The stench of rot carved its way into Mo Li's skull before his mind had fully returned. His eyelids were crusted shut with dried blood. When they finally peeled apart, the world around him was darkness layered in decay—a mountain of corpses, soaked in death.
He didn't breathe.
He couldn't.
His lungs weren't functioning the way they should. His chest rose not from air, but from something else. Something deeper. A will that refused to perish.
Because he had died.
He remembered the blade in his back. The way it slipped between his ribs. The look in his senior brother's eyes as he delivered the blow—calm, cold, without hesitation.
Then… darkness.
Now?
Now he lay among the dead, his body bloated, skin tinged with purple, his fingers curled stiff in rigor mortis. But he was awake. Not as a ghost. Not as a spirit. Not as a remnant.
He had returned in the flesh.
"Congratulations," whispered a voice, thin as bone dust. "You're the first corpse that moved."
The voice didn't echo from above—it came from beneath. It was stitched into the marrow of the pile, layered between snapped vertebrae and shattered skulls.
Mo Li didn't flinch. He smiled, his lips splitting as cracked flesh parted.
"Then I guess I win."
He sat up slowly. Bones popped. Muscle tore. Maggots slid down from his left eye socket like tears. His fingernails had blackened, thickened—closer to talons than flesh.
Something inside his chest pulsed. Not a heart. Not anymore.
It was a seed.
A dark, squirming node embedded between bone and sinew. It fed on the corpse qi that choked the pit. Fed on rot. Fed on hatred.
He could feel it now: the essence of ten thousand dead, soaked into the soil, into the air, into him. It bled into his marrow, filled his breathless lungs.
He laughed.
It was a harsh, wet sound—half cough, half madness.
"So this is what it takes," he muttered, flexing fingers that cracked like dry wood. "To walk a path no one dares name."
Above him, a thin beam of moonlight trickled down through a crack in the stone ceiling. Pale. Cold. Indifferent.
Just like the heavens.
He stood—slowly, unsteadily—naked atop a pile of broken bodies. Bones shifted beneath his feet. Ribs cracked like old ice.
Still, he stood tall.
"Let them chase immortality with clean robes and celestial light," he whispered. "I'll carve mine from filth and bone."
A rumble stirred deep below. The corpse mountain shifted. A broken jaw snapped shut. Fingers twitched in the dark.
Mo Li opened his arms wide, breathing in the thick, toxic air.
"This is my domain now."
His eye—his left eye—flickered.
Not with moonlight.
With something darker.
The will of the dead.
A glowing mark bloomed on his brow, shaped like a bone-white flame.
His first Corpse Mark.
The rumble beneath Mo Li's feet grew louder.
Something deep in the corpse pit had awakened—drawn to him, or perhaps challenged by him. The pile of bodies shifted, parts falling away with wet slaps as the pit groaned like a creature stirring in its sleep.
From above, footsteps.
Dust trickled down from the stone ceiling. A moment later, a lantern flickered into view—then a face. Pale, clean, still untouched by rot. A cultivator in gray robes leaned over the edge, frowning.
"Shit," the man muttered. "Another one moved?"
He turned to someone behind him. "Tell the overseer. We've got a twitcher."
Mo Li tilted his head. "Twitcher?"
He grinned. "No. I'm awake."
The cultivator above blinked. Then laughed. "Oh? Awake, are you? Then crawl up here, freak. Let's see if you can still talk when I cut your tongue out."
He drew a blade from his side—a glowing saber, lined with inscriptions of the Celestial White Sect. Standard issue. Mass-produced. Meant for cutting down ghouls, not negotiating with them.
Mo Li stared at the blade, then at the cultivator.
And smiled.
The Corpse Mark on his brow pulsed once.
Below his feet, something stirred.
A corpse—one missing its lower jaw—twitched. Its eyes rolled in its sockets, milky and dead. But something inside it responded to Mo Li's will.
He raised a finger.
The corpse rose.
Not as a zombie, no. It didn't groan. It didn't stagger.
It launched.
Like a bullet, it flew upward, its broken limbs flailing as it slammed into the edge of the pit.
The cultivator shouted, slashing at it in reflex. But the corpse exploded on impact, spraying rot and blackened blood into his face.
The lantern fell. Crashed.
Darkness swallowed the rim of the pit.
Mo Li climbed.
He didn't levitate. He didn't fly.
He walked—up the side of the corpse wall, each step pulling on threads of corpse qi that responded like chains.
With every movement, dead flesh shifted to form footholds. He wasn't climbing.
He was being lifted.
By the dead.
At the top, a second cultivator screamed.
Mo Li reached the edge, eyes glowing with corpse light, flesh still rotting, but grin intact.
"Your sect dumped me here," he said, voice like gravel and thunder. "They forgot to bury me deep enough."
He snapped his fingers.
Three corpses leapt from below, crashing into the cultivators.
Screams.
Blood.
Then silence.
Mo Li stepped out of the pit, naked under the moon, surrounded by the corpses of his killers.
He took one of their robes. It didn't matter which.
He took one of their swords. It was too clean. That would change.
And then he looked out, beyond the pit, into the dark valley where the Celestial White Sect dumped their failures.
Where discarded disciples and ruined cultivators were thrown away like garbage.
He looked, and he smiled.
"My turn."
Mo Li didn't run. He didn't need to.
As the first blast of sword qi slammed down from above, slicing through the edge of the corpse pit, he merely tilted his head and stepped aside. Stone exploded behind him. Bones shattered. Dust spiraled like ghosts.
A figure leapt down from above—a disciple clad in pristine white robes, eyes sharp with disgust.
"Demon scum," the man spat. "What manner of filth crawls out from graves these days?"
Mo Li blinked. The sword light had singed his tattered robes, revealing bare chest, ink-black veins pulsing beneath rotted skin. He looked like a corpse half-revived.
He smiled. "A kind you're not prepared for."
The disciple scoffed and raised his blade again.
That's when Mo Li moved.
He didn't dash. He didn't vanish in a flicker of light. He just—walked.
And every step echoed with the creak of coffins, every movement carried the weight of the dead.
The disciple's sword came crashing down.
Mo Li raised his arm.
The blade struck flesh—and stopped.
There was no clang. No burst of light.
Just a sickening crunch.
His arm didn't break. The sword did.
The disciple stared at the shattered weapon, wide-eyed. "What… what kind of body refinement—"
Mo Li drove his palm forward.
It struck the man in the chest, not with speed, not with cultivation technique, but with absolute, rotting force.
A sound like wood splintering echoed through the pit. The disciple flew back, blood spraying mid-air, spine bent like a snapped bow.
He crashed against the corpse wall, fell, and didn't move.
Mo Li looked at his hand. The skin had peeled away. Bone gleamed. But it still worked.
He flexed his fingers. "Still too soft."
Above, more voices echoed.
"He's down there!"
"A corpse cultivator!"
"Notify the elders!"
Mo Li didn't look up. He looked at the corpses instead.
They stared back.
Empty sockets. Cracked skulls. Mouths agape in silent screams.
And yet, somehow—they listened.
He knelt and pressed his palm to the ground.
Corpse qi surged.
"Spare me your righteous fury," he muttered. "From now on, I cultivate not with pills or scrolls, but with rot and ruin."
The soil around him twisted. Bones shifted. The dead moved.
A skeletal hand rose beside him, clutching a broken talisman.
Another corpse arched its back and spat out a shattered soul bead.
The mountain began to breathe.
Above, the disciples hesitated. No one jumped in.
Mo Li stood slowly, his back straight, eyes glowing faintly.
"To the righteous sects above," he said softly, "you call this a grave."
A grin tore across his face, feral and alive.
"I call it a cradle."