Chapter 161| Chapter 162| Chapter 163
Chapter 161: Don’t Run Away
Seeing that they were about to be physically dragged away, the four maids and matrons panicked, screaming at the top of their lungs:
“Master, we are innocent! It was the Young Madam who explicitly commanded us! She ordered that the absolute first thing we do upon that woman’s awakening was to report directly to her!”
“Master, please, have mercy! We won’t ever do it again! We swear we’ll never disturb the Young Madam’s rest with reports in the middle of the night again!”
“…”
In their absolute terror, their pupils dilated as they roared their excuses, projecting their voices so loudly that every single servant and concubine hiding in the shadows around the courtyard could hear their defense crystal clear.
The senior matrons attempting to haul them away felt their expressions violently twist. Surged with a mixture of intense panic and fury, they scrambled to slap their hands over the screaming guards’ mouths.
If those words were allowed to circulate, the entire household would brand the Young Madam as a demanding, neurotic tyrant! Who would ever willingly serve under her command after that?!
“Silence, you treacherous little wenches! How dare you deliberately attempt to drag the Young Madam’s spotless reputation through the mud at an hour like this?!” one of the senior matrons snarled. Her eyes flared with ruthless intent. Without a second thought, she ripped off her own soiled socks and brutally jammed them into the screaming guards’ mouths to gag them.
The concubine who had slinked out of the bedchamber alongside Young Master Mo suddenly offered a sweet, poisoned smile. “Oh, Master, please do not strain your health with anger. These unruly servants must be fabricating lies! The Young Madam has been feeling quite unwell lately, which is likely why she failed to properly discipline her staff. Otherwise, she certainly would have stepped out to greet you by now, wouldn’t she?”
The senior matron’s heart violently skipped a beat. She shot the concubine a venomous, hateful glare before frantically turning back to Young Master Mo. “Master, the concubine speaks the truth! The Young Madam has indeed fallen ill, which is the sole reason she hasn’t emerged to offer her respects…”
Young Master Mo merely let out a cold, mocking sneer. “Unwell?! What exactly could possibly be wrong with her?! Wasn’t she perfectly fine this morning, hosting a lavish tea party with her socialite friends?!”
He was fully aware his wife hailed from a deeply entrenched, affluent lineage, but her arrogance had grown entirely out of hand! Ever since their wedding day, she had greeted him with nothing but a cold, deadpan expression, bringing absolute misery into his household.
If she harbored such profound disdain for him, why had she agreed to the marriage arrangement in the first place?
Even if he had only staged this theatrical marriage to solidify his parameters to deal with Qing’er, he was still profoundly irritated by his wife’s attitude.
As the diverse cast of characters in the Mo Mansion processed the drama, Lu Yunxi remained comfortably crouched on the rooftop, observing the chaos with immense interest, exactly as if she were watching a premium theatrical drama unfold.
However, she noted a peculiar demographic quirk: while the Mo Mansion possessed a staggering volume of concubines—so many she couldn’t even mentally index them all—there was a stark, complete absence of children running around the estate.
Given the sheer size of the household, she found it deeply confusing.
Lu Yunxi concentrated on her acoustic parameters for a few minutes, eventually catching a hushed conversation filtering up from the primary bedchamber below.
“Where exactly is the woman the young master smuggled into the estate?” an icy, commanding voice asked.
“Young Madam, please, there is no need to stress your humors over some random stray he dragged in from the gutters. You are well aware that the young master never anchors his attention to a single plaything for long,” an elderly, earnest voice advised.
“Do not mistake my intentions, Nanny. I am fully aware of his vile nature. It is simply…” The woman addressed as the Young Madam let out a sharp sneer. “…that I absolutely refuse to tolerate this specific insult! He is free to squander his seed on whatever loose women he desires, but I shall be the one to select and assign his concubines. For him to bypass my authority and smuggle a stray into the estate from parts unknown… Nanny, find a way to discretely inject our operatives into her detail.”
“Young Madam, are you intending to execute a direct intervention against the girl? But it appears the young master hasn’t even bothered to visit her quarters,” the old nanny cautioned, her brow furrowing. “If you orchestrate a move against her, you risk soiling your own hands for nothing.”
“I comprehend your logic, Nanny, but I simply cannot let this slide. I hold the binding indentures for every other concubine in this mansion; their lives rest entirely in my palm, which is why I permit them to stay. But this stray anomaly is entirely off the grid… She cannot be allowed to remain under my roof!” The Young Madam shook her head decisively. “But do not fret, Nanny. If only to accumulate karmic blessings for the heirs I shall one day bear, I will not order her execution.”
Lu Yunxi continued to eavesdrop for another ten minutes, but having failed to intercept the specific tactical blueprint of the extraction, she simply shrugged, dropped back into her room, and comfortably returned to sleep.
She slept soundly through the night. The operatives dispatched by the Young Madam didn’t execute their breach until the crack of dawn.
Just as Lu Yunxi was blinking her eyes open, her consciousness still wading through the dregs of sleep, a horribly familiar cloth was suddenly clamped firmly over her nose and mouth.
The pungent, synthetic chemical stench and the rough texture of the fabric immediately triggered her memory files, snapping her completely awake.
I am honestly impressed by how rapidly the Young Madam mobilized her assets! But I am infinitely more astounded by the fact that after monologuing about her grand strategy for half the night, her ultimate master plan was just to drug me unconscious… Really? That’s it?!
Feeling her physical vessel being hoisted into the air, Lu Yunxi let out a silent, internal sigh.
The operational playbooks of these local NPCs were incredibly repetitive, recycling the exact same two kidnapping mechanics ad nauseam. It was getting horribly boring.
The operatives carrying her marched through the estate for several minutes before finally dumping her onto a hard surface and binding her wrists and ankles with heavy rope.
As the heavy wooden door creaked shut and the lock clicked into place, the muffled sounds of soft, terrified sobbing drifted through the gloom.
Lu Yunxi slowly fluttered her eyes open.
Her visual parameters rendered a dark, dingy woodshed. Scanning the structural layout, she realized it looked almost identical to the storage yard directly adjacent to the isolated sector she had originally been dumped in.
The courtyard she had previously occupied sat in the extreme northwest corner of the estate, bordered by two massive external walls facing the public street. The adjoining eastern courtyard functioned entirely as an industrial storage hub for lumber, coal, and miscellaneous sundries.
Given her complete geographic mapping of the Mo Mansion, she calculated an eighty percent probability that she had merely been shifted one courtyard over. The transit time had been incredibly brief, proving she hadn’t been moved far. Furthermore, the estate’s primary kitchen operated on a 24-hour cycle and was perpetually swarming with staff; an extraction team wouldn’t risk stashing a hostage anywhere near that high-traffic zone. This desolate storage sector was the perfect blind spot.
She shifted her gaze toward the source of the weeping, noting two young girls huddled in the corner, and felt a wave of mild confusion.
“Excuse me, but who might you two be? And where exactly are we?” Lu Yunxi asked, sitting up straight and plastering a look of profound, innocent bewilderment onto her face.
Hearing her voice, the two sobbing girls gradually stifled their tears.
“You… you truly don’t know where we are?” the girl dressed in a faded blue tunic asked, looking at her with wide, curious eyes.
“I really don’t. One moment I was casually browsing the marketplace stalls… and the next, I wake up in this shed,” Lu Yunxi replied, her expression a perfect mask of confusion.
The two girls instantly shot her looks of profound, empathetic pity.
“We are currently locked inside the Mo Mansion. You… well, the reality is, the three of us are likely waiting to be sold to the human traffickers.”
Hearing those horribly familiar words, Lu Yunxi almost froze in a deadpan silence.
Her eye twitched. She was just about to snap her ropes and break out of the shed when the girl sitting adjacent to her burst into a fresh wave of hysterical weeping.
“I was legally purchased by Young Master Mo from the market! But the exact day I was drafted into the household, the Young Madam ordered her guards to drag me into this woodshed, declaring she intended to liquidate my contract…” The girl in blue was so overwhelmed by her tragic fate that she buried her face in her knees, sobbing uncontrollably.
Seeing her break down, the second girl, dressed in a faded pink tunic, felt her own despair flare and began to weep as well. “I was originally purchased as a baseline domestic servant for the Mo Mansion! My only assigned duty was to tend the kitchen fires. Who could have foreseen that while I was simply walking back from the latrines one afternoon, I would accidentally bump into the young master in the corridor… The Young Madam instantly ordered me to be sold to the slavers. I really didn’t do anything wrong…”
The more the two girls shared their backstories, the more devastated they became. But the more Lu Yunxi listened to their data, the more thoroughly bewildered she grew.
The Young Madam had explicitly monologued that while she was willing to tolerate the presence of the other officially indentured concubines, she absolutely refused to permit an unregistered stray like Lu Yunxi to remain in the estate. Lu Yunxi had initially operated under the assumption that she was the primary, exclusive target of the Young Madam’s jealousy.
She absolutely had not anticipated a crowded waiting room!
What is going on here? Does the Young Madam simply harbor a zero-tolerance policy for anyone who crosses her path?
Lu Yunxi let out a soft, mocking chuckle.
She was just preparing to stand up and dismantle the shed when the distinct sound of heavy footsteps echoed outside the walls.
The heavy wooden door was yanked open, and a third, terrified young girl was violently hurled into the room before the lock snapped shut again.
Lu Yunxi: ???
In a matter of seconds, the entire shed descended into a chaotic chorus of overlapping weeping.
A few days later.
A heavy, unmarked transport carriage rumbled along a jagged, desolate mountain path, heading toward parts unknown.
Lu Yunxi sat comfortably amongst a tightly packed cluster of girls. Because her captors had systematically fed her heavy doses of a muscle-softening narcotic, they hadn’t bothered to bind her wrists or ankles with rope.
However, the relentless, ambient weeping echoing throughout the cabin made it mathematically impossible for her to catch a moment of rest.
Her brow twitched with annoyance.
When that third girl had been thrown into the shed, Lu Yunxi had initially logged the event as a random, isolated coincidence. But as the days progressed, she quickly realized the Young Madam operated an incredibly high-volume, automated pipeline.
Barely two days after she was dumped in the storage sector, three additional maids were thrown into the cell. Then, the entire collective was simultaneously gassed unconscious and loaded into this exact carriage.
Within the crowded cabin, Lu Yunxi was technically the only hostage who was completely “oblivious” to the internal politics of the Mo Mansion. Every other girl possessed a firm understanding of exactly why the Young Madam had marked them for liquidation.
Consequently, the entire collective harbored a deep, profound sympathy for Lu Yunxi, viewing her as an innocent civilian who had been dragged into a horrific nightmare without knowing a single thing. They believed her fate was the most tragic of all.
They didn’t just internalize their sympathy; they actively demonstrated it through their actions.
“Feeding time!” an elderly, hardened matron barked as the carriage ground to a halt. She roughly yanked the leather curtain aside.
She retrieved a sack of stale, dry hardtack biscuits, violently snapping them into crude fragments. She tossed a single, meager shard to each girl, then turned her back to consume her own premium rations, entirely unconcerned with their survival parameters.
Instead of greedily devouring their portions, the little girls carefully snapped a small fragment off their own biscuits and silently pressed the pieces into Lu Yunxi’s hands, before gingerly nibbling on their remaining crumbs.
Lu Yunxi: “…”
She genuinely appreciated the warm, uncorrupted kindness these girls were projecting, but she really, really did not want to eat this… Her facial expression contorted into a deeply strained, subtle grimace.
Ultimately, she accepted the fragments.
Every single meal this matron distributed had been heavily laced with the potent muscle-softening narcotic. Furthermore, the trafficking syndicate clearly lacked a precision alchemist; their dosage calculations were wildly erratic, frequently flooding the food with lethal concentrations of the drug. If these young girls continued to ingest the spiked rations, their baseline physical parameters would permanently degrade, leaving them crippled from the toxic accumulation.
The little girls, blinded by their non-stop crying and the sheer exhaustion of the journey, naturally assumed their severe physical weakness was simply a byproduct of fatigue. They didn’t harbor a single shred of suspicion regarding the food supply.
Lu Yunxi, however, possessed vastly superior diagnostics. As a Grandmaster who had systematically mastered the pharmaceutical arts, if she couldn’t detect a crude chemical poisoning operation, she might as well permanently log off the server and return to a starter village to farm sweet potatoes.
Chapter 162: Almost Gone
Lu Yunxi kept her eyes and ears peeled, processing the environmental data as her group of girls was escorted through the remote village by a pack of rugged, filthy men.
The settlement was built directly onto the slope of the mountain, featuring rows of low, crumbling mud houses constructed along a winding dirt path.
There was a surprisingly high concentration of men lingering outside the huts. Regardless of their age, every single one of them watched the new arrivals with cloudy, intensely predatory eyes, unconsciously wearing sleazy, malicious smiles on their faces.
The few women Lu Yunxi managed to spot were in horrific condition. With disheveled hair and tattered clothes, they looked like absolute lunatics. They labored silently in the dirt, acting as though they were entirely invisible, their faces fixed in expressions of pure, hollow numbness.
Running a quick census, Lu Yunxi calculated the village possessed roughly thirty households.
Her group was marched to a dilapidated, heavily weathered shack situated at the extreme far end of the settlement.
“Get inside!” the man bringing up the rear barked, giving them a violent shove.
Lu Yunxi deliberately staggered her footing, forcing a look of sheer, trembling terror onto her face as she silently huddled into a crouch in the corner.
Absolutely no one noticed the microscopic cloud of colorless, odorless powder she had already released into the localized airspace.
Several men gathered in front of the huddled girls. One of them procured a basin of murky water from outside and roughly scrubbed the mud from their faces, one by one.
“Haha! I knew the inventory that slaver brought us was premium! The women delivered by the other syndicates might be able to breed, but they don’t possess aesthetic parameters anywhere near this high!” One of the villagers was so ecstatic that he stood directly in front of the group, boldly running his grimy hands over their cheeks, one by one.
Feeling the man’s filthy, callused hand graze her face, a lethal chill flashed in Lu Yunxi’s eyes. She was just preparing to violently slap his arm away when she realized her physical vessel was trembling uncontrollably.
Lu Yunxi: ???
Strange! Why are my muscles suddenly spasming?
Thoroughly bewildered, she instantly double-cast two high-tier internal healing spells onto her avatar, but her physical parameters remained completely unchanged.
It wasn’t until she subtly shifted her gaze to monitor her companions that she finally processed the data.
Throughout the entire transit, the girls had continuously vowed they wouldn’t try to escape, insisting on riding the transport carriage to the final destination while maintaining a facade of absolute fearlessness. Consequently, once they had spawned into the village, Lu Yunxi had focused her cognitive processing entirely on mapping the external environment and analyzing the hostiles, completely neglecting to monitor her team’s psychological state.
As it turned out… the girls were literally shaking with pure, unadulterated terror, and her proximity to them had caused the trembling to bleed over.
While Lu Yunxi was busy unraveling the mystery of her shaking, the group of villagers concluded their inspection, nodding to one another with profound satisfaction—looking exactly like merchants who had just successfully appraised a fresh shipment of prime pork.
Watching the men stroll out of the shack, she immediately turned to comfort the terrified girls. “Do not panic. While we were on the road, I managed to harvest a significant volume of wild fruits containing natural muscle-softening toxins. Once the opportunity presents itself, I will discretely deploy the extract into their communal food supply. We will neutralize them.”
Seeing her project such supreme, unshakeable confidence, the girls felt their panic immediately recede.
They were just about to huddle closer to discuss their tactical execution when Lu Yunxi’s eyes suddenly narrowed. She raised an index finger to her lips, signaling absolute silence.
The group instantly quieted down, shrinking back into their crouches and lowering their heads to project total submission.
A moment later, a woman with a severe, hollow expression marched into the shack carrying a heavy iron pot.
The pot was filled to the brim with a boiling, watery stew consisting of various coarse wild vegetables.
Maintaining her deadpan expression, the woman retrieved a stack of chipped, filthy clay bowls, scooped out seven servings of the thin, green broth, and shoved them toward the girls.
“This is your food ration for the day. Once you consume it, go straight to sleep.”
Lu Yunxi stared down at the bowl of watery green sludge, noting the two tough, overgrown weeds floating on the surface that looked entirely unchewable. Her eye twitched.
As the woman turned to leave, one of the braver girls suddenly spoke up. “Auntie, please… we intercepted data indicating we were purchased to serve as brides… Do you happen to know which specific household we have been assigned to?”
The expressionless woman suddenly froze. She slowly turned her head, staring at the girls with a bizarre, intense look for several long seconds before bursting into a harsh, hysterical laugh. “Which specific household?! You are everyone’s bride!”
The question seemed to have triggered a deeply buried trauma. Her previously numb face twisted into a mask of pure, ferocious hatred and disgust. “Hahaha! Not a single one of us can ever escape this hell! The women dumped into this ravine don’t belong to a single man—we belong to the entire village!”
With a final, unhinged cackle, the woman spun on her heel and marched out of the shack with the remaining pot of vegetable scraps.
Everyone: “…”
The girls, who had just managed to stabilize their anxiety, were plunged right back into a state of absolute, existential terror.
It took Lu Yunxi a considerable amount of time to talk them down and restore their nerve. Once everyone had calmed, she slipped out of the shack to conduct a covert reconnaissance of the settlement.
“What’s the tactical layout? Can we execute an escape?” Seeing her slip back into the room, the girls instantly scrambled to their feet, their faces tight with nervous anticipation.
Lu Yunxi: “…”
Didn’t you all specifically state that you had nowhere to go, so running away was pointless?! Why the sudden change in corporate strategy?!
She couldn’t help but issue a silent, internal complaint before getting straight down to business. “The women in this settlement operate on a forced rotation, assigned to a different household for a full month before being transferred. There are thirteen surviving women in total. Only three possess the clearance to walk the grounds; the remaining ten are permanently bound with rope. As for the hostiles, there are at minimum thirty to forty able-bodied men. Furthermore, the slaver who escorted us into the ravine this morning has already logged off; I cannot track his current coordinates.”
She waved her hand, signaling the team to close the perimeter so she could lower her voice. “Here is our operational blueprint…”
Over the next few days, Lu Yunxi systematically snuck out of the shack to harvest wild game and fresh rations, ensuring her team ate well, stayed hydrated, and maximized their stamina recovery.
After several days of tense waiting, the original mob of villagers finally returned to the dilapidated shack—accompanied by a fresh batch of newly purchased girls.
The new arrivals were in a vastly worse psychological state than Lu Yunxi’s team. The exact moment they were violently shoved through the threshold, they began trembling uncontrollably like terrified, cornered animals.
“Haha! Fresh meat has spawned!”
“Don’t the trafficking syndicates usually run their supply lines in the autumn? Why did a shipment trigger this early in the fiscal year?”
“Who cares about the logistics! Let’s prioritize how we’re splitting the new assets, shall we?”
The mob of villagers roughly scrubbed the dirt from the new girls’ faces, immediately initiating a degrading appraisal of their physical parameters.
“This one possesses excellent visual stats. She has a round face and looks incredibly festive. Transfer her contract to my household!”
“This one looks severely underfed. With a frame that fragile, how could she possibly survive childbirth…”
Lu Yunxi ignored the disgusting banter entirely. Her attention was locked onto a single, critical anomaly: one of the newly delivered girls was completely unconscious!
The girl was dressed in a coarse, filthy gray linen tunic, and her face was caked with so much grime she looked as though she had been dragged through a landfill. But the most alarming variable was the deep laceration on her forehead, which was actively bleeding. As the blood loss continued, her lips were turning a translucent shade of white.
Because a wall of villagers separated them, Lu Yunxi couldn’t physically reach the patient to execute a manual pulse check. She immediately deployed her system’s advanced scanning probe.
Target Condition: Severe Hemorrhage.
[Lv.1 HP: 5/100]
Staring at the agonizingly low 5 HP remaining on her health bar, Lu Yunxi inhaled a sharp gasp.
She is literally seconds away from a permanent logout!
She prepared to cancel the scan and quickly fetch a specialized potion from her inventory to stabilize the girl later. However, she noticed the digital numbers hovering over the girl’s head had begun to shift.
4, 3, 2… Her health points were actively draining in real-time. The moment that final drop of HP vanished, the girl’s avatar would be permanently deleted!
Lu Yunxi didn’t hesitate for another microsecond. Bypassing the inventory entirely, she instantly cast a max-tier targeted blood-recovery spell directly onto the girl, instantly refilling her HP bar to 100%.
Despite her vitals being stabilized, perhaps due to a severe concussion or lingering trauma, the girl merely offered a weak frown and remained deeply unconscious.
“Hey, Eldest Brother, I just conceptualized an incredibly entertaining new interaction format…”
Suddenly, an oily, disgustingly obscene gaze swept over the shack, locking onto Lu Yunxi and her team with blatant malice.
Only then did Lu Yunxi divert her attention back to the hostiles.
The men huddled together, whispering conspiratorially for a few moments before commanding an elderly woman to haul in several heavy buckets of bathwater.
“Scrub yourselves clean! You’re completely caked in filth—you’re absolutely disgusting! I have no idea when your hygiene parameters were last reset, but you reek!” One of the villagers tilted his chin up, sweeping a cold, disgusted glare over the girls before wrinkling his nose and clamping a hand over his face, acting exactly as though they were carrying a lethal virus.
Lu Yunxi stared at the thick, crusty layers of black grime coating the man’s own skin—looking as though his avatar hadn’t registered a bath in several decades—and was rendered utterly speechless.
What exactly is this mechanic?
The literal pot calling the kettle black?!
The elderly woman finished boiling the water, filling a massive wooden tub for the captives. Wiping a heavy sheen of sweat from her brow, she clutched her aching spine and hobbled out of the shack. It was painfully obvious that hauling dozens of heavy water buckets was severely degrading the old woman’s stamina.
Seeing that the villagers had exited the room and the heavy wooden door was firmly barred by the old woman, the captured girls finally allowed their tension to ease.
“Are we… are we actually required to bathe?” The girls who had originally accompanied Lu Yunxi were entirely accustomed to following her command directives; they immediately turned to her for confirmation.
Among the four newly arrived girls—excluding the one who remained unconscious on the floor—the remaining three shuddered violently, their faces masked in absolute, terrified confusion. Noticing that the veteran captives were deferring to Lu Yunxi, they couldn’t help but look toward her as well.
Lu Yunxi: “…”
Her advanced acoustic sensors picked up a sudden shift in the environmental audio outside the shack. Recognizing the distinct, rapid footfalls approaching their coordinates, her eyes narrowed. “Hostiles inbound!”
Every single girl in the room shuddered in perfect unison, a fresh wave of panic gripping their hearts.
The next second.
The wooden door was violently kicked open, and one of the villagers who had just departed burst back into the room.
“Little sisters, I deduced your baseline parameters might be too low to scrub yourselves properly! I have returned to personally assist you with your hygiene maintenance!”
Before the terrified girls could even process the threat, several more villagers spawned in the doorway behind him.
“Hey! You treacherous little parasite! You fed us false data claiming you were heading to the latrines! Is this how you navigate to the toilet?!”
Chapter 163: Fighting All Over
The latecomers immediately smacked the back of the first man’s head, chuckling as they eagerly snapped their fingers and stepped into the room.
Lu Yunxi scanned the group of men closing in on them, her grip tightening almost imperceptibly.
It appeared the original tactical plan needed to be revised.
No one noticed the cold steel of the dagger that had just slipped silently from her sleeve into her palm.
However, before she could execute the first strike, the unconscious girl lying on the floor suddenly jolted awake.
Both Lu Yunxi’s team and the group of villagers froze, entirely stunned by the first words to fall from the girl’s mouth.
“My head is killing me… where am I?” the girl muttered, rubbing her temples as she sat up with a heavy frown. Suddenly, her eyes widened in sheer panic, and she frantically began patting her pockets. “Oh no! I have to clock in for work today! I’m going to be late! I’m completely doomed!”
“Clock in for work?” Lu Yunxi murmured softly.
The native NPCs of this world used terminology like “going to labor” or “reporting for duty,” but they absolutely never used the phrase “clock in for work”… Was this a vernacular exclusive to the Flower Continent?
Her eyes flashed with sudden realization. She seamlessly slid the dagger back up her sleeve and knelt down to help the girl sit up properly.
“Little sister, are you alright?”
The girl flinched, staring at her in shock. “Who are you?!”
Looking past Lu Yunxi, her gaze swept the dark, dilapidated shack, finally registering the crowd of grimy men hovering over them. Absolute panic seized her features. “Who are all of you?! Where am I?! Wasn’t I just asleep in my own bed?!”
“Your own bed?” The villagers burst into a chorus of harsh, mocking laughter. “Little miss, your own flesh and blood fenced you to our syndicate! From this day forth, you belong to the village. You’d better serve your new husbands well!”
“What?! My family sold me to you?!” The girl was so violently stunned that the words choked in her throat. Her pupils dilated with shock, and her hands began to tremble violently. “That’s mathematically impossible… My parents adore me! They would never sell me!”
“What kind of delusional garbage are you spewing?! If you have the energy to talk back, you have the energy to stand up!” one of the men barked, his brow furrowing with impatience. “Serve us obediently, and your survival parameters will be much smoother!”
The girl was completely paralyzed, staring up at him with a blank, hollow expression.
Lu Yunxi narrowed her eyes, observing the data.
She already had a solid working theory regarding the girl’s true origins!
I just don’t possess the diagnostics to determine whether this girl is a fresh transmigrator who just spawned in, or if her original soul has finally booted back into its proper vessel, just like the artifact mentioned before.
At that exact moment.
A frantic, rapid pounding echoed against the shack’s door.
“What’s the emergency?!” several of the men snapped, thoroughly irritated by the interruption.
“Disaster, masters! A fire has broken out in the central courtyard!” the elderly woman who distributed their rations shrieked, bursting through the threshold with absolute panic written across her face.
The men instantly abandoned their lecherous advance. Without wasting a single second to argue, they bolted out of the shack to contain the blaze.
The elderly woman stood by the door, tracking their retreating figures. The moment they vanished down the path, the panic melted from her face, replaced by a flash of freezing, absolute hatred.
She turned a cold, calculating gaze onto the captive girls. “Evacuate immediately! If you don’t want to endure a fate infinitely worse than death, flee toward the rear cliffs. There is a pack of wild tigers nesting there; they will end your suffering swiftly.”
Lu Yunxi was mildly surprised by the data drop.
She had initially assumed that since this woman possessed the clearance to freely navigate the settlement, she was actively collaborating with the hostiles and wouldn’t assist them. Who could have guessed… and one shouldn’t assume the woman was offering malicious advice, either. For a mortal girl trapped in this hellscape, a quick execution by a tiger truly was a superior alternative to the daily torment.
Having delivered her warning, the elderly woman lowered her head and hobbled back out into the dirt to resume her chores.
The remaining girls exchanged terrified, confused glances.
“Sister Lu… should we execute her escape plan?” the group asked, turning to her for leadership.
The only entity whose processor was still severely lagging finally managed to reboot. “Hold on! What is happening?! Someone explain the current server dynamics to me immediately!”
Scrambling to her feet, she looked entirely prepared to bolt out the front door. “No, this is unacceptable! I have to return to my apartment!”
“What is wrong with your memory banks?!” The girls who had been transported with her were thoroughly shocked. “Didn’t you explicitly state in the carriage that your brother sold your contract?!”
Despite the shack being packed with captives, the sudden influx of conflicting data created a chaotic feedback loop, making it incredibly difficult to establish a coherent timeline.
Ultimately, Lu Yunxi stepped forward, intercepting the panicking girl and concisely summarizing the current geopolitical situation using baseline terminology both parties could process.
Having absorbed the horrific reality of the data, the suspected transmigrator exploded with absolute outrage. “The sheer audacity! How dare they operate a human trafficking syndicate in broad daylight! We need to break out of this sector and contact the local authorities immediately!”
“Contact who?” The native girls stared at her in utter confusion.
The girl’s lips trembled. Her frantic gaze, which had been wildly scanning the room, finally anchored onto the environmental details.
She stared at the archaic, pre-industrial clothing draped over the native NPCs, then looked down at her own coarse, historical linen tunic. The final pieces of the puzzle clicked into place.
“Did I… did I actually transmigrate?” she murmured under her breath, her lips trembling with existential shock.
The audio output was so incredibly faint that no one in the room caught the dialogue—except for Lu Yunxi’s max-tier sensory stats. She let out a quiet, internal sigh of relief. This player has been awake for ten minutes, and she finally read the server patch notes!
Fortunately, one of the native girls who had shared the transport carriage recalled the backstory the transmigrator’s predecessor had shared during the journey, quickly summarizing the data log.
“Your assigned registry name is Xiaoya. After your parents passed away, your elder brother liquidated your contract.”
“…Abandoning one’s original spawn point equates to initiating a new save file. From this moment onward, you may refer to me as Zhou Yu,” the girl declared with profound reluctance, formally accepting her new avatar’s tragic backstory.
The newly formed party rapidly synced their intelligence files, establishing a baseline understanding of their current tactical situation. Just as they were pivoting to draft an extraction protocol, the heavy footfalls of the returning villagers echoed outside.
When the elderly woman stepped back into the shack behind them, her face registered genuine shock that the girls hadn’t already fled the perimeter. She quickly masked her expression, silently lowering her head to distribute the evening rations.
“Dammit all! If I ever uncover the identity of the idiot whose faulty pathing triggered that fire, I’ll beat him into digital paste!” one of the villagers spat viciously.
They stormed into the room cursing up a storm, but the moment their eyes locked onto the massive cluster of captive girls, their rage began to dissipate.
“Brothers, let’s dump the negative debuffs! Today is an incredibly rare, high-yield spawn day. We have two separate shipments colliding at once! We can all share the loot!”
Wearing oily, lecherous grins, the mob began slowly advancing on the girls.
“Hold your advance!” one of the men suddenly barked, delivering a vicious, heavy kick straight into the elderly woman’s ribs. “You useless, stinking parasite! Didn’t I explicitly command you to run these assets through a hygiene cycle?! What is the meaning of this?! Why are their dirt parameters still maxed out?!”
The elderly woman staggered violently from the impact, desperately bowing and offering frantic, groveling apologies. “Forgive me, masters, forgive me! I was reassigned to manage the fire containment… The bathwater has gone entirely cold. Please, allow me to reboot the boilers.”
“Who cares about the water temperature?!” one of the villagers rolled his eyes, thoroughly impatient. “They aren’t premium imperial concubines. Just scrub them down with the cold water! My stamina bar hasn’t been drained by a woman in ages!”
“Forget the old crone! We’ll handle the hygiene cycle ourselves!”
With that declaration, the men rolled up their sleeves and aggressively lunged toward the captives.
Lu Yunxi happened to be positioned in the far corner of the room.
It was a terrible tactical placement for crowd control. She was just preparing to execute a micro-dash to secure a superior combat angle when a deafening CRASH shattered the tension.
The massive wooden tub resting in the center of the room had been violently overturned. Unable to withstand the kinetic impact, the reinforced wooden staves shattered into jagged splinters.
Zhou Yu snatched a heavy, dripping plank of jagged wood from the floorboards and hurled it directly at the advancing men, her eyes blazing with absolute, bloodshot fury. “Back the hell off! Do not touch me!”
Lu Yunxi and the native girls froze in shock. Zhou Yu had been projecting a calm, rational demeanor just seconds prior, yet her aggression parameters had suddenly spiked to maximum!
“You suicidal little bitch! You’re begging for a permanent logout!” Several men threw their arms up to deflect the incoming wooden shrapnel. A wave of cruel, lethal intent flashed in their eyes as they synchronized their aggro and swarmed Zhou Yu.
“Form up! Support the vanguard!” Lu Yunxi’s expression darkened. She instantly snatched a heavy wooden stave from the wreckage and ruthlessly drove it into the face of the nearest hostile.
Triggered by her initiation, the native girls instantly entered the combat sequence.
With a Grandmaster-level powerhouse like Lu Yunxi secretly anchoring a squad of low-level rookies, dismantling the opposition was entirely effortless.
“What is our next objective?!” The native girls stared at the pile of groaning villagers sprawled across the dirt, their faces pale with panic. “Now that we’ve inflicted physical damage, they will definitely initiate a catastrophic revenge protocol!”
Just as the panic set in—
The men writhing on the floor suddenly synchronized their vocal outputs, roaring at the top of their lungs: “Emergency! Breach in sector four! The assets have turned hostile!”
The deafening alert siren echoed across the entire valley in a fraction of a second.
Before Lu Yunxi and the team could even establish a defensive perimeter, a massive wave of enraged villagers flooded toward the shack from the exterior.
The girls anchored themselves just inside the threshold, wielding brooms, splintered planks, and heavy branches, desperately spamming their attack animations to repel the invading mob and bottleneck the hostiles at the door.
To their absolute shock, the elderly woman who delivered their rations seamlessly joined their party, grabbing a heavy iron ladle to furiously bludgeon the attackers pushing through the frame.
Time dilated into a grueling, chaotic blur of violence.
By the time the server sky had transitioned entirely into night, they had successfully beaten the absolute life out of every single male NPC in the village.
