Chapter 79: Water in the Sea
Even though Lu Yunxi was a Master-level expert, she could do nothing but go with the flow while trapped inside the protective barrier.
Time bled away. At first, her mind remained completely sharp, but as the relentless tossing and turning continued, a deep wave of motion sickness washed over her.
“Shen San, are you dizzy?” She covered her mouth, casting a worried look at her apprentice.
“I’m fine, Master. Are you feeling unwell?” Shen San observed her carefully. He reached into his spatial backpack, pulled out a small cloth pouch, and held it right beneath her nose. “Take a breath of this. It’s a citrus-scented sachet. It should help settle your stomach.”
Seeing that he wasn’t suffering from the turbulence, Yunxi let out a breath of relief. She peacefully closed her eyes. “No need. The dizziness will fade once I fall asleep. You should try to rest too.”
Unfortunately, reality quickly proved that her optimism was entirely misplaced.
The journey was a hundred times more jarring than any roller coaster, twisting and looping so violently that sleep was an absolute impossibility.
Before long, the protective bubble suddenly began to ascend at a rapid velocity.
“Strange. Are we moving upward?” Lu Yunxi frowned, stabilizing her footing.
“Master, we…” Shen San started to speak.
But before he could finish, an ethereal, booming echo resonated through the dark space. In the next fraction of a second, a powerful torrent of water launched their bubble upward, blasting them into the open air like a geyser.
Lu Yunxi gasped in shock as she looked down at the massive, island-like form shifting beneath them.
The creature that had swallowed them whole was actually a colossal whale!
The whale swam leisurely through the deep blue, sending a spectacular plume of water high into the sky. As it breached and dove, the surrounding ocean fractured into violently rolling waves.
“Master, are you alright?” Shen San scrambled over. Seeing her sitting there calmly, he turned back to stare at the massive leviathan with a look of pure astonishment. “To think there are creatures this massive in the ocean… and they defecate straight out from the top of their heads!”
“No,” her eye twitched violently. “That is definitely not where it empties its bowels. That’s its…”
She paused, narrowing her eyes. “Probably something closer to a pair of nostrils?”
Since she hadn’t been a marine biologist in her previous life, her understanding of cetacean anatomy was basic at best. She quickly dropped the topic. “Don’t get any closer. It’s far too dangerous to linger near a beast of that scale. Let’s swim clear of its wake and deploy the boat.”
It was now the tenth day of drifting on the open sea.
Shen San lay flat in the center of the lotus boat. Because the vessel was so incredibly compact, he was forced to curl his long limbs into a miserable, cramped ball. He pressed a hand against his hollow stomach, staring up at the empty sky with lifeless, glassy eyes.
“Master… I’m so hungry.”
Lu Yunxi sat perched on the opposite edge, her attention entirely locked onto her fishing line. “Just hold on a little longer. A fish will bite soon.”
Hearing the word fish, Shen San felt actual tears sting the corners of his eyes.
His master’s fishing attributes were undeniably superb, and she had systematically hauled in a massive bounty of heavy seafood over the last week. But inside this tiny, combustible wooden craft, sparking an open flame to cook was a logistical impossibility.
Consequently, they were forced to consume raw sashimi for every single meal.
The pristine slices had tasted phenomenal during the first few days, but after a solid week, the repetitive texture became deeply unpalatable. The cold flesh offered zero comfort to their drained systems. For the first time in his life, he found himself profoundly missing those primitive, soot-stained iron stoves that required manual firewood to burn.
Yunxi was well aware of her apprentice’s profound depression, but she made no move to offer empty comfort. In truth, an exponentially more lethal crisis was looming over their coordinates.
When they had anchored at the desert oasis, their storage capacity had been strictly limited. They hadn’t been able to hoard an infinite supply of cacti and fresh well-water without utterly draining the local resource node to its absolute limit. Now, that compromise had come back to haunt them.
Over the course of these ten days, their fresh water reserves had systematically dwindled to nothing. If their current trajectory remained unchanged, they would succumb to fatal dehydration long before starvation ever claimed their bars.
A human being could survive without food for weeks, but three days without hydration was an absolute evolutionary hard cap.
Weighing the dire statistics, she secured her fishing rod firmly to the rim of the boat, keeping one hand loosely anchored to the wood so she could register any structural vibrations, and sank her consciousness deep into her spatial inventory.
Cured meat, salted duck eggs, pickled greens… she bypassed them immediately. Those items were loaded with sodium; consuming them would only violently accelerate their dehydration metrics. Dried alchemy herbs, raw crafting components… entirely useless. What her matrix desperately required was pure, drinkable water.
“Master!” her disciple’s voice suddenly cut through her thoughts.
Lu Yunxi snapped her awareness back to the physical layer. “What is it?”
“Master, I’ve cracked the solution!” Shen San waved a blank sheet of message parchment in the air, his eyes reigniting with life. “Can’t I just compose an urgent letter to my associate and instruct him to ship supplies directly to our location? Is there anything specific your station requires?”
She froze for a fraction of a second before excitement overrode her caution. She lunged forward, firmly grasping his hand. “Yes! Yes, absolutely! You are an absolute genius, my apprentice! Have them dispatch fresh water immediately. Our reserves are completely dry. Don’t worry about anything else—just water!”
Shen San blinked, a sudden look of hesitation clouding his features as he processed her urgency. “Master… exactly how much fluid does your inventory have left? I’ve monitored the system parameters; delivery pings across the ocean layer experience severe data lag compared to land networks. It takes roughly three days for a carrier pigeon to map these coordinates. Counting the round trip, a supply drop will take at least six full days to manifest.”
“If we ration the absolute final drops… we can probably sustain our bars for one more day. Right?”
The master and disciple locked eyes. The ambient atmosphere inside the tiny boat instantly turned silent, heavy, and thick with tension.
Ultimately, Lu Yunxi had still miscalculated their survival window.
The reality of their situation was far more severe than her structural estimates. Perhaps because their consistent diet of raw seafood had introduced a high volume of salt into their systems, their metabolic strain was accelerating.
They extracted every remaining piece of juicy fruit, wild vegetation, and raw medicinal root from their bags, meticulously mashing them to extract a few bitter thimbles of juice. Even with absolute, strict rationing, the fluid barely sustained them through the afternoon.
Two more agonizing days trickled past.
Lu Yunxi and Shen San lay completely motionless. One was slumped within the cramped hull of the boat, while the other was draped across the wooden plank rigged above the petals. Both profiles wore the exact same hollow, unblinking expressions. They spent the entirety of those forty-eight hours sleeping, utilizing the unconscious state to artificially numb the agonizing sensation of dry, cracking throats.
Beep. Beep. Beep.
The clinical chime of a system-set alarm cut through the silence, notifying her that their biological maintenance cycle had rolled over. It was time to log sustenance.
With leaden movements, she summoned a heavy stack of her custom-baked buns from her inventory, sliding the bulk of the rations across the deck toward Shen San. This volume was mathematically sufficient to keep his hunger bar filled for a month. She was terrified that if her matrix collapsed into a permanent comatose state, his inventory would be left bare, so she chose to transfer the provisions in advance.
Executing the trade with half-closed eyes, she collapsed back onto her wooden plank. Time began to lose all structural cohesion, and the vibrant blue of the surrounding ocean slowly dissolved into a blank, featureless gray.
A rhythmic, metallic tick, tick echoed through her fading consciousness.
“Shen San…? Did you manage to source water? Has the six-day courier loop finally cleared?” Lu Yunxi’s eyelids felt as though they had been fused shut with industrial cement. She lacked the motor control to force them open, but she could distinctly feel a cool, heavy liquid systematically trickling past her lips.
She greedily sucked down the moisture, desperate to stabilize her internal metrics. Yet, as the fluid registered on her palate, she noted a strange, dense texture. It was remarkably thick.
“Master? Can your consciousness hear me? Is your status stabilizing?” Shen San’s voice sounded remarkably bright and clear, radiating his usual resilient energy.
But Yunxi had spent months supervising his training; she understood the subtle nuances of his vocal inflections better than anyone.
With a monumental surge of willpower, she forced her eyes open. The vision that crystallized before her was a pale, hollowed-out face that looked terrifyingly gaunt.
“What happened to your attributes? Why has your model deteriorated to this extent?”
His physical parameters looked infinitely worse than her own! She had explicitly left the absolute majority of their final moisture reserve in his possession before fading out; this level of physical degradation made zero logical sense.
Shen San forced a reassuring smile, easing his frame back onto the deck as his eyelids heavy rolled shut. “I simply managed to construct a basic filtration method to process some local seawater. Use it to sustain your bar for now.”
Lu Yunxi assumed his exhaustion was merely the byproduct of staying awake to nurse her through the crisis, and a soft smile touched her lips. She reached up, her fingers tracing the residual dampness lingering at the corner of her mouth to gauge the moisture level.
The moment her skin brushed her lips, she noted a distinct, dark crimson stain transferring onto her fingertips.
She froze. She rubbed her fingers together, her heart dropping into her stomach.
It wasn’t water. It was blood.
Her eyes contracted with absolute dread. She instantly cast her highest-tier detection spell onto the resting warrior beneath her. The system reading materialized instantly, revealing that his total vitality pool had been violently severed by half.
Lu Yunxi drew a sharp, ragged breath.
The pieces of the puzzle slammed into place. Shen San had been so consumed by panic over her crashing metrics that he had deliberately self-inflicted damage, drawing his own blood to sustain her NPC matrix. But executing a blood transfer inside this engine…
A torrent of complex, unutterable emotions swirled through her chest, leaving her completely overwhelmed. Closing her eyes tightly, she forced her breathing to stabilize, pretending to slip back into a deep slumber.
Roughly ten minutes later, she heard the subtle shifting of fabric as Shen San carefully pushed himself up. He quietly retrieved one of her master-tier buns and began to chew.
However, while her custom baking was structurally capable of rapidly replenishing missing health pools, the engine treated hunger and dehydration as entirely separate statistical nodes. Eating dry bread could restore his red bar, but it did absolutely nothing to alleviate the systemic dehydration penalty wasting away his attributes. Having drained his own lifeforce, his internal water deficit was now vastly more critical than hers, leaving his character model profoundly fragile.
Once his vitality points crawled back to maximum, the sheer weight of his dehydration forced his avatar back into a heavy, comatose sleep.
Lu Yunxi opened her eyes, staring blankly up at the vast, uncaring expanse of the sky.
After a long, agonizing silence, she silently rolled over, pulling herself into a seated position. She reached out and grasped her fishing rods.
There has to be a mechanical solution, she thought fiercely. If this game engine placed a hidden sea route between continents, there must be an environmental drop designed to alleviate water scarcity.
Clinging to that single shred of hope, she forced down two meat buns to maximize her own stamina, prepared her high-tier lines, and cast her lines back into the deep water, initializing her detection radar to monitor the dark trenches below.
