Chapter 62: Crisis of Mushroom Village
“Help! I’m dead! I’m literally dying! Stop chasing me!” A scrawny man sprinted forward in a bizarre, frantic waddle, frantically covering his backside out of sheer terror that the lion hot on his heels would take a chunk out of him.
“Run over here! There’s a trap right below us!” someone shouted from the branches of a nearby tree, pointing frantically at a patch of dirt. “We’ll bottleneck the tiger here in a minute. Just make sure you step over it!”
The player being chased burst into tears. “That’s easy for you to say! This lion isn’t exactly domesticated! It doesn’t just go wherever I tell it to. I’ve already looped around this spot three times, and the damn thing refuses to fall into your trap!”
The players hiding in the canopy started to feel a collective headache coming on. It wasn’t that they didn’t want to dig a more substantial pit, but the only person in their entire group who had unlocked the trap-making skill could only manufacture a trap of this pathetic size.
“Damn it! Why on earth is there a high-level monster inside a starter zone? Could this thing be over Level 30?!”
“Way higher! My buddy told me that when he tried to leave the village at Level 10, he cross-mapped into a Level 30 mob. It didn’t instantly one-shot him, and he actually managed to kiting it for a solid few minutes. This lion is on a whole different level!”
“If that’s true, this thing has to be at least Level 40, right? What are we even supposed to do?!”
The players trapped in Mushroom Village turned pale, collectively deciding that the early-game experience was far too brutal.
“Where are the local NPCs? We clearly can’t handle a wild boss of this caliber, but shouldn’t the town guards or something step in?!”
“Are you kidding? The native NPCs in a Novice Village are either standard farmers or flavor-text passerby. None of them have a combat matrix!”
“I thought starter zones were supposed to have beginner protection! Why is there a wandering world boss tearing up the village?!”
A large group of players who hadn’t even reached Level 10 crouched safely in the high branches, complaining bitterly about the game’s balance. Meanwhile, the runner looping below was utterly exhausted. “Will someone just hurry up and aggro this thing off me?!”
Finally, a player who had just logged onto the server couldn’t stand the whining any longer. Peering down from his branch, he yelled, “Just log off, you idiot!”
The runner froze, the realization hitting him like a lightning bolt. In the next microsecond, his avatar vanished on the spot, his final expression a mixture of tears and hysterical laughter.
The ferocious lion skidded to a halt, looking thoroughly bewildered. It tilted its massive head, sniffed the empty air where its prey had just been, and then aggressively lashed its tail. Its glowing red eyes slowly drifted upward, locking onto the crowd perched in the trees.
Fortunately, Mushroom Village was home to several ancient, exceptionally sturdy trees. Everyone had climbed well past the lower branches, and since lions couldn’t scale vertical trunks in this engine, the players were safe for the time being.
However, as the immediate panic subsided, the thought of the monumental experience payout for slaying a high-level beast made the players restless. Squatting on their perches, they began tentatively casting ranged starter spells and throwing basic projectiles down at the lion.
While the players waged their safe, low-stakes war from the canopy, the native villagers had crowded into the newly constructed courtyard adjacent to the ancestral hall.
“Village Chief, what is our strategy?” an elder asked, his voice trembling. “None of those outworld adventurers possess any real martial prowess. How can they possibly defend us against a mid-tier feral lion?”
The village chief looked incredibly grim, frantically tugging at his beard until he almost pulled the hairs out. He was completely out of ideas.
He had heard rumors of the great regional Beast Tides before, but historically, those catastrophes were managed by elite imperial legions or high-tier cultivation sects; very few common settlements ever survived a direct hit. Who could have predicted that a stray alpha beast would manage to migrate all the way to their remote valley? The physical barricades outside the village lines could deter standard wildlife, but they were nothing more than paper against the maddened entities driving this horde.
An anomaly of this scale hadn’t occurred in centuries. Why did it have to trigger during his watch?!
Sensing the chief’s absolute despair, the surrounding villagers slowly lowered their heads. Several women broke down entirely, clutching their children and weeping.
“Ancestors of the Lu lineage, please look down upon us! My baby is only three years old. Please grant him safe passage through this night.”
“Husband… if we don’t survive, let us find each other and be wed again in our next life.”
“If only Xiaoxi were here! Girl Lu is so incredibly powerful, she would definitely have a solution for this!”
Hearing her name, a sudden spark ignited in the village chief’s eyes. Gritting his teeth, he turned on his heel and strode purposefully into the central building.
This newly erected structure next to the ancestral hall had been explicitly commissioned to honor Lu Yunxi. Of course, the interior didn’t house the girl herself, but rather a grand, custom-carved statue. While the budget hadn’t allowed for pure solid gold, the master craftsmen had given the effigy a flawless, heavily gold-plated finish that gleamed brilliantly in the dim light.
Indeed, to properly express their eternal gratitude for her saving their lineage, the village men had spent weeks building this shrine, matching the premium dry goods the women routinely shipped out. They had collectively agreed that when Xiaoxi eventually returned and witnessed her own gilded monument, she would be absolutely thrilled.
Unfortunately, the ink on the ledger had barely dried before the Beast Tide fractured their borders.
“Xiaoxi… please look down upon your home and grant our people salvation,” the chief murmured, standing before the altar. Tears welled in his old eyes as he stared up at the statue, almost seeing the vibrant young girl standing before him once more.
Overwhelmed by a profound wave of emotion, he stood motionless for a long moment before solemnly lighting a bundle of premium ritual incense and placing it in the brazier.
It was a stroke of absolute luck that Lu Yunxi was entirely oblivious to these grand gestures; otherwise, witnessing her own living shrine would have given her a minor heart attack.
Seeing the chief’s absolute, pious devotion, the remaining villagers filed into the sanctuary one by one. They lit their own incense sticks, lowering their heads to pray silently from the depths of their hearts.
Back on the coastal front of Yanyu Palace, Lu Yunxi—who had just successfully obliterated a massive wave of level-appropriate monsters—suddenly let out a string of aggressive sneezes. Rubbing her nose, her eyes accidentally drifted toward her system panel, only to freeze.
The hidden Vow Power attribute was violently ticking upward.
[Vow Power: 121… 123… 125… 150…]
The metric ceased its steady, incremental crawling and began surging forward in erratic, massive blocks, only stabilizing when it hovered just shy of the 230-point mark.
What on earth is this attribute? she wondered, her mind racing. Why did it experience a random, massive spike? Is it triggered by clearing specific mob waves?
Determined to observe the mechanic closely during her next engagement, she prepared to aggro another cluster of razor-clams. But before she could even notch an arrow, the counter jumped again.
This time, the scaling was significantly slower, ticking upward in disjointed, single units as if the data pipeline was heavily lagging.
Yunxi stared at the interface, her confusion deepening. She was currently out of combat and resting; if the initial spike could be dismissed as a system sync delay from her previous clears, this continuous growth while idling completely decoupled the attribute from monster kills.
After weighing the variables for a few minutes and coming up blank, she decisively toggled the status interface closed and laid her head back to sleep. It didn’t matter; this Vow Power stuff seemed entirely cosmetic anyway.
Ding!
She had barely closed her eyes when a piercing system alert shattered her rest.
What now?!
[System Alert: Your registered hometown, Mushroom Village, is currently experiencing a catastrophic tier-event. The native residents and local adventurers are actively projecting prayers toward your entity matrix. Do you wish to manifest your accumulated Vow Power skill?]
Yunxi blinked, her gaze darting to the counter, which had already breached the 300-point threshold. Vow Power… the power of localized prayers? A sudden realization hit her—the metric was scaling because the villagers were actively praying to her name!
But structural mechanics aside, the core issue was urgent: her hometown was facing absolute annihilation. Even if she activated her high-tier lightness skills and ran non-stop across the provinces, traveling to the starter zone would take days. Furthermore, she couldn’t simply desert her defense sector at Yanyu Palace without triggering an immediate sect penalty.
Frowning tightly, she decisively tapped [Yes].
No physical phenomenon erupted in her immediate surroundings. The only visible modification was a new status sub-header materializing within her active skill index:
[Active Vow Skill: Channeling En-Route.]
I can only hope the village anchors hold, she thought, a knot of worry tightening in her chest. But before she could dwell on it, another thunderous roar echoed from the shoreline as a fresh wave of feral beasts broke the surf, instantly forcing her attention back to the battlefield.
“Move it! Are there any players left who haven’t logged a prayer inside the main courtyard? Get your metrics over there right now!” a player roared from the central tree, using his map channel to blast the surrounding coordinates.
“A prayer?” a group of low-level players who had just logged onto the server asked, thoroughly baffled. “What kind of hidden quest line is that?”
“It’s a localized event trigger! The native NPCs just told me that according to the zone lore, if a sufficient volume of accounts register a prayer command inside the shrine, it forces a server-side resolution matrix to clear the zone crisis!” the player explained at the top of his lungs.
The announcement reverberated through the entire novice instance.
Though highly skeptical of the mechanical theory, the players looked down at the gathering horde of feral Level 40 and 50 mobs completely filling the streets and realized they had absolutely nothing to lose. Deftly swinging through the high canopy, they dropped down into the heavily reinforced courtyard of the shrine.
However, unlike the profoundly pious native villagers, the players treated the action as a perfunctory macro-command. But as the minutes ticked by and the terrifying growls outside the walls intensified, the casual atmosphere evaporated, replaced by genuine panic.
The street boundaries were overflowing with high-level predators. Trapped inside the perimeter wall, the players began frantically spamming the prayer interface.
Please let some high-level admin or wandering boss spawn and clear this map!
They were a collection of absolute newbies hovering between Level 1 and 10; if the barrier fell, they would be completely wiped out by the maddened beasts outside.
Thud! Thud!
A series of violent impacts rattled the heavy structural timber. The dense concentration of life signatures inside the courtyard had finally drawn the horde’s aggro.
Just as the structural integrity of the main gates hit critical and the wood began to splinter under the beasts’ weight—
A brilliant, pristine white light erupted from the core of the gold-plated statue. The luminescent energy surged outward, slowly expanding into a massive, translucent, bubble-like barrier.
The feral beasts clawing at the threshold were violently repelled by the shimmer, locked entirely outside the perimeter. The protective bubble continued to expand, effortlessly pushing past the courtyard, swallowing the village proper, and extending all the way to the outer farmland boundaries before finally stabilizing.
The entire courtyard fell into absolute, stunned silence. Staring blankly at the terrifying monsters snarling harmlessly against the shimmering barrier, the villagers’ eyes instantly welled with hot tears.
“The ancestors… no! May the holy maiden Lu Yunxi bless and protect us!”
