Chapter 164| Chapter 165| Chapter 166
Chapter 164: Tasting Hundreds of Herbs
After successfully dealing with the hostility of their captors, the heavy, suffocating depression that had weighed down the captured girls lifted significantly.
However, a massive new logistical dilemma emerged.
They had beaten the villagers black and blue, but… what was the next phase of the operation?
“We need to evacuate this ravine and report the syndicate to the regional authorities!” Zhou Yu declared, her tone hard and unyielding. “They are operating a massive human trafficking ring! The sheer scale of their crimes is unacceptable! We must turn them over to the magistrates!”
“No, we absolutely cannot involve the authorities! What if the syndicate has bribed the local officials? We’ll just be accelerating our own executions!”
“Even if this isolated village operates outside of government jurisdiction, the magistrates won’t care about our well-being. The absolute best-case scenario is that they forcibly deport us back to our registered households… Zhou Yu, do you honestly want to be sold to a slaver a second time?!”
“What if… what if we simply execute all the male villagers, claim this settlement as our own, and live off the land?” a faint, trembling voice suggested from the back of the room.
Lu Yunxi blinked in genuine shock.
What an absolutely terrifying tactical proposal… Since when did these timid girls possess such ruthless operational parameters?
The captive men lying bound on the dirt floor instantly lost their nerve, frantically weeping and begging for their lives.
“Wait! Heroines, please have mercy! Do not execute us! We can… we can serve as your manual labor!”
“Yes! We will do whatever you command! Just please don’t zero out our health bars! If you absolutely must execute someone, execute him!”
The bound villagers instantly began violently turning on one another, shouting and shifting the blame, plunging the room into a deafening, chaotic argument.
The hostage girls, who had never managed a hostile occupation before, were thoroughly annoyed by the noise and completely at a loss for what to do.
After several days of hushed, intense deliberation, the girls finally finalized their corporate strategy: they would untie the older women who had been previously trafficked to the village, organize a communal labor force, and sustain themselves through cooperative farming and weaving.
The village was nestled against a sheer cliff—a geographic chokepoint that was incredibly easy to defend and virtually impossible to assault. Even with a small garrison of girls, they had nothing to fear from external raids. Furthermore, the village possessed several viable agricultural plots. While the crop yields weren’t optimal, they generated enough baseline sustenance to survive.
Since the majority of the trafficked girls originally hailed from peasant farming households, managing the agricultural logistics was second nature to them.
Although Lu Yunxi strongly opposed the motion to untie the older, traumatized women—fearing unpredictable psychological variables—the collective vote overruled her objection.
Ultimately, every single male villager was tightly bound and secured in the sheds, and the liberated women assumed control of the agricultural lines.
A few days later.
A heavy rainstorm had swept through the valley overnight, leaving the morning foliage dripping with fresh dew.
Lu Yunxi hoisted a woven basket onto her back and trekked up the mountain path, her boots crunching softly against the damp earth.
Her foraging parameters for tracking edible mushrooms were entirely unmatched, making her the undisputed champion of the group. Consequently, her assigned daily chore was to scale the mountain and harvest the primary food supply for the settlement.
Strangely enough, Zhou Yu, whose designated role was managing the kitchen, had abandoned her station today to follow Lu Yunxi up the trail.
At first, Lu Yunxi couldn’t calculate why the girl had tagged along, until—
“Sister Lu, look over there! Is that wild taro?!” Zhou Yu squealed, pointing frantically at a cluster of broad-leafed plants near the tree line before sprinting toward them with unbridled excitement.
Lu Yunxi instantly understood the motivation.
It appeared Zhou Yu was thoroughly sick of cooking mushrooms. In all fairness, boiling the exact same fungi every single day was a culinary nightmare!
However, when Lu Yunxi glanced at the specific plant Zhou Yu was charging toward, her casual amusement morphed into absolute horror. She engaged her Qinggong, blurring forward to violently yank the girl back.
“Halt! Zhou Yu, do not touch that foliage! That is not sweet taro—it is Alocasia macrorrhizos, the Weeping Goddess of Mercy! It is highly toxic!”
Lu Yunxi managed to arrest Zhou Yu’s momentum just a microsecond before her fingers brushed against the lethal leaves.
She let out a massive, internal sigh of relief, cold sweat beading along her forehead.
Thank the heavens my reflex parameters are maxed out! This transmigrator is entirely too bold! Does she seriously intend to forage random vegetation without running a hazard scan first?!
Zhou Yu stared longingly at the “fragrant taro,” looking profoundly disappointed, though she implicitly trusted Lu Yunxi’s botanical diagnostics. She turned back, her eyes practically pleading. “Sister Lu, aside from the endless mushrooms, is there truly nothing else we can harvest?”
“What do you mean, ‘nothing else’?” Lu Yunxi replied, shooting Zhou Yu a deadpan look. “We have a steady supply of wild rice and sweet potatoes stockpiled in the village. You simply have to rotate the inventory.”
Zhou Yu groaned. “…No, that’s not what I’m asking. I mean, are there no other vegetables we can forage? We’ve been surviving on boiled mushroom stew for days… the flavor profile is agonizingly monotonous.”
Lu Yunxi nodded in sympathy. “I cannot assist you there. My foraging data is limited to a few specific categories. I only possess the absolute certainty that the local mushrooms will not trigger a toxic debuff.”
In truth, during her extensive scouting runs across the mountain, she hadn’t detected a single viable alternative food source! The severe lack of edible flora was frustrating enough, but the mountain didn’t even spawn any local wildlife… How was that mathematically possible?!
It was an absolute miracle the weak, low-level villagers had managed to sustain their colony in this barren zone for so long!
While Lu Yunxi was lost in her own internal analysis, Zhou Yu abruptly dropped into a crouch, staring intensely at a patch of random weeds.
Without a shred of hesitation, she yanked a fistful of the grass from the dirt, shoved it directly into her mouth, and began aggressively chewing.
Lu Yunxi: “…”
Her eye twitched violently.
She understood the logic—she truly did!
Enduring a daily loop of boiled mushrooms, cooked using the exact same primitive method, was a psychological torment! The village lacked proper iron woks or flat cooking slates, restricting their culinary options to basic boiling. Furthermore, their seasoning inventory was catastrophically low—they only possessed coarse salt and absolutely zero cooking oil!
But enduring a bland diet was absolutely no excuse to start manually testing random herbs like a deranged alchemist!
“Cease this madness immediately,” Lu Yunxi snapped, grabbing Zhou Yu’s jaw and forcefully extracting the masticated wad of weeds before tossing it into the dirt.
She tried her best to de-escalate the situation and comfort the desperate cook. “Patience. Let me expand my scanning radius, we might find—”
Before she could even finish her sentence, Zhou Yu suddenly burst into a series of loopy, unhinged giggles.
Lu Yunxi: ???
Don’t tell me she actually triggered a beneficial stat buff from that garbage?
“They’re dancing… so many colorful little people are dancing in the air…” Zhou Yu giggled hysterically, collapsing backward into the mud as she began wildly waving her arms at invisible entities.
After a microsecond of stunned silence, Lu Yunxi processed the data.
Dammit!
In the brief window she had been distracted, Zhou Yu had managed to ingest a hallucinogenic toxin!
Lu Yunxi immediately attempted to execute a diagnostic scan, but Zhou Yu was thrashing around in the mud, completely incapable of holding still for the medical interface to lock on.
Left with zero alternatives, Lu Yunxi delivered a swift, precise chop to the back of Zhou Yu’s neck, knocking her unconscious. She rapidly administered a high-tier detoxification spell, cast a localized protective barrier over the girl’s sleeping avatar, and proceeded further up the mountain to harvest her daily quota of mushrooms.
By the time she returned with a fully loaded basket, Zhou Yu was just beginning to stir from her forced reboot, blinking her eyes groggily.
Suddenly, her memory cache reloaded the events leading up to her blackout. She shrieked in absolute terror, scrambling to her feet.
“Ahhh! I just…” She frantically patted down her limbs, jumping up and down in the dirt to verify her motor functions hadn’t been permanently paralyzed by the neurotoxin.
Thank the heavens that specific strain of toxic grass only triggered visual hallucinations and wasn’t lethal. My metabolism must have slowly purged the debuff while I was unconscious, Zhou Yu reasoned, her internal logic entirely flawed.
She turned to look at Lu Yunxi, a wave of profound gratitude washing over her.
The server sky was already darkening into twilight, yet Sister Lu had remained by her side the entire time. She must have stood guard to ensure her safety!
“I’m glad your system finally rebooted. Exercise extreme caution in the future! The vegetation in this biome is riddled with undocumented toxins,” Lu Yunxi warned, genuinely relieved the girl hadn’t suffered permanent parameter damage. “Let’s move! We need to return to base camp and initiate the cooking cycle.”
As the two of them trekked back down the trail toward the village, Zhou Yu’s eyes began to dart around thoughtfully.
“Sister Lu, have you ever considered venturing out into the open world?” she asked.
Though she hadn’t spent much time networking with the other native girls, it was painfully obvious that Sister Lu was the absolute apex entity of their group. Whether it involved manual labor, physical combat, or general environmental intelligence, her parameters were terrifyingly high. She didn’t act like a baseline NPC in the slightest.
As a modern transmigrator, Zhou Yu naturally harbored zero desire to permanently anchor her save file to a desolate mountain ravine. She had already drafted a long-term roadmap: once she ensured the native girls were permanently secured and self-sufficient, she intended to log out of the village and explore the broader map.
While the native NPCs seemed perfectly content to settle into an ordinary agrarian lifestyle, she strongly suspected Sister Lu operated on a different wavelength.
Catching the speculative look in Zhou Yu’s eyes, Lu Yunxi’s advanced cognitive processing quickly mapped out the girl’s underlying intent.
This player must have been quite young prior to her transmigration. Otherwise, she wouldn’t possess such an idealistic, burning desire to explore a hostile server.
However, Lu Yunxi’s primary concern wasn’t Zhou Yu’s wanderlust; it was debating whether she should disclose the horrific truth of the server architecture to the girl.
She vividly recalled the absolute, existential dread that had crushed her own psyche when she first discovered she was trapped inside a holographic VRMMO matrix.
Although the system artifact had explicitly assured her this was a legitimate, physical reality that had simply suffered a catastrophic dimensional downgrade… her ultimate questline required her to restore the world’s underlying spiritual energy. It was a monumental, grueling task that would likely require an astronomical amount of time to complete.
If Zhou Yu ventured into a major metropolitan hub, she would inevitably notice the glitching NPCs and the rigid behavioral loops.
Lu Yunxi had no idea how severely that revelation would shatter the poor girl’s mind.
Weighing the variables, Lu Yunxi clamped her mouth shut, opting to withhold the classified data.
Misinterpreting her grim silence as quiet contemplation, Zhou Yu’s face lit up with absolute joy. “Sister Lu, then it’s a pact!”
“…” Whatever! She was inevitably going to evacuate this zone regardless of the pact!
The two of them hiked in silence for another twenty minutes before reaching the village perimeter.
However, the environmental dynamics of the settlement were profoundly anomalous today.
Under standard operating procedures, thick plumes of smoke from the cooking fires should have been rising from the chimneys, and the girls should have been gathered in the central plaza, chatting happily as they prepared the evening meal. Yet, the entire village was currently cloaked in an eerie, absolute dead silence.
Zhou Yu marched forward carelessly, her low-level sensory stats entirely failing to detect the anomaly.
She scratched her head, sighing in frustration. “It appears our delayed return threw off the logistics. Since they lacked the mushroom inventory to cook the stew, is the entire guild going to be forced to consume dry rations tonight?”
Chapter 165: A Good Person
Lu Yunxi’s brows snapped together. She instantly hooked an arm around Zhou Yu’s waist, dragging her back into the shadows while dropping her voice to a sharp whisper: “Don’t make a sound!”
Seeing Zhou Yu clamp her mouth shut and look at her with wide, uneasy eyes, Lu Yunxi didn’t waste any time explaining. She simply closed her eyes, expanding her sensory parameters to carefully map out the life signs across the settlement.
A few seconds later, her eyes snapped open. “Something happened,” she murmured, her voice barely a breath.
The dense cluster of auras that had previously marked the central plaza—where the village men had been securely tied up—had completely dispersed. Instead, over a dozen faint, suppressed life signs were now huddled neatly inside the dilapidated shack at the far end of the village.
“Wait here. I’ll go scout the perimeter,” she whispered to Zhou Yu, prepping her light-footwork mechanics to glide invisibly into the sector.
She hadn’t even cleared two paces, however, when a firm grip snagged her sleeve.
“Sister Lu, I can’t let you take all the aggro alone. I’m deploying with you!” Zhou Yu declared, her jaw set with absolute transmigration-protagonist determination.
Scanning her immediate environment for a weapon, she rubbed her palms together, locked her eyes onto a low-hanging tree branch, and threw her entire body weight into snapping it off.
Unfortunately, the native flora of this world possessed remarkably high durability parameters. Zhou Yu managed to crack off a meager, stubby piece of wood, but she used so much reckless force that the branch violently recoiled. The kinetic kickback sent her flying backward, crashing ungracefully onto her backside.
Refusing to wait for an assistant, she dusted off her trousers, scrambled back up, and excitedly brandished her new wooden baton. To finalize her battle prep, she executed a snappy mantis-style kick, freezing in a dramatic, one-legged martial arts stance.
Lu Yunxi: “…”
“Ahem…” Caught beneath Lu Yunxi’s flat, utterly deadpan stare, Zhou Yu’s face flushed red with sudden embarrassment. She slowly, awkwardly lowered her leg. “Sister Lu… layout cleared. Let’s advance!”
With that, she launched herself forward like a rogue arrow, plunging headfirst into the village gates.
Lu Yunxi clapped a hand over her forehead, her eye twitching violently. With a rapid flick of her fingertips, she instantly cast a max-tier protective barrier, anchoring the shield directly to Zhou Yu’s tracking data. Once she verified the girl’s health bar was secure, she executed a triple-jump, bounding onto the thatched rooftops in a blur of motion.
“Whoa! Oh my god!”
The exact microsecond Zhou Yu stormed the central lane, a massive, unfolding black shroud blocked her entire field of vision. Unable to calculate what the looming dark mass was, she panicked completely, squeezing her eyes shut while wildly swinging her wooden baton in a frantic, 360-degree arc.
The village men waiting in ambush raised their heavy clubs and iron staves, unleashing a brutal, synchronized volley of strikes against her position.
The sheer density of the hostiles turned the bottleneck into a chaotic melee.
The thugs’ weapons slammed repeatedly against Lu Yunxi’s invisible protective shield. Operating under the blissful delusion that their physical strikes were actively crushing the intruder’s bones, the mob grew increasingly ecstatic, spamming their attack animations with feral energy.
This was especially true as Zhou Yu’s frantic, terrified shrieks echoed through the lane; the men took it as hard data that her health bar was actively vaporizing.
Zhou Yu whipped her stick through the air until her stamina bar completely depleted. Panting heavily, she rested her hands on her hips, finally opening her eyes to inspect the battlefield.
Lurking silently in the roof shadows, Lu Yunxi tracked the engagement, her eye twitching once more.
Well, at the very least, the transmigrator’s vital signs weren’t in any immediate danger.
Leaving Zhou Yu to act as a highly effective aggro sponge, Lu Yunxi executed a series of fluid roof-dashes, arriving instantly above the crumbling shack in the corner.
The structural integrity of the dilapidated roof was catastrophically low. Before Lu Yunxi could even anchor her footing or reach out a hand, her weight triggered a physics calculation, causing a cluster of weathered clay tiles to slide off the rafters and shatter on the cobblestones below.
“Who goes there?!” a harsh voice bellowed from the interior. A guard marched out of the threshold, his eyes scanning the perimeter with intense vigilance.
Lu Yunxi instantly retracted her advance, melting into the blind spot of the eaves while utilizing a narrow fissure in the mud wall to run a visual diagnostic on the interior.
Inside the cramped, dim room, the village’s captive women were tightly bound with heavy ropes, stacked neatly against the floorboards. In addition to the hostesses who had traveled with her from the capital convoy, the older, long-term victims of the settlement were also pinned in the corner.
She ran a rapid headcount, confirming that aside from herself and Zhou Yu, the only entity missing from the capture list was a quiet, low-profile matron who had seamlessly hidden her tracking marker from the raiders.
Lu Yunxi only spent a single second calculating the tactical variables before locking her focus onto her core companions.
The girls were sprawled across the dirt in critical condition. Deep lacerations marred their avatars, and their physical blood volume was actively draining, pooling into grim, dark stains across the floorboards.
Her gaze darkened into a lethal glaze. Having verified via her interface that only a solitary guard was managing the holding cell, she launched herself downward without a shred of hesitation, driving her weapon straight toward the gatekeeper’s blind spot.
Having concluded his external patrol without detecting any anomalous tracking markers, the guard grumbled under his breath, scratching his head. “How strange… Could those clay tiles have simply suffered an automated durability failure rather than an intruder trigger?”
Muttering to himself, he turned to step back inside the shack. But the exact microsecond his boots cleared the threshold, a blinding flash of cold steel dominated his visual field.
He crashed heavily onto the dirt, his consciousness instantly dropping to zero as his system forced a complete knockout state.
The weeping, half-dead girls on the floor froze. Staring at the massive thug who had just been brutally dominating them suddenly drop like a felled tree, a wave of profound confusion washed over their pupils.
Right then, Lu Yunxi stepped smoothly into the dim light of the shack. Her hands moved in a fluid sequence as she cast a wide-area, high-tier health-recovery spell, instantly forcing their open wounds to stitch closed and regenerate in a matter of seconds.
“Are you all operational?” she asked, her voice level and calm as she forcibly suppressed the dangerous wrath simmering in her core.
The hostesses gasped, staring in absolute, paralyzed shock as the severe lacerations splitting their clothes instantly healed over, leaving pristine skin underneath.
“Who… what tier of cultivator are you?!” someone cried out, looking up at her as if she were a divine entity.
However, a few of the more traumatized, long-term captives didn’t even process the supernatural nature of the healing, their minds too shattered to register the anomaly. “Thank heaven your parameters are high enough to break the siege…”
“If your arrival had suffered another minute of latency, our avatars would have faced permanent liquidation.”
Seeing that their baseline vitals had recovered past the danger threshold, Lu Yunxi let out a controlled breath and advanced to dismantle their bindings.
“My word… Miss Lu, you’ve successfully returned to the sector?!”
A raspy voice echoed from behind the broken doorframe as an elderly matron suddenly materialized, staring at her with wide, shocked eyes.
Lu Yunxi paused, her curiosity flaring. This was the exact low-profile matron who had successfully evaded the initial village purge alongside herself and Zhou Yu.
“Auntie, where exactly did you conceal your tracking marker during the raid? Why did you venture into this hot zone? The hostile density here is entirely too dangerous for your stats!” she warned, her brow furrowing with genuine concern.
“I didn’t hide far,” the old woman replied smoothly, her tone remarkably flat as she stepped closer to the group. “The men were likely allocating one hundred percent of their sensory scanning to track your positioning, completely neglecting a baseline unit like myself.”
“Hold your advance,” Lu Yunxi commanded, pausing mid-slice as she cut the ropes binding a hostess’s wrists. She slowly, methodically hoisted her head, locking a freezing, grave gaze onto the matron. “Explain your intelligence parameters. How exactly do you command the data that my surname is Lu?”
Granted, she had officially introduced herself to her immediate party, but that registry was strictly limited to her convoy companions and the fresh transmigrator. The older, broken women of the settlement historically maintained absolute silence, never engaging her in dialogue.
“I simply intercepted the name from the general chat logs of the other girls. Did my processing unit render the wrong identifier?” The old woman blinked, her expression a perfect mask of innocent confusion.
Lu Yunxi slowly retracted her visual focus, opting to drop the interrogation for the moment. It was a logical explanation; while she had been busy scaling the peak to harvest mushroom inventory, her hostesses had been actively networking with the resident women to establish the agrarian commune.
She lowered her chin to resume cutting the ropes, completely unaware that her shifting focus had triggered a behavioral loop in the NPC.
The old matron’s posture suddenly grew incredibly tense, her limbs trembling violently as she lowered her head. A dark, predatory glint flickered across her pupils as she silently closed the distance between them.
The moment her boots crossed the two-meter threshold—
One of the bound hostesses, whose face had turned a deep crimson from desperate exertion, finally managed to force her vocal override past her terror, her entire body shaking as she shrieked: “Miss Lu, execute an immediate dodge! That woman is a double-agent! She’s in total alignment with the village men!”
“Hmph! You realize the trap too late, little bird!” the old crone sneered, her frail frame suddenly exploding with frantic kinetic energy as she lunged forward like a starved eagle swooping down on a nest of chicks.
Lu Yunxi: “…”
Speechless. Absolute, deadpan speechlessness.
Did this low-level NPC honestly believe she possessed the combat parameters to execute a successful grapple against a Grandmaster? If a baseline commoner managed to inflict structural damage on her avatar here, Lu Yunxi would go down as the most pathetic, laughable joke in the entire century-long history of the Misty Rain Palace!
The sheer lack of disrespect these villagers displayed for her gear score was offensive. Did they honestly believe a crude ambush like this would require her to exert herself?
She didn’t even bother utilizing a active combat art.
Within a fraction of a second, her hands blurred through a standard knotting animation, wrapping the old matron in heavy hemp rope until she resembled a perfectly bound dumpling, before carelessly dropping her onto the dirt floor.
Turning her back on the groaning double-agent, Lu Yunxi smoothly finished untying the rest of her hostesses.
Following the exact corporate playbook from their first victory, the liberated girls immediately re-armed themselves with blunt staves, forming a unified frontline to take the fight straight to the remaining hostiles outside.
Naturally, the final calculation yielded the exact same result.
Every single male villager, along with the treacherous old crone who had masterminded the counter-raid, was systematically bound with heavy utility rope and dumped unceremoniously into the exact same dilapidated shack they had used as a cage.
“Wait a moment… why does our prisoner inventory show an additional unit?” After executing a meticulous post-combat tally of the hostiles secured in the shack, Zhou Yu scratched her head, thoroughly perplexed. She took a step forward to inspect the cage.
“Sister Zhou, abort your advance! Do not touch that venomous viper!” the hostesses behind her shrieked, frantically grabbing her shoulders to check her momentum.
“She speaks the truth! The exact moment you and Miss Lu scaled the mountain ridge for the forage run, that wretched old woman covertly untied every single hostile in the sheds! That is the sole variable that triggered our containment breach!”
“Look at the structural damage across our garments! Those punctures were caused by their blunt clubs beating our health bars down! The blood loss parameter was terrifying—it was incredibly painful! And that old crone was actively assisting their vanguard, swinging her iron ladle with absolute, merciless cruelty!”
Zhou Yu stared at her companions blankly. Sure enough, running a visual scan across their silhouettes, she detected dozens of clean rips, tears, and heavy blood splatters decorating their linen tunics.
“The physical toll looks immense… Hold on!” Zhou Yu’s internal Sherlock Holmes protocols suddenly booted online, her eyes flashing with a sharp, analytical brilliance as she scrutinized their forms. “If you all sustained high-tier puncture wounds and catastrophic blood loss… why on earth are there absolutely zero physical injuries visible beneath those torn clothes?!”
“We were on the verge of a total vital failure from blood loss, but Miss Lu spawned into the coordinates just in time to execute a miracle intervention!” the hostesses chimed in unison, their eyes sparkling with unbridled, religious adoration as they turned their heads to worship Lu Yunxi.
Lu Yunxi: …Crap!
An operational error! She had completely relied on her subconscious gaming reflexes earlier, spamming her max-tier area-of-effect health-recovery spell while entirely forgetting that a modern, rational transmigrator was observing the metrics…
Though, calculating her long-term roadmap, she supposed it didn’t matter much. At the rate this server’s rendering logic was dissolving, Zhou Yu was bound to discover they were trapped inside a holographic VRMMO matrix sooner or later.
“Are you all completely out of your minds?!” Zhou Yu barked, her voice dripping with sheer, deadpan skepticism as she glared at the smiling hostesses. “Do you honestly take me for a brainless fool? How can a lethal, hemorrhaging wound completely regenerate its cell tissue in a matter of seconds without leaving a single scar?! That violates basic biology!”
Stepping back, her gaze turned intensely vigilant as she evaluated the tied-up matron inside the cell, before looking back at the unblemished girls. “Let’s look at the hard data here… Clearly, that elderly Auntie is the actual, law-abiding victim, and you wretches are running a massive gaslighting operation against me, right?!”
The courtyard fell into an absolute, suffocating silence as the native NPCs stared at her, completely mute.
Chapter 166: Stockholm Syndrome
Every single girl fell silent.
If it weren’t for the unmistakable, vibrant bloodstains drying on the floor and the violent tears shredding their tunics, they would have undoubtedly concluded they were trapped in a collective dream.
Lu Yunxi: “…”
She had fully expected someone to notice the glaring logical error in her medical intervention, but she certainly hadn’t anticipated Zhou Yu’s thought process to remain so rigidly bound by modern science.
Just as she quietly let out a breath of relief, preparing to synthesize a plausible excuse to salvage the timeline, one of the younger hostesses suddenly clapped her hands.
“Oh, I’ve intercepted rumors about this before!” the girl chirped, her eyes sparkling with intense admiration as she stared at Lu Yunxi. “The legendary grandmasters who graduate from the elite hidden sects possess absolute mastery over mystical meridian manipulation. The technique Miss Lu deployed just now must be one of those legendary secret arts, right?!”
Lu Yunxi: “…”
Well… if it helps stabilize your suspension of disbelief.
“Indeed,” she replied smoothly, adopting a serene, sagely countenance. “I am a core disciple of a reclusive martial sect.”
Zhou Yu’s jaw dropped, her processor entirely unable to handle the sudden influx of cultivation data. Staring at Lu Yunxi, she and the young hostess blurted out in perfect, synchronized shock:
“A martial sect?!”
Lu Yunxi offered a stoic, definitive nod.
“Do you know the Little Dragon Girl?!” Zhou Yu blurted.
“Is this the legendary martial faction that commands the exact same tier rating as the Imperial Academy?!” the native hostess hollered.
The two girls threw themselves forward simultaneously, each aggressively seizing one of Lu Yunxi’s sleeves to demand more data.
Lu Yunxi looked down at her left arm, then shifted her gaze to her right arm, suddenly experiencing the distinct, uncomfortable guilt of a scumbag husband caught between a furious primary wife and a demanding concubine.
After a brief moment of internal calibration, she looked from side to side, calmly addressing their respective queries.
“I possess zero database records regarding a ‘Little Dragon Girl.'”
Turning her focus to the native hostess, she added, “But your assessment is accurate. Both the reclusive sects and the capital academies command peak-tier parameters within the realm.”
Zhou Yu slowly retracted her hand, the brief flash of modern nostalgia that had sparked in her chest instantly dissolving into a puddle of profound, existential confusion.
Conversely, the native hostess’s eyes burned with an even brighter, unyielding excitement. “Sister Lu, could you grace us with a lore drop regarding the sects? Or perhaps share a historical archive about the Academy’s elite cultivators?!”
Spurred by the prompt, the rest of the young hostesses completely forgot about the tied-up double agents groaning in the cell, swarming around Lu Yunxi’s position with wide, intensely curious eyes.
Facing this wall of eager faces, Lu Yunxi ran a quick search through her memories, deciding to share a brief, high-level summary of the rumors she had passively intercepted regarding the prominent factions during her travels across the continent.
Granted, she carefully framed the data around the specific lore of the Flower Continent.
“According to the common archives, the most formidable combat faction specializes in weaponizing natural flora to execute ranged damage strikes. Because blossoms are a ubiquitous resource in the open world, their disciples can harvest lethal weapons at any given coordinates, eliminating the need to spend gold coin on blacksmithing. It is a highly efficient operational model.”
“Furthermore, the elite pharmaceutical sects similarly anchor their crafting recipes to diverse floral species. Different blossoms yield entirely different status effects; they can seamlessly execute an untraceable assassination, or completely purge a lethal debuff to restore a target’s vitals.”
“Curiously, the system logs indicate that the underlying relationship between these two factions is notoriously toxic. Even though one commands peak offensive parameters and the other prioritizes ultimate healing capabilities, their respective world quests routinely overlap, leading to intense friction.”
“Some world-building analysts suggest their animosity stems from a resource war over the flora. While common flowers spawn everywhere, the rarest, high-tier spiritual blossoms require treacherous, high-risk conditions to cultivate. Consequently, the two factions continuously clash over these premium resource nodes, causing their diplomatic relations to degrade to absolute hostility.”
“…”
Lu Yunxi offered a light, breezy smile, wrapping up the data drop. “However, you must remember these records are merely regional legends circulating among the merchant guilds. I cannot personally verify their baseline accuracy.”
Zhou Yu stood entirely frozen on the periphery. Staring at the massive crowd of girls eagerly hanging on every syllable of Sister Lu’s fantastical world lore, her mind waded through a swamp of absolute, unmitigated daze.
The rest of the hostesses were practically radiating a renewed sense of hope, their latent desires for a peaceful, stable lifestyle finally awakening within their character parameters.
Listening to their passionate chatter, Zhou Yu felt her entire understanding of reality completely implode.
How can a human entity instantly stitch a hemorrhaging artery closed without leaving a single scar?
Where exactly does this leave the fundamental laws of modern science?
Is it possible I didn’t actually transmigrate, but am simply trapped in a highly detailed, prolonged lucid dream?
While Lu Yunxi was cheerfully narrating the legendary chronicles of the Flower Continent, her sharp sensory stats caught the exact moment Zhou Yu’s cognitive processor began to suffer a system freeze under the weight of her existential crisis. She couldn’t help but stifle a quiet laugh.
She understood the feeling perfectly!
At this exact moment, Zhou Yu was replicating her own historical trajectory—endlessly questioning the validity of her own senses, desperately trying to deploy logical deduction to rationalize her environment, only to watch her deductions repeatedly shatter against the server’s reality. If she hadn’t personally intercepted the out-of-character chat logs of the interdimensional players with her own ears, she would never have believed this world operated on such unholy gaming logic either.
Noticing that the atmosphere in the courtyard was growing entirely too chaotic, Lu Yunxi smoothly cut through the chatter with a warm smile. “By the way, our units have been holding this defensive line for hours, and our stamina bars are entirely depleted! Let’s relocate to the kitchen and continue our strategy discussion over dinner.”
“Ah?!” The girls blinked, their internal hunger meters suddenly triggering. They quickly nodded in agreement.
“Before we migrate, let us secure this holding cell properly,” Lu Yunxi noted, casting a casual glance up at the crumbling, fragile roof of the dilapidated shack. “We need to ensure their pathfinding doesn’t exploit a structural flaw to execute an undetected breakout.”
The hostesses certainly weren’t going to dispute a safety directive. They immediately swarmed the threshold, procuring several thick coils of heavy-duty hemp rope to bound the structural gates tightly from the exterior.
Lu Yunxi pulled up her system interface to run a quick environmental scan, and the smile on her lips deepened as she confirmed the incoming weather metrics.
The unified party rapidly marched toward the central sector of the settlement.
Within the village layout, the structures positioned in the core lane boasted significantly higher durability ratings and premium insulation. The girls immediately claimed these pavilions as their temporary base camp.
Working with seamless, cooperative efficiency, the team rapidly spun up the cooking fires and finalized the evening meal.
Perhaps because their collective physical and psychological stamina had been thoroughly pushed to the brink by the day’s skirmishes, everyone was profoundly exhausted. Even though the resulting mushroom broth was identical to the monotonous rations they had been surviving on for weeks, the girls devoured their portions with unbridled gusto, as if it were a five-star feast.
While replenishing their vitals, the conversation naturally veered toward unmasking the motivations of the treacherous old matron.
“I am completely unable to calculate what warped script that Auntie was running,” one hostess spat, slamming her bowl down. “To actually execute a covert betrayal and align herself with those vile monsters!”
“Exactly! You and Sister Zhou had barely cleared the mountain ridge for the forage run when that wretched woman immediately slipped into the sheds, systematically slicing the ropes to unleash the hostiles so they could ambush our position!”
“…” The younger hostesses were thoroughly enraged by the old woman’s betrayal, their dialogue transforming into a relentless loop of bitter complaints and nagging critiques.
Even the veteran victims who had survived the village rotation for years looked completely bewildered by her actions.
“I remember her case vividly,” one of the older women murmured softly, her eyes hollow. “A few winter cycles ago, she managed to trigger a pregnancy parameter. The village men collectively beat her so brutally she suffered a forced miscarriage right on the cobblestones… the blood loss was horrific. How could her system possibly harbor zero hatred for those men after that?”
Lu Yunxi’s brow knit into a tight, grim line.
Zhou Yu let out a hollow, exhausted sigh. “It’s a textbook case of Stockholm syndrome.”
“Stockholm… what tier of affliction is that?!” the native girls asked, completely baffled by the alien terminology.
“It’s not a physical disease; it’s a severe psychological coping mechanism,” Zhou Yu explained, lowering her chin to conceal the profound, weary sorrow darkening her features. “Under specific trauma conditions, certain victims who endure intense, prolonged violence from a dominant captor will unconsciously develop a twisted emotional dependency on their abuser. Their internal logic fragments until they actively align their parameters with the very monster who broke them, turning their backs on those trying to save them.”
The native hostesses stared at her, their historical database entirely lacking the context to fully process such a grim concept.
“To think the human mind could fracture into such a terrifying state…”
“What is our secondary protocol then? Are we intended to keep that Auntie locked in the cage indefinitely?”
“Let us maintain absolute containment for now. At the very least, we can assign a daily rotation to feed her through the grates. Once our organization drafts a more permanent psychological rehabilitation protocol, we can re-evaluate her clearance.”
Zhou Yu and Lu Yunxi simultaneously lapsed into silence.
They both possessed a baseline theoretical awareness of the condition, but if the system required them to actively engineer a behavioral cure to mend a broken soul, their current skill trees were entirely inadequate for the task.
Having fully replenished their hunger bars, the hostesses crawled into their respective bedrolls, their exhaustion forcing them into a deep, uninterrupted sleep state.
Late that night.
The atmospheric pressure across the valley violently shifted. The outdoor wind currents began to howl like raging beasts, the tree limbs groaning under the sheer kinetic force as the foliage rustled with deafening intensity.
Lu Yunxi’s eyes snapped open instantly within the dark room.
The extreme weather event has finally initialized.
Down in the desolate, forgotten structure at the extreme edge of the settlement, the internal conditions were rapidly deteriorating.
A massive physical gap dominated the center of the thatched roof, but because the interior was packed to absolute capacity with bound villagers, a chaotic spatial war had erupted as every single hostile desperately scrambled to avoid spawning directly beneath the open sky.
“Get the hell back! What do you think you’re doing, shoving your bulk into my radius?!” a thug roared, aggressively thrashing against his ropes. “This sector is already at maximum capacity! Where on earth do you expect me to shift my parameters?!”
“Bah! Your objections are entirely hypocritical because your current coordinates are safely insulated from the downpour!” another villager shrieked, his voice raw with panic. “Why don’t you volunteering to anchor your vessel directly beneath the leak?! Let’s see how comfortably your frame handles the kinetic impact of a storm when you’re pinned to the mud!”
“Cease this infighting! Every unit needs to compress their collision boxes and move toward the western wall! Do not let the rain parameters compromise our health bars!”
The mob of villagers huddled together, shivering violently as they aggressively packed themselves into the dry quadrants of the room. Fortunately, the crude spatial packing protocol yielded a baseline return; although the intense physical proximity generated a thoroughly foul, suffocating stench, they successfully managed to keep their garments dry.
However, before they could even finalize their positions, the environmental metrics spiked.
The wind vectors outside escalated into a violent, howling gale.
The reinforced wooden shutters insulating the window frame rattled violently for a few seconds before the structural hardware catastrophically failed, the planks being violently ripped from the masonry and carried away into the night sky. Concurrently, the clay tiles across the remaining roof segments began to violently vibrate, a terrifying, low-frequency rumble echoing across the mountain walls.
The bound men within the structure panicked completely. They thrashed their arms and legs in a frantic, uncoordinated frenzy, entirely unable to calculate which direction was safe as their faces contorted with raw, existential terror.
But with the threat of structural collapse looming over their heads, the petty arguments evaporated; not a single villager possessed the nerve to scream profanities anymore.
“Why… why are the wind parameters peaking like this?!” a man whimpered, his teeth chattering uncontrollably. “Is this specific building experiencing a durability failure?!”
“Pfft! Shut your mouth! Our units are going to clear this event safely!” another shouted, trying to force confidence into his voice. “I remember a maintenance ticket being processed for this exact pavilion last season… Which entity was assigned to oversee the repairs?!”
Every single eye in the dark room instantly locked onto a scrawny villager pinned against the corner.
Caught beneath the suffocating glare of his entire faction, the man broke down completely, tears and snot streaming down his bruised face as he wept hysterically. “Waaah… forgive me! I noticed this structure was entirely vacant and only utilized to hold the captive women, so I assumed its asset priority was negligible… I never allocated any timber to repair the foundation…”
“You… you absolute, brainless degenerate! Your faulty priorities are going to trigger a total wipe of our faction… Alas!”
The crowd lacked the emotional stamina to even formulate a proper curse. Plunged into a state of absolute, hollow despair, they could only hoist their chin parameters toward the rafters, their faces pale with resignation.
Above them, the remaining clay tiles shook with apocalyptic violence, unleashing a deafening, crackling symphony of shattering stone as the roof prepared to cave in.
