Chapter 182| Chapter 183| Chapter 184
Chapter 182: Can It Be Cured?
Almost as soon as Lu Yunxi set up her spot, a large crowd gathered to watch the commotion.
“Well, well, what do we have here? A little girl selling…” They didn’t even glance at the goods on the ground; their eyes were glued to her face.
What Lu Yunxi didn’t realize was that this particular market street was entirely dominated by old men, with barely any women in sight. The moment a young girl like her appeared, she was like a piece of fresh meat drawing a pack of stray dogs. She couldn’t have been more conspicuous if she tried.
“Fresh wild boar! Are you looking to buy, customers?” Lu Yunxi gave the bound, shivering boar next to her a friendly pat and greeted the crowd warmly.
“Hehe… Yeah, sure! Cut me half a pound!” The man probably didn’t even process what she was actually selling. He wiped the drool from his chin and chuckled lewdly.
Lu Yunxi paid no mind to whatever degenerate thoughts were running through his head. The corners of her lips curved upward, and she felt a quiet surge of excitement.
Yesterday, a massive crowd had chattered and hovered around her tofu stall for hours, but not a single soul actually made a purchase. Today, she was finally going to make her very first sale!
She picked up her heavy butcher’s machete and began running it aggressively against the whetstone.
The harsh, rhythmic scraping sound echoed down the lane. The blade grew sharper and sharper by the second, flashing with a lethal, cold light.
At this point, the rest of the onlookers finally began to notice her movements, crowding closer to catch the show. Among them were several of the local hooligans she had thoroughly thrashed just days prior. She couldn’t tell if something was fundamentally wrong with their eyesight, but they didn’t even seem to recognize her!
“Nice! That blade is sharp enough to cut bone!”
“This girl is something else. Not only can she sharpen a blade, but she can even hunt, haha… Wait, hunt?!”
The crowd froze, the collective gears in their heads finally grinding to a halt as they realized something was profoundly amiss.
Lu Yunxi didn’t care what they whispered, as long as she could finalize the transaction. Her instincts told her that once she actively opened her business and generated real sales, her experience bar would surge rapidly, rather than painfully ticking up by one or two digits every few days.
The thought made her so genuinely happy she felt like humming a song.
With a bright, radiant smile plastered across her face, she raised the butcher’s knife and pinned the wild boar to prepare for the slaughter.
Swish—!
The bright silver blade drove in; a crimson spray followed.
The wild boar unleashed a blood-curdling howl, its entire body thrashing in agonizing pain. Lu Yunxi maintained an iron grip on the beast with one hand, effortlessly pinning it to the cobblestones to prevent it from breaking free. Gradually, the boar’s desperate suffocating squeals bottomed out, and its heavy carcass went entirely limp against the dirt.
The surrounding crowd recoiled in absolute horror.
The echoes of the boar’s dying screams seemed to linger in the heavy air. The men finally snapped out of their daze, and every single shred of their previous lecherous, lustful thoughts evaporated into thin air.
Lu Yunxi finished bleeding the boar, looking down at the dark crimson pooling on the ground with a trace of professional regret. She turned her head to face the crowd, offering them a thoroughly warm, pleasant smile.
“Does anyone happen to have a large basin? It would be a terrible waste to let all this fresh blood go to ruin… By the way, which specific cut would you like me to carve for you?”
She tilted her chin up slightly, a tiny splatter of dark blood staining her porcelain cheek. The morning breeze caught her hair, and against her snow-white skin, her vibrant red dress looked as dark and striking as fresh blood.
The onlookers didn’t see a beautiful maiden anymore. They saw a demon. The words “which specific cut” began echoing through their minds like a death sentence.
“She’s a monster!” someone shrieked in terror.
The crowd broke.
In a matter of seconds, the packed market lane devolved into a stampede as the men swarmed in the opposite direction, desperately trying to clear the sector.
Lu Yunxi stood paralyzed, entirely bewildered by the sudden evacuation.
“Where are you going?! Hey! Didn’t you explicitly state you wanted half a pound of meat?!” Seeing her potential profit margin about to vanish, she grew anxious and reached out to grab the man who had initiated the purchase.
But the moment her shadow shifted toward them, the crowd’s panic spiked, and they ran even faster.
Within a handful of breaths, the entire marketplace was completely desolate. A lonely gust of wind swept down the empty lane, rustling a few dead leaves across the cobblestones, leaving behind a stark, freezing silence.
Lu Yunxi’s eye twitched violently. She felt a profound wave of deadpan exasperation and burning irritation.
With a heavy sigh, she hoisted the heavy wild boar back into her dimensional inventory.
Another absolute failure! Running a commercial enterprise in this world was becoming an impossible grind. She couldn’t comprehend why her target demographic kept executing sudden, uncoordinated flight commands. It was truly bizarre!
Furrowing her brow, she began navigating her way out of the abandoned market sector, when her peripheral vision caught the silhouette of a girl curled beneath a weeping willow by the canal, weeping bitterly.
Lu Yunxi’s initial instinct was to bypass the NPC and focus on her own roadmap. But just as her boots cleared the shadow of the tree, a highly familiar voice filtered into her ears.
“Ugh… sniff… how could the code render like this…?”
She checked her stride, mild surprise flashing across her features. “Zhou Yu?”
Hearing her name, Zhou Yu jerked her head upward, her tear-stained face pale. “Sister Lu?”
Staring down at the girl’s heavily swollen, bloodshot eyes, Lu Yunxi let out a soft gasp. “Zhou Yu, did a hostile entity compromise your parameters? Did someone abuse you?”
“Sister Lu… why aren’t you my biological sister?” Zhou Yu stared at her blankly, before her emotional walls collapsed entirely, and she dissolved into another frantic wave of tears.
Lu Yunxi: “…”
“How did my save file end up trapped inside a literal holographic game matrix?! I genuinely computed that I had transmigrated into a standard, pre-industrial historical timeline…”
“The psychological toll is too high! Why is the server running this script… If my account stops consuming those daily pharmaceutical rations, won’t my lifecycle face permanent deletion?!”
“…”
Zhou Yu’s tears poured down like rain.
Lu Yunxi’s internal processor instantly flagged a critical alert. Her gaze sharpened, tracking Zhou Yu’s facial micro-expressions with extreme intensity, trying to calculate whether the transmigrator was covertly running a compliance test on her own identity.
“Zhou Yu, has your cognitive engine suffered a latency error? What bizarre nonsense are you spewing? What is a ‘game’?” she asked, carefully advancing a single pace to test her reactions.
But Zhou Yu seemed entirely locked inside a localized mental feedback loop, mindlessly muttering fragments of modern gaming terminology to the dirt.
After monitoring her behavioral patterns for a few minutes, a cold chill crept up Lu Yunxi’s spine.
This is a disaster. Zhou Yu’s psychological stability parameters have completely collapsed.
Without a second thought, she reached down, pressed her fingers against Zhou Yu’s pulse points, and ran a quick medical diagnostic. The internal data caused her heart to sink to absolute zero.
The existential dread of discovering the world’s holographic nature, stacked on top of her prior trauma, had induced a severe systemic breakdown.
Lu Yunxi tightly grit her teeth, hoisted the uncoordinated girl onto her back, and sprinted through the city lanes toward the medical district.
Granted, while her own high-tier cultivation skills made her proficient across multiple clinical fields—internal medicine, trauma surgery, and targeted pharmacology—the crisis she was currently managing was an advanced psychological fracture. This fell entirely outside her active skill tree.
She navigated the city streets for over an hour, systematically vetting clinics until she finally managed to secure a consultation with a renowned, high-tier physician.
“Physician, what is the prognosis for my companion?” Lu Yunxi requested, gently pinning Zhou Yu’s thrashing limbs to the examination table, her brow knit with deep anxiety.
“The diagnostic parameters are grim,” the old doctor noted, smoothing his long white beard as a heavy, solemn look settled into his eyes. “Several months ago, this maiden endured a massive, cataclysmic shift in her environmental reality, leaving her baseline security metrics completely compromised. Following that initial shock, her system was subjected to a secondary traumatic stimulus. She attempted to deploy a prolonged self-deception script to rationalize the data, but the workaround failed. The longer she forced the simulation, the more psychological damage her core accumulated. This current hysterical break is simply the absolute limit of her suppressed trauma venting all at once.”
Lu Yunxi monitored Zhou Yu’s erratic behavior—watching her swing violently from catatonic, weeping depression to manic, unhinged rambling—and her own expression darkened significantly.
The physician’s analysis mapped perfectly onto the historical timeline. Back when Zhou Yu was hunted by the bandits and subsequently forced to clear that high-horror late-night instance dungeon, her mental parameters had already begun tracking anomalies. Lu Yunxi had simply failed to run a proper surveillance check on her companion’s stress meters at the time.
Lu Yunxi took a slow, heavy breath, forcing the question past her throat as she gazed at the doctor with a flicker of hope. “Can her mind be patched back to baseline? Can she be cured?”
“Had your unit delivered her to my clinic months ago—the exact frame the initial psychological stimulus triggered—the intervention would have been elementary. Managing the crisis at this stage of degradation is a bit late, but her core files are not entirely unrecoverable,” the physician noted, continuing to smooth his beard. “However, the processing duration will be exceptionally long, and the treatment will require a steady draw of premium, high-tier alchemical herbs.”
“The financial cost concerns me not,” Lu Yunxi breathed a genuine sigh of relief, a soft smile returning to her face. “My gold reserves can easily support the expense. Pray utilize your absolute premier inventory to stabilize her.”
At the end of the day, Zhou Yu was a fellow transmigrator—the closest entity she had to an actual compatriot on this server. Surviving in a strange, alien world completely cut off from one’s origins was an incredibly isolated existence; she felt a moral obligation to assist the girl’s recovery however she could.
The old doctor’s severe expression softened slightly, though his gaze remained anchored to her face with quiet intensity. “Even if your ledger can clear the cost of premium medicine, the primary catalyst required to override this affliction is the constant, unyielding presence of a trusted loved one.”
“Without the emotional anchor of a deeply cherished companion, even the most legendary alchemical compound will yield a zero percent success rate.” The doctor let out a soft sigh. Having managed countless clinical rotations throughout his life, he recognized that emotional presence was the rarest resource for a patient to secure, which was why he wasn’t surprised when the young lady froze.
“But… my account has only been synced with this girl for a remarkably brief duration!” Lu Yunxi’s brow furrowed, her thoughts scrambling. “Where on earth am I supposed to source a biological relative for her profile?!”
Zhou Yu had almost certainly spawned into this world via a solo transmigration event, completely leaving her original family database behind in her modern timeline. Where could she possibly locate an ancestral anchor for her on this server?!
The physician evidently hadn’t calculated that specific variable, his movements freezing mid-stroke.
“The… the social framework of her character is truly that desolate?” The old doctor smoothed his beard, a wave of genuine respect softening his features. He had implicitly computed that the two girls shared a bloodline bond; who could have guessed… there still existed such selflessly compassionate players in this cruel world.
But reviewing the clinical roadmap, his anxiety returned.
“Devoid of a primary kinship anchor, her therapeutic progression will encounter a significantly higher difficulty rating. My unit can only promise to exert our maximum processing power to manage the treatment.” The doctor let out another weary sigh and initiated the first session.
Lu Yunxi stood silently by the bedside, quietly monitoring the initialization of the medical script.
Over the subsequent weeks, Lu Yunxi systematically divided her daily schedule—routinely visiting the clinic to monitor Zhou Yu’s recovery metrics, while occasionally deploying her wooden table down at the market stalls to slowly, steadily farm her business experience points.
As the calendar pages turned, the physician’s treatment yielded an excellent return on investment. The structural fractures in Zhou Yu’s psyche began to heal, and her behavioral loops gradually stabilized back to normal parameters. Later on, fully reclaiming her sharp analytical faculties, she successfully cleared an interview to secure a high-paying administrative clerk position within the local prefecture government, her quality-of-life metrics rising significantly.
Watching her companion’s life officially stabilize, Lu Yunxi let out a final breath of relief. Checking her status screen, she confirmed the last commercial experience event on her mandatory trial list had officially cleared. It was time to advance her character to the next phase of her master questline.
Chapter 183: The Asylum and the Village
Through her past experiences, Lu Yunxi had discovered a peculiar quirk in the world’s mechanics: every time she was captured or sold, her experience bar surged at an incredible rate.
She strongly suspected that “being sold” was essentially a hidden multiplier for farming experience.
Previously, she had been far too entangled in survival logistics to test this theory, but now she finally commanded some free time. Determined to maximize her level as quickly as possible, she gritted her teeth, tracked down a local human trafficker, and approached him directly.
“Sell me.”
“You want me to do what?!” The trafficker stared at her, his jaw dropping as his eyes widened in sheer, unadulterated disbelief.
“I said, sell me,” Lu Yunxi repeated with a firm, definitive nod, indicating his auditory sensors hadn’t glitched.
“Little lady… looking at the quality of your garments, you clearly aren’t starving,” the trafficker said, shaking his head as he tried to reason with her. “Why on earth would you willingly throw your own contract into the slaver market?”
Lu Yunxi remained perfectly stoic, refusing to offer an explanation. Naturally, she wasn’t suffering from a starvation debuff; she was simply attempting to exploit a narrative shortcut to power-level her stats.
Observing her absolute lack of movement, the trafficker’s brow furrowed so deeply it could have crushed a mosquito.
He glanced around the empty street and let out a helpless sigh. Reaching into his weathered coat, he pulled out a solid silver ingot and forcefully pressed it into her palm. “No matter how severe your current hardships are, the system will eventually balance out… Take this silver and secure some rations for now.”
Lu Yunxi stared down at the bright silver in her hand, then shifted her gaze to the man’s tattered, low-durability clothes. Her eyelids trembled slightly, a trace of genuine emotion softening her features.
“…My profound thanks for your benevolence,” she murmured softly. “But the situation isn’t what you think. My account requires this transaction for highly specific reasons. Please, process my contract.”
The trafficker was visibly startled, but reading the absolute, unyielding determination locked in her eyes, he simply let out a weary sigh.
“Very well. State your destination variables. Where exactly do you wish to be shipped?”
Before long, Lu Yunxi climbed into the trafficker’s transport carriage, officially setting off on her journey to be sold.
Unlike the ruthless syndicates she had repeatedly dismantled in the past, this particular merchant was remarkably decent. He allowed the captives to sit freely inside the cabin without enforcing any physical restraint scripts, and he even distributed the exact same food rations to the cargo that he consumed himself—though the menu was strictly limited to coarse vegetable dumplings.
The heavy wooden wheels rumbled continuously against the dirt track.
Throughout the transit, the sharp, heartbreaking wails of a child echoed inside the cramped cabin. After enduring the high-volume crying for over an hour, Lu Yunxi finally opened her eyes, her focus sharpening.
Aside from a handful of older women whose expressions were completely numb, the source of the noise was a tiny girl who looked barely five or six years old. She was painfully emaciated, her large eyes protruding unnaturally from her hollow, thin face. She was huddled tightly against a woman’s torso, tears streaming down her cheeks as she sobbed in absolute terror.
Lu Yunxi’s brow knit into a tight frown as her gaze drifted to the mother. While every other passenger in the cabin was entirely unbound, this solitary woman was heavily secured with thick ropes, her limbs pinned to the bench.
A wave of subtle confusion washed through Lu Yunxi’s mind.
Having monitored the trafficker’s behavioral algorithms throughout the trip, she knew he lacked any malicious intent. Why would a merciful NPC enforce such a strict containment protocol on this specific asset?
During their scheduled noon rest stop, Lu Yunxi approached the driver to query the data.
“Are you asking about the bound woman with the child?” The trafficker blinked, his processor enduring a brief latency spike before he recalled the specific inventory file. He let out a heavy, melancholy sigh. “That poor soul was explicitly sold down the pipeline by her own kin.”
“Her own family?”
“Aye. Her husband was drafted to fight in a brutal campaign across a distant continent, where his unit was entirely wiped out. The imperial government actually remitted a massive silver compensation package to the household. Unfortunately, because she had only spawned a single daughter, she lacked the social standing to anchor the estate. The predatory relatives swooped in and systematically looted her entire inheritance,” the trafficker explained, spitting into the dirt. “Had the tragedy stopped there, her stats might have held up. But the sheer psychological trauma caused her mind to completely fracture. Her in-laws flatly refused to allocate resources to support a madwoman and a useless daughter, so they processed a slave ticket to clear them from their ledger.”
“A mental fracture?” Lu Yunxi turned her head to observe the woman’s hollow, lifeless stare. The sheer tragedy of the script left her temporarily speechless.
For a prolonged duration, a heavy, suffocating atmosphere hung over the wagon.
Finally, Lu Yunxi broke the silence. “What exact coordinates do you intend to deliver the mother and daughter to?”
“Ah, you lack the regional map data,” the trafficker replied, a hint of professional pride bleeding into his tone as he rubbed his calloused hands together. “If we advance a few miles further and clear the upcoming mountain ridges, we will breach the perimeter of a massive medical asylum. I’ve intercepted server rumors stating that patients suffering from extreme hysteria or cognitive corruption receive premium care within those walls. Even those whose gold reserves are completely dry can secure entry without a single worry.”
Lu Yunxi’s immediate cognitive reaction was pure skepticism. A medical asylum?
Does a specialized infrastructure of that tier even belong in a pre-industrial cultivation server? Could it be a modern administrative setting implemented by the game developers?
“Are there truly such altruistic philanthropists on this server?” she asked, voicing her secondary concern. “Constructing a massive medical facility and granting zero-fee entry to destitute commoners… is this charity?”
Sensing her profound confusion, the trafficker offered a swift breakdown of the economic loop. “It makes sense that your profile has never logged an asylum node before; it’s a highly specialized medical clinic engineered specifically to treat severe hysteria and cognitive madness. You won’t find this asset rendered on any other map—it is a unique landmark exclusive to the Green Oasis province.”
“Destitute patients are permitted to occupy the facility’s beds for free without spending a single copper coin. However, the exact frame their cognitive parameters recover, they are hard-coded to remain at the facility to generate labor value. They must work as staff for at least two or three years to completely offset the medical debt before the system grants them a exit clearance.”
Hearing the transactional breakdown, Lu Yunxi’s suspicions smoothly dissipated.
An absolute, unconditional benevolence in a broken world was inherently terrifying. If the asylum enforced a mandatory labor contract to balance the medical sheets, it meant the system logic was fundamentally sound.
Concluding her dialogue with the driver, Lu Yunxi settled back into the transport cabin, her posture relaxing. She was just prepping her system to enter a brief meditation loop when an intuitive thought flashed through her mind.
Turning toward the bound, catatonic mother, she casually cast a standard health-recovery spell, harboring absolutely zero expectation of a positive return.
To her utter amazement, the rejuvenation graphics flashed across the woman’s silhouette, and the healing patch successfully initialized!
Fascinating… When she had previously attempted to deploy this exact spell to clear Zhou Yu’s psychological break, the interface had flagged a total failure.
Lu Yunxi rapidly analyzed the data, quickly isolating the underlying variable. Zhou Yu’s mental collapse had been entirely psychological—a severe emotional depression triggered by existential dread. This native woman, conversely, was indeed enduring intense grief, but her cognitive madness had primarily been triggered by a severe physical trauma to her skull sustained during her eviction, which secondary stimulus had glitched her mind.
Because Lu Yunxi’s health-recovery art was highly optimized to repair physical trauma, the spell effortlessly repaired the structural damage to her brain.
Gradually, the lifeless fog vanished from the woman’s pupils, her eyes regaining a sharp, rational clarity. As her memory cache successfully reloaded the tragic events of her past, a silent torrent of tears began to stream down her cheeks.
“Miss Lu, are you completely certain your profile intends to cross the asylum threshold?” the trafficker asked a few hours later, peering toward the looming white complex in the distance with a sudden, ominous prickle of unease. “That poor mother’s cognitive stats have completely stabilized; she no longer requires an asylum slot!”
“My thanks for the alert. I shall re-evaluate my trajectory,” she replied with a placid smile, pulling up her system interface to run a data check.
The driver naturally assumed she was aborting the deployment because the initial inventory problem had been solved, but his calculations were completely off.
Lu Yunxi had been tracking this trafficker’s wagon across multiple sectors for hours, yet the experience bar on her main menu hadn’t nudged forward by a single millimeter.
The diagnostic was clear: attempting to power-level her account through the passive “being sold” exploit was no longer viable. The system had evidently patched the shortcut, meaning she could no longer farm experience without active engagement. Since idling in the carriage was a waste of time, she ordered the vehicle to a halt and disembarked.
It was pure geographic coincidence that her pathing had terminated right outside the asylum walls.
She let out a soft, internal sigh. She had systematically ground through the majority of the training events listed on her master questline, but the aggregate experience yield was heavily plateaued. The server logic evidently penalized repetitive actions, rendering copycat exploits entirely useless.
“Young lady, what is a fragile maiden like yourself doing wandering these coordinates completely unescorted?” a sharp voice called out.
Lu Yunxi hoisted her chin, watching a middle-aged peasant woman wipe her soiled hands on her apron, set down her iron hoe, and march over from a nearby agricultural plot.
“Greetings, Auntie. I am merely a travelling scholar mapping out the local geography. Pray tell, what is the official registry of this settlement?”
“Ah! A scholar!” the woman chirped, her chest swelling with immense local pride as she pointed toward the massive white pavilion peeking through the canopy. “Our settlement is officially registered as the Mental Asylum Village! That medical asylum is the absolute premier landmark in the entire state province. Because our borders sit right against their real estate, our community won’t let any other village claim the name!”
“Mental Village?” Lu Yunxi repeated, her eye twitching slightly at the phrasing.
“Exactly! The neighboring district used to run a fierce campaign to steal the trademark on the map! Our two factions nearly triggered a full-scale village war over the naming rights. But their village chief eventually executed a total migration command, abandoning the sector with his underlings, so the system legally granted the name to our ledger! Our luck parameters are truly maxed out!” The auntie grew incredibly animated as she unpacked the local lore.
“Ever since that asylum initialized its operations, our local economy has experienced a massive boom. A few enterprising players even established premium inns to accommodate passing travelers and tourists. Back in the older server cycles, our lives were catastrophically grim—durability was low, and multiple commoners were literally forced to harvest dirt to stave off the hunger debuffs…”
The talkative peasant showed zero signs of hitting a text limit, continuously spewing out regional anecdotes.
Lu Yunxi maintained a polite, placid smile, listening to the data stream in absolute silence.
Suddenly, a sharp, localized wind current swept across the fields.
A remarkably distinct, intensely familiar aroma drifted directly into her sensory arrays.
Lu Yunxi’s eyebrows subtly arched, a brilliant, calculated spark flaring deep within her pupils.
Chapter 184: The Food Delivery Person
Lu Yunxi’s brow twitched. The next microsecond, her physical body dropped flat against the grass, fully initializing a feigned unconsciousness script.
“…Is the sequence finalized?” a low, incredibly raspy voice suddenly filtered through the trees from a distance.
The middle-aged peasant woman, who had been chattering non-stop just moments before, cautiously closed the distance. Dropping into a crouch, she extended a rough hand to check Lu Yunxi’s respiration parameters. She knit her brow, entering a heavy internal calculation loop for several long seconds, though her diagnostic modules failed to parse any clear data.
“The structural integrity is fine. Her vessel is operational, and she is maintaining a steady respiration rate,” she reported seriously, turning her head to address her partner in the shadows.
“Who cares about her breathing parameters?! Ever since that catastrophe cycle where we accidentally administered an excessive dose and poisoned an asset to death, our group has throttled the potency of our knockout powder down to a minimum. Our compounds lack the damage rating to kill a target. For all we know, her system hasn’t even fully entered the sleep state yet!” The hidden accomplice emerged from the brush, sounding thoroughly enraged. He marched over to run his own surveillance check on Lu Yunxi’s vitals. “Do not delay! If her consciousness reboots, she will execute a flight command and escape the sector!”
“According to the medical database, the respiration parameters of a comatose entity become exceptionally faint and slow,” the man muttered, his brow furrowing as he analyzed her breath. “Does this maiden’s current profile register as faint and slow? Well, her vessel is completely flat on the dirt; her sensory arrays are likely offline, so she can’t intercept our dialogue anyway.”
“Move out. Lock onto her limbs and execute the transport protocol immediately.” The man’s anxiety metrics peaked. He rapidly dropped into a squat, gripping the top of Lu Yunxi’s shoulders to hoist her skull.
The peasant woman shuffled over to anchor herself to her feet.
The two low-level NPCs tightened their grips, forcefully throwing their muscle parameters into the lift.
Lu Yunxi’s physical vessel was instantly bent into a sharp “U” shape—her skull and boots were hoisted high into the air, while her midsection and waist continuously sagged toward the dirt.
Her internal consciousness was completely deadpan. These two bumbling amateurs clearly lack baseline proficiency in body-snatching labor. Otherwise, how could a simple transport assignment turn into such a clumsy logistical disaster?!
“Our syndicate hit a massive payout matrix with this asset! Once the gold liquidates, our units can take an extended holiday off the grid! Accelerate your movement velocity!”
As the two traders optimized their dialogue tree, their eyes flashed with feral, greedy excitement, and they began traveling at maximum speed. Pinned in her awkward posture, Lu Yunxi felt her internal sensors tracking severe kinetic vibrations as they sprinted down the trail.
In a matter of minutes, her character coordinates were officially moved inside the perimeter of the medical asylum.
“Where exactly did your squad harvest this cargo? If our administration logs this specific profile into our registry, it won’t trigger any security alerts or faction retaliation, correct?”
“Oh, rest easy, administrative Master! How could our scouts ever dare deliver a high-risk entity to your clinic?! This maiden is a lone traveler. What exact variables define a traveler? It means her account commands zero social ties in this jurisdiction; she has absolutely no family units to file a missing person report!”
“Excellent. Here is the agreed gold disbursement. Clear out of the facility immediately and lock your chat logs.”
“Fully understood… structural compliance confirmed! Our profound thanks, Master.”
Filtering the ambient conversations through her auditory arrays, Lu Yunxi’s internal calculations shifted.
Forest Continent, Green Oasis Province, Medical Asylum.
Lu Yunxi had been systematically bound with heavy, reinforced leather straps, her physical vessel firmly pinned to a clean hospital cot.
When her eyelids fluttered open, her visual field was dominated by a stark, pristine white ceiling—a graphic rendering that differed drastically from the heavy wooden beams and rafters common to the region’s traditional architecture.
She rolled her eyes left and right, running an environmental scan.
The cell was a high-security, completely enclosed block, featuring a solitary ventilation window situated near the high ceiling that measured barely the size of a standard building brick. A faint, natural white light filtered through the aperture, indicating the server clock was still calculating the morning hours. Aside from the heavy metal cot beneath her spine, the room’s asset count was an absolute zero; there wasn’t a single secondary piece of furniture rendered in the space.
She blinked once.
Suddenly, the heavy iron door swung wide open, and a dense crowd of white-robed entities swarmed into her cell.
The leading NPC was draped in a pristine white lab coat and a heavy sanitary face mask, flanked by a massive entourage of subordinate medical units—his character presentation perfectly mirroring a high-ranking Department Director from her previous world.
“Behold our newest inmate asset, designated as Patient Number 3,” the Department Director declared, pointing a sterile finger toward Lu Yunxi’s bound form. “Her cognitive faculties have already suffered total dementia. Every unit must exercise extreme caution when closing within her strike radius. Moving forward, systematically execute the chemical prescription I am about to write…”
Lu Yunxi: “…”
Unbelievable. With an expression of sheer, unadulterated deadpan, she let her eyes roll back toward the ceiling.
“Excellent! Look at her facial data—she is actively executing an involuntary eye-roll animation! This is an absolute textbook symptom of profound, hard-coded idiocy!” the Director shouted, his enthusiasm parameters peaking as he gestured wildly toward her face.
The surrounding interns’ eyes lit up in unison. They swarmed Lu Yunxi’s cot like tourists crowding around a monkey enclosure at a local zoo, frantically clicking their ink pens to log the symptoms into their medical ledgers.
Another subordinate doctor unrolled a parchment scroll, reading off the diagnostic criteria line by line: “Profound stupidity, absolute flatline emotional affect, persistent mutism, systemic dementia, catatonic eye-rolls… The pathology aligns perfectly with the manual! The Master’s diagnostic algorithms are truly flawless!”
The longer Lu Yunxi listened to their absurd medical analysis, the more profound her deadpan became, her lips subtly twitching with pure exasperation.
What a load of complete garbage!
Right at that microsecond, the Department Director intercepted her shifting facial variables, his excitement metrics violently spiking.
“Analyze her facial expressions! Do your scanners detect that sudden micro-twitching along the jawline?!” he lectured with supreme confidence, continuously unpacking his medical lore to the class. “Under standard pathology scripts, localized muscle twitching is more commonly observed across a patient’s limbs. But in this case, the muscle contractions are strictly localized to the corners of her mouth—meaning her cerebral channels are currently blocked by massive, severe blood clots!”
The wall of intern doctors behind him nodded in frantic, submissive unison, absorbing the briefing with absolute devotion.
Lu Yunxi: “…”
She casually pulled up her interface, casting a basic detection technique across the medical team. The data analysis instantly revealed that within the entire crowd, only the Department Director commanded a genuine medical skill tree—though his actual rating was throttled at a baseline intern tier, meaning he had barely cleared his starter professions. As for the rest of his entourage, their medical attributes sat at an absolute zero.
She was completely speechless.
What tier of administrative madness is this facility running?! A massive pack of unclassed commoners who don’t even possess a basic first-aid skill are huddled together conducting a clinical review of my brain parameters?!
It was an immense blessing that she had proactively deployed her high-tier healing arts to clear the cognitive fracture of the mother in the carriage. Had that poor woman been processed through this clinic’s care pipeline, who could possibly calculate what horrific systemic torture her health bar would have endured?
Recalling how enthusiastically the human trafficker had praised the asylum’s medical reputation on the road, her eye twitched a second time.
At this juncture, the Department Director finished venting his long-winded academic monologue, his satisfaction metrics apparently maxed out. He completely ceased his monitoring of her face, casually waving his arm to lead his subordinates out of the containment cell.
Lu Yunxi tracked the heavy iron door as it slammed shut, the locking mechanism clicking home from the exterior. Instantly channeling her internal energy, she cleanly snapped her leather bindings, swinging her legs over the frame to run a thorough map-scouting routine on this “asylum.”
However, before her boots could even make contact with the floorboards, the door handles rattled, and a figure breached the room.
“Gasp! Holy heaven! Why has your asset model descended from the cot?!” The courier holding a wooden lunch tray let out a frantic gasp, his tone laced with extreme anxiety. “Return to your designated station immediately! The server clock has initialized the lunch interval!”
Lu Yunxi maintained absolute silence, keeping her eyes fixed on the man as he rushed into her cell. He set down a ceramic bowl filled with a murky green potion, alongside a stack of dry, hard-baked throat-burning cakes.
She directed a quick scan toward the liquid, her eye twitching at the item description.
[A Bowl of Medicine: Alchemical Grade. Efficacy: Unknown. Side Effects: Unknown.]
She delivered a flat, expressionless rejection: “My profile refuses to ingest this item.” Drinking an unindexed alchemical fluid with unknown side effects was an absolute recipe for a vital failure.
While her progression bar had nearly crossed the Grandmaster threshold—meaning she would soon command the power to reset the world’s parameters back to normal—she refused to expose her build to unnecessary operational risks at this critical juncture.
The orderly’s brow knit into a tight, highly irritated knot, but his programming forced him to check his aggression meter for the moment. “Negative. Your character model is registered as a patient unit within this sector. How can a patient flatly refuse to consume her prescribed medicine?”
Lu Yunxi’s features instantly darkened.
Locking a freezing, lethal gaze onto his face—her eyes burning like a wild apex predator tracking its prey—the generic threats and mandatory lecture scripts the orderly had been preparing to bark out suddenly jammed right in his throat. He completely lost the capability to articulate his dialogue tree.
Letting out a forced, terrified chuckle, he slowly executed a back-dash, backing his way out of the room.
Lu Yunxi didn’t waste a single frame monitoring his retreat.
Her internal hunger parameters were flagging a low alert, so she opened her dimensional inventory, retrieving a handful of premium fresh buns she had prepared earlier to clear her debuff.
The exact frame she finalized her lunch animation, the heavy iron door was violently breached a second time. The orderly who had just retreated from her cell stormed back into the coordinates—flanked by a massive crowd of security guards.
“That’s the unit! That’s Patient Number 3!”
The orderly pointed a trembling finger at Lu Yunxi, and the guards immediately synchronized their aggro, swarming her position. One squad aggressively lunged forward to pin her limbs to the cot, while a secondary guard hoisted the ceramic medicine bowl, attempting to force the toxic fluid down her throat.
Lu Yunxi let out a sharp, dangerous sneer. Since initializing her character on this server, her build had never endured such a pathetic tier of humiliation!
With a fluid backhand flick of her wrists, she redirected their kinetic force, executing a rapid sequence of high-damage martial arts strikes that dismantled the opposing frontline within a few brief moves.
The low-level security guards were completely outmatched by her gear score. Screaming in agony as their health bars took massive damage, they were utterly neutralized by her retaliation. Lu Yunxi methodically divided the remaining green medicine into equal portions, forcefully feeding the unindexed compound to every single guard sprawling on the floor.
Observing their character models instantly pacify as the heavy sedative effects of the unknown draught initialized, Lu Yunxi let out a cold snort and stepped past their unconscious forms to explore the broader layout of the map.
The medical asylum was structurally limited to a two-story layout. Aside from a single, centralized corridor bisecting each level, the floor plan was exclusively comprised of identical containment cells. Every room rendered the exact same asset layout: a single iron cot and a tiny ventilation brick.
As she navigated the upper lane, her spatial calculation modules suddenly flagged an anomaly.
The dimensions are mathematically flawed… These individual cell parameters shouldn’t be this compressed.
Narrowing her eyes into a sharp gaze, she advanced along the hallway, running her knuckles against the masonry to test the acoustic properties. She methodically knocked her way down the length of the corridor, and within seconds, her ears registered a distinct shift in the audio frequency filtering through the wall.
Lu Yunxi’s eyes flashed with calculated brilliance. She immediately began inspecting the adjacent moldings to scan for a hidden mechanism node.
She hadn’t anticipated this baseline asylum map would conceal its secrets so thoroughly; the architecture had covertly implemented a hidden dark room within the walls.
She fumbled along the brickwork for a few moments, and the exact frame her fingers unlocked a latch trigger, the group of sedated guards from her holding cell suddenly recovered enough consciousness to scurry out into the hall.
Lu Yunxi instantly retracted her hand from the mechanism, smoothly turning her torso around to face them as she sauntered back toward her cell.
The squad of guards let out a massive, collective breath of relief the moment their visual sensors re-established tracking on her silhouette.
“Why exactly are your pathing lines running erratic loops down the corridors?! Are you hunting for a—” One guard began aggressively barking a disciplinary script, but hoisting his chin to meet Lu Yunxi’s freezing, detached expression, his vocal output completely froze. Recalling how effortlessly her bare hands had pulverized their entire containment squad moments ago, he wisely chose to abort his dialogue tree.
“Our unit was simply experiencing a temporary concern regarding your safety parameters,” the adjacent guard stammered, offering a thoroughly dry, placid laugh to lower the tension. “This facility houses a high density of unstable patient units. If your vessel wanders into unmapped sectors without an escort, your account might trigger a lethal hazard code.”
Lu Yunxi’s countenance remained entirely serene. She simply directed a quick diagnostic scan toward the active status debuffs ticking down on their interfaces, continuing her leisurely stroll past their line.
In reality, the low-level staff had simply harvested those generic medicine bowls from an uncalibrated alchemical batch; since they had only just ingested the fluids, the chemical properties required a brief countdown to fully initialize their effects. The true data breakdown would manifest shortly.
The exact second that analytical thought finalized in her mind—
Multiple guards within the sub-party suddenly went entirely pale, their hands frantically clamping over their midsections. “The outhouse! Where on earth are the directional coordinates for the nearest outhouse?!”
Unleashing a wave of desperate, high-volume roars, the men broke into a frantic sprint down the hall, violently shoving and trampling one another as their bowel metrics hit a critical emergency, completely erasing Lu Yunxi’s tracking marker from their priority queue.
