Chapter 92: Taking Blood
While Lu Yunxi fell into a peaceful slumber, Shen San was frantically searching for her like a madman.
He was losing his mind.
He had just boasted that his master would be perfectly safe under his watch, and the very next second, she was abducted! If his master could be snatched away right under his nose, he might as well delete his character and go back to farming. What right did he have to even think about protecting her?
Taking a deep breath, he forced himself to calm down and began meticulously scanning the alleyways for any displaced data tracking or physical clues. Master must be terrified right now, he thought fiercely. I swore to protect her. I have to find her!
As night fell, Lu Yunxi finally blinked her eyes open. She looked up, only to find herself resting in a pitch-black cavern. Having sheltered in caves during her journeys before, she wasn’t particularly bothered by the stark environment.
What she did care about, however—was the smell.
It was absolutely foul.
This wasn’t like the pristine caverns she usually unearthed. It was evidently the abandoned den of some wild beast, which the masked man had likely cleared out. Layers of old animal droppings coated the floor, and after fermenting in the damp air, the mess had attracted swarms of buzzing mosquitoes and flies, emitting a nauseating stench. Even with her iron-clad psychological fortitude, Yunxi found the odor entirely unmanageable.
Her sudden movement as she pinched her nose immediately alerted her captor.
The masked man abruptly lowered his head, fixing her with a grotesque, twisted smile as he stretched his grimy hands toward her stroller. “Well, little girl, you’re finally awake. Now I can begin my work without any distractions!”
A dark cave, a flickering candle, a creeping villain, and a chilling laugh—Lu Yunxi stared at the wretched man, her miniature eye twitching. If she didn’t know any better, she would have thought she had stepped onto the set of a horror movie. She broke into a cold sweat, raising her hand to blast him, but she paused when she realized he wasn’t actually approaching her. Instead, he shuffled over to a secluded corner of the cave.
She watched him with a perplexed expression, entirely unable to deduce his intention.
The man retrieved a crude stone vessel from his bag, which bore a striking resemblance to a witch’s cauldron from ancient lore. Stepping back over, he grabbed her hand and drove a sharp needle into her fingertip to harvest her blood.
Because her mind was still foggy from sleep, her reflexes lagged for a fraction of a second. By the time her consciousness fully booted up, the lunatic had already collected a sufficient quantity of blood.
Curious to see what he was up to, Yunxi chose to monitor him rather than retaliate.
She watched as he drained the blood into his cauldron, tossed in a chaotic assortment of wild flora—including common herbs used for clotting, soothing coughs, and reducing inflammation—and aggressively mashed the mixture together. After a bizarre sequence of boiling and steaming, he finally completed his brewing process.
The man carefully funneled the charred, black sludge from the stone pot into a large porcelain bowl, lifted it with trembling hands, and brought the rim to his nose. Closing his eyes, he took a deep, ecstatic breath, his features twisting into an expression of pure, unadulterated bliss. “What a spectacular aroma! The ancient texts of the Immortality Secret did not deceive me! It truly requires the blood of a pure youth to catalyze the perfect formula!”
Perched in her stroller, Lu Yunxi watched his display of intense ecstasy, her mind spinning with calculations. What kind of twisted ‘Immortality Secret’ demands the blood of infants? Am I the initial test trace for his recipe, or has he already sacrificed other children on this map?
“With the youth’s blood anchoring the matrix this time, the catalyst should stabilize, right?” the man muttered, a trace of frantic doubt leaking into his voice as he stared at the viscous black sludge.
Drawing a sharp breath, he tilted his head back and downed the horrific concoction in one continuous gulp.
Yunxi narrowed her eyes. It was statistically obvious now that she was the first child this man had ever captured. He had only harvested a single drop of fluid from her fingertip, meaning her health parameters hadn’t sustained any real damage. Too lazy to trigger an unnecessary scene, she decided she would simply let him finish his script and hand his account over to the city guard later.
She closed her eyes, relaxing her limbs. Her natural infant drowsiness immediately rushed back to claim her.
Unfortunately, sleep was not in the cards.
With a deafening shatter, the porcelain bowl crashed against the stone floor, splintering into dozens of shards.
The masked man violently lost his composure. He clawed at his hair, his eyes bloodshot and swimming with manic rage. “Why?! Why does the system reject the brew?! Why did the formulation fail again?! What macro-variable am I missing to trigger a success?!”
He collapsed onto his knees, completely unhinged. Reaching into his tunic, he unrolled a tattered, weathered manual and began frantically tearing through the pages.
“No, the alignment is still wrong!” He scanned the torn manuscript leaf by leaf. Suddenly, his fingers froze over a specific text line, a look of profound, manic enlightenment breaking across his face. “So that’s the hidden trigger! The translation trace implies an entirely different coordinate!”
He drew a jagged dagger from his belt and marched directly toward the stroller.
Witnessing the absolute madness burning in his eyes, Lu Yunxi’s chest tightened. Danger! Did this lunatic conclude that his recipe failed due to an insufficient volume of blood? Was he planning to delete her character node entirely?!
She half-closed her eyes, aggressively pinching her own arm to shock her system awake so she could access her high-tier combat strings.
But before she could release a spell, she froze. The man had started to speak again.
“The lifeforce required to catalyze the Great Art of Immortality cannot be harvested from the peripheral extremities,” he whispered, raising the dagger high above her chest, his gaze locked into an unyielding, fanatical stare. “The core matrix must be extracted directly from the heart. I offer you my apologies, little one! In our next reincarnation cycle, my soul shall repay this debt by granting you a new life!”
His words shattered the last remnants of her drowsiness.
She let out a cold, mental sneer. Repay the debt in the next life? Don’t bother! If you’re going to pay with a life, you can forfeit yours in this one!
She curved her tiny fingers, preparing to unleash a lethal energy pulse, when a sudden boom echoed through the cavern. The masked man was violently launched across the space, crashing heavily against the stone wall.
Her fingers paused. She turned her head toward the cave entrance to see her apprentice standing in the shadow of the threshold, his face contorted with pure, unadulterated fury.
He stepped slowly out of the shadows, crossing into the pale moonlight filtering through the fissures. The dim candle flame failed to fully illuminate his features, leaving his profile cast in a stark, half-bright, half-dark contrast. But his frigid, piercing eyes and tightly white-knuckled fists made it abundantly clear that his anger had peaked.
“Who goes there?!” the thief wheezed, wiping a streak of dark blood from the corner of his mouth as he stared up at the intruder in absolute terror.
“You abduct my master, and your voice dares to question my identity?” Shen San’s voice cut through the damp cave, heavy with a mixture of dark mockery and towering rage.
Realizing his position was compromised, the thief scrambled to his feet, lunging toward the stroller in a desperate attempt to seize Lu Yunxi as a meat shield.
But Shen San’s Master-tier agility metrics completely outscaled him. He materialized in front of the stroller almost instantaneously, his heavy boot driving into the thief’s chest with crushing velocity.
“Puff—!”
The man ejected a spray of blood, sailing backward across the cavern before collapsing into an unmoving heap on the floor.
“What under the sun is this supposed to be?” the desk magistrate asked, staring in bewilderment at the bruised, bloodied figure bound tightly from shoulder to ankle like a heavy canvas caterpillar, twitching mindlessly on the office floor.
“This culprit executed a coordinated abduction on the main thoroughfare, targeting my child with intent to murder,” Shen San explained, his vocal tone entirely flat, as if he were merely reporting that the morning weather was pleasant.
Registering the freezing, deathly calm vibrating beneath the warrior’s voice, the magistrate couldn’t help but shiver. He looked down at the battered, swollen face of the criminal, coughing awkwardly. “But… young traveler, your party has delivered this suspect in such an advanced state of physical degradation that our visual tracking cannot match his identity parameters!”
“…He suffered a succession of severe navigational falls while trying to evade custody.”
Shen San and the magistrate locked eyes in heavy, dead silence.
After a long, suffocating pause, the officer finally yielded. Letting out a weary sigh, he signaled his guards to drag the caterpillar into the holding cells so they could manually audit his household registration data.
Even after clearing the government gates, a dark, oppressive aura hung over Shen San. He marched down the thoroughfare in total silence, his expression grim.
Sensing the dense, low-pressure atmosphere radiating from her apprentice, Lu Yunxi chose discretion, remaining completely motionless inside her stroller to avoid drawing his focus.
They walked for what felt like an eternity before Shen San abruptly halted. He dropped to his knees, his hands carefully locking onto her shoulders. The intense, unblinking gravity in his eyes caused her heart to skip a beat.
“Master,” he choked out, his voice thick with emotion. “Please forgive my absolute incompetence! My focus wavered for a single second, and your station sustained a critical injury because of my carelessness!”
He gently lifted her tiny hand, staring at the fingertip he had meticulously swathed in layers of thick bandages until it resembled a small, oversized bun, his eyes swimming with intense guilt. “Rest your mind, Master. From this micro-second onward, my entity will anchor itself to your coordinates permanently. I will never permit your form to drop out of my line of sight again!”
Staring up into his watery, intensely dramatic eyes, Lu Yunxi was left entirely speechless.
In truth, the puncture wound was so microscopic she hadn’t even deemed it worth the mana to cast a basic recovery spell. Moreover, she had only permitted the man to harvest the drop because she had been curious about his alchemical cooking process; had she genuinely wished to evade him, no low-tier Level 20 thug could have touched her parameters.
But looking up at his face, which was entirely consumed by genuine, crushing remorse, the logical counter-arguments died in her throat.
She let out a soft, tiny sigh, reaching out a miniature hand to gently pat his forehead. “You foolish boy… I am completely unharmed. Do not allow your thoughts to spiral over this; there is zero utility in carrying such guilt.”
Shen San offered no verbal reply. He simply leaned forward, burying his face against her shoulder as he held her in a quiet, protective embrace. Yunxi maintained her gentle rhythm, lightly patting his back until his breathing stabilized.
True to his vow, following the cavern incident, his vigilancescaled to an almost exhausting degree. No matter where she steered her stroller, he trailed her like an inseparable shadow, constantly scanning the environment for threats. If a stray autumn leaf drifted too close to her canopy, his posture would violently lock up as if an elite boss had initialized.
To soothe his overstimulated nerves, Lu Yunxi eventually mandated a slower travel pace, forcing him to abandon their aggressive marching schedule.
Only when they ceased their frantic rush across the continent did the true beauty of the shifting seasons finally crystallize around them. They watched the elegant, silent descent of late-season snowflakes, the sparkling dance of crystal water droplets as the permafrost began to thaw along the ridges, and the vibrant, fresh emerald green bleeding into the bare branches as the trees initiated their spring awakening.
Surrounded by the peaceful landscape, the heavy anxiety clouding Shen San’s mind gradually unspooled. He finally stopped tracking her position with frantic panic every time she dipped out of his direct line of sight for a few seconds.
