Chapter 191| Chapter 192| Chapter 193
Chapter 191: Fire
The door suddenly swung open. A pot-bellied man swaggered into the room, a wicked, lecherous smile plastered across his face.
Right behind him was a patrol guard from the mental hospital, who pointed at Lan Niang with an obsequious grin. “Sir, does this girl suit your tastes? If not, we have plenty of others—pretty, charming, noble… all kinds to choose from.”
The two girls hidden in the room remained completely silent. This guard didn’t sound like a patrolman at all; he sounded exactly like a brothel pimp.
“She’ll do. Let’s take her,” the pot-bellied man said, looking at Lan Niang’s pale face with a satisfied nod. “Go find my servant later to collect your reward.”
“Excellent, as long as you’re pleased!” The guard clasped his hands together, his smile widening happily. He then turned back to Lan Niang, his face instantly shifting to a stern, disciplinary scowl. “Remember to serve the master well!”
Lan Niang lowered her eyes, responding with forced submissiveness. In a gentle, trembling voice, she said, “Master, please come in. What kind of tea would you prefer?”
The door was pulled shut by the guard outside.
Lan Niang breathed a silent sigh of relief. Thank goodness they hadn’t noticed there was someone else hiding in the room!
The very next second.
The pot-bellied man flashed a sickening smile. He stepped forward eagerly, reaching out to grab Lan Niang’s hands.
Lan Niang’s face filled with absolute terror, but she didn’t dare move an inch.
Lu Yunxi’s eyes sharpened. She gripped her heavy iron mace and swung it with deadly precision.
Thwack!
“Argh—!”
With a sharp scream, the man collapsed heavily to the floor, blood gushing from his fractured skull.
Lan Niang stared at the man crumpling in front of her, her hands flying to cover her mouth in sheer horror. After hearing that piercing scream, the blood drained completely from her face.
“What do we do?! He shouted so loudly! They’ll definitely…” Lan Niang was so frantic that tears threatened to spill from her eyes.
Lu Yunxi could already hear the sound of hurried footsteps echoing down the corridor outside.
She quickly pressed an index finger to her lips, signaling the girl to be quiet.
Lan Niang instantly clamped both hands over her mouth, not daring to make a single sound.
The patrol guards rushed over and quickly formed a perimeter around the door.
“Is this the place?” the leading guard asked, raising his halberd toward the heavy wood.
“Yes, sir. The scream we just heard definitely came from this room. Should we breach the door now?”
“Wait!” The head guard frowned, pressing his ear close to the panels to listen carefully to the movements inside.
Inside the room, Lu Yunxi pinched her throat and mimicked a delicate, breathy voice: “Master, please… this servant is in so much pain… sob…”
Then, she lowered her pitch to flawlessly mimic the unconscious man’s sleazy tone: “Haha! How about it? Am I amazing, little beauty?”
After a brief pause, heavy, rhythmic breathing sounds could be heard echoing through the door.
Listening to the muffled conversation, the patrol leader’s eyebrows twitched uncontrollably.
He stood in deadpan silence for a moment, then spun around and slapped his subordinate hard on the back of the head.
“You idiot! The guest is just having a good time! What are you doing?! If we barged in right now, you’d get me killed!”
The subordinate nearly stumbled to the ground from the force of the slap. He rubbed his head, looking deeply aggrieved. “But I really heard someone scream at the top of their lungs just now…”
“That’s just how the elite guests enjoy themselves! You’re so ignorant. Some of these rich lords play much rougher than others.” The patrol leader waved his hand in dismissal to the large squad behind him. “Disperse! Next time, don’t report every little noise!”
The guards murmured their compliance and scattered to resume their patrol routes.
Inside the room, as the footsteps outside finally faded into silence, Lu Yunxi let out a breath of relief.
Lan Niang patted her chest. As her racing heart finally calmed down, her sharp intellect returned.
“Who are you really? You understood exactly what I meant earlier, right? Otherwise, you wouldn’t have come up with that solution,” Lan Niang asked, her eyes probing carefully. “Are you an agent sent by the government?”
When Lu Yunxi turned around, she found Lan Niang staring at her with eyes as bright and intense as searchlights.
“…I did infiltrate this place on purpose,” Lu Yunxi admitted. A sudden flash of inspiration hit her, and she quickly put on a deeply worried expression. “A good friend of mine disappeared without a trace. I investigated for a long time and finally tracked his files to this mental hospital. That’s why I sneaked in.”
Lan Niang stared at her blankly, finding the story almost unbelievable. After a long silence, she let out a heavy sigh. “So that’s how it is…”
She lowered her head, lost in thought for a while. Suddenly, she looked up and asked, “What is your friend’s name? I’ve been locked up here for quite some time, and I know the faces of many inmates. If you trust me, give me his details, and I can help you find him.”
Lu Yunxi smiled inwardly. She finally said it. I’ve been waiting for this exact opening!
“His name is Shun Hai,” she said slowly, proceeding to describe Shun Hai’s physical appearance in meticulous detail.
Lan Niang shot up from her seat, her face glowing with pure shock and excitement. “You know my brother?!”
But just as the words left her mouth, she shook her head, instantly rejecting her own guess. “No, that’s impossible. My brother is studying at the academy. Why would he ever come to a hazard zone like this?!”
Yet, the more she listened to the girl’s precise description, the more undeniable it became. It was definitely her brother.
Lu Yunxi’s eyes flashed with triumph. Her suspicions were fully confirmed. Lan Niang was indeed Shun Hai’s missing sister!
Down in the subterranean cells, Shun Hai jumped in alarm. “Miss Lu, why are you down here?! It’s far too dangerous!”
He lowered his voice to an urgent whisper, glancing nervously at the other captives sleeping around them. “You need to leave immediately. The guards patrol this area constantly. If they catch you…”
“Do you recognize this person?” Lu Yunxi cut off his frantic warnings, unrolling the portrait she had drawn of Lan Niang right in front of his eyes.
“This—!” Staring at the familiar face, Shun Hai’s pupils trembled violently. He snatched the parchment from her hands, his eyes locked onto the image.
Tears rapidly blurred his vision, and his hands shook as his trembling fingers gently traced the drawn face.
“This… this is my sister!” His voice hitched, growing louder with raw emotion. He looked up at her with desperate, frantic hope. “Where did you see her?!”
Lu Yunxi cast a quick glance at the surrounding bodies to ensure no one had been woken by his outburst. Satisfied the perimeter was secure, she relaxed slightly.
“I found her locked in one of the dark rooms upstairs. A VIP guest arrived today, and they brought her there to serve him. I just happened to intercept them.” Seeing Shun Hai’s face instantly contort into murderous rage at the mention of the guest, she quickly reassured him. “Don’t panic. I knocked the bastard out cold with my mace. She is perfectly safe right now. We’ll figure out a way to extract her later.”
Shun Hai looked at her with overwhelming gratitude, thanking her over and over again. “Thank you… thank you so much! Oh, wait!” He frantically fumbled at his waist. “Take this token. I have two loyal subordinates who also managed to infiltrate this facility. If you show them this, both my sister and my men will follow your absolute command.”
His voice was thick with emotion as he pressed his ancestral wooden token into her hands.
Lu Yunxi accepted the token with a firm nod.
Armed with Shun Hai’s crest, she slipped back into Lan Niang’s secure suite.
The exact moment she presented the wooden token, tears immediately welled up in Lan Niang’s eyes.
“This is the keepsake my mother left for my brother…” she whispered, her eyes brimming with a mix of sorrow and deep nostalgia as she touched the wood. After a moment, she looked up, confused. “How did this end up in your hands?”
Now that Lan Niang was confirmed to be Shun Hai’s sister, Lu Yunxi didn’t hide anything. She detailed everything that had happened in the dungeon and gave a brief introduction of her own background.
“Since this guest is unconscious in here, no guards will come to check on the room for a while. You can use this window of opportunity to escape. I’ll stay behind and impersonate you so your absence isn’t noticed,” Lu Yunxi said, quickly laying out a tactical extraction plan.
Lan Niang furrowed her brow, her expression hardening.
“Even if you hide in this room, someone will eventually come to clear the suite in two days at most. If I escape now, they will absolutely discover the switch,” she said, shaking her head firmly. “Once the alarm is raised, it will be mathematically impossible for anyone else to get out of here alive.”
“You want to save the others?” Lu Yunxi asked, frowning.
Lan Niang hesitated for a moment. Orchestrating a mass rescue was incredibly complicated and required flawless planning.
“I want to rescue my brother, too! Miss Lu, thank you so much for everything you’ve done. You’ve been an immense help to our family. But please, you need to leave this place first. I will find a way to meet up with my brother, and we’ll figure out an escape route together.”
No matter how hard Lu Yunxi tried to persuade her, Lan Niang stubbornly refused to burden her savior any further, insisting that Lu Yunxi escape the hazard zone immediately.
After arguing for a long time, Lan Niang simply would not budge.
Lu Yunxi was genuinely left with no other options.
Conceding the point, she cast a high-tier protective shield over Lan Niang to ensure her safety, then sneaked back down to inform Shun Hai of his sister’s stubborn decision.
Let the brother worry about his own family’s affairs.
Shun Hai felt a wave of profound helplessness wash over him. He spent a full day and night running intense mental calculations, finally synthesizing a viable tactical plan.
Lu Yunxi sat with him for a long time, meticulously patching up the logistical loopholes in his strategy before they finally went their separate ways to put the master plan into motion.
Chapter 192: To Save or Not
As evening descended, the quiet mental asylum began to stir with activity, but the liveliness was strictly confined to the second floor. The first floor remained as desolate and silent as ever.
Standing post at the heavy entrance gates, the two assigned guards couldn’t help but stifle a few tired yawns.
“Are we actually expecting any more clients this week? With such a massive influx of guests arriving every single day, I haven’t had a proper rest cycle in ages. My stamina bar is completely bottomed out,” one of the guards complained, rolling his stiff shoulders in a low, exhausted murmur.
“Keep your audio output low. Without a steady stream of elite clients, how do you expect the administration to process our monthly salary? Besides, the rush only lasts for a few peak days throughout the fiscal year. Just grit your teeth and push through it.” The second guard, whose stress metrics were perpetually running high, executed a rapid visual sweep of the perimeter. He gave his partner a reassuring pat on the shoulder before dropping his voice to a whisper.
Realizing his complaint could be flagged as insubordinate data, the first guard shut his mouth, not daring to run his dialogue tree any further.
By this hour, the VIP guests who had been out surveying the grounds or hunting in the nearby ridges began trickling back into the compound one after another.
The two gatekeepers immediately forced their avatars to project high energy, standing at rigid attention by the door and cheerfully welcoming the returning lords.
However, the final guest count for the evening was relatively low. Once the server sky faded into absolute darkness, every single client migrated up to the second floor. To maximize the security parameters surrounding the VIPs, the majority of the asylum’s patrol detail remained permanently garrisoned upstairs, only descending to the first floor to execute mandatory shift changes.
Left entirely alone at the entrance, the two gatekeepers felt their sleep parameters creeping dangerously high.
Standing propped against their halberds, their eyelids grew heavier and heavier until they finally closed completely.
Absolutely no one intercepted the data that, the exact microsecond the guards’ consciousness logged off, a pair of dark, calculating eyes blinked in the shadows, seamlessly gliding toward the rear exterior of the asylum.
One of the sleeping guards lost his equilibrium, his head tilting sideways until his skull violently cracked against the stone masonry.
“Hiss! Critical damage!” He jolted awake instantly, furiously rubbing the bruised lump on his head as he muttered a string of harsh profanities. He let out another massive, jaw-cracking yawn.
The night air carried a distinct, heavy scent of burning fireworks, and a localized wave of thermal heat washed over his skin, making him feel cozy enough to initiate a second sleep cycle… Wait. Pause the script!
Fireworks?!
His eyes snapped wide open, his visual scanners frantically panning across the environment.
The exact frame his eyes locked onto the towering, raging inferno rapidly consuming the rear of the pavilion, all the color drained from his face.
Catastrophic hazard!
“Fire breach!” he attempted to roar at the absolute top of his lungs.
Unfortunately, his character had consumed a massive volume of highly spiced, throat-burning rations over the past few days. His vocal cords were severely degraded, leaving his voice as a raspy, broken croak. No matter how much breath he forced into the scream, the audio output remained pitifully low.
He frantically whipped his head around, desperately hunting for a water barrel to extinguish the blaze, but his sensors only mapped his partner standing a few meters away, still leaning against the wall in a deep sleep state.
Gritting his teeth, he lunged forward, violently seizing his companion by the collar and shaking him like a ragdoll. “Reboot your system! Fire hazard! The structural integrity is failing!”
The second gatekeeper was violently rattled for several seconds before his eyes finally fluttered open. Rubbing the sleep from his vision, he peered into the darkness. The moment he processed the towering flames, his facial rendering instantly turned a sickly shade of blue.
“Fire hazard!” he roared, his fully functional vocal cords generating a massive sonic boom that echoed straight into the night sky.
However, a fatal architectural flaw complicated the alert. To maximize containment security and client privacy, every single window in the asylum was engineered high against the ceilings and restricted to the size of a standard building brick.
While a few entities garrisoned on the upper floor vaguely intercepted the muffled shouting from below, the vast majority of the population’s audio filters completely ignored the noise as background data.
The two gatekeepers initially prepared to execute a dash into the facility to manually trigger the alert, but just as they hoisted their weapons, they watched the flames violently surge outward, the heat wave rapidly encroaching on their immediate coordinates.
“The thermal damage is too extreme! If our units breach the perimeter, our lifecycles will be instantly deleted! Should we abort the rescue run?!” one guard stammered, his teeth chattering with raw panic.
The other guard monitored the inferno in deadpan silence for a few seconds before giving a solemn nod. “Life and death are determined by the server’s RNG. If the system logic dictates they survive, they will naturally find an escape vector.”
The two men locked eyes, perfectly synchronizing their cowardice.
They rapidly executed a maximum back-dash, retreating far out of the fire’s aggro radius. Tossing their weapons into the dirt, they dropped into a cross-legged meditation stance and began silently chanting sutras, offering passive prayers for the trapped souls inside.
As the countdown timer ticked forward, the patrol guards actively running routes inside the first floor were the first to flag the environmental anomaly.
Their shift-change sequence with the gatekeepers was scheduled to trigger every few hours.
Approaching the scheduled interval, the relief detail marched toward the main entrance. Instead of finding the two gatekeepers stationed at their posts, they were greeted by a massive wall of raging fire.
Their facial expressions violently shifted, and they immediately sprinted back into the facility’s core to broadcast the crisis alert.
Absolutely no one noticed that deep within the subterranean dungeon, across multiple iron cells, every single captive simultaneously lowered their heads, silently gripping crude, sharpened stones in their hands.
“Catastrophic hazard! All units report to the upper levels for damage control! We have a fire breach!” A massive, echoing roar filtered down the central shaft.
The patrolmen actively marching their loops through the dungeon immediately hoisted their weapons and bolted up the stone stairs to assist the crisis.
Inside the cages, the imprisoned assets snapped their heads up, a freezing, calculated light flashing in their eyes.
The operational window had arrived!
The designated rogue who had successfully pickpocketed the master ring sprinted to the heavy iron grates, desperately working the locks, while the secondary captives rapidly assisted one another, utilizing their sharpened stones to meticulously saw through their ropes and leather bindings.
The entire demographic was moving in perfect synchronization, yet the scene played out like a silent film. Aside from the faint, metallic clinking of iron chains and the grinding of stone against hemp, the breakout generated absolute zero audio.
The clock ticked forward, second by second.
By the time the entire captive population successfully cleared their containment cells, over twenty minutes had elapsed.
While the dungeon population was furiously executing their escape script, a massive influx of staff had flooded the first floor.
Initially, the patrol teams were desperately hurling buckets of water at the flames, but they were trapped inside the pavilion, and the water reserves in the centralized tanks were steadily dropping. If the burn rate continued, their extinguishing assets would hit zero.
Facing imminent server deletion, the staff completely abandoned their baseline protocols. Splitting into two strike teams, they frantically charged up to the second floor and began violently hammering on the doors of the VIP dark rooms.
“Do you have any liquid assets?!”
“What liquid assets?! I was right in the middle of a high-yield enjoyment cycle, and you suddenly… Hey! What is your malfunction?! Why is your unit confiscating our drinking water?!”
“Pardon the intrusion, my lord, but does your suite contain an active water basin?”
“Negative! Wait, abort your breach command! I… identify your faction! You look exactly like a raiding bandit!”
“Is there water in your quarters?!”
“Ah! You absolute lunatic! Do not close the distance! My avatar is completely naked in the bathtub! Where exactly are you transporting my coordinates?!”
The crisis parameters were so extreme that the guards completely bypassed their compliance filters. Locating a VIP lord actively soaking in a custom wooden bathtub, they ignored his frantic shrieking, physically hoisted both the guest and the heavy tub into the air, and aggressively hauled the entire asset downstairs to dump the water on the fire.
Countless elite clients were thrown into an absolute, unmitigated rage. Tying their robes, they furiously rolled up their sleeves and marched downstairs to calculate the damages.
Many lords had been mere moments away from peaking their enjoyment meters, only for the guards to violently breach their suites and instantly shatter their buffs. The psychological debuff was so devastating they entirely lacked the stamina to resume their activities; they simply wanted to unleash a massive string of profanity onto the guards.
The captive girls and boys who had been dragged up to the second floor to serve the VIPs were entirely confused by the chaos. Exchanging hesitant glances, they tentatively crept down the stairwell—only to spot a large group of highly familiar faces jogging up from the lower levels.
“Why are your character models rendered here?!” Weren’t your profiles permanently archived in the subterranean cages?
“Shh! Mute your audio output! Synchronize with my tactical blueprint…”
The victims originally drafted to serve the guests finally linked up with the dungeon escapees, while the first floor remained consumed by absolute panic.
The guards and doctors were strictly focused on survival, furiously spamming water-splashing animations without a single frame of hesitation. The VIP guests, however, suddenly registered the lethal hazard, their stress meters spiking as many began aggressively screaming, cursing, and threatening physical violence.
“What is the structural logic of this facility?! How did your masonry catch fire so easily?! If my avatar sustains a single point of thermal damage today, I will have your entire faction beheaded!”
“These coordinates are completely unsecure! Where is your administrative Dean?! Summon him to my interface immediately!”
“Execute a rescue command! My lifecycle cannot terminate here! Oh heavens… your ledger will compensate my account for this trauma! Bah! I will never log into your entertainment node again!”
The Dean frantically wiped thick sheets of cold sweat from his forehead, plastering a desperately apologetic smile across his face as he bowed continuously to the enraged lords.
He was secretly groaning in absolute despair. Every single guest occupying the floor was either the patriarch of a high-net-worth aristocratic lineage or a powerful imperial official—demographics his faction absolutely could not afford to aggro. If a single VIP sustained critical damage… only the developers could save him!
While the asylum staff oscillated between frantic panic and numb exhaustion, a massive crowd gradually formed a perimeter outside the burning pavilion.
Excluding the two cowardly gatekeepers who had been praying in the dirt since the initial spark, the rest of the onlookers were all native NPCs from the adjacent Mental Asylum Village.
These villagers lived right on the facility’s border and derived a massive volume of gold from the asylum’s economic loop, yet staring at the towering inferno, their action menus were entirely frozen.
“What is our optimal support vector? Should our units initiate a rescue assist?!” one villager asked, his face pale with worry.
The surrounding peasants exchanged nervous glances, but not a single unit executed a movement command.
How much raw liquid volume would be required to extinguish a structure of this magnitude?
Even if they mobilized their entire workforce to continuously haul buckets from the village’s three primary wells, the math simply didn’t support a successful rescue! But if they actively chose not to assist… the Dean’s faction might log a permanent grudge, blacklisting their village from all future employment contracts!
The Village Chief’s eyes darted rapidly, his processing units churning through the variables until a compromise generated.
“The asylum is geographically bound to our sector, meaning our faction is morally obligated to run a support script… Here is the logistics chain: every single household will deploy one active unit. We will divide into three teams: water harvesters, transport couriers, and frontline splashers.”
The exact second the directive was broadcast, the villagers erupted into a fierce argument.
Every single NPC desperately wanted to secure a slot on the frontline splashing team. Hauling heavy water buckets across the map rapidly drained stamina bars, whereas standing on the frontline allowed the unit to simply idle in place and wait for the couriers to deliver the assets.
The villagers shouted and bickered at maximum volume for several minutes, completely failing to reach a logistical consensus.
Chapter 193: Prayer
The standoff between the villagers dragged on. No one cared about the raging fire anymore; they were far too busy fighting over their chores.
Lu Yunxi watched the chaotic spectacle from her hiding spot in the woods, her eye twitching in sheer disbelief.
Fortunately, she had anticipated the limits of their cooperation. Before Shunhai initiated the master blueprint, Lu Yunxi had deployed her max-tier internal energy to cloak the entire interior of the mental asylum with a heavy, multi-layered protective barrier. The fire would, at most, scorch the outer masonry; it was mathematically impossible for the flames to compromise the structural integrity inside or inflict a single point of damage on the occupants. Furthermore, she had cast a secondary containment shield around the exterior perimeter, creating a flawless thermal cage that prevented the blaze from spreading into the primeval forest.
Otherwise, if the captives had actually been forced to wait for these native NPCs to organize a rescue loop, not only would the internal demographic have faced permanent deletion, but even the villagers outside would have likely been consumed by the unchecked wildfire!
Back on the main track, the shouting escalated into a full-blown physical brawl.
“Your Liu family has eight sons in total! Taking turns hauling water wouldn’t even dent their stamina bars! You should deploy your boys to harvest the wells!”
“Your family’s agility parameters are the highest on the map! Why isn’t your own kin assisting the transport detail?!”
“Insolence! Why should their household secure the frontline splashing slots while our units are forced to run manual labor loops?!”
“…”
Monitoring the absolute collapse of his workforce’s discipline, the Village Chief’s brow knit into a severe frown.
“Silence! Abort the argument!” The thick veins along his forehead throbbed violently before he unleashed a massive, booming roar. “If your accounts flatly refuse to run the water logistics, then stay right where you are! Join the two gatekeepers in chanting sutras to pray for the souls inside!”
Having delivered the command, he dusted off his rough linen robes, mirrored the exact cross-legged posture of the two cowardly guards, and sat flat on the dirt. Forcing a mask of profound, saintly compassion onto his features, he closed his eyes and began silently projecting prayers toward the sky.
Observing the shift, the villagers realized they could completely bypass the grueling water-hauling labor without logging an insubordination penalty. Shrugging off their anger, they promptly followed his example, dropping their torsos onto the dirt and crossing their legs.
Before long, dozens of peasants were neatly arranged in a long row right outside the asylum gates, their palms tightly pressed together as they spammed prayer animations.
Had a towering, apocalyptic inferno not been actively devouring the pavilion across the street, an outside observer logging into the sector would have assumed this demographic was exceptionally pious.
Lu Yunxi paid the chanting crowd zero mind, focusing her auditory arrays on the internal commotion instead.
She had previously finalized a safety protocol with Shunhai: if their operational parameters hit an insurmountable glitch, he was instructed to ring a specialized spiritual bell she had provided, and she would instantly launch a high-intensity combat intervention to extract them. Yet, despite the extended duration of the fire event, the bell’s audio signature remained completely silent. Shunhai’s tactical control over the interior variables was evidently holding up perfectly.
Satisfied the script was running smoothly, she leaped onto a sturdy oak branch, closed her eyes, and entered a brief rest cycle.
The interior execution mapped precisely onto her projections.
The asylum orderlies aggressively drained the liquid volume from every private suite, furiously splashing the contents against the core exit lanes. By the time their water assets neared absolute zero, the wall of fire blocking the main threshold had been severely throttled down.
They had successfully carved out a narrow, viable escape vector!
Provided their vessels successfully crossed a shallow, ankle-high line of residual embers directly ahead, their profiles could safely clear the burning prison!
Sensing their survival metrics stabilize, the elite clients threw themselves into a frantic scramble, fighting to breach the exit first.
“Clear the path for my vessel! My biological father commands the entire regional prefecture as the local county magistrate!” one lord bellowed, aggressively shoving his way to the front.
Hearing his political credentials, the surrounding aristocrats let out a collective, mocking sneer, aggressively firing back with their own family statuses.
“Heh! A low-tier county magistrate is a minor bureaucrat! My biological uncle rules as the Grand Governor of Green State!”
“The Governor’s guild is indeed powerful, but your profiles are merely relying on legacy kinship buffs! My account is entirely different—I hold the active imperial office myself!”
The crowd of high-born lords bickered and collided with one another, not a single asset willing to yield his priority positioning.
Shunhai’s eye twitched in deadpan silence. He executed a rapid hand signal to his hidden retainers, who immediately surged forward to launch a physical intervention against the squabbling staff and guests.
“Be quick! Neutralize their movement parameters and drag them out of the hot zone! Prioritize the maidens and elderly commoners for immediate extraction, then have the secondary units follow behind!” Shunhai commanded at high volume, monitoring the frontline as the first wave of captives successfully cleared the smoking threshold.
Outside, observing a steady stream of human assets suddenly emerging from the heart of the inferno, the two gatekeepers and the cross-legged villagers were momentarily stunned before their features erupted into pure, ecstatic joy.
The Village Chief burst into a boisterous laugh. “Haha! My tactical intuition was entirely flawless! The spiritual script I engineered has yielded a supreme success rate! Escalate the prayer volume, everyone!”
As he spoke, he straightened his spine, tightly clamped his eyelids shut, and resumed his silent chanting with renewed vigor.
The extracted victims: “!!”
Staring at the wall of peasants completely barricading the primary exit lane, the survivors’ facial expressions turned remarkably distorted.
Incredible!
If your accounts desire to grind passive prayer metrics, at least have the basic cognitive decency not to block the absolute solitary escape vector on the map!
Having just survived a near-fatal extraction, the victims instantly collided with the human barricade. Because their visual interfaces were severely glitched by the thick smoke—causing continuous tear-streaming animations—they had entirely failed to map the obstruction in advance. Pushed to their physical limits by the blockade, the raw irritation of the upper-class lords peaked. They aggressively grabbed the praying villagers, forcefully dragging them off the path to clear the lane.
Up on her branch, Lu Yunxi’s eyelids fluttered open. She sat quietly amidst the leaves, her scanners monitoring the dense crowd as the final units successfully migrated out of the burning pavilion. Only after verifying her tracking logs that not a single human signature remained inside the facility did she let out a clean breath of relief.
A truly catastrophic server event officially terminated here.
The fire had burned with terrifying visual effects, and though her dual shields had perfectly contained the destructive radius, the towering pillars of flame had painted a massive quadrant of the evening sky crimson. An administrative anomaly of this magnitude was mathematically impossible to conceal from the high-tier imperial authorities.
Within days, a massive deployment of government investigators breached the sector to conduct a thorough audit. Every single official or high-born lord who had secretly visited the facility to purchase illegal services was locked in a severe political investigation loop. The corrupt Dean and his unclassed doctors were stripped of their credentials and permanently exiled to a remote northern frontier province to perform hard labor repairing the imperial Great Wall. As for the low-level support staff, since the investigation confirmed their accounts lacked access to the syndicate’s backend secrets, they were released from containment after a brief jail cycle without suffering any permanent alignment penalties.
Naturally, among the surviving thugs, a few high-intelligence operatives attempted to run a defense script, shouting at the top of their lungs during their trials, “Our unit is being framed by a rogue player! Analyze the map data! Had a standard wildfire of that magnitude initialized naturally, the entire forest continent biome would have been completely reduced to ash! How is it mathematically possible for the fire to perfectly vaporize a single building without singing a solitary leaf?!”
Unfortunately for their accounts, the imperial magistrates completely ignored their bugs, dismissing the claims as unscripted nonsense.
“My profound, eternal gratitude for your intervention this season, Miss Lu,” Shunhai delivered the dialogue softly. He held a premium lacquer box with both hands, carefully extending it toward her inventory. “If your profile ever encounters a critical bottleneck down the line, simply present this premium jade pendant at any branch of the Haiji trading syndicate. Their commercial network spans every major state capital on the world map. the exact frame a shop manager scans this artifact, his establishment will exert its maximum processing power to fulfill your quest requirements.”
Lu Yunxi accepted the jade pendant with a warm smile, finalizing the item transfer. After exchanging a final round of parting prompts with Shunhai and his sister, she adjusted her alignment settings and embarked once more onto her nomadic cultivation path.
A tiny grey donkey ambled lazily along a narrow, winding mountain path.
Lu Yunxi sat relaxed upon the mount’s back, a long blade of grass tucked into the corner of her lips. She balanced a simple bamboo fishing rod in her right hand, dangling a fresh carrot a few inches ahead of the donkey’s snout. Driven by the primitive AI loop, the mount moved forward at a slow, perfectly leisurely pace.
Thwip—!
Suddenly, a sharp, high-velocity arrow ripped through the quiet airspace from a nearby thicket, carrying enough raw kinetic force to penetrate solid steel.
The sudden projectile violently triggered the donkey’s panic parameters. It let out a frantic braying sound, its front hooves flapping wildly in the dirt as its balance calibration failed. Lu Yunxi rapidly shifted her weight, locking her arms around the animal’s neck to stabilize its vessel and keep from being unceremoniously tossed from the saddle.
Pivoting her chin to run a rapid scan of the environment, she mapped two entities locked in a high-speed chase sequence through the trees. The archery attributes of the chasing party were truly, catastrophically pathetic.
He was aggressively sprinting behind his target, spamming arrows on cooldown, yet not a single projectile managed to lock onto the fleeing player. Instead, the shafts were scattering wildly in every random directional vector across the map.
Lu Yunxi was forced to execute a series of rapid left-and-right head tilts to dodge the stray projectiles, her deadpan expression returning.
Initially, the donkey had attempted to run a standard flight command to clear the zone, but the stray arrows were raining down across its coordination grid in such a dense pattern that its survival algorithms glitched. Terrified, it dropped its front knees directly into the dirt, its entire frame trembling violently as it entered a hard stasis lock.
“Identify your factions!” Lu Yunxi projected her voice in a deep, commanding register.
Could these two entities be running a coordinated theater routine, their true aggro covertly locked onto her own build?
At the thought, her large eyes narrowed into a freezing, lethal glaze, a dense wave of unbridled killing intent radiating from her core form. However, she temporarily omitted the calculation that while her own internal cultivation had reached the peak Grandmaster tier, the distance parameters between their models were far too wide; the runners couldn’t intercept her audio output at all.
Still, inside this desolate mountain biome, the only active assets rendered on the map were the two runners, her own vessel, and a trembling donkey. They were naturally impossible to miss.
It wasn’t long before the fleeing player’s radar mapped her coordinates, and he immediately altered his trajectory, charging straight toward her position.
“Second Brother, abort the mission! Run! The primary infiltration script has failed!” he roared with immense, theatrical desperation, his face a mask of raw panic.
Lu Yunxi: “…”
She monitored the runner trailing behind him, who promptly released a fresh volley of arrows aimed squarely at her own chest. Even though the pathetic accuracy metrics caused the projectiles to veer off-target and thud into the surrounding dirt, the raw sensation of a hostile lock targeting her hit box was exceptionally clear.
Brilliant.
You genuinely possess a high proficiency for transferring your aggro onto innocent bystanders!
Tracking a smug, sinister grin spreading across the fleeing player’s face as he prepared to capitalize on her confusion to slip off the map, Lu Yunxi’s lips curled into an ice-cold sneer. She reached into her dimensional inventory, retrieving a specialized projectile weapon her account hadn’t deployed in multiple chapters.
Flick—!
A lightning-fast spiritual projectile shot forth, cleanly snagging the runner’s heavy collar and pinning his tunic flat against a massive pine trunk with immense kinetic force.
The hunter sprinting behind finally cleared the brush, skidding to a halt as his visual sensors processed the bizarre entrapment. Staring blankly at the target pinned to the tree for several long seconds, his analytical modules finally resolved the data discrepancy.
“My sincere apologies, young lady,” he stammered, his features flushing with deep embarrassment as he lowered his bow. “I hadn’t calculated that this scoundrel would deploy a false identity script to gaslight your profile. I hope my stray volleys didn’t inflict any latent damage on your health bar?”
Lu Yunxi’s internal irritation metrics smoothly receded.
“It is a non-issue. Had this target not proactively executed that deceptive dialogue line, your sensors wouldn’t have flagged my unit as a hostile faction anyway.”
The newcomer kept his eyes anchored to the trapped rogue for another moment, confirming the entity’s physical mobility parameters were completely locked down, before letting out a massive breath of relief. He pivoted his torso to fully address the maiden.
“My registry is… Wait, it’s you?! Miss Lu?!”
Hearing her authentic character name clear his throat, a sudden wave of familiarity touched Lu Yunxi’s logic engine.
She hoisted her chin, her large eyes locking onto the hunter’s features. Standing directly before her mount was Fu Yi, his face a complete picture of absolute, unadulterated shock.
“Young Master Fu?!”
“Miss Lu?! What exact map coordinates have guided your avatar to this remote sector?!”
