Chapter 128| Chapter 129| Chapter 130
Chapter 128: Level Stuck
After several days of hit-or-miss flirting that yielded absolutely no results, Luo Mingyi decided to just abandon his subtle tactics and cut straight to the chase.
“Miss Lu, what do you think of me?”
Before Lu Yunxi could even process the question, Qiu Yan, who was hiding outside the window, began gnashing her teeth in fury.
Good job, Luo Mingyi. You really do harbor underhanded intentions! I need to sync data with Shen San about this immediately.
Inside the room, Lu Yunxi offered her standard, pleasant NPC smile. “How are you? You’re doing quite well. You’re cheerful, enthusiastic, and exceptionally handsome… Why do you ask all of a sudden?”
“Then, do you like me?”
Hearing this, Lu Yunxi hesitated for a fraction of a second, her internal database running a quick diagnostic. Like? How bizarre. Why was Luo Mingyi suddenly throwing a romance prompt at her? Had he triggered some hidden world quest to capture a high-tier native NPC?
Seeing her blank expression, Luo Mingyi’s lips curled into a thoroughly displeased line. “You’re lying! You obviously don’t like me at all!”
Lu Yunxi fell silent for a moment. A sudden realization struck her regarding the game’s hidden mechanics: since her own system interface tracked relationship metrics, it stood to reason that a corresponding favorability bar existed on the player’s UI.
“My apologies,” she replied smoothly, immediately deploying a flawless ‘good person’ rejection card. “You are an exceptionally good person, and everyone in the territory likes you.” If a server-wide quest required her to verbally state she liked him to unlock a reward, she wouldn’t care about bending the truth. But if he was trying to genuinely force her affinity core to spike… that was mechanically impossible.
Meanwhile, out in the courtyard, Shen San noticed that Qiu Yan hadn’t returned from her “reconnaissance” run. Suspicious, he marched over to the main pavilion to investigate.
He reached the threshold just in time to overhear the rejection, and a massive wave of silent laughter nearly breached his composure.
Inside the parlor, Luo Mingyi’s brow furrowed as he threw out a defensive, pivoting question. “Then, do you like Shen San?”
Shen San’s boots froze flat against the stone floorboards. His heartbeat instantly lost its steady rhythm, fluttering with a sudden, chaotic energy.
Taking a slow, silent breath, he pressed his ear directly against the wooden paneling to intercept the audio feed.
Lu Yunxi’s eyelid twitched slightly. “Of course I like him. He is an exceptionally hardworking disciple.” Both of her apprentices were fiercely dedicated to grinding their proficiency bars, so from a mentor’s perspective, she naturally favored them both.
Luo Mingyi curled his lip, his tone dripping with aristocratic annoyance. “Miss Lu, you’re being entirely unfair. Even though you claim he’s just a good person, you clearly harbor an immense amount of favoritism toward him. Between the two of us, your sub-routines always side with his coordinates.”
“…” Lu Yunxi stared at him deadpan. If a master didn’t favor her own direct, tea-sworn apprentice, was she supposed to be partial to a random combat squatter who just showed up for free meals?
Following that afternoon’s absolute shutdown, no one could quite deduce what was running through Luo Mingyi’s mind, but his aggressive courtship protocols ceased entirely.
It appeared he had officially logged out of his seduction routine.
Lu Yunxi internally breathed a massive, profound sigh of relief.
Later that evening, around the dinner table, the four residents sat together to clear the evening’s culinary spread.
Seeing that the platters were nearly empty, Qiu Yan suddenly broke the silence, her tone dropping into a casual murmur. “Master, a major culinary tournament is scheduled to launch in my hometown very soon. The baseline theme for the opening phase requires contestants to execute a dish centered entirely around eggs. What would your sub-routines think of me synthesizing a traditional tomato and egg drop soup?”
Luo Mingyi froze mid-bite, his eyes widening in absolute horror. He began frantically winking and casting warning glares across the table. What on earth is wrong with this woman?! Has her brain completely glitched? Did she completely forget that they were currently trapped inside an isolated, high-tier instanced valley? There was an absolute communication block between this zone and the outside world! How could she possibly receive updates regarding a real-world Interstellar competition, let alone register an active login to participate?!
Catching his aggressive, spastic blinking, Qiu Yan blinked back in pure bewilderment. The exact second her cognitive channels traced back through her dialogue, she realized she had accidentally leaked real-world data in front of an NPC. Her face drained of color, and she hurriedly shifted her gaze to scan her mentor’s facial animations.
However, Lu Yunxi’s internal interface had already scraped the exact data logs from the player forums days ago: the Interstellar Federation’s Grand Annual Culinary Championship was about to officially launch its broadcast servers.
Qiu Yan was clearly aiming to utilize the event to secure a high-tier professional title and blast through her lineage’s class barriers.
The structural blueprint of the tournament was divided into three distinct phases: the public preliminaries, the professional qualifiers, and the grand finals.
To clear the initial preliminaries, contestants had to secure a passing ratio of public votes from the viewing audience. In contrast, the subsequent qualifiers and finals were evaluated strictly by a panel of Grandmaster judges from the central Chefs Association.
The opening preliminaries were streamed live via premium virtual capsules utilizing full five-sense neural syncing, allowing hundreds of billions of citizens across the galaxy to directly taste and evaluate the entries from the comfort of their homes.
Because professional lifestyle chefs were an astronomically rare elite class in the Interstellar era, this annual event represented the absolute sole window for ordinary citizens to experience high-tier gastronomy. Statistical data verified that the broadcast captured nearly ninety percent of the global population’s active attention.
If Qiu Yan could successfully navigate the brackets and secure a high-tier rank, her personal prestige within the Qiu syndicate would experience an exponential upgrade. Her biological and adoptive parents would instantly claim immense societal protection, effectively deleting the elders’ ability to humiliate them.
The mechanical constraints for the qualifiers and finals relied on a randomized lot-drawing system executed live on stage, but the thematic criteria for the public preliminaries were consistently broadcasted well in advance.
Parsing the forum data in her mind, Lu Yunxi offered a reassuring, maternal nod. “An egg theme? We are entirely in luck. The mountain passes flanking this waterfall overflow with wild pheasant nests. Tomorrow morning, we shall harvest a substantial batch of premium eggs, and I will personally instruct you in several advanced formulations.”
Over the next several days, completely resolved to see her second disciple secure an elite placement, Lu Yunxi systematically shelved her dungeon routines. She dedicated every waking hour to a grueling, hands-on culinary boot camp, drilling Qiu Yan through the mechanics of delicate steamed egg custards, savory bitter melon scrambles, and light sponge cakes. The menu covered everyday home-cooked favorites, elegant desserts, and substantial main courses; she was determined to ensure at least one recipe captured the public’s palate.
“The exact second the prawns hit the hot oil during the scramble, your manual timing must be absolute…” Lu Yunxi instructed with extreme gravity, methodically breaking down the macro-level fire control and mechanical wrist movements required for the dish.
Beside the counter, Shen San stood watching the intensive tutorial with a completely wooden, stone-cold expression.
“Master, your sub-routines are being incredibly partial today,” he muttered, subtly edging closer to throw a deeply bitter, envious glare at his junior sister.
He couldn’t help but recall his own grueling apprenticeship. When he was first learning the trade, his master had merely demonstrated a recipe a single time before leaving him to figure out the variables himself. She had never once verbalized her internal metrics with this level of extreme, meticulous precision for him!
Qiu Yan offered a smug, immensely proud smile, tossing her hair. “Well, what can I say? The system variables dictate that Master favors my coordinates the absolute most.”
Lu Yunxi: “…”
And they’re back at it again.
Sighing helplessly, she stepped between them to de-escalate the bickering. “Shen San, when your account first initiated the apprenticeship, I drilled you with absolute focus. But once your character sheet unlocked the baseline fundamentals, you naturally possessed the capacity to independently parse my movements. In the future, once your junior sister clears the intermediate thresholds, her curriculum will default to the exact same independent routine.”
Under this intense, rote-learning system, the server cycles slipped past rapidly. Within a few days, the tournament’s opening queues were ready to launch.
“Master, I am officially entering a state of deep, secluded cultivation to finalize my techniques,” Qiu Yan announced solemnly, checking her spatial inventory. “There is no need to initiate a search for my coordinates; I have hoarded a massive cache of provisions to sustain my metrics.”
Lu Yunxi nodded understandingly, fully aware that her student was simply logging off the server to attend the live neural-broadcast.
Not only was Qiu Yan fully occupied with her tournament queues, but both Luo Mingyi and Shen San also appeared to have run into urgent real-world logistics, as neither of their character models had reconnected to the server over the past forty-eight hours.
With the entire trio of players safely offline, the constant pressure to maintain her rigid, automated NPC animations vanished completely, and Lu Yunxi instantly felt a wave of pure, unadulterated bliss.
Taking absolute advantage of the empty house, she effectively relocated her lifestyle base directly into the underground cavern. She spent her days aggressively farming the monster spawns, while her evenings were dedicated to lounging on her porch, browsing the world boards, and enjoying premium fruit wines. She maintained a strict, healthy routine, forcefully logging her awareness out at exactly nine o’clock every night.
The trending threads on the forums were endlessly entertaining, with nearly every front-page discussion zeroing in on the ongoing Culinary Championship. Even inside the high-level zones of Ancient Times, the server population had visibly thinned out as players abandoned their level-grinding to focus on the event.
[The Egg Phase is Live!]: Did everyone catch the opening parameters? We’re cooking with eggs! That is strictly my specialty build! I don’t even hold a junior lifestyle badge, but I locked in my registration anyway!
[Gourmet Master]: To the casual player above: what kind of trash formulation are you planning to execute? I’ve already optimized my recipe sheet.
[Server Analyst]: It appears the entire player base has successfully migrated techniques they learned from native NPCs inside “Ancient Times.” Statistical archives show that last year’s tournament only pulled a few hundred registrations across the entire galaxy. This year? The official registration ledger has already shattered the 50 million threshold, and the queue is still expanding exponentially.
[Elite Chef]: Are you people entirely delusional? Do you genuinely believe that skimming through a basic lifestyle routine inside a virtual reality game grants you the mechanical proficiency to rival a certified, real-world culinary professional? What an absolute joke.
[Casual Grinder]: Look at this elitist clown. You’re only salty because your faction affinity was too low to find an NPC mentor to instruct you. I’ve been training under a local tavern chef for a single month, and my real-world kitchen execution is completely flawless now.
Lu Yunxi scrolled down the global rankings, checking the skyrocketing numbers of registered trainee chefs, and felt a trace of genuine surprise. Previously, the leaderboard was an incredibly exclusive circle containing only a few hundred names; now, the roster had expanded into a massive, multi-page data wall.
Curious about the sudden influx of competitors, she dug deeper through the tactical sub-boards, eventually locating a highly upvoted guide instructing the community on the exact quest triggers to secure a native NPC chef apprenticeship.
Scrolling further down the thread, multiple casual players had proudly attached image captures of their real-world attempts to replicate the ingame egg recipes:
[A charcoal-black, gelatinous mass scorched into the bottom of a steel pan.jpg]
[A fractured boiled egg with its internal albumen violently leaking through the structural fissures.jpg]
[A plate of entirely unpeeled, raw whole eggs submerged in premium soy sauce.jpg]
Lu Yunxi’s expression turned highly, intensely subtle.
Staring at the horrific visual data compiled by the galaxy’s civilian population, the lingering anxieties she held regarding Qiu Yan’s tournament prospects vanished completely.
Yeah, my student has absolutely nothing to worry about.
Given the abysmal baseline talent of the general public, the intensive, month-long curriculum she had forcefully crammed into Qiu Yan’s brain would allow her to easily obliterate the competition.
With her mind entirely at ease regarding her disciple, Lu Yunxi threw herself right back into her aggressive dungeon-clearing routine.
Perhaps the hidden luck variables of the zone swung in her favor, but as she entered the cavern on the third consecutive day, her consciousness slipped into an exceptionally rare, hyper-focused state of flow. It felt as if her immediate surroundings had been entirely wiped from her perception; the layout, the terrain, and the environment faded away until nothing remained within her universe except the fluid mechanical execution of the monster targets.
Back in her previous life, she had occasionally tapped into this identical state of peak cognitive flow during high-stakes academic examinations or massive corporate projects.
Whenever this mental state triggered, her operational efficiency experienced an exponential surge.
To completely maximize her clear speed while the flow buff remained active, Lu Yunxi systematically harvested a variety of rare poisonous flora from her inventory, extracting their raw toxins to coat her arrows. The high-potency venom instantly annihilated any target below level 60 on contact, while monsters scaling between levels 60 and 80 were entirely incapacitated and defeated in a single mechanical sequence.
Under this ruthless, hyper-efficient optimization, her experience bar surged forward at a terrifying velocity.
By the time she successfully hit level 89 and entirely maxed out her remaining experience pool, a significant block of server cycles had passed.
Checking the system clock, she noted that the public preliminaries of the real-world Culinary Championship were still actively processing their broadcast queues. Reassured that she hadn’t managed to sleep through her student’s exam windows, she packed up her longbow and returned to the compound.
Predictably, the three player cabins remained entirely dark and vacant.
Allowing her muscles a few days of well-deserved rest, Lu Yunxi finally found the mental bandwidth to analyze her own critical character dilemma: her progression had hit a dead stop.
Within the structural logic of the server, breaking through from the advanced brackets to the master tier was an intensely punishing ordeal—but attempting to force a breakthrough from a master-tier cap up to the legendary Grandmaster brackets was a completely separate nightmare.
Despite having her experience pool entirely locked at one hundred percent, she had continuously slaughtered high-level dungeon bosses for two straight days, yet her character sheet refused to register a level shift to ninety.
When absolute, relentless diligence failed to override a hard-coded system wall, she found herself standing in the quiet parlor, thoroughly and utterly stuck.
Chapter 129: It Was Him
Lu Yunxi was buried deep in her thoughts, wandering around the valley out of sheer boredom.
As she neared the base of the roaring waterfall, her pupils suddenly contracted, and her boots froze flat against the dirt path.
Wait… this scene feels incredibly familiar.
Recalling the three separate occasions where she had stumbled across her disciples in this exact location, her eyelid gave a violent twitch.
Don’t tell me someone else plummeted over the edge?!
It was completely unbelievable.
Was there some kind of bizarre, metaphysical magnet coded into this waterfall? The exact second one captive settled into the valley, more people would systematically fall from the sky like dumplings.
Lu Yunxi quickened her pace, curious to see which unfortunate soul had triggered the spatial drop this time. But before she could even clear the thickets, a sharp shout echoed from behind her.
“Master—!”
She spun around, finding that both Shen San and Luo Mingyi had successfully reconnected to the server.
“You… your real-world business is concluded?”
“Yes, Miss Lu,” Luo Mingyi replied, stepping up beside her. Catching sight of the motionless silhouette sprawled on the riverbank ahead, a trace of surprise crossed his features. “What do we have here…?”
Shen San internally nursed a massive headache.
According to the local data logs, not a single soul had breached this isolated valley for decades. He had no clue what the developers had botched in the backend coding, but suddenly, high-level entities were raining down from the crest like clockwork.
If this trends continued and more squatters materialized in the zone, the finite population of wild pheasants nesting in the mountain passes wouldn’t be enough to sustain their hunger bars. Was the entire household doomed to starve?
Leaving the two players to run their internal monologues, the trio advanced toward the body, flanking the unconscious form from three separate angles to create a clean perimeter.
The stranger was clad in heavily tattered garments, his fabric entirely caked in travel dust and grime. While it was obvious the model belonged to a male character, the physical debris effectively obscured his true facial features.
Lu Yunxi’s gaze swept over the tattered robes, her eyelashes fluttering slightly as she analyzed the stitching.
This time, the individual who had survived the drop wasn’t a player—it was a native NPC!
The cosmetic gear equipped by players, while often highly elaborate and flashy, was structurally simple to navigate, consisting strictly of an inner layer and an outer robe. In contrast, the traditional attire worn by wealthy, high-status native NPCs was an incredibly intricate, multi-layered affair that almost no casual player bothered to research.
The three companions exchanged a series of silent, heavily conflicted glances.
“The guy is completely out cold. We can’t exactly leave him rotting in the dirt,” Shen San remarked, his face entirely expressionless. Knowing the waterfall’s unique coding eliminated all lethal trauma variables, he was too lazy to run a manual diagnostic scan himself. “Which one of us is hoisting him back?”
“Don’t look at me,” Lu Yunxi countered immediately, stepping back. “How could a delicate young woman like myself carry a strange man back to her quarters? Wouldn’t that be akin to inviting a wolf straight into the parlor?” Since she had two capable disciples flanking her coordinates, she had zero intentions of handling the physical labor herself.
“Why are you both staring at my screen?” Luo Mingyi asked, narrowing his eyes as he caught their unified gaze. He offered a lazy, elegant shrug. “Do you honestly expect a high-tier combat class to carry a dusty stranger and manage his medical care? I have absolutely zero proficiency variables in nursing.”
Lu Yunxi’s eyelid twitched violently.
As the old Interstellar proverb went, when too many people are assigned to manage a well, everyone ends up dying of thirst. She finally understood the absolute truth of that statement.
“Fine, forget it. I’ll handle the retrieval.” She stepped forward, extending her arms to lift the unconscious man off the rocky bank.
Shen San: “!!”
“Master, leave a grueling physical task like this to your apprentice!” he blurted out, frantically lunging forward to intercept her path. Shoving her aside, he aggressively turned the stranger over and picked him up in a firm bridal carry.
The exact second the man’s face cleared the debris, Shen San let out a sharp gasp.
Good heavens, this guy is stunning! Did he shell out a massive amount of real-world fiat currency to override his facial customization parameters?
The unconscious man possessed an exceptionally outstanding countenance, his features capturing that delicate, striking threshold positioned right between a youthful teenager and a mature adult.
Because Shen San had dropped into a low crouch to scoop him up, his broad shoulders completely blocked Lu Yunxi’s line of sight.
Failing to process the face, she merely noted her apprentice’s sudden, paralyzed hesitation. “Shen San? Did your character model just trigger a lumbar strain?”
“No…” Shen San shook his head quickly. Adjusting his grip, he began marching back toward the residential compound with the man securely in his arms.
However, as he shifted his posture, the stranger’s face was fully exposed to the light.
Lu Yunxi’s breath caught in her throat. “Junior Brother?!”
Staring at the painfully familiar, elegant features, she was completely struck by shock.
Was this not Wen Liyun, the elite medicine disciple who had accompanied her on the high-stakes diplomatic mission to the Desert Gate?
How on earth had he suddenly plummeted into this isolated valley?
“Master, you personally recognize this entity?!” Catching the intense panic fracturing her usual calm demeanor, Shen San’s internal alarms immediately shrieked at maximum volume.
Junior Brother?! Having a competitive junior sister was already testing his sanity, and now a male junior brother had materialized from the sky?! If this progression sustained itself, were her Grandmaster mentors and sect elders going to start raining down into the courtyard next week?
Lu Yunxi remained entirely oblivious to the theatrical drama torturing her first apprentice, anxiously leaning over Wen Liyun’s face to scan his vitals.
Shen San deliberately slowed his walking speed, allowing her to execute a clearer inspection. “Shall I transfer him directly to my bedroom?”
Lu Yunxi deliberated for a brief second. “Is the structural capacity of your cabin sufficient? If it’s too cramped, redirect him straight to my private courtyard compound… This is my own direct junior brother. I cannot fathom how he bypassed his sect boundaries to fall here. Wait… is he… poisoned?!”
Initially, she had merely been scanning his limbs for physical trauma lacerations, but the exact fraction of a second her gaze swept across his fingernails, catching a deep, blue-black discoloration, her countenance turned incredibly grim.
“Poisoned?!” Shen San echoed, thoroughly bewildered.
He had only ever encountered that specific plot device within historical web dramas back on StarNet; who could have anticipated it would actually manifest as a live mechanic inside the server? Even if it was technically confined to a game world, the visual data was highly intense.
The pair accelerated their pace, rushing the comatose NPC straight into Shen San’s private quarters.
Lu Yunxi retrieved a high-tier Night Pearl from her spatial bag, positioning the glowing artifact by the nightstand to illuminate the bed. She meticulously analyzed Wen Liyun’s facial variables, inspected his tongue coating, and firmly pressed her fingers against his wrist to run a deep pulse diagnostic.
The structural reading was exponentially worse than she had calculated. The poison coursing through Wen Liyun’s meridians was of pristine, orange-tier toxicity, comprising a complex cocktail of multiple conflicting venoms.
However, the diagnostic also revealed a bizarre miracle: precisely because his system was saturated with an overabundance of distinct toxins, the various chemical properties had locked into a volatile state of mutual neutralization. The balance was the sole reason his health bar hadn’t completely bottomed out upon impact.
They had only been separated for a brief period; she couldn’t fathom what kind of catastrophic plot development had reduced her elegant junior brother to this broken state.
While her master-tier pharmaceutical skills were technically sufficient to synthesize a cure, the core mechanical obstacle was the ingredients. The rare botanical flora required to neutralize an orange-grade cocktail simply didn’t spawn within this isolated valley.
Her expressions fluctuated rapidly before she let out a long, heavy sigh.
Standing by the bedside, Shen San maintained a long, solemn silence before asking quietly, “Master, is Martial Uncle’s condition fatal? Can our lifestyle skills save him?”
Lu Yunxi shook her head, then offered a slight nod. “His condition is exceptionally severe. While I possess the alchemical proficiency to stabilize his life force, the exact herbs required for a full purification are completely locked out of this zone… The reserves hoarded inside my spatial inventory can only sustain his baseline health bar and marginally suppress the pain. The efficacy is minimal. He is doomed to endure immense agony.”
Within this restricted instance, carrier pigeons could neither breach the outer boundary to fly out, nor could incoming player mail penetrate the spatial wards. It was mechanically impossible for outside guilds to ship in premium medical supplies.
Her brow furrowed deeply. “The toxin accumulation inside his channels is far too dense. The exact second his consciousness returns, the sensory feedback will be excruciating. I am genuinely terrified his mental fortitude will break under the strain.” While the diagnostic indicated the pain metrics would dip during the evening server cycles, allowing him to sleep, the daylight cycles would offer absolutely zero relief.
Certain levels of systemic pain were simply too brutal for an ordinary human psychology to process; many individuals would actively choose a character wipe over enduring the torment.
“Master, if your sub-routines require an extra hand to manage his diagnostics, simply command me,” Shen San said, firmly thumping his chest. “At the end of the day, this is a family emergency involving my own Martial Uncle. I have an absolute structural obligation to assist.” Internally, however, he was silently praying to the developers that this comatose NPC would hurry up, grind his stats, and trigger a spatial breakthrough so he could leave the valley to seek treatment elsewhere.
Ever since his master had accepted Qiu Yan into the lineage, her attention had been entirely consumed by his junior sister’s training, leaving him—the pioneer apprentice—practically buried in the background logs.
And now, a direct Martial Uncle had materialized out of thin air, completely saturated with orange-tier poison. His master was undoubtedly going to lock her focus onto his medical charts for the foreseeable future… As the eldest disciple, he was deeply terrified of being completely erased from her priority settings.
“Martial Uncle?” Lu Yunxi caught his choice of honorific and couldn’t help but let out a soft, amused chuckle. “While it is true you have sworn your apprenticeship to my coordinates and he is my direct junior brother, our respective lineages are structured differently. You belong to a unique player tracking path, so there is absolutely no mechanical requirement for you to address him as Martial Uncle.”
The server cycles slipped past, day by day.
Right before Wen Liyun’s consciousness could fully break through the comatose state, the public preliminaries for Qiu Yan’s real-world Culinary Championship officially concluded their voting window.
Executing a flawless, basic steamed egg custard, she had successfully secured a stunning second-place finish across the global leaderboard.
Lu Yunxi was intensely curious about what kind of legendary, master-tier masterpiece the rank-one contestant had engineered to outclass her student, promptly logging onto the world boards to analyze the data.
Fortunately, an enterprising netizen had already pinned a high-definition neural playback of the winning entry to the front page.
The reigning champion had simply presented a raw, unhatched egg cracked into a bowl, garnished with exactly two drops of premium soy sauce.
Lu Yunxi stared at the visual capture of the raw egg mixture, her entire cognitive processing coming to a grinding halt.
That’s it?! That’s the entire recipe?!
And yet, this simplistic, zero-effort assembly that required absolutely no technical knife work or fire control had successfully claimed the absolute crown of the galaxy’s grandest tournament.
Worse still, the elite judges panel from the central Chefs Association had forwarded the image capture across all major corporate channels, showering the entry with an immense cascade of academic praise.
[Grandmaster Judge A]: The rank-one victory is entirely undisputed. Look at the impeccable, translucent viscosity of the external albumen, perfectly framing the flawless golden sphere suspended in the center. The visual geometry is exceptionally stunning. The precise addition of a single drop of dark soy sauce produces a breathtaking collision of three distinct color gradients. What kind of peerless culinary genius possesses the raw artistic vision to engineer such a masterpiece?!
[Casual Citizen A]: Is my neural syncing glitching out? Am I the only person in the comment section who thinks a fully cooked, delicate steamed egg custard tastes infinitely superior to raw slime?
[Gourmet Blogger]: Ugh, raw eggs carry an incredibly distinct, metallic odor…
[Grandmaster Judge B]: Certain uncultured palates are entirely blind to high art. They prioritize base flavor over structural visual aesthetics! Culinary mastery is a transcendent art form, not a simple matter of satisfying primal hunger!
[Grandmaster Judge C]: Are these casual commenters implying that a raw egg drizzled with soy sauce lacks gourmet depth? That velvety, silky texture profile! That highly subtle, natural embryonic aroma! That ultimate, minimalist beauty… If your palate registers nothing but a strange smell, you are entirely ignorant of high-end gastronomy! That is the pure, unadulterated essence of the ingredient!
Lu Yunxi: [Old Man on the Subway Squinting at His Phone.jpg]
Chapter 130: Wake Up
In short, although some of the judging and mechanics in this culinary championship were utterly baffling, Qiu Yan had achieved her goal. She was officially famous.
Nearly everyone on the Interstellar Network now recognized the name of this rising star chef.
Lu Yunxi scrolled through the trending threads for a bit longer, preparing to close out the world boards, when her gaze caught several other familiar, home-cooked entries, including a classic plate of scrambled eggs with green onions.
She paused, sharpening her focus as she read through the review logs.
Initially, she had assumed that with the advanced training she had provided, Qiu Yan would coast through the remaining brackets of the tournament without a single hiccup. However, analyzing the competitive field, she realized that wouldn’t be the case at all.
Take the green onion scramble, for instance: though the automated video capture showed a few stray fragments of eggshell had accidentally dropped into the mixture, the contestant’s underlying mechanical execution, fire control, and seasoning were entirely flawless. If the individual hadn’t botched the presentation with those broken shells, their global ranking would have skyrocketed.
Lu Yunxi clicked through several more pages of data, noting a substantial number of high-tier dishes that were beautifully synthesized. Unfortunately, because they fell slightly short in absolute flavor parameters or suffered minor aesthetic structural glitches, they had been entirely locked out of the leaderboard.
If Qiu Yan hadn’t spent the past month methodically executing the exact same steamed egg custard thousands of times, securing a second-place finish against this horde of competitors wouldn’t have been nearly so effortless.
Even more surprising was a sudden administrative update from the event coordinators. Perhaps because of the unprecedented influx of novice lifestyle players registering for this year’s tournament, the core leadership of the Chefs Association had authorized a specialized structural event.
Every single contestant who successfully advanced past the public preliminaries would be forcefully drafted into a highly classified, secluded boot camp for an extended duration. According to the system announcement, the closed-door training would log them out of the public servers for nearly half a year.
Before the isolation parameters took effect, however, the server granted the qualifiers a brief administrative vacation to pack their spatial inventories and bid farewell to their respective lineages.
Lu Yunxi’s brow furrowed slightly in pure bewilderment. Closed-door training? This was a culinary tournament, not an elite military draft. Why on earth would lifestyle chefs be subjected to a classified lockdown?
What she remained entirely oblivious to at that exact moment, however, was that Qiu Yan had already logged back into the server and was currently huddled in a hushed consultation with Luo Mingyi and Shen San near the compound gates.
“What on earth is the meaning of this?”
Lu Yunxi stared at the massive, towering mountain of steamed buns filling the center of her parlor, her almond eyes widening to their absolute limit.
The sheer volume of the culinary haul was staggering; the baked goods could have easily packed an entire academy classroom from floor to ceiling.
“Master, I’ve been aggressively practicing my dough-kneading and steaming techniques back at my estate lately,” Qiu Yan explained smoothly, gesturing toward the endless rows of fluffy white buns filling the space behind her. “While it’s true my proficiency bar in other recipes remains painfully low, my baseline execution for these is entirely flawless. I am well aware that your research schedule often leaves you with zero time to man the stove, so I synthesized this entire batch to serve as your private cache of dry travel rations. Whenever your hunger bar drops, you need only infuse them with a quick burst of internal heat.”
Lu Yunxi stood frozen, her brain completely failing to process the absurd scenario, when Luo Mingyi hastily stepped into the perimeter to run damage control.
“Ahem… wait a minute. Weren’t you supposedly trapped inside a strict, meditative seclusion block over the past few days?” he asked, aggressively winking and throwing intense, frantic warning glares across the room at Qiu Yan.
Qiu Yan’s posture stiffened as she realized she had completely botched her cover story again. Forcing a dry, skeletal laugh, she quickly pivoted. “Haha! Yes, of course! What I actually meant to say was… I managed to flawlessly execute the dough-kneading parameters inside a lucid dream state!”
Lu Yunxi’s lips curled into a faint, knowing smile, though she chose not to dismantle the lie. “I see. Thank you for the thoughtful offering. Once you depart the valley to engage in the next phase of your tournament, make absolute sure you exert your full potential.”
“Thank you, Master!”
While Lu Yunxi was secretly delighted by her second disciple’s success, she never could have anticipated the absolute disaster that would unfold that very evening.
It was a pitch-black night, and a violent wind was howling through the canyon trees.
“Miss Lu! A catastrophic emergency has breached our perimeter!” A roaring, panicked shout suddenly blasted through the quiet house, shattering the silence so violently that Lu Yunxi’s hand gave a hard tremor, and her porcelain teacup slipped from her fingers, smashing against the floorboards with a loud clang.
Dashing out the front door in a daze, she was met by the sight of an anxious Luo Mingyi pacing frantically across the veranda. Catching the heavy sheets of panic sweat drenching his forehead, Lu Yunxi didn’t waste a single second on questions, immediately deploying her movement skills to follow his lead.
Over the past few weeks, to secure rare ingredients for her culinary practice, Qiu Yan had consistently pushed her exploration parameters to dangerous extremes, scaling shear mountain cliffs and diving into treacherous aquatic channels without a single thought for her safety metrics.
But tonight, her luck had run out entirely.
Arriving at the coordinates, Lu Yunxi froze in absolute horror at the sight of the figure sprawled in the dirt. The entity was so violently bloated and swollen it was entirely beyond human recognition.
If Luo Mingyi hadn’t repeatedly cross-referenced his tracking map to verify that this grotesque, ballooned character model was indeed Qiu Yan, she would have branded him a lunatic.
She didn’t even dare extend her hand to touch her apprentice’s fragile skin. Dropping into a cautious crouch beside her head, she frantically spammed a succession of high-tier health restoration spells over her coordinates before gently pressing her fingertips against her wrist to monitor her internal meridians.
The exact fraction of a second her fingers made contact, Lu Yunxi’s countenance turned incredibly dark.
Not only had the girl’s tissue expanded multiple times past its baseline structural volume, but a deep, unnatural ink-black coloration was rapidly diffusing across her skin.
Shortly after establishing their residential base in this valley, Lu Yunxi had personally scouted the geographical data and explicitly warned every single captive who plummeted over the waterfall to stay clear of the restricted eastern ridge. That specific territory was the primary spawning ground for a hyper-aggressive swarm of native toxic hornets.
Every single hornet in that hive commanded a baseline Master-tier classification.
When mobilized as a collective swarm, the threat level was so astronomical that even Lu Yunxi systematically forced her pathing to take a massive detour around the sector, completely pretending the hive didn’t exist rather than inviting a catastrophic server aggro onto herself.
She hadn’t anticipated that Qiu Yan would possess such reckless, unhinged audacity. It appeared immortal players truly lacked a baseline psychological fear of death!
Surging with pure, unadulterated aggravation, Lu Yunxi hoisted the bloated disciple into her arms and marched back toward the compound, firmly resolved to deliver a severe, structural lecture the exact second the troublesome brat opened her eyes.
“Miss Lu, I will anchor the bedside and monitor her vitals here,” Luo Mingyi proposed urgently, his tone laced with a sudden, intense enthusiasm. “Should you head out into the valley to forage for a localized antidote?”
Lu Yunxi was slightly perplexed by his sudden, hyper-attentive demeanor, but given the severity of the crisis, she didn’t decline the support. The standard universal detoxification pills stowed inside her spatial bag were mechanically insufficient to clear a golden-quality biological toxin. Without a highly specific, targeted alchemical cure, the girl’s avatar wouldn’t suffer a permanent wipe, but she would be doomed to endure an excruciating world of sensory pain.
Lu Yunxi vanished into the night to hunt for rare botanical specimens, desperately hoping to harvest a premium counter-agent to neutralize the venom.
Unfortunately, after an entire day of grueling foraging and testing various chemical compounds, the standard mountain flora failed to yield an instantaneous cure. Mercifully, right before the server clock rolled over, she managed to locate a cluster of rare herbs, successfully synthesizing a specialized anti-hornet elixir that possessed a highly potent efficacy rate.
“Have you completely lost your mind, girl?!” Lu Yunxi roared, a massive sigh of relief escaping her lips the exact second Qiu Yan’s eyes cracked open, though her underlying temper flared right back up. “Do you have even a microscopic understanding of how cataclysmic those toxic hornets are? If Master Luo hadn’t executed an early tracking sweep and dragged your body out of the aggro zone, your character sheet would be entirely wiped by now!”
“Master… I am deeply sorry for causing your sub-routines such immense anxiety,” Qiu Yan rasped, her breathing shallow and labored as she struggled to force the syllables past her swollen throat.
Lu Yunxi shook her head in deep, weary resignation. “Remain perfectly still and accept the rest animation. Your baseline life force has been successfully stabilized, but your internal meridians are doomed to register severe, residual phantom pain. The systemic debuff dictates you must remain completely bedridden over the next six server months.”
Leaving those parting instructions, she turned and stepped out of the bedchamber to grant her apprentice the necessary quiet to heal.
However, before her boots could even clear the central corridor, the muffled echo of a conversation drifted through the thin wooden paneling.
“Qiu Yan, the tracking loops are clear. You can safely disconnect from the server now… But holy hell, you are genuinely terrifying. To think you’d execute such a brutal self-harm exploit just to manipulate the system parameters!”
“Thank you for locking down the coordinates for me, Luo Mingyi,” Qiu Yan murmured, her digital model exuding absolute physical exhaustion as her eyelids slid shut. “If I hadn’t engineered a severe, long-term medical debuff to explain my sudden inactivity, Master’s affinity algorithms would have triggered a massive anxiety spike the moment my account entered the classified lockdown phase! This was the only viable exploit to protect our relationship metrics.”
Before initiating her raid on the hornet nesting grounds, she had meticulously cross-referenced the server data with local information brokers. The golden venom was programmed to induce acute respiratory failure, massive localized inflammation, and a mandatory ‘Comatose Sleep’ state during the recovery phase. Unlike the lethal biological hornets of the real world, the virtual hive’s damage caps were strictly non-fatal. By deliberately throwing herself into the swarm, she ensured her master would simply perceive her character model as entering a standard, long-term rest cycle inside the cabin, entirely oblivious to her real-world departure to the Chefs Association lockdown.
Standing in the dim hallway, Lu Yunxi stared deadpan at the closed door, clamping a hand over her forehead in complete, utter speechlessness.
This absolute blockhead of a disciple. If she desperately wanted to execute a long-term log-out, she could have simply duplicated her elder brother’s baseline strategy—claiming she felt slightly under the weather and intended to sleep for a few days! Why on earth did she feel the mechanical necessity to throw herself into a nest of master-tier monsters?!
With Qiu Yan officially departing the server to engage in her classified corporate boot camp, Shen San and Luo Mingyi remaining entirely consumed by real-world logistics, and Wen Liyun trapped deep within his comatose stasis cycle, the chaotic household fell perfectly silent.
Lu Yunxi spent several peaceful server cycles quietly refining her sub-professions and practicing her martial arts around the serene courtyard.
Suddenly, on a crisp morning, the long-dormant figure resting within the guest quarters stirred. Wen Liyun slowly opened his eyes.
“Where… what coordinate is this?” map tracking failed to register as he clamped a hand over his throbbing forehead, forcing his upper body off the mattress with a look of acute, agonizing pain. Catching sight of the woman standing by the bed, his pupils contracted in sheer shock. “Senior Sister?!”
“Junior Brother, you’re finally conscious!” Lu Yunxi gasped, a surge of genuine joy erupting through her features as she stepped forward to press her fingers against his wrist. “How on earth did your character parameters degrade to this level? Your internal meridians are completely shattered. Did you accidentally blundered straight into a den of high-tier venomous insects?”
Wen Liyun’s brow furrowed into a tight, agonizing line. The sheer intensity of the neural feedback pulsing through his brain completely paralyzed his cognitive processing, forcing a sharp, ragged hiss past his teeth.
“Do not attempt to alter your posture,” Lu Yunxi instructed firmly, pinning his shoulders against the pillows to restrict his movement animations. “Your consciousness has only just cleared the stasis loop, so the sensory adjustments will be intensely jarring. Fortunately, our luck variables swung in our favor over the past week; while foraging for another medical crisis, I managed to synthesize an elite compound that can aggressively suppress your specific venom lines. Though it cannot permanently purge the orange-tier toxins, it is capable of eliminating nearly eighty percent of the systemic pain.”
A few days prior, while hunting for the specialized herbs required to patch Qiu Yan’s self-inflicted hornet disaster, her appraisal sub-routines had accidentally flagged a rare botanical specimen that perfectly matched Wen Liyun’s toxic markers. If she hadn’t secured that clutch ingredient, his current awakening wouldn’t be confined to a simple headache—his entire character model would be locked in an excruciating state of absolute paralysis.
Wen Liyun lay entirely motionless against the sheets for several long minutes, allowing his processing loops to finally calibrate.
“I remember the event sequence now!” he groaned, slapping his palm against his forehead as a dark, pained scowl warped his features. “Several server cycles ago, I departed the inner gates to harvest a batch of rare botanical flora, but my regional navigation glitched, and I became entirely lost within the mountain sectors. Getting lost would have been a minor administrative hassle, but while tracking back, a high-tier venomous serpent executed a surprise ambush and bit my ankle. I possessed a premium universal antidote pill inside my quick-slot inventory, but the visual disorientation was so severe… I accidentally mapped the wrong item slot and consumed the wrong vial!”
Lu Yunxi’s expression turned completely flat and wooden. “Which specific vial did you consume?”
“I accidentally swallowed the absolute highest-grade lethal poison our Master had gifted me for emergency self-defense,” Wen Liyun explained, a deeply bitter, self-deprecating smile twisting his lips. “Master synthesized that specific poison as a pure, experimental draft—he hasn’t even coded a functional antidote for it yet! It is an absolute miracle of probability that I crossed paths with your coordinates, Senior Sister, otherwise my character data would have been scrubbed from the database by now!”
The two native NPCs stared at each other in an absolute, deadpan silence.
“Right! The emergency parameters require immediate action!” Wen Liyun bolted upright, his eyes widening. “I must deploy a carrier pigeon to Master’s coordinates right this instant and command him to formulate a purification cure to rescue my character sheet!”
Lu Yunxi sighed, her hand dropping onto his shoulder. “Save your stamina, Junior Brother. The spatial coding of this valley is completely absolute. Outgoing carrier pigeons cannot breach the boundary wall.”
