Chapter 66: The Tree
Not far away, a large group of players had gathered on the grass. They sat in a scattered circle, each holding a portable medicine cauldron in their hands, their faces masked with expressions of sheer misery.
“What on earth is this manual talking about? I can’t parse a single sentence of it.”
“This is brutal! How did that guy who broke through to the beginner rank even do it? Why does it have to be this difficult?”
“Cut the root at exactly two-thirds, then add three drops of mulberry leaf juice, and then…”
Amused by the spectacle, Lu Yunxi halted her steps. She found a large, flat boulder nearby and sat down, casually munching on a steamed bun while watching them struggle with their alchemy.
“Are you all brewing medicine?” she asked curiously. “What kind of potion is it?”
Standing to the side, Fu Yi didn’t step in to interrupt the conversation. It wasn’t classified information anyway, and his men had already toggled their faction tags to anonymous. In truth, the time allocated for these guys to fiddle with their cauldrons was meant to serve as a mandatory rest period.
“Yeah, we’re trying to craft health and mana regeneration potions for our instance runs,” the player sitting closest to her grumbled. “Buying them from the general stores in town is a total rip-off. Worse, those basic town potions don’t instantly replenish your bars; the tick rate is so slow that sometimes we wipe before the healing even kicks in. The premium potions sold in the main provincial cities are effective, but they’re ridiculously expensive. The silver we drag out of the dungeons isn’t even enough to cover our basic supply overhead.”
Yunxi listened, nodding silently.
From her perspective as a master, their operational techniques were agonizingly crude. Whether it was the raw preparation of the herbs, the sorting of the leaves, or the precise weight and timing used to introduce the components into the cauldron—absolutely nothing was correct.
Watching their clumsy, disorganized movements, she felt a powerful urge to march over, grab the stirrers, and correct their forms on the spot.
But she forced herself to hold back.
If she intervened right now, wouldn’t she be exposing the fact that she was a high-tier pharmacist? Logically, she was supposed to be a low-level novice just like them—unless she was willing to openly admit that she was the anonymous number one player dominating the global leaderboards.
Visualizing a nightmare scenario where she was perpetually swarmed by desperate guilds day and night, a violent shudder ran down her spine, and she instantly abandoned the thought.
At that exact moment, a sudden commotion erupted near a massive tree hole a short distance away.
Two figures stumbled out of the cavity. Yunxi blinked in surprise.
One man, his avatar covered in horrific, bleeding lacerations, was being heavily supported by his companion. He was barely clinging to a single point of vitality, his eyes rolling back into his head the moment he cleared the threshold.
The circle of players who had been messing with their cauldrons immediately scrambled to their feet and swarmed the duo.
Lu Yunxi: …
If that guy isn’t dead yet, you’re all about to crowd-smother him to death.
Fortunately, Fu Yi remained perfectly calm and composed. He stepped forward, forcefully blocking the eager crowd and ordering them to back off to give the casualty some air to breathe.
Only when the space cleared did Yunxi notice that the critically injured man had a massive, unrefined clump of basic hemostatic herbs stuffed directly into his mouth.
She was entirely speechless. While consuming raw hemostatic herbs was a known low-tier method to stave off bleeding in the wilderness, the actual therapeutic absorption rate was pathetic—yielding barely one percent of the plant’s processed alchemical efficacy.
The mangled player gasped, his awareness slightly returning under the frantic handling of his squad. He chewed aggressively a few times, swallowing the dense, unwashed mass of raw vegetation.
Predictably, his structural wounds showed zero visible signs of closing. His injuries were far too severe; even if he gorged himself on raw flora, low-grade wilderness plants couldn’t move the needle against critical status damage.
Seeing his teammates frantically prepare another handful of raw stems, the man didn’t object, numbly swallowing the bitter leaves one by one.
Yunxi literally couldn’t bear to watch the medical tragedy unfold any longer. Stepping forward, she fluidly slipped through a gap in the perimeter, completely ignoring the startled expressions of the surrounding soldiers, and lightly tapped her fingers through the air.
A pristine wave of golden light cascaded over the fallen vanguard.
In a fraction of a second, every laceration, bruise, and critical trauma point across the man’s avatar seamlessly knit back together, leaving his physical form entirely unblemished. Had it not been for the heavy coating of red pixel stains drying on his armor, he likely would have assumed the entire dungeon run had been a bad dream.
“You… little sister, you actually possess an active combat recovery spell?!”
The surrounding players stared at her, their eyes wide with absolute, unbridled shock. They were hard-core dungeon delvers who ran instances on a mechanical loop every single day, yet their combined network had never successfully dropped a single healing or restoration skill book! And here was a random solo girl who could cast one casually!
“Miss Lu, a word if you please!” Witnessing the absolute potency of the cast, Fu Yi’s eyes flared. He aggressively shoved past his subordinates, locking his gaze onto her face as if he were staring at a prime piece of luxury meat.
Once he had maneuvered her away from the lingering crowd, Fu Yi immediately laid his cards on the table. “I would like to formally contract your services to assist my vanguard squad in clearing an instance. What are your terms?”
“?”
“A baseline salary of 3,000 star coins for the first month,” he offered rapidly. “You won’t be required to log full hours with our secondary units; your primary objective will strictly be assisting our elite team in clearing uncharted territory. Once the initial map data is stabilized, we can re-evaluate the metrics and discuss a long-term corporate partnership. What do you think?”
It wasn’t that he was trying to lowball her; rather, he assumed she was a civilian resident of an impoverished planet. Handing an unverified account a massive fortune in star coins was equivalent to handing a toddler a stack of solid gold bricks in a lawless alleyway—it was an invitation to real-world corporate data theft. He wanted to protect her identity.
Yunxi stood in silence, closing her eyes as she suppressed a wave of internal grief. Star coins? I literally don’t possess a real-world banking matrix to process them.
“I must decline,” she said, shaking her head as she gritted her teeth to maintain her persona. “Financial assets hold no value for my station. My only motivation is the mastery of the simulation itself.”
Faced with Fu Yi’s thoroughly bewildered expression, she quickly shifted the narrative. “Your unit appears exceptionally organized and highly leveled. How is it that your elite team failed to clear the threshold? The standard bandit stronghold is relatively straightforward to execute.”
“You haven’t heard? The tactical breakdowns are currently trending all over the forums,” Fu Yi replied, a hint of surprise touching his features. “A brand-new hidden instance just initialized inside the server architecture—it’s located right inside the core of the tree hole my men just exited.”
“I rarely monitor the community networks,” Yunxi lied smoothly, her pulse quickening slightly as she opened her system panel, pretending to review localized forum threads with immense seriousness.
Fu Yi provided the tactical summary. “Our initial data stream indicates this dungeon enforces a strict minimum party count of two players, with a maximum scaling limit of one hundred entrants per instance. However, the system scales the mob density and baseline attributes in direct proportion to the party count. To circumvent the multiplier, I dispatched our two highest-rated combatants to execute a stealth test run.”
The catastrophic result of that test run had just played out before her eyes. The heavily lacerated player had been configured as the primary threat-absorber, while his companion handled the offensive output.
Lu Yunxi agreed to the deployment without a second thought.
Since the instance logic strictly enforced a two-player minimum to bypass the spatial gateway, she would have been forced to recruit a random player to explore the node anyway. She might as well integrate with Fu Yi’s structured squad, masquerade as an eccentric gaming savant, and harvest the data from within their party matrix. Besides, Fu Yi was a thoroughly honorable leader.
Following a rapid coordination phase, the preparations were complete.
Fully equipped and moving with heightened alertness, Lu Yunxi and Fu Yi crossed the perimeter of the tree hole, leaving the remaining security detail to anchor the campsite outside.
If the aesthetic profile of the Bandit Stronghold could be described as dark, gloomy, and claustrophobic, the interior of the Tree Hole Instance was an entirely different biome. Stepping through the barrier, they were greeted by a sprawling, vibrant meadow of emerald grass, with two waist-high saplings standing perfectly stationary in the absolute center of the clearing.
Fu Yi and Yunxi raised their weapons, tracking the entities with intense vigilance. Given the absolute panic trending across the public networks regarding this map, they refused to get complacent.
However—
Following two consecutive, anti-climactic thuds, both saplings were cleanly sliced in half and collapsed into the grass under a single opening volley.
Fu Yi’s tense posture relaxed slightly. “It appears the high-tier variables are positioned deeper within the zone. Maintain your guard.”
Moving cautiously, the duo advanced through the verdant corridor. As they pushed past the outer thresholds, the mob models systematically evolved—transitioning from fragile starter saplings to towering, ancient oaks that required multiple people to encircle their trunks.
As the combat scaled, Yunxi quickly deduced the exact structural mechanic that was causing the outworld player base to wipe.
“Focus your output on the tree bearing the fruit!” she shouted to Fu Yi, an expression of profound annoyance crossing her features.
They had reached the final gateway, which spawned two massive level-bosses. The ancient tree laden with glowing fruits was configured with a high-priority, continuous area-of-healing spell, while the bare, withered willow flanking it was built for high-output physical attacks.
Because the initial exploratory teams lacked this data, they had focused their damage entirely on the aggressive willow, only to watch its health bar instantly snap back to one hundred percent every time the fruit tree ticked. By the time they realized the fruit tree was the mechanical engine driving the encounter, the bosses’ health pools had already cycled multiple times, completely draining the players’ potion supplies.
Furthermore, both entities were Level 60 raid bosses—two full tiers higher than Fu Yi’s current level. Managing the overlapping offensive and healing matrices simultaneously was an immense strain on a solo damage-dealer.
Currently, Yunxi’s operational persona was a young, eccentric girl who loved beautiful cosmetic dresses, possessed zero offensive capabilities, and functioned strictly as a dedicated support healer. Consequently, she couldn’t simply draw her Orange-grade bow and shred the world-bosses into toothpicks.
I swear, the systems developers in this world are completely unhinged, she grumbled internally. Why couldn’t they design a seamless solo-entry loop? Forcing me to carry a teammate just complicates my life!
Yunxi frantically spammed her high-tier healing light over Fu Yi’s frame, keeping his health locked at maximum while subtly shifting her positioning to body-block the sweeping roots of the attacking willow, neutralizing its impact.
Sustained by her invisible structural support, Fu Yi unleashed his full offensive rotation, finally felling the twin colossi after a grueling, high-intensity endurance battle.
The duo smoothly stepped out of the spatial tear, emerging back into the fresh air of the mountain valley.
The auxiliary troops stationed around the camp stared at them, noting the absolute lack of a single scratch or status affliction on either of their armor sets. Following a collective beat of stunned, silent disbelief, the clearing erupted into a roaring cheer.
“Wow! They actually cleared it!”
