The dark tunnel stretched ahead like the throat of hell itself.
Mo Fan moved in silence, the high-tier spell skeleton WTF gliding at his side, as the two of them slipped deeper into the belly of the mid-level mine.
His objectives tonight were clear.
Not just to break through his own experience bottleneck...
But to secure genuine Tier-2 beast bones for the three "old brothers" still stuck grinding away on their Qi Condensation frames back in the [ Necrotic Realm ].
Now that he himself had crossed into Tier-2, the Tier-1 bone quality of Mo Yan and the others was simply no longer cutting it. One high-intensity collision and they risked falling apart entirely.
Upgrades. Urgent.
One man, one skeleton—they moved quickly through the labyrinthine mine shafts.
Along the rock walls, patches of faintly glowing moss flickered in the dark.
SKREEEE——!
As they rounded a massive underground fault line, a sharp, grating screech tore down from the darkness above.
Mo Fan stopped. Looked up.
Through the grayish-white filter of [ Death Vision ], a colony of oversized mutant bats hung inverted from the ceiling.
At the center of the cluster, one specimen spread its wings to a span of several meters.
A pair of crimson eyes locked onto the two intruders below, radiating the savage pressure of a peak Qi Condensation beast.
"What a small world."
Mo Fan's mouth curved into a smile that held absolutely no warmth.
These were the same bat colony that had tormented him in the shallow mine shafts—the ones that had nearly finished him with their sonic death-trap. He remembered them well.
But the Mo Fan standing here now was not the same man who'd been rolling around in the dirt like a helpless chicken, taking hits and praying for survival.
"Stay back. I've got this one."
He didn't even signal WTF. Just a cold, quiet exhale in the back of his mind.
Hum!
A burst of concentrated death-qi detonated from his body.
A pair of translucent, ghostly blue phantom wings—[ Floating Soul Wings ]—erupted from his back like a butterfly tearing free of its chrysalis.
BOOM.
His legs shattered the rock beneath him.
Riding the soul wings' powerful lift, Mo Fan launched himself upward like a blue meteor fired in reverse—straight into the bats' airspace!
The peak Qi Condensation Bat King visibly hesitated at the sudden aerial assault.
But territorial instinct kicked in immediately.
It threw its jaws wide, preparing to unleash that lethal high-frequency sonic blast again.
"You think that's going to work twice?"
Mo Fan was already faster.
Mid-air, he wrenched his body through a violent reversal and closed the distance to the Bat King's flank in an instant...
Tanking the faint sonic interference on his reinforced body without flinching.
No flashy spell exchange. No technique duel.
A fist wrapped in [ Bone Armament ], trailing a sharp crack of displaced air, drove into the Bat King's cervical vertebrae without a shred of mercy.
CRACK——!
The sound of shattering bone rang out clean and sharp in the open air.
The brief aerial engagement ended in the most brutally physical way imaginable.
The Bat King's massive body dropped like a severed kite and hit the mine floor with a heavy thud, twitched twice, and went still.
Mo Fan descended slowly on his soul wings.
Landing beside the corpse with the unhurried ease of something that had never been in danger.
He glanced at the bottom-right corner of his retina with anticipation.
[ Killed: Mutant Stone Bat King (Peak Qi Condensation). EXP Gained: +15 XP ]
The two-digit number stared back at him. The progress bar barely registered as having moved.
Whatever composure Mo Fan had been wearing evaporated instantly.
"System, go f*ck yourself!"
The profanity came out with the practiced fluency of a daily ritual.
That single notification killed the last ember of hope he'd been quietly nursing.
The idea that maybe, through sheer volume of kills, quantity could eventually become quality.
At his current level, the experience bar was a chasm.
It was coldly, ruthlessly forcing him toward one option only: hunt above his tier. Kill higher-ranked beasts. Or cultivators.
"Whatever. Peak Qi Condensation is still usable material."
The cursing didn't slow his hands for a single second.
Mo Fan efficiently swept the Bat King's corpse—along with several elite bats that had been killed by the shockwave—into his premium storage bag.
High-tier beast corpses, intact, still saturated with spiritual energy and blood essence...
They were premium ammunition for WTF's [ Corpse Explosion ]. The higher the beast's rank, the more catastrophic the detonation.
He was building a walking munitions depot.
Loot secured, the pair pressed on toward the depths.
The deeper they went, the more the mine changed.
Strange purple-green toxic fluid began seeping through the rock walls. The oxygen thinned noticeably.
The air turned cold in a way that had nothing to do with temperature—a bone-deep, soul-chilling cold.
Mo Fan kept Death Vision LV. 2 running in constant overdrive.
Advancing with the careful, measured steps of someone walking across ice they weren't sure would hold.
Then the radar grid on his retina flickered with something wrong.
Every low-tier mutant rat and poisonous insect that had been scuttling through the rock crevices—gnawing on mineral debris, minding their own business...
Suddenly abandoned their burrows in mass panic, scrambling toward the outer tunnels as fast as their legs could carry them.
Something had suppressed them at the bloodline level.
"Big one ahead."
Mo Fan stopped immediately. Held his breath.
At the edge of his grayish-white field of vision, all the background noise had vanished.
What remained was a single massive life-signature—a blinding red cluster of light, enormous and grotesquely shaped, coiled at the center of a vast underground fault chamber ahead.
As the distance closed, the System's notification appeared without fanfare:
[ Target: Stygian Poison Centipede (Tier-2 Early-Stage Beast) ]
[ Realm: Foundation Establishment — Early Stage ]
[ Traits: Lethal Venom / Hardened Carapace / Extreme Blood Frenzy ]
"There it is. Tier-2 prey."
Mo Fan licked his dry lips.
A flicker of excitement crossed his eyes—but the cold calculation behind it was far stronger.
Against something like this—a Tier-2 beast dripping with venom, its body the length of a passenger train—he had absolutely no intention of sending WTF in for a direct confrontation.
No matter how impressive WTF's stats were, it couldn't survive getting bitten in the face by something this size.
Hunting required a brain.
Mo Fan studied the surrounding terrain with the quiet, predatory focus of someone who had done this before.
Using the cover of the rock formations, he crept soundlessly to the entrance of a narrow stalactite passage at the edge of the centipede's territory.
The only route it used to move through this section of the mine.
He opened his storage bag and positioned the Bat King's corpse with deliberate care directly in the center of the passage.
For maximum effect, he drew his blade and made several cuts across the body...
Letting the thick, rich scent of high-tier beast blood bleed freely into the underground air currents, drifting steadily toward the fault chamber where the Stygian Poison Centipede lay coiled.
"Bait's ready."
Mo Fan pulled WTF back with him, retreating dozens of meters to a tall rock formation that cut off the sightline completely.
They waited.
Not long.
Shh... shh... shh...
A dense, skin-crawling sound filled the dark—hundreds upon hundreds of chitinous legs dragging across stone in perfect, rhythmic unison.
The Stygian Poison Centipede emerged.
Seven or eight meters of armored horror, every segment bristling with backward-curving spines, its carapace a deep, mottled purple-black.
Two antennae whipped through the air like steel cables.
The mandibles—dripping dark-green venom—caught the faint light and threw back a cold, lethal gleam.
As the undisputed apex predator of this section of the mine, it moved without a shred of caution.
In this place, it was the sky. Who would dare ambush it?
When it caught the scent—that thick, rich blood-smell—and spotted the high-tier bat corpse lying in the center of the passage...
A glint of pure greed passed through its compound eyes.
It moved without hesitation, flowing its massive body forward, lowering that ugly, savage head toward the corpse...
Mandibles spreading wide, preparing to swallow the entire thing in one bite.
The moment its mouthparts were about to make contact—
Dozens of meters away, hidden in the dark, the corner of Mo Fan's mouth pulled into the coldest smile he'd made all night.
Beside him, WTF's deep-blue ghost-flames erupted.
The white bone arm beneath the Daoist robe snapped upward. At the tip of the [ Pale Bone Scepter ], a pulse of sickly green death-law light ignited the darkness.
Detonate.
Mo Fan's mental command hit like a hammer.
BOOM——!!!
The Bat King's corpse—packed with the volatile energy of a peak Qi Condensation beast, now laced with forcibly injected unstable death-qi—reacted.
The explosion that followed was not an explosion.
It was an event.
A thunderous, eardrum-shredding detonation tore through the deepest section of the mid-level mine.
A sphere of destructive force several meters across erupted upward...
Carrying shredded bone, toxic bat blood, and raw concussive energy in every direction!
SKREEEEEE——!!!
The Stygian Poison Centipede's prized purple-black carapace—the armor it had spent its entire existence trusting—shattered.
Point-blank. Zero warning. Zero distance.
It came apart in pieces.