Chapter 185| Chapter 186| Chapter 187
Chapter 185: Goudan
Lu Yunxi’s eyebrows twitched slightly. Watching the squad of guards desperately sprint down the hall to find a restroom, she secretly shook her head and casually strolled back into her cell.
She had noticed that the hidden mechanism in the corridor appeared somewhat complex. Even if she possessed the capability to brute-force the latch, cracking the lock would require a significant block of time. Therefore, she needed to run a proper setup first.
She remained inside her room, meticulously tapping against the masonry of the adjacent walls. It was only after her acoustic sensors confirmed there were zero secondary hidden chambers buffering her immediate coordinates that she felt secure enough to begin mapping the corridor mechanism.
After spending the entire afternoon tossing and turning the data in her head, she finally formulated a viable infiltration plan.
However, before she could execute her exit script, she triggered an encounter with a fresh courier unit.
This new food delivery orderly appeared remarkably honest. He knocked gently on the heavy iron door. Only after receiving her vocal authorization did he silently step inside, gently placing the tray down onto her cot before quietly turning to leave.
“Here is your daily medical allocation.”
Lu Yunxi stared down at the tray resting on the mattress, her brow arching in surprise.
She had fully prepped her combat parameters to engage in a massive physical altercation with this orderly, yet she hadn’t anticipated he would voluntarily execute a back-dash without trying to force the potion down her throat.
Running a quick calculation, she retrieved a pristine, unused ceramic washbasin from her dimensional inventory. She poured the toxic green fluid and the throat-burning cakes into the basin, dabbing a single microscopic drop of the liquid against the corner of her lips to simulate ingestion, before pulling the door open.
“My thanks. I have completed my medical cycle.”
Hearing her dialogue, the orderly’s lips trembled unconsciously. His eyes flashed with a complex, highly conflicted array of emotions, as if his programming was struggling to render a warning. Ultimately, he swallowed his text, silently gathering the empty tray and exiting the hall.
Lu Yunxi felt the behavioral shift was distinctly anomalous.
Over the subsequent few days, Lu Yunxi dedicated her time to systematically mapping the guard patrol routes buffering her sector before preparing to launch her expedition.
As for the new delivery orderly, he maintained an absolute, vow-of-silence routine.
Lu Yunxi had already intercepted the local gossip channels; it appeared the initial delivery guard had privately spammed the staff networks with claims that her character was a hyper-violent, apex predator. Consequently, the veteran orderlies were absolutely terrified to step inside her aggro radius.
To bypass the hazard, the staff had unceremoniously dumped the high-risk delivery assignment onto this quiet, honest rookie.
It was a massive tactical stroke of luck that this new orderly didn’t belong to the Department Director’s faction. Otherwise, the administrative tier might have run a diagnostic and realized her ‘idiocy’ parameters were entirely faked days ago.
Checking the server clock, Lu Yunxi lay back against the iron cot to execute a brief sleep cycle. Her roadmap dictated she would wait for the orderly to deliver the noon rations, after which she would initiate her stealth run into the hidden chamber.
Knock, knock.
The familiar, gentle rapping echoed from the door. The honest orderly stepped inside with his usual silent disposition, quietly setting the lunch tray down on the mattress.
Lu Yunxi lowered her gaze to monitor the drop—and suddenly, her eyes narrowed into a sharp, calculated squint.
She had completely missed the texture rendering before, but analyzing the data up close, she realized this ‘honest’ orderly possessed a distinct set of heavy calluses across his hands.
These weren’t the standard, rough abrasions generated by gripping an iron hoe or executing manual farm labor. The friction patterns were highly specialized, mimicking the exact calluses formed by wielding a calligraphy brush for a prolonged duration!
An entity simply wouldn’t spawn that specific callus data unless they had been diligently gripping a scholar’s pen for over a decade!
Lu Yunxi’s expression turned incredibly subtle.
This medical asylum was deeply isolated within a primeval mountain valley. While its coordinates technically fell under the jurisdiction of the massive Green Oasis metropolis, it was physically surrounded by hostile ridges. Baseline literacy rates in this rural sector were practically zero, let alone populations boasting decades of dedicated academic study!
An honest peasant? Highly improbable.
The only variable she couldn’t immediately calculate was his faction alignment. Was his core loyalty tethered to the asylum’s administration, or was he running an independent sabotage script?
Just as the man turned his torso to exit the cell, Lu Yunxi executed a microscopic, invisible flick of her fingertips, manipulating a trace of internal energy.
“Ah!”
With a sharp yelp, the orderly’s balance parameters failed, and he crashed heavily onto the floorboards.
He rubbed his bruised knee, his expression entirely bewildered as he scanned his immediate perimeter, only to find the stone floor perfectly flat and clear of any physical hazards.
Bizarre! His processor concluded he had merely suffered a random latency glitch causing his leg to go numb, triggering the fall.
Lu Yunxi observed his recovery animation. His movements were distinctly rigid and uncoordinated.
Her diagnostic was clear: this entity had dedicated his lifecycle to reading academic texts. Even if he had initiated a basic martial arts routine, it was strictly optimized for baseline cardio and health preservation. He possessed absolutely zero real-world combat data.
Confirming he wasn’t an undercover assassin, she opted not to trigger a security alarm, simply asking mildly: “Are your structural parameters secure?”
The man shook his head, brushing the dust from his robes.
Seeing that he had to cycle through the rest of his delivery route, Lu Yunxi rapidly dumped the toxic medicine and dry cakes into her hidden basin. After waiting for a brief cooldown period, she handed the empty tray back to the orderly.
She idled in her room for another hour. As the noon lunch interval hit its peak—verifying via her acoustic sensors that the corridor was entirely clear of guard patrols—she smoothly advanced toward the location where she had mapped the hidden mechanism.
She cracked the latch trigger in a matter of seconds, silently slipping her silhouette into the dark chamber.
However, the exact microsecond her boots cleared the threshold, her eyes widened to absolute maximum.
Based on Lu Yunxi’s standard gaming logic, she had assumed this covert vault would be heavily loaded with classified administrative secrets or high-tier treasure chests. But the actual rendering was…
Ethereal, sheer silk curtains draped from the ceiling. A dense layer of crimson rose petals was strewn across the floorboards. Dominating the center of the room was a colossal, luxurious bed taking up a full two-thirds of the square footage, adorned with a vibrant, blood-red silk quilt. Every single environmental detail radiated an intensely explicit, highly suggestive aesthetic.
Lu Yunxi surveyed the chamber, a profound sense of deja vu striking her processor.
Didn’t the VIP suites on the second floor of the Fengyue Tower deploy this exact same decorative blueprint?!
She activated her light-footwork mechanics, silently gliding across the petals to run a meticulous inspection.
However, the entire room was restricted to this specialized ‘entertainment’ layout. Not a single gold coin, silver ingot, or premium item drop could be located.
Thoroughly disappointed by the zero-yield exploration, Lu Yunxi was just prepping her exit script when her auditory sensors suddenly picked up a faint, muffled scrape originating from the adjacent cell.
Her heart skipped a beat. She instantly dropped her respiration rate to a whisper, utilizing her highest-tier stealth mechanics to silently close the distance to the shared wall.
It was only at this proximity that her visual interface highlighted several microscopic spy-holes drilled directly into the masonry of the hidden chamber, granting a crystal-clear surveillance view into the neighboring patient cells.
She held her breath, pressing her eye tight against a viewport.
Standard patient cells flanked both sides of the hidden suite, and it just so happened that the two rooms adjacent to her current coordinates were currently vacant.
Yet, an entity had just breached one of those empty cells…
Sharpening her visual focus, she tracked a silhouette actively executing a stealth-search script across the room.
The figure aggressively flipped the heavy iron mattress and systematically tapped his knuckles against the floorboards, clearly running a scanning protocol to locate hidden treasure or classified data.
However, observing the character model from behind, the asset looked remarkably familiar!
She furrowed her brow, leaning even closer to the spy-hole.
The exact frame the entity pivoted his head, Lu Yunxi was thoroughly startled.
It was the ‘honest’ orderly who had been managing her food deliveries all week!
She instinctively slapped a hand over her mouth, tracking the man as he meticulously completed his search cycle before silently slipping out the iron door.
Lu Yunxi rapidly reset any environmental assets she had disturbed inside the red room back to their default coordinates. Taking advantage of the vacant corridor, she executed a high-speed dash back into her own cell.
While the honest orderly had been tearing through the adjacent room, his facial parameters had been locked into a grim, deeply solemn expression, his eyes radiating profound disgust. He absolutely did not look like a loyal drone assigned to this asylum’s faction.
However, her logic engine flagged a secondary possibility: his cold demeanor could simply be a behavioral byproduct of enduring severe workplace bullying from the veteran staff.
She needed to run a secondary compliance test.
Evening initialized.
When the honest orderly arrived to deliver the dinner rations, Lu Yunxi abruptly broke her vow of silence. “What is your official registry name?”
The orderly opened his mouth, his processor hesitating for a fraction of a second before he lowered his chin. “My registry is… Goudan.”
Lu Yunxi’s eye twitched. Completely ignoring the blatantly fake, low-level peasant name, she fired off a direct probe: “Why has your profile been exclusively assigned to my delivery route this week? Is the senior staff actively grieving your account?”
“I am not enduring workplace bullying. My character simply possesses a high affinity for manual labor,” ‘Goudan’ replied with absolute, deadpan seriousness.
“Oh? Your parameters enjoy manual labor?” She offered a highly ambiguous smile. “My sleep quilt has acquired a severe grime debuff and is stained with oil. You can execute a dismantling sequence and wash the linens for me right now.”
“I… ahem.” Goudan choked on his own script, reluctantly nodding his compliance.
Lu Yunxi leaned against the wall, thoroughly analyzing Goudan as he initiated the sequence to strip the heavy quilt.
His physical animations were incredibly stiff and uncoordinated. He spent half the afternoon aggressively struggling to complete a baseline domestic chore that a standard NPC would finalize in seconds. Instead of efficiently clearing the task, he merely succeeded in draining his own stamina bar, his forehead dripping with sweat and his hair reduced to a tangled mess.
An outside observer lacking context would assume his avatar had just finished sprinting a grueling two-kilometer marathon.
Lu Yunxi narrowed her eyes, locking onto his movement loops for several minutes before a definitive hypothesis finalized in her database.
This ‘Goudan’ undoubtedly spawned from a high-net-worth, elite lineage. His hands lacked the friction calluses generated by any form of physical or agricultural labor. Furthermore, while his external uniform jacket was rendered with coarse, low-durability peasant fabric, the inner collar of his tunic was woven from premium, high-tier silk—a luxury material that standard commoners couldn’t even identify, let alone afford.
Although the garments he wore were artificially aged to look weathered, the baseline item quality was exceptional.
Could his aristocratic family have suffered a catastrophic political purge, forcing him into hiding?
Sensing the intensity of her surveillance tracking, Goudan nervously wiped the sweat from his brow. “Hehe… is there an error with my rendering? Why are your visual sensors locked onto my profile?”
Lu Yunxi smoothly retracted her gaze, offering a pleasant smile. “It’s nothing. My scanners simply registered the decorative token secured to your belt… That specific asset boasts a remarkably high market value, does it not?”
Her eyes had casually swept over the wooden tag hanging from Goudan’s waist. While it was modeled to resemble a baseline wooden identification badge, the carving resolution was exquisitely detailed, and the underlying timber was a premium, top-tier exotic wood. It was absolutely not a common drop.
Its raw market value easily eclipsed that of multiple high-end jewelry pieces.
Goudan’s facial expressions remained perfectly locked, but the system logs would have registered a massive cold sweat instantly soaking his inner tunic.
“Haha, elder sister, what bizarre data are you processing! I purchased this token off a generic street vendor; its gold value is practically zero,” he replied, executing a dry, forced laugh while nervously scratching the back of his head.
Elder sister?! Lu Yunxi’s eye twitched violently at the familiar address, choosing not to push the dialogue tree any further.
Goudan secretly exhaled a massive sigh of relief. He rapidly bundled the soiled sheets into his arms and bolted out of the cell.
Tracking his frantic, fleeing silhouette, a calculated light flared in Lu Yunxi’s eyes.
While the pristine white coats worn by the asylum doctors were high-quality, they were standard commercial assets that could be purchased with baseline gold. But Goudan’s inner garments were entirely restricted to elite crafting tiers.
Her core hypothesis was now absolute.
That ‘Goudan’ is absolutely not an authentic employee of this asylum faction!
If she wanted to continually scout the hidden suite, she would be forced to constantly run her stealth protocols back to her cell before the dinner delivery arrived, which was a massive logistical headache. But… if she could successfully bribe Goudan and secure his faction alignment…
Processing the tactical advantage, the corners of her lips curled into a sharp, satisfied smile. She didn’t rush to breach the secondary hidden rooms, instead opting to wait patiently for her trap to spring.
Chapter 186: Infiltration
Before long, Lu Yunxi found the opportunity she was looking for.
On that particular day, she was out wandering the grounds. The patients at the asylum were permitted designated outdoor hours, and every morning and afternoon, a few would drift out to clear their heads. This was the perfect window for her to mingle with the crowd and move about without drawing the guards’ attention.
As she passed a secluded corner of the lower garden, a barrage of harsh, familiar voices cut through the quiet air.
“Hit him! Beat him to death!”
“You miserable parasite! How dare you crawl behind our backs to kiss the director’s boots?! What’s your game, huh?! Trying to usurp my position?!”
“Break him! Keep swinging! Anyone who throws a fist today gets a chicken drumstick for dinner!”
Lu Yunxi paused, her focus sharpening. The thugs shouting so viciously were the exact same orderlies who had tried to force-feed her the sedative on her first day. She knit her brow. Who were they tormenting now?
Stepping subtly to the side, she peered through the heavy shade of a dense thicket in the corner. A man was curled on the dirt, his arms locked tightly over his head, silently enduring a ruthless beating from a mob of staff members. The onlookers grew increasingly feral with every strike, their curses turning steadily cruder and more vicious.
Lu Yunxi’s gaze turned ice-cold. What a vile pack of animals. To use such excessive force on a defenseless person…
Her expression darkening, she casually scooped up a handful of sharp gravel from the path. With a fluid, nearly invisible flick of her fingers, she unleashed the stones.
“Ow!”
“Son of a—!”
“Who threw that?!”
The mob instantly broke, their eyes nearly popping out of their sockets as their faces flushed crimson with rage, frantically spinning around to scan the empty garden.
Down in the dirt, the bruised victim tentatively lifted his chin, but his sensors only caught the faint, poetic flutter of a red skirt vanishing around the bend.
Back in her cell later that afternoon, Lu Yunxi scanned the wooden tray resting on her cot with a trace of mild amusement.
“What is the meaning of this layout?” she asked, her eyes glinting. “Why has the menu suddenly been upgraded today?”
“Those are the premium snacks reserved exclusively for the medical staff. You can ingest them without worrying about toxic properties,” Shun Hai replied, keeping his chin tucked low to conceal the fresh, dark contusions marring his face. “My thanks… for intervening to salvage my health bar today.”
Lu Yunxi arched a delicate eyebrow, a playful spark flaring in her eyes. “Oh? My database lacks any log of my unit saving your profile.”
“…”
Shun Hai choked on his words, failing to advance the dialogue tree. He knew with absolute certainty that his lifecycle had been on the absolute brink of termination during that beating. Had this mysterious woman not executed a timely intervention, his character would have been permanently deleted from the server.
Though he couldn’t decipher why she insisted on keeping her capabilities classified, a wave of profound gratitude washed through his system.
“My authentic registry name is Shun Hai,” he volunteered softly, mapping out his coordinates in meticulous detail. “If your profile ever requires assistance down the line, simply execute a left turn upon clearing your door and track the corridor to the absolute end of the second floor. That is my designated quarters.”
The corners of Lu Yunxi’s lips curved upward. This aristocratic scholar was remarkably quick on the uptake.
“Fascinating,” she teased, her eyes narrowing into a half-smiling glaze. “Did your account not explicitly state your registry was Dog Egg just yesterday? How is it you are suddenly named Shun Hai?”
Shun Hai choked a second time, a sudden wave of heat flushing his cheeks. He opened his mouth to deploy a complex explanation, but locking eyes with her thoroughly amused, knowing expression, he simply collapsed his defenses with a helpless sigh.
This maiden truly possessed a high attribute for teasing!
“In any case… that is the data,” he muttered sheepishly. Leaving the premium snacks on her mattress, he gathered the empty tray and stepped toward the exit.
But a millimeter before his boots cleared the threshold, a soft voice filtered from the center of the cell: “My lineage name is Lu.”
Following that encounter, the structural boundaries between Lu Yunxi and Shun Hai smoothly dissolved, and the two began trading regular updates. Shun Hai quietly leaked a massive cache of localized backend gossip—which doctor possessed a secret affinity for consuming putrid fermented dishes, which guard pathing routines were optimized for slacking off while on duty, and various other camp anomalies.
While Lu Yunxi’s advanced arrays had already mapped a significant portion of these variables independently, Shun Hai’s data filled several critical blind spots in her regional files.
The calendar pages continued to turn.
One evening, capitalizing on the midnight cycle when the entire compound’s vigilance parameters plummeted, Lu Yunxi glided out of her cell to hunt for the dark room’s primary console.
But as she executed a rapid pivot around a blind corridor junction, her form collided directly with a secondary entity.
“Gasph!”
Shun Hai let out a sharp, terrified wheeze. His heart nearly lunged straight through his chest wall, his panic parameters only resetting to baseline when a familiar whisper murmured, “It is me.”
“Miss Lu?!” Shun Hai gasped, staring at her silhouette in absolute, wild bewilderment, his analytical units flooding with suspicion. “The server clock has long since initialized the mandatory sleep cycle… what exact quest prompt has guided your vessel to this corridor?!”
Lu Yunxi completely bypassed the scrutiny in his eyes, her features remaining entirely placid and deadpan. “There is zero anomaly in my current coordinates. But your own profile? To be wandering the corridors in the dead of night… is your account perhaps running a burglary script?”
The two entities locked eyes in the darkness, before simultaneously shifting their gazes down the intersecting hallway.
In truth, both of their processors had already finalized the calculation.
The entity standing opposite them was running a carbon-copy script—covertly infiltrating the asylum core to extract a specific objective!
Yet, neither side commanded enough data to map the other’s exact operational targets.
Recognizing a prolonged interrogation would merely drain their stealth frames, they chose to abort the dialogue tree. Offering brief parting nods, they split their pathing lines, each advancing toward their respective nodes.
Lu Yunxi’s motivation for mapping this complex was layered: first, her personal curiosity parameters were locked onto the mystery; second, the server logic dictated that simply standing inside this hostile environment steadily ticked up her business experience bar.
She executed a swift pivot down the western lane, only for a piercing shriek to violently fracture the silence.
The audio file carried an extreme terror rating, echoing through the rafters like a critical crisis alert.
In a fraction of a second, the heavy doors of the central guard barracks were thrown open, and a massive torrent of staff members erupted into the corridor.
Lu Yunxi’s reflexes triggered instantly; she executed a flawless kinetic leap, melting her silhouette into the deep shadows of the ceiling vaults.
Shun Hai, conversely, happened to be idling directly within the hot zone.
Commanding a pure scholar build with zero agility buffs, his reaction time suffered a severe latency error. By the time his motor controls re-engaged, a wall of white-coated orderlies had already flooded the path, blocking his escape vectors.
Fortunately, the midnight lighting parameters were exceptionally low, and the architecture featured minimal window arrays, cloaking the corridor in near-total darkness.
Lu Yunxi monitored his frozen collision box for a microsecond. Blurring downward, she snagged his collar and forcefully yanked his frame into an adjacent, unmapped storage room.
Inside the stifling, silent vault, the only active audio was the rapid, shallow rattling of Shun Hai’s panicked respiration.
Lu Yunxi smoothly released her grip, watching the scholar slide helplessly down the doorframe until his knees hit the floorboards, his hands clamped over his face as his adrenaline peaked.
“My profound thanks, Miss Lu… your speed parameters have salvaged my lifecycle a second time,” Shun Hai whispered bitterly after a prolonged cooldown, his breathing slowly resetting to baseline.
“Do not let it drop your morale,” Lu Yunxi replied, her brow arching as her sensors noted his inner tunic was literally soaked through with cold sweat. “Even if my unit hadn’t executed a displacement command, you could have simply blended into their ranks and simulated an orderly responding to the alert. Why did your stress levels spike so drastically?”
“Negative… you lack the structural data for this facility,” Shun Hai corrected with a grim, humorless chuckle. “The asylum rules strictly dictate that only official medical doctors possess the security clearance to navigate the corridors during the night cycle. Any secondary class—whether they are assigned to food delivery or janitorial maintenance—is hard-coded to remain locked in their quarters. If a low-level unit is intercepted out of bounds at this hour, their profile is instantly flagged as a hostile saboteur.”
“And the system handles infiltrators with absolute severity. Once a rogue asset is contained, they are… well, I lack the precise coordinates, but the doctors transport them down a hidden pipeline, and their character models are completely deleted from the server, never to be rendered again.” Having unmapped the terrifying penalty, a trace of residual dread caused his shoulders to tremble.
Lu Yunxi continued the dialogue loop, systematically parsing his background files until his core objective was completely transparent.
Shun Hai was indeed the legitimate heir of a high-net-worth aristocratic lineage, but he was the product of the patriarch’s deceased primary wife. The moment the second wife successfully initialized her contract and assumed the position of matriarch, his family standing suffered a severe systemic downgrade.
The clan elders and his biological father aggressively prioritized the children spawned by the second wife, effectively freezing his account out of the primary inheritance loop.
Under normal parameters, Shun Hai spent his entire yearly cycle garrisoned at the capital’s high-tier academy, entirely unbothered by the internal politics of the estate. However, he shared a bloodline link with a younger biological sister who was forced to navigate the inner household under the absolute, unchecked authority of their stepmother.
Initially, his database had logged zero warnings regarding the inner courtyard layout. It wasn’t until he executed a temporary return command during a holiday and discovered his fragile sister constantly hiding inside her quarters weeping that his security alarms triggered.
“My sister’s clothing items were structurally degraded and several sizes too short, and her daily ration drops were consistently delivered cold… The exact frame I finalized a heavy disciplinary sweep against the offending servants, her quality-of-life metrics recovered,” Shun Hai explained, his knuckles turning white as a volcanic rage flared deep within his pupils. “But the moment my unit cleared the estate to resume my studies at the academy, the matriarch struck. When I re-entered the residence this season, her character model had been completely wiped from the map!”
“The clan elders processed a generic disinformation script, claiming she had accidentally lost her pathing parameters during an excursion to a mountain temple to burn incense!” His tone turned so chillingly dark it practically dropped the room’s temperature parameters.
When a high-born lady from a wealthy house migrated across the map, her vanguard was mandated to feature a minimum of seven or eight defensive attendants. How could her tracking metrics simply dissolve on a standard road?! Even if the primary perimeter guards failed, her personal handmaids and carriage drivers remained active. How could a core character model just vanish into thin air?!
“I drained a massive volume of resources investigating her disappearance until I finally intercepted a trace of raw data. A rogue informant confirmed my sister had been covertly shipped to this exact medical asylum,” Shun Hai whispered, his head dropping into the shadows. “I immediately dispatched my personal elite retainers to demand the liquidation of her contract, but the administration ran a denial loop every time, swearing her asset was not in their database! But those retainers were a legacy inheritance left to my ledger by my biological mother; their scouting attributes are maxed out, meaning their intelligence files can’t be flawed… Left with no administrative alternative, I was forced to execute a stealth infiltration script myself.”
Lu Yunxi felt a genuine surge of respect touch her core.
A frail, unclassed scholar—commanding zero combat parameters—had proactively thrown his own vessel into a lethal high-level hazard zone purely to salvage his sister’s lifecycle.
Reviewing his daily routine, he was constantly subjected to physical abuse and kinetic strikes from the low-tier guards here. Had his internal willpower stat not been phenomenally high, a standard civilian character model would have suffered a total psychological collapse weeks ago.
“Have your searches yielded any viable tracking markers?”
Shun Hai shook his head, a heavy wave of bitterness painting his features. “I have systematically cleared dozens of sectors over the past weeks, but my diagnostic tools have failed to register a single trace of her sister asset… However, my surveillance has logged a highly unusual administrative pattern: every few cycles, a random selection of patients—and even a few low-level staff orderlies—will suddenly vanish from the server entirely. Because the deletion frequency is kept exceptionally low, the broader demographic fails to notice the missing numbers.”
At this critical data point, a brilliant, desperate spark of hope reignited within his eyes. “My analytical modules project that this specific anomaly represents our primary break in the case.”
Lu Yunxi nodded slowly, her large eyes narrowing into a sharp, lethal squint. “Your deduction is entirely sound. For living character models to consistently drop off the map without triggering a logout notification… this facility is running an incredibly sinister script.”
Chapter 187: Mop Family
The two entities ran a rapid diagnostic on their combined intelligence files and concluded their database was still far too shallow, resolving to continue hunting for clues together.
“By the way, Miss Lu, what exact parameter led your account to this facility?” Shun Hai asked, mild curiosity touching his features.
“My unit? I was physically ambushed in the exterior world, knocked unconscious, and delivered here on a transport. The layout felt profoundly anomalous, so my curiosity algorithms triggered, and I chose to stick around to map the sector,” Lu Yunxi replied with absolute, unapologetic frankness.
Shun Hai’s system paused, mildly surprised by the blunt explanation, before he slowly nodded.
Had a secondary NPC offered that explanation, he would have flagged the dialogue as a disinformation script. But having observed Miss Lu’s behavioral loops, he knew she possessed phenomenally high curiosity metrics. It was entirely plausible she was idling in a lethal hazard zone purely to unravel the localized lore.
“Can you initialize a character description of your sister? I will execute a surveillance sweep across the patient demographics tomorrow. If my scanners lock onto her profile, I can relay a secure message,” Lu Yunxi suggested, a tactical idea spawning in her mind.
If Shun Hai’s sister had been forcibly processed into the asylum, the administration had likely run a binding script on her avatar and dumped her into the patient wards exactly like her own initial containment.
“My sister’s character model is rendered slightly shorter than yours. She possesses a distinct birthmark on the back of her hand and runs a highly timid, cautious behavioral script. Her registry name is Lan Niang,” Shun Hai explained, hesitating for a fraction of a second before un-archiving his sister’s files. However, he swiftly rejected her offer to run the sweep. “A baseline search across the patient wards is futile. My unit has systematically scouted the entire public map of this facility over the past weeks. Her character model has not spawned in any of the primary cells.”
Lu Yunxi nodded, her processing units immediately linking his failure to locate her with the covert architectural elements she had discovered. An idea flashed.
“Then there is an incredibly high probability her asset is locked inside one of the hidden dark rooms. Leave the mechanism hacking to me.”
Once Shun Hai received the alert regarding the hidden suites, he leveraged his janitorial access to systematically map out every structural anomaly in the facility that had the potential to conceal a trapdoor, drafting a highly detailed topographic blueprint for her inventory.
Operating under the cover of the midnight sleep cycle, Lu Yunxi initiated a meticulous, room-by-room search sequence, strictly adhering to the coordinates mapped on Shun Hai’s blueprint.
Disappointingly, despite burning multiple nights running her stealth protocols, the search yielded absolutely zero returns.
The asylum architecture was riddled with hidden dark rooms, yet their interior environmental layouts were practically identical—all featuring the same explicit, red-draped aesthetics. She systematically swept every single hidden node, but failed to locate a single captive hiding within them. It was completely mathematically illogical; what was the operational purpose of rendering so many hidden suites if they were all vacant?
Because her stamina pool was heavily drained by the nightly infiltrations, she lacked the energy to execute daytime exploration loops, choosing instead to idle on her iron cot and grind out sleep cycles.
Lu Yunxi operated under the assumption her low-profile behavior was keeping her off the radar. What she failed to calculate was that the asylum staff was constantly running surveillance tracking on her specific movement parameters. Observing her sudden shift into prolonged lethargy, a frantic orderly immediately summoned a doctor to her cell.
She lacked the backend data to know that the asylum administration had hard-coded a specific bounty system: if a patient’s behavioral script abruptly deviated from its baseline loops, any staff member who reported the anomaly—upon official verification—would be rewarded with a silver bonus drop.
Since Shun Hai was a recent addition to the server and actively isolated himself from the staff gossip networks, he naturally hadn’t intercepted the bounty intel.
It wasn’t until a massive raid group of white-coated doctors surrounded her cot, and she watched the orderly gleefully stash a silver ingot into his inventory, that Lu Yunxi finally realized what specific event had triggered.
“Why has her lethargy parameter suddenly spiked to maximum?”
“Is it possible the recent alchemical batch suffered a calibration error?”
“Her facial rendering is exceptionally pale, and her eye-roll animations are increasing in frequency… Should I manually increase her dosage threshold?”
The cluster of doctors aggressively debated her symptoms, treating the situation exactly as if they were engaged in a high-tier academic peer review.
Lu Yunxi simply let her eyes roll back into her head in a continuous, deadpan loop.
Her core health bar was perfectly fine! She had simply been burning the midnight oil running stealth missions, so her system required daytime sleep cycles to recover stamina!
Too profoundly exasperated to listen to their pseudo-medical chatter, Lu Yunxi forcibly closed her eyes and shut down her audio receivers.
“Update the prescription parameters… increase the toxicity limits…”
The overlapping voices slowly faded into the background.
Following that diagnostic review, the medical team officially updated her prescription.
Do not ask her how her internal sensors verified the change.
Because while her previous medicine had simply registered as a bundle of [Unknown] variables, the newly rendered potion explicitly flagged as a lethal poison.
To somehow merge a massive stack of entirely non-toxic, baseline herbs into a highly lethal, corrosive compound… Lu Yunxi was genuinely impressed by their profound incompetence!
For a prolonged sequence of days following the update, the medical team initialized a daily check-in routine, swarming her cell every single morning.
It was an immense blessing that the surveillance clampdown only triggered after she had successfully mapped every dark room in the facility. Had the medical detail initiated this high-security monitoring protocol earlier, it would have been logistically impossible for her to execute her midnight stealth runs.
“My apologies for severing our communication link over the past few cycles.” Catching a brief window where the corridor was vacant, Shun Hai slipped into her cell, letting out a massive breath of relief as he transferred the premium food rations he had procured.
“It is a non-issue. With that medical raid group camping my coordinates every day, establishing a secure dialogue channel was impossible anyway,” Lu Yunxi replied, waving her hand to dismiss his concern. “More importantly, has your investigation yielded any progressive data over the past few days?”
At the mention of the core quest, Shun Hai’s expression visibly darkened.
He lowered his head, his tone laced with deep, simmering frustration. “Zero updates.” Initially, when she had uncovered the hidden dark rooms, his hope metrics had spiked to maximum. He had never calculated the horrifying reality that every single dark room would spawn entirely vacant. What was the architectural utility of constructing the network?!
Lu Yunxi fell into a brief analytical silence. “I have systematically cleared the entire first and second-floor layouts, yet the primary database remains locked… We need to shift our targeting algorithm and monitor the secondary NPCs. Do the inmates or staff members execute any synchronized mass-gatherings? Or participate in collective behavioral loops?”
Shun Hai’s eyes lit up. “My thanks for the tactical adjustment! I shall initiate a tracking sweep immediately!”
In the days that followed, Shun Hai aggressively dedicated his stamina to running intelligence checks, while Lu Yunxi focused entirely on her recovery cycles.
Spamming late-night infiltration scripts had inflicted a severe durability penalty on her physical vessel, so she needed to optimize her rest parameters.
As the server clock ticked forward, the medical team eventually lost their academic fascination with Lu Yunxi’s static condition. They even turned on the orderly who had claimed the initial bounty, barking that her metrics had simply stabilized to a new baseline and actively demanding the silver refund.
Terrified of losing his employment contract, the orderly furiously returned the gold, his irritation parameters completely maxed out.
Once the data of the failed bounty leaked onto the staff networks, not a single orderly was willing to burn their time monitoring Lu Yunxi’s cell anymore.
Through this bizarre sequence of events, Shun Hai successfully converted a localized disaster into a tactical buff. With the security patrols completely ignoring her sector, his data-gathering runs became vastly easier than before.
On this particular day, Lu Yunxi merged her avatar into the crowd of patients executing their designated courtyard walk. However, she instantly noticed that the demographic’s behavioral scripts had suffered a massive, localized anomaly.
Despite the facility proudly broadcasting its status as a mental asylum, her prior diagnostic sweeps had concluded that the only entities genuinely requiring cognitive patching were the doctors. The majority of the inmates rendered as perfectly sane, standard NPCs.
But today… the patients’ behavioral loops were genuinely unhinged.
“I have evolved into a roach! My survival parameters grant me absolute immortality… Mwahaha!” A male NPC suddenly vaulted onto a stone table, planting his hands firmly on his hips as he executed a manic, villainous laugh animation.
A secondary unit locked onto the man’s performance, suddenly launching into a wild, uncoordinated dancing and singing script.
He physically grappled the self-proclaimed roach, and the two character models began aggressively jumping up and down across the tabletop in a chaotic loop.
The surrounding patients apparently synchronized with the bizarre performance data, forming a dense circle around the table and spamming cheer animations.
Naturally, a small subset of units refused to merge with the main event, executing their own isolated, highly irregular scripts.
Lu Yunxi narrowed her eyes, locking her visual focus onto an individual who was literally dragging his torso across the cobblestones, moving exactly like a giant inchworm. Her expression turned incredibly subtle.
“Is your account currently running a caterpillar simulation?” she guessed, leaning over.
“Hmph! You absolute low-level simpleton! Does your database truly lack the processing power to identify my current form?!” The inchworm violently aborted his movement loop, throwing his chin up to glare at her. “Do you comprehend the structural utility of a mop?!”
“A mop?”
“Alas, the vast majority of the server population lacks this specific lore file. It is a highly advanced, newly patched utility item engineered exclusively by the elite crafters of our home village!” The inchworm puffed out his chest with immense pride. “It is an absolute necessity for every domestic household! With a single, fluid sweeping motion, it entirely clears a sector’s dust debuffs!”
“My character model has successfully ascended! I am currently operating as a premium mop!” He hoisted his head high, running a quick visual scan over her avatar before shaking his head in deep disappointment. “Your current stats lack the clearance to transition into a mop. If you desire to join the elite ranks of our Mop Family, you must perfectly mirror my movement parameters.”
Having delivered his tutorial, he immediately dropped back onto the stones and resumed his violent, twisting floor-crawl.
As his coarse uniform relentlessly ground against the cobblestones, the localized floor tiles actually rendered an incredibly clean, polished texture; his garments were literally absorbing the environmental dust mapping.
Lu Yunxi: “…”
My profound thanks, but my account absolutely refuses to class-change into a janitorial tool.
She silently extended a thumbs-up emoji. “Your cleaning parameters are truly exceptional! You are a top-tier mop!”
The compliment caused the inchworm’s pride metrics to spike even higher, and he began aggressively slithering back and forth across the lane with renewed vigor.
Lu Yunxi was just preparing to abort the interaction and clear the sector when her processor suddenly locked onto a massive data discrepancy.
Wait! Pause the script!
Could the term Mop Family actually function as a covert cryptographic code? Was it a localized distress signal engineered to rally all the undercover infiltrators who had breached the facility?!
Her expression shifted instantly. She rapidly executed a dash to intercept the inchworm’s pathing. “Halt your movement loop! I am formally submitting an application to join your family faction!”
“Your profile wishes to align with our Mop Family?” The inchworm’s animation froze for a microsecond, before he burst into a joyous, triumphant laugh.
“My calculations were flawless! Not a single entity on this server possesses the willpower to resist the glory of the Mop Family!” he declared, his chin pointed straight toward the sky.
Lu Yunxi dropped into a crouch, forcibly lowering her audio output to a secure whisper. “Can your unit authorize my recruitment? How many active profiles are currently registered in your faction? Where exactly are your secure chat channels located?”
The inchworm finally terminated his crawling script, rising from the floorboards to stand at his full height.
He flashed a highly mysterious, conspiratorial smile. “I shall escort your unit to the primary node immediately.”
Lu Yunxi cast a brief, deadpan glance at the thick layer of mud, grime, and unidentifiable stains completely caking his uniform, her eye twitching violently.
Rapidly pushing the cosmetic horror out of her mind, she eagerly synchronized her pathing with the inchworm.
She was about to crack a massive, server-level secret.
Her own unit had successfully infiltrated the map, and Shun Hai had bypassed the perimeter as well. It was mathematically guaranteed that secondary players had also managed to breach the security grid! She simply needed to intercept their specific quest objectives to understand why this asylum was a centralized hot zone for infiltration!
