Back in his room.

After repeatedly opening and closing the daily settlement panel for nearly fifteen minutes, Wen Jiu's excitement finally subsided like the ebbing tide. Sleepiness crept in again, pulling him back into slumber.

Early the next morning, before dawn had even broken, Wen Jiu suddenly jolted awake from his wooden bed. The first thing he did upon waking was open the daily settlement panel. Seeing that it was indeed still there, he let out a deep sigh of relief.

"Thank goodness it wasn't just a dream."

Lifting his gaze, he noticed a faint white glow in the sky outside the window. Almost simultaneously, an intense hunger surged through him.

Just as he was about to gulp down some water to ease the emptiness in his stomach before searching for food, a knock on the door was accompanied by a woman's voice.

"You lazy brat, get up already."

"Open the door for me."

Her voice carried both warmth and a touch of sharpness—familiar, unmistakable.

Wen Jiu hurried to open the door, revealing a woman dressed in a simple cyan cloth dress.

Though her attire was plain, her features were striking—delicate eyebrows, almond-shaped eyes, and skin as fair as snow.

The moment he saw her, memories of her flooded his mind.

Wen Ya.

His sister.

"How are you feeling after resting for a night? Is your body any better?" Wen Ya stepped inside, placing a sea-blue porcelain bowl covered with a lotus leaf onto the wooden table. As she lifted the leaf, she spoke again.

Wen Jiu knew what she was asking about. As he answered, his eyes were already drawn to the fragrant contents of the bowl. "I'm alright… I think I can eat now. Sis, what is this? It smells amazing."

When the lotus leaf was fully removed—

It was a bowl of rice.

It seemed that he was truly starving, because even a simple bowl of plain white rice smelled so delicious that it made his mouth water uncontrollably.

"Smells good, doesn't it? This is a bowl of spirit rice. It's low-grade, but it's still something that immortals eat!"

As she spoke, Wen Ya handed him the bowl and a pair of chopsticks.

But Wen Jiu didn't take them. His face was full of doubt. "Sis, how did you get your hands on spirit rice?"

According to his memories—

He had signed a contract to sell himself as a gravedigger.

His sister, on the other hand, worked as a menial laborer on the Dead Man's Peak.

Although her wages were three to five taels more than his, there was no way she could afford even low-grade spirit rice.

Wen Ya forced a small smile. "One of the immortal overseers in charge of the gravediggers appreciates how diligent I am, so he let me work as his servant girl… Hurry up and eat. Even low-grade spirit rice can cleanse impurities from your body and protect your internal organs from the corrosion of blood energy, corpse energy, death energy, and yin energy."

"Sis, you didn't agree to this just for the spirit rice, did you?" Having lived two lives and worked in the real world for seven or eight years, Wen Jiu could easily see through her forced smile. Things weren't as simple as she made them out to be.

Wen Ya quickly shook her head. "No, no! Why are you asking so many questions? Just eat. If you wait too long, you'll have to go bury corpses again. If you don't eat, where will you get the strength to dig graves?"

With that—

She gave him no chance to speak further. She stood up and turned to leave, but before stepping out, she left him with one final sentence.

"Do your work properly, and never forget… The only reason we can stay on this immortal mountain is because our parents paid for it with their lives."

Bang!

The wooden door shut tightly.

Wen Jiu stood frozen for a few moments, but he didn't chase after her. Instead, he picked up the bowl and began eating in big, hungry mouthfuls.

At this point—

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There was nothing he could do.

Nothing he could change.

The only thing left was to eat his fill and use the daily settlement panel to grow stronger, step by step.

…

Soon, Wen Jiu found himself back at the land of mangled corpses.

Compared to the previous day, the air here was even colder. The moment he stepped within a hundred feet of the site, a bone-piercing chill enveloped him. Around him, the other gravediggers instinctively pulled their clothes tighter, but it did little to shield them from the cold.

Yet unlike yesterday, Wen Jiu felt completely at ease among the scattered remains.

The so-called cold—

The so-called death energy, corpse energy—

All of it felt incredibly comfortable to him.

If not for the need to conceal his abnormality, he would have stripped off his outer robe, removed his mask, and taken deep, greedy breaths of the surrounding death and corpse energy.

"Get moving! We're finishing early today. If anyone dares slack off, don't blame me for using my whip!"

After the middle-aged overseer barked his warning, Wen Jiu grabbed a shovel and started turning over the blood-soaked earth, loading the dismembered corpses onto the cart.

As far as the eye could see, the sight of scattered corpses and severed limbs was no longer as terrifying as before. Instead, it made Wen Jiu develop the thought of fully assimilating them, turning them into something he could use.

However, considering that he had only managed to transform one corpse so far and combining that with the information provided by the system about a Level 1 Corpse Nurturer, Wen Jiu decided to take his time finding a complete corpse. After all, a fully intact corpse would be far stronger after transformation than a fragmented one.

Yet, after searching for half a day, he still couldn't find a single intact corpse. The other corpse buriers around him faced the same predicament. The most complete body Wen Jiu had come across was that of a middle-aged male cultivator, but even he only had his upper torso remaining.

Although he hadn't found a suitable corpse, listening to the conversations around him gave him a profound understanding of the cruel reality of the cultivation world. It turned out that the ones who had died here were not ordinary mortals but powerful, high-ranking cultivators.

Not a single commoner among them.

Wen Jiu couldn't determine the exact number of fallen cultivators in this vast land of death, but he estimated that at least ten thousand had perished here.

Ten thousand cultivators left to rot in the wilderness.

After death, their only fate was to be buried in the nameless hills by corpse buriers.

How tragic. How pitiful.

"Mortals dream of becoming immortals, just like the original body's parents, who willingly served cultivators and even sacrificed their lives, all for the chance to have their children remain on an immortal mountain... But do any of them truly understand the brutality of the cultivation world?"

Wen Jiu couldn't help but sigh internally.

Just as he was lost in thought, his eyes fell upon a kneeling corpse. The man's face was frozen in an expression of resentment and fury, his chest hollowed out as if some monstrous beast had torn it open. As Wen Jiu stepped closer, he could feel that the corpse exuded a much heavier aura of yin energy compared to the surroundings—by at least threefold.

Though threefold might not seem like much, to anyone other than a Corpse Nurturer like himself, exposure to such intense yin energy would be enough to either kill them or leave them bedridden for days.

"You'll do."

Wen Jiu slowly walked toward the corpse.

As he approached, a simple status panel for the body appeared before his eyes.

[Unnamed Male Corpse]

[Bone Age: Thirty-five | Cultivation Before Death: Body Refinement, First Level]

[Proceed with Transformation?]

After scanning the area and confirming there were no fully intact corpses in sight, Wen Jiu decisively chose "Yes."

The moment he made his choice, he discreetly bit his finger, allowing three drops of blood to fall onto the corpse—one on its forehead and one on each of its shoulders. In an instant, the body absorbed his blood with a sudden force.

As his blood merged with the corpse, the surrounding yin energy surged even further. Fortunately, the middle-aged overseer was far enough away not to notice the abnormality.

Wen Jiu knew that the transformation had begun.

Now, all he had to do was place the corpse near the death grounds and let it naturally absorb the surrounding yin and death energy.

With time, it would evolve into a White Ghoul.

Unlike traditional corpse-nurturing techniques, which required selecting, storing, bathing, and refining the corpse, this method only required choosing the right place for the process to take place.

But what were these traditional steps?

Selecting a corpse meant choosing a suitable body—one that had an inherently yin-aligned fate and had died during an eclipse or at an hour of extreme darkness.

Storing the corpse involved placing it in a designated location for five to seven days. If it resisted decay and its yin energy continued to grow, like this cultivator's corpse, then it was deemed qualified.

Bathing and refining were even more complicated.

The bathing process cleansed the corpse of its past life, erasing all traces of its former humanity. Refining, on the other hand, was a lengthy ritual—at minimum, it took forty-nine days, requiring the corpse to be doused in fresh animal blood three times a day while being subjected to Corpse Nurturing Incantations.

But thanks to the secret technique of corpse transformation, Wen Jiu could skip all these steps.

All he had to do was bury the body in a death-saturated land, feed it his blood daily, and let it absorb the ambient yin and death energy.

Once it had absorbed enough, it would naturally transform, sprouting white fur all over its body—becoming a White Ghoul.

However, White Ghouls feared sunlight, fire, water, chickens, dogs, and—above all—humans.

It wouldn't be ready for use just yet.

It would have to continue evolving.

Only when the White Ghoul shed its fur and turned into a Black Ghoul would the process be complete.

At that point, it would become a weapon at Wen Jiu's disposal, a true offensive force under his command.

When that day arrived...

He would become a true Corpse Nurturer.

A true cultivator.

Without wasting time, Wen Jiu struggled to drag the corpse toward the burial ground, finally placing it beneath three feet of yellow earth on the nameless green hill.

After finishing his work, he returned to the land of death and resumed transporting corpses, continuing to absorb yin and death energy into his body.

Corpse energy could be infused into bodies.

Death energy could be used for cultivation.

Although he had yet to begin his cultivation journey, there was no harm in accumulating death energy in advance.

...

By the time Shen hour arrived—before sunset—the middle-aged overseer suddenly ordered everyone to stop.

It seemed there was an urgent matter at hand.

Without explanation, he quickly led the entire group back.

However, instead of allowing them to return to their wooden huts, he gathered all one hundred corpse buriers and led them three miles away—toward a marketplace where cultivators resided.