Chapter 170| Chapter 171| Chapter 172
Chapter 170: Strange Black Hole
“What’s wrong?” Zhou Yu panted, staring at the tight cluster of hostesses gathered ahead of her. Her low-level sensory stats failed to pierce the darkness, leaving her completely blind to the layout, so she had to call out over the wind.
Lu Yunxi’s face darkened.
At the terminus of their current path lay a sheer, vertical precipice. Beyond the drop, the terrain was choked by a dense matrix of primeval trees and heavy vines, rendering it completely impassable for ordinary units.
Having been backed into this structural chokepoint, Lu Yunxi could easily have executed a fluid roof-dash or used her light footwork to glide down the cliffside to escape, but the rest of her guild did not command those mobility parameters.
Realizing their pathing was bricked, the hostesses spun around to form a defensive line against the advancing villagers.
“What exactly is your core objective?” Lu Yunxi asked, her voice dropping into a freezing register as she locked her focus onto the mob of men closing ranks opposite them.
“Haha! The rest of your little guild companions back at base camp have been thoroughly neutralized by our vanguard!” the leading villager sneered, a wave of profound malice burning in his narrow eyes. “If you desire to keep their health bars from being permanently deleted, your units will execute a vertical leap from this cliff right now! Don’t you two loudmouths love to preach about the sanctity of life? Let’s run the calculation. Do your vessels choose to preserve your own survival metrics, or will you sacrifice yourselves to keep the girls in the village on the server?”
Lu Yunxi stood firmly at the vanguard of the formation, her gaze darkening. But just as she prepared to initialize an attack command to dismantle the mob, a sudden physical force tugged at her sleeve.
“Sister Lu,” Zhou Yu whispered, her voice shaking with intense hesitation as she leaned close. “The elderly Auntie just intercepted my audio. She claims she possesses the geographic data to bypass this hazard node. Do you trust her calculations?”
“What?!” Bypass it how?
Before Lu Yunxi could run a diagnostic on the strategy, the old matron lunged forward, grabbing both of their arms and violently dragging them over the edge.
The next microsecond, a violent updraft of mountain wind swept over her face. The familiar physics engine calculations returned as their vessels plummeted into the gorge.
Lu Yunxi: “…”
The grand tactical solution you engineered… was to literally hurl us off a cliff?! Facing the roaring wind, her eye twitched violently as she hollered through the draft.
“Miss Lu, do not let your morale drop! I have mapped these exact coordinates before!” the old woman cackled through the wind, her voice echoing off the rock faces. “During a prior pathing error, my vessel accidentally slipped over this ridge. There is a massive canopy of reinforced branches nesting directly below—the grid density is so immense it will completely absorb our falling velocity!”
Fortunately, the old woman’s environmental data proved entirely accurate.
Their descent lasted only a brief few seconds before their frames were safely caught by a thick, springy web of dense branches, instantly neutralizing their kinetic momentum.
Lu Yunxi cast her eyes downward to scan the immediate terrain. Directly beneath the canopy, a hidden mountain path jutted out from the cliff face. Standing on the peak above, the shelf was completely occluded from view, but from her current coordinates, the structural layout was crystal clear. The path measured roughly a meter in width, and the solid ground sat a mere half-meter beneath her boots.
Activating a minor jump command, she landed gracefully onto the dirt.
Following her lead, the rest of the hostesses executed light bounds, dropping onto the hidden road one by one. A basic physical maneuver of this tier was incredibly easy for their attributes to clear.
Once the entire party finalized their landing parameters safely, the old matron pointed a finger down the narrow ledge. “Maintain a steady pace along this trail. Within half an hour, our pathing will loop us right back into the central lane of the village.”
“Thank the heavens! This layout allows our units to survive, and our companions back at base camp won’t take any collateral damage!” several of the younger maids gasped, let out a massive, collective breath of relief. “Those vile monsters won’t have any reason to harass the rest of the guild now, correct?”
Lu Yunxi: “…”
In reality, before she had even authorized the mountain forage quest, she had deployed a max-tier protective barrier around the hostesses idling at the base camp. Even if their party had flatly refused to execute the cliff leap, the villagers’ offensive scripts would have shattered harmlessly against the shield. Furthermore, she harbored zero illusions that a pack of low-level criminals would ever honor a hostage treaty.
But with their party already positioned at the bottom of the gorge, explaining the underlying server logic was pointless, so she opted to keep the data classified.
The unified group advanced with extreme caution along the rock shelf.
Granted, while the dirt trail was remarkably narrow and bordered a thousand-foot vertical drop into an absolute abyss, as long as a unit monitored their tracking and exercised basic caution, the path was entirely manageable. It wasn’t so compressed that it forced a single-foot balance restriction.
Time bled away, minute by minute.
However, the exact microsecond the group calculated they had cleared the hazard zone and achieved absolute safety—
A massive, swirling black vortex abruptly materialized directly across their coordinates.
By this point, the server sky had transitioned completely into pitch-black night. Because the ambient lighting had bottomed out, no one in the party detected the spatial anomaly—except for Lu Yunxi, whose max-tier visual parameters could pierce any shroud.
Emergency! A layer of cold sweat instantly beaded along her forehead and slid down her cheek. She opened her mouth to broadcast a freeze command to the vanguard.
But navigating a narrow cliff path in absolute darkness was inherently volatile. She didn’t dare project an excessive wave of panic through her vocals, fearing the sudden alarm would fracture the hostesses’ morale and cause them to lose their footing on the edge.
Consequently, her warning was delivered with such a low audio output that the majority of the team missed the cue entirely.
Only Zhou Yu, who was anchored directly adjacent to her position, intercepted the data.
She froze mid-step, desperately wanting to turn her torso around but lacking the courage to shift her equilibrium on the ledge. Clamping her fingers tightly around a protruding rock face on the cliffside, she subtly tilted her head back. “Sister Lu, what’s the layout? Did a hazard trigger?”
Lu Yunxi’s eye twitched violently.
Before Zhou Yu could even finish processing the question, Lu Yunxi watched the front lines of her hostesses march straight into the center of the vortex, disappearing into the dark maw like a succession of falling dumplings.
A severe cognitive headache throbbed behind her temples. What was the optimal strategy here? Was she supposed to leave the fragile transmigrator stranded on a dark cliff face alone while she plunged into the portal to run a solo investigation?
Weighing the choices, she decided to tentatively deliver a simplified version of the data, posing a straight prompt: “Zhou Yu, a spatial anomaly has generated directly ahead of our pathing. Do you desire to plunge into the vortex alongside my unit, or would you prefer to anchor your vessel out here on the ledge and wait for my return?”
Zhou Yu’s heart violently seized with panic.
The environment was already cloaked in near-total darkness, forcing them to shuffle along a lethal drop while white-knuckling the stone. She certainly hadn’t anticipated a literal wormhole spawning onto her map!
Wait! What?! Aren’t black holes a specialized astrological phenomenon confined strictly to outer space?!
For a cosmic anomaly to materialize inside a standard, pre-industrial valley… what tier of reality was she running?! She absolutely refused to be left behind to idle on a freezing ledge alone. Amidst this pitch-black night, her visual parameters were completely bricked—she couldn’t see a single asset!
“Sister Lu, I am deploying with your unit!” she cried out, her free hand instantly locking onto Lu Yunxi’s sleeve with a desperate, iron grip, utterly terrified of being left behind on the cliff.
The two girls stepped through the threshold of the vortex, one after the other.
The freezing night wind swept across the empty ledge, leaving nothing behind but the hollow rustling of the mountain foliage.
Concurrently.
Back within the main village compound.
A handful of the older, liberated women sat huddled inside a dark pavilion, staring blankly at the roaring bonfire lighting up the central plaza outside. Listening to the distant echo of boisterous singing and festive music filtering through the walls, their mood metrics plummeted into deep depression.
“What is our secondary protocol?” one woman whispered listlessly. “Should our units organize a rescue party to track Miss Lu’s coordinates?”
“Maintain your current position,” a senior hostess countered, gesturing out the window. “The village men are entirely unable to execute an offensive strike against our vessels because a completely transparent defensive dome has encapsulated this entire pavilion. I calculate this high-tier ward was deployed by Miss Lu specifically to secure our parameters before she departed.”
“That data tracks perfectly. Since her skill tree commands the capability to render an absolute fortress shield around our base camp, her raw attributes are more than enough to safeguard the foraging team… However, if our units abandon these coordinates to launch an uncoordinated search, the exact moment Miss Lu loops back to the village, she won’t be able to map our location. That would cause a total system failure for our guild!”
“But our characters lack the combat rating to neutralize the hostiles drinking outside. Are we truly intended to just cower inside this room indefinitely?”
“Let us… let us simply freeze our positions and allow the timer to run down for tonight.”
The girls debated their options for another hour before compression boxes locked together, and they fell into a tense, uneasy sleep state.
Outside on the cobblestones, the mob of villagers paid absolutely no mind to the barricaded women. They hoisted their wine jars high into the air, bellowing out rowdy tavern songs with supreme arrogance.
“Haha! Those hyper-aggressive wretches who broke our containment are finally wiped from the server! From this evening forward, our syndicate can finally resume normal, lucrative operations!”
“Did you catch the exact trajectory of their leaps? It was an absolute comedy goldmine! Those stupid little wenches genuinely operated under the delusion that their physics calculations would land them safely onto the hidden mountain path below!”
“How could a pack of low-level outsiders possibly possess the map data?! That specific ledge is only passable during daylight hours when the rendering is active. The moment night falls, the spatial algorithms dissolve—anyone who sets foot on that trail is instantly purged from the map, never to be found again!”
The group of men clinked their clay cups together, oily, meaningful smirks written all over their faces.
Lu Yunxi stared at the translucent text box flashing before her eyes, a sharp, calculated glint flaring across her pupils.
[Hidden Trial Initialized: Late-Night Instance Dungeon triggered successfully.]
It is another instance dungeon!
A specialized, time-locked trial that can only be unlocked during the midnight cycle!
To make matters worse…
She subtly shifted her gaze to monitor Zhou Yu’s status.
Sure enough, the fresh transmigrator’s eyes were widened to the absolute physical maximum, her jaw slack as she stared at the glowing neon interface hovering in mid-air, her features masked in absolute, unmitigated confusion.
Lu Yunxi let out a quiet, internal sigh.
Originally, she had been systematically drafting a long-term roadmap to gradually leak the game-world mechanics to Zhou Yu, ensuring her modern consciousness wouldn’t endure a catastrophic psychological collapse when the truth came out.
Who could have foreseen that a high-tier instance dungeon would abruptly force an automatic reveal?
At this point, Zhou Yu was undoubtedly reading the glowing system prompt directly on her own interface.
Lu Yunxi paused for a fraction of a second to let the data settle, then continued her advance into the cavern interior. The system log simply read “Late-Night Instance Dungeon,” providing zero baseline flavor text or mob descriptions. Even more troubling, the hostesses who had stepped through the portal ahead of them had vanished down the dark tunnels; their pathing was winding deeper into the cave system. She needed to accelerate her velocity to catch up before they triggered an elite hazard code.
“Sister Lu…” Zhou Yu whimpered, her fingers violently clutching Lu Yunxi’s sleeve as tears of pure terror welled in her eyes. “Are we… are we genuinely supposed to advance into this zone? And… that thing hovering in the air… did your system render it too?”
“Did my system render what?” Lu Yunxi arched a delicate eyebrow, offering a relaxed, completely unbothered smile. “Of course I see it. A hidden cavern layout of this magnitude is a prime node; there is an incredibly high probability that a premium treasure chest has spawned at the terminus of the map.”
Zhou Yu’s heart violently seized at the word system, before her modern gaming instincts overrode her fear, her panic settling back down to baseline.
“Let’s move, we need to survey the interior layout,” Lu Yunxi said, completely ignoring the girl’s hesitation as she strode into the depths.
To her mind, clearing an instance trial of this tier would be an absolute breeze for a Grandmaster gear score, but for a squad of low-level, unconditioned hostesses, this map was a death trap.
Zhou Yu gasped, rapidly scurrying to keep pace with her strides. Although her conscious mind was still reeling from the sudden sci-fi genre shift, her baseline analytical processing confirmed that Sister Lu was the absolute apex entity of the world and possessed a flawless moral character alignment. Following her tracking lines was the safest bet on the server.
The sharp, rhythmic echo of their boots reverberated continuously against the smooth stone of the empty cavern walls.
Lu Yunxi marched forward with an absolute, deadpan expression, her advanced sensory arrays scanning the dark corridors. Yet, mile after mile, the map failed to spawn a single monster or hostile entity.
A subtle tint of confusion flashed across her eyes. Where are the mobs?
Chapter 171
Zhou Yu had played plenty of video games before and was well-acquainted with the term “dungeon.” However, actually standing inside a real one was an entirely different story. Petrified, she huddled even closer to Lu Yunxi, practically gluing herself to the girl’s side.
Suddenly, a voice shattered the silence.
“Ah—help—!”
It was a trembling cry, pushed to the absolute brink of terror.
Lu Yunxi locked onto the speaker’s coordinates almost instantly and bolted forward.
“Sister Lu, wait for me!” Zhou Yu shrieked, thoroughly shocked by Lu Yunxi’s explosive speed. She grabbed Lu Yunxi’s arm with both hands and squeezed her eyes tightly shut.
Pulled off balance by the sudden weight, Lu Yunxi staggered and nearly face-planted onto the stone.
She rubbed her temples in sheer resignation, then simply scooped Zhou Yu up into a secure hold and dashed toward the source of the screaming.
Fortunately, the missing girls were all huddled together in a tight cluster. They were neatly arranged, and a quick scan confirmed that no one had sustained any physical damage.
The main issue was that every single one of them had their eyes clamped shut and their faces buried in their hands. They were simply screaming at the top of their lungs, too terrified to even look at one another.
The deafening, non-stop screeching was giving Lu Yunxi a massive headache, forcing her to yell over the din: “Stop screaming! It’s me!”
Instead of de-escalating the situation, her sudden voice caused the shrieks to spike to a piercing, glass-shattering register that nearly rattled the cavern rafters.
Zhou Yu cautiously opened one eye. The exact millisecond she registered the eerie, glowing environment, her own processor short-circuited, and she joined the screaming chorus.
Surrounded by a literal 360-degree wall of screaming, Lu Yunxi’s eye twitched violently.
Since one of her arms was securely pinned by Zhou Yu’s death grip, she abandoned any plans of drawing her bow from her inventory. Instead, she prepped her trusty iron fire poker, ready to melee the specters hovering opposite their position.
In reality, this instance dungeon was vastly weaker than she had initially calculated; it was a textbook, low-level beginner’s trial.
The spirits encircling the hostesses only registered between levels 1 and 3.
If these girls simply pooled their numbers and put some effort into their attack animations, they could easily dismantle the mobs themselves. It was purely their psychological terror parameters blocking their pathing; otherwise, clearing these monsters wouldn’t be a challenge at all!
With that analysis in mind, Lu Yunxi raised her poker and charged the frontline.
Yet, before her weapon could even connect with the hostiles, several of the low-level spirits panicked. They clutched their glowing heads in their hands and began fleeing wildly, wailing like frightened children.
“Save us!” the ghosts shrieked, tears literally streaming down their translucent faces as they floated away into the dark tunnels.
Hearing the fresh wave of spectral wailing, the captive hostesses squeezed their eyes even tighter, weeping and sobbing hysterically.
Lu Yunxi stood entirely deadpan.
Listening to the seemingly endless, echoing crying filling the cavern, she took a deep, controlled breath and boomed: “Cease your weeping! The ghosts have already broken containment and fled the sector!”
Recognizing that familiar, authoritative voice, Zhou Yu was the absolute first to open her eyes, sniffling heavily.
Sure enough.
The entire cavern was completely cleared of hostiles, leaving only her immediate guild companions. The terrifying phantoms they had just seen had entirely vanished off the map.
She burst into a sudden, relieved laugh. “Thank goodness! Those ghosts carried an incredibly high horror rating!”
Hearing the two familiar voices trade casual dialogue, the remaining hostesses slowly gathered their courage, tentatively opening their lids.
“Waaah—!”
Before Lu Yunxi could react, she was instantly swarmed by the entire demographic. They lunged forward in a weeping mass, wrapping their arms around her physical vessel in a desperate, suffocating group hug.
“Miss Lu, thank heaven you successfully tracked our coordinates!”
“A phantom almost zeroed out our health bars just now! The trauma metrics were far too high…”
Lu Yunxi’s eye twitched as she felt the immense, crushing physical pressure of the embrace. Even with her maxed-out Grandmaster endurance parameters, she was actively running out of oxygen.
“Quickly… disperse… I am experiencing a suffocation debuff…”
Before her throat closed completely, Zhou Yu recognized the hazard and immediately began physically yanking the girls out of the cluster. “Back off! Disperse immediately! Sister Lu’s eyes are literally rolling back into her head! If we don’t grant her some airway clearance, our own guild is going to liquidate her!”
The hostesses panicked, their faces turning pale as they instantly released their grips and scrambled backward.
Lu Yunxi, who had been lifted a full half-meter off the floorboards by the sheer force of the hug, dropped flat onto the dirt.
She let her eyes roll back for a brief microsecond, then exhaled a massive breath to stabilize her vitals. “Maintain your composure. Those spirits don’t command any actual offensive power. The exact moment I advanced into their radius, their morale broke, and they fled the zone crying.”
“Sister Lu, your combat parameters are broken, so it’s a given that the mobs harbor a mortal dread of your avatar,” one of the maids replied softly. “But those entities won’t show the same fear toward our low-level stats.”
The moment the statement cleared, the entire group turned to gaze at her with unbridled, religious adoration.
Lu Yunxi was mildly perplexed. To her mind, her physical execution just now had been thoroughly mediocre; why did these NPCs treat her as though she were a peak-tier powerhouse?
What her internal analysis failed to calculate was that her perpetual, deadpan calm in the face of an existential threat was a trait exclusively reserved for apex entities. How could a baseline commoner maintain a perfectly flat stress meter when trapped inside a supernatural crisis?
But parsing their psychological loops wasn’t the immediate priority. The critical objective was determining how to exit this instance dungeon.
Zhou Yu immediately hoisted her hand into the air, chiming in: “I understand the mechanics! Standard dungeon rules dictate that as long as we systematically defeat the remaining hostiles, the exit portal will automatically initialize. Win the engagement, and we clear the level, right?”
“But how are we supposed to defeat a phantom? Isn’t Miss Lu the only unit who commands the necessary offensive stats to damage them?”
“We cannot simply rely on Sister Lu to solo every single mob! Are we genuinely intended to just idle in the backlines and watch her carry the team?!”
The hostesses immediately launched into a boisterous, overlapping debate. At the end of the day, leaving Lu Yunxi to grind out the dungeon alone felt incredibly shameful, so the consensus rapidly shifted toward organizing balanced raid parties to share the burden.
Lu Yunxi nodded in approval. “Do not stress over the difficulty. I ran a quick diagnostic on those spirits before they scattered. Their attributes are exceptionally low. The more transparent their avatars appear, the weaker their baseline health pools. As for the slightly more solid variants, their stats are higher, but even the elderly Auntie commands enough physical power to solo them.”
“Are your calculations accurate?!” the girls gasped, staring at her with wide, unyielding disbelief.
“My assessments are precise. I have navigated the martial world for a considerable duration; my ability to gauge raw power levels is flawless.” In truth, her system panel allowed her to read their exact level markers with absolute accuracy. Furthermore, these low-tier beginner phantoms didn’t even require specialized taoist talismans or elemental weapons to damage.
The girls erupted into pure delight, rapidly mobilizing to execute the raid.
Lu Yunxi formed a solo party to clear her own pathing, while the remaining hostesses divided themselves into balanced squads of three or four, scattering into the intersecting tunnels to hunt down the remaining spirits.
However, a highly unusual RNG glitch occurred. While every single sub-party successfully triggered an encounter and farmed their respective mobs, Lu Yunxi couldn’t locate a single spirit no matter how deeply she scouted the corridors.
Realizing the game logic had effectively barred her from grinding, she simply gave up, dropping into a comfortable cross-legged position on the stone to wait for her team to wrap up their chores.
Roughly fifteen minutes later, amidst a deafening chorus of victorious cheers, the environmental rendering violently shifted before Lu Yunxi’s eyes.
The entire party was automatically teleported out of the hidden trial.
The harsh night wind swept across their coordinates, delivering a sudden, icy chill.
“Brrr! The temperature parameters out here are freezing!”
The extraction coordinates where the party had spawned sat several mountain ridges away from their original ravine camp.
Having fought their very first supernatural engagement, the girls’ stamina bars were entirely bottomed out, leaving them with zero physical energy to initiate a multi-ridge mountain climb in the dark. Furthermore, navigating treacherous, pitch-black mountain passes without a light source was an absolute recipe for a pathing disaster.
Lu Yunxi was equally surprised by the layout. In her historical gaming experience, a standard instance dungeon exit usually deposited a player no further than a single hill away from the entrance node. This specific map configuration was uniquely frustrating.
Following Lu Yunxi’s lead, the hostesses quickly foraged a selection of broad, heavy leaves from the local canopy, laying them out across the earth to fashion primitive bedrolls.
With Lu Yunxi’s max-tier protective barrier safely encapsulating their perimeter, they didn’t have to worry about local hazard triggers or predatory snakes compromising their rest.
And yes—since Zhou Yu had already witnessed the neon system text boxes and read the patch notes, Lu Yunxi completely abandoned her frail maiden disguise, casually casting her high-tier defensive skills right in front of the entire demographic.
The hostesses’ eyes practically glowed with adoration.
Throughout the night, multiple girls could be seen huddled over the glowing loot items they had salvaged from the dungeon rewards, turning the drops over and over in their palms, their features locked in deep, contemplative thoughts.
When Lu Yunxi blinked her eyes open the following morning, she found herself staring directly into several pairs of glittering, intensely focused eyes.
“…Is there a problem with my parameters?”
“Sister Lu, I have finalized my long-term roadmap—I want to become a legendary martial hero too! I want to deploy alongside your unit and explore the broader world!” Zhou Yu’s eyes burned with unyielding excitement as she proudly thrust her hand forward, showcasing the item she had farmed from the ghost cave the night before. “Behold! This is the premium reward my account secured from the dungeon… run a diagnostic on this!”
Lu Yunxi silently directed her visual focus toward the girl’s palm, only to find her holding a single, completely ordinary piece of dry firewood.
Her internal interface was instantly flooded with a wall of silent question marks.
Fascinating.
Back when her own account sat at a lower level tier, she didn’t recall the system ever distributing such an aggressively garbage tier of loot. But running a quick logical analysis, she reminded herself that she had never stooped to farming level 1 starter trash mobs before, so the drop rate tracking made sense. This was simply the standard reward table assigned to level 1 entities.
“My thanks for the offer, but your profile should retain the asset. My inventory does not require firewood…” she replied gently, shaking her head to decline the trade.
Right then, the surrounding native hostesses crowded around her position, their voices tight with anxious anticipation. “Miss Lu, our units also harbor a burning desire to master the arts of cultivation! Do you calculate that our physical vessels can still successfully assimilate martial parameters given our current age brackets?”
The latent desire for absolute self-preservation that had been brutally suppressed by their past trauma had completely reawakened within their character scripts. Every single maiden was raring to initiate a training sequence.
The paradigm shift was absolute! They finally understood the baseline rule of this server: society, family, and law were entirely fleeting variables! Only raw, unyielding physical force registered as real data! If their vessels had commanded even a fraction of this power before, their contracts would never have been violently manipulated by low-level slavers and primitive villagers!
Furthermore, having successfully cleared the ghost raid, multiple girls had watched loot drops populate their inventory lines. Though the items were currently low-value, they recognized that their baseline stats were still weak. Logically, once they maximized their strength parameters in the future, the algorithms would inevitably grant them access to legendary treasures!
Lu Yunxi lapsed into a brief, calculated silence. “I can systematically instruct your profiles in the foundational elements of internal energy regulation and baseline self-defense, but my clearance restricts me from distributing advanced manual data. If your units desire to acquire high-tier combat arts, you must eventually engineer a way to align your accounts with an official hidden sect or a capital academy.”
The hostesses erupted into a mixture of intense surprise and pure euphoria, nodding in frantic, submissive agreement. They possessed excellent baseline intelligence; they understood that high-level cultivation techniques were heavily guarded corporate secrets. For Miss Lu to voluntarily share her foundational curriculum was already an immense, life-altering blessing for their profiles.
Having finalized their training contracts, the unified group organized their formation and initiated the grueling trek up the mountain ridge.
After several consecutive days of steady, disciplined pathing, their convoy finally cleared the tree line, successfully returning to the edge of the steep cliff where their plunge had initialized.
Chapter 172: Fighting Monsters
After a long trek across mountains and rivers, they finally entered the village. The moment they stepped past the perimeter, Lu Yunxi and her group came upon a tense standoff.
On one side stood the men who had forced them over the cliff; on the other stood the hostesses they had left behind at base camp.
“Where on earth did you take Miss Lu and the others? Tell us right now!” one of the hostesses demanded, her voice shaking with rage. “If you don’t start talking, don’t blame us for getting rough!”
“Get rough? With what parameters?!” the leading villager sneered, bursting into a mocking laugh. “It’s been a few days since your little champion left. I don’t believe for a second that whatever transparent ward she placed over this house is still active. Do you simpletons honestly think you can defeat us?!”
Lu Yunxi couldn’t help but let out a sharp laugh. “Oh? Do you genuinely believe we can’t?”
The moment her voice echoed across the plaza, both factions whirled around to face the gates.
The hostesses erupted into pure joy, their faces lighting up as they rushed forward in a frantic wave. “Miss Lu! You’ve finally returned to the sector!”
Conversely, the mob of men looked absolutely horrified, their features contorting as their morale crashed. “How is this mathematically possible?! You’re still alive?!”
Lu Yunxi and her foraging team were entirely speechless, their annoyance rapidly morphing into cold, unbridled fury.
Having spent the last several days traversing the mountain wilderness, the girls had long since unraveled the operational logic of the situation. They realized they had been completely played!
Recalling the grueling days they had just spent stranded in the upper ridges, forced to eat raw flower petals and drink morning dew to keep their hunger bars from bottoming out, the girls’ expressions turned profoundly grim. Without a word, every single one of them tightly gripped the heavy wooden staves they had foraged along the trail.
Before Lu Yunxi could even issue an engagement command, someone let out a battle cry, and the two factions violently collided.
This time, Lu Yunxi didn’t bother masking her attributes or throttling her physical output.
Amidst a chorus of stunned gasps from the watching hostesses, she blurred through the frontline, systematically neutralizing every single male villager within a matter of moves.
Once absolute containment was re-established, Lu Yunxi fired up her alchemical kiln, mass-producing the targeted amnesia draught. She manually ran each villager through the dosage cycle, forcing the liquid down their throats one by one. To finalize the extraction protocol, she escorted the memory-wiped men far across the mountain pass, dumping them near a distant trading town before peacefully returning to her hidden mountain valley.
Even the elderly, Stockholm-afflicted matron was run through the exact same memory-liquidation sequence.
With the hostiles permanently cleared from the map, the mountain commune officially initiated their long-term training curriculum under Lu Yunxi’s direct guidance.
However, an immediate performance bottleneck emerged: the learning velocity of these rural girls was catastrophically slower than the hostesses back at the Fengyue Tower!
The maidens at Fengyue Tower had been systematically instructed in literacy, which allowed them to rapidly parse the conceptual logic of internal cultivation. Conversely, among these trafficked country girls, the vast majority possessed an absolute zero literacy rating. Even the few who claimed basic comprehension could barely recognize a hundred baseline characters. When it came to deciphering the profound, metaphorical meanings embedded within the martial manuals, they spent hours staring blankly at the text box, completely unable to process the data.
To prevent them from bricking their internal energy networks or executing flawed cultivation paths in the future, Lu Yunxi had no choice but to adjust her roadmap, initiating a mandatory literacy and enlightenment phase.
But she had severely underestimated just how grueling basic academic instruction could be for a Grandmaster.
For example:
“All mortals are spawned into the server with a pristine moral alignment… This implies that when a human entity initializes, their baseline nature is inherently kind,” Lu Yunxi lectured relentlessly from the pavilion stage.
“Miss Lu, why exactly are human parameters coded to be kind at the moment of spawning?”
“…The performance was so profoundly moving that one forgets the taste of meat for three consecutive months.”
“Miss Lu, our guild hasn’t seen a single meat ration in over a week. Is that what the manual defines as ‘a week without meat’? Can our party execute a hunting quest to harvest some animal protein today?”
“…”
By the time the afternoon sessions concluded, Lu Yunxi felt entirely drained, her mental stamina bar flashing red.
Fortunately, her hard work eventually yielded a positive return on investment. Though the initial phase was incredibly exhausting, Zhou Yu stepped up to assist, deploying her modern educational logic to help the girls systematically assimilate the characters.
Furthermore, Zhou Yu took over the absolute entirety of the mathematics curriculum, completely relieving Lu Yunxi of the burden of teaching basic arithmetic.
To make matters better, the girls’ processing speeds for mathematics were remarkably high.
Perhaps because managing an agrarian commune required constant, real-time calculations for seed inventory and fabric weaving, they rapidly mastered addition and subtraction formulas within the 100-character threshold. However, the exact moment the numeric variables scaled past 100, their calculation speeds bottomed out. Because their daily routines rarely triggered calculations of that magnitude, they became thoroughly listless and checked out the second complex algebra entered the chat log.
Lu Yunxi racked her brains to optimize the curriculum, systematically mapping the vocabulary words they needed to master directly onto their daily chores. This practical integration finally cheered them up, raising their focus metrics back to baseline.
Their daily schedule was locked into a strict, highly productive loop: they completed an hour of intensive literacy study in the morning, maintained a rigid horse stance configuration for thirty minutes, and spent the entire afternoon farming the plots and operating the looms.
Day by day, the calendar pages turned.
The maidens of the mountain commune gradually began to stabilize their foundational parameters.
Once the entire workforce could execute basic iron-fist boxing routines with smooth, fluid accuracy, Lu Yunxi decided it was time to transition them into live combat trials.
True combat proficiency was an attribute that could only be refined through active field practice; endlessly spamming katas against empty air would never optimize their combat logic.
And their current territory featured the absolute perfect grinding zone. The swirling black wormhole nested along the cliff path was a built-in instance dungeon—the ultimate automated sandbox for her underlings to level up their stats!
One evening, the moment the guild finalized their dinner rotation and the server sky transitioned into night, Lu Yunxi led her vanguard back to the rock shelf. Under the cover of total darkness, the party stepped through the vortex, successfully entering the instance dungeon.
The moment they spawned into the cavern, she turned to face her students, issuing a clear directive: “Because this raid is explicitly configured to optimize your practical combat parameters, my unit will maintain absolute neutrality throughout the run. I will not execute a single strike. I expect your profiles to fully leverage these phantoms and specters to refine your real-time boxing animations.”
The girls nodded, their expressions tight with determination as they scattered into the corridors to track down the phantoms.
To ensure she could monitor their performance without interfering with the dungeon’s AI scripting, Lu Yunxi completely suppressed her internal energy aura. Her tracking marker vanished from the map entirely; even if a level 1 specter drifted straight past her coordinates, the system’s pathfinding would simply register her presence as a passing draft of wind.
Lu Yunxi sauntered through the tunnels, meticulously evaluating each sub-party’s execution. It didn’t take long for her to diagnose a massive, systemic flaw in their combat logic.
Down in tunnel three, Girl A triggered an encounter with a level 1 phantom.
Girl A immediately assumed a defensive stance, crossing her forearms tightly over her chest.
The phantom’s AI initialized a basic collision skill, aggressively floating straight toward her collision box.
Under standard tactical formatting, Girl A was supposed to either execute a side-step dodge or launch an immediate counter-strike to interrupt the enemy’s casting animation.
Instead, Girl A did absolutely nothing. She rigidly followed the strict sequence of her form, pulling her right hand all the way back to her hip to chamber a clenched fist.
Lu Yunxi: “…”
What tier of pathfinding is this? That specific animation was a transitional closing form designed exclusively to channel kinetic force for a tertiary strike! It featured zero offensive parameters and provided absolutely no defensive coverage. Deploying it right as a mob launched a charge skill was a total tactical error!
The level 1 phantom slammed directly into Girl A’s hit box, causing a bright red [-2] damage text to float into the air above her head.
Lu Yunxi was thoroughly deadpan.
Fantastic. You’ve successfully allowed a level 1 trash mob to shave off two of your health points.
Girl A let out a booming, highly aggressive “Ha!”, looking incredibly fierce as her right fist finally exploded forward, driving toward the phantom’s core.
However, the specter’s agility rating wasn’t zero. It executed a minor, automated float animation, effortlessly drifting out of her weapon tracking line to avoid the strike.
Instead of re-orienting her target line to pursue the mob, Girl A calmly froze in place, methodically deploying her fourth scripted kata form…
Lu Yunxi clapped a hand over her forehead, turning on her heel to evacuate the sector before her blood pressure spiked.
Unfortunately, the data across the other sub-parties yielded nearly identical results. Because the majority of the native girls lacked real-world combat experience, they had strictly internalized Lu Yunxi’s pre-raid safety briefing to “maintain absolute, unflinching calm under pressure.”
Consequently, even as the level 1 specters repeatedly hammered their defenses—causing a constant stream of [-2] and [-3] damage text to pop above their heads—the girls remained completely unmoved. Even though cold sweat was literally dripping down their foreheads due to the physical pain of the impacts, they stubbornly refused to break sequence, methodically executing every single boxing move one by one like glitching robots.
The only units demonstrating viable combat efficiency were Zhou Yu and a handful of the older, liberated matriarchs.
The older women had survived decades of brutal domestic altercations prior to their rescue; their behavioral scripts were entirely unburdened by rigid martial theory. The exact millisecond the phantoms advanced, the matrons completely threw Lu Yunxi’s elegant boxing forms out the window, relying entirely on raw, unyielding street-brawling instincts. They lunged forward with feral energy, relentlessly clawing at the specters’ faces and violently ripping at their phantom hair.
The level 1 mobs were so thoroughly tormented by these unorthodox grapple mechanics that they broke into frantic, automated wailing loops.
As for Zhou Yu, she had apparently taken a few modern self-defense seminars prior to her transmigration, and her strike execution was remarkably solid.
Lu Yunxi ran the final performance metrics. The older matriarchs achieved the fastest clear times, completely deleting a phantom’s health bar within a minute or two. Zhou Yu optimized her run at the three-minute mark, while the standard literacy-challenged hostesses required anywhere between five and eight minutes to finalize a single level 1 clear.
Upon logging out of the dungeon, Lu Yunxi held a comprehensive debriefing, systematically reviewing the data and correcting every single awkward, non-functional movement parameter her students had displayed.
Over the subsequent weeks, the mountain commune settled into a repetitive, highly disciplined cycle of live-combat grinding followed by thorough tactical review sessions.
It wasn’t until the entire hostess demographic successfully hit the level 10 threshold—and unlocked baseline proficiency markers within their pharmacy and medical skill trees—that Lu Yunxi finally prepared to evacuate the mountain ravine.
Naturally, she map-routed her departure alongside the solitary individual who, after months of intensive isolation, still harbored a burning, unyielding desire to log off the agrarian commune and explore the broader open map: Zhou Yu.
Zhou Yu was trekking down the mountain path at a casual pace when she suddenly turned her torso around to flag a comment. But mid-sentence, she let out a sharp, horrified gasp, her legs turning to absolute jelly as she staggered backward and crashed heavily onto the dirt.
“Sister Lu… I… ah!” The color drained from her face in a fraction of a second, leaving her completely ghost-white.
Lu Yunxi spun around, her brow furrowing with confusion before her eyes locked onto a massive, majestic tiger crouching on a ledge a short distance away. The apex predator lowered its massive skull, its unyielding, predatory gaze tracking their coordinates from above.
Because she had spent months mapping this territory without triggering a single high-tier encounter, her processing units had completely archived the data that this wilderness zone carried a severe, high-level danger rating.
Zhou Yu was so profoundly paralyzed with terror that her motor controls completely failed.
She sat frozen in the dirt for several long seconds before her modern survival instincts violently overrode her system lock. Scrambling to her feet with manic velocity, she lunged forward, grabbed Lu Yunxi’s arm with an iron grip, and bolted down the trail.
“Sister Lu, run for your life!”
Lu Yunxi stood entirely stunned by the sudden kinetic yank. When she managed to stabilize her balance and look over her shoulder, she noted the massive tiger appeared briefly perplexed by their sudden flight script, before its hunting AI initialized, causing it to bound down from the ledge to chase them with frantic velocity.
She was completely at a loss for words.
Within the behavioral psychology of elite carnivores, if a target stands perfectly still and projects a neutral dominance aura, the beast will often hesitate to engage. But the exact microsecond a unit breaks into a frantic panic-dash, the predator’s hard-coded chase parameters automatically lock on, ensuring a pursuit.
Yet, Lu Yunxi’s analytical modules confirmed the transmigrator wasn’t to blame.
A baseline commoner face-to-face with a literal apex predator would understandably suffer a catastrophic morale failure; many low-level entities would have fainted dead on the spot.
Under such overwhelming terror, Zhou Yu had still prioritized keeping her companion within her protection radius, dragging her along as she fled. In the grand calculation of human parameters, her execution was already exceptionally high!
