Mo Fan slowly raised his right hand and clenched his five fingers into an empty fist.
"[ Corpse Explosion ]!"
BOOM——!!!
A deafening, earth-shaking roar erupted.
A corpse lying in the densest part of the bone tide detonated with a thunderous blast!
The horrific shockwave, mixed with shattered bone shrapnel, instantly blew apart and tore to pieces over a dozen bone soldiers around it.
But it wasn't over!
Boom! Boom! Boom!
A second explosion followed immediately!
A third! A fourth!
Dense death magic erupted in an unbroken chain all along the bone tide's charging front line.
That suffocatingly packed army of white bone was, by one man alone, blown wide open into an enormous gap!
In that moment—
[ Death Missiles ] streaked through the gray mist, tearing the air apart.
[ Corpse Explosions ] bloomed through the enemy ranks one after another like fireworks.
Mo Yan's sword light was a reaper's scythe, each swing harvesting swathes of soul flame.
Unit 003 became a dark phantom, endlessly diving from midair to pick off the stragglers trying to slip around the front line.
And Unit 004 stood like a silent beast of war, holding the line locked immovably in front of Mo Fan no matter how violently the waves crashed in!
This churning battlefield of gray mist had become Mo Fan's one-man massacre!
Four high-tier undead, under the command of a Tier-3 Undead Mentor, exerted a terrifying dominance that far exceeded a dozen peak Foundation Establishment cultivators simply fighting side by side!
"Exhilarating!"
Mo Fan watched the bone tide being harvested without end, his eyes full of abandon.
However—
Just as the bone tide was being steadily suppressed by this savage firepower and seemed on the verge of collapse—
From the deepest part of the fog.
Came a low, muffled boom that seemed to strike directly against the soul.
DONG——!
And then.
An aura immeasurably more terrifying than any ordinary Gray Mist Bone Soldier slowly rose out of the depths of the fog.
The vast quantities of gray mist around them were yanked as if by some frenzied suction, beginning to form an enormous vortex.
At the very center of that vortex—
A colossal undead standing a full seven or eight meters tall, crudely stitched together from the massive bones of countless unidentifiable demon beasts—
Came striding forward with earth-shaking steps, its hideous, enormous form gradually emerging from the mist!
The creature's structure was bloated and rough, its shoulders and back piled thick with bone plating heavy as stone.
Its two arms were as thick as a pair of giant stone pillars built for siegework!
And deep within that vast ribcage woven from countless interlacing ribs—
A clump of grayish-white soul flame pulsed violently, as massive and blinding as a small sun!
Bone Amalgam Colossus!
Mo Fan's pupils contracted slightly.
According to his Death Vision, the creature's movements were somewhat sluggish and its skeletal assembly far from perfect.
But that pure, suffocating pulse of raw skeletal strength...
Had already, faintly, brushed against the threshold of Golden Core!
"Finally, something with some weight to it."
The corners of Mo Fan's mouth pressed down, the ease draining from his face.
The moment the Bone Amalgam Colossus appeared, it wasted no motion whatsoever.
Those hollow eye sockets locked dead onto Unit 004 standing at the very front.
Then that enormous bone arm—like a siege ram—rose high and came smashing down at 004 with brutal force, a shrill sonic crack tearing through the air behind it!
BOOOOM——!!!
A horrific roar exploded through the fog, as though space itself were being crushed apart!
Violent force poured out all at once.
Unit 004's seemingly unbreakable composite bone shield let out a wail of overload beneath that single blow!
Its mountain-heavy body was driven backward, skidding several zhang across the ground and plowing two deep furrows into the earth!
And at the dead center of that bone shield, several glaring, clearly visible cracks had torn open!
What monstrous brute strength!
Mo Fan's heart jolted, but he didn't panic.
The colossus's power may have brushed the Golden Core threshold, but its crude body structure doomed it to be ponderous and riddled with openings!
"Mo Yan, 003, probe the flanks! 004, hold the line!"
Mo Fan issued his orders coldly.
As the undead probed, Mo Fan quickly discovered that after each of its terrifying attacks, the colossus suffered an extremely brief stall in its movements, the result of that massive body's poor coordination.
Now!
A cold light flashed in Mo Fan's eyes.
"[ Grave Chill ]!"
Perfectly concealed frigid death energy invaded the colossus's knee joints—patched together from countless bone fragments—and its already clumsy movement seized up hard!
Immediately after—
"[ Corpse Binding ]!"
Invisible ghostly claws reached up from beneath the ground and clamped down tight on the colossus's feet.
Though these two control spells could only sustain the lock for under half a second, for Mo Fan—
That was more than enough!
"Mo Yan!"
Mo Fan roared the command in his mind.
"[ Death Frenzy ]!"
Violent death energy surged like a burst levee, flooding backward into Mo Yan's smooth jade bones.
The soul flames in Mo Yan's sockets erupted upward.
On the cold iron longsword in his hand, gray death sword-qi condensed to its absolute limit in an instant, even letting out a piercing sword howl!
Shhk!
Mo Yan became a bolt of black lightning cleaving the darkness, closing on the colossus instantly.
He seized that half-second opening with perfect precision, driving his blade into the exceedingly narrow seam between two thick slabs of bone plating on the colossus's chest!
Shunk!
Gray death sword-qi detonated inside the colossus's ribcage!
That enormous grayish-white soul flame was ground and lashed by the sword-qi until it shuddered wildly, nearly scattering!
And just as the colossus let out a soundless roar of fury and moved to swat Mo Yan into paste with its bone arm—
Mo Fan's killing blow, charged and waiting all this time, finally arrived.
"[ Death Missile ]!"
A thumb-thick streak of dark light—so black it devoured the very light around it—crossed the distance in an instant, at a speed the naked eye simply couldn't track.
BANG——!
The streak flew with perfect precision along the gap Mo Yan's blade had torn open, entering the colossus's ribcage without the slightest obstruction!
And then punched straight through the dead center of that core grayish-white soul flame!
Crk...
The colossus's terrifying raised bone arm froze dead in midair.
That immense grayish-white soul flame deep in its chest cavity was like a punctured balloon.
With a soft pop—
It shattered completely and dissolved into nothing.
Robbed of its soul flame's support, the mountainous horror that had been so utterly unstoppable moments ago collapsed with a teeth-grating cascade of clattering bone!
Countless massive bone fragments crashed to the ground, kicking up clouds of bone dust.
The entire battlefield went still in that instant.
With the Bone Amalgam Colossus utterly destroyed—
The remaining Gray Mist Bone Soldiers, now leaderless, dropped in waves like machines cut off from their power source.
Then.
Mo Fan keenly sensed that the oppressive gray fog around them had finally begun to change.
At first, only the mist coiling between the bones on the ground started to slowly dissipate.
Then that distant wall of fog—thick as something physical, once impenetrable—actually began to retreat, inch by inch!
Like an enormous curtain being slowly drawn open.
The unknown region that the mist had kept sealed away at last revealed its true shadowed earth to the victorious pioneer.
Though as far as the eye could see, heavy fog still stretched into the distance without any visible end.
But standing on this newly conquered territory, feeling his control over this space tangibly expanding outward—
An indescribable surge of exhilaration and pride rose in Mo Fan's chest.
"Pushing open a door... yeah, that feels pretty good."
And just as Mo Fan let out a long breath and prepared to step forward and inspect the spoils—
Ding——!
A crisp, long-absent system notification rang out deep in his sea of consciousness.
Then.
Several lines of radiant text slowly surfaced at the center of his vision:
[ Expansion successful! ]
[ Unknown region cleared. ]
[ Necrotic Realm control range significantly expanded! ]
[ Calculating experience... ]
[ Calculating spoils... ]