into meat paste...
So long as the Nascent Soul remained...
That cultivator would still be alive!
They could even seize a new body and live another life.
So then...
Here came the question.
That Nascent Soul cultivator who'd lost their original body...
Were they...
Dead?
The answer was obviously no.
Nobody would consider a Nascent Soul old freak a dead man.
In that case...
Was he,right now...
Dead?
Mo Fan slowly lowered his head and looked at himself.
He had no heartbeat.
No blood.
No skin or flesh capable of sensing hot and cold.
But he could still think.
Could still perceive the flow of death energy in this space.
Could still control Mo Yan's white bone shell perfectly.
Could even still cast necromantic spells.
More importantly...
At this very moment...
He still knew,with perfect clarity and absolute certainty...
That he...
Was Mo Fan!
Time seemed to stand still in this space of dead silence.
For a long...
Long while afterward...
A flicker of enlightenment suddenly surfaced in Mo Fan's eyes.
It seemed he'd finally understood something.
"The physical body is not life itself."
Mo Fan's voice echoed slowly through the Necrotic Realm.
"What truly carries this concept of'me'has never been this shell of flesh and blood."
"It's the soul."
The death of the body was merely the death of a shell.
So long as the soul still existed...
"I"still existed.
Only when the soul dispersed entirely...
When consciousness,memory,and self all ceased to be...
That.
Was true death.
Mo Fan was silent for a long while.
Then he raised his head once more and looked at that body which had once been his own.
In this moment...
His thoughts ran clear.
His spirit platform was lucid.
He suddenly felt that...
Rather than calling that thing"himself"...
It would be more accurate to say...
That it was merely...
His physical body.
A body that had once carried him,and had already died.
A thought,entirely natural and long overdue,slowly surfaced in Mo Fan's mind.
He looked quietly at that corpse.
Looked for a long while.
Then slowly extended his right hand.
"Since it's already a corpse..."
A smile hooked at the corner of Mo Fan's mouth.
"Then..."
"Summon Undead..."
"Rise!"
However...
In the very instant Mo Fan was about to truly cast the skill!
HUMMM!!!
Deep in Mo Fan's mind,it was as though a blazing sun detonated!
On the System's cold interface,a piercing radiance abruptly flared.
Line after line of text surfaced directly in his field of vision.
[Tier-3 Breakthrough Quest:Where Does the Body Return]
[Quest Objective:Comprehend the essence of death.]
[Quest Progress:1/1(COMPLETE!)]
[Breakthrough conditions met.Realm break in progress...]