At the edge of the abyss, a "war" of truly spectacular volume was underway.
"AAAAHHHHH—!"
"Junior Sister, SAVE ME—!"
"I DON'T WANT TO DIEEEEE!"
Dozens of skeletons shrieked like broken records stuck on their final, most pathetic moments of existence.
They swung bone-fists, femurs, and even their own ribs with reckless abandon, hurling themselves at the wolf pack like undead berserkers with nothing left to lose.
This was Mo Fan's tactical masterpiece: Psychological Warfare via Audio Pollution.
The Bone-Spike Demon Wolves were apex predators of this region, but when had they ever encountered this?
They'd come here to hunt. Instead, they'd stumbled into what could only be described as a mass-casualty crime scene playing on loop—except the "victims" were somehow more violent than any murderer.
The cognitive dissonance shattered their predatory instincts entirely.
But Mo Fan wasn't done.
From his perch in the crooked pine, he'd organized his skeletal forces into proper combat formations.
The beefier-looking skeletons charged the front line as meat shields—or rather, bone shields—while those lucky enough to have rusted weapons followed behind, delivering what could generously be called "damage output."
The wolves, already mentally compromised by the cacophony of dying screams, found themselves unable to coordinate. Their attempted encirclement fell apart under the shambling onslaught.
The first wolf broke and ran.
Then another.
Within seconds, the entire pack was in full retreat, their howls of frustration echoing off the cliff walls as they fled into the mist.
"Haah..."
Mo Fan exhaled, watching the last demon wolf tuck its tail and scramble away.
"So this is what double mana capacity feels like."
He'd been running his undead army like a perpetual motion machine, and the high was intoxicating. For a brief, beautiful moment, he felt almost invincible.
Then the pain hit.
It came without warning—a lance of white-hot agony that drove straight through his skull.
It felt like a hundred steel needles piercing his brain simultaneously, or perhaps like three consecutive all-nighters of coding followed by the server crashing the moment you hit "deploy."
[ WARNING: Soul Overload Detected! ]
[ Current Spiritual Connections: 20/5 ]
[ CRITICAL: Safety threshold exceeded by 400%! ]
[ Initiating emergency disconnection... ]
"Wha—"
Mo Fan's vision went black before he could even finish the word. The red warning text blurred into meaningless smears of color, and then—nothing.
The feeling of absolute control, of being a puppet master with dozens of strings, vanished as if someone had yanked the plug.
Clatter-clatter-clatter—
Below, the skeletons collapsed in unison.
The ghostly green flames in their eye sockets winked out like snuffed candles. Bones clattered against stone, spilling into the abyss or jamming into crevices—a waterfall of remains pouring into the void like dumplings into a pot.
Silence crashed down like a physical weight.
The contrast was jarring. One moment: a symphony of screaming and violence. The next: only the lonely howl of mountain wind through the canyon.
Mo Fan shook his head, trying to force his splitting skull back into functionality. His vision swam, doubled, then slowly focused.
That's when he noticed the survivor.
The skeleton he'd summoned first—the one with the broken sword—was still there, wedged into a crack in the rock face about three meters away.
The twin flames in its eye sockets had dimmed to faint embers, but they burned still. Stubborn. Persistent.
"You didn't fall apart?"
Mo Fan stared at it warily.
[ System Analysis: Summon No. 001 ]
[ Status: Minor Damage ]
[ Cause Assessment: This individual possesses superior bone density and residual obsession. Automatically designated as Default Primary Summon. ]
For a long moment, man and skeleton simply stared at each other.
Mo Fan held his breath, terrified that the thing would suddenly open its jaw and belt out another ear-splitting "AAAAHHHHH," drawing every monster within a ten-kilometer radius straight to them.
But Summon No. 001 just... looked at him. Its mandible clicked once—clack—and then nothing.
In standby mode, it was as silent as an actual corpse.
"So the screaming really is just a combat audio bug," Mo Fan muttered, letting out a relieved breath.
The tension drained from his shoulders.
Crisis temporarily resolved. The wolves had fled. The skeletons had scattered.
But now came the next problem.
Mo Fan shifted his weight experimentally. The searing agony that shot up his legs reminded him that he was, in fact, a multiply-fractured patient currently dangling from a crooked pine tree growing out of a cliff face.
He couldn't climb up. He couldn't climb down.
He looked at his sole remaining "employee."
"Hey. You. No. 001." He jerked his chin toward the skeleton. "Get over here and help."
The skeleton tilted its skull. The flames in its sockets flickered once.
Clack.
It didn't move.
"Can't understand complex commands?" Mo Fan frowned, then tried simplifying. "Swing sword."
Whoosh!
Summon No. 001 immediately slashed at empty air, nearly taking off a nearby branch.
"..."
Mo Fan was speechless. This level of intelligence had clearly said goodbye to bicycle-riding privileges long ago.
Rubbing his temples against the lingering migraine, he closed his eyes and concentrated.
In his mind's eye, he visualized the connection—that thin blue thread of spiritual energy linking his consciousness to the skeleton's skull. This time, instead of shouting commands like some medieval warlord, he treated it like operating a cursor on a computer screen.
Select target. Issue command.
[ Command: Transport/Move ]
[ Target: Host ]
The moment the directive registered, Summon No. 001 moved.
It crawled toward him with jerky, mechanical movements, reaching out with those bare-bone hands.
"Easy now," Mo Fan warned. "I'm injured, so you need to be carefu—"
His collar yanked tight around his throat.
No. 001 had grabbed the back of his shirt like he was a dead dog being hauled to the garbage.
Then, searching for leverage, the skeleton swung its arm—
THUNK!
Mo Fan's forehead slammed directly into the tree trunk. Stars exploded across his vision.
"Mother—FUCK—"
Tears of pain pricked at his eyes as he mentally scribbled furious notes.
"This level of customer service would get you buried in one-star reviews! Deducted from your performance bonus! Absolutely deducted!"
Despite the rough handling, 001 was still a cultivator's skeleton. Its raw strength was absurd.
It hauled Mo Fan up one-handed, clinging to the cliff face like some kind of undead gecko, and began the clumsy ascent toward the top.
As they climbed, the violent jostling and repeated head trauma triggered something in Mo Fan's borrowed body—a protective mechanism buried deep in its original memories.
Fragments flooded his mind.
Who am I?
Lu Xiaoqi. The Mystic Realm. A bottom-tier servant in the outer sect of the Azure Cloud Sect.
Spirit Root: Trash-grade Five-Element Hybrid Root. Basically guaranteed never to reach Foundation Establishment in this lifetime.
Daily duties: Hauling water. Chopping wood. Being everyone's punching bag.
Where is this?
The forbidden zone behind Azure Cloud Sect—Abandoned Sword Cliff.
This was where the sect dumped its failed treasures, alchemical slag, and the bodies of servants who'd "made mistakes."
"So the original owner was sent here to gather herbs, slipped, and fell to his death..."
Mo Fan processed the information, and a cold satisfaction settled in his chest.
"Perfect. A bottom-rung nobody. Even if I disappear for two weeks, no one will notice or care. Ideal conditions for farming in peace."
The cliff's edge was almost within reach now. Mo Fan could see grass.
"Keep it up, 001. Get me to the top and I'll find you a nice thick femur to replace that leg—"
Crack.
The sound cut off his empty promise.
Abandoned Sword Cliff had earned its name for a reason.
Generations of discarded swords had leaked their residual sword-qi into the stone, leaving the rock brittle and unstable.
The handhold Summon No. 001 had grabbed simply... crumbled.
"..."
Mo Fan didn't even have time to finish his curse.
One man, one skeleton—inches from safety—embraced gravity once more.
No crooked pine tree to save them this time.
The wind screamed past Mo Fan's ears as he plummeted. Above him, that bone-headed idiot 001 seemed to activate some kind of core protection protocol.
It wrapped its skeletal frame around Mo Fan, positioning itself beneath him like a full-body cushion.
CRASH!
Dust and debris exploded upward. The world went briefly white.
A long moment passed.
"Koff... haack..."
Mo Fan rolled over with tremendous effort, spitting out a mouthful of blood and dirt that tasted like copper and grave soil.
Thanks to Summon No. 001 absorbing the impact—and the vines they'd torn through on the way down bleeding off some momentum—he'd survived the fall. Every bone in his body screamed in protest, but he was alive.
His "star employee" hadn't been so lucky.
Summon No. 001 lay motionless in a crater of rubble beside him.
Its ribcage was completely pulverized. Left arm: gone entirely. Right leg: snapped into three separate pieces. The rusted sword had vanished somewhere in the chaos.
Worst of all, the soul-flames in its eye sockets had faded to barely-visible flickers, guttering like candles in a storm.
[ WARNING: Summon No. 001 approaching critical failure. ]
[ Current Structural Integrity: 15% ]
"Don't do this to me, buddy."
Mo Fan ignored his own agony and dragged himself over to the skeleton. "You're my only asset right now."
He looked around desperately.
The valley floor was a graveyard of garbage—discarded pill residue, broken artifacts, and bones.
Bones everywhere, from the indigenous humans and beasts alike, thrown down from above and left to rot.
But how was he supposed to fix a skeleton?
His Necromancer abilities included [ Summon ]. There was no [ Repair ] function in the skill tree!
Out of pure instinct—the material-science graduate in him refusing to die—Mo Fan grabbed a random leg bone from the debris nearby.
Some unknown animal's femur.
He held it up to Summon No. 001's shattered limb, trying to eyeball whether it might fit.
And then the miracle happened.
The moment he brought that bone close to No. 001's stump, a green wireframe overlay flickered to life across his vision—like the guide-lines in a 3D modeling program.
[ Compatible Component Detected: Indigenous Humanoid Leg Bone (Low Quality) ]
[ Compatibility: 65% ]
[ Initiate Grafting? Y/N ]
A dotted line appeared between the animal femur and Summon No. 001's broken joint, snapping into place like LEGO bricks with magnetic alignment.
Mo Fan froze.
Then a manic grin spread across his bloodied face.
This wasn't complicated cultivation alchemy. No furnace required. No mystical runes. No years of training.
This was something he understood intimately.
Building with blocks.
"So this is how a Necromancer is supposed to work..."
Mo Fan surveyed the bone-strewn valley floor—an endless supply of raw materials—then looked back at the dying Summon No. 001.
His grin widened into something almost feral.
"System. Lock target."
"And fucking Graft."