Chapter 167| Chapter 168| Chapter 169
Chapter 167: Rescue
First, loose tiles plunged from the widening chasm in the roof, striking the dirt floor with a succession of sharp, crisp cracks.
As the gale-force winds intensified, the rupture above their heads expanded rapidly. The bound men huddled together in a desperate mass, shivering violently as complete panic paralyzed their decision-making parameters.
“We need to execute a heavy strike against the structural doors and break out of this sector! We cannot simply idle here and wait for our health bars to drop to zero!” one villager bellowed. Having been pelted by heavy roof tiles seven or eight times in a row, his endurance limit had completely shattered. He scrambled up against the wall, attempting to force his way toward the main entrance.
However, the spatial density of the crowd was entirely too high; his pathing was completely blocked.
“Watch your step, you idiot! Someone is stepping on my limbs! Back off!”
“Help me! Waaah… is my avatar facing permanent liquidation here? I don’t want to log off yet!”
“More tiles are falling! Dammit! I’ve reached my limit! If those wretches survive this and don’t grant us a manual release, I will personally ensure they experience a fate worse than death once I clear this room!”
Hysterical weeping, desperate shouting, and venomous curses fused into a chaotic feedback loop.
Outside, Lu Yunxi’s lips curved into a serene, pleasant smile as she closed her eyes and drifted into a peaceful sleep. Behind the walls of the hostesses’ quarters, her high-tier protective barriers smoothly deflected every ounce of wind and rain, leaving the interior cloaked in absolute silence.
The desperate howling of the villagers continued unabated through the dead of night.
The following morning.
The girls had just finalized their breakfast rotation and were preparing to deploy to their designated agricultural sectors when a young maid scrambled into the courtyard, her face pale with panic.
“Disaster! The localized storm last night completely destroyed the dilapidated shack—it has suffered a total structural collapse! I cannot locate the old Auntie anywhere in the wreckage!”
Lu Yunxi blinked, her processor enduring a microsecond of latency before she recalled that the treacherous old matron had been secured in that exact building.
The entire guild rushed to the edge of the settlement, gasping in unison as they surveyed the flattened ruins of the lumber shack.
“Was the weather metrics really that severe last night? For the infrastructure to collapse entirely… yet I didn’t intercept a single audio cue during my sleep cycle!”
“We owe our lives to Miss Lu and Miss Zhou! If they hadn’t executed that miracle rescue operation last week, our own vessels would be pinned beneath those heavy timbers today!”
“Should we initialize a retrieval protocol? Forget about tracking the old woman—look at the wreckage, the hostiles are completely buried… We haven’t even secured enough baseline food foraging for ourselves today!”
“Absolutely not!” several of the senior matriarchs who had survived the village rotation for years declared, their expressions hardening into masks of absolute determination. “If we execute a rescue, those monsters will simply reboot their aggressive scripts and harm our guild again. Besides, we didn’t actively zero out their health bars; it was heaven itself that judged their crimes and wiped their parameters from the map!”
Once the veteran hostesses finalized the corporate strategy, the rest of the team shifted their focus back to their daily chores.
The guild was perfectly content to let the male hostiles rot beneath the timber, but out of a lingering sense of humanity, they still desired to see if they could extract the treacherous old woman from the debris.
Lu Yunxi hadn’t anticipated the native girls would choose to completely abandon the surviving men, but she had zero intention of countermanding their decision. The sole reason these maidens were currently enjoying a peaceful agrarian lifestyle wasn’t because the hostiles had experienced a change of heart; it was because she, a Grandmaster-level powerhouse, was silently anchoring their security parameters from the shadows. If she weren’t actively monitoring the sector, who could possibly calculate what horrific fates would have befallen these girls?
Recalling the grim caches of female remains she had mapped out during her stealth scouting runs across the mountain peaks, an ice-cold chill flared in her eyes.
Perhaps the old double-agent’s lifecycle wasn’t destined to terminate today.
After barely ten minutes of clearing debris, the girls’ shovels struck a garment, revealing the trapped matron. Working with meticulous care, they cleared away the shattered clay tiles and heavy stones pinning her frame, gently hoisting her unconscious body out of the dirt.
Lu Yunxi leaned down, pressing two fingers against the woman’s carotid artery. Her expression smoothed as she verified the vitals. “Her respiration parameters are stable, but her physical vessel has sustained severe structural damage. I need to harvest a highly specific blend of regional herbs to stabilize her condition.”
“I shall handle the foraging run myself. Keep a strict watch on her tracking marker,” she instructed, a brilliant metallurgical plan suddenly flashing through her mind.
Lu Yunxi grabbed a woven basket and a small iron hoe, plunging straight into the dense foliage of the mountain forest.
The native flora of this mountain biome possessed incredible, undocumented alchemical attributes. However, reviewing the classic formulas and medicinal scrolls archived within the Misty Rain Palace, she noted that the majority of their recipes utilized ingredients indigenous to the Forest Continent. High-tier herbs native to the Flower Continent were a massive rarity in those texts, their exact parameters rarely mapped out.
This isolated ravine was the absolute perfect sandbox to execute independent alchemical experiments, allowing her to systematically engineer her own proprietary prescriptions.
Naturally, her primary objective was to rapidly synthesize a high-potency amnesia draught. If she could successfully overwrite the old woman’s memory sectors, she wouldn’t have to constantly worry about the NPC’s pathological fixation on assisting the village hostiles.
She immediately got to work, aggressively harvesting every strange, unindexed plant phenotype that crossed her path, planning to run them through her cauldron the moment she returned to base camp.
While Lu Yunxi was happily optimizing her alchemical inventory in the woods, a severe diplomatic dispute had re-ignited back in the village.
At noon, having fully loaded her basket, Lu Yunxi cleared the tree line and stepped back into the central lane, instantly detecting a massive distortion in the local atmosphere.
Under normal parameters, the hostesses maintained an exceptionally high harmony rating, greeting one another cheerfully whenever their paths crossed. What specific event had triggered a system error during her brief foraging run?
She paused beside a stone wall, silently monitoring the demographic variables.
Whether the girls were actively tilling the soil, scrubbing garments by the well, or sweeping the porches, every single one of them kept her chin locked to her chest, a heavy blanket of profound melancholy visible between their brows. They would routinely freeze mid-animation, letting out deep, exhausting sighs before sluggishly resuming their tasks.
Lu Yunxi: ? ?
“What is the meaning of this behavior? When you were all actively locked in the slaver’s transport carriage, I didn’t hear a fraction of this sighing. Why are your stress parameters peaking now?” she asked, approaching a young maid who had been aggressively pushing a broom over the exact same patch of dirt for twenty minutes without making a dent.
“It’s just…” The maid clamped a hand over her waist, violently slamming the broom handle against the cobblestones. But the exact moment she hoisted her chin and registered Lu Yunxi’s presence, her vocal output stuttered. “Miss Lu… Miss Lu! You’ve successfully returned to the sector?”
“What specific data were you about to unpack? Why the constant sighing? Speak clearly.”
The maid let out another heavy, ragged sigh. “Miss Lu, it is entirely Miss Zhou’s doing! The moment her consciousness rebooted this morning and she intercepted the report that we were leaving the collapsed lumber shack alone, she threw a massive tantrum. She is fiercely demanding that we execute a full excavation to rescue every single man pinned beneath the rubble! No matter how much historical data we present regarding their brutality, her logic parameters refuse to process the warning!”
Lu Yunxi offered a slow, knowing nod. “So, this is the variable disrupting your efficiency?”
“Precisely! How can Miss Zhou possibly be this profoundly naive?!” the maid shrieked, violently waving her broom in the air as her face flushed crimson with pure frustration. “To actually demand the preservation of our abusers?! If our guild rehabilitates those monsters, we will inevitably be the ones who take catastrophic damage down the line! She even had the audacity to lecture us, stating that regardless of their crimes, we lack the judicial authority to execute them, and must instead escort them across the mountain pass to surrender them to the magistrate’s courts!”
The more she unmapped the argument, the more her anger escalated, her breathing turning ragged. “What magistrate?! We didn’t lift a finger to harm them—it was heaven itself that deleted their defenses! If we waste our daily stamina bars digging them out, who is going to manage our agricultural quotas, cook our meals, and forage for resources?! The sheer stupidity of it makes my blood boil!”
“…Miss Zhou possesses a deeply rooted reverence for life parameters. Let her run her script,” Lu Yunxi replied mildly, offering a reassuring pat. “If her presence continues to create severe friction within our commune, we can simply construct a logical framework to evict her from the sector later.”
Zhou Yu was a fresh transmigrator who had newly spawned into this pre-industrial setting. While she had briefly faced the hostile intent of the villagers, Lu Yunxi’s max-tier protective barrier had absorbed every ounce of incoming damage, ensuring her avatar never experienced true physical trauma or systemic abuse. Furthermore, having been conditioned by the absolute human rights philosophies of the modern world, her behavioral algorithms inherently mandated the preservation of every individual health bar. Lu Yunxi wasn’t surprised by her actions in the slightest.
“Do not let it disturb your peace. Even if her rescue operation succeeds, those hostiles have sustained catastrophic structural damage; their current parameters are far too low to pose a security threat to our guild,” she added smoothly.
Once she verified the young maid’s stress debuff had cleared, Lu Yunxi quickly navigated her way back to the open plaza in the center of the village. She sat cross-legged on the cobblestones, retrieving a basic clay cooking pot from an adjacent kitchen to utilize as a makeshift alchemical kiln. By deploying a low-value earthen pot for her experimental synthesis, even if her combinations triggered a volatile chemical explosion or corroded the vessel entirely, her personal gold reserves wouldn’t suffer a significant loss.
Observing Lu Yunxi’s perfectly serene, unbothered posture, the surrounding hostesses felt their own lingering anxieties dissolve. Shrugging off the drama, they decided to ignore the ideological dispute entirely. Since Zhou Yu was sweating bullets trying to manually clear the structural timbers alone, several of the kinder native girls eventually shifted over to assist her extraction pathing.
With the added workforce, Zhou Yu’s rescue efficiency skyrocketed.
An hour later, the extraction team successfully paraded the mangled, groaning bodies of the village men into the central plaza—depositing them onto the dirt directly adjacent to where Lu Yunxi was currently conducting her alchemical experiments.
Zhou Yu was greedily chugging water from a bamboo canteen when her eyes locked onto Lu Yunxi’s unorthodox processing style, her jaw instantly dropping with intense, modern skepticism.
“Sister Lu… this isn’t standard culinary cooking! Your processing logic is completely flawed—you can’t just carelessly dump random, unindexed flora into a clay pot and expect a successful alchemical yield!” she called out. She wasn’t trying to throw cold water on her companion’s efforts, but even within standard culinary mechanics, throwing random, uncalibrated ingredients into a stew resulted in a toxic, shady dish. Let alone active medicinal pharmacology… what breed of lunatic would ever volunteer to ingest the final product?
Lu Yunxi didn’t pause her animations. She casually tossed another handful of unindexed regional herbs into the bubbling earthen pot, offering a relaxed, deadpan response: “Do not stress over the formatting. Once the item finishes rendering, I will personally run a baseline intake test on my own vessel.”
“Hold on! That violates absolute safety protocols!” Zhou Yu yelled, frantically waving her hands. “I am simply terrified that… look at our coordinates, we are stranded in an isolated mountain valley completely cut off from the metropolitan hubs! If your system suffers a severe chemical poisoning debuff, where on earth are we supposed to find a physician to clear your status?!”
“I am fully aware of the risk—”
Before Lu Yunxi could even finalize her sentence, the clay pot suddenly began to violently vibrate against the stones, emitting a deeply dense, familiar aroma of premium medicinal refinement.
Lu Yunxi’s focus sharpened to an absolute maximum.
The rendering cycle has completed ahead of schedule!
I lack the data to determine what exact status effects this custom formula will yield.
Feeling the localized kinetic heat parameters peak beneath her palms, she smoothly unsealed the clay lid the exact microsecond the completion alert triggered. A massive plume of thick white vapor instantly erupted from the vessel, completely blocking their line of sight.
“Cough… hack! What tier of smoke screen is this?!” Zhou Yu wheezed, swatms of vapor choking her airways as she aggressively fanned the air, desperately lowering her head to peer into the basin.
Resting neatly at the base of the earthen pot were three perfectly spherical, deep-black medicinal pills, their surfaces radiating a flawless, high-luster premium sheen.
Chapter 168: Jump
Several girls who were weaving nearby noticed the commotion and wandered over, their faces full of curiosity.
“Sister Lu, what kind of medicine is this?”
Lu Yunxi didn’t actually know what the pills did yet, so she immediately pulled up her system interface to run a quick diagnostic scan.
But before the item information could fully render on her screen, Zhou Yu reached out, snatched one of the lustrous black spheres, and shoved it straight into her mouth.
“Sister Lu, you’re the absolute backbone of our group,” Zhou Yu declared, her tone fierce and unyielding as she swallowed the pill. “If your system takes a catastrophic debuff, the rest of us won’t know how to navigate the map. Let me act as the safety tester first!”
Staring at the look of tragic, heroic sacrifice plastered across the girl’s face, Lu Yunxi froze in utter bewilderment. Then, snapping out of her shock, she lunged forward to support her.
“Hold on!”
This transmigrator was entirely too impulsive! To just randomly ingest unindexed alchemical compounds on a whim was completely unhinged. Lu Yunxi hadn’t been paying attention to her hands at all.
Rubbing her temples in sheer, deadpan resignation, Lu Yunxi carefully read through the text that had finally populated her interface. The moment she parsed the data, she let out a massive sigh of relief.
[Spirit-Boosting Pill: Cultivation Grade. Possesses a miraculous, near-instantaneous effect on targets suffering from severe depression or lethargy, immediately raising their energy parameters to maximum.]
Ah, I see, Lu Yunxi thought. Given the item parameters, it shouldn’t inflict any negative health debuffs on her. After all, Zhou Yu’s baseline enthusiasm was already remarkably high.
However, her relief turned out to be entirely premature.
Zhou Yu had spent the better part of the morning executing grueling physical labor, manually hoisting heavy timbers and dragging injured villagers out of the collapsed woodshed. Her stamina pool had been entirely depleted, leaving her physically exhausted.
The moment the high-grade cultivation pill dissolved into her system, her energy parameters violently surged. Her muscles flooded with an unyielding, frantic pressure that demanded immediate physical output.
Attempting to suppress the unnatural, hyperactive sensation, she scrambled over to a wooden stool and clamped her hands tightly around the edges, pinning herself down. To guarantee she wouldn’t lose control and execute any bizarre behavioral loops, Zhou Yu desperately wished she possessed a tube of industrial superglue to permanently anchor her backside to the wood.
Unfortunately, the raw kinetic power of a cultivation-grade stimulant wasn’t something a mortal mind could override.
She abruptly bolted upright. Before the stunned gazes of the gathered hostesses, she began wildly dancing across the plaza.
Zhou Yu executed a series of frantic, high-intensity vertical bounds, twisted her torso into a dramatic “S” curve, and then rolled her hands into a makeshift trumpet shape before thrusting her lips out.
The crowd: “…”
Just as Lu Yunxi was seriously beginning to debate whether the girl’s modern predecessor had been a professional pop idol or a trained dancer, Zhou Yu suddenly drove her head straight toward the dirt, executing a clumsy, frantic somersault right through the mud.
Zhou Yu was losing her mind!
She felt exactly as though her physical vessel had been hijacked by an external script. Her conscious mind remained perfectly calm and rational, but her body was operating on an independent, hyper-aggressive loop.
It was… profoundly humiliating!
Catching the strained, utterly horrified expressions of the spectators anchoring the perimeter, she desperately wished the server would render a sinkhole right beneath her boots so she could bury herself alive.
“Miss… Miss Zhou? Are you experiencing a glitch?” someone called out tentatively, her voice shaking. But at this point, absolute chaos had seized Zhou Yu’s motor functions, and no low-level NPC possessed the parameters to arrest her momentum.
The entire guild could only stand back in a silent, paralyzed circle, watching her frantically leap around the plaza like an unhinged frog.
A few seconds later, the performance escalated.
“Miss Lu, what is the counter-strategy here?!” one of the hostesses squealed, frantically stamping her boots in a panic. “Look at her trajectory! She just launched herself straight into the communal cooking cauldron! Thank heaven the kitchen staff hadn’t lit the firewood underneath yet—otherwise, her avatar would have sustained massive burn damage!”
“Just let Miss Zhou exhaust her active frames for a while,” Lu Yunxi replied smoothly, coughing lightly to mask her amusement as she took her seat back on the cobblestones. “The behavior is simply a systemic reaction to the pill’s chemical parameters. The moment the duration counter hits zero, her motor controls will revert to normal.”
Ignoring the surrounding hostesses who were visibly trembling as they tried to suppress their hysterical laughter, Lu Yunxi calmly pulled her attention back to the earthen pot to formulate the next batch.
This time, her RNG alignment was vastly superior. Within a remarkably brief window, she successfully finalized a high-grade compound capable of inducing targeted memory liquidation.
Once administered to the villagers, the chemical would permanently overwrite their long-term memory sectors. Moving forward, the algorithms would completely erase their cognitive mapping of the mountain trails, and they would possess zero recollection of the girls’ faces or existence.
Lu Yunxi nodded, thoroughly satisfied with the item description.
Right about then, the duration counter on Zhou Yu’s stimulant debuff finally hit zero.
Panting like a winded hound, the transmigrator collapsed face-first onto the dirt, her stamina pool thoroughly bricked. Her vital signs were so weak that her voice was barely an audible whisper: “Water… someone… quickly slide some water into my inventory…”
Fortunately, Lu Yunxi’s max-tier sensory stats caught the audio cue instantly. She poured a clean cup of fresh spring water and brought it over.
“Your contribution to our research parameters was invaluable,” Lu Yunxi praised with a pleasant, bright smile, helping her sit up. “Thanks to your field test, I have successfully engineered a flawless amnesia draught. Once we run the villagers through the dosage cycle, we can escort them out of the valley permanently. We will never have to worry about a retaliatory raid against our coordinates! From this evening forward, our guild can settle into a peaceful, permanent agrarian lifestyle here.”
Zhou Yu offered a weak, muddy grin, thoroughly relieved that her embarrassing ordeal had yielded a positive return on investment. “I’m just glad my parameters were high enough to assist. I was genuinely terrified I would turn out to be a useless burden to the commune.”
A handful of native girls hurried over to help clean her clothes and manage the logistics.
In truth, the commune required a massive volume of medical inventory.
The structural collapse of the lumber shack hadn’t actually deleted a single hostile health bar; despite sustaining varying degrees of blunt-force trauma, every male villager had survived the weather event. Even the treacherous old matron, whose wounds were infinitely more severe than the men’s, remained locked in a deep coma.
Sure enough, bare minutes after Zhou Yu’s stimulant duration concluded, the battered villagers sprawling across the central plaza began to reboot their consciousness loops one after another.
The exact millisecond their senses returned, they aggressively launched into their standard toxic dialogue tree.
“You miserable, ungrateful wretches! Why haven’t you lined up the evening food rations yet?! If you lack the programming to cook for your masters, what was the point of liquidating our silver to purchase your contracts?!”
“You brainless females honestly believe your colony can survive without our masculine attributes, don’t you?! The localized storm completely flattened our infrastructure. If you want us to allocate our labor to rebuild the shacks, you’d best start catering to our comfort parameters! If our mood meters peak, we might consider processing a repair ticket for you.”
“Fucking hell! My structural durability is flashing red! Where the hell is that useless old crone?! We graciously permitted her to remain on the server specifically so her vessel could absorb the falling roof tiles for us! Did that treacherous bitch exploit the chaos to execute an unauthorized escape?!”
“…”
Perhaps because the girls had actively dug them out of the timber wreckage, the villagers operated under the absolute, arrogant delusion that Lu Yunxi and her guild lacked the nerve to execute them. Even though they were pinned to the dirt, unable to wiggle their limbs due to their fractured bones, their posture remained profoundly entitled.
The hostesses completely ignored the shouting, turning their eyes onto Zhou Yu.
“Are we required to distribute rations to them?” a young maid asked, her lips twisting into a sour pout.
Sensing the entire demographic was deferring to her judgment, Zhou Yu’s lip twitched with intense irritation. “Why on earth would we waste company resources feeding them? I intervened earlier simply because I believe every individual lifecycle possesses inherent value and shouldn’t be casually deleted by a structural collapse. But now that their vitals have stabilized, their survival metrics are entirely their own problem! We have zero corporate obligation to nurse them.”
Since even the highly idealistic transmigrator had officially denied them food rations, the rest of the hostesses naturally abandoned any thought of assisting the captives.
Lu Yunxi quickly mapped out a list of the additional botanical ingredients required to scale up her production lines, and several of the nimbler native girls immediately grabbed their baskets and scaled the mountain trail to forage. Because her prior scouting runs had confirmed the mountain range spawned zero dangerous wildlife or high-level predators, she felt entirely secure letting them complete the quest alone.
Once she washed and prepared the remaining raw materials, she initiated the primary compounding cycle.
Time bled away, minute by minute.
By the time her immediate botanical reserves were completely exhausted, she had only rendered enough memory-wiping pills to clear one-third of the prisoner inventory. The server sky was rapidly transitioning into dusk, yet the foraging team she had dispatched to the peak had failed to return to the coordinates.
Sitting adjacent to the kiln, Zhou Yu’s anxiety metrics began to spike.
“Sister Lu, their return window has suffered a massive delay. Is it possible they ran into a high-level hazard code?”
Lu Yunxi closed her eyes, expanding her sensory perception across the entire mountain ridge. She didn’t detect a single active danger variable or hostile entity. However, a map that registered as entirely safe to her Grandmaster-level stats could easily feature lethal environmental terrain for a squad of low-level commoners whose stats sat firmly below level ten.
“Let’s initialize a search protocol. We’ll track their pathing up the ridge.”
The two of them rapidly swept the rendered pills into the earthen pot and rose from the cobblestones.
Though the crippled men sprawling nearby lacked the data to understand their specific tracking metrics, their advanced hearing parsed the dialogue, realizing several of the little maids were lost in the mountain forests. A chorus of malicious, mocking laughter erupted from the dirt.
“Haha! That’s what you get for denying us our rations! Let me clue you into the local lore, you arrogant little wenches—there is a peak-tier apex tiger nesting on that ridge! Without our experienced hunters leading the vanguard, those fragile little girls are probably being chewed into digital particles right about now!”
Zhou Yu’s face instantly drained of color, her fingers violently trembling as terror seized her. “What?! An active tiger spawn?! Where exactly are its hunting coordinates?!”
Feeling her arm being tightly gripped in a near-panic, Lu Yunxi smoothly reached out with her free hand, offering a reassuring, steady pat against the girl’s shoulder. “Maintain your composure. I have mapped every sector of this mountain dozens of times and have never once triggered an encounter with a tiger. Their dialogue is purely an engineered lie to disrupt our morale.”
“Hmph, you think we’re bluffing…” several of the men snorted coldly, preparing to bark out graphic, terrifying scenarios to further fracture their psychological stability.
Lu Yunxi’s features remained entirely placid, but she slowly turned her head, locking a freezing, razor-sharp glaze onto the cluster of men.
In a fraction of a second, the hostiles choked on their own words, looking exactly like a flock of roosters whose necks had been violently clamped mid-crow. They were utterly unable to force another syllable past their lips.
It wasn’t until Lu Yunxi and Zhou Yu’s silhouettes had completely cleared the plaza gates and vanished up the trail that the paralyzed mob finally managed to exhale, their muscles relaxing against the dirt.
“Holy hell… that glance just now was pure nightmare fuel! For a microsecond, I genuinely felt as though she had initialized a permanent execution delete on my avatar.”
“The tactical layout is blindingly obvious now. Within that entire faction of women, the one who just issued that freeze glare is their absolute apex combat asset! If it weren’t for her monstrous stats anchoring the commune, our syndicate would never have been broken into this pathetic state!”
“And what about that loud mouth standing beside her? Her raw combat rating is garbage, but her behavioral scripts are pathologically optimized to stir up trouble and rally the troops!”
“We need to engineer a coordinated trap to permanently purge those two from the server!” a villager hissed, a wave of profound, venomous malice burning in his narrow pupils.
“Oh, brilliant strategy, genius!” another rolled his eyes, shifting his bruised torso to find a more comfortable spot on the dirt. “If our faction commanded the active parameters to execute a lethal purge against them, would our units currently be sprawling in the mud like paralyzed dogs?!”
“I am not suggesting a direct physical engagement,” the instigator sneered, his gaze turning incredibly dark. “Look around us—tell me at least one of you has recovered enough motor control to adopt a standing posture? We don’t require high offensive stats to break them. We simply need a single unit to stand up, approach their vanguard, and strategically guide their pathing straight into that specific sector!”
“You mean…” The collective minds of the villagers processed the suggestion, the underlying puzzle pieces clicking into place as a wave of realization swept through their eyes.
Huddling their heads together, the crippled men launched into a hushed, intense loop of conspiratorial whispering. A few minutes later, unable to contain their excitement, a chorus of oily, villainous laughter erupted across the empty plaza.
The jarring, unnatural audio output violently rippled through the valley, startling a massive flock of mountain birds into the darkening sky.
Chapter 169: There Is A Way
“A-choo!” Zhou Yu rubbed the tip of her nose as an sudden itch forced out a sharp sneeze.
“Are you alright? Did you catch a chill from the damp air?” Lu Yunxi turned her head to check on her.
“No, I don’t think so. Maybe one of the hostesses back at camp is gossiping about my database?” Zhou Yu rubbed her nose playfully. But noticing Lu Yunxi’s expression had suddenly turned incredibly sharp—as if her max-tier auditory sensors were tracking a distant signal—the transmigrator felt a wave of primitive fear. “What’s the layout? Did… did that tiger spawn truly trigger?”
Her voice actively trembled with terror, her pronunciation turning entirely muddy.
Lu Yunxi intercepted the sound files of the disabled villagers violently cackling across the distant plaza. Her brow arched slightly, a casual, unbothered smile touching her lips. “It is nothing. My sensors simply registered a faint audio cue resembling a bunch of hyenas laughing. I must have mapped the sound incorrectly.”
The two of them accelerated their pace, rapidly executing their light-footwork mechanics to glide up the mountain trail.
Commanding vastly superior acoustic tracking, Lu Yunxi fluidly mapped the directional coordinates of the missing foragers, guiding Zhou Yu straight to their location within minutes.
Clearing a thick cluster of briars, they discovered a young maid sprawling unconscious across the damp earth, her complexion entirely pale. The remaining hostesses were huddled around her physical vessel, their eyes wide with absolute panic.
Right at that microsecond—
The elderly matron who had survived the lumber shack collapse stumbled through the trees from the opposite ridge, clutching a handful of freshly harvested wild flora in her trembling grip.
“The… the antidote flora to arrest the hemorrhage parameters is here!” she panted heavily, gasping for breath as she frantically jammed the weeds into her own mouth. Chewing them into a crude mash, she spat the green paste into her palm and aggressively lunged forward to smear it across the unconscious girl’s skin.
Lu Yunxi’s hand moved in a blur, firmly locking onto the old woman’s wrist to check her momentum.
“Halt. Allow me to run a full diagnostic scan on her avatar first.”
Lu Yunxi dropped into a crouch, meticulously inspecting the girl’s vital stats. Her analysis confirmed the hostess hadn’t sustained standard physical trauma; she had accidentally triggered a localized hazard node by brushing against a high-tier hallucinogenic dream grass.
To be more precise, her consciousness wasn’t bricked—she was currently locked inside an automated illusion loop.
Under the server’s world-building rules, these specific botanical illusions rendered entirely at random, forcing a target to endure either a magnificent, high-yield dream or a catastrophic, terrifying nightmare.
Lu Yunxi turned to explain the mechanics to the panicked crowd, shaking her head. “Standard pharmaceutical herbs carry zero baseline parameters to clear a status debuff generated by dream grass. The exact moment her internal illusion sequence concludes, the physical lacerations will automatically execute a self-healing patch.”
“Locked inside an illusion loop…?” Zhou Yu muttered, her modern scientific processing completely scrambled by the data. “Does that mean her core health bar won’t sustain true kinetic damage?”
“Correct.” However, while her physical vessel would bypass any permanent structural trauma, the psychological impact of a high-intensity nightmare loop was an entirely unpredictable variable.
Furthermore, the server rules dictated that external physical forces possessed zero capability to shatter a dream grass illusion from the outside.
Left with no alternative tactical options, the party collapsed onto the logs, waiting patiently for the duration counter to run down.
To everyone’s absolute shock, bare minutes into the vigil, the unconscious girl’s eyes snapped wide open, and she violently bolted into a sitting posture.
“Thank heaven! Your consciousness has finally rebooted! You…” One of the younger hostesses burst into tears of pure relief, throwing her physical body forward to envelop her companion in a tight hug.
Lu Yunxi’s arm shot out, snagging the hostess’s shoulder to pull her back as her brow knit into a grim line. “Abort the advance! Her cognitive units have not cleared the debuff yet!”
The intercepted hostess froze in confusion. The entire group locked their eyes onto the girl stranded in the center of the clearing.
The maid stared blankly at the surrounding foliage before suddenly throwing a rigid fist into the air, screaming at the top of her lungs: “Bow your heads, you mortals! I am the favored primary disciple of the supreme Immortal Realm! How dare you look upon my true form?! Drop to your knees and execute a submissive kowtow before me this instant!”
Having delivered her high-tier dialogue, the little maid began wildly throwing out air punches and executing dramatic martial arts kicks against the empty space.
Completely immersed in her god-tier simulation, her navigation pathing entirely failed to scan the environment, blind to the massive, exposed tree roots coiled beneath her boots.
She drove a ferocious front kick forward, only for her trailing foot to violently catch on the wood, completely breaking her equilibrium.
THUD!
She crashed spectacularly face-first into the mud.
The surrounding hostesses simultaneously clamped their eyes shut, completely unable to endure the second-hand embarrassment of the spectacle.
When the girls tentatively reopened their lids, they watched the little maid scramble back to her feet, completely ignoring the thick layer of black dirt coating her nose and cheeks.
“Behold! I am the absolute premier master swordsman under heaven! Every entity on this server shall be crushed beneath my ultimate blade! Watch this combo—” The girl locked her palms together, mimicking the grip of a legendary celestial broadsword as she squared up against a massive oak tree.
“Hyah! Take that! Die, you fiend!” she roared continuously, her hands flashing through a rapid sequence of finger slashes as her knuckles repeatedly hammered against the rough bark.
Eventually, her arm stamina seemed to bottom out.
Pivoting her combat loop, she began aggressively launching roundhouse kicks straight into the trunk.
Lu Yunxi had no idea what specific crimes that oak tree had committed against her lineage within the simulation.
The rescue party monitored the engagement for several minutes. Having verified through her system panel that the girl’s health bar wasn’t sustaining any true damage, Lu Yunxi quietly took her seat on a mossy boulder, waiting for the chemical duration to expire.
Zhou Yu sat beside her, looking profoundly, agonizingly awkward.
Oh, mortifying, the transmigrator thought, burying her face in her hands. When that stimulant pill hijacked my motor controls earlier… did my avatar look this incredibly ridiculous?! I cannot begin to fathom the sheer social death this poor girl is going to experience the microsecond her consciousness reboots… This server is brutal!
To kill time, the remaining hostesses began systematically indexing the botanical materials they had successfully harvested before the containment breach.
Lu Yunxi ran a quick inventory check, verifying the gathered flora perfectly cleared the resource threshold required to mass-produce the amnesia pills. She offered a relaxed smile. “Rest easy, the material yield from this forage run is completely sufficient. I shall initiate—”
Before she could finalize her statement, the dialogue was cut short. Every single hostess around her froze, their eyes widening and their jaws dropping to maximum as they stared blankly at the hallucinating girl.
Mildly perplexed by the sudden shift in the demographic metrics, Lu Yunxi tracked their line of sight.
The little maid’s face had been transformed into an absolute, bruised disaster! Due to her non-stop sprinting, frantic leaping, and high-intensity tree-boxing, her vessel had repeatedly collided with solid timber. Her limbs were completely covered in deep purple contusions and severe abrasions, looking exactly like an operative who had just endured three hundred rounds of hard-core PvP combat, with multiple scrapes actively oozing blood.
“Sister Lu… should our units execute a physical restraint directive?”
The group turned their heads in unison, waiting for her command override.
Lu Yunxi offered a firm nod, reaching out to tear a thick length of heavy vines from a nearby canopy to fashion some bindings.
Yet, the exact microsecond her fingers clamped around the foliage, the hallucinating girl burst into a brilliant, vacant laugh, shifting her pathing toward a specific vector.
In the brief blink of an eye, her automated movement script carried her straight to the edge of a sheer, vertical precipice—she was a mere two paces away from tumbling into the gorge.
“Intercept her! Quickly!”
The atmosphere in the clearing instantly spiked to maximum tension, the hostesses completely holding their breath as their panic flared.
Lu Yunxi’s Qinggong activated instantly. Blurring across the gap, she caught the back of the maid’s collar a millimeter before her boots cleared the drop.
“Heaven protect us! Thank the gods Miss Lu’s speed parameters are broken! If she hadn’t tracking our coordinates, that girl would have executed a permanent leap, and we wouldn’t have possessed the strength to stop her!”
The shaken hostesses swarmed the clearing, aggressively pinning the girl’s limbs to the grass to assist the containment.
Had Lu Yunxi not authorized the search protocol and tracked their positioning up the mountain, the only asset waiting for them at these coordinates would have been a cold corpse.
Lu Yunxi systematically bound the girl with the heavy vines, noting, “Maintain the physical restraint until her conscious mind completely boots up. If we grant her an early release, her chaotic pathing will simply inflict more structural damage on her own vessel.”
The group nodded in frantic agreement.
Fortunately, the drug’s active frames were nearing their expiration. After waiting another ten minutes, the vacant haze cleared from the maid’s eyes, and her cognitive units fully recovered.
Zhou Yu was the absolute first entity to step into her radius, her face a mask of intense curiosity. “How do your parameters feel right now?”
Is your internal database enduring an absolute, apocalyptic wave of social awkwardness?
However, an immediate discrepancy emerged between the maid’s status and Zhou Yu’s historical data: while Zhou Yu’s memory cache had perfectly retained every single humiliating action her body had executed under the stimulant, the native maid’s mind had suffered a complete data wipe regarding her dream states.
She scanned the bound vines wrapped around her torso, thoroughly perplexed. “Sisters… why has my vessel been placed in total containment?”
One of the hostesses immediately launched into a highly detailed, dramatic recapitulation of her tree-boxing chronicles. Listening to the data, the little maid’s face was a picture of sheer, unadulterated disbelief.
Once the party’s stamina pool recovered, they gathered their baskets and initiated their descent back toward the village base camp.
They hadn’t even cleared the mid-mountain junction, however, when three male silhouettes suddenly materialized on the path ahead, blocking their tracking lines.
Lu Yunxi’s expression remained completely placid, but the native hostesses instantly checked their momentum, their bodies stiffening as they adopted highly vigilant, defensive postures.
“What is the meaning of this code?!” one maid barked. “Did your faction not explicitly claim your structural durability was bricked and you lacked the motor controls to adopt a standing posture?! Your current pathing looks entirely functional!”
“Hmph! Naturally, our units deployed a basic disinformation script to lower your guard, and your low-level processors swallowed the bait! You truly are nothing but a pack of naive, simple-minded little wenches!” one of the men sneered, a crude, oily grin splitting his face.
The color drained from the hostesses’ faces.
Before the team could even formulate a formal interrogation, the hostiles aggressively advanced their dialogue tree to state their core operational objective.
“Let me lay out the current server metrics for you—every single hostess you left idling back at the base camp has been successfully captured by our primary vanguard! If you desire to keep their health bars from being permanently deleted, your units will strictly follow our command prompts!” the leading villager barked, attempting to project supreme, domineering authority.
Granted, had his legs not been visibly trembling against the dirt, one might have actually believed his bravery parameters were real.
Lu Yunxi casually took three languid steps forward.
The three villagers instantly executed a synchronized panic-dash backward, their features violently distorting with pure terror as their survival instincts flared.
“Halt your advance! Stand down! Do you genuinely harbor zero concern for the structural integrity of your guild companions’ lives?!”
Listening to the man’s desperate, heart-wrenching shriek echo through the trees, the smile playing on Lu Yunxi’s lips deepened with absolute disdain.
“Just moments ago, your faction…” Did your collective brains honestly engineer such a profoundly tedious, uninspired hostage plot?
Before she could finish dismantling their narrative, a sudden physical force yanked her backward.
Spinning her head around, she found the entire squad of native hostesses completely overridden by panic, their pathing breaking as they began fleeing wildy into the brush.
“Sister Lu, we need to execute a tactical retreat down this western corridor! The elderly Auntie explicitly stated she possesses the geographic data for this specific path—there is a high-security hidden cavern node at the terminus of the trail! We can drop our aggro and take cover inside!”
Lu Yunxi opened her mouth to countermand the command, but the vanguard of her party had already dashed dozens of meters down the ridge. Shrugging off the logistical mess, she clamped her lips shut and effortlessly glided alongside the fleeing girls to maintain her protection detail.
Naturally, the three hostiles ahead weren’t the only units who had recovered their mobility parameters. As their retreat wound deeper into the gorge, a succession of secondary male villagers spawned along the perimeter, attempting to box them in.
The hostesses were thoroughly terrified. But because the enemy claimed to hold active leverage over their captured companions, their behavioral scripts prevented them from initiating a direct physical engagement, forcing them to continuously alter their tracking to evade the nets.
Lu Yunxi’s internal logic flagged multiple inconsistencies in the tactical layout, but because the girls were running in a highly fragmented, scattered formation, executing a centralized strategic briefing was impossible. She could only anchor her positioning to their rear guard, continuously monitoring their status bars.
Regardless of what trap lay ahead, her raw parameters guaranteed their absolute safety.
The analytical thoughts flashed through her mind in a fraction of a microsecond.
Suddenly, the front lines of the wildly sprinting hostesses slammed to an absolute, grinding halt.
