Chapter 73: Do I Need to Buy Water?
The sunlight was blinding.
Lu Yunxi shielded her eyes with her arms and forced her aching body up into a sitting position. As her vision cleared, she took in her surroundings. Endless sand stretched out in every direction, and lying right beside her was a body that looked completely lifeless.
Of course, she quickly realized he had to be alive. If Shen San were dead, his avatar would have materialized back at a resurrection point by now; he wouldn’t still be sprawled out here on the ground.
She immediately cast her health recovery skill, and the agonizing soreness in her limbs vanished in an instant. Standing up, she lightly bounced on her heels and scanned the horizon. There was nothing but an ocean of yellow sand. Unlike the pale, clean shores of the Forest Continent, this sand was a deep, burning ochre. A knot of worry tightened in her chest.
She turned her attention back to her apprentice. He still hadn’t stirred. Curious, she stepped closer. Usually, a pulse of her recovery skill would snap anyone wide awake. Why was he still down?
[Status Alert: An outworld adventurer who has collapsed from severe dehydration.]
Yunxi’s brow furrowed at the prompt. Thankfully, she had stocked a flask of water in her spatial inventory for emergencies. It seemed that emergency was now. Kneeling, she unstoppered the flask and slowly trickled the liquid between his parched lips.
Time bled away, and though she kept vigil, Shen San didn’t wake. Meanwhile, the sun climbed higher, baking the desert with relentless force. Standing on the dunes, Yunxi felt as though the soles of her feet were actively burning through her boots. If they stayed out in the open like this, his dehydration would only spiral out of control.
She frantically rummaged through her inventory until she unearthed several large bolts of fabric. Working quickly, she rigged up a makeshift tent in a small dip between the dunes, dragged Shen San into the shade, and collapsed onto the mat beside him.
The heat outside was oppressive enough to wither a person into a husk. With nothing else to do, she pulled up the player forums to pass the time by reading about life in the interstellar empire. Although the network was dominated by game mechanics, users occasionally posted snippets of their actual daily lives.
[User_9921]: I just got ambushed in an alleyway on my home planet, and my muscle memory from the simulation kicked in. I actually counter-mapped the mugger using my sect’s starter forms!
[Sect_Grinder]: Has anyone successfully mapped the coordinates for the Forest Continent? I just drew a high-tier chain quest that forces a drop there. What kind of terrain is this? How do I even build a path to cross the ocean boundary?!
Yunxi couldn’t help but chuckle as she scrolled through the chaotic comments.
“…Master?”
A faint voice cut through the tent. Shen San was clutching his forehead, slowly pushing himself up. He blinked groggily at his master, who had suddenly burst out laughing, a subtle look of confusion crossing his pale face. Had the sun finally gotten to her?
Moreover, he couldn’t shake the bizarre feeling that he was hallucinating. Just before he lost consciousness out on the beach, he could have sworn a brilliant wave of golden light had washed over his avatar from her direction, instantly stabilizing his stats.
He rubbed his temples, genuinely concerned that the sea monster’s impact had corrupted his cognitive processing.
Oblivious to his internal crisis, Yunxi closed out the forum interface and pressed the back of her hand against his forehead. “Are you alright? Do you feel dizzy? Your temperature seems normal, at least no fever.”
“I think my sensory feeds are just lagging,” he muttered under his breath. Shaking his head, he raised his voice. “Master, where are we?”
“The real question is how we’re going to escape this heat,” Yunxi sighed, patting the empty space on the straw mat next to her. “That kraken completely threw off our trajectory. Instead of making landfall on the Ice Continent, the currents dragged us straight into the Desert Continent. The sun is at its peak right now, so we stay put and rest.”
To conserve what little moisture they had left, the two fell silent, quietly waiting out the grueling daytime cycles. It wasn’t until dusk painted the sky that they finally packed up the fabric tent and began their long, arduous trek deeper into the shifting sands.
The desert stretched out under a solitary plume of smoke, matching the timeless image of a blood-red sun sinking over a endless river of sand.
Lu Yunxi and Shen San trudged forward at a snail’s pace. Every gust of wind whipped fine grit into their eyes and coated their hair in dust. There were no natural oases in this sector, and the reserve water they had hoarded had long since dried up, leaving their lips cracked and bleeding.
“We’re setting up camp,” Yunxi ordered, noting that her apprentice’s face had grown as gaunt and hollow as an old man’s. She immediately manifested the fabric shelter once more.
Shen San’s baseline attributes were significantly lower than her own, meaning the dehydration penalty was draining his bars at a much faster rate. If he kept pushing forward under this status debuff, his avatar would hit zero and forcefully clip back to a regional resurrection point. The moment they crawled inside the shade, he closed his eyes and drifted into a heavy stupor.
Initially, Yunxi didn’t panic. But as the desert night froze over and he still refused to wake, a cold dread settled in her stomach.
She recalled reading on the forums that these advanced holographic setups were vastly different from the PC games of her past life. They were entirely immersive loops; players typically remained logged into the simulation for two full months at a time while their physical bodies were sustained by medical nutrient pods. If an account manually logged off, the avatar would instantly despawn from the world layer.
Shen San’s form was still physically anchored here, which meant his consciousness was trapped inside a corrupted, comatose status loop.
A sudden urge to hunt down the systems developers and beat them senseless washed over her. What kind of sadistic programmer codes a mechanic where players can actively slip into a medical coma from a simple desert environment design?!
Cradling her unconscious apprentice, she furrowed her brow and began systematically searching every storage slot in her spatial inventory. While the fresh water was gone, she managed to locate a small stash of wild herbs and exotic fruits she had harvested back on the lower peaks. They still retained a fraction of moisture.
Carefully, she crushed the wild fruits into a hollow wooden bowl, meticulously collecting every single drop of juice. She fed the liquid to Shen San drop by drop, her hands steady as she ensured not a single millimeter of the precious fluid was wasted.
Once the bowl was empty, she suddenly paused, smacking her own forehead in a fit of sudden realization.
Wait a minute. Shen San is an outworld player! Even if his bars hit zero, he won’t actually die. He’ll just respawn at the nearest city! She had completely let her immersion warp her logic.
“…Master?” a weak, raspy voice murmured.
Yunxi snapped her head around to look at him. Sure enough, his eyelids were fluttering open.
“Master,” he whispered, his gaze shifting with a complex mixture of intense guilt and profound sorrow.
Confused by the heavy emotion radiating from him, she leaned in closer. “What is it? Are you in pain?”
“I… Master, do not waste any more of your water supply on my account,” Shen San said, squeezing his eyes shut as if looking at her pained him. “Hoard the remaining moisture for your own survival.”
Yunxi’s eye twitched.
Of course I’m going to keep enough to survive! she thought. If your account wipes, you just face a standard respawn timer. If my matrix hits zero, I’m permanently deleted from existence!
Despite her internal commentary, she reached back into her bag, pulled out another handful of fruits, and began crushing them into the bowl.
Shen San’s eyes snapped open, a brief flare of warmth hitting his expression before it clouded over with absolute misery. He looked at her several times, his mouth opening and closing as if he were wrestling with an impossible secret.
“Master, stop. You must listen to me,” Shen San blurted out, his posture stiffening as if he were preparing to march onto a executioner’s block. “I will lay my cards bare. The truth is, your station is actually an N—”
“A what?” Yunxi asked, entirely focused on squeezing the pulp. She had only caught the faint syllable at the end.
“I mean… Master, the reality is that my entity belongs to an immortal lineage!” Shen San scrambled to correct himself, aggressively slapping his chest to sell the narrative. “My soul cannot be extinguished by worldly elements. I am fundamentally incapable of dying! Therefore, you must cease worrying over my condition. Do not squander your life-saving liquids on a vessel that will simply reform.”
Yunxi froze, turning her head to stare at him with a thoroughly bewildered expression.
As an outworld player, his immortality was a mechanical fact. But she was utterly stunned that he had chosen to say it aloud to a native resident! Was he entirely unconcerned that she would demand a logical explanation for his claims? How on earth did he plan to explain the concept of server architectures and NPC data models to a medieval character?
She maintained her long, unreadable stare until he began to sweat under the scrutiny, before quietly turning back to her bowl.
“I see.”
Watching her return to her task without launching into a terrifying interrogation, Shen San covertly pressed a hand to his racing heart and let out a massive sigh of relief. Thank goodness her character AI didn’t possess a script to cross-examine his claim; otherwise, he wouldn’t have known how to construct a fantasy lore story to back up his slip of the tongue.
Just as the atmosphere inside the fabric tent turned distinctly bizarre, a sudden shadow fell across the entrance. A figure draped entirely in heavy, midnight-black robes had materialized out of the desert sands.
“Do either of your stations require a supply of fresh well-water?”
The traveler’s voice was incredibly hoarse, rasping like shattered flint, and his speech patterns featured strange, mechanical pauses between syllables.
“What is your price?” Yunxi demanded, immediately rising to her feet. She didn’t care about the statistical anomaly of a merchant wandering a barren wasteland with liquid cargo. It was a game engine; no matter how absurd an event trigger seemed, it was just standard scripting.
The cloaked entity let out a sharp, grating laugh that sounded remarkably like a dying duck.
“Financial coin holds no transactional value in this sector,” the stranger hissed, a demonic, calculated grin cutting through the shadows of his hood. “However, the parameters of my inventory stipulate that I may only allocate this water to one of your entities. The companion must remain unserved. So… tell me, travelers. Which of your souls shall drink?”
