"HUMMM—!"
No hesitation. Mo Fan severed the Mana flow instantly, force-quitting the [ Death Vision ] that had been showing him what felt like a live feed straight from the abyss.
The world snapped back from frozen grayscale to normal nighttime colors. The wind's howl flooded back into his ears.
"Urgh—"
The whiplash of visual signals cutting out mid-stream, combined with the psychic aftershock of staring directly into that torrent of high-energy things—Mo Fan stumbled, grabbed a nearby boulder, and dry-heaved.
His face had gone corpse-pale. Cold sweat beaded across his forehead. He looked like a drowning man who'd just been dragged up from the ocean floor, still choking on seawater.
Too terrifying.
That was no Qi Condensation-tier dungeon. The sheer volume of energy contained in that underground blood-river—if even a fraction leaked to the surface, it would grind his pathetic little body into powder without noticing.
"Retreat! Now!"
Mo Fan wiped the sour taste from his mouth, voice tight and urgent. "No. 003, return! Cease hunting!"
Greed?
In the face of absolute, primal death-terror, whatever greed he'd felt had been scared clean out of his skull. Probably orbiting somewhere in the upper atmosphere by now.
He understood perfectly what had just happened. He'd been an ant crouched at the rim of a volcano, trying to warm its hands by the magma glow. The smart play—the only play—was to run like hell before the eruption started, before that underground flood noticed the insignificant mosquitoes buzzing around on the surface.
If he got greedy and kept killing, if he accidentally disrupted some underground balance or triggered a stress response from that massive hive-mind, if even a few of the real monsters decided to tunnel up for a look...
There wouldn't be enough left of him to fill an urn.
"Mo Yan, grab the sacks. Move! Back to town!"
Mo Fan didn't even bother cleaning up the freshly-killed rat corpses at the scene. He fled with his two undead units under cover of darkness, skulking away like a thief with a guilty conscience, never once looking back at that cursed killing field.
Qingmu Town. Cloud's Rest Inn, Branch Location.
Mo Fan practically crashed through the door. He slammed the bolt home, slapped two sound-dampening talismans on the frame, and only after confirming the cramped room was completely sealed did his thundering heartbeat begin to slow.
"Hah... hah..."
He collapsed into a chair and poured himself a cup of long-cold tea, draining it in one desperate gulp.
In the corner, Mo Yan (Summon No. 001) stood in its usual vacant pose. Two bulging burlap sacks sat at its feet, still seeping blood through the weave. Summon No. 003 had already been disassembled and stored back in his storage pouch.
"Those things... what the hell were they?"
Mo Fan set down the cup. His gaze drifted to the blood-stained sacks.
He'd escaped, yes. But that prickling sensation of invisible crosshairs on his back refused to fade. As a Necromancer who believed in scientific methodology (even while cultivating in a fantasy world), he needed to understand the logic behind this "supernatural phenomenon."
If only so he could avoid it more effectively next time.
"Mo Yan. Dump one out."
Mo Fan drew the dagger from his belt. His eyes sharpened into a forensic investigator's focus.
Thump.
A bloated Mutant Spirit-Devouring Rat corpse hit the floor. Rigor mortis had already set in, body stiff as wood. But something was wrong—even in death, its eyes hadn't faded to the expected milky gray of a dead fish. Instead, they still held a faint, unsettling blood-red glow.
And its abdomen was distended. Grotesquely swollen. Like it was pregnant. Or had eaten far, far too much.
"Something's off."
Mo Fan pulled on gloves and made a practiced incision down the rat's belly.
No half-digested spirit grain inside. No stench of ruptured organs.
Beneath that thin layer of abdominal skin, where the stomach should have been, something else had taken up residence. A coal-black growth, no larger than a fingernail.
No—not a growth.
Mo Fan lifted it on the tip of his blade.
A seed.
A seed with faint black veins pulsing across its surface. Throbbing rhythmically like a tiny heart. Radiating an aura that triggered immediate, visceral nausea in Mo Fan's gut.
"This is..."
His pupils contracted.
As a Necromancer, he was intimately familiar with death energy, corpse toxins, the cold and silent weight of negative energy.
But this seed's aura was completely different. Chaotic. Violent. Corrupted. Carrying a mad hunger that wanted to devour all living things.
This was the signature of the Mystic Realm's native Demonic Dao! The real deal—the kind of cultivation that used living humans for pill refinement, that sacrificed sentient beings in blood rituals, that pursued power through any means necessary.
"This isn't natural mutation."
Mo Fan stared at the still-pulsing demonic seed. His hands and feet went cold.
"Someone's breeding Gu insects."
Someone—or some faction—was using Qingmu Town's spirit fields as a cultivation medium. Using these Spirit-Devouring Rats as hosts. Mass-producing these demonic seeds on an industrial scale.
The rats' frenzied consumption of spirit roots, their tireless march toward the spirit vein—none of it was about feeding themselves. The seeds inside them were hungry. Driving their hosts toward higher-grade spiritual energy sources like parasites steering meat-puppets.
"Does the sect that posted the bounty... know about this?"
Conspiracy theories cascaded through Mo Fan's mind. "Or is this part of the mastermind's plan? Hell—are we bounty hunters who took the rat-killing mission also pieces on their board?"
The more he thought, the more terrifying it became.
Crack!
Mo Fan flicked his wrist, launching the demonic seed into the fire brazier. Acrid black smoke hissed up as it burned. The nauseating aura finally dissipated.
He stood and paced the room, agitation bleeding through every step.
"Can't investigate. Absolutely cannot dig any deeper."
An icy chill ran down his spine. Whoever had the balls to run this kind of large-scale demonic operation right under Azure Cloud Sect's nose? That was a high-realm powerhouse playing games at a level far above his pay grade.
He was a freshly-minted Level 4 shrimp who hadn't even reached Foundation Establishment. If he stuck his head into that mess to take a peek, he'd get mulched so thoroughly there wouldn't be scraps left for the crows.
"If this were some wild-spawn boss, even a strong one, I might risk a few pokes. But this is clearly someone's private dungeon—and the entry fee alone is more than I could earn in ten lifetimes."
The decision crystallized instantly.
Strategic cowardice.
"Stop immediately. If I keep killing and accidentally disrupt the mastermind's setup—say, thin the herd enough that their 'blood river' loses flow—and they come looking for the cause? I'm dead. Full stop."
Mo Fan glanced at the two sacks on the floor.
"These few dozen rat tails are more than enough to complete the mission. Exceeds quota, even. Five Spirit Stones isn't much—but compared to my life? I'm walking away with profit."
He didn't flee back to the sect overnight.
Too conspicuous. Too guilty-looking. If someone was watching from the shadows, a servant who bolted in the middle of the night would only raise red flags.
"I'm a Body Cultivator. I'm exhausted. I finished my mission and I'm resting in town for the night. Heading back at first light. Completely reasonable behavior."
Mo Fan forced himself onto the bed and pulled the blanket over his head.
"I don't know anything. I'm just a big dumb musclehead who kills rats with his fists."
"Whatever conspiracy is brewing here? That's the Inner Sect Elders' problem. When the sky falls, let the tall people hold it up."
Outside the window, the night pressed down like spilled ink.
Occasionally, a shrill rat-squeal pierced the darkness. Tonight, those sounds no longer rang like coins dropping into his pocket.
They sounded like death warrants crawling up from hell.
Mo Fan burrowed deeper into his blanket. In this night thick with demonic shadows, he felt for the first time just how fragile his few dozen HP really were.