Chapter 63: Returning Home
Lu Yunxi and her fellow disciples were so utterly consumed by the non-stop slaughter that they completely lost all track of time. The brutal siege ground on for more than a month before the relentless waves of feral beasts finally fizzled out.
Even the eldest senior brother, completely abandoning his usual poised and graceful demeanor, collapsed flat on his back. He lay sprawled in the dirt, panting heavily, looking far more exhausted than if he had just run a marathon. “This beast tide lasted over a month…” he wheezed. “I’m absolutely spent!”
The other inner disciples were too dead on their feet to even slide over a single inch. They sat or lay scattered across the blood-soaked terrain, looking like a field of corpses. Normally, they would have chimed in with enthusiastic agreement to anything the leadership team said, but right now, their faces were entirely blank. They didn’t even acknowledge the eldest brother’s heavy sigh, choosing instead to slowly close their eyes.
They were simply too exhausted to speak.
Lu Yunxi felt a profound, bone-deep weariness pulling at her own lungs. She didn’t even bother to open her system interface before letting her consciousness drift away into sleep. After all, aside from the creatures driven by the spatial fractures of the beast tide, no outside enemies could possibly breach the inner barriers of their sect.
Seeing the vanguard collapsed in the dirt, the surviving outer disciples grew terribly anxious.
“Supervisor,” a menial disciple whispered, looking down at his elite senior brothers and sisters with a heavy heart. “Should we try to carry them back to their private quarters to sleep?”
The outer sect steward rolled his eyes up to the heavens. “If you think you have the muscle for it, be my guest and carry them all back yourself!” While the support staff hadn’t been forced to hold the combat line, they had been working around the clock cooking, mending shattered armor, and hauling supplies. He was just as hollowed out as the rest of them. Dropping his head onto his pack, the steward instantly fell into a dead sleep.
The few younger disciples who were barely clinging to consciousness exchanged a groggy look. Too lazy to care about protocol anymore, they simply scouted out a few patches of clear grass, threw themselves down, and blacked out.
While the frontline survivors were busy catching up on sleep right where they fell, a frantic group was charging through the mountains toward the perimeter.
The Palace Master of Yanyu Palace, along with an elite contingent of elders and high-level disciples, was sprinting through the valleys at a breakneck pace.
“Hurry! We must double our speed!” tears pricked the Palace Master’s eyes, her voice tight with panic. “The sheer scale of this beast tide was vastly beyond our projections. There were far too few fighters left behind to hold the core arrays!”
She didn’t dare say another word, terrified she would break down right in front of her subordinates. Historically, a regional beast tide ran its course in a week at most, a window that the inner disciples left behind could easily anchor. But reality had shattered their models; this horde had raged for a solid month!
Three weeks ago, she had desperately wanted to detach a reinforcement squad to reinforce the main gate, but her expeditionary force was holding the continent’s absolute outer perimeter. Each master was solely responsible for a massive geographic sector; if a single slot opened, the main defensive wall would have crumbled. No one could be spared.
Now that the horizon had finally cleared, the returning masters ignored their own bleeding wounds, running like madmen toward the valley. The atmosphere among the elders was deathly grave. Given the horrifying duration of this specific cycle, it would be an absolute miracle if even half of the inner disciples left behind had managed to survive the slaughter.
The group pushed their footwork to the absolute limit for half an hour before finally crossing into the sect’s home territory. The moment they cleared the mountain pass, they were greeted by the sight of the defensive vanguard lying motionless across the grass in various twisted postures.
“Ah—!” a young disciple shrieked, instantly clapping a hand over her mouth as hot tears streamed down her cheeks.
Others wept in stunned silence, while some instinctively recoiled, their eyes wide with horror. A few broke ranks entirely, sprinting into the field to frantically turn bodies over, desperate to find a familiar face.
Lu Yunxi’s master was no exception.
Spotting his star disciple slumped right in the thick of the field, the old Grandmaster let out a panicked cry and bolted over. He grabbed her shoulders with both hands, shaking her vigorously back and forth. “Disciple! My poor, brilliant disciple! You died so tragically—!”
Yunxi was violently jarred from her sleep by the sudden commotion. The chorus of agonizing wails and sobbing echoing around the valley was deafening enough to wake the dead.
She cracked her eyes open in sheer confusion, only to see her master’s wrinkled face looming over her, entirely covered in a messy mix of tears and snot. Her survival instincts instantly flared. Yunxi slammed her palms against his chest, shoving the old man back and scrambling away in absolute disgust.
“Master! Don’t wipe your nose on my training robes!”
The elder, his vision thoroughly blurred by tears, froze mid-wail. It took him several long seconds to process her movement before he stammered out in shock, “You… you’re still breathing?!”
Lu Yunxi was completely speechless. “Of course I’m still breathing, Master! What on earth are you crying about? Did you fall asleep on the march and have a nightmare?”
“I thought every single person left behind had been slaughtered!” He wiped his face with a sleeve, looking utterly bewildered.
“What do you mean ‘slaughtered’? Don’t jinx us like that!” Yunxi huffed, dusting off her slacks. “We’re all perfectly fine and well!”
The moment her clear voice echoed across the lawn, every single master who had just returned paused, their faces a collective portrait of absolute shock. Their expressions practically screamed, Are you kidding me?!
Yunxi’s eye twitched. Before she could offer a structural explanation of their defense strategies, the heavy shifting of bodies around the field signaled that the resting inner disciples were finally waking up. Within moments, the grim atmosphere inverted entirely. The returning sect members rushed into the field, pulling their exhausted juniors into fierce, joyous embraces.
“Ack—let go! I’m going to die! Don’t squeeze so hard… I can’t breathe!” A nearby disciple, who had barely clocked thirty minutes of sleep, gasped for oxygen under his elder’s iron grip.
Against all cosmic odds, the home guard had held the lines without a single casualty. The sheer miracle of it left the entire sect in a state of absolute euphoria, triggering a massive bonfire celebration that raged for three consecutive days.
“Returning home?” the inner disciples echoed in unison from the floor of the Great Hall.
“Indeed,” the Palace Master announced from the elevated dais, her voice carrying a heavy weight. “This particular beast tide was unprecedented. A significant number of high-tier predators managed to slip past our main cordons, scattering into the provincial towns and low-lying valleys. I am temporarily releasing you all to return to your respective hometowns, as I fear your native settlements may have sustained heavy damage. If you locate rogue predators within your borders, eliminate them immediately.”
She raised a hand to emphasize her final point. “But remember to return to the mountains swiftly. Feral beasts are still causing chaos across multiple outer sectors, and we will require every available blade to clear the wilderness once the domestic lines are secure.”
Lu Yunxi collected her formal performance bonus for the campaign and returned to her private quarters to pack. The baseline reward from the sect treasury wasn’t massive, given that Yanyu Palace had to fund its own operational repairs, but it wasn’t a pittance either—a clean fifty silver coins. Combined with the private cache of resources her master had covertly slipped into her sleeve, her total haul reached a flat one hundred silver.
After securing the coins inside her spatial inventory, she opened her character interface, pulled out a strip of the cured smoked meat the Mushroom Village women had gifted her, and began contentedly chewing on it.
Incredible.
Her level indicator had officially settled at [Level 67].
The grueling, month-long grind against a relentless horde had paid massive dividends. She had jumped from Level 50 straight into the high sixties, tearing through nearly twenty level milestones in a single continuous campaign. Yunxi was immensely satisfied. Once her metrics shattered the Level 70 threshold, she would formally transition into a certified high-tier master. Only at that tier would the game system permit an account to freely map-hop across the great oceans dividing the world’s continents.
Yes, the world matrix featured multiple massive landmasses. If an account possessed the stats to cross the boundless, uncharted seas, they could unlock entirely separate civilizations. Unfortunately, the vast majority of players couldn’t even survive the aggressive mob spawns along the shallow coastlines, let alone navigate the terrifying leviathans guarding the deep trenches.
Packing away a few local specialties she had purchased from the sect’s internal market, Yunxi set off toward the spatial gates, her heart light with the prospect of seeing her old home.
Meanwhile, within the real-world interstellar network.
“Brother, you are a absolute genius! Do you have any idea what our total sales metrics for the premium salted duck eggs look like right now?” Fu Jinxi stared at the data streams flashing across his terminal, his face breaking into a massive, manic grin. “Our net profit for a single calendar month has breached hundreds of millions of star coins!”
Fu Jinheng, however, remained entirely placid. His expression didn’t shift by a fraction of a millimeter. He knew exactly why the product had captured the market. Every culinary method his master had drilled into his routine yielded items that were profoundly delicious, completely organic, reasonably priced, and infinitely superior to the synthesized luxury menus served at high-end metropolitan establishments. It would have been an absolute anomaly if the line hadn’t broken sales records.
However, a persistent moral dilemma weighed heavily on his mind. These recipes were intellectual properties his master had graciously bestowed upon his account. Utilizing her data to hoard real-world financial capital without compensating her station felt deeply unprincipled. Yet, within the boundaries of his comprehension, his master was simply a highly advanced localized data node—a native NPC embedded within an entertainment matrix. There was no mechanical channel to wire real-world star coins to an NPC’s inventory.
How am I supposed to resolve this ledger?
After agonizing over the problem for an entire afternoon, he decided the most honorable path was to approach her directly within the simulation.
[Master, the specialized salted duck egg techniques you drilled into my routine have yielded a phenomenal response in my home sector. The commercial returns have been immense. I firmly believe the financial distribution should be routed to your station. Pray tell, what format does your station prefer to process the transfer?]
Lu Yunxi, who was currently navigating a mountain pass on her journey home, paused to read the incoming system notification. Perusing the text of her apprentice’s letter, a soft, maternal smile pulled at her lips.
So, my poor student has attempted to establish a small street-vending operation with salted duck eggs in the real world?
The message only solidified her deep-seated belief that her apprentice led a profoundly tragic, impoverished existence on some forgotten, low-tier mining planet. In her mind, he was likely one of those destitute citizens netizens frequently discussed on the forums—surviving entirely on baseline government nutrient pastes and desperately selling low-grade digital assets inside the game just to keep his real-world body from starving.
My poor, sweet disciple, she thought, her heart aching with sympathy. He actually thinks pulling a few thousand copper coins from selling homemade eggs constitutes a ‘phenomenal financial return’!
Wanting to preserve his dignity, Yunxi quickly drafted a gentle, reassuring reply to decline the offering. She stated that her own travel purse was completely full, and reminded him that since the basic recipe for salted duck eggs was common knowledge across the provinces, the data itself held no real structural value.
Receiving the formal rejection interface, Shen San naturally had zero intention of letting the matter rest. The salted duck egg enterprise was scaling into a multi-planetary franchise, and he was currently pocketing astronomical wealth off her name. If he actually followed her instructions and kept the entire profit margin without offering tribute, he would be nothing less than a black-hearted, ungrateful wretch.
After extensive deliberation, he hit upon an alternative strategy. He resolved to travel across the interstellar trade hubs, systematically purchasing every rare, premium luxury item and exotic commodity available in the high-tier markets, and ship them directly into his master’s game coordinates as a continuous stream of tributes.
