Chapter 29: The Blocked Road
Chi Yan’s body was gradually disappearing!
Lu Yunxi took two quick steps forward and reached out to grab him, but her fingers closed on empty air. Only a few fading specks of light remained scattered at her fingertips.
“Why is this happening?” The dead villagers still lay on the ground, but Chi Yan had completely vanished.
The only difference between Chi Yan and the locals was that he was an adventurer. Do all adventurers vanish upon death, or was Chi Yan a special case? Was he actually some kind of mountain spirit rather than a human being?
She frowned, buried under a mountain of unanswered questions.
However, she didn’t have the luxury of time to think, as the weeping around her started up again. She stood there in a daze for what felt like an eternity, and when she finally came to her senses, the village chief was standing beside her.
“Xiaoxi, don’t take it too hard.” He patted her shoulder, his eyes heavy with sorrow. “None of us could have anticipated that he would manage to escape right from under the noses of the imperial guards.”
Lu Yunxi lowered her head and let out a soft hum.
It wasn’t until the deep dead of night that she finally walked back home, her limbs stiff and robotic. That hollow, empty feeling lasted for more than half a month before she finally managed to quiet her mind.
Carrying her packed bag, Lu Yunxi let out a long sigh of relief the moment she stepped past the boundaries of the village.
Finally! She had safely made it out!
After wiping the sweat from her brow, she walked a few hundred meters before turning back to take one last, careful look at her home. She quietly memorized the three characters carved into the entrance marker: Mushroom Village.
She stared at the sign for a long time. Just as she was about to turn around and continue her journey, a sudden thought struck her, and she instinctively activated her Appraisal technique.
[Mushroom Village: A cursed village.]
She froze. She suddenly recalled her past investigation into Liu Baozhu’s condition, which had also explicitly mentioned a curse.
After reflecting on it for a moment, she etched the detail deeply into her memory. She cast one final, lingering glance at the settlement, turned on her heel, and walked away without looking back.
There was only a single dirt road leading out of the valley, and Yunxi made rapid progress along the path. Around noon, she wiped the sweat from her face, found a shaded spot beneath a canopy of trees, and sat down to pull out some rations.
Right at that moment, a painfully familiar voice drifted through the brush.
“That miserable bitch! If she has the guts, she should stay holed up in that Novice Village forever. The second she steps outside, I’m going to make her pay!”
Yunxi went entirely still. She quietly crept into a thicket, completely concealing herself as she peeked through the leaves at the two men standing a short distance away.
The speaker was none other than Chi Yan—the very man she had watched die just a few weeks ago! He couldn’t possibly be drawing breath, yet the man standing before her possessed the exact same aura, physique, and grating voice as the criminal.
“Chi Yan, curb your bloodlust next time!” the man beside him complained. “Look at the mess you’re in now. Just because you went on a rampage murdering NPCs, your reputation is tanked and you can’t even enter the Novice Village anymore! If your respawn point hadn’t defaulted to the wilderness, I wouldn’t have to hike out to this wasteland to meet you. You’ve completely ruined my chances with the girls I spent weeks flirting with!”
“Hmph! At the end of the day, this game’s code is just garbage. NPCs are nothing but clusters of data anyway. Who cares if I slaughter them?!” Chi Yan snorted in dissatisfaction. Feeling his stomach rumble, he reached down, yanked a handful of common weeds from the dirt, and shoved them into his mouth.
“Hey, don’t eat those yet! Let me check the database log first. We don’t even know if they’re poisonous!” his companion shouted.
Once the two figures trailed further down the path and vanished from sight, Lu Yunxi stepped out from the shadows, her face a mask of absolute bewilderment.
NPC? Novice Village?
Were those two talking in some kind of code?
She lowered her head, her mind racing to connect the dots.
The strange adventurers who had suddenly flooded their valley recently… the way some of them slaughtered the local villagers as if they were merely butchering pigs or cattle; the way they threw hysterics over ordinary weeds; the way they ruthlessly trespassed into private homes without showing a single shred of remorse…
Everything clicked.
If the world she inhabited was actually just a virtual reality simulation, and these so-called adventurers were merely players logged into a game, then their unhinged behavior made perfect sense! Who would ever care about the thoughts of digital data? Who would ever grieve over the lives of artificial NPCs manufactured by code?
Yunxi suddenly found the entire revelation hilarious. She covered her face with both hands and burst into a fit of uncontrollable laughter, laughing so hard that hot tears spilled over her fingers.
It turned out she was just an NPC!
When she first woke up in this life, she truly believed she had reincarnated into a traditional ancient dynasty. Later, when she unlocked her ancestor’s spatial bracelet, she became convinced she was navigating a fantasy world of immortal cultivation where the spiritual energy had dried up.
Who could have predicted that she had actually traveled inside a virtual online game? The sheer irony of it was spectacular.
After her near-manic laughter finally subsided, her eyes turned blank and hollow. She stood frozen in the middle of the path like a lifeless corpse. It wasn’t until night completely blanketed the forest that she finally snapped out of her stupor, moved her stiff limbs, and sought out a defensible spot to camp.
Exhausted by the violent emotional whiplash of the day, she quickly ate her dinner and fell into a deep sleep.
The next morning.
After a long, restorative sleep, Yunxi’s mind cleared, and a sense of calm returned.
To the players, this reality might be nothing more than a virtual playground. But to her, this world was absolute reality! The venomous insects, the lethal snakes, and the savage beasts in the forests were real. The parents who had meticulously nurtured her from a toddler were real. The childhood friend who had anchored her through her darkest grief was real. Every single one of them existed in reality. Therefore, she had absolutely no reason to fall into despair.
Unless the development company suddenly decided to wipe her character data, she wasn’t in any immediate danger. And even if the creators did choose to take action, a single NPC like her couldn’t possibly stop them anyway.
In comparison, the real threat to her survival came from the rogue players who loved to cause chaos. People like Chi Yan had absolutely zero regard for the lives of NPCs. Fortunately, the game had only recently launched, meaning the player base was still in its infancy. She still had a precious window of time to grind her attributes, because player growth required time too!
As long as she worked relentlessly to become the absolute strongest entity in this entire virtual world, the players wouldn’t ever be able to lay a finger on her. She had to train like a lunatic. Only by staying leagues ahead of everyone else could she guarantee her own survival.
Spurred by this fierce resolve, Yunxi took a deep breath, shook off her doubts, and accelerated her pace toward the nearest major settlement.
Mushroom Village was exceptionally isolated. Even pushing her physical stamina to its absolute limits, it took her two full days of non-stop travel before she finally reached the crossroads the elders had always spoken of.
The path bifurcated cleanly. The western road led toward the local regional town, while the eastern highway stretched toward the grand city of Jinzhou.
After a brief hesitation, she turned her boots toward the east. Naturally, if one wanted to master high-tier martial arts, the more affluent and populated the region, the higher the probability of crossing paths with legendary masters. Besides, she wanted to see what the property market looked like in a capital city like Jinzhou! If things were too expensive, she could always turn back to the regional town.
However, while Yunxi’s strategic planning was flawless, reality refused to cooperate.
She hadn’t marched more than a few hundred meters down the eastern highway when she collided hard against a solid surface.
A wall. A completely transparent, invisible wall.
She could clearly see the sprawling landscape continuing on the other side of the barrier, but an intangible force blocked her path, making it entirely impossible to advance a single inch. Yunxi tried to shatter the obstacle by launching a volley of her highest-powered arrows, but the projectiles simply bounced off without leaving a scratch. Left with no other alternative, she abandoned her plans for Jinzhou and turned back toward the western road.
As she made her way toward the regional town, a sudden realization struck her. In all her years of listening to the elders, not a single soul from Mushroom Village had ever actually traveled to Jinzhou, even though everyone spoke of it constantly.
So it wasn’t just me, she thought with a dry smile. The entire local population has been getting blocked by an invisible barrier.
