Chapter 197| Chapter 198| Chapter 199
Chapter 197: Smart People
Lu Yunxi rubbed her temples and fell into deep thought. She was just about to ask her disciple what exactly he had encountered after escaping when, without warning, the world in front of her eyes suddenly went pitch black.
“Master?!” Shen San shrieked in horror.
Hearing the commotion, the villagers guarding the house rushed in immediately.
“Doctor Lu?! Oh no! Doctor Lu has fainted!”
In an instant, the entire village was thrown into absolute chaos.
It took quite a while before someone finally remembered the village’s original doctor. Fortunately, Lu Yunxi had already cured Doctor Cheng, and he had woken up from his coma. Otherwise, with no other doctor in the village, they wouldn’t have known who to turn to for help.
The trouble was that Doctor Cheng’s medical skills were mediocre at best, and he was rarely able to solve any complex conditions. But now, he was the only option left.
Since the villagers couldn’t find anyone else, they rushed to his house, hoisted him up, and carried him all the way back. As they ran, they frantically explained the situation. “Doctor Cheng, please, you have to look at Doctor Lu!”
Doctor Cheng nodded quickly. He was a compassionate man, and besides, since Lu Yunxi had just saved his life, he felt a deep obligation to help.
However, the moment he placed his fingers on Lu Yunxi’s wrist, his brow knit together in a tight frown. After a long silence, he let out a heavy sigh. “This is bad! Doctor Lu’s condition… you had better start preparing for her funeral.”
“What?!” The villagers’ faces turned pale with shock.
Shen San utterly refused to accept this. He dragged himself out of bed, completely ignoring the fresh stream of blood bubbling from the corner of his mouth, and desperately lunged forward to grab the hem of Doctor Cheng’s robes.
Looking like a ghost with his wild, bloodshot eyes, Shen San gripped the doctor’s clothes with terrifying strength, his voice hoarse and breaking. “Doctor, I beg you, save her!”
Doctor Cheng stared back at him, feeling a massive headache coming on. He was only equipped to treat basic, everyday illnesses. Looking at Lu Yunxi’s current state, he could tell at a glance that she had been poisoned, but he had absolutely no idea what kind of toxin it was, let alone what medicine could counter it.
The surrounding villagers chimed in anxiously. “Yes, Doctor Cheng, please do something! At least help Doctor Lu wake up! Once she’s awake, she can treat herself!”
The villagers were well aware of his limited skills, so they naturally didn’t expect him to completely cure her.
Even so, Doctor Cheng was caught in a terrible dilemma. His father had passed away early, leaving him with very little formal training; even his methods for treating a common cold were things he had slowly figured out through his own trial and error. He was terrified that if he forced a random medicine down Lu Yunxi’s throat, it wouldn’t wake her up at all, but rather send her straight to her grave.
Under the desperate, expectant gazes of the crowd, he swallowed hard and said with great difficulty, “I will do my best.”
Steeling himself, he took a heavy step forward to approach Lu Yunxi again. It was a distance of barely two paces, but to him, it felt as daunting as climbing over a mountain range.
He focused on her pulse once more. This pulse… hmm… the Chi pulse is deep and thready, the Cun pulse is weak and feeble… Huh? Suddenly, the rhythm shifted completely, becoming broad and hollow, like pressing down on a hollow scallion tube. This must be… wait, what kind of medicine causes this?
The longer Doctor Cheng held his fingers to her wrist, the more a cold sweat began to drench his skin. Perhaps because his anxiety parameters had completely peaked, the sweat kept pouring into his eyes, blurring his vision entirely.
With a heavy thud, his knees buckled.
“Oh no! Doctor Cheng has fainted too!” the villagers screamed in absolute terror.
Shen San watched the scene unfold, a wave of cold dread washing over him. This is a disaster! Without a doctor, who is going to save Master…
Before he could finish the thought, a sudden surge of blood erupted from his lips. Puff!
“Heavens! Doctor Lu’s apprentice is vomiting blood and passed out again!”
Three people had fainted in rapid succession, and two of them were the only medical assets in the village. For a while, total panic gripped the settlement. Fortunately, the village chief stepped in just in time to take control of the situation, preventing the crowd from completely losing their minds.
“Village Chief, what do we do now? Why did all three of them collapse like this?” a villager asked, his face pale with worry.
The village chief was completely bewildered. He wasn’t a doctor, so how on earth was he supposed to know what was happening to these three?
He pondered the situation for a moment, tightly gritted his teeth, and finally ordered, “Move them all into the same room first. Get a few of the older women to guard them. They must keep a watchful eye on them at all times. The moment anything changes, report it to me immediately!”
The remaining villagers exchanged helpless looks. Lacking any better alternative, they could only carry out his orders.
As it turned out, the village chief’s strategy held up. Under the constant, meticulous care of the village aunts, the condition of the three patients didn’t deteriorate any further over the next few days.
Eventually, after managing a mountain of chaotic village affairs, the village chief finally cleared his schedule to check on the patients. The moment he stepped through the door, the aunt in charge of the watch met him with a relieved smile.
“Village Chief, Doctor Lu and her apprentice are looking much better, though Doctor Cheng’s condition hasn’t changed much. It’s just like you calculated—they probably fainted from pure exhaustion. They should be waking up shortly.”
The village chief nodded and stepped closer to inspect them. Doctor Cheng’s cot was positioned closest to the entrance, so he checked him first. The man had lost a bit of weight, but otherwise seemed stable.
However, when he walked around the cot to check on Lu Yunxi, the village chief’s brow knit into a deep frown. He stared at her face, and suddenly, his expression violently shifted. “This is bad! Doctor Lu isn’t recovering at all!”
The aunts turning to look at him were utterly confused. “What do you mean? Doctor Lu’s color looks much better!”
“No! When I was a boy, I heard the elders say that when someone is critically ill, a sudden flush of bright red in their cheeks doesn’t mean they are recovering—it means their life force is burning out!” The village chief racked his brain, trying desperately to recall what the old folks had said about a countermeasure, but the specific memory logs were completely blank.
The aunts grew incredibly anxious, completely at a loss for what to do.
The village chief’s grip tightened on his cane as his mind raced. After a long silence, a sudden flash of inspiration hit him. “Wait! When Doctor Cheng checked Doctor Lu’s pulse earlier, didn’t he state that she had been poisoned?”
The aunts recalled the event and nodded in unison. “Yes, but Doctor Cheng explicitly said he had no idea what kind of toxin it was.”
The village chief abruptly whipped his head around to stare at the unconscious Shen San. “Consider the data. Is it possible that the poison ravaging Doctor Lu’s system was covertly transmitted to her by her apprentice?”
“Huh?”
“Think about it! Since many common diseases can easily spread from one person to another, why can’t poisoning be transmitted the exact same way?!” The more the village chief rationalized his hypothesis, the more flawless it seemed to his own mind.
The aunts exchanged thoroughly bewildered glances. “But our group has been managing their care for days, and not a single one of us has triggered a poisoning flag?” According to the chief’s logic, their own health bars should have glitched ages ago!
The village chief waved his hand dismissively. “You women simply lack the structural lore. I heard from the village ancestors that different afflictions transmit through entirely different vectors. Some are contracted by drinking from the same water source or sharing rations, others require direct contact with a target’s blood, and then there are secondary variables… In short, exercise extreme caution when handling them moving forward.”
He then urgently commanded, “Now, waste no time! Retrieve the specific medicine Doctor Lu prepared for her apprentice earlier. Boil a fresh batch and force her to try it!”
After heavily debating the options, the aunts ultimately chose to defer to the chief’s judgment. There was no helping it; the village chief was indisputably the highest-intelligence entity in the settlement. If they didn’t follow the smart man’s parameters, who else could they rely on?
The women immediately threw themselves into motion, their legs moving as fast as spinning wheels. Within half an hour, a fresh bowl of the concoction was ready, and they carefully fed the liquid down Lu Yunxi’s throat. A tense crowd gathered around her cot, breathlessly monitoring the results.
Fortunately, though this specific alchemical formula was completely unsuited to her underlying condition, the absolutely unbearable, mind-numbing bitterness of the draft still successfully jolted Lu Yunxi’s consciousness back online.
She opened her eyes, only to instantly lock gaze with more than a dozen pairs of eyes staring intently into her face.
“Eek!”
Terrified by the sudden crowd, she executed a flawless kinetic leap, instantly sitting bolt upright.
The next microsecond, a severe, splitting migraine hit her skull like a physical hammer blow, causing intense pain. She frantically clutched the edge of the bedframe with one hand, using her other palm to shield her throbbing forehead.
“Doctor Lu, are your vital parameters secure?!”
“Your system has been compromised by a poison script, run a self-diagnostic immediately!”
“This specific formula is remarkably potent! Should I initialize another boil cycle for your inventory?”
The aunts spammed dialogue prompts all at once, the sheer volume of the noise causing her headache to spike even more aggressively.
Lu Yunxi rubbed her temples in silence, waiting patiently until her internal pain metrics finally dropped to a manageable level before she systematically extracted the sequence of events from the women.
In her heart, she was profoundly skeptical about the poisoning diagnosis. After all, her personal medical attributes were so immensely advanced that if her physical vessel had encountered a lethal chemical hazard, her internal monitors would have flagged the discrepancy long ago.
To verify the data, she placed her fingers onto her own wrist to run a precise pulse check.
Wait a minute.
“?! A structural error has actually manifested!”
She was deeply, utterly perplexed. Her physical body had undergone rigorous cultivation training; even if she hadn’t achieved absolute immunity to physical weaponry or elemental elements, her baseline resistances were exceptionally close to that tier. How could her system collapse so abruptly? She hadn’t been bitten by a toxic beast, nor had she consumed any contaminated rations!
“Doctor Lu, what exact countermeasure do you require to save your lifestyle?” the village chief pressed anxiously.
“Give me a moment to process the data,” she replied, hoisting her chin to quiet the surrounding crowd. Her brow furrowed tightly as she analyzed her own pulse. “This pathology… it doesn’t look like a standard poisoning event at all…”
After meticulously auditing her internal pulse variables, Lu Yunxi found herself completely lost in a maze of contradictions. There was indisputably a massive structural anomaly running amok within her physical system, and while the surface symptoms heavily mimicked an advanced poisoning script, the underlying code felt entirely different.
For the first time, her own medical interface had returned a completely unresolvable error.
Chapter 198: The Destined One
Lu Yunxi immediately cast a high-tier blood recovery spell on herself before running a self-targeted detection spell.
[Status: Cursed. Your profile has been afflicted by a localized hex. Escape this cursed village immediately, or your physical vitality parameters will steadily degrade until your lifecycle hits zero.]
Staring at the floating system prompt, a sharp light flashed in her eyes.
Could there be an NPC like Yaxi stationed on the surrounding mountain ridges?
Lu Yunxi distinctly remembered an event from years ago when she had just cleared the Mushroom Village questline. She had encountered Yaxi on a hilltop overlooking the town; devastated by an unfaithful lover, the NPC had triggered a massive area-of-effect curse that blanketed the surrounding settlements.
Now, this village was also heavily cursed. Could this be a generic, localized lore script engineered by the game developers and randomly distributed across different server nodes?
With that hypothesis in mind, she immediately sought out the village chief.
“Village Chief, your administration must realize that an insane percentage of your demographic is perpetually sick… Has your leadership truly failed to map out a counter-strategy?” When an isolated village was trapped by a curse, they were generally forced to exile their residents because they couldn’t survive past their eighteenth year. Even if Dragon Village couldn’t manually extract its population… the Chief had to possess some backend knowledge of the lore.
The old man, his hair entirely white, fell into a prolonged silence as he struggled to unarchive his historical memory files.
“Our administration has executed countless strategies… but every single workaround returned a total failure!” he finally admitted, his brow knitting into a pained knot.
He explained that the village had cycled through every conceivable spiritual script—offering prayers to local deities, initiating massive ancestral worship ceremonies, and consulting any rogue doctor whose pathing brought them near the valley—but not a single entity could decode the pathology. Ultimately, their resources ran dry, leaving them entirely helpless. They could only sit back and let the curse passively drain their vitality.
Lu Yunxi frowned deeply, continuing her probe. “Village Chief, have your scouts flagged any bizarre, localized anomalies across the valley map? Please process the data carefully; it might be the primary catalyst driving the villagers’ sickness!”
Previously, the inhabitants of Mushroom Village had to successfully execute a combat script against a swarm of field mice before the system authorized them to cross the perimeter. She had never witnessed such a bizarre exit condition in any other settlement. Logically, this cursed village should command its own unique, localized anomaly.
The Village Chief heavily furrowed his brow, but his cognitive modules were simply too degraded by age to recall any specific data points.
Feeling mildly helpless, Lu Yunxi had no choice but to let the old man return to his quarters to slowly process the files. She quickly formulated a temporary alchemical compound for herself to stabilize her own vitals, ensuring her character model wouldn’t suffer another unexpected faint animation.
Fortunately, having identified the underlying threat as an unindexed curse rather than a standard pathogen, she drastically updated her daily parameters. The absolute first action she took every morning upon waking was running a manual pulse check on her own system.
Over the next few days, her core health bar recovered significantly, though she still endured randomized dizziness debuffs.
But the dizziness wasn’t the critical issue.
Within a handful of days, the entire village demographic suffered a massive relapse! Their health statuses ranged from mild debuffs to critical alerts, and worst of all, the pathologies were entirely chaotic and varied. Every single unit required her to execute a custom diagnostic and formulate an independent medical draft, a logistical nightmare that caused her headache parameters to spike aggressively.
On one specific afternoon, she had just finalized a follow-up round and was prepping to retreat to her homestead for a rest cycle, when she hoisted her chin and spotted a villager casually strolling past. He was carrying a woven bamboo basket overflowing with raw gold ingots, silver, and premium jewelry.
Perhaps because the container’s volume was maxed out, a massive, pigeon-egg-sized pearl spilled over the rim and hit the dirt.
A brilliant, tactical flash illuminated Lu Yunxi’s logic engine. She finally mapped a viable clue!
With all the chaotic, high-stress medical grinding over the past week, she had nearly purged the data from her active memory cache! This village’s economic rendering was profoundly anomalous! Every single peasant household seemed to command an infinite stockpile of high-tier gold, silver, and precious gems!
Locking onto the clue, she immediately sprinted to the Village Chief’s coordinates to interrogate him.
“Oh! Doctor Lu, now that your prompt forces the inquiry, my memory files have successfully loaded!” The Village Chief aggressively slapped his thigh, an expression of sudden realization blooming across his face. “Our valley’s economy didn’t originally command such a massive volume of gold. This staggering wealth only spawned… after our administration officially renamed the settlement to Dragon Village.”
The old man paused, his processors whirring for a long moment, before he suddenly snapped his head up to stare at her, a profound realization settling into his eyes.
“That’s the missing data! I had completely archived the core lore of our valley!” He violently slapped his forehead. “Doctor Lu, your specific profile might actually be the legendary Destined Entity our faction has been ordered to wait for!”
Having dropped the massive lore bomb, the Village Chief immediately escorted her out of the village perimeter. As they navigated the mountain trail, he unpacked the historical data logs.
Dragon Village wasn’t originally registered as Dragon Village; its default geographical name had been completely lost to server wipes. One cycle, an authentic Divine Dragon had descended from the skybox, crash-landing directly into their valley. Whether its vessel had sustained critical battle damage or suffered an environmental debuff, the entity’s stamina pool was completely bottomed out. It requested basic water rations from the locals. The peasants rallied their resources, nursing the legendary beast back to baseline vitality. Before executing its flight command to leave the map, the dragon dropped a massive treasure cache to reward their faction. Leveraging that gold, the administration completely overhauled the village architecture, drastically spiking the population’s quality-of-life metrics.
A full decade later, just as the community’s memory of the event was beginning to fade into myth, the Divine Dragon suddenly spawned into the valley a second time. This time, its health bar was even closer to deletion than before. It finalized a binding contract with the village: the peasants were to stand guard over a specialized treasure vault, patiently waiting for a specific, destined player to arrive and claim the asset. In exchange for their garrison services, the dragon granted them an infinite supply of gold, silver, and premium jewelry, all stored in a localized node tucked somewhere behind the village’s rear hills.
Any registered unit belonging to the Dragon Village faction possessed the clearance to enter the node and harvest the gold at any time.
Lu Yunxi instantly recalled the absurdly generous medical bounties the peasants had dropped into her inventory. The Divine Dragon’s localized gold drop must have been phenomenally massive.
Roughly one kilometer outside the village’s border line, they arrived at a massive, ancient tree whose trunk was severely charred, rendering exactly as if it had suffered a max-tier lightning strike.
The Village Chief executed a highly specific, synchronized pathing loop around the trunk several times. Suddenly, a dimensional gateway smoothly materialized in the air before them.
The aesthetic rendering of the portal was practically identical to the entrance gate of her own high-tier cultivation sect—profoundly mystical and imposing.
“Doctor Lu, pray step through the threshold,” the Village Chief prompted, raising a weathered hand.
“My unit is to cross the perimeter unescorted?” Lu Yunxi’s brow knit into a tight frown.
The Village Chief gave a firm nod. “Had your dialogue tree not explicitly referenced the gold and silver assets, I never would have unarchived the classified lore passed down by our elders! Your profile possesses a high probability of being the legendary Destined Entity. As for whether your class aligns with the system requirements, the data will verify itself the moment you breach the vault. Lord Shenlong’s parameters were absolute on this matter.”
Lu Yunxi hesitated for a brief frame before slowly stepping her boots through the glowing threshold.
Unlike the serene, ambient noise of the main village, this pocket dimension was completely muted. The environmental rendering was intensely desolate, consisting entirely of a massive clearing surrounded by scorched, blackened trees and burnt grass.
Clack.
The dimensional portal suddenly snapped shut behind her. She aggressively whipped her torso around, only to catch a fleeting glimpse of the Village Chief’s utterly deadpan, expressionless face before the gateway completely de-rendered from the map.
Her heart skipped a beat.
Why did the Chief’s facial rendering suddenly shift to such a hostile, calculated mask?
She executed a rapid dash backward, but the entrance node had completely vanished from the coordinates; there was absolutely no interactive surface remaining.
After struggling to locate a secondary exit trigger for a prolonged duration, she finally yielded the effort and pivoted to scan the scorched grove ahead of her. Deep within the center of the burnt perimeter rested several massive, heavy treasure chests.
The instanced map was remarkably compact. Aside from the charred forestry assets, the only interactive items rendered were the chests themselves.
The containers were constructed from thick, premium timber, projecting a massive structural weight.
Lu Yunxi cautiously extended a hand, executing an interaction prompt to lift a lid.
To her surprise, the physical weight parameter was incredibly low; the lid smoothly swung open with a gentle push.
Her tactical skepticism peaking, she carefully tossed a handful of loose stones into the container, thoroughly verifying the interior lacked any hidden explosive or kinetic mechanisms before she finally reached her hand inside to check the loot.
SWOOSH—!
Lu Yunxi’s eyes instantly turned freezing cold. She violently retracted her arm, executing a flawless, high-speed back-dash to clear the strike zone.
Dozens of high-velocity arrows violently slammed into the charred trunk directly behind where she had just been standing, their feathered tails vibrating aggressively from the kinetic impact.
Her eyes narrowing into lethal slits, a dense aura of cold hostility radiating from her core, she locked a freezing glare onto the perimeter. Emerging from the scorched tree line was the Village Chief, flanked by dozens of highly familiar villagers. She stared at their advancing formation, a trace of genuine confusion mixing with her rage.
“Explain your parameters!” Are these NPCs completely unhinged? To launch a coordinated ambush against her build… weren’t their logic engines terrified that her unit would permanently terminate their medical support?!
“Explain our parameters?!” The Village Chief abruptly hoisted his chin, his voice dropping into a harsh, aggressive register. “Why must we explain anything?! How is it mathematically justifiable that a rogue, external player is authorized to claim the legendary artifacts left by Lord Shenlong, while our localized faction is flatly denied access?!”
The massive mob of villagers trailing behind him—brandishing crude, low-tier weapons—echoed his hostility in synchronized unison, their eyes burning with intense, aggressive dissatisfaction.
“Every single asset Lord Shenlong dropped into this sector legally belongs to our faction’s inventory! Your profile is strictly prohibited from extracting the loot!”
“Execute a retreat command! Clear your vessel from our map! You absolute bandit!”
Lu Yunxi, suddenly re-classed as a bandit by the local NPCs: “??”
“Terminate your joke scripts! It is blindingly obvious your units completely lack the access clearance to crack the locks on these chests, which is precisely why your frustration parameters have peaked!” She let out a sharp, freezing sneer, her facial rendering turning incredibly dark. “Your administration explicitly finalized a binding contract with the Divine Dragon to safeguard these assets until the intended player arrived. To suddenly violate the quest conditions… is your faction not terrified that the Dragon will respawn and wipe your entire settlement off the server?!”
The Village Chief leaned heavily against his gnarled cane, closing his eyes in deadpan silence.
He fell into a brief internal calculation loop before snapping his eyes open again, his tone completely flat and indifferent. “My administration logs a genuine apology for the hostility against your profile, but the premium artifacts left by Lord Shenlong must remain permanently bound to our village’s ledger!” This exact ambush protocol had been meticulously engineered by the village elders at the cost of immense processing power. As the current patriarchal unit, he was hard-coded to adhere to their strategic blueprint and execute the ambush.
Lu Yunxi stared at his profile, computing that his logic matrices were completely locked and unreasoning. She smoothly shifted her lethal gaze to the massive mob backing his line. “And what of your secondary units? Does your collective demographic share this corrupted logic?”
The crowd’s aggression metrics hesitated for a microsecond, but the Village Chief instantly severed their doubt with a harsh, booming command: “Do not intercept her disinformation scripts! Never purge the survival directives coded by our ancestors!”
The villagers violently snapped out of their hesitation, their brows instantly knitting into hostile lines as they glared at her with absolute, unwavering indifference.
Lu Yunxi lowered her eyes. Thank the heavens my tactical modules prompted me to cast a permanent high-tier protective barrier over my apprentice’s cot before initiating this questline. Had Shen San’s vessel been left unprotected, this mob of lunatics would have either deleted his lifecycle or flayed his avatar alive by now.
Suddenly, a brilliant, terrifying tactical flash exploded within her logic engine.
“Your demographic’s perpetual sickness…” she started, her voice dropping into an icy register. “Was it entirely self-inflicted?!”
Isn’t that a horrifically brutal meta strategy? To intentionally corrupt their own health bars and perpetually debuff their entire population just to manipulate the quest conditions and secure the dragon’s loot?!
The mob of villagers completely froze, staring at her silhouette in raw, unmitigated disbelief.
Chapter 199: Red Dragon
The Village Chief paused, but ultimately chose not to explain his faction’s logic. “For the survival of our ancestors and the future of our village, this sacrifice is entirely justified!”
Although the Chief refused to unpack the specific dialogue, Lu Yunxi’s logic engine had already compiled the truth from his attitude alone.
It seemed the villagers’ sickness wasn’t a standard environmental hazard. It was highly probable the Village Chief had deliberately introduced a toxic alchemical compound into their food or water supply to intentionally corrupt their health bars! The cruel irony was that the vast majority of the population was completely oblivious to the sabotage, operating under the assumption their illness was just a tragic glitch!
A freezing chill descended into Lu Yunxi’s eyes.
“Doctor Lu, execute a flight command immediately! Our faction will not terminate your lifecycle,” the Village Chief declared, striking the earth heavily with his gnarled cane. His facial expression betrayed zero hesitation. “After all, your unit did expend significant resources to cure our population. However, do not harbor a single delusion of claiming Lord Shenlong’s treasure.”
“Negative! This artifact was explicitly hard-coded by Lord Shenlong to drop into my inventory! By what administrative right does your faction revoke my access?!”
Naturally, Lu Yunxi completely rejected his terms.
If this were a generic treasure chest containing baseline gold and silver, she might have abandoned it. But an artifact personally dropped by a Divine Dragon, locked behind a specialized quest for a “Destined Entity”? That lore screamed of a high-tier legacy item left behind by ancient Grandmasters of the cultivation server.
She was mathematically obligated to inspect the loot. What if the chest contained a legendary skill book or a premium asset capable of dramatically buffing her current build?
For a prolonged moment, the two opposing factions were locked in an absolute, hostile stalemate.
The Village Chief’s countenance grew increasingly severe, and Lu Yunxi’s face settled into an icy, unyielding mask.
Just as the standoff was about to escalate into a full-scale kinetic brawl, a brilliant tactical compromise flashed through her mind.
“Very well. My request is simply to visually inspect the specific artifacts Lord Shenlong left behind.” Seeing the Village Chief instantly furrow his brow, prepping a hard rejection script, she rapidly cut him off. “Village Chief, do not jump to a hostile block. My scanners project that this specific chest doesn’t contain raw gold, silver, or jewelry. It is highly probable it contains unindexed academic texts or skill books. Allow my unit to read the data, and I shall leave the physical copies in your inventory. That resolves the conflict with a mutual benefit, does it not? If Lord Shenlong ever runs an audit on your settlement, it won’t be flagged as a betrayal of your contract.”
The Village Chief fell into a deep calculation loop, his brow furrowing as he weighed the variables. Finally, he gave a curt nod. “Your profile is authorized to scan the texts. However, regardless of the item’s tier or utility, the physical assets must remain bound to our ledger!”
Lu Yunxi didn’t initialize a vocal response, merely offering a silent nod as she smoothly advanced toward the heavy wooden chest.
The Village Chief immediately deployed his mob to form a tight, aggressive perimeter around her coordinates, ensuring she couldn’t covertly stash any loot into her dimensional inventory.
As her logic had predicted, the chest was packed with ancient bound tomes. From a distance, the volume appeared massive, but a quick physical inspection revealed the underlying layers were entirely cosmetic props that couldn’t be lifted from the rendering. Only the single topmost tome functioned as a genuine, interactive asset.
However, the exact microsecond she pulled the cover open, an intensely bizarre, ominous red light violently projected from the pages.
A lethal coldness flared in Lu Yunxi’s eyes. Her reflexes triggered instantly, and she successfully deployed multiple high-tier protective barriers before the light could even cross the distance.
The surrounding villagers were so thoroughly horrified by the sudden, bizarre anomaly that their stamina bars completely zeroed out. Their knees buckled in unison, and because their collision boxes were packed so densely together, the entire mob collapsed into a chaotic heap on the scorched grass.
Lu Yunxi entirely ignored their panic, her tracking sensors locked exclusively onto the erratic pathing of the red light.
After aggressively bouncing off her protective shield, the red light rapidly retracted, zipping back into the pages of the open tome.
“V-Village Chief… what exactly was that anomaly?!” a villager stammered, barely managing to suppress his terror as he nervously crawled closer to the patriarch, his eyes wide with profound dread.
The Village Chief’s facial rendering, however, was equally consumed by raw panic.
Although his age stat was exceptionally high and he commanded immense administrative experience, Dragon Village had been geolocked for generations. As an entity who had never once cleared the valley’s boundary line, relying entirely on the archaic lore files passed down by his ancestors, encountering a supernatural hazard naturally threw his logic engine into absolute chaos.
“Could it… could it possibly be the localized aura of a legendary treasure? I have intercepted lore claiming that premium artifacts naturally emit radiant light effects,” the Village Chief hypothesized after a prolonged internal struggle, forcing a reluctant guess past his lips.
However, he knew his dialogue was merely a hollow script designed to pacify the mob’s morale.
As the patriarch authorized to unlock the dimensional gateway to the dragon’s vault, his intuitive danger-sensing algorithms were incredibly sharp.
The exact millisecond that red light spawned, his system had flagged an absolute, unavoidable death countdown.
Had Doctor Lu not instantaneously deployed that translucent barrier to intercept the strike, his entire faction would have likely suffered a total demographic wipe.
Reflecting on how she had actively expended her own mana pool to shield them during the crisis, a massive wave of genuine gratitude washed through his core. Yet, realizing her unit was currently flagged as their primary hostile enemy, he could only let out a deep, conflicted sigh.
Such is the cruel RNG of fate!
Lu Yunxi had no processing capacity to decode their internal monologues, her mind completely focused on analyzing the nature of the red anomaly.
A sharp light glinted in her eyes. Stabilizing her internal mana, she extended her hand a second time, tentatively reaching out to interact with the tome resting inside the chest.
The surrounding villagers let out a collective, terrified gasp.
“Abort the interaction!”
The two young NPCs positioned closest to her coordinates lunged forward, desperately clamping their hands around her wrists, acting exactly as if her physical proximity to the chest would trigger a nuclear detonation.
“Doctor Lu, has your logic engine crashed?! Did your sensors not log the extreme hazard rating of that anomaly?!”
Her eye twitched. How bizarre. Mere moments ago, this mob was aggressively preparing to murder my avatar over loot distribution, and now they are frantically trying to preserve my health bar?
“Calm your anxiety parameters. Even if my unit aborts the action, your faction will inevitably be forced to open the tome yourselves, correct?” she reasoned, gently patting the shoulders of the two young men to lower their stress metrics.
However, the exact frame the dialogue cleared her throat, every single villager—save for the stoic Village Chief—suffered a catastrophic drop in morale, their faces turning completely bloodless with terror.
“Village Chief!” The mob simultaneously whipped their heads toward the patriarch, their expressions locked into a frantic, pleading loop.
Capitalizing on the distraction as their aggro shifted entirely away from her hit box, Lu Yunxi rapidly flipped the tome open to scan the data.
Instantly, the ominous red light launched from the pages again.
The projectile slammed violently against her coordinates, but was effortlessly deflected by her active protective shield.
After aggressively richocheting off the barrier multiple times, the red light’s intensity parameters visibly degraded, and it listlessly retreated back into the bound pages.
While executing evasive maneuvers to dodge the light, she had also managed to run a visual scan across the open pages—and the data return was an absolute zero!
She aggressively flipped through dozens of pages, yet failed to locate a single rendered character or text string.
She was forced to run a diagnostic on her own assumptions.
Could this red light actually function as a specialized data-transfer protocol? A legendary mechanic utilized by the cultivation realm to beam lore directly into a player’s cerebral cortex?
She fell into deep, analytical thought.
Behind her, the villagers had completely swarmed the Village Chief, frantically muttering and arguing over their next operational sequence.
Lu Yunxi wasted no time running secondary experiments on the artifact. She deployed a localized fire spell to burn the tome, then attempted to submerge the pages in a water basin. Yet the book’s durability parameters were absolute—it remained completely invulnerable to elemental damage, physical strikes, and the pages remained stubbornly blank.
After draining a massive volume of stamina testing the item, she finally yielded the effort.
Although she couldn’t decode the encrypted data, the fact that her system couldn’t read the files strongly suggested her current level lacked the clearance to process the lore.
Concluding the loop, Lu Yunxi approached the patriarch. “Village Chief, my unit has aborted the inspection. Please initialize the gateway and extract my avatar back to the primary map.”
The Village Chief, who had been locked in a heated debate with his subordinates, paused his dialogue tree. Looking up, his expression was completely deadpan. “My administration lacks the operational knowledge to execute an exit command.”
“What?!” Her facial parameters shifted violently, and she drew a sharp, deep breath. “But when you transferred my coordinates into this zone, your unit was the one who manually unlocked the threshold! Why can your profile not simply reverse the command?!”
The Village Chief shook his head grimly. “I just ran a diagnostic. My authorization codes only grant me the clearance to open the gateway from the exterior map to funnel units inside. Once my avatar crosses the threshold, I completely lose the administrative access to open the exit.” When the red anomaly had first spawned, his survival algorithms had immediately prompted him to open the door and evacuate the mob, but the system had returned an Access Denied error.
“What about previous cycles? Hasn’t your faction funneled other test subjects into this zone before?”
“Affirmative. Lord Shenlong explicitly stated that if a unit fails the ‘Destined’ parameters, the system will naturally authorize their extraction,” the Village Chief noted, his logic stalling for a frame. “But Lord Shenlong never provided the data on what happens if the entity is the Destined One… however, basic logic dictates we should still be able to leave, correct?”
Lu Yunxi was so profoundly exasperated she nearly suffered a critical system crash.
Exhaling a massive, heavy sigh, she completely abandoned the dialogue tree with the useless NPCs and began manually scouting the perimeter for an exit trigger.
Aside from a small cluster of elders still conferring with the Chief, the vast majority of the mob synchronized with her pathing and began frantically searching the zone.
The red anomaly had completely shattered their psychological stability! They currently computed that maintaining physical proximity to Lu Yunxi’s high-tier avatar was their only viable survival strategy!
Unfortunately, after systematically sweeping every single square inch of the scorched earth, they failed to locate a single interactive trigger. Left with zero alternatives, the entire party was forced to regroup around the chest.
Lu Yunxi’s eyes hardened. With absolute, unyielding resolve, she manually disabled her protective shields and threw the tome open.
The surrounding villagers were so horrified by the action that their facial textures completely distorted into masks of pure agony. They desperately lunged forward to abort the interaction: “Stop! Doctor Lu! The hazard rating is too extreme!”
But their agility parameters were far too low. The very next microsecond, the red light successfully established a direct hit on her hit box.
In the absolute blink of an eye, the scorched, barren terrain completely de-rendered from her visual interface. Her avatar was instantaneously teleported into a void-like, pitch-black space where the darkness parameters were so dense she couldn’t even see the fingers on her own hands.
“Identify your entity,” Lu Yunxi demanded, dropping her voice into a deep, lethal register.
Although the acoustic rendering of the void was so dead silent she could have heard a pin drop, her advanced sensory arrays definitively confirmed the presence of a secondary unit sharing the coordinates. However, the entity’s stealth parameters were phenomenally high, making its tracking marker almost impossible to isolate unless she actively channeled her focus.
The master entity anchoring this domain was clearly executing a deliberate script to conceal its aura.
After holding her stance for a prolonged duration without triggering an encounter, Lu Yunxi opted not to spam secondary prompts, silently navigating her avatar through the pitch-black void.
She trekked through the darkness for an extended interval. Just as her internal stamina bar began flagging a minor fatigue warning, a highly familiar, massive wave of red light suddenly surged toward her coordinates with an absolutely unstoppable, kinetic momentum.
This specific red light was rendered exponentially larger than the anomaly she had encountered in the exterior zone, yet its core atmospheric properties were identical—radiating a profound, indescribable malice.
She paused her stride, effortlessly deploying a counter-measure to block the incoming strike.
The red anomaly immediately halted its advance.
Locking her max-tier visual scanners onto the target, the data finally resolved. It was an authentic, fully rendered Dragon!
