Chapter 97: No Longer Heartbeat
Lu Yunxi and Shen San stared in utter bewilderment as the gargantuan toad suddenly revived, its health bar instantly snapping back to maximum.
What is the meaning of this? Did the system notification imply they had to fight this entire boss encounter from scratch?!
Shen San tentatively raised his heavy broadsword, his posture tensing.
Before he could take a step, Yunxi’s pupils contracted. Sensing an immediate structural shift, she violently threw up a master-tier protective barrier around them.
“Get back, Shen San! Its parameters just scaled up to Level 90!” she roared, fluidly drawing her gold bow and unleashing a rapid rain of arrows.
Shen San’s gaze darted to the text tracking above the creature’s crown. Sure enough, the indicator now read [Level 90]!
A ten-level increase wouldn’t be an issue on a standard map, but this mechanical jump pushed the boss completely out of the Master tier and directly into the legendary Grandmaster tier! The mathematical scaling between the two ranks was a vast, unforgiving chasm.
The duo rapidly backpedaled, attempting to leverage their ranged abilities to safely chip away at the toad’s massive health pool from a distance. But the Grandmaster-tier AI was far too advanced. It effortlessly predicted their trajectories, darting left and right to evade the incoming projectiles before aggressively lashing its tongue across the space, swatting them backward with immense kinetic force.
Staring at the violent, sizzling feedback crackling across the surface of the translucent shield, the master and disciple grew incredibly solemn.
“Master, can your barrier withstand the pressure?” Shen San asked, his voice tight. Although his mentor routinely boasted that her protective arts could negate any damage code in the game world, the barrier currently looked as though it were hovering on the brink of structural collapse.
Lu Yunxi immediately initialized a diagnostic trace on her defensive grid. Only after confirming the baseline parameters were holding did she exhale a long breath of relief.
“Hold your ground. The shield is crackling because the toad’s regional toxin modifier is exceptionally high, but the structural integrity is safe. It will hold.”
Watching the barrier emit dense plumes of white smoke and sputter violently every single time the toad’s skin made contact, the two gradually relaxed as they realized the energy bubble, though noisy, remained completely unbreakable.
However, an elite boss that had leaped ten levels to shatter a racial tier barrier was a completely different entity compared to its previous Level 80 iteration!
Lu Yunxi and Shen San executed their combat rotations flawlessly for a grueling thirty minutes, yet when they checked the boss’s indicators, the toad’s health pool had only depleted by roughly… one percent.
Staring at the massive red bar that had barely sustained a microscopic scratch, Lu Yunxi felt a profound, crushing exhaustion sink into her bones. This thing was an absolute fortress. It was simply too difficult to kill!
After wasting half the afternoon, they realized that as the toad’s fury metrics scaled, its pathing became completely erratic, jumping wildly across the chamber and making accurate targeting an absolute nightmare. Left with no choice, they abandoned the engagement and retreated past its tether radius, setting up a secure camp beyond the aggro line to recover their stamina.
They consumed their evening rations in total, heavy silence, neither possessing any real appetite.
“Tomorrow, we shift our focus to farming the low-tier mob spawns in the peripheral corridors to grind our skill proficiency,” Lu Yunxi mandated, setting down her utensils. “Once our execution metrics scale higher, we will return to dismantle this toad.”
Evaluating today’s performance data, throwing themselves back into the main chamber tomorrow would yield zero results. Their only viable path to clearing the instance was to systematically massacre the local trash mobs, force their attributes to level up, and attempt a brute-force breakthrough.
Shen San nodded in quiet agreement.
The next morning, the duo initialized their intensive grinding routine.
To their surprise, the repetitive loop of farming mobs wasn’t tedious in the slightest. In her earlier life cycles back in Mushroom Village, Lu Yunxi had regularly scaled the high peaks completely solo to slaughter wild beasts purely to secure her survival; she didn’t view combat as a chore, and having her apprentice anchor her rotation made the execution seamless. To her mind, she was simply letting the boy power-level her attributes.
“Watch your spacing! That creature’s hide carries a corrosive contact poison—do not register a manual touch with your bare skin!” she barked.
Shen San turned his head just in time to see his master preparing to reach out and harvest a component directly from the monster’s carcass. Panic overriding his restraint, he didn’t care about the boundaries of discipline; he instantly lunged forward and firmly clamped his hand over hers, pulling her back into his chest.
Lu Yunxi found herself completely enveloped in his embrace, her fingers tightly locked within his heavy grip.
The sudden, intimate proximity sent a strange, unfamiliar jolt rippling through her awareness. A wave of intense heat rapidly climbed the back of her neck, staining the tips of her ears a vivid crimson.
She quickly lowered her head, using her free hand to aggressively pat her cheeks to cool the flush.
It was an incredibly bizarre reaction. When her model had been trapped in a ten-centimeter infant state, he had scooped her up and cradled her profile against his skin thousands of times without triggering a single anomaly. But now that her character height had fully restored to its adult parameters, executing the exact same physical interaction felt profoundly unnatural, sending her internal processing into a total tailspin.
Sensing the sudden shift in the atmosphere, Shen San rapidly withdrew his hand, his own posture turning stiff. He mumbled a brief, low-voiced technical explanation regarding the poison mechanics before tentatively reaching out toward her.
Perceiving his hand approaching to reclaim her harvesting knife, Lu Yunxi initially intended to verbally refuse, but the exact millisecond his skin accidentally brushed against her fingers, a sharp tremor shot through her arm. Her grip loosened subconsciously, and she let go of the hilt.
The blade dropped instantly into his palm.
Shen San quickly pulled a pair of heavy alchemical gloves from his inventory and knelt down, focusing entirely on meticulously extracting the raw materials from the mob.
Yunxi stood perfectly still beside him, her mind completely dazed as she absentmindedly rubbed the residual warmth lingering on her fingertips. Her gaze wandered aimlessly across the cavern floor, her ears burning hot.
By the time her consciousness fully stabilized, his harvesting loop had already concluded.
“Master,” he murmured, his posture freezing as he scanned an invisible interface. The easy, bright smile that usually defined his features completely vanished, replaced by a tight, apologetic frown. He looked up at her hesitantly. “I need to… slide into a deep rest cycle for a brief period. I’ll boot back up to resume grinding mobs with your station later, alright?”
Lu Yunxi’s face paled, her expression turning uncharacteristically blank.
Forcing her lips into a rigid, artificial smile, she murmured, “What ridiculous phrasing! If your parameters are drained, simply rest. It’s not as if we possess the statistical output to dismantle a Level 90 Grandmaster boss this afternoon anyway.”
Shen San let out a heavy breath of relief, rapidly pitching a standard secure tent before crawling inside to initiate his rest cycle.
Staring out at the massive cavern that had suddenly fallen into absolute, dead silence, Lu Yunxi slowly lowered her gaze.
The logic was undeniable. What her apprentice referred to as a “rest cycle” was merely the mechanical byproduct of an external communication intercepting his real-world platform. He had severed his data feed and gone offline.
Tracing a finger over her racing heart, a bitter, hollow smile touched her lips.
For a single fraction of a second just now, her core matrix had actually registered a profound emotional spike. Have my programming loops completely corrupted? To allow her native awareness to develop genuine feelings for an outworld entity belonging to an entirely different reality was absolute madness.
She closed her eyes tightly, drawing a long, jagged breath into her lungs to stabilize her code.
She was Lu Yunxi—a permanent resident hard-coded into this holographic world matrix. She must never, under any circumstances, allow her heart to beat for a human belonging to the physical plane. There was no future, no data path, and no happy ending down that road.
She repeated the mandate like a silent prayer, forcing the boundaries of her heart to lock down into stone.
Time became a featureless blur inside the high-dilation instance layer. In the blink of an eye, another five full years bled away.
Through an absolute, unhinged dedication to slaughtering every single spawn that materialized in the outer rings, Lu Yunxi’s attributes had successfully scaled to Level 87. Shen San, however, had recently been plagued by a series of unknown disruptions on the physical plane, forcing his account to log offline with high frequency. Consequently, his character progression had fallen one step behind her trajectory, leaving his attributes anchored at Level 83.
Despite the level disparity, the sheer math of their combined offensive output was no longer comparable to their low-tier metrics from five years ago!
The duo reached a mutual agreement: it was time to execute a final, definitive deployment against the Grandmaster Toad.
Yet, just as they were cross-auditing their remaining potion stacks and maximizing their equipment sets, Shen San let out a sharp gasp of pure shock. “Huh?!”
“What anomaly has initialized?” Yunxi asked, snapping her head up.
“Do you recall that massive egg we harvested from the bird’s nest back on the Ice Continent mountain peak?” Shen San asked, his eyes wide as he scanned his account logs. “The hatching timers must have cleared ages ago, but the data completely slipped my mind! The system interface is flashing a critical alert—my bound pet is currently hovering on the brink of absolute starvation!”
The moment the words cleared his lips, he caught himself, panic flaring across his features. “The system is—”
Lu Yunxi instantly deployed her cognitive blocks, pretending the second half of his sentence hadn’t registered to her audio feed. She interjected with a layer of forced nervousness, “Your companion is facing starvation?! Grant me a view of its dietary requirements immediately. Let me audit my spatial inventory to see if my vaults hold the necessary components.”
The legacy egg they had gone through absolute hell to secure had finally completed its cycle; allowing the creature to suffer a permanent data wipe due to starvation would be a catastrophic waste of resources!
Shen San immediately choked back his technical explanation, letting the matter drop. It appeared the game’s anti-meta hard-coding was operating perfectly; whenever an NPC encountered localized outworld terms like “system panel,” their cognitive processing automatically filtered the data out. Otherwise, his master wouldn’t have bypassed the breach so seamlessly.
“Let me cross-reference the logs,” he muttered, letting out a breath of relief as he focused back on his pet interface. “The matrix indicates it requires liquid goat or cow milk, high-tier wild fruits, and a portion of finely minced premium meat…”
Listening to the bizarre ingredient list, Yunxi rapidly manifested the requested materials from her spatial vaults, internally bewildered by the creature’s profile. What kind of monstrous entity eats a diet this chaotic? The maintenance costs alone would completely bankrupt an ordinary adventurer!
As Shen San mapped out the item inputs, curiosity drove him to fully maximize the pet detail panel. The moment the data initialized on his screen, his brain completely stalled.
“Master… the pet entity is a dragon!”
“A dragon? What archetype?” she asked, her mind failing to process the scale of the information as she answered subconsciously.
The very next second, the structural meaning of his words fully hit her awareness, and her eyes widened to the size of saucers.
“It’s an Ice and Snow Dragon! The model is distinct blue,” he explained frantically, activating the summon string to deploy the creature onto the cavern floor.
A tiny, lethargic ice-blue dragon materialized on the sand, its vitality bars flashing a critical, dying crimson. Its physical condition was profoundly weak.
Lu Yunxi immediately surged her internal energy, casting her highest-tier restoration spells to stabilize its health pool before kneeling down to meticulously guide the milk and crushed fruit past its snout. The two of them worked with frantic, breathless speed, pouring their crafting resources into the infant leviathan until its status bars finally stabilized.
It was an absolute miracle that the creature belonged to a legendary dragon lineage; its native vitality stats were high enough to endure decades of starvation locked inside an unmonitored inventory storage slot. Had it been any lesser companion tier, the node would have suffered permanent corruption years ago!
Once the little dragon was breathing comfortably, Yunxi carefully lined a woven basket with soft silk sheets to fashion a secure nest, her expression deeply perplexed as she studied its features. “Shen San… does the geometry of this whelp look strangely familiar to your station?”
“It does,” Shen San murmured, adjusting his glasses as he knelt beside her. “The model vectors are an absolute, identical match for the ancient leviathan that launched us into the stratosphere back on the Ice Continent. The only variance is the scale… It is highly probable that this entity is that exact dragon’s biological offspring.”
Lu Yunxi nodded slowly, a trace of dark amusement touching her lips. “That Master-tier eagle possessed an incredible amount of audacity. To brazenly hoard a dragon’s egg inside its own nest… it clearly harbored zero fear of a high-tier territorial retaliation!”
Shen San bypassed the world lore entirely, his face lighting up with a sudden, brilliant grin as he read the combat attributes on his interface. “Master, look at the base parameters! The whelp was generated with a default baseline at the Master tier! Once we initialize the boss fight, we can command it to join our vanguard rotation. With its attributes anchoring our damage output, we can completely obliterate that toad in a single attempt!”
“Oh?!”
Hearing the massive statistical advantage, a bright gleam returned to Lu Yunxi’s eyes. She resolved to anchor their position for the night, allowing the little dragon’s stamina bars to fully maximize before they marched on the final chamber.
That evening, the two master-level combatants and the newly awakened frost dragon quietly crossed the aggro line, anchoring their positions before unleashing a devastating, synchronized opening volley against the Grandmaster Toad.
Although neither human had mathematically broken past the Level 90 Grandmaster barrier on their character sheets, the raw synergy of three fully optimized Master-tier combat loops executing a perfect, simultaneous rotation was more than enough to give the Grandmaster Boss an absolute nightmare.
