Chapter 30: Arrival in the Town
Lu Yunxi traveled relentlessly day and night, and after a few grueling days on the road, she finally arrived in the regional town.
A scattering of pedestrians strolled along the streets of the small town. An elderly woman haggled aggressively with a street vendor over the price of vegetables, while a young child walked past clutching a stick of candied haws, laughing happily.
Yunxi navigated through the quiet residential quarters until she reached the heart of the busiest market street. Looking at a nearby stall selling steaming buns, her mouth watered, and she swallowed her saliva. She ultimately decided to head straight to the home of the village chief’s family. Don’t ask why she was being so incredibly stingy; she only had a handful of copper coins left on her person. If she squandered them now, she would be completely stranded when an actual emergency arose later!
Fortunately, the town wasn’t particularly large. Aside from the residential sectors, it only consisted of a few main streets. It didn’t take her long to locate the property.
The moment the village chief’s wife realized Yunxi was a local from the valley, her eyes lit up with joy. She beamed, warmly grasping the girl’s hands. “How are things faring back in the village lately? Is everyone doing well?”
Yunxi hesitated for a fraction of a second. She chose to keep the conversation brief and superficial, omitting the horrific details of the recent tragedies. After exchanging a few pleasantries, she handed over the village chief’s letter and was immediately escorted to a room to rest.
Having pushed her physical limits for days without a break, her body was completely spent. The moment her head hit the mattress, she lost consciousness, sleeping straight through the evening until the dead of night.
When Yunxi finally woke up, she glanced out the window at the pitch-black sky. She pulled out a few travel rations for a quick, casual bite, and finding herself entirely unready to go back to sleep, she pulled up her system interface to inspect her status.
[Name]: Lu Yunxi
[Identity]: Mushroom Village Villager
[Level]: 23 (Beginner)
[Age]: 15
[Appearance]: 90
[Strength]: 247
[Agility]: 239
[Spirit]: 122
Her baseline attributes had skyrocketed. Staring at the updated numbers, a wave of profound relief washed over her. Having both her Strength and Agility clear the two-hundred threshold meant she was in an exceptionally strong position.
As she navigated through the other tabs, she noticed that the system—which she hadn’t opened in weeks—had undergone another structural update. Her titles had been moved to a dedicated directory, and two brand-new modules had been integrated into the interface: Favorability and Forum.
The Favorability tracking was split cleanly into two categories: NPCs and Players. Virtually every local villager back home sat comfortably above a rating of 80. In stark contrast, there was only a solitary entry under the player directory—Chi Yan, whom she had personally executed twice. His rating plummeted to a flat -100, flagged with a stark bracketed note: Nemesis. Will attack on sight.
She cast a dismissive glance at the notification, swiftly skipping past it to access the community Forum. The moment the contents rendered on the digital screen, she sat up straight, her eyes widening with intense curiosity.
This forum wasn’t some localized network shared among native NPCs; it was the actual, real-time global discussion board utilized by the players!
[Trending Post 1]: Absolute shocker! There’s a high-level toxic player in our Novice Village who actively went rogue and murdered a local NPC. His character status got flagged, and the system permanently relocated his respawn point out into the wilderness safe zone!
[Trending Post 2]: Were historical clothes seriously this ridiculously thick? It’s the dead of summer right now, and the system forced my character to wear dozens of heavy fabric layers. I almost suffered literal heatstroke during the tutorial!
After browsing through the general threads with immense relish, she clicked on the single most popular post sitting at the top of the chart:
[The Boss of my Novice Village is a literal virtual goddess, what am I even supposed to do?]
[Original Poster]: Just look at the attached screenshot! This is our local village maiden! Oh my god, I am never clearing the tutorial area! I am officially committing to staying in this Novice Village forever just to worship my goddess!
[Young Master Fengliu]: What the hell?! Why did my server algorithm spawn a mean, decrepit old man as our village chief? This is garbage!
…
[I’m a Good Person]: OP, do yourself a favor and delete this thread immediately! Word is your constant bragging has triggered a wave of jealousy from players stuck with ugly NPCs, and they’ve started mass-reporting the server variance to customer service! The developers are rolling out a major patch in a few days; if you keep this up, the dev team might overwrite her code and turn your village boss into a burly, bearded giant!
[Original Poster]: Who is the absolute degenerate mass-reporting this?! That is incredibly toxic! How shameless can you get!
[Most Handsome Guy in StarCraft]: Stop listening to the unscientific nonsense above. In a next-gen holographic MMORPG engineered with hyper-realistic behavioral AI, it is mathematically impossible for developers to arbitrarily purge a high-intelligence NPC’s data pool. These entities are hard-coded into the local ecosystem matrix. If you abruptly delete a core resident, the surrounding NPCs will immediately detect the structural anomaly, triggering a logic cascade and widespread data corruption. The entire regional server would experience a fatal crash!
[XX Game Programmer]: Can confirm. If a developer forcefully overwrote a high-level AI asset without proper integration, it would take at least a year or two of deep architectural restructuring to stabilize the local network. The entire game would have to be taken offline indefinitely!
Reading through the technical breakdown, Yunxi let out a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding, her eyes sparkling with excitement. Her absolute greatest anxiety since discovering the nature of this world was the constant, terrifying threat of being wiped from existence as a mere cluster of superficial code.
But if the external developers were restricted from arbitrarily deleting her data pool, she was fundamentally safe! From here on out, as long as she dedicated herself to grinding martial arts and scaling her attributes to the absolute peak, her survival would be entirely in her own hands.
Yunxi carefully parsed through the remaining threads, and once she was absolutely certain the gaming corporation wouldn’t launch a targeted strike against her entity, she rolled over onto her back, a brilliant smile breaking across her face.
The next morning.
“There is only a solitary martial arts academy established within the town limits,” the village chief’s wife explained, her face clouded with maternal worry. “You simply follow the main road straight down and make a right turn. However, the tuition fees required by the instructors there are astronomically expensive. Are you truly intent on enrolling, child?”
The letter from her husband had explicitly stressed how much the young lady of the Lu lineage had sacrificed to safeguard the valley, fiercely commanding his wife to secure her stable employment in the town. But the only positions she had the authority to offer were baseline domestic cleaning jobs! She lacked the social leverage to plant people into merchant guilds or corporate apprenticeships. Furthermore, she had never anticipated that this little girl from the mountains would harbor the ambition to pursue high-tier martial arts.
“I’ll head over to investigate the requirements later,” Yunxi replied, offering a warm, grateful smile. “Thank you so much for sharing the directions, Auntie.” If she had been forced to scout the infrastructure entirely on her own, she would have burned through a massive amount of valuable time.
“Think nothing of it, child,” the chief’s wife dismissed with a wave of her hand. She paused, sinking into deep thought for a moment before firmly gritting her teeth. “The academy instructors only teach the absolute baseline fundamentals to public students, yet a single session costs at least five hundred copper coins… How about this? You can take over the domestic maintenance of our property. Just handle the basic cleaning chores every day, and I will personally compensate you with three hundred copper coins a month. What do you say?”
In truth, she had historically hired local laborers to clean her estate for a mere one hundred copper coins a month. But remembering how much this child had protected her husband back in the valley… the worst-case scenario was simply that she would work a bit harder herself to balance the household books!
Yunxi stiffened slightly, instantly reading the profound benevolence motivating the old woman’s offer. Before leaving the valley, she had meticulously researched the baseline economic standards of the town; the salary the chief’s wife was proposing was vastly higher than the standard market rate. The old woman was explicitly taking a financial hit to look after her.
A warm wave of emotion swelled in her chest, and she offered a gentle smile. “I am deeply moved by your kindness, Auntie, but I intend to see if I can secure a position at the local restaurant first.”
The village chief’s wife let out a silent sigh of relief, though a trace of anxiety remained. After all, this was the individual her husband had repeatedly commanded her to shelter!
“Very well, then! If the merchant quarters prove too difficult or you find yourself struggling to secure a position, you march yourself straight back to this courtyard! You are welcome to reside here for as long as you need; heaven knows we have more than enough vacant rooms!”
After offering her repeated, heartfelt thanks, Yunxi departed the estate and began meticulously scouting the town’s commercial sectors. Eventually, she managed to secure employment at the single grand establishment boasting the word Restaurant carved across its storefront banner.
The terms were exceptional for the region: a fixed salary of five hundred copper coins a month, excluding room and board, with a strict clause allowing her to retain one hundred percent of her personal service tips. This compensation package was easily the best available in the entire town—even if the baseline reality was that most traditional waitstaff rarely accumulated substantial tips from the locals.
That evening, Yunxi formally requested a minor advance on her salary to pay her first month’s rent at the chief’s estate, strictly adhering to the town’s local housing standards. Although the chief’s wife went to extreme lengths to reject the coins, Yunxi remained fiercely unyielding, and the old woman eventually relented.
After all, according to established custom, any villager migrating from the valley was expected to contribute toward their upkeep once they secured a stable trade. Furthermore, the chief’s wife required a steady influx of capital to maintain the sprawling property and procure external labor of her own.
