Chapter 80: Unknown Side Effects
Staring at the colossal mushroom she had just hauled aboard, Lu Yunxi sank into deep thought.
Do mushrooms even grow in the ocean?
With her current Grandmaster Chef rank, she could effortlessly evaluate any ingredient to determine which parts were safe for consumption and which were toxic. Yet this particular fungus was baffling. Her culinary intuition told her it occupied a bizarre gray area—hovering precariously between safe and lethal.
Worse, when she initialized her exploration skill to scan it, the system interface only returned a row of frustrating text: [???]
After weighing the risks, she drew her knife and carefully sliced the cap open. To her delight, the mushroom’s crown was entirely hollow, acting as a natural reservoir filled with a massive quantity of clear fluid. She immediately retrieved her storage jars and meticulously collected the juice.
With the reservoir drained, only the fibrous flesh of the fungus remained. When she ran a secondary diagnostic scan, the system shed a bit more light on the item. The pure fluid from the cap’s cavity was completely safe. The flesh itself still held a high concentration of moisture that could be squeezed out, but consuming it carried a warning.
The primary complication was that while her detection technology flagged the presence of a side effect, the system couldn’t identify the specific nature of the affliction.
Yunxi pondered for a long moment. She carefully put the extracted mushroom meat aside, took a tiny, tentative sip of the clear juice to verify its safety, and waited. When no negative status conditions registered on her own panel, she knelt beside Shen San and slowly began feeding it to him.
The liquid from the center of the sea mushroom tasted exactly like distilled water and was remarkably effective at combating dehydration. She nursed him with extreme care, ensuring not a single drop of the hard-earned fluid was wasted. Although the fungus itself was massive, the safe harvest from the cap was only enough to sustain a single person for two days. To maximize their survival window, she had to ration it down to the absolute minimum.
“…Master?”
When Shen San’s eyelids finally fluttered open, he registered the cool moisture on his lips and froze. His gaze instinctively darted down toward her hands.
Lu Yunxi tightened her lips, deliberately adopting the stern, unyielding expression of a school principal. “What are you looking at?” She fixed him with a sharp, half-amused glare. “Searching for fresh cuts on my fingers again?”
Hearing her sarcastic jab, Shen San’s heart skipped a beat. He sat up, meeting his master’s unreadable expression with a flare of panic.
“Haha… Master…” He let out an incredibly dry laugh, nervously rubbing his nose. Internally, his mind was racing. Did she actually find out what I did, or is she just guessing?
“Don’t ever pull a stunt like that again,” Lu Yunxi said, cutting through his silent panic. “We haven’t even hit the worst phase of this journey yet. There is absolutely no need for you to go sacrificing your lifeforce to save my bar.”
“Master, I’ve already explained that my entity is fundamentally immortal,” Shen San argued, scrambling to defend his logic. “You don’t need to waste your concern on my account. Your survival is the absolute priority.” After all, if his master’s matrix was deleted, where on earth would he ever find an NPC this powerful again?
Sensing that she was gearing up to deliver a stern lecture, he quickly deflected. “Speaking of which, Master, how did you source water? Or did the delivery drop from my associate finally clear the server queue?”
“What kind of daydream is that? It’s barely been three days since the carrier pigeon left our coordinates.” A sudden vibration rattled her fishing line; she fluidly reeled in a large ocean fish and swept it into her backpack. “I happened to harvest a massive sea mushroom that was loaded with fresh fluid. That’s what I just fed you.”
Shen San pulled up his status panel. Seeing that his critical dehydration debuff had been entirely wiped clean, a massive grin broke across his gaunt face.
“Master, my stats are fully restored. Let me take over the lines.” He eagerly took the rod from her hand, settling against the rim of the boat with renewed interest.
The two sat in companionable silence for a while, watching the waves. Soon, however, a familiar, heavy vertigo began to cloud Lu Yunxi’s mind. She fiercely suppressed the dizziness, forcing her posture straight to keep her physical deterioration hidden.
But Shen San’s observation metrics were far too sharp. The exact millisecond her brow furrowed in discomfort, he abandoned his rod and shifted directly into her space.
“Master, your facial parameters are dropping. You…” His eyes locked onto her dry, cracked lips, and a sudden realization hit him, causing his hands to tremble. “Did you funnel the entire supply of the mushroom water into my bar?”
He pursed his lips, entirely at a loss for words. Initially, he had simply prioritized her safety because her character AI possessed a phenomenal database of life skills; he had merely been reluctant to lose a high-tier mentor. But her benevolence toward his account went beyond anything he could comprehend. Even in the real world, very few flesh-and-blood people would starve themselves to keep another alive. To her, he was just a single, insignificant disciple. If his account wiped, her programming would easily allow her to recruit a hundred replacements!
“Master… thank you,” he murmured, his gaze dropping as his throat tightened. “But next time, you must prioritize your own inventory.”
Lu Yunxi didn’t register the heavy, emotional crisis her apprentice was enduring. Her focus was entirely locked onto the raw mushroom meat resting inside her spatial backpack, her arms crossed as she ran the calculations. The clean water they had left wouldn’t keep both of them alive until the courier arrived. Was it time to risk consuming the toxic flesh?
No risk, no reward.
Decision made, she pulled out a massive wooden basin and used a heavy iron spoon to aggressively compress the mushroom pulp. To her surprise, the fluid yield from the flesh was staggering—easily matching the volume they had harvested from the core reservoir.
Unfortunately, when she triggered her detection spell over the freshly squeezed liquid, the interface returned the exact same maddening error:
[Status Reading: ??? — Possesses volatile, unidentified properties. Please consume with absolute caution.]
Shen San stood at her shoulder, watching her intensely manipulate the ingredients and stare into the basin with a dark expression. Curiosity finally overrode his caution. “Master, is this the supply you intend to feed me next?”
Lu Yunxi shook her head. “You consumed the pure reservoir water from the cap. This fluid is derived directly from the toxic flesh.”
The implication clicked in his brain instantly. “Meaning this portion is classified as inedible?”
Yunxi offered no response. She simply reached out, her hands gripping the rim of the basin as she brought the murky fluid toward her lips. She didn’t care what the hidden side effects were anymore. If she stayed on her current trajectory, her life bar would hit zero and her consciousness would be permanently erased. In the face of absolute deletion, a minor system affliction was entirely irrelevant!
Suddenly, a slender, calloused hand shot forward, firmly blocking her grip and forcing the basin away from her mouth.
“Master, if the metrics are unverified, let my account run the test trace first,” Shen San said. He forced a bright, easy smile, his other hand reaching down to wrench the basin from her fingers.
But Lu Yunxi had zero intention of letting him take the hit. As an apprentice, Shen San had been thoroughly flawless. He consistently hurled his avatar into the vanguard whenever a boss aggroed; he handled their logistics, secured their campsites, and managed their basic provisions with absolute devotion. But if she, the Martial Master, spent the entire journey hiding behind her own student, it would be an absolute disgrace to her station!
“I am the Master here!” she barked. Forcing his hand away with a surge of internal energy, she tilted her head back and downed the entire basin of mushroom juice in one continuous gulp.
Gulp. Gulp… Ah! She let out a long, profound sigh of absolute relief.
The fluid instantly saturated her parched throat and cracked lips, sending a wave of incredible vitality coursing through her system. Even the endless, monotonous view of the ocean and sky suddenly looked remarkably beautiful.
“…Master, are you experiencing any status anomalies?” Shen San asked tentatively, his eyes swimming with intense anxiety.
Yunxi sat quietly for several minutes, monitoring her internal energy loops. When no negative indicators or debuffs manifested on her interface, she relaxed completely. “The parameters appear stable. Come, let’s leverage this window to sleep and preserve our stamina. This volume should easily anchor our bars until your associate’s courier intercepts our boat.”
The two settled back down onto their respective decks. Lulled by the cool ocean breeze, they drifted back into a heavy sleep.
As night fell, the sea breeze stiffened, bringing a deep chill across the open water. The lotus-shaped boat drifted slowly beneath the stars.
Under the faint illumination of the crescent moon, Shen San quietly sliced their fresh catch into thin layers, arranging the raw sashimi neatly in a wooden bowl. With the meal prepared, he stepped over to wake his mentor.
“Master, the rations are—” He reached out, lightly nudging her shoulder as she lay asleep on the wooden plank.
The moment his fingers made contact, an anomaly triggered. His baseline physical strength seemed to have multiplied exponentially. Normally, his master’s model was an unyielding anchor that couldn’t be budged by a casual touch, but a simple, feather-light nudge sent her rolling straight off the plank.
SPLASH.
She tumbled cleanly over the rim and vanished into the dark sea.
Shen San froze, his brain stalling for a horrific second before his reflexes violently kicked in. “Master! No!”
Panic seizing his chest, he frantically stripped off his heavy plate armor, preparing to dive into the black depths to retrieve her data node. But before his boots could clear the gunwale, a slender, dripping hand clamped onto the edge of the boat.
“Shen San… step back. I’m right here.” Along with the wet hand, a voice echoed from the surf—it carried a familiar cadence, yet the acoustic pitch was subtly, inexplicably deep.
“Who… who goes there?!” Staring at the pale shadow hauling itself out of the black water, emitting a strange, altered voice in the dead of night, Shen San felt his pulse violently skyrocket. He aggressively recoiled, his back slamming against the absolute furthest edge of the lotus petal. “What entity are you?!”
Lu Yunxi swung her legs over the rim, collapsing onto the deck. She leveled a deeply confused look at him, assuming her apprentice was merely executing another bizarre outworld joke. “Who else would I be? Stop being ridiculous. I’m your master!”
As she spoke, she gathered the dripping fabric of her skirt, attempting to wring out the brine. However, the moment her fingers twisted the material, she noted something deeply wrong. The fabric felt incredibly dense—heavy and unyielding, as if she were attempting to wring out a massive, frozen winter quilt rather than a light silk dress.
She gasped for breath, sweat beading on her forehead from the sheer physical exertion. “This is bizarre… why is my gear suddenly tracking this much weight?”
“M-Master…” a faint, trembling whisper echoed from above her.
Lu Yunxi blinked, tracking the sound. Her eyes slowly traveled upward, only to freeze as they met a massive, towering silhouette looming over her coordinates.
“What the—! Shen San, you absolute brat, what are you doing trying to scare me?!” She instinctively clapped a hand over her racing heart, glaring up at the giant figure in pure irritation. “When on earth did you unlock a transformation skill? How did your model grow this massive?!”
