Chapter 188| Chapter 189| Chapter 190
Chapter 188: Noisy
Lu Yunxi followed the giant inchworm, slipping away from the main crowd until they reached a completely hidden alcove.
“Behold, the secret headquarters of our Mop Family.”
For a brief second, Lu Yunxi actually felt a surge of confidence in this so-called faction. She had been mapping this facility for days and had completely missed this secluded corner. From this vantage point, she could easily scan for eavesdroppers, yet ordinary security patrols would never spot it. It was incredibly secure.
It seems this Mop Family commands some highly intelligent operatives, she thought.
Standing in the shadows, Lu Yunxi waited patiently.
One minute passed. Two minutes passed. Soon, twenty minutes had evaporated.
Lu Yunxi’s patience bar finally hit zero.
“Maomao—no, what exactly should I call you?” She took a deep breath. “Where are the secondary members of our Mop Family? Why hasn’t a single unit spawned?”
If they continued to idle here, the outdoor recreation timer would run down. Once the interval concluded, the orderlies would herd the patients back to their respective cells. If she was caught lingering in an unassigned zone after hours, her tracking marker would be far too conspicuous. It would be no different from marching up to a guard and saying, “My account is running a sabotage script, please execute a containment protocol.”
“You may address my profile as Big Mop,” the inchworm muttered, his chin dropping as a sheepish flush painted his cheeks. “The entire active workforce of the Mop Family is already present at these coordinates!”
Lu Yunxi’s brow knit into a tight line. “But there are only two units in this alcove… Wait a minute.”
Her expression shifted instantly, her sharp gaze locking onto the man beside her. She pointed a finger at him, then at herself. “Are you stating… that the entire global registry of the Mop Family consists strictly of you and me?”
Big Mop gave a proud nod.
She inhaled a sharp, controlled breath, forcefully suppressing the raw urge to throw a kinetic strike. Forcing a tight, rigid smile onto her face, she grunted, “Are you running a joke script on my account? What tier of ‘family faction’ consists of a grand total of two players?!”
Unbelievable! I actually allowed a low-tier NPC to glitch my intelligence metrics!
“But your profile has formally accepted the guild invite, correct? Our faction numbers will inevitably scale up in future patches.” Big Mop shrank his neck into his collar, looking mildly intimidated by her sudden spike in killing intent. “Well, now that your account has successfully merged with the family, shouldn’t we update your registry name?”
Lu Yunxi stared at him in deadpan silence, her eyes flat.
Completely failing to scan her expression, Big Mop enthusiastically continued his monologue. “How about we input your name as Golden Mop?”
The moment the phrase cleared his throat, he finally noticed her features were completely frozen like stone.
He nervously scratched his head. “Too flash? What about Silver Mop? Copper Mop?”
“Heh… my profound thanks for your administrative generosity,” she replied, forcing a thoroughly hollow laugh.
Just as she prepared to break the link and clear the sector, a sudden thought struck her. Tightly gritting her teeth, she pulled up her interface and cast a detection spell directly onto his profile.
She flatly refused to believe it! This guy’s cognitive pathing had seemed so coherent, and his dialogue delivery was completely stable. He had to be an undercover operative faking a debuff!
[Status: Cognitive Confusion. Target is enduring a severe state of mental disorientation, unconsciousness, and structural cognitive impairment. Highly recommended to initiate a medical extraction protocol immediately.]
Lu Yunxi: “…”
So his character model is an actual, unscripted lunatic?!
Holding her forehead in pure, deadpan resignation, she weakly retraced her steps back toward the cell blocks.
Medical Asylum, First Floor.
The low-level staff orderlies were currently locked in a state of absolute euphoria around the dining tables. Those who routinely triggered high-volume arguments over daily chores had completely muted their bickering, their faces buried so deeply into their ceramic basins they were practically part of the dinner assets.
“Incredible! The kitchen staff actually distributed a meat ration today! This massive slab of pork fat is exceptionally tender and juicy!”
“This is the absolute first time my profile has tasted meat processed via this specific culinary algorithm! Back in my home village, I computed that green-bean braised pork was the absolute apex dish on the server, but this dry-charred glaze completely breaks the meta!”
“That isn’t a dry-charred technique at all! I ran a surveillance check on the kitchen, and the chef explicitly infused the broth with refined sugar and a massive stack of premium spices! How could the basic meat we char over our home hearths ever command a flavor profile this intense?”
“…”
The crowd of orderlies chattered continuously, their satisfaction parameters maxed out.
Shun Hai stared down at the rare, glistening piece of pork fat resting on his own tray. Swallowing his saliva, he clamped his teeth together and forcefully wrenched his gaze away from the food. Miss Lu had repeatedly deployed her high-tier capabilities to salvage his lifecycle, yet his own ledger had yielded zero return investments to thank her. Why not transfer this premium ration to her inventory? After all, her account hadn’t logged a single meat drop for several days.
With that roadmap in mind, he monitored the blind spots of the room, covertly sliding several choice cuts into a clean oil-paper pouch while the surrounding staff were consumed by their own eating animations.
However, his fingers had barely finalized the storage loop when his peripheral arrays mapped a group of senior orderlies advancing from the far end of the hall. Lowering his chin, he rapidly sealed the pouch, stashing the asset deep within his uniform robes before their line of sight locked onto his coordinates.
The exact frame the package was hidden, a heavy palm violently slammed against the wood of his dining table.
“Oh? Harvesting a meat drop, rookie? Does the flavor profile clear your quality standards?” A thick arm unceremoniously draped around his neck, the senior guard mimicking a posture of intense, threatening intimacy.
“Master,” Shun Hai responded smoothly. His eyes flashed with an honest, submissive gaze as he executed a rapid sequence of bowing and nodding animations. “The culinary rendering is exceptional… Does your profile desire to sample my allocation?”
With a submissive gesture, he carefully slid his entire meal tray across the wood, placing it directly within the thugs’ strike zones.
The group of bullies who had marched over explicitly to run an intimidation script on his account burst into a loud, mocking chorus of laughter, exchanging smug glances.
“Excellent choice! Your processing units are remarkably quick on the uptake!” The heavy arm choking his neck slowly retracted.
The senior guards casually patted his shoulders, cleanly clearing every single scrap of meat from his tray before sauntering off with triumphant grins.
Shun Hai maintained his head-bowed, deeply respectful posture until their pathing cleared the hall. The moment they exited his sensory radius, he let out a massive, silent breath of relief, a trace of genuine marvel flashing across his pupils.
When Miss Lu had initially instructed his profile to deploy this submissive, low-aggro behavioral loop to deflect staff hostility, his academic brain hadn’t quite trusted the logic. Who could have guessed her psychological calculations would be so entirely precise? The bullies had completely bypassed his character model without launching a single kinetic strike.
Quickly clearing his remaining baseline grains, he leveraged his janitorial pathing to deliver the hidden pouch straight to Lu Yunxi’s cell.
“Miss Lu, our lunch rotation successfully spawned a premium meat drop today!” Shun Hai whispered carefully, retrieving the concealed oil-paper pouch from his inner robes. “My luck parameters held up; the structural heat hasn’t dissipated yet. Pray sample the asset immediately!”
Having delivered the item, a wave of aristocratic embarrassment flushed his cheeks. “Your unit has expended a massive volume of processing power to secure my safety over the past cycles, yet my ledger lacks the resources to clear the debt… This pork carries zero gold value, but I shall map out a route to harvest a superior treasure for your profile later.”
Lu Yunxi offered a warm smile, carefully peeling back the layers of the oil-paper pouch.
But the exact frame her nose cleared the seal, an incredibly unusual, anomalous scent triggered her olfactory sensors. As a max-tier Grandmaster chef who had executed countless flawless culinary formulas—and endured an equal volume of chaotic, unpredictable experimental dishes engineered by her low-level disciples—her internal database automatically flagged a critical error.
This meat has been manipulated.
Lu Yunxi instantly deployed an analytical detection technique onto the item.
[Item: Medicated Meat. Classification: Alchemical Hazard. Usage Warning: Pray consume with extreme caution. Chronic ingestion will induce a severe systemic cognitive confusion debuff, triggering automated loops of uncoordinated singing, manic dancing under the moonlight, hysterical laughter, unchecked rage, and rapid verbal profanity.]
Her gaze instantly darkened. Turning a deeply worried look onto the scholar, she barked, “Did your character ingest any portion of this ration?”
Concurrently, her interface began running a rapid diagnostic sweep on his vital indicators.
“My vessel consumed the standard allocation before retrieving this packet. You may ingest it without any reservation,” Shun Hai replied. Computing that her hesitation stemmed from a polite refusal to drain his personal food supply, he immediately forced a wide, thoroughly satisfied grin onto his face. “The texture profile is genuinely magnificent. Taste it!”
Lu Yunxi monitored the system box rendering over his form, verifying his active health bar and cognitive channels remained entirely free of any toxic status debuffs. Her features locked into an intensely bizarre, perplexed expression.
“Your account…” She knit her brow, thoroughly confused.
But before her dialogue tree could process the anomaly, her visual sensors tracked a microscopic, involuntary twitch in his throat. His eyes were unconsciously drilling into the contents of the oil-paper bag with an immense, burning hunger, his knuckles tightly clenched inside his sleeves as his willpower fought to suppress his starvation parameters.
Lu Yunxi: “…”
The logic matrix immediately resolved. The scholar was running a noble deception script; he was simply terrified that her pride would prevent her from accepting the food if she knew he was starving, so he had fabricated the data to claim his own hunger bar was maxed out.
“This meat has been laced with a high-tier alchemical contaminant,” she stated flatly, tossing the pouch onto the cot. “If your system ingested a single shred of it, execute a purge animation and spit it out immediately.”
“What?!” Shun Hai’s head snapped upward, his eyes wide with pure, unmitigated shock.
“My diagnostics are absolute. If my alchemical tracking is accurate, the massive volume of meat distributed to the workforce today was explicitly deployed to trigger a widespread cognitive debuff.” For an isolated mountain facility that routinely forced its labor to consume raw dirt, suddenly spawning an infinite supply of premium livestock was a massive statistical anomaly. A trap was clearly initializing.
Shun Hai’s scholar brain rapidly rebooted, his features turning intensely solemn as he processed the tactical implications. “What exact objective does the administration hope to achieve by running this script? If the entire orderly workforce suffers a total cognitive collapse, how are those unclassed doctors supposed to maintain containment over the patient demographics?”
“Exercise extreme caution,” Lu Yunxi commanded, crossing her arms as her tactical modules finalized a blueprint. “Secure your vessel inside your private quarters this afternoon and flatly refuse to clear the door. My calculations project that the mastermind behind this facility will launch their primary offensive script tonight at the absolute latest.”
She let out a sharp, cold chuckle. “This widespread chaos might actually yield the exact operational window our profiles require.”
Has the hidden mastermind finally overplayed their hand?
“Understood. The moment my surveillance logs any progressive data, I shall establish a secure channel to update your unit.”
Lu Yunxi’s tactical projection proved entirely flawless.
The sudden appearance of the medicated meat was the primary harbinger for a major server event; every covert faction on the map was preparing to initialize their moves.
Midnight arrived. The central corridors of the medical asylum violently erupted with a chaotic, high-decibel racket.
Filtering the frantic, uncoordinated footsteps echoing past her door, Lu Yunxi’s eyes snapped wide open in the dark. She paused, waiting for the ambient audio to hit peak saturation, before executing a flawless ghost-dash to anchor her silhouette right against the iron doorframe.
However—
One minute tick down. Two minutes ticked down. Soon, a full thirty minutes had completely evaporated.
The hostile forces outside her room were running erratic back-and-forth pathing lines, their frantic shouting confirming their panic parameters had peaked. Yet, the heavy iron handle of her specific cell door remained completely stationary. Not a single entity attempted to breach her coordinates.
Lu Yunxi’s deadpan expression returned, her features turning remarkably subtle.
This makes zero mathematical sense.
Did the automated pathfinding of the enemy units completely omit the data that Patient Number 3 was garrisoned inside this specific room?
She parsed the anomaly for a few seconds before flatly dismissing the idea. Even though the pseudo-doctors running this asylum possessed an absolute zero rating in actual clinical proficiency, their administrative ledgers were meticulously maintained. They possessed flawless data tracking regarding which cells held active player assets and which grids were empty.
Were the hostile forces intentionally filtering their targets as they initialized the purge?
She stood silently in the dark for another ten minutes, but the threshold remained entirely unbreached, and the violent, echoing commotion down the central corridor gradually faded into a hollow silence.
Chapter 189: Underground
If I step out to scout the corridors now, my character model will inevitably collide with a patrol unit, Lu Yunxi calculated. Shifting her strategy, she crawled back onto her cot, deciding to execute a sleep cycle first to pass the time.
When her consciousness finally rebooted, the server clock had already ticked past noon the following day.
Bang, bang, bang!
A violent, aggressive hammering on the iron door ripped Lu Yunxi from her sleep state.
Filtering the auditory data, her eyes narrowed subconsciously.
Shun Hai possessed an inherently gentle, aristocratic disposition; whenever he approached her cell, he knocked with a slow, polite, and rhythmic cadence. This frantic, high-volume pounding—as if the courier were fleeing for his life—was a completely different behavioral script.
Her eyes flashed with calculation. Dropping her spine flat against the mattress, she stared blankly up at the ceiling, rolling her pupils back into her head to simulate an absolute, vegetative despair.
“Lunch rotation!” The courier aggressively hammered the door for a few more seconds before shoving it open himself, barking the alert as he stormed into the cell balancing a wooden tray.
The drop was identical to her first meal: a ceramic bowl filled with toxic green medicine, accompanied by a small plate of dry, hard-baked biscuits…
But the exact frame her visual sensors processed the biscuits, the corners of her lips twitched violently.
Lu Yunxi had previously intercepted data from Shun Hai confirming that while the baseline food rations allocated to all patients were identical, the actual portion sizes were entirely dictated by the courier assigned to the route.
The initial courier who had delivered her meals hadn’t been overly generous or malicious, strictly dropping the standard baseline portion. Shun Hai, naturally, optimized her plate with extra rations, occasionally slipping her premium snacks harvested from the staff quarters.
But this third courier? The standard dry biscuit was already barely the size of a human palm, yet this specific unit had actually fractured the asset in half!
The scrap of flatbread resting on her plate was only a quarter of its original rendering!
She was thoroughly convinced!
She had long since parsed rumors across the server that corrupt staff members would covertly skim patient food drops, either redirecting the calories to their own families or liquidating the assets on the black market for extra gold.
No matter how you ran the math, it was a pure profit margin.
But intercepting a data file was one thing; watching an NPC boldly skim seventy-five percent of a patient’s baseline calorie drop right in front of her face was a completely new experience!
Lu Yunxi lay entirely deadpan as she watched the courier unceremoniously dump the tray onto her cot and frantically sprint out of her aggro radius. She had genuinely learned something new about the depths of NPC greed today.
However, the skimmed rations were merely a tertiary concern. The primary tactical problem was—
The courier assigned to today’s rotation was not Shun Hai!
It was critical to note that following the initial violent altercation where she force-fed the guards, Shun Hai was the absolute only orderly in the facility who possessed the courage to step inside her cell; every other staff member avoided her coordinates like a lethal hazard zone!
If Shun Hai failed to spawn for the delivery rotation today, did that imply he had executed an unescorted scouting run?
But given his absolute zero combat rating, the microsecond his infiltration was detected… Lu Yunxi’s brow knit into a severe frown.
She rapidly dumped the toxic medicine into her hidden basin and patiently idled in her room for an hour.
During the afternoon interval, when the administration released the patients into the courtyard to stabilize their fresh-air metrics, she smoothly capitalized on the distraction to slip out of her cell.
Over the past few days, Lu Yunxi had dedicated almost every outdoor rotation to systematically observing the patient demographic. She had memorized exactly which specific units spawned in the courtyard, their exact exercise routines, and their behavioral loops.
Running a meticulous visual sweep across the garden, her database confirmed that every single patient hard-coded to deploy for the afternoon rotation was physically present. Not a single character model was missing from the registry, and no one was running a cosmetic disguise script; they were all the original, authentic NPCs!
Lu Yunxi paced along the perimeter, her processor stalling in confusion.
After running a few tactical simulations, she pivoted and began executing a door-to-door scan of the primary cell blocks.
A rapid survey yielded the exact same data: every single patient asset was fully accounted for! If the inmate population remained completely stable, what specific demographic was aggressively stampeding up and down the corridors last night?!
She looped through her analytical files over and over, desperately trying to isolate the variable that had shifted.
It wasn’t until her third pass by Shun Hai’s designated quarters that the realization finally crashed into her logic engine.
Correct!
The patient demographics remained perfectly static, but the staff registry had suffered a massive, overnight overhaul!
Excluding the high-tier security patrols and the white-coated doctors, every single low-level support unit—from the food couriers to the janitorial sweepers—had been systematically wiped from the facility and replaced!
Recalling that the toxic alchemical hazard had been explicitly cooked into the staff’s premium meat drop rather than the patients’ standard rations, the entire strategic blueprint instantly became transparent.
Her tactical modules simply hadn’t mapped that specific vector. From a standard logical perspective, the captive patients were the vulnerable, high-value targets, while the staff were the facility’s active defense network. Initiating a purge against the staff would naturally flag massive security alerts! How could any mastermind confidently execute such a high-risk operation?!
Checking her blind spots to ensure her stealth parameters were secure, she rapidly phased into Shun Hai’s private quarters.
Just as the data projected!
The small room was entirely empty!
Running her hand over the mattress, her thermal sensors confirmed the fabric was freezing cold. The occupant had clearly been deleted from these coordinates hours ago.
Lu Yunxi’s eye twitched. She hadn’t calculated that the plot would accelerate this violently.
However, her sharp visual tracking quickly isolated a cluster of white flour dusted across the floorboards beside the bed.
He had previously updated her files, noting that he occasionally utilized his free time to assist the kitchen staff with the cooking routines.
Whoever had executed the abduction script must have ambushed him the exact moment he exited the kitchen, hauling him away before he could even register the flour clinging to his uniform.
Observing the aggressively twisted, distorted wrinkles rendering along the corner of his bed quilt, Lu Yunxi locked onto the faint, trailing scent of baking flour. She smoothly followed the tracking marker, which eventually led her out the rear exit of the asylum compound.
Nestled within a heavily shaded grove of weeping willows sat a massive, unremarkable boulder.
She fumbled along the stone’s surface for a few seconds before her fingers caught the mechanism trigger. A concealed tunnel entrance smoothly spiraled open, leading straight down into the earth.
The subterranean pathing was remarkably short. After descending roughly thirty stone steps, the corridor terminated into a single, massive holding vault. The interior rendering was chilling: dozens of bodies lay strewn across the floorboards, all heavily bound with thick utility rope.
Their facial textures were deeply pale, with a faint, toxic purple hue rendering along their eyebrows, making them look exactly as if their health bars were hovering on the absolute brink of deletion. Even when Lu Yunxi deliberately increased her footstep audio to test their awareness, not a single unit executed a wake animation.
Running a quick visual scan over the bound demographic, she rapidly spotted Shun Hai’s silhouette mixed into the cluster.
Dropping to his side, she ran a quick pulse diagnostic, immediately pulling a premium antidote pill from her dimensional inventory and forcing it past his lips.
A few minutes later, Shun Hai’s consciousness slowly rebooted.
“What are my current coordinates… hiss!” He sluggishly attempted to push his torso upright, only to discover his limbs were structurally locked by heavy ropes. Staring at the horrific environmental rendering of the underground vault, his panic parameters spiked even higher.
“Are your vitals secure?” Lu Yunxi asked, projecting her voice in a low, intentionally gloomy register.
“Who goes there?! Identify your faction!” Shun Hai was violently startled. He attempted to project a loud, commanding audio script, but his core confidence was clearly running on empty.
Her eye twitched as her logic engine immediately parsed his confusion.
While her max-tier visual stats allowed her to map the dark basement with crystal clarity, a baseline scholar’s visual interface could only render a pitch-black, unidentifiable void.
“Lower your volume. It is my unit. You triggered a massive security alert across the facility last night; do you possess any memory logs regarding what specific event occurred after your capture?”
“Miss Lu?!” Shun Hai finally recognized her audio signature, letting out a massive breath as his stress levels plummeted. With his anchor restored, his processor finally booted up to analyze her prompt. “I… my database is entirely blank. I entered a standard sleep cycle last night, but my system generated a horrific nightmare script where my oxygen parameters were completely cut off. When my consciousness finally re-engaged, my coordinates had already been shifted to this vault.”
Lu Yunxi gave a slow nod.
He had absolutely zero tracking data, which aligned perfectly with her tactical projections.
“My audio sensors intercepted a massive volume of frantic pathing across the corridors last night, and your tracking marker vanished from the facility this morning,” she summarized efficiently, glancing toward his bound form on the stones. “Your hands were coated in a layer of kitchen flour, which generated a breadcrumb trail across the floorboards. I simply tracked the marker, which led my unit straight to this covert tunnel behind the asylum.”
Hearing her breakdown, Shun Hai’s facial expression violently shifted.
“My profile is almost certainly flagged for external transport this time. I should have calculated this vector earlier! If my sister’s asset couldn’t be located within the primary facility blocks, she must have been processed and shipped off the map!”
“Are you absolutely certain you desire to anchor your vessel here?”
“Affirmative. Execute a retreat to your cell immediately!” He nodded with absolute, unyielding determination.
You cannot secure a tiger cub without diving headfirst into the tiger’s den.
Lu Yunxi felt a wave of profound helplessness as she watched the unclassed scholar willingly drop his avatar back into a feigned unconsciousness loop. Retracing her pathing, she meticulously wiped all traces of her tracking from the dust, sealing the boulder mechanism tight behind her as she exited the basement.
Having cleared the exterior tunnel, she rolled her eyes and began a localized patrol loop across the asylum’s first floor.
Previously, her architectural diagnostic had been strictly limited to scanning the walls for hidden dark rooms. She hadn’t calculated that the facility might be running an entirely separate subterranean map!
If the exterior perimeter featured a hidden basement, how could her logic guarantee the interior pavilions weren’t built over a massive underground network as well?
Her brow furrowing in deep concentration, Lu Yunxi began rhythmically knocking her knuckles against the floorboards, her acoustic sensors heavily amplified to detect any hollow resonance from below.
Suddenly, the hem of a light-blue orderly robe spawned directly into her peripheral vision.
Lu Yunxi’s core processor skipped a beat.
Critical Error!
My stealth parameters are about to be breached!
In a fraction of a microsecond, her tactical module generated a flawless counter-script. She instantly dropped her torso flat against the floorboards, initiating a violent, slithering animation exactly like a giant caterpillar.
“I am a premium mop! The absolute highest-tier, most aesthetically pleasing mop on the server…” She plastered a vacuous, utterly idiotic grin onto her face, aggressively spamming a loud, off-key singing script.
The bizarre audio triggered a massive startle animation from the orderly standing beside her.
The guard paused his patrol route, staring down at her writhing form with profound disdain. “What an absolute, irredeemable idiot!”
Tracking the light-blue robes as they marched out of her radius, she secretly exhaled a massive breath of relief.
The aggressive stares from the surrounding NPCs gradually cleared from her hit box, and her stress metrics stabilized. However, strictly maintaining her cover, she kept the vacuous grin locked onto her features, continuing to sing with manic joy: “I am a colossal mop, la la la…”
While running her vocal loop, she methodically tapped her knuckles against the floor tiles, secretly channeling her focus to analyze the acoustic feedback from the subterranean layers.
Since the asylum patrols interacted with severe cognitive glitches on a daily basis, they naturally failed to flag her idiotic performance as a tactical threat, treating her entirely as background noise.
Absolutely no one intercepted the data that Lu Yunxi’s structural investigation speed was exponentially accelerating.
Tap, tap! She lowered her chin, knocking her knuckles against a specific stone tile.
Just as her processor assumed the masonry was completely solid, the acoustic feedback suddenly returned a distinct, hollow thud-thud.
Her facial expression shifted slightly. Her agitation parameters spiking, she executed a secondary knock against the exact same coordinate.
Following her strike, two distinct, hollow echoes resonated from beneath the stone!
She immediately dropped her ear flush against the floorboards, amplifying her audio receivers to intercept any dialogue filtering up from the vault.
But the exact frame she pivoted her head, she locked eyes with a highly familiar NPC sprawling flat on the floor right beside her, staring directly into her face with an expression of pure, unadulterated innocence.
The manic singing loop Lu Yunxi had been broadcasting abruptly crashed to a halt.
Chapter 190: Lan Niang
Lu Yunxi’s lips twitched. Seeing the person next to her squatting directly over the coordinate patch she was trying to investigate, she opened her mouth to order him to clear the grid. Unexpectedly, the other player was faster on the draw, his features twisting as if he were on the absolute brink of tears.
“How could your account run a script like this?!” he wailed.
Her physical frame violently shuddered, a sudden wave of goosebumps flaring along her arms. What is with this deeply resentful, tragic concubine tone?
“How am I running what script?”
“Do not attempt to push a deception protocol on my interface! My auditory sensors logged your entire voice data file! You explicitly broadcasted to the server logs that you were the Big Mop… sniff, sob…” Large, heavy teardrops welled in the corners of his eyes, his cheeks puffing out with immense, dramatic grievance. “The database clearly dictates that I am the Big Mop! Your registry is the Golden Mop! How could your profile steal my title?!”
Lu Yunxi let her eyes roll back, her memory files finally synchronizing. Right. She had completely forgotten that her improvised “Big Mop” cover had been aggressively plagiarized from this exact lunatic’s class settings.
Feeling thoroughly helpless, she adjusted her dialogue parameters to a soothing register. “My apologies, my system experienced a minor calculation error. I am indeed the Golden Mop.”
Seeing that his crying script was still looping, she was forced to deploy a few more reassurance prompts, vowing, “My account will never misread your title again. The data is locked down: I am the Golden Mop, and you are the Big Mop.”
The giant inchworm sniffed heavily, his cognitive modules apparently accepting the manual patch, and he officially terminated his crying loop.
Watching him drop back into a compliant, idle stance on the floorboards, Lu Yunxi let out a silent breath of relief and immediately resumed knocking against the stone masonry.
But this time, the acoustic feedback returned absolutely zero data. Her browser stalled in confusion—until the entity right in front of her suddenly flashed a wide, joyous grin and aggressively hammered his own knuckles against the stone.
A sharp thud-thud echoed right beside her ear.
A profoundly ominous feeling instantly flashed through her processor.
She executed a secondary test knock on a different tile; the Big Mop happily synchronized his animations, mimicking the action a frame later. The pattern repeated multiple times.
Lu Yunxi’s facial features went entirely wooden.
Fantastic. The glorious subterranean echo she had spent ten minutes tracking wasn’t a hidden underground facility at all; it was just this moron clapping his hands against the floorboards!
The lunatic evidently computed that her character model was running a high-tier minigame with him. Whenever her vessel crawled a few inches to the left, his collision box aggressively tracked to the left. The exact frame she pressed her ear flush against the stone, he instantly copied the orientation… In short, his AI script was locked into a permanent mirror mode.
The logistical headache was absolute.
To prevent nearby security guards from flagging their erratic pathing as a security hazard, she had no choice but to feign absolute ignorance, letting him run his playstyle while she masterfully blended into his chaotic loop. Because the formation simply rendered as two severely glitched inmates rolling around on the floorboards, the high-tier patrol units aggressively ignored their coordinates, purging them from their tracking priority.
Yet, leveraging his chaotic cover, Lu Yunxi’s secondary scanners actually managed to pinpoint the true subterranean entrance node.
Midnight initialized. Once the server clock transitioned the entire facility into a deep sleep state, she smoothly slipped past the patrol vectors and glided down to the first floor.
The exact frame her boots cleared the stairwell, a massive trapdoor segment silently slid open in the floorboards ahead, rendering an aperture wide enough to accommodate two adult avatars side by side.
The corners of her mouth curved into a sharp, satisfied smile.
What a spectacular stroke of behavioral RNG!
She had been mildly concerned that cracking the entrance would require a prolonged mechanism-hacking sequence, yet the system had automatically opened the gate the exact microsecond she entered the sector.
Amplifying her acoustic sensors, she carefully parsed the audio data filtering up from the abyss. A low, continuous rustling confirmed a high density of active units was currently garrisoned below. Peering down into the throat of the shaft, the darkness parameters were exceptionally high—the perfect environmental shroud to cloak her stealth frame.
Lu Yunxi stabilized her internal energy and silently glided down the stone steps.
This specific subterranean map differed drastically from the isolated mountain tunnel where Shun Hai had been stashed. It was rendered as a massive, sweeping central corridor flanked on both sides by heavy, reinforced partitions. Rather than solid security doors, the cells were barred with thick iron grates, allowing her advanced night-vision arrays to clearly parse every single asset resting inside the cages.
A series of low-wattage alchemical lamps cast a dim, permanent haze down the main corridor, keeping the shadows intact and ensuring her tracking marker remained completely hidden from the inmates’ line of sight.
Conversely, her own scanners locked onto dozens of highly familiar character models. She spotted the entire original workforce of support orderlies who had been wiped from the upper levels—and right in the center cage, Shun Hai’s silhouette.
She was completely deadpan. Did that unclassed scholar not deliver a fierce, noble monologue earlier, swearing his profile would bravely dive into the tiger’s den to unravel the hidden lore of this server? Yet, after all that strategic bravado, he simply allowed the guards to lock his account in a generic dungeon cage?
Lu Yunxi chose not to trigger a dialogue encounter with him. Multiple secondary assets inside his specific cage were actively awake; if she aggressively breached their cell parameters now, she couldn’t guarantee their panic wouldn’t trigger a global facility alert.
She focused instead on running a rapid structural sweep of the subterranean boundaries, confirming the entrance shaft she had just cleared represented the absolute solitary extraction point on the map. Satisfied that the logistics were locked down, she executed a high-speed back-dash and returned to her private cell.
The moment her iron door clicked shut, she opened her dimensional inventory, retrieving a premium set of scholar’s parchment, brushes, and high-grade inkstones.
The scope of the first floor’s underground facility was immense, currently hosting a population density of roughly two to three hundred individual commoners, yet the cell grids still commanded plenty of empty real estate. Aside from the original staff units she had previously logged, the cages were packed with a massive volume of entirely unindexed faces—undoubtedly previous victims who had been systematically harvested off the open map over past fiscal quarters.
Invoking her max-tier visual memory cache, she began methodically rendering every single face she had scanned onto the parchment, generating a flawless gallery of portraits.
By the time the final character asset was perfectly inked onto the paper, the server clock had already cycled into the morning hours, right against the lunch interval. She carelessly tossed the brushes and the massive stack of portraits back into her spatial inventory, collapsed flat onto her iron cot, and forced her system into a deep hibernation state.
Because her stamina parameters had been thoroughly drained by the marathon all-night drawing session, the high-volume audio generated by the daytime staff loops failed to register on her consciousness.
It wasn’t until the server sky faded completely into dusk that her internal monitors finally rebooted.
A succession of soft footsteps was echoing down the corridor outside.
Lu Yunxi let out a slow, lazy yawn, initially archiving the audio as a generic guard patrol—until the specific text files of their dialogue filtered into her receiver.
“My lord, which precise luxury pavilion does your account desire to secure for tonight’s cycle? This northern suite is engineered with advanced ventilation parameters, ensuring the breeze clearance is exceptionally high and comfortable. Furthermore, the master washbasin inside this specific unit is a custom-forged premium asset, possessing enough spatial volume to comfortably accommodate a five-man party…”
The speaker’s voice was heavily throttled, pitched so low it almost dissolved into the drafts, but the raw, unadulterated flattery bleeding through the audio track was incredibly loud.
Her eyes narrowed into a sharp, dangerous glaze. Phasing across the room like a ghost, she pressed her torso right against the iron doorframe, her sensory arrays maxed out to intercept the data.
The sycophantic guide continuously spammed room descriptions, while his companion merely remitted a series of flat, detached grunts, his affect entirely devoid of emotional metrics.
The heavy footsteps gradually moved past her grid.
Click.
The heavy lock of a VIP suite down the hall turned home, leaving only the solitary, rhythmic footsteps of the guide echoing back down the corridor as the guest officially logged into his room.
Lu Yunxi’s focus sharpened to maximum. The exact second the upper level returned to a total dead silence, she smoothly slipped through her door to scout the layout.
The entire asylum map had undergone a massive real-time update.
Down in the lower courtyard, a fleet of sleek, high-tier carriage mounts, rows of systematically organized supply wagons, and a dense vanguard of max-durability, heavily armored private bodyguards confirmed that an elite executive NPC had officially entered the sector. Concurrently, the hidden dark rooms across the second floor had fully initialized their operation scripts. Although the walls had been engineered with premium acoustic-dampening materials, the friction of silk and leather couldn’t bypass Lu Yunxi’s Grandmaster auditory tracking.
She monitored the muffled rustling filtering through the masonry, her pathing shifting as she prepared to breach one of the active suites, when a sudden succession of light footsteps escalated from the lower stairwell.
Lu Yunxi checked her momentum, instantly melting her silhouette into the deep shadows of an architectural blind spot.
However, the exact frame the female asset cleared the landing, Lu Yunxi’s visual scanners flagged a massive anomaly—the target’s physical dimensions looked remarkably familiar.
Recalling the precise character descriptors Shun Hai had mapped out regarding his missing sister, her pupils contracted. She activated her stealth parameters and covertly trailed the girl’s tracking marker down the hall.
“Step inside the grid,” the patrol guard trailing the maiden barked, roughly shoving her torso through an open doorway. “The entities occupying our facility tonight are high-ranking, elite lords commanding immense political power. If your account harbors any delusion of clearing your containment contract, you had best optimize their comfort parameters tonight.”
The thug violently slammed the heavy wood shut, locking the door.
Absolutely no one within the corridor intercepted the data that a localized gust of wind had brushed the frame, causing the latch to open and reset within a single microsecond.
“Identify your faction!” The maiden violently flinched as the door suddenly rattled, initially computing that a premium client had initialized an encounter script. Her entire frame was actively vibrating with terror—but looking across the room, her visual interface rendered a young girl instead of a brutal lord!
“State your own registry,” Lu Yunxi replied, her eyes flashing with a sharp, calculated light. Instead of directly calling out the sister’s hidden name and bricking her cover, she expertly deployed a vacuous, innocent smile, perfectly mimicking a generic inmate. “My character model is an active patient in this ward; this specific room is assigned to my ledger. Did your pathing logs map an incorrect coordinate?”
The maiden stood frozen, her processing units apparently struggling to parse the dialogue.
The extended duration she had spent locked inside this horrific asylum had evidently glitched her cognitive retention, making her past life feel like an entirely separate chronicle.
She fell into a heavy internal calculation loop for several long seconds before the data finally synchronized. Staring down at Lu Yunxi, a wave of profound, intense pity softened her features. She forcibly dropped her vocal settings to a muted whisper, pleading: “Your unit must execute an immediate flight command to clear these coordinates! This facility is a catastrophic hazard node—do not let your account remain anchored here!”
“Heh! Your profile is feeding me disinformation!” Lu Yunxi huffed, pouting with masterful idiocy. “The administrative Masters guaranteed that my vessel would receive premium, high-tier medical care without drawing down a single copper coin from my ledger! My sole requirement is simply to execute a basic labor contract for the facility down the line!”
“You silly creature!” The girl choked on her words, her eyes rolling back in pure, exasperated frustration. “The authentic medical staff who originally operated this clinic were systematically arrested and thrown into the dungeon cages weeks ago! The ‘doctors’ currently managing this server are an organized syndicate of bloodthirsty bandits running a master disguise script! They are literal cannibals who liquidate human assets! Capitalize on the current server chaos while the guard vigilance is low! Melt into the mountain ridges and run as fast as your stamina allows when the patrols aren’t monitoring your sector!”
“What is your official character name?” Lu Yunxi pressed, her voice dropping the childish cadence. “Why does your own profile refuse to join my flight path?”
“Simply log my registry as Lan Niang…” The maiden’s head dropped into the shadows, a heavy wave of absolute despair dulling her eyes as tears began to spill across her cheeks. “Given the state of my account parameters… what exact destination could I possibly navigate to even if I successfully executed an escape?”
Lan Niang.
A calculated spark flared deep within Lu Yunxi’s pupils.
Confirmed. She has successfully located Shun Hai’s missing sister.
Scanning the girl’s hands, the physical mole parameters mapped perfectly to the scholar’s ancestral data.
But before either entity could advance their respective dialogue trees, a heavy, deliberate sequence of leather boots violently resonated from the exterior corridor, the tracking markers aggressively closing within meters of their door.
Both girls stiffened, their stress meters instantly spiking.
Lan Niang’s pupils dilated with raw panic, her avatar frantically pacing around the small room like a trapped animal. “Disaster! What is the optimal defensive counter-measure?!”
Lu Yunxi’s large eyes merely darkened into a freezing, lethal glaze. Gliding across the floorboards without a single sound, her hand smoothly clamped around the handle of a massive, spiked iron mace resting against the wall. She pinned her spine flat against the interior partition, her body perfectly concealed within the door’s blind spot.
Tracking her terrifying combat stance, Lan Niang instantly deciphered the strategy, a sharp gasp tearing from her throat as her panic metrics peaked.
She frantically clapped both hands over her lips, forcibly arresting her own vocal output to keep from glitching the ambush.
Swallowing down her terror, she marched over to stand directly in the center of the room. She folded her palms neatly over her lower abdomen, her chin tucked tight to her chest as she forced her character model to project a completely submissive, broken affect.
SLAM!
The heavy wooden door was violently thrown open.
