Chapter 176| Chapter 177| Chapter 178
Chapter 176: Performance
Dozens of kilometers away from Lu Yunxi’s position, the chief and the second-in-command of the bandit stronghold were riding a high wave of excitement.
They had just successfully ambushed a merchant caravan that had blundered down this forgotten route. Inspecting the wagons loaded to the brim, the two leaders exchanged satisfied nods.
“With a haul this massive, Third Brother will finally stop grumbling about the village running low on food and winter clothes.”
“Exactly. Look at all this bolt cloth. Even if we generously tailor two outfits a year for every man, this supply will last the stronghold for a decade. And the rations are top-tier, premium rice and flour. We couldn’t buy grain this pristine if we went to the market towns ourselves.”
“The only absolute joke is the caravan owner’s brain. Why on earth did he waste wagon space transporting crates of dried mushrooms? Those things sprout everywhere on this mountain for free.”
After reviewing the inventory, the two chiefs decided to escort the goods back to base camp before planning their next raid. This single haul was a massive jackpot, enough to sustain their consumption parameters for several years.
With triumphant grins plastered across their faces, the two leaders had absolutely no idea that the balance of power back in the village had completely shattered.
The caravan convoy set out early the next morning. Because they were hauling heavy freight, their travel velocity was significantly throttled. Even though the bandits openly mocked the quality of the mushroom crates, they didn’t leave a single scrap behind, stubbornly dragging every last item back up the mountain.
By the time the convoy finally cleared the stronghold gates, the sky had already deepened into twilight.
The two chiefs excitedly marched the heavy prize into the central plaza, smugly waiting for the underlings to swarm the wagons with praise and loud cheers. Oddly, after idling by the entrance for several minutes, the courtyard remained ghost-white and empty. Not a single soul came out to greet the vanguard.
The chief and the second-in-command stood frozen like idiots, exchanging a deeply perplexed glance.
Right then, a low-level bandit scurried past the lane, looking incredibly frantic.
The Chief reached out an arm, violently snagging the man’s collar.
“What is the meaning of this layout? Our convoy has been idling inside the perimeter for minutes, so why hasn’t a single unit come down to help unload the freight?!”
The bandit began to bristle with irritation at the delay, but the moment he registered the familiar voice, his eyes welled with tears. He desperately grasped the Chief’s hand, his entire frame vibrating with intense emotion as he looked at the second-in-command. “Chief! Second Master! You have finally returned to the sector!”
Initially, the two leaders had harbored a heavy ego debuff because their grand return had been ignored. But seeing the underling trembling with such manic euphoria at their sight, their pride was instantly restored.
They were still the beloved, undisputed rulers of this mountain!
The second-in-command scanned the completely deserted lanes and asked, his brow furrowing, “Did a catastrophic security breach occur while our party was off the grid?”
“Oh, crap!” the bandit shrieked, suddenly tracking a clock counter in his mind as he slapped his forehead in a panic. “My time slot is almost up! I have to report straight to the pavilion to execute my performance!”
Without wasting a single second to unpack the data, he franticly broke away from the grip and sprinted up the trail.
Left completely in the dark, the newly arrived chiefs and their raiding vanguard could only stand amidst the wagons, staring blankly at the empty plaza.
A succession of secondary bandits hurried past the freight carts, completely consumed by their own urgent errands. Watching the workforce aggressively ignore the massive haul, the two leaders grew intensely curious. Under normal server parameters, delivering a jackpot of this magnitude would automatically trigger a massive, rowdy tavern feast. Why on earth was the entire base camp treating them like invisible ghosts?!
Instructing the vanguard to manually stash the freight inside the secure storehouses, the two chiefs rapidly trailed the frantic crowd up the mountain ridge.
“Isn’t that Third Brother’s private residence?” the second-in-command noted, peering through the gloom. A massive wall of bandits had completely encapsulated the pavilion, forming a dense, impenetrable circle around the structure. The crowd was so thick that if their own quarters weren’t situated nearby, they wouldn’t have been able to identify the building’s registry.
“What tier of crisis is Third Brother navigating?” the Chief muttered, his expression darkening as he analyzed the demographic anomaly. “For the entire workforce to form a defensive perimeter around his door… did his vital stats take a hit?”
Exchanging a grim look, the two leaders accelerated their velocity, ruthlessly shoving their way through the dense crowd of bodies to breach the interior.
The bandits standing in the rear guard had their backs turned, entirely failing to scan the leaders’ faces. Annoyed by the sudden physical disruption, one man barked over his shoulder, “What is your problem, jerk?! Why are you pushing the line?! Do your processors lack a basic comprehension of first-come, first-served… holy crap! Chief?!”
The moment the words cleared, the bandits who had been aggressively shouting choked on their own breath, delivering a rapid sequence of bowing animations and frantic apologies.
The two stronghold leaders let out a cold snort. Anxious to verify Third Brother’s health parameters, they bypassed the crowd without a word.
However, the exact microsecond they cleared the threshold and scanned the interior, their eyelids flared wide with pure, unmitigated shock.
The pavilion’s primitive, rustic decor had been completely wiped. The floorboards were now draped in a thick, ultra-premium soft carpet strewn with fresh, aromatic flower petals. Nestled in the center of the room was a suite of exquisitely carved mahogany tables and chairs.
The two beautiful maidens they had casually abducted off the trail were currently reclining sideways across the premium plush seating, leisurely sipping tea while tracking… a live talent showcase?
Directly before their lounge chairs, a rotation of rugged bandits was stepping forward one by one to execute performance modules. One muscle-bound thug was actively breaking heavy stones over his chest, while another group was locked in a synchronized song-and-dance routine. The entire hall was an explosion of festive energy and high-volume entertainment.
Furthermore, anchoring the backlines behind the girls’ chairs were several senior bandits, diligently operating heavy silk fans, pouring premium tea, and delicately peeling fresh fruit skins for them.
The Chief and the Second-in-Command: “???”
Weren’t these the two defenseless female assets we dragged back to camp to serve as labor? Is the entire village suffering a collective AI glitch?! Why is the workforce spending their daily stamina bars trying to maximize their comfort meters?!
Staring at the bizarre spectacle for several agonizing seconds, the Chief’s confusion violently morphed into unbridled fury.
“What is the meaning of this madness?!” he roared, his voice booming across the rafters with enough kinetic force to shake everyone awake. The fact that his own grand return hadn’t triggered a single greeting, while his entire faction was dancing like court jesters around a pair of stray women, was a complete insult to his authority!
Squatting silently in a dark corner of the room, the Third Master filtered the audio, his head snapping around. The exact millisecond his eyes locked onto his older brothers’ forms, his psychological defense parameters completely shattered, and he burst into hysterical tears right on the spot.
“You… you two have finally returned to the sector?!”
The first and second-in-command instantly froze, thoroughly unsettled by the absolute despair radiating from their military advisor.
Concurrently, the entire crowd of performing bandits stiffened. Their faces twisted into a complex macro-expression that blended raw, manic excitement with profound existential dread as they slowly locked their eyes onto the leaders.
Had these men been ordinary civilians rather than hardened criminals, their posture would have perfectly mirrored refugees laying eyes on a squad of divine saviors.
The two chiefs paused, their steps heavy and measured as they cautiously advanced into the room.
Sensing the shift in the environmental dynamics, the two captive maidens suddenly let out a pair of elegant, perfectly calm smiles, smoothly rising from their mahogany chairs.
“Ah! This server is completely unplayable! The torment is absolute!”
Down in the residential sector, a bandit who had been aggressively pushing a broom over the exact same cobblestones for an hour suddenly hurled the tool into the dirt, roaring at the sky in pure frustration.
“Calm your processor,” the Third Master advised, letting out a heavy, utterly exhausted sigh as he leaned against a stone wall.
“Calm my processor?! Third Master, construct a viable roadmap for our faction!” the sweeper wailed, his limbs trembling with residual trauma. “During the initial containment breach, your administrative briefings continuously promised that once the Chief and the Second Master returned from the raid, our operational parameters would recover! You swore we simply had to endure until the high-level combat units synchronized with the map! But look at the final calculation…”
Recalling the horrific imagery of their supreme, apex leaders currently hanging upside down from the stronghold’s heavy spiked iron gates, the guard violently shuddered, his vocal processing completely freezing before he could finish the sentence.
The surrounding bandits navigating the corridor similarly turned their heads, casting looks of desperate, pathetic anticipation onto their military advisor.
In reality, the Third Master’s internal stress levels were flagging a critical emergency.
How on earth was he supposed to devise a counter-strategy?! His historical briefings had merely been a series of fabricated reassurance scripts engineered to keep the workforce from routing—empty promises he had desperately repeated to stabilize his own morale meter.
Now that his absolute best-case scenario had been thoroughly pulverized by Lu Yunxi’s bare hands, his logical engine was entirely stalled.
He lowered his chin, running through every theoretical workaround in his database for several minutes, but the calculations continuously returned a zero percent success rate.
At that exact tactical junction, a sub-party of scouts sprinted into the courtyard, their faces pale.
“Third Master, a catastrophic administrative update has just cleared! Miss Lu has officially processed a new directive, appointing a random underling from sector B to assume full command of the kitchen and supply logistics! She explicitly commanded that your profile must surrender the primary master keys to the central storehouses to the new manager immediately!”
“Third Master, that newly appointed manager has already initialized his pathing to your coordinates! We highly recommend your unit executes an immediate flight command to clear the area!”
“…”
The handful of bandits delivering the alert had historically belonged to the Third Master’s personal faction. Having absorbed a significant volume of silver bribes from his ledger over the past fiscal cycles, their loyalty parameters remained active enough to risk delivering the data.
Having completed the prompt, the scouts didn’t dare idle inside the hot zone for another microsecond, breaking into a frantic run to clear the sector.
The Third Master stood frozen on the cobblestones, his features shifting through a complex sequence of panic and humiliation, before he ultimately let out a deep, deflated sigh.
Execute a flight command? Where exactly am I supposed to navigate on this map? As long as his avatar remained anchored to this mountain ridge, not a single NPC in the database possessed the courage to countermand the absolute authority of those two women! From this evening forward, the true executive leadership of this stronghold had officially shifted hands.
While his processor was locked in a daze, the newly appointed manager strolled into the courtyard, offering a remarkably polite, smiling dialogue tree as he requested the immediate liquidation of the storehouse keys.
The Third Master watched the transaction with a hollow, deeply twisted sensation in his chest. Looking past the manager’s shoulder, he watched the rest of the common bandits aggressively swarming the new administrator, spamming flattery animations and offering premium personal gifts to secure his favor.
If his account flatly refused to comply with that monstrous woman’s corporate restructuring, would he even be permitted to retain a basic baseline position within the hierarchy?
He hoisted his chin in a wave of sudden panic, recalling the absolute thrashing his older brothers had sustained when they tried to assert their authority. He tightly clenched his teeth, his internal algorithms finalizing a dramatic, sudden paradigm shift.
Since his faction lacked the raw gear score to overpower her build, his only viable survival strategy was to execute an immediate corporate merger! If he could proactively run a compliance sweep and convince the Chief and the Second Master to swallow their pride, Miss Lu would likely reward his strategic utility with a premium management position.
He certainly wasn’t harboring any delusions of recovering his historical glory as the supreme Third-in-Command of the base. But at the very least, his final placement couldn’t be completely garbage—he couldn’t allow his profile to plummet from Chief Military Advisor straight to a baseline courtyard sweeper, right?!
Chapter 177: Collapse
Lu Yunxi sat in her mahogany chair and suddenly let out a heavy sigh.
“Miss Lu, is there something weighing on your mind?” The Chief chuckled nervously, immediately stepping forward to fan her with a thoroughly sycophantic smile. “Whatever the issue is, just pass the directive to me. I’ll handle it immediately.”
Lu Yunxi glanced up at him, knowing full well this low-level bandit couldn’t help her with her real questline.
She had just received a telepathic ping from Long Aotian. Because they were bound by a spirit contract, Long Aotian could communicate directly with her mind whenever its system ran into a glitch. Currently, she was letting it rest under Huawang’s care to stabilize its parameters.
But a few days ago, it sent an urgent update stating that Kao’s condition was rapidly deteriorating. Its avatar was slipping into a prolonged sleep state, entirely unable to maintain consciousness. To preserve its own baseline vitality, Long Aotian was also forced to enter a deep hibernation cycle, only occasionally booting up to report its safety metrics to her.
Lu Yunxi’s internal anxiety was peaking. She wished she could force her experience bar to break through to the Grandmaster cap today, master the ultimate paths of immortality tomorrow, and rapidly patch the broken laws of the world back to their original state.
But reminding herself that the more her stress metrics spiked, the slower her progression bar crawled, she could only force her system to calm down.
“I lack any specific worries. My system simply desired to execute a sigh animation,” she noted with a faint smile, leaning back against the cushions.
The Chief tightly clenched his teeth in silence, feeling thoroughly manipulated.
He desperately recalled the administrative briefing the Third Master had delivered to him in private.
“Eldest Brother, that woman is an absolute, game-breaking monster. Our current gear score stands zero chance of defeating her build. Our only viable pathing is to submit to her authority, catering to her comfort meters until she decides to log out of our zone… I comprehend the psychological toll it takes on your pride, but we are completely outmatched. If we countermand her scripts, our lifecycles might be permanently deleted before we even register the incoming damage!”
Recalling the Third Brother’s desperate strategy to appease the targets, the Chief forced a rigid smile onto his face and pivoted to check on the secondary female asset.
To his immense dismay, Zhou Yu simultaneously let out a heavy sigh of her own.
A thoroughly ominous feeling flared inside the Chief’s processor. Was this second woman also hard-coded to randomly execute sigh animations?!
“Miss Zhou, what exactly is causing your mood metrics to drop?” he asked, forcing a pleasant smile while his eyes darted around suspiciously.
Zhou Yu stared down at the dirt, tracking the insects scurrying across the cobblestones. “The ant colonies are migrating in dense formations, and the snakes are crossing the main pathing. According to weather patterns, an extreme downpour will initialize tomorrow.”
“?” The Chief looked completely blank.
“Have your databases never logged the traditional peasant proverbs?” Zhou Yu exhaled a long breath, her brow furrowing. “I’m deeply concerned that a catastrophic rainstorm will compromise our infrastructure over the next few days. Does your faction intend to initiate any structural reinforcement protocols?”
“Reinforcement for what?” The Chief grew even more perplexed. “The Second Master has already deployed units to organize our freight inside the storehouses. Provided the primary roofs hold up, we have zero reason to worry about the inventory taking water damage.”
“…Your workforce is packed into hundreds of fragile thatched huts!” Zhou Yu’s eye twitched violently. “If your units fail to patch the structural durability, what happens when the ceilings spring massive leaks?!”
“Rest easy, the structures won’t fail. Our syndicate has occupied this ravine for multiple fiscal cycles, and the shacks have managed to withstand the elements perfectly fine, correct?” The Chief couldn’t help but chuckle at her paranoia.
Zhou Yu scrutinized his supreme, unshakeable confidence, nodding her head as she tentatively accepted his data.
However, when evening initialized, Zhou Yu and Lu Yunxi had barely finished running through their hygiene routines and hadn’t even climbed into their bedrolls.
A deafening BOOM rattled the valley walls, and an apocalyptic deluge of heavy rain violently slammed down upon the mountain stronghold.
“Ah—!”
Zhou Yu shrieked as a cluster of heavy clay tiles suddenly detached from the ceiling, shattering into fragments right beside her boots.
“Maintain your composure. The core load-bearing columns of this pavilion remain stable. At most, we will simply endure a minor leakage script,” Lu Yunxi clarified with a perfectly serene smile.
“But I explicitly questioned that knockoff Chief today, and his response guaranteed the ceilings wouldn’t leak!” Zhou Yu grumbled, her face flushing with anger. “Is that bastard running a active deception protocol against my account?!”
“He didn’t intentionally feed you false data, but their entire faction lacks baseline engineering skills. You consulted the wrong class tree!” Lu Yunxi shook her head mildly. “Those bandits probably don’t even possess the cognitive capacity to realize that the buildings along this ridge have suffered severe structural neglect for so long that their foundations are entirely incapable of handling an extreme weather event.”
Lu Yunxi glided over to the window frame. Tracking the distant audio of buildings structurally failing amidst the roaring rain, a complex expression settled into her eyes.
Zhou Yu didn’t command her max-tier sensory stats; her visual interface was completely blinded by the thick sheet of downpour outside.
Scrambling across the room, she procured a large ceramic basin and placed it directly beneath the primary ceiling leak, quietly waiting for the drainage metrics to stabilize.
The night evaporated.
The morning sky, washed clean by the torrential storm, rendered a vast, pristine shade of light blue, instantly raising one’s relaxation parameters to maximum.
While Lu Yunxi was lazily admiring the scenic environment from her perch, Zhou Yu’s sudden, terrified scream pierced the room.
“What asset error has triggered now?”
“Their… their residential pavilions have suffered a total structural collapse!” Zhou Yu cried out, her eyes locked onto the courtyard below as her pupils shook with raw panic. “The destruction parameters are horrific! I cannot calculate if any of their lifecycles survived the collapse!”
Without a second thought, she shook her head violently to clear her shock and bolted out of the hut to execute a search and rescue operation.
Lu Yunxi remained perfectly calm.
She had systematically scanned the architectural layouts of the shacks days ago. Her calculations confirmed that the low-tier bandits would easily survive the physics collapse, sustaining nothing worse than minor bludgeoning damage.
Furthermore… those men didn’t necessarily deserve their rescue frames.
The final data output mapped exactly to her projections.
As the sun climbed higher into the sky, the bandits trapped beneath the lightweight thatched roofing gradually cleared the debris themselves, though a handful of character markers remained missing from the immediate sector.
While the units occupying the thatched huts escaped without critical injury, the premium pavilions situated further up the mountain ridge were engineered from solid mud bricks and heavy tiles. When those structural elements suffered a durability failure, the falling debris inflicted significant damage on the occupants.
Driven by intense anxiety, Zhou Yu mobilized a small detail of surviving bandits, aggressively moving broken masonry and shattered bricks to excavate the collapsed foundations.
“Is anyone occupying this coordinate?! Are there any active units trapped beneath this rubble?!” she hollered continuously, her hands clawing frantically at the broken tiles.
Lu Yunxi tracked the operation for several minutes, feeling thoroughly helpless as she observed the girl’s frantic exertion.
“Cease your labor. You are wasting your stamina bars; it is an entirely futile exercise. Regardless of how thoroughly your scanners search this pile, your return on investment will be absolute zero.” Lu Yunxi dropped into a squat beside her, gently patting her shoulder while inspecting Zhou Yu’s dust-caked, bleeding fingertips.
Tears of frustration welling in Zhou Yu’s eyes.
After all, she was a modern citizen whose database had never encountered a corpse. Hearing Lu Yunxi’s cold analysis, her features instantly contorted with intense sorrow.
“Even though my logic acknowledges they are unprincipled criminals… watching their lifecycles get deleted right before my eyes… my system simply cannot process it.” Zhou Yu sniffed heavily, desperately trying to blink back her tears as embarrassment flushed her cheeks.
Lu Yunxi’s expression turned remarkably subtle. “What bizarre script is your brain running? When exactly did my dialogue state that their characters were dead?”
“Huh?” Zhou Yu blinked, her tear-filled eyes widening in complete confusion. “But Sister Lu, did you not just command me to abort the excavation? You explicitly stated that continuing the search would be a total waste of effort.”
“…It is a waste of effort because the rooms are entirely vacant. Every single high-ranking asset evacuated the sector in the dead of night, so naturally, your scanners can’t lock onto a single target,” Lu Yunxi explained, her eye twitched.
“What?! They executed a total retreat?!” Zhou Yu repeated, her chest heaving violently as her outrage peaked. “But did those bastards not deliver a formal compliance speech, vowing they would reform their character traits and abandon their bandit professions?!”
“They originally abandoned the idea of a flight command because they calculated our speed parameters were too high and we would hunt them down. But when the extreme rainstorm randomized the map variables yesterday, their leadership tier clearly experienced a script change. The three Masters, along with their core management squad, successfully migrated off the server under the cover of the storm.” Even Lu Yunxi had been mildly surprised by their sudden tactical flexibility.
“!” Zhou Yu’s face shifted through a wild sequence of blue and purple tones, looking exactly as though a digital color palette had been violently overturned across her features.
The weeks dissolved one by one. Left entirely without their executive leadership, the remaining low-level bandits lacked the courage to trigger any hostile events, frozen in a state of absolute compliance and terrified to wander east or west.
Lu Yunxi quickly noticed that her experience bar had hit another hard stasis lock. Realizing the zone was completely dry of progression points, she informed Zhou Yu that she was logging out of the mountain ravine. Zhou Yu immediately authorized the request, opting to stay synced with her party.
Prior to clearing the perimeter, Lu Yunxi deployed a massive network of advanced defensive formations across the boundaries, anchoring the parameters to the Five Elements and the Eight Trigrams.
Moving forward, even if the original bandit leaders attempted to return and reboot their raiding operations, the spatial distortions would completely brick their line of sight. Whenever they lurked near the passes, passing merchant caravans would remain entirely occluded from their vision boxes.
Consequently, this treacherous pass transformed into the absolute safest trade route in the regional database, with commercial caravans aggressively prioritizing the path for their transit.
Naturally, that was a long-term server update for a later chronicle.
Out on the open road, Zhou Yu was practically radiating high energy, skipping and bouncing along the trail as her pathing continuously shifted to harvest local wild flora and inspect random mountain fruits.
However, this hyperactive playstyle rapidly depleted her stamina pool. By the time the server clock transitioned into the afternoon, her motivation to advance had completely bottomed out.
“Sister Lu… what exact directional vector is our party tracking?” she panted heavily, bracing her palms against her hips while using a massive oak tree to stabilize her equilibrium.
Lu Yunxi maintained a perfectly steady, unbothered stride throughout the entire journey, her physical parameters entirely untouched by fatigue. However, running a quick internal diagnostic, she realized her geographic database was completely empty.
“I do not command the data for our current coordinates… But mathematically speaking, provided our units maintain a linear trajectory in a single direction, our pathing will eventually clear the mountain boundaries.”
Back when she had first spawned into the Fengyue Tower, she had meticulously monitored her orientation tracking. But after being systematically sold and transported across multiple state capitals, she had completely abandoned her navigation logs, allowing her internal compass to drop into total confusion.
Hearing this profoundly unreliable navigational briefing, Zhou Yu’s entire processor suffered an existential shock, her face masking in pure disbelief.
“Sister Lu… please tell me your account is simply running a joke script!”
Holy crap! So Sister Lu was a total directionless wanderer?! She had intercepted multiple regional lore files stating that common players who lost their pathing inside these primeval mountain biomes were permanently archived, their avatars never to be found again!
Locating a lost entity inside a mountain wilderness was a monumental challenge even back in her modern era with satellite tracking—let alone within this pre-industrial ancient server! There wasn’t even a local rescue faction available to process a help ticket!
Chapter 178: The County Magistrate’s Son
Lu Yunxi and Zhou Yu quickened their pace. After trekking for a little while longer, they finally crested the ridge.
Climbing over the summit and peering down the other side of the mountain, a small town nestled in the valley came into view.
“Sister Lu, look! I can see the town!” Zhou Yu bounced on her heels with excitement, pointing toward the vast expanse of blue stretching out beyond the rooftops. “There’s even an ocean down there!”
Lu Yunxi offered a small smile.
When she had first set out, her core objective was to leave the Flower Continent entirely and explore the other realms. She had been worried her aimless wandering would accidentally drive her right into the continent’s landlocked center.
It seemed her luck parameter was still holding up quite well.
“Fresh seaweed soup! Hot seaweed soup! Perfect for everyone just back from the docks—come grab a bowl!”
“Crispy shrimp cakes! Deep-fried and fragrant, packed with real shrimp meat in every bite!”
Smelling the savory aromas drifting through the air, Zhou Yu swallowed hard.
Lu Yunxi scanned the bustling stalls, purchased a variety of local snacks, and handed them over for Zhou Yu to try. After tasting the local cuisine, both of them formed a solid plan.
“Sister Lu, I think I’m going to look for a standard job here. What about you?”
“I plan to start a small business.” Within the inventory manifest she had pulled from her premium treasure pouch, multiple trial objectives were directly tied to commerce.
As it happened, this town sat right on the coast, meaning seafood was incredibly cheap and plentiful, but other commodities were scarce. Since she had a massive stockpile of processed goods stored safely inside her dimensional space, she was more than capable of running a lucrative stall.
Having finalized their roadmaps, the two girls said their goodbyes.
Instead of investing her gold coins in prime real estate, Lu Yunxi simply set up a wooden table by the roadside and initialized a tofu stall.
This specific inventory had been mass-produced back when she was grinding her culinary professions. The total quantity was immense; even if she generated a steady stream of customers from sunrise to sunset, she possessed enough stock to keep selling for a year or two. More importantly, every single block was of purple-tier quality, boasting built-in cosmetic buffs that could beautify and nourish the skin.
“Young lady, how much for a plate of your tofu?” The woman running the fish stall next to her swallowed her saliva and sauntered over with a neighborly smile.
“This tofu is just two copper coins a portion. Would you care for some, Auntie?” Lu Yunxi replied with a pleasant smile.
She reached into her dimensional inventory, quickly sorting through her slots to locate the fried tofu she had prepared earlier, intending to hand out a few complimentary samples.
But before she could even retrieve the items, a figure suddenly burst around the street corner.
The man looked absolutely petrified. His jaw was hanging wide open as if he were trying to scream a warning, but his vocal chords failed to produce a single sound. He could only wave his arms around frantically, sprinting back and forth down the avenue like a sudden gust of wind.
Lu Yunxi: “…”
This individual had been stationed at the intersection just moments ago, looking exactly like a standard guard on patrol. Yet for some bizarre reason, his behavioral script had suddenly shifted to absolute madness.
She hesitated, debating whether to step out and physically arrest his movement when the fish vendor beside her suddenly went pale. The woman reached out and violently tugged her sleeve.
“Girl, pack up your inventory right this second! The county magistrate’s son is inbound!” The old lady packed her entire stock in a fraction of three seconds, hoisted her carrying pole over her shoulders, and bolted down the lane.
Lu Yunxi froze for a microsecond, turning her head to scan the avenue.
The surrounding merchants rapidly processed the environmental cue. Throwing themselves into a panic, they frantically swept their goods into sacks and fled the sector in a wild scramble, running just as fast as the fish vendor.
In less than sixty seconds, the bustling market street was completely abandoned. Only Lu Yunxi remained standing by the curb, her lonely tofu stall resting before her.
A cold wind swept down the desolate avenue, carrying a few dead leaves across the cobblestones as a flock of crows cawed overhead.
Lu Yunxi: “…”
What tier of menace is this magistrate’s son? Is it mathematically necessary for the entire population to log off the street the exact moment he spawns?
Shrugging off the absurdity, she slowly began stowing her wooden platters. Now that the magistrate’s son had cleared the map, not only had the merchants evacuated, but the entire customer base had vanished as well. There was zero operational utility in keeping the stall active.
However, having delayed her departure by a single frame, her escape window slammed shut.
“Halt right there!” a harsh command boomed from the intersection.
A squad of low-level guards wielding long spears charged down the cobblestones, rapidly forming a tight perimeter around her position.
Lu Yunxi monitored the guards encircling her table, her expression turning remarkably subtle. She was beginning to understand the local server rules. These NPCs were effectively acting as a crude municipal code enforcement unit.
Recalling her initial arrival, multiple local elders had sworn to her that setting up a roadside stall in this town required absolutely zero zoning fees. Her eye twitched.
“Honorable officers, I am merely running a baseline micro-business,” she said, plastering a sheepish, innocent smile onto her face while completely ignoring the razor-sharp halberd tip resting centimeters from her throat. “I truly lacked the data that setting up a table here required an administrative fee… If my account needs to clear the arrears, what is the exact gold fee?”
The guards exchange a series of strange, perplexed glances.
One of the officers slowly lowered his halberd, grunting impatiently, “Keep your hands where we can see them! Who fed you that garbage data? Roadside vendors are not subject to tax fees in this jurisdiction!”
Sensing the cold steel leave her neck, Lu Yunxi maintained her serene composure. “Then pray tell, officers, what exact violation has my unit committed to warrant a high-security containment ring?”
“Hmph! You truly claim ignorance regarding your offenses?!” a condescending sneer echoed from down the road.
Lu Yunxi shifted her gaze toward the source of the audio.
A massive entourage suddenly materialized at the far end of the avenue. Six heavily armed officials marched at the vanguard to clear the path, eight muscular palanquin-bearers managed a heavy sedan chair in the center, and six secondary guards brought up the rear to anchor the formation.
This particular transport asset differed drastically from a traditional bridal sedan. It lacked any enclosed silk curtains, featuring an entirely open-air design.
A man with a thoroughly greasy, bloated face sat lounging against the cushions, holding a massive cooked chicken leg in his right hand and aggressively ripping off chunks of meat between sentences. He was the entity who had delivered the spoken dialogue.
“My grand procession is currently auditing the county capital, yet a lowly commoner like yourself possesses the audacity to drop an anchor right in my pathing?!” he barked, contemptuously brandishing his half-eaten chicken leg in her direction.
The luxurious sedan chair advanced from the distance, grinding to a smooth halt the exact microsecond it aligned with her tofu table.
The magistrate’s son shifted his heavy torso, clumsily stepping down from the platform to stand directly before her. He maintained his haughty, arrogant smirk until his eyes fully locked onto Lu Yunxi’s features. Suddenly, his pupils dilated to maximum, a greasy grin spreading across his face as the thick flesh of his cheeks shuddered violently.
“Well, well! It turns out to be a premium-tier little beauty!” he cackled boisterously, running a pair of intensely oily, suggestive eyes up and down her silhouette. “I was running a complex analysis trying to calculate why a maiden would stubbornly refuse to clear the avenue! As it turns out, her AI script was explicitly waiting for my arrival!”
The blue veins along Lu Yunxi’s forehead twitched with dangerous intent.
She seriously wanted to consult the system developers to determine whether these textbook, low-level thugs were actual historical entities or if the narrative design team was simply lazy. Was this repetitive trope genuinely necessary? She felt as though she had triggered encounters with far more degenerate hooligans since spawning into this world than she had in her entire previous life.
“Secure the asset. Transport her back and have the Head Madam log her contract,” the magistrate’s son commanded, tearing another massive chunk of meat from his chicken leg as he waved a dismissive hand toward his guards.
The officials hoisted Lu Yunxi, marching her directly into the heavily fortified magistrate’s estate. It wasn’t until she was violently shoved through a heavy iron door and locked inside a pitch-black holding cell that her processing units finally stabilized.
“Ugh… sob…” a faint, muffled whimper echoed through the dark interior.
Lu Yunxi’s brow knit into a tight line. She turned her head, expanding her visual senses to locate a source of light within the cell.
Right at that tactical junction, a sudden wave of localized body heat materialized directly behind her shoulder blades.
“Sister Lu?!”
Lu Yunxi’s survival instincts triggered a rapid reflex sequence. Her hair stood on end, and she spun her torso around, unleashing a lightning-fast fist into the dark airspace.
“Ow—!”
A sharp shriek cut through the gloom as a female vessel crashed heavily onto the floorboards.
Lu Yunxi sharpened her visual focus, peering down through the shadows. Wait, Zhou Yu?!
Staring at the girl writhing on the ground while desperately clutching her bruised face, Lu Yunxi’s eye twitched violently. She felt an immense wave of relief that her motor controls had automatically throttled her physical output just now. Had she channeled even ten percent of her Grandmaster kinetic force into that punch, she would currently be looking at a corpse.
“Why on earth have your coordinates synced to this cell?!” She let out a heavy breath, forcibly suppressing her sheer helplessness as she knelt down, locking her eyes onto Zhou Yu’s face to cast a swift health-recovery spell.
“My unit was swept up in a random sweep and dragged straight into the compound! I originally intended to submit an application for a standard administrative clerk position at the government office, but the guards bypassed the interface and threw me in here!” Zhou Yu groaned, the intense throbbing behind her eyelids instantly evaporating as the healing spell cleared the debuff. She spread her hands in the dark, her face a picture of absolute, deadpan speechlessness. “According to the chat logs of the other captives, every single girl secured in this facility is hard-coded to become a concubine for the magistrate’s son!”
Zhou Yu had been captured several days prior to her arrival, allowing her to compile a decent amount of localized intelligence.
Logically, as official concubines of the heir apparent, the girls should have been garrisoned within the primary residential wings of the magistrate’s ancestral mansion rather than being packed into this dark, depressing suburban outpost.
But the sheer density of his harem had completely bricked their real estate logistics.
The magistrate’s estate was indisputably the largest and most luxurious mansion in the entire county database, yet its total square footage was barely sufficient to accommodate his inner circle of primary wives and elite favorites—to say nothing of the endless daughters his lineage had produced.
Fortunately for their inheritance lines, the magistrate’s son was an only child; had the family spawned secondary male heirs, their estate management would have suffered a total collapse.
Even so, only the magistrate’s primary wife and his top ten preferred concubines possessed the security clearance to occupy the central mansion. The remaining lower-tier units were systematically discarded, dumped into this dark holding facility hidden away in the suburbs.
“My apologies for the physical strike,” Lu Yunxi noted, helping her up. “My sensors calculated a hostile entity was executing an ambush, so I initiated a counter-attack without running a full identification scan. I hope your parameters didn’t take severe structural damage?”
