Chapter 194| Chapter 195| Chapter 196
Chapter 194: Save Him
“Ah! Yes, I… I came to the mountains to forage for some medicinal herbs,” Lu Yunxi laughed dryly.
She remembered how she always seemed to lose her composure whenever she ran into Fu Yi. Internally, she wished she could sprout wings and fly far away from here, but she managed to keep her expression completely normal.
“By the way, Young Master Fu, what brings you out here?”
“This thief actually stole an artifact from the academy where I teach. I caught him in the act and chased him through these ridges for several days,” Fu Yi said, pointing his bow at the struggling figure pinned to the tree. “If you hadn’t intercepted him, there’s no telling how much longer I would have been forced to pursue him.”
He glared at the captive and let out a cold snort. “A while back, an intruder covertly breached the academy’s perimeter. It must have been this exact scoundrel. Unfortunately, I lost his trail back then and he managed to evade capture. Who could have predicted he’d be arrogant enough to return so soon? He dared to strike the same sector twice, and this time he actually made off with the goods!”
The man nailed to the tree trunk stopped thrashing, wailing defensively, “This is a false accusation! I’ve never set foot inside that academy before today. This is my absolute first time running a heist there, and your unit caught me immediately!”
Hearing his defense, Lu Yunxi suddenly froze.
Memories rushed back. She vividly recalled the time she had sneaked into the First Military Academy to secretly audit classes. Back then, it was Fu Yi who had aggressively chased her down the lanes. If she hadn’t meticulously concealed her face and body, and if her agility attributes hadn’t been exceptionally high, she might not have escaped his pursuit.
“A false accusation?! You have the audacity to claim innocence!” Fu Yi barked, his face dark with rage as he reached out to violently seize the man’s collar. “Spit out the data! What was your true objective in breaching our academy?!”
The weeping thief yelled in terror, frantically surrendering every single item he had pillaged from the campus. Yet, despite the pressure, he stubbornly refused to admit he had ever executed a prior break-in.
“There are very few rogues in this realm bold enough to infiltrate the academy grounds. Who would swallow your lies?!” Fu Yi snorted coldly. Keeping an iron grip on the man’s collar, he relentlessly pressed his interrogation.
The captive was so utterly broken by the pressure that he dissolved into hysterical tears, snot and mucus running down his face.
Lu Yunxi: “…”
In her heart, she actually believed the thief.
Looking at the furious Fu Yi and then at the thoroughly devastated burglar, a deep wave of guilt washed over her. She cast a sheepish, self-conscious glance at the duo, quickly fabricated a polite excuse to clear her coordinates, and slipped away.
Fortunately, both men were entirely consumed by their interaction, allowing her to quietly guide her grey donkey down the track.
Once she was safely out of their radius, Lu Yunxi relaxed into her saddle again, allowing the little donkey to amble leisurely along the mountain trail.
However—
When their pathing brought them past a uniquely twisted, jagged boulder for the third consecutive time, she finally yanked the reins to a halt.
Drawing her dagger, she carved a clean, deep mark into the bark of a nearby tree before urging the donkey forward once more.
A few minutes later, the exact same stretch of path materialized before her eyes.
Staring blankly at the fresh carving she had just sliced into the trunk, she lightly stroked her chin, her analytical modules fully engaged.
“Xiao Mao, it appears our party has collided with a mysterious wall,” she muttered to the mount. Leaping lightly from the saddle, she took the donkey by the lead and began navigating the terrain on foot to scan for anomalies.
She had previously invested a significant volume of study into the Five Elements and the Eight Trigrams, but the bizarre thing about this sector was that no matter how thoroughly she scanned the environment, the landscaping showed absolutely zero signs of an artificial formation. Generally speaking, no matter how flawlessly a master cloaks an illusion array, the geometric distribution of the stones, the alignment of the trees, and the residual energetic traces will inevitably betray some structural discrepancies.
She dragged the donkey through the thickets for an extended duration but failed to map an exit vector. The only viable pathing remaining was a solitary trail that felt as though it had been intentionally left open by whoever had engineered the sector.
By this point, the little donkey had been walking for far too long. Its patience bar bottomed out, and it flatly refused to take another step.
Lu Yunxi casually fed the stubborn animal the carrot from her fishing line. After carefully sketching out the surrounding topography on a parchment, she dragged the lead toward the solitary road.
The donkey aggressively kicked its hooves against the dirt, braying in loud dissatisfaction.
Seeing that the mount—despite being perfectly hydrated and well-fed—absolutely refused to advance down the trail, she had no choice but to adjust her strategy. She retrieved a massive stockpile of fodder and fresh water from her dimensional space, leaving it beside the animal. She then cast a high-tier protective barrier to secure its hit box against rogue predators before stepping into the dense woods alone.
After cutting through several layers of thick, overlapping forest, the trail abruptly terminated at the entrance of a hidden valley village.
The layout was remarkably simple: a solitary dirt road bisected the settlement, flanked on both sides by two rows of systematically arranged, uniform houses. A pack of large yellow farm dogs was loitering along the path; the moment their sensors registered a stranger breaching the perimeter, they initiated a high-decibel barking routine.
Lu Yunxi maintained a perfectly serene countenance, casually walking past the gathering onlookers as she advanced deeper into the village.
Strangely, she had predicted that stepping into an isolated mountain village would instantly trigger a hostile encounter script with the locals, but the actual reality was entirely peaceful.
The peasants merely hoisted their heads to track her movement before quietly returning to their tasks. They were simply sitting along the curbside, retailing basic commodities from small mats spread before them. Some were weaving bamboo baskets and conical hats, while others offered fresh eggs and wild vegetables—a standard assortment of daily survival necessities.
Their garments were heavily patched, and their faces carried a deep, localized exhaustion, but their profiles lacked any active aggression markers.
“Greetings, Auntie. I am hunting for a trace of data,” Lu Yunxi noted pleasantly, retrieving a handful of bright copper coins and pressing them into an elderly vendor’s palm. “What is the official registry of this valley? My vessel originally trekked into these ridges to forage for medicinal herbs, but my pathing glitched, and I accidentally stumbled into your sector. Which directional vector leads back to the nearest market town?”
The old vegetable vendor’s eyes flared with intense brilliance at the sight of the coins, but the light vanished just as quickly as it had appeared.
She listlessly swept the currency into her apron pocket, letting out a hollow sigh. “This coordinate is registered as Dragon Village, young lady. Now that your vessel has successfully cleared the boundary line, you had best purge any thoughts of a return journey from your mind. It is mathematically impossible to leave this valley.”
“Analyze the demographic over there. Do your visual sensors scan that elderly man resting by the pavilion? That is our Village Chief. Find him later, and his administration will allocate a plot of arable land to your inventory,” the old woman added, pointing toward a figure a short distance away. “Simply set up your homestead and settle down.”
Lu Yunxi fired off a sequence of targeted questions until her database possessed a solid foundational understanding of Dragon Village’s lore.
Dragon Village was a settlement entirely sealed away within the deepest depths of the primeval mountain biome.
For reasons that remained completely unindexed in their historical files, a specific day had arrived where the villagers suddenly lost the capability to pass the perimeter lines, forcing the population into a lifetime of absolute isolation from the outside world.
Fortunately, a massive salt lake bordered their territory, and the valley spawned a continuous supply of wild vegetables, mountain fruits, grains, and lumber, allowing the community to maintain a baseline self-sufficiency metric. Had those resources not been hard-coded into the map, Dragon Village would have suffered a total demographic wipe generations ago.
Lu Yunxi felt a trace of deep helplessness wash through her system after parsing the vendor’s data. Despite running a lengthy dialogue loop, her analytical modules failed to isolate a single variable that explained why the physical boundary line flatly blocked all exit commands.
Offering her polite thanks to the old woman, Lu Yunxi tracked the coordinates toward the Village Chief to probe further.
However, the current environmental conditions weren’t optimal for an interview.
The Village Chief had set up a modest wooden stall displaying a variety of lifelike wooden carvings. But the entity occupying the space opposite his counter wasn’t a client looking to clear his inventory; it was a local woman locked in a state of absolute distress.
“Village Chief, I beg of your administration to save my child’s lifecycle! He has only survived five winters!” The woman was kneeling flat on the cobblestones, tears streaming down her pale cheeks as she delivered a heart-wrenching plea.
The surrounding villagers who registered the event didn’t step in to offer assistance; they merely shook their heads in helpless resignation, accelerating their pathing to clear the hot zone.
The Village Chief’s countenance was intensely solemn, but the underlying attribute driving his affect was profound, unmitigated helplessness.
“Goudan’s mother, my administration is fully aware that your child’s health bar is crashing. My heart breaks for your household, but even if your vessel kneels before my counter until your durability hits zero, my skills cannot reverse the condition! I do not command a medical class tree!”
“Village Chief, I implore your intellect to formulate a alternative workaround! I shall offer a kowtow to your position!” the mother sobbed hysterically. Pushed to absolute despair, she lacked any secondary recourse; she began violently slamming her forehead against the earth, desperately praying that the highest-ranking administrative entity in the settlement could patch her child’s parameters.
Lu Yunxi monitored the intense emotional scene, her brow knitting into a sharp line.
Is this entire valley devoid of a baseline medical clinic?
She hesitated for a brief frame, but her internal algorithms couldn’t tolerate watching the mother’s psychological stability metrics permanently shatter. Stepping across the boundary line, she announced, “I command a medical profession… Sister, if your household trusts my capabilities…”
Before her dialogue tree could even finalize the statement, every single villager within earshot violently snapped their heads around, their eyes flaring wide as they locked their focus onto her silhouette.
“Are your medical attributes authentic?!” The frantic mother bolted across the stones, her fingers clamping tightly around Lu Yunxi’s wrist like a vice.
Suddenly finding herself the absolute center of mass-demographic aggro, a bead of cold sweat slowly traced its way down Lu Yunxi’s forehead. “…My skills are real. However, my diagnostic tools must run a physical sweep on the patient first to calculate if the pathology falls within my treatment threshold.”
The old mother looked exactly as though her account had just grabbed a legendary lifeline asset. “That is perfectly acceptable! Please, follow me immediately to check on my Goudan!”
Lu Yunxi synchronized her pathing with the frantic woman, trailing her back to her homestead. A massive crowd of curious villagers tracked their coordinates, and even the Village Chief hobbled along behind the vanguard, relying on a gnarled wooden cane to maintain velocity.
Resting upon a severely degraded, tattered wooden bedframe was a tiny, emaciated boy. His eyelids were firmly locked, and his lips were entirely devoid of color. Had her advanced sensors not tracked the rhythmic, shallow rise and fall of his chest cavity, his character model would have easily been mistaken for a corpse.
“What specific event triggered this state?” she asked casually, initiating her preliminary scan.
At first glance, aside from a severe malnutrition debuff, no obvious physical trauma markers were rendering on his form.
“His system suddenly executed a total faint command without warning, and he has failed to trigger a wake animation since. The status effect has persisted for seven consecutive days. If his parameters remain locked like this much longer, I fear…” The mother’s vocal processing fractured, and she dissolved into another frantic weeping loop.
Over the past week, Goudan’s physical rendering had deteriorated from a healthy, robust toddler to a collection of skin and bone, his respiration metrics growing shallower by the hour. How could a mother’s morale meter not plummet to absolute zero face-to-face with such a countdown?
Lu Yunxi’s brow furrowed tightly as her fingers pressed against the child’s wrist to execute a precise pulse diagnostic.
The underlying pathology was indeed an exceptionally rare, high-difficulty disease matrix. Fortunately, during her extended free periods when she was aggressively grinding her medical professions, her database had cross-referenced an almost identical case study, and a viable treatment formula rapidly compiled in her mind.
She fell into a brief analytical silence, before her fingers blurred across a parchment to write down a highly specific prescription. Realizing the local valley infrastructure lacked the specialized botanical assets required by her default formula, she deftly modified the script, substituting the missing items with common regional herbs currently growing in the valley. Once the document finalized, she ordered the attendants to aggressively boil the concoction and carefully administered the premium medicine down Goudan’s throat.
Chapter 195: Gold, Silver and Jewelry
The medicine worked with astonishing speed. Within just half an hour, Goudan’s eyes fluttered open, and his consciousness fully returned.
The frantic mother immediately threw herself across the mattress, tears streaming down her face as she gathered him into her arms. “Goudan! My son! You’re finally awake!”
After weeping for a long time, she wiped her face, looking slightly embarrassed, and turned to Lu Yunxi with profound gratitude. “Doctor, thank you so much! Words cannot express what you’ve done for us!”
Suddenly remembering something, she scrambled into the inner room. When she returned, she was hoisting a massive, heavy chest, which she eagerly thrust into Lu Yunxi’s arms. “Doctor, please accept this humble thank-you gift! Our household has no fine things to offer, so this is the only asset I can give you. Please, do not despise it.”
With a fluid motion, she flipped the heavy latch and threw open the lid.
A brilliant, dazzling golden light burst from the chest, practically blinding anyone looking directly at it.
The container was packed to the brim with raw gold ingots, fine silver, and priceless jewelry. Thick, heavy gold chains and sparkling, multi-colored gemstones filled the interior as if they were common pebbles gathered from a riverbed. Without a single trace of hesitation, the old mother forcefully wedged the fortune into Lu Yunxi’s arms.
Lu Yunxi’s gaze subtly drifted past the woman’s shoulder to monitor the reaction of the onlookers.
To her utter amazement, the surrounding villagers didn’t even blink at the sight of the treasure. Their countenances remained entirely flat and serene, devoid of any emotional fluctuation.
Her large eyes narrowed slightly, her analytical modules whirring.
How bizarre.
Under normal server parameters, when commoners are suddenly exposed to a massive, game-changing fortune, the demographic should display intense envy, and a few low-alignment units might even generate malicious intent. Why on earth were these peasants acting as though the chest contained nothing but dirt?
Though deeply puzzled, she automatically initiated a polite refusal script, pushing the chest back. “This is far too excessive. I merely treated a standard medical condition; my services are absolutely not worth a bounty of this magnitude…”
Before she could finalize her dialogue line, the mother cut her off completely. “How could my son’s lifecycle not be worth it? Goudan’s life is infinitely more precious than this useless metal! Doctor, your profile must accept it!”
The adjacent villagers immediately joined the chorus, aggressively urging her not to be so polite and to take the gold.
At that exact frame, Lu Yunxi remained thoroughly bewildered as to why the population was displaying such manic generosity over a baseline medical quest. It wasn’t until several days later that her logic engine finally solved the mystery.
Naturally, that was a long-term piece of lore for later.
At this specific junction, having just secured a massive influx of funding, her mood metrics were exceptionally high. Stashing the chest into her dimensional inventory, she began casually exploring the village lanes to shop.
“Uncle, the craftsmanship on this bamboo umbrella is spectacular!” Lu Yunxi noted, stopping before a rustic market stall. Standard bamboo umbrellas on this server were notoriously heavy, yet this elderly artisan had somehow optimized the structural weight, rendering a frame that was incredibly light yet elegant. The oiled paper canopy was meticulously painted with an assortment of vibrant flora, fauna, and aquatic life.
Squatting beside the display, Lu Yunxi’s attention locked onto a specific umbrella decorated with delicate plum blossoms.
The brushwork on the plum blossoms was phenomenally advanced, lacking the jagged lines and rough textures typical of low-tier regional crafts. Her artistic database verified at a single glance that this wasn’t the work of a generic amateur. Even though the canvas was merely an ordinary umbrella, the item was an absolute masterpiece worthy of a collector’s inventory.
The old artisan glanced at the specific asset she was inspecting and noted flatly, “Young lady, your sensory stats are remarkably high. That specific umbrella is the absolute premier item in my current inventory. The price is locked at fifty kilograms of solid gold.”
“How much?!” Lu Yunxi blinked, assuming her audio receivers had suffered a translation glitch.
“Fifty kilograms of gold. Alternatively, your account can provide an equivalent item barter,” the old man replied, closing his eyes and adopting the serene, detached posture of a grandmaster.
Lu Yunxi let out a sharp gasp.
Fifty kilograms of gold for a solitary umbrella? Is this NPC unhinged?
Granted, the item might eventually evolve into a legendary antique in future server patches, but within the current timeline, it was simply a newly crafted canopy. The gold value was completely nonsensical.
“What about this secondary option?” Shaking off her daze, she paused for a frame before pointing a finger at a generic umbrella resting on the adjacent rack.
The artisan opened a single eye, ran a quick visual scan over the target, and listlessly closed his eyelid again. “The units arranged along the front row are fixed at five kilograms of gold. The secondary rows are valued at ten kilograms of gold. As for the plum blossom asset, it remains locked at fifty kilograms.”
Lu Yunxi lowered her chin, activating her advanced detection arrays to inspect the goods.
The umbrellas lining the front row all glowed with a faint green uncommon aura, the secondary rows pulsed with a blue rare tier, but the plum blossom umbrella was actively radiating a brilliant orange epic-tier quality light!
“…State your parameters for the item barter option.”
“Barter? Is your profile genuinely prepared to finalize a trade?” The old man’s interest metrics suddenly spiked to maximum. He bolted upright in his chair, his eyes burning with intense enthusiasm as he locked onto her form. “My account has zero utility for gold or silver. I strictly require raw meat drops. The epic plum blossom umbrella can be exchanged for a single whole wild boar. The green-tier front row requires one pound of meat, and the blue-tier units are fixed at three pounds.”
Lu Yunxi was internally staggered by the data.
Her mind had been racing, predicting she would have to harvest a century-old Tianshan Snow Lotus or a thousand-year-old Divine Ginseng to clear the barter requirement. Who could have guessed… this? Just a generic wild boar?!
When it came to complex alchemical gathering, her skills might have limitations, but hunting high-level game was her absolute signature attribute!
“Say no more, Uncle. Maintain your position; I shall harvest a fresh wild boar for your inventory immediately.”
Leaving her dialogue line active, she enthusiastically bolted toward the mountain ridges, brandishing her recurve bow. It wasn’t long before she returned to the stall, successfully transferring the carcass to the artisan and mapping the orange epic umbrella directly into her equipment slots.
What made the item even more magnificent was that its item properties allowed it to function as a specialized concealment weapon! It was a profound pity her character tree lacked the necessary umbrella-mastery combat skills; otherwise, the tactical utility would have been too tempting to resist. Brandishing a lethal combat umbrella was an incredibly aesthetic playstyle!
Securing high-tier bargains naturally maximizes a player’s satisfaction metrics.
Lu Yunxi spent the remainder of the daylight hours meandering through the hidden village, aggressively vacuuming up a massive volume of premium, unindexed commodities.
Through these transactions, she rapidly isolated a glaring flaw in the local economy: within this specific valley biome, the absolute least valuable assets on the server were gold and silver. Attempting to clear a transaction using hard currency was a massive waste of resources; even purchasing a simple bundle of vegetables could entirely bankrupt a ledger. The absolute meta for trading in this sector was pure barter. Every independent stall required a different subset of materials, with fresh meat, poultry eggs, churned butter, and processed salt functioning as the ultimate universal currencies. Armed with those provisions, an account could effectively trade for anything on the map.
Perhaps because the hidden boundary permanently blocked the inhabitants from leaving the valley, the population spent their endless idle hours tirelessly grinding their domestic professions at home. Consequently, the local craftsmen commanded phenomenally advanced skill attributes.
By the time the sun dipped below the ridge, Lu Yunxi’s scanners had logged no fewer than five independent Grandmasters across the market lanes! That concentration of high-tier artisans completely eclipsed the aggregate total she had encountered throughout her entire journey across the continent!
The density of premium loot drops made her feel exactly like a field mouse that had accidentally tumbled into a kingdom’s master granary, her joy parameters breaking the charts.
After dedicating several consecutive days to her frantic shopping spree, Lu Yunxi finally managed to throttle back her consumer instincts and focus on her primary questlines.
On that particular morning, the Village Chief tracked her coordinates, accompanied by a small delegation of local elders. His eyes were heavily bloodshot, his facial features a mask of pure, desperate pleading.
“Our settlement is currently enduring a massive crisis; a high density of our population has been afflicted with severe sickness. Could your profile extend its medical attributes to run a diagnostic sweep on our people? The administration will clear the quest reward using pure gold. What is your decision?” The old man’s voice trembled slightly. “If your ledger prefers to settle the contract using raw game meat or premium woven cloth, that is entirely acceptable; our workforce will mobilize to harvest the assets for your inventory as rapidly as the system allows.”
The flanking elders nodded their heads in frantic, rhythmic unison, their expressions practically begging her to initialize the healing sequence immediately.
She gave a firm, reassuring nod.
Over the course of her market explorations, she had successfully scraped the historical data of the zone. The valley had originally commanded a single resident physician, but the unfortunate NPC had sustained a catastrophic fall debuff while harvesting herbs along the high cliffs, slipping into a permanent coma. Deprived of professional care, whenever a villager triggered a disease flag, they were forced to rely on their baseline vitality parameters to fight through the script.
The sudden appearance of an active player commanding advanced medical attributes was a legendary lifeline for the entire population.
“I shall accept the directive, but I must establish absolute transparency first,” Lu Yunxi clarified seriously. “Though my medical attributes are high, my skill tree cannot automatically clear every pathology code on the server. I can only guarantee that my unit will exert its maximum processing power to manage the crisis.”
The villagers frantically waved their hands to clear her doubts. “That is more than enough, Doctor! Your willingness to initialize the treatment is already a massive boon to our morale. Any active chance at survival is a victory for our lines.”
As the topic shifted to the underlying disease, a collective sorrow darkened the elders’ eyes.
“Ever since the boundary laws glitched and prevented our population from leaving this valley, the collective vitality metrics of our people have steadily degraded, triggering high-frequency sickness loops across every generation. Scan our demographic lines, Doctor… our community commands a grand total of barely three or five elderly survivors. Every secondary peer of my generation suffered a premature vital failure years ago.” The Village Chief let out a long, heavy sigh, a profound ancestral grief painting his features.
How could an old patriarch not endure a severe psychological drain after personally watching every single companion of his starter bracket drop off the server one by one?
Lu Yunxi silently processed the historical context, nodding her compliance as she trailed the old man toward a colossal compound tucked away in a remote quadrant of the valley.
This specific estate was indisputably the largest architectural asset in the village. Aside from a centralized kitchen pavilion and basic sanitation blocks, the layout featured over a dozen expansive residential halls engineered to garrison a massive workforce.
Lu Yunxi ran a swift visual sweep of the exterior before tracking the Chief into the central pavilion.
The interior was entirely devoid of standard bed furniture. The floorboards had been heavily reinforced with thick wooden planks, upon which rested a vast, seamless sea of bedding. The cots were packed together with extreme density, separated only by a labyrinth of narrow footpaths barely wide enough for a single avatar to navigate on foot.
A living character model occupied every single mattress. Some units were desperately gasping for oxygen with their eyelids sealed and their jaws hanging slack. Others displayed intensely flushed, crimson cheeks that looked exactly as though a cosmetic rouge had been aggressively smeared across their skin. A few were trapped in deep sleep states yet continuously spammed nonsensical dialogue streams to the empty air… Staring down at this dense concentration of suffering entities, even Lu Yunxi’s seasoned composure suffered a violent shock.
“This… the infection density is catastrophic!” Running a rapid digital count across the immediate floor space, her sensors locked onto more than thirty individual patients languishing on the mats.
For a secluded valley settlement, thirty critical patients was an insane percentage of the total demographic!
Hearing her sharp, incredulous audio output, the Village Chief’s countenance shifted into a remarkably grim, unsettling expression.
“The registry is vastly larger than this single hall, Doctor. Virtually every residential wing within this compound has been fully converted into a medical ward. The total active patient count sits well above a hundred units.” The old man hoisted his chin, his memory files struggling to compile the exact numbers. He had intentionally avoided auditing the casualty ledgers for months, terrified of the psychological toll. “I implore your intellect… please, run your diagnostics across their profiles.”
Over a hundred concurrent cases?!
Lu Yunxi’s large eyes dilated to absolute maximum as she sucked in a sharp breath.
“The pathology is exceptionally severe, completely locking the targets into a permanent bedridden stasis,” the Chief explained hoarsely. “In truth, the remaining active workforce in the village is also enduring a variety of minor health debuffs, but our people simply force their systems to endure the symptoms to keep farming, so the administration doesn’t log them as critical.” As the words cleared his throat, a sudden cough reflex overrode his vocal modulations, and the old man violently hacked into his sleeve several times.
Lu Yunxi’s brow instantly knit into a severe, tense line, a profound sense of tactical dread flaring within her calculation models.
Malnutrition doesn’t behave like this. Could this be a localized, highly contagious viral outbreak?
Anchoring her mind against the looming hazard, she immediately closed the distance to the nearest mattress, initiating a meticulous, high-precision pulse diagnostic to systematically dissect the pathology code of the valley.
Chapter 196: Poisoning
However, the moment Lu Yunxi placed her fingers onto the patient’s wrist, her heart skipped a beat.
What on earth was going on?
The pulse of the patient beneath her touch was completely chaotic—at times it surged violently, rough and bounding, only to suddenly drop into a weak, thready whisper the next second. His facial color was just as unstable, flushing crimson like a ripe apple one minute before turning a sickly, zombie-like green the next.
She sat in deep concentration for a long time, but her diagnostic modules completely failed to parse the underlying anomaly.
Running a basic exploratory examination could only yield standard, surface-level symptoms like a heavy cough or a burning fever; it couldn’t decode the core pathology of the disease itself.
For the first time in a long time, Lu Yunxi found herself entirely at a loss.
After a moment of tense deliberation, she resolved to shift her focus and inspect the next mattress first.
Yet, as she methodically worked her way through every single patient in the massive hall, she realized she had collided with a monumental crisis. When the Village Chief first specified a casualty registry of over a hundred units, she had merely calculated that her schedule would be locked out of any rest cycles for the next forty-eight hours.
Now, she recognized that this wasn’t a brief, two-day grind. If she stayed to clear this ward, she might be anchored to these exact coordinates for the next two years!
The data was completely defying reality.
Her medical professions were undisputedly ranked at the absolute apex of the world tier, yet here she was, suddenly blindsided by a massive demographic harboring an array of highly intricate, volatile pathologies—not a single one of which existed in her medical databases! Every independent patient in the ward was running a completely different disease script, meaning she would have to meticulously calculate a custom treatment and a flawless alchemical formula for every single individual.
Taking a sharp, steadying breath, Lu Yunxi requested to clear the partition and inspect the adjacent residential wings.
By the time she completed her preliminary rounds of the estate, she held a massive, towering stack of custom medical logs in her hands.
The pathologies were utterly surreal. There were patients whose motor controls were glitched, forcing them to navigate the floorboards by hopping erratically like rabbits; there were individuals literally growing sprouts of wild grass from the crowns of their skulls; and there were mute captives who had lost the capability for human speech, only able to emit sharp, high-pitched bird chirps… The sheer density of cognitive and physical abnormalities was staggering.
For a brief second, she genuinely questioned whether her character model had strayed into a high-tier illusion array.
She spent an extended duration wandering the lanes, running continuous diagnostics on her own consciousness to verify she hadn’t been gaslit by a hidden formation. Once her system confirmed her sanity parameters were perfectly normal, she let out a heavy, defeated sigh.
From that day forward, Lu Yunxi completely abandoned her shopping loops, dedicating her entire processing capacity to managing the villagers’ health bars.
The Village Chief’s initial assessment had been entirely literal: every single entity in the settlement was carrying a sickness flag. Fortunately, the mobile peasants wandering the market lanes were only afflicted with minor, low-tier debuffs. It required barely half a month of routine treatment to completely purge the tracking markers from their profiles.
But the broken, bedridden demographic languishing inside the central compound refused to clear so easily.
“Miss Lu, an emergency has initialized! Come quickly!”
A violent, frantic hammering abruptly rattled her front door. The raw urgency of the impact made it glaringly obvious that the messenger’s panic parameters had completely peaked.
Throughout this grueling deployment, Lu Yunxi had been operating day and night without a single frame of downtime, her brain cells thoroughly drained from endlessly calculating custom herb measurements. The extreme cognitive overload had triggered a severe, splitting headache, and she had barely managed to log a brief twenty-minute sleep cycle before the disturbance hit.
Her eyelids felt as though they had been sealed shut with iron weights. She weakly pulled the door open, her vision blurry.
“State the crisis,” she murmured hoarsely, her shoulder dropping flat against the doorframe to anchor her posture and prevent her vessel from sliding down the wall.
“Miss Lu, the elite gathering unit that ventured into the ridges to hunt game and harvest salt was brutally ambushed! Every single man has sustained severe trauma and massive hemorrhage debuffs! Their consciousness parameters are entirely offline!” The villager’s vision was completely glitched by a continuous tear-streaming animation, his voice raspy from frantic screaming as he yelled the report directly into her face.
“Harvesting salt and hunting…” she repeated sleepily, her groggy mind slowly cycling through the text before a sudden shock of adrenaline shattered her lethargy. “Their party sustained critical damage?!”
Virtually the entire adult demographic of the valley was already languishing in the medical wards. The village commanded a pitifully small pool of able-bodied male units, forcing them to form a single, synchronized raid group whenever they needed to forage for essential provisions like salt. If this vanguard suffered a total wipe, the local population would be reduced exclusively to the elderly, the frail, women, and young children!
When the server loops are stable, an isolated demographic can survive. But the exact frame a structural crisis triggers… she wouldn’t even be able to recruit an assistant to help her gather wild herbs from the peaks!
Forcing her throbbing headache to the background, Lu Yunxi snatched her premium medicine chest and sprinted out of the homestead, trailing closely behind the frantic guide.
Arriving at the village gates, she found dozens of male character models laid out flat across the dirt. Crimson pools were violently expanding beneath their armor plates, surrounded by a wall of weeping family units.
Scanning the casualties from a distance, she rapidly fired off a succession of high-tier detection spells. The data readout confirmed that despite the severe hemorrhage metrics, every single victim still commanded at least fifty percent of their maximum health pool. Exhaling a sharp breath of relief, she instantly channeled her internal energy to cast a mass rejuvenation spell, freezing their lifecycles and stabilizing their vital indicators.
As she trotted into the center of the bloody clearing, the frantic dialogue of the surrounding peasants filtered into her audio receivers.
“Heavens above! Why must your algorithms target my son’s lifecycle?! Erase my own profile instead! I beg of the system, let my boy survive!”
“By the gods… the custom coffin I’ve been crafting for my own retirement… my little brother is going to inherit the asset first! I spent literal decades foraging the deep ridges to harvest that premium, flawless timber! I have no data if my current stamina metrics can ever replicate a piece of wood that perfect again!”
“…”
Lu Yunxi’s eye twitched in deadpan silence. Stepping past the dramatic mourners, she offered a few calm, reassuring words to pacify their morale. “Calm your anxiety, everyone. Their vital parameters are temporarily locked out of the danger zone. Can a few units assist me by initializing a few fires to boil the medicine?”
An older woman immediately wiped the tears from her face, stepping out from the crowd. “Assign the labor to my profile! I routinely managed the boiling station during the previous clinic sweeps; my proficiency with this specific task is exceptionally high.”
Several adjacent villagers scrambled to assist, rapidly gathering heavy rocks and iron grates to construct a row of makeshift alchemical stoves. Within minutes, multiple fires were roaring in unison.
Fortunately, this fresh batch of casualties was strictly suffering from surface-level lacerations and external trauma parameters rather than the convoluted, glitched pathologies of the residential compound. They could all be patched using a single, universal recovery formula, requiring only minor micro-adjustments to the dosage based on their individual weight metrics.
As she systematically cleaned and dressed their wounds, one of the primary vanguard units suddenly triggered a wake animation.
He forced his eyelids open with immense difficulty, his head rigidly panning across the environment as if hunting for a specific target. The exact frame his eyes locked onto Lu Yunxi’s silhouette, his gaze flashed with intense brilliance.
“Doctor Lu…” the man whispered, his lungs rattling heavily as he feebly hoisted a trembling hand, his physical strength thoroughly drained from the massive blood loss. He pointed a shaking finger toward an unindexed, blood-soaked figure lying on the grass beside him. “Our entire unit owes its survival to this solitary warrior’s intervention. Had his blade not intercepted the pack, our accounts would have been permanently deleted by the mountain wolves hours ago. We never would have commanded the chance to re-enter the valley threshold… I implore your skills, prioritize his diagnostic sweep first! This was the binding blood-oath our party finalized while we were besieged by the beasts…”
His voice dropped to a barely audible whisper, expending the absolute final reserves of his stamina bar to complete the dialogue line.
Lu Yunxi felt a wave of helpless sympathy look down at the man. Despite the crimson fluid actively leaking from the corner of his lips, his fingers were desperately clamping onto her heavy sleeve, his wide eyes refusing to close until he received validation.
“Rest easy,” she promised softly, her palm gently pressing over his hand. “My unit will exert its full capabilities to stabilize his vitals.”
Securing her confirmation, the vanguard warrior’s stress meters instantly hit zero. A relieved smile touched his features, and his character model smoothly entered a peaceful unconsciousness loop.
The surrounding family members gasped, their anxiety temporarily spiking again before Lu Yunxi verified his status screen was perfectly stable. Waving the crowd away to clear her operating radius, she turned her torso and advanced toward the mysterious champion who had anchored the defense line.
However, the exact microsecond her eyes locked onto the stranger’s facial features, her internal processor suffered a catastrophic shock, her pupils dilating to absolute maximum in sheer, unadulterated disbelief.
“Shen San?!”
When the battered hunting convoy had first collapsed outside the village gates, every single asset had been completely caked in thick mountain dust and dried grime. Her initial sweeps had completely missed his identity. Had she not physically marched over and deployed a damp cloth to wipe the dirt from his features, she never would have calculated that this elite defender was actually her own rogue disciple!
Reflecting on the continental geography, now that her pathing had safely returned her to the Forest Continent, triggering an encounter with an old acquaintance wasn’t statistically impossible.
But her internal database still firmly maintained that Shen San and the rest of her disciples should have been securely garrisoned beneath the hidden waterfall instance for the foreseeable future. After all, following her departure with Long Aotian, she had meticulously engineered a logistical pipeline to dump a colossal mountain of premium survival resources down into their cavern—stockpiling enough food, drinkable fluids, and high-tier cultivation elixirs to comfortably sustain their lifecycles for a full century!
“Miss Lu, is our household’s savior enduring a lethal status effect? Is his health bar about to drop to zero?!” a nearby elder asked, his hands trembling with anxiety.
Lu Yunxi forcibly re-anchored her scattered thoughts, offering a reassuring smile to the peasant. “Banish the worry. His vitals are perfectly secure; his system simply requires an extended sleep cycle to clear his exhaustion parameters.”
Only then did the collective tension of the village demographic finally dissipate.
Over the subsequent days, the unconscious warriors systematically completed their recovery cycles and woke up one by one.
When Shen San’s consciousness finally re-engaged and his visual sensors tracked her silhouette, his expression erupted into pure, unmitigated shock.
“Master?!”
Hearing the prestigious title clear his throat, the surrounding villagers were thoroughly stunned, their chat logs instantly exploding with high-volume chatter.
“Incredible! Our faction’s savior is actually Doctor Lu’s personal disciple?!”
“It aligns perfectly with the lore! Only a disciple trained under Doctor Lu’s noble lineage could command a benevolence that grand!”
The exact frame the community verified that Shen San was directly bound to Lu Yunxi’s faction house, their hospitality metrics spiked to absolute maximum, and they swarmed his cot with endless waves of premium local care.
Concurrently, as the initial batch of wounded hunters recovered enough mobility to assist her clinic sweeps, the structural burden on Lu Yunxi’s shoulders steadily eased. She was finally capable of logging her rest cycles on a predictable schedule, even commanding enough free stamina to occasionally take a peaceful evening stroll down the valley lanes.
However, her brief window of administrative relief lasted barely a handful of days before a local peasant burst through the clinic gates, his face a complete mask of pure, unadulterated panic.
“Doctor Lu, a catastrophic failure has occurred! Your disciple is violently vomiting blood! His system has executed a total collapse!”
Lu Yunxi’s focus snapped instantly. Shen San’s physical parameters had been tracking a perfectly stable recovery curve; what specific variable had triggered such an aggressive, unscripted regression?
She executed a high-speed dash to his quarters, finding her apprentice sprawled across the cot with his eyelids locked and his skin entirely drained of color, looking exactly as though his lifecycle would terminate in the next microsecond.
Running a rapid diagnostic sweep, her interface highlighted that Shen San’s condition differed drastically from the commoners’ ailments. His primary status debuff wasn’t physical trauma or standard exhaustion—his system was actively enduring a severe, deep-seated poisoning event!
Had his high-tier martial attributes not been exceptionally advanced, a baseline civilian vessel would have been vaporized by the wolves long ago. The corrosive alchemical toxin had systematically seeded itself deep within his internal organs, lingering silently in his system instead of clearing naturally.
Her mind racing through her alchemical recipes, she rapidly prepared a high-potency purgative draft and carefully forced the medicine past his lips to jolt his consciousness back online.
Shen San’s eyelids fluttered open, a deeply bitter, strained smile painting his pale features.
He had endured an absolute mountain of grueling trials and high-horror instances to finally break free from that subterranean waterfall prison, yet the exact frame his boots cleared the outer perimeter, his account had been slapped with a lethal chemical debuff. Had his master not been geographically positioned to deploy an immediate intervention, his avatar would have undoubtedly been forced to execute a hard respawn back at his starter point by now.
“Master… my profile has caused your ledger immense worry,” Shen San whispered hoarsely, his chest rattling. “Had your skills not cleared the toxin, I truly lack the data to calculate how my account would have managed… cough, hack!“
Midway through his dialogue line, a violent, uncontrollable coughing reflex shattered his throat controls. He frantically clapped his palms over his mouth, but a dark, corrosive stream of blood violently surged from between his clenched fingers.
A sudden wave of raw panic flashed through Lu Yunxi’s chest. Reaching out with lightning speed, she firmly pinned his shoulders back against the pillows. “Cease your speech immediately! Lock down your vocal modules!”
A severe headache began to throb behind her temples. Her diagnostic arrays were completely glitched; she couldn’t isolate the chemical source of the toxins ravaging his organs, meaning engineering a definitive cure was still light-years away.
What made the pathology even more terrifying was that Shen San himself had been entirely oblivious to the hidden debuff! He had only registered the threat because her physical examination had forced his system interface to officially render the [Poisoned] text box onto his field of view.
Tragically, the system text was severely truncated—it simply flagged his profile as poisoned, completely omitting the data file that specified the exact strain of the toxin.
