Chapter 200| Chapter 201| Chapter 202
Chapter 200: Turtle Shell
“Could it be… you are the divine dragon the residents of Dragon Village have been speaking of?”
The dragon stared down at Lu Yunxi, its massive eyes glowing as bright as floating paper lanterns. “Fated One, your arrival is finally at hand!”
Its colossal eyes were hovering mere inches from her face.
She silently executed a slow back-dash, generating a safe distance between her avatar and the giant red dragon. Her facial expression remained as serene and placid as a still lake, but her internal processor was rapidly churning through a bizarre discrepancy.
When she had manually cracked the tome in the exterior world, her sensory arrays flagged that the red anomaly was attempting to aggressively breach her cerebral cortex. Yet now, the environmental rendering suggested her consciousness had been sucked into the dimensional space of the book… What exact mechanical loop was currently active?
She subtly rolled her eyes, instantly masking the calculated glint in her pupils. Forcing a perfectly innocent, bewildered mask onto her features, she tilted her head and asked, “Lord Shenlong? The administration of Dragon Village informed me that your profile was actively tracking my coordinates. What exactly is the context of this questline?”
The dragon, whose serpentine body stretched several dozen meters across the void, aggressively thrashed its tail. “My dear, does your database possess any lore regarding the nature of this realm?”
Lu Yunxi blinked rapidly, running a quick visual sweep across the pitch-black void. Her eyes flickered. “Is this… a localized dream sequence?”
“Negative!” The dragon whipped its tail a second time. A distinct flash of impatience flared within its glowing eyes, its behavioral script appearing remarkably irritable.
Her tactical modules instantly triggered a high-alert warning, and she covertly began pooling internal mana into her sleeves to prepare a preemptive strike. Ultimately, the dragon managed to suppress its aggression metrics, preventing a kinetic outburst.
She lowered her gaze, secretly marveling at the anomaly.
Its irritation parameters spiked so aggressively just now, I genuinely computed it was about to initialize a boss fight!
The red dragon aggressively coiled through the empty skybox for a few moments before heavily landing back on the invisible floorboards. It spoke with a slow, deliberate cadence: “In truth, I summoned your vessel to these coordinates because your specific profile is the designated future savior of the entire cultivation server.”
“Oh?” She arched a delicate eyebrow, her eyes fluttering as she played the bewildered maiden flawlessly. “What exact cultivation server are you referencing? And you claim I am a savior… My alignment leans heavily toward a neutral-chaotic disposition; I am absolutely not a paragon of virtue. I believe your targeting algorithm has locked onto the wrong character model.”
The red dragon’s excitement metrics suddenly skyrocketed. Its massive tail began thrashing the void with such manic velocity it practically rendered a kinetic afterimage.
“The structural reality of the server is as follows…” The Red Dragon launched into an extensive lore drop, unpacking the identical narrative regarding the collapse of the immortal cultivation realm that the intelligent supercomputer had previously outlined for her.
Verifying that its data stream mapped perfectly onto the core intelligence the supercomputer had provided, her internal tension slightly dissipated.
It appears this red dragon isn’t running a hostile deception script.
However, literally one second after she finalized that calculation, the Red Dragon abruptly pivoted to propose a tactical workaround. The specific solution it aggressively pushed was fundamentally opposed to the roadmap the intelligent computer had outlined.
“To successfully salvage this crumbling, decentralized world, your vessel requires access to a phenomenally massive power threshold. If your account grants authorization, I can personally transfer those combat skills into your database.”
“How exactly do you intend to run this tutorial?”
“I shall initiate a direct possession script and enter your physical vessel. By assuming manual override of your motor controls, I can personally execute the combat sequences to terminate your enemies.” The exact frame the dialogue line cleared its throat, the red dragon instantaneously converted its colossal form into a concentrated beam of crimson light and violently lunged straight into Lu Yunxi’s soul matrix.
Lu Yunxi’s eyes turned absolutely freezing cold. Her logic engine instantly decrypted the Red Dragon’s true operational objective.
Its ultimate goal is to execute a hostile takeover of my character model!
She let out a sharp, icy sneer, launching her avatar into a full-scale spiritual battle against the red dragon without a single microsecond of hesitation.
Did this ancient parasite genuinely compute she would voluntarily surrender her administrative privileges so easily?!
The red dragon was profoundly stunned by the resistance. It had explicitly spammed the dramatic lore dialogue to lock the maiden’s attention and lower her firewall parameters, intending to smoothly overwrite her consciousness. Yet, after successfully breaching her spiritual perimeter, its possession script had stalled out completely; it couldn’t finalize the system override.
It forcefully ground its teeth, its frustration metrics peaking.
“Release your administrative blocks! Transfer your vessel’s control parameters to my ledger! Do your civilian algorithms possess any real-world combat data?! What happens if your build wanders into a lethal hazard zone?!”
“Haha! It is blindingly obvious your actual objective is to hijack my avatar, you parasitic glitch! If your default class is a Divine Dragon, why don’t you simply maintain your current build?! Why are you aggressively attempting to pirate my human vessel?!” Lu Yunxi fired back. Her data files explicitly stated that a dragon’s physical rendering possessed absolute immunity to kinetic weaponry, water, and fire damage. She couldn’t calculate a single logical reason why the beast wanted to delete its own racial buffs!
“Haha!” The Red Dragon suddenly erupted into a manic, unhinged laugh, though its glowing eyes were entirely devoid of warmth, radiating pure, calculated malice. “What does your low-tier processor comprehend?! Do you have any data on the catastrophic survival trials my unit endured when the server architecture collapsed?! Yet your profile—a completely generic, baseline human—rolls a max-tier luck stat and arbitrarily inherits the ‘savior’ title! The entire global demographic worships your faction and constantly spams gratitude prompts at your feet!”
Lu Yunxi: “…”
“I lack the data on whether the global server is genuinely grateful to my profile, but I can mathematically verify that your specific faction harbors zero gratitude toward me.”
The Red Dragon completely ignored her logic check, its eyes burning with raw, unadulterated resentment. “What is the mathematical justification?! Why does your specific account possess the clearance to salvage this server?! Your survival is purely dictated by RNG and a favorable reincarnation spawn! If your system simply authorizes my consciousness to pilot this vessel, I shall inherit the ‘savior’ class from this day forward!”
As the Red Dragon’s emotional processors overheated, its aggression metrics peaked, and it aggressively re-engaged her in spiritual combat.
The two entities locked into a brutal, high-intensity duel, their spiritual avatars clashing violently across the pitch-black void. They fought until the server cycle simulated dusk, straight through to dawn, and back to dusk again.
As a legacy artifact who had survived the cataclysm of the original cultivation realm, the Honglong’s spiritual stats were immensely inflated, making its attack patterns exceptionally resilient and difficult to parry. But Lu Yunxi’s build was absolutely not a baseline civilian. She had aggressively ground her stats through endless trials to secure her current Grandmaster-tier ranking. Furthermore, they were actively fighting within the internal architecture of her own soul matrix, granting her a massive home-field buff that kept the combat algorithms perfectly deadlocked.
However, allowing a spiritual war of attrition to loop infinitely was not a viable tactical solution.
Lu Yunxi felt her internal patience meters beginning to flag.
She ran a rapid calculation through her inventory and finalized a decision to deploy her ultimate strategic asset—the ancient tortoise shell bestowed upon her by the descendants of the legendary Black Tortoise, Xuanwu.
Inside the pitch-black spiritual domain, Lu Yunxi’s avatar—currently rendered at the diminutive scale of a toddler—suddenly manifested a heavy, tortoise-shell-shaped artifact in her hands.
The opposing red dragon suffered a massive startle animation. “How is that mathematically possible?! Your current rendering is strictly a spiritual soul-state! How can your avatar equip a physical inventory asset?!”
The moment the words cleared its throat, the dragon violently back-dashed, its evasion protocols triggering as if it harbored an innate, hard-coded terror toward the shell’s properties.
A weapon?
Lu Yunxi, who had been actively racking her brain trying to calculate the specific activation mechanism required to open the shell, suddenly paused her script.
She hoisted her chin, her eyes flashing with a brilliant, calculated spark as a tactical workaround loaded into her mind.
“Hmph! Dodge this!” she sneered coldly, aggressively hurling the closed tortoise-shell box directly at the beast’s hit box.
The red dragon’s panic metrics peaked. It scrambled frantically backward, its pathing desperate to execute a full flight command and clear the zone. Yet, its greed algorithms forcibly anchored it to the coordinates. It had remained in deep hibernation for an entire epoch, enduring countless server wipes specifically to intercept this fated player! If its unit aborted the encounter now, the statistical probability of a secondary viable host spawning into the valley was absolute zero!
Originally, Lu Yunxi had simply intercepted the dragon’s use of the term “weapon” and instinctively defaulted to a generic throwing animation, expecting to inflict blunt kinetic damage. Who could have calculated that mid-flight, the tortoise shell would suddenly project a massive, radiant green aura—rendering visually exactly like a glowing green hat—and aggressively clamp itself directly over the red dragon’s skull?
The red dragon unleashed a catastrophic, high-volume scream before its entire character model violently de-rendered, vanishing completely from the spiritual domain.
Having successfully purged the parasitic entity and fully reclaimed administrative override of her motor controls, Lu Yunxi let out a massive, heavy breath of relief.
She ran a rapid sequence of stretching animations across her limbs, executing a full system diagnostic to verify the dragon hadn’t left any hidden corruptions or debuffs within her code. Once the scan returned a clean bill of health, her stress metrics finally dropped, and she strolled forward to retrieve the fallen tortoise shell.
Just as she lowered her hand to inspect the artifact’s item description, a blinding flash of white light triggered across her visual interface.
Relying on pure instinct, she instantly transferred the tortoise shell back into her dimensional space.
The exact microsecond the item cleared her inventory slot, the environmental rendering around her violently shifted.
Lu Yunxi’s avatar successfully teleported back to the physical world, her boots landing solidly on the scorched earth of the exterior grove.
The Village Chief and his mobilized mob of villagers hadn’t cleared the zone; their character models were still clumped together in the dirt, their facial textures projecting raw, unadulterated panic.
“Village Chief, why is your faction still garrisoned at these coordinates?” she asked, genuinely surprised. She had fully calculated that the mob would have executed a massive retreat script the moment her spiritual avatar locked into combat with the red dragon.
However, as she stepped forward, intending to trigger an assist animation to help a few collapsed villagers back to their feet, the entire demographic violently scrambled backward, scraping across the dirt exactly as if her profile had been flagged as a high-tier horror boss.
Lu Yunxi: “??”
She was completely bewildered. When the villagers had aggressively backstabbed her minutes ago, her alignment hadn’t even shifted into a hostile stance. What specific variable was currently breaking their pathing?!
“Your unit… halt your advance!” The Village Chief pointed a violently trembling finger at her silhouette. “Is your registry currently rendering as a human or a demonic entity?!”
“What kind of corrupted data are you processing? My class is obviously human. Your behavioral scripts are glitching way out of bounds!” Lu Yunxi retorted, deadpan, though she aborted her forward momentum so as not to force their stress levels higher.
Her current primary objective was to exit the instanced zone and run a surveillance check on the main village, specifically to verify Shen San’s survival parameters.
Seeing her avatar freeze in place, the entire villager mob let out a collective, shuddering breath, aggressively clustering together to spam panicked whispers into their local chat channel.
“What is our optimal counter-measure?! I never calculated the possibility that Lord Shenlong’s fated vessel wouldn’t even belong to the human race! Village Chief, shouldn’t our administration simply transfer the tome into his inventory to pacify the aggro?!”
“Her visual rendering was absolutely terrifying during the transition! One of her optic sensors remained standard, but the secondary pupil turned a glowing, demonic crimson—exactly like a ghost! Furthermore, her audio output was completely glitched; her voice modulated back and forth between a deep male register and a high-pitched maiden’s tone. The horror metrics were off the charts!”
“We must initialize a formal apology script to Doctor Lu! The baseline peasants in the main settlement lack the clearance to know the valley’s classified secrets. If Doctor Lu’s hostility metrics peak after she clears this zone, what if she initiates a mass-arrest protocol against our families…”
Lu Yunxi’s lips twitched violently.
So that’s the data. When that parasitic red glitch was actively battling to hijack her motor controls, the internal conflict had actually generated a cosmetic horror overlay on her physical vessel in the real world, severely traumatizing the local NPCs.
“Negative!” the Village Chief barked, glaring at the highly unstable mob. “Has your demographic completely purged the survival directives coded by our ancestors?! The artifacts left by Lord Shenlong will grant our faction a massive, permanent buff, securing the quality-of-life parameters for all our future descendants!”
The villagers were deeply conflicted, their survival instincts clashing violently with their greed, but they ultimately ground their teeth and yielded to the patriarch’s command.
Concurrently, Lu Yunxi’s active scanners finally isolated a hidden mechanical switch embedded beneath the heavy wooden chest. She gripped the node and executed a forceful, kinetic twist.
A heavy stone gateway slowly ground open directly in front of the mob.
Lu Yunxi analyzed the atmospheric data filtering through the threshold, verifying the environmental rendering perfectly matched the familiar, primeval mountain biome of the exterior map.
Without a single microsecond of hesitation, she stepped her boots through the exit.
Chapter 201: Teleportation Array
Lu Yunxi walked out the door without hesitation.
The other villagers were initially stunned, but they quickly scrambled to follow her out.
Even if they suspected a trap, they were starving after being locked up in that godforsaken place for several days. They had no time to worry about any potential conspiracies. Fortunately, the door was indeed the exit back to their village.
Once outside, Lu Yunxi got her bearings and hurried to check on Shen San.
He was still fast asleep, lying quietly on the bed with a peaceful expression. The blankets covering him were clean and carried the faint, warm scent of sunshine.
She secretly breathed a sigh of relief.
It seemed the rest of the villagers were truly unaware of the village chief’s “good deeds.”
Things turned out exactly as she had expected.
Since Lu Yunxi had no interest in the items left behind by the dragon, the village chief and the few locals who knew the truth naturally dropped their hostility toward her.
Perhaps it was because they had secured the book the dragon left behind. Even though they had already discovered its pages were completely blank, they remained firmly convinced that it contained some mysterious, undiscovered secret.
When she announced her intention to take Shen San and leave, the villagers not only came to see them off in person, but also gifted them a generous haul of gold, silver, and jewelry.
The treasure amounted to five times their agreed-upon medical fee.
Lu Yunxi was a little bewildered, eventually guessing that the village chief and his accomplices simply felt guilty about stabbing her in the back and were trying to save face.
In reality, the villagers kept in the dark were genuinely enthusiastic, while the chief’s secret followers were overcompensating out of a guilty conscience. Staying in the village might have been a comfortable option, but the truth was bound to come out sooner or later.
Besides, she had finally uncovered the reason why the villagers were chronically ill—it was the air.
She didn’t know what exactly had changed in the atmosphere, but the air here was incredibly strange. Prolonged exposure made people highly susceptible to bizarre illnesses. The rampant diseases that plagued the village were largely due to breathing this tainted air.
Fortunately, the village was nestled deep in a valley surrounded by mountains, limiting air circulation. Otherwise, the toxicity might have spread to other regions. Then again, perhaps the toxic gases naturally dissipated over time, dulling their impact.
Regardless, Lu Yunxi knew she had to get Shen San out of there fast, or they might both end up losing their lives.
With this in mind, she pushed the cart and quickened her pace, eager to leave the area behind.
Who knew that after walking just a few hundred meters, she would spot a familiar figure standing under a massive, deeply rooted tree?
“Village Chief?” she asked, raising an eyebrow in surprise.
The chief was accompanied by only one young man—the one who usually helped him get around.
“Doctor Lu, I’d like to speak with you alone,” the village chief said, bowing slightly before waving the young man away.
She was speechless. The village chief really had a lot of faith in her character to meet her alone without fearing she’d beat him up on the spot.
“Go ahead.”
“Doctor Lu,” the village chief began, his eyes reflecting a mess of complex emotions. After a long pause, he let out a heavy sigh and bowed deeply. “Thank you so much! And… I also want to apologize to you! Lord Shenlong clearly left those things for you, yet we insisted on keeping them.”
“…” The red dragon had absolutely no intention of leaving her anything valuable; it simply wanted to seize the opportunity to possess her body. As for the gold, silver, and jewelry it left the villagers, that was only because as a soul, it couldn’t take physical treasures with it anyway!
She waved a hand nonchalantly. “It’s fine.”
“No, you saved so many of our people. Please accept this as a token of our gratitude.” Trembling, the village chief pulled out a piece of paper and handed it to her.
Lu Yunxi took the ancient parchment, feeling a bit confused.
“This is an heirloom passed down from our ancestors. It’s said to be a treasure map, but our people have been searching for nearly a hundred years and still haven’t found the location,” the village chief explained, looking a little embarrassed. He quickly added, “But our ancestors swore there is a genuine treasure to be found.”
She stared down at the drawing—which looked like it had been scribbled by a kindergartener—and fell silent.
Even if there was a treasure, she actually had to find the place first.
After a long silence, she accepted the gift and offered a warning in return. “You should all find a way to relocate as soon as possible. The air in this village… it seems to be tainted with miasma. If you live here year-round, you’ll constantly fall ill. Your bodies won’t be able to handle it.”
The village chief had been thrilled to see her accept the gift, but upon hearing this, his smile instantly froze.
She was shocked by his reaction. “No way! Did you guys create this miasma yourselves?”
She had originally assumed the villagers had accidentally fed her some strange, toxic food that made her sick. Who knew they were this ruthless? If they did this intentionally, their own descendants would be forced to breathe poisonous gas!
The village chief looked miserable. He explained that the miasma had been created by his ancestors over a century before he was even born.
“…But our people can’t leave,” he sighed helplessly. “I don’t know why, but a long time ago, we suddenly found ourselves unable to leave the valley. That wasn’t our ancestors’ doing.”
“Don’t worry about that,” she reassured him. “I suspect it was because the dragon’s formation was placed near the village, and over time, it affected the surrounding area. Now that the formation has been broken, you can leave at any time.”
“…Master?” Shen San mumbled groggily as he woke up.
The day his master had fainted, he had suddenly felt a tightness in his own chest. His vision had gone black, and he passed out shortly after. Since then, every time he tried to log into the game, he was greeted by pitch-black darkness without a single system prompt.
After waiting for several days, he was finally able to open his eyes in-game again.
Seeing that his master was safe and sound, he instantly breathed a sigh of relief.
Lu Yunxi smiled and gently pressed a hand against his chest to stop him from getting up. “You were poisoned, and there are still residual toxins in your system. Don’t move too quickly, or you’ll get a severe headache.”
Shen San smiled dismissively. “No, I’m…”
Before he could finish his sentence, a splitting pain exploded in his head.
He instinctively clutched his temples, and it took a long time for the throbbing to finally subside. Slowly, he managed to sit up, but just getting into a seated position took him a grueling five minutes.
“Master, where have you been all this time?” Shen San asked. After he had successfully reached the ‘Master’ tier in his fishing skill, he had left the waterfall. Who knew his luck would take such a nosedive? One minute he was accidentally falling into random pits, and the next he was getting poisoned.
Thinking of this, he quickly opened his system interface to check his status, paranoid that he might have been infected with something else without realizing it.
“I didn’t go anywhere,” Lu Yunxi replied. She didn’t want to explain the whole ordeal with the intelligent brain artifact. Rolling her eyes, she smoothly changed the subject. “By the way, I got a treasure map! We’re going treasure hunting.”
Excitedly, she pulled out the drawing the village chief had given her and unrolled it for Shen San to see.
Shen San stared at the kindergarten-tier map in front of him and went completely silent.
Seeing that she had successfully redirected his attention, Lu Yunxi proudly shook the parchment, preparing to put it away.
But a second before she could retract her hand, Shen San’s eyes suddenly lit up.
“Wait! Master, I think I’ve seen this place before!”
Lu Yunxi froze. Somewhat doubtful but harboring a glimmer of hope, she spread the map back out and urged him to look closer.
He stared at the drawing for a long time, beads of sweat dripping down his forehead from the intense concentration. It wasn’t until nightfall that the memory finally clicked.
“I know! Master, this is a location on the Ice Continent. I stumbled across it by accident once!” Shen San slapped his thigh in triumph, but upon seeing her delighted expression, he looked a little sheepish. “But… I got blown off course by a blizzard and lost my way right after I found it. If we go now, I might not be able to track it down again.”
“That doesn’t matter. We can always retrace the route you took last time,” Lu Yunxi said, putting the map away with a bright smile. “You might not remember exactly where we need to go, but I have a general idea.”
She had originally assumed finding the location on the map would be a lost cause. She never expected to find a solid clue right away.
It seemed this treasure was simply destined to be hers!
“…But Master, the last time I went to the Ice Continent, I went alone,” Shen San hesitated. “Wait, don’t you know? You can use teleportation arrays to travel to other continents now.”
“Teleportation arrays?!”
“Yeah! A lot of countries have recently built teleportation arrays connecting the continents. It’s so much more convenient. There’s no need to take the long sea routes anymore.”
Lu Yunxi was stunned. She secretly used her consciousness to pull up her system interface.
Lately, she had been so completely absorbed in her training that every time she opened her system panel, she only ever checked her experience bar and ignored the rest. If Shen San hadn’t brought it up, there was no telling how long it would have taken her to notice the massive update.
Chapter 202: Settlement of Accounts
The cross-continental teleportation array had become a major topic of discussion on the community forums.
Lu Yunxi scrolled through the posts, catching a glimpse of a thoroughly exhausted Shen San out of the corner of her eye.
“Go get some sleep, Shen San. We’ll rest here for a bit.”
She patted his back gently. Once she saw his eyes close and his breathing even out, she turned her full attention back to the forum.
[A cross-continental teleportation array has finally appeared! Has anyone actually traveled to another continent yet? Let me let you in on a secret: I found a purple-grade pet in the Desert Continent! Ahhhh!]
[So far, the highest-ranked pet shown on the forum is only blue. This is the first time I’ve even heard of a purple-grade pet! Can the original poster show us what it looks like?]
[Picture.JPG]
[Wow! That beast looks so majestic! Look at those long eyelashes—it managed to look tall and mighty while being kind of adorable at the same time. Talk about a gap moe!]
The replies below the image were flooded with similar praise.
Lu Yunxi stared at the camel in the attached picture, falling silent for a moment.
Technically speaking, the poster wasn’t wrong. It was tall, and it was oddly cute.
She quietly closed out of the thread and opened the leaderboard instead. Only then did she notice that many players who had been bottlenecked at level 69 had finally broken through, successfully advancing to master-level experts.
She flipped through a few more pages. Seeing that the rest of the rankings hadn’t fluctuated too drastically, she felt a wave of relief.
Time flew by, and in the blink of an eye, a month passed.
Shen San’s body had fully recovered; he was no longer coughing up blood at the slightest provocation. With his health restored, Lu Yunxi and her disciple hit the road once again.
Their luck held out. Just as the sun began to dip below the horizon, they spotted a small town in the distance, marked by faint wisps of cooking smoke rising from several rooftops.
When they reached a roadside stone engraved with the words Lengshui Town, the two paused and exchanged a look.
A bright smile broke across Shen San’s face. “This is great, Master! Most towns have local teleportation arrays. We can use it to head straight to the imperial capital.” Generally speaking, the massive cross-continental arrays were only located in capital cities.
With lighter steps, they navigated past the rocks and headed into the settlement.
However, as they stepped past the town’s perimeter, their smiles faded into frowns.
The town was incredibly desolate. While typical towns boasted populations in the thousands, this place—despite technically being classified as a town—looked to have no more than twenty or thirty households in total. Plenty of large villages had more houses than this.
Worse still, the few residents they saw moved with hollow, numb expressions, hurrying along as if consumed by anxiety. Even though two unfamiliar adults were standing right at the intersection, the locals completely ignored them, passing by as if they were invisible.
Perplexed, the master and disciple looked at each other.
“Should we find the mayor first?” Shen San suggested.
“Usually, the mayor lives in the nicest house around. Let’s head toward that one over there—it looks brand new.” Lu Yunxi scanned the town and quickly singled out an anomaly.
The freshly built house stood out starkly against a backdrop of weathered, ancient structures, drawing the eye like a splash of bright red amidst a sea of dull green.
They walked up to the pristine house and knocked on the door.
“Who is it?” a woman’s voice called out from within. A moment later, the door swung open.
An elderly woman stepped into view. Seeing the strangers, a flicker of suspicion crossed her eyes. “Who are you looking for?”
Lu Yunxi took note of the fine silk dress the old woman was wearing. Pausing briefly, she decided to be direct. “Hello, ma’am. We’re just passing through and were hoping to find the town mayor. We have a few questions for him.”
The old woman frowned, pointing a finger toward a rundown, ancient house sitting near the dead center of the town. “The mayor lives over there.”
Without waiting for a reply, she slammed the door in their faces.
The master and disciple traded surprised glances. The mayor didn’t even live in the nicest house in his own town?
Shaking off the odd encounter, they walked over to the dilapidated house the old woman had pointed out and successfully found the mayor.
The mayor was an elderly man with severely failing eyesight. As he squinted at his visitors, his eyes narrowed, then widened in an attempt to clear his vision.
After studying them for a good while, he nodded slowly. “Ah, travelers passing through… But what is this ‘teleportation array’ you speak of? I’ve never heard of such a thing.”
His words struck a sudden note of apprehension in Lu Yunxi and Shen San’s hearts.
“The teleportation array, Mayor! The device that can transport you across vast distances in an instant,” Shen San explained, using his hands to gesture dramatically in the air to get the concept across. “When you first arrived here to take office, surely you were teleported in?”
The old man stroked his chin, thinking hard for a long time before a spark of recognition finally lit up his face.
“Oh! I remember now!” the mayor exclaimed. “But we don’t have one of those things in our town.”
The two stiffened.
As the mayor explained, Lengshui Town was situated right on the country’s border. Foreign raiders frequently launched plundering expeditions in the area, which had driven most of the population away. Anyone with the means to leave had abandoned the town long ago.
To ensure national security, the government naturally couldn’t establish a teleportation array here. If they did, and an enemy force managed to seize it, hostile troops could materialize deep within the borders before anyone even realized they were under attack.
The master and disciple, who had envisioned an easy exit, let out a synchronized, heavy sigh.
Hearing their disappointment, the mayor offered a word of comfort. “Don’t be discouraged. If you head due east from the town for about three hours, you’ll reach a much larger trading hub. There’s a transport company there with carriages that can take you to the nearest city.”
Lu Yunxi and Shen San thanked the old man for his guidance, though they had no intention of taking his advice. Given their current strength, if they traveled at full speed on foot, they would easily outpace any horse-drawn convoy.
Leaving the mayor’s house, they stepped back out into the quiet streets.
Night had fully fallen. The town was dead silent, its residents seemingly asleep. Only a scattering of houses showed faint candlelight flickering behind their window panes.
“Master, do we really have to travel through the night?” Shen San groaned, staring up at the pitch-black sky.
Though a few houses were lit, the weak glow barely reached the street, making it nearly impossible to see the path ahead. Fortunately, the town was laid out along a single straight road; otherwise, they would have walked straight into a wall by now.
Lu Yunxi looked at her brooding disciple, lost in thought.
She used to assume that as a person grew stronger, their night vision would naturally scale up. While that was true to an extent, there was clearly a hard ceiling to the attribute. Shen San’s night vision had improved slightly early on, but it had completely plateaued since then.
The two walked on in silence, buried in their own thoughts.
As they passed a slightly larger residence, a faint, sharp scraping sound echoed from above.
Lu Yunxi’s reflexes kicked in instantly. She snapped backward two paces, smoothly dodging the incoming “hidden weapon.”
Looking down, she saw two clay roof tiles shatter against the dirt.
She sighed, exasperated. “Note to self: from now on, we walk down the center of the road, not right against the walls…”
Before she could finish her sentence, a much larger shadow came hurtling downward.
Lu Yunxi instinctively leaped back a few more steps, completely forgetting that Shen San was standing right beside her.
Thud!
The falling object collided squarely with Shen San.
With a sharp yelp, he was pinned instantly to the ground. Blood sprayed across the dirt, quickly pooling around them.
Startled, Lu Yunxi lunged forward to check his pulse. It took her a few panicked seconds to remember that he was a player and wouldn’t die permanently from a physical impact. Only then did she calm down enough to inspect the projectile that had crushed him.
Remaining cautious, she observed the heap from a safe distance for a moment before stepping closer.
The object that had flattened Shen San was indeed a human being—a young girl.
The girl’s head was heavily covered in blood, though the severe trauma clearly predated her fall from the roof.
Lu Yunxi glanced up at the empty rooftop, then immediately cast a healing spell over both of them.
Once their conditions stabilized, she set up two separate tents, moving the unconscious pair inside before finally turning in for the night herself.
The next morning.
Not long after Lu Yunxi woke up, Shen San groaned and sat up, clutching his aching forehead.
“…Master? What the heck happened last night?”
“Last night, a young girl fell from the roof. I’m not sure if she threw herself off intentionally or just slipped, but she landed right on your head.” Seeing Shen San’s face instantly warp with fury, she couldn’t help but feel a twinge of pity.
The poor guy had only been recovered from his poisoning for a few days, and his reward was getting used as a human crash pad.
“Where is she? She crushed me! The least she can do is apologize and give me an explanation!” he spat through gritted teeth, thoroughly indignant.
“She hasn’t woken up yet.” Honestly, given the potency of Lu Yunxi’s healing spells, the girl’s physical injuries should have been completely mended by now. The fact that she remained unconscious was a different issue entirely.
Looking at the pale, still face of the girl in the adjacent tent, Lu Yunxi shook her head.
It was going to be difficult for Shen San to demand any accountability. The girl had clearly embraced a desire for death; her mind was refusing to wake up, keeping her trapped in a self-induced coma.
“Are you kidding me…” The veins on Shen San’s temples throbbed violently. He suddenly clutched his chest, his breathing turning ragged and shallow.
“What’s wrong?” A terrible premonition gripped Lu Yunxi, and she reached out to check on him.
But before her hand could even touch his shoulder, Shen San sprayed a mouthful of fresh blood across the tent and collapsed limply to the floor.
