Chapter 51: So Good
Thinking about how much the players on the forums envied and hated the Blue gear sets, she couldn’t help but smirk. If she were to show off her own collection right now… hehe!
Although Lu Yunxi was fully capable of obtaining Purple gear on her own, free loot was always the absolute best.
She paused mid-thought, pulling out the Purple dress to admire it before deciding whether she should eventually sell it for a fortune. However, the moment her eyes locked onto the fabric, she froze.
This skirt was absolutely stunning!
The inner lining was crafted from a pale purple silk that felt incredibly smooth to the touch, while the outer layers consisted of gossamer-thin tulle, tied neatly at the waist with a pristine white sash.
She couldn’t bring herself to sell such a beautiful dress.
After a quick debate, she retreated deep into the shadows of the cave and slipped into the garment. She opened her system panel to check her reflection.
So beautiful!
When she walked, the delicate layers of gauze swayed gently around her ankles. It gave her an ethereal, charming aura, reminiscent of a classic beauty strolling across a stone bridge in the misty regions of the south.
Lu Yunxi paced back and forth inside the cavern, staring at her system reflection and giggling to herself.
While her master-tier cooking allowed her to easily manipulate system parameters to craft high-attribute Purple items, their aesthetic designs were utterly mundane, looking only slightly better than default novice rags. If she wanted to manufacture truly beautiful equipment, she would first have to grind her weaving, tailoring, and embroidery skills to the advanced threshold. Her embroidery was already there, but as for weaving and tailoring… Well, for now, she would just have to settle for default designs.
After twirling around the cave for a solid fifteen minutes, she finally calmed down enough to read the item description.
[Yanyu Palace Purple Dress: Skirt]
Aside from the skirt itself, the set included four other accessories: a hairpin, a necklace, a bracelet, and a ring. If she could collect all five pieces, she would trigger a massive set bonus. It was absolutely flawless.
But…
Yanyu Palace? What on earth is Yanyu Palace?
Curious, Yunxi activated her Appraisal skill on the item.
[Yanyu Palace Purple Dress (Skirt): A uniform designated for the low-tier menial disciples of Yanyu Palace. By equipping this garment, you may unlock a fated path to locating the entrance of Yanyu Palace itself.]
A sudden thrill ran down her spine. The realization hit her like a thunderbolt—could Yanyu Palace be one of those legendary, hidden sects?
There was no way she could sell this dress now! In fact, according to the Appraisal notes, she needed to wear it every single day to trigger the hidden pathing.
After equipping the full set, Yunxi methodically organized her stored ingredients and medicinal herbs. Her hand paused as it brushed against the remaining Purple volume.
[The Spellcaster’s Redemption: The path of a curse weaver is fundamentally volatile. Every hex cast directly leeches the user’s vitality and inflicts excruciating, full-body agony. This manual details the ancient techniques required to safeguard a spellcaster’s life force and significantly alleviate the backfire of their crafts.]
Lu Yunxi gasped. So every time Yasi unleashes an attack, she is enduring unbearable physical agony?! The girl was incredibly stoic; she had never shown a single trace of discomfort.
Remembering how fiercely Yasi had fought to help her hunt down leads in the past, Yunxi felt a deep wave of worry and heartache.
She eagerly flipped open the manual to parse the contents. The introductory chapters outlined strict moral codes, such as a prohibition against arbitrarily harming innocent commoners. The middle sections detailed specialized atonement methods to circumvent the daily backfire—like establishing sanctuaries for orphans. The final pages harbored a absolute cleansing ritual, essentially acting as a system format to purge the user’s corrupt energy. However, executing this wipe would reduce Yasi from a Level 30 curse weaver down to a Level 0 ordinary civilian.
Yunxi fell silent for a long moment. Ultimately, she wrapped the strange skill book into a secure parcel and dispatched it straight to Yasi via carrier pigeon.
A few days later, she received a frantic reply from Yasi, accompanied by a massive crate of premium delicacies as a thank-you offering. The letter explicitly stated that the text would fundamentally alter her destiny.
Having fully processed her spoils, Lu Yunxi finally prepared to exit the instance. Before stepping through the barrier, she opened her main character interface.
Name: Lu Yunxi
Profession: Mushroom Villager, Chef
Level: 40 (Intermediate)
Age: 16
Appearance: 90 (+100)
Strength: 405 (+100)
Agility: 410 (+100)
Spirit: 359 (+100)
She had finally reached Level 40! Combined with the stat multipliers granted by her new disciple set, her core physical attributes had shattered the 500-point threshold.
At this tier, running the bandit dungeon was a joke. She didn’t even need to consume food to maintain her bars, effortlessly blitzing the entire instance in under a minute. Unfortunately, despite her higher level, she still hadn’t triggered any spatial markers for the hidden sects.
Closing her character menu, she stepped out of the cave mouth, only to freeze instantly.
The surrounding clearing was packed with a massive influx of players. Though they were scattered in small clusters of three or four, the precise, calculating glances they exchanged made it blindingly obvious that they were operating under a unified command structure.
Worse, her exit vector was directly encircled by this crowd.
Yunxi’s chest tightened. While she maintained a perfectly placid, indifferent expression, her combat instincts surged to maximum alert, her fingers subtly loosening around her bowstring.
She kept her guard up until she successfully drifted past the outer perimeter of the crowd. Ducking into a nearby thicket, she pretended to harvest wild berries while quietly keeping her eyes on the gathering.
The crowd paid absolutely no attention to her movements.
After all, among the general player base, wealthy individuals with high-tier gear were a rare minority. The vast majority of players lacked the funds to sustain themselves at taverns, forcing them to forage for wild greens and roots in the wilderness just to keep their hunger bars from bottoming out.
Granted, this specific group appeared to be hard-core combat enthusiasts who couldn’t care less about culinary flavor profiles, unlike the “Life Class” players who happily squandered silver to pamper their avatars.
Every single individual in this group bore a lethal, intensely disciplined expression as they stood in absolute silence outside the dungeon entrance.
The afternoon sun beat down mercilessly. The intense heat was enough to make even Yunxi break into a sweat, yet these players didn’t shift their stances by a fraction of an inch. They remained perfectly motionless, entirely devoid of the typical banter and chatter characteristic of standard player parties.
Observing their rigid, synchronized posture, a sudden realization struck her.
Could they be active-duty military personnel?!
She quietly retreated further into the brush, scaling a higher ridge to get a better vantage point.
Sure enough, moments later, a man radiating a powerful aura of command marched into the clearing to organize the units. In the blink of an eye, the scattered clusters snapped into flawless, razor-sharp columns. It was clear they had already optimized their party layouts; the groups of five systematically advanced, crossing the threshold into the dungeon in rapid succession.
Yunxi stood stunned by the display.
Nearby, a few rogue players who had also retreated to the ridge were watching the spectacle with intense curiosity.
“Are those guys actual federal soldiers? Why are they deploying entire battalions into a historical simulator?”
“I heard they’re elite cadets from the Central Military Academy! Apparently, the tactical divisions discovered that undergoing physical drills inside this matrix directly optimizes your biological body’s fitness metrics in the real world. Plus, the time dilation here operates at a two-to-one ratio compared to the real world. Training inside the server essentially gives you two days’ worth of physical conditioning in a single day!”
“It’s not just the military academies. Word on the network is that multiple elite universities have dispatched logistics teams to purchase real estate and construct academic campuses inside the major provinces! They’re planning to have students complete a full two years of curriculum in here, which only translates to a single calendar year on the outside.”
“That’s amazing! So future students can blast through their degrees, graduate early, and get straight to field placements, right?!”
“What kind of daydream is that? The corporate boards already stated that graduation requirements will still be tethered to real-world time models. For instance, if a standard university degree requires four years of study, you’ll have to log eight full years of study inside the game before they issue your diploma. The goal is to let everyone absorb double the volume of knowledge!”
“…”
Yunxi’s eyes widened, offering a brief second of profound mental sympathy to the future generations of students trapped in that hellish academic loop.
However, a sudden epiphany struck her.
If these interstellar institutions were established inside the game matrix, they would be teaching real-world, high-tier knowledge. Wouldn’t that grant her a golden opportunity to absorb advanced interstellar science and technology completely from within the simulation?
If the technology of this era was truly as miraculous as it seemed, she might finally uncover the cosmic anomaly that had triggered her reincarnation into this world—and perhaps even engineer a way to materialize her consciousness back out into the real world!
Bursting with newfound motivation, she immediately began approaching passing players, carefully interrogating them for the coordinates of the newly established educational zones.
