Chapter 85: Suspicion
Once a player binds a pet, the worst-case scenario is merely dealing with low favorability or a stubborn creature that refuses to help in battle; the system flatly prevents the pet from actually running away.
Since Shen San couldn’t change Lu Yunxi’s mind, he finally accepted the massive egg and registered it into his pet interface to begin the hatching sequence. His internal logic was simple: once he hatched the battle pet and trained it up, he would simply transfer its custody to his master. That way, she would have a dedicated guardian and wouldn’t have to face any future map hazards unprotected.
With his mental blueprint securely in place, he glanced down at the active hatching timer. The confident smile on his face immediately twitched.
“It actually takes a full month to hatch!”
Lu Yunxi was equally taken aback, but her initial shock quickly transformed into intense excitement. “It seems the data profile inside this egg is truly extraordinary!” Common pets like rabbits or squirrels usually completed their hatching cycle within half a day at most.
After observing the interface for a short while, the two harvested a nearby cluster of raw provisions and wild alchemy herbs, then resumed their trek, pushing deeper into the uncharted interior of the continent.
Thirty minutes into their march, the topography shifted dramatically. The landscape became heavily saturated with lakes, pools, and winding marshes, the water nodes densely distributed across the entire region. The environment bore a striking resemblance to the baseline layout of the Forest Continent, with one key structural difference: the Forest Continent was defined by its towering canopy, whereas this map was defined almost entirely by its endless water networks.
“Is this sector locked into an autumn cycle? The leaves are constantly falling.” Initially, when they were navigating the barren coastlines, she hadn’t noticed the foliage. But as they penetrated further inland, the horizon filled with skeletal, bare-branched trees.
“I’ve read on the forums that different continents operate under independent seasonal loops to diversify the environmental aesthetics, so an autumn cycle here is standard,” Shen San explained. He used his hands to forcefully clear away the dead branches blocking their path, treading carefully along the slick mud.
The natural pools were tightly packed together, leaving the dirt pathways between them incredibly narrow. A single misplaced step could easily cause a traveler to plunge into the deep water.
In fact, his focus wavered for a split second, and he slipped sideways off the ridge. Fortunately, his master’s passive barrier was robust enough to instantly displace the liquid, saving his avatar from turning into a drowned rat.
Lacking a comprehensive geographical chart for this continent, the duo committed to a single compass heading and kept moving.
By late afternoon, the monotony of the marshlands finally broke.
“Master, look ahead! There’s a massive lake with a structure anchored right in the center!” Shen San pointed toward a small, isolated house built over the water, his face radiant with excitement. “We’ve finally located a resident node.”
Scooping her up securely, he broke into a trot toward the shoreline.
However, before they could even manifest their collapsible flower boat, a familiar, clinical system prompt chimed directly into their audio feeds:
[Ding—Welcome to the Pond Instance Dungeon.]
In a flash of light, the environmental geometry shifted, transferring the two of them into a separate instance layer.
Staring blankly at the hostile aquatic entities initializing across the water, the master and disciple fell into a profound, heavy silence.
Wait… didn’t the public network threads claim that players had been strip-mining the continents for weeks without discovering a single hidden instance? Weren’t dungeon keys universally classified as hyper-rare, tightly guarded secrets that were borderline impossible to trigger?
How was it that they couldn’t even run two consecutive steps without accidentally falling backwards into a high-tier dungeon zone?
The duo stood dazed for a long moment before forcing their brains to adapt to the mechanical shift.
Lu Yunxi hopped into the corner of the small lotus craft, while Shen San gripped the plant-like green oar and began rowing toward the isolated house anchored in the center of the lake. The water mass stretched out until it met the artificial boundaries of the instance, its surface unnaturally placid and dead silent.
He threw his weight into the oar for a few minutes when a series of violent ripples suddenly fractured the calm face of the lake.
The master and disciple instantly assumed a high-alert combat posture.
A second later, the water violently erupted with a sharp burst, and a gargantuan fish monster breached the surface. Although the entity possessed a distinct piscine model, a vivid, crimson blood-stripe ran down its forehead. Its mouth parted to reveal rows of razor-sharp fangs—resembling a stylized cartoon shark—and its predatory eyes locked onto their coordinates.
Shen San drew his heavy broadsword, his posture shifting into a defensive anchor. “Master, maintain your position on the deck.” With a heavy splash, he hurled his avatar straight over the side, sinking into the depths to engage the beast in close-quarters combat.
Lu Yunxi watched his tactical execution, her miniature eye twitching violently as a row of imaginary black lines cascaded down her forehead.
In their past training cycles, she had strictly supervised his alchemical and cooking progression, paying zero attention to how his account managed mob aggro. While his heavy, close-combat style looked undeniably striking and high-impact on dry land, forcing a pure strength-build warrior into an underwater engagement was a mechanical nightmare.
Although her master-tier barrier insulated his model and permitted seamless respiration beneath the surface, the physical parameters of the water pressure severely crippled his agility. The fish monster maneuvered with extreme fluid speed, effortlessly darting left and right to evade his heavy, sweeping blade.
Left with no offensive recourse due to her shrunken frame, Lu Yunxi could only perch on the gunwale, monitoring his status bar and systematically cycling her recovery spells whenever his health fluctuated. After all, her healing arts didn’t require her to hoist a weapon to register the cast.
Shen San was visibly gridlocked by the environmental modifiers. The fish entity was hyper-agile, whereas he had dump-stat allocated almost his entire attribute pool into raw physical strength, making underwater targeting an absolute slog.
It took a full, exhausting hour of grinding before Shen San finally managed to deplete the monster’s health bar.
He dragged himself back onto the lotus boat, massaging his screaming shoulder muscles as he shoved a handful of custom buns into his mouth, waiting for his stamina pool to reset.
“The opening vanguard entity was Level 60; the subsequent tiers inside this instance will undoubtedly scale exponentially higher,” Lu Yunxi analyzed, crossing her tiny arms as she leveled a grave look at him. “Shen San, if the mechanical pressure becomes unmanageable in the next phase, we will abort the run.”
Shen San was in the middle of drinking from his water flask. Hearing her directive, his hand froze mid-air, and he turned to look at her, his eyes swimming with sudden, deep suspicion.
“Persistence is a virtue when a path is viable, but knowing when to cut your losses is equally vital,” she stepped forward, gently patting his hand where it rested against the timber. “It takes genuine courage to execute a strategic retreat. Once our baseline parameters scale higher in the future, we can simply return and crush this node.”
Her miniature features were painted with an expression of profound, maternal tolerance and gentle encouragement.
However, Shen San didn’t absorb her emotional support. Instead, his focus remained tightly locked onto the logical discrepancy of her statement.
“Master… how exactly does your station know that fish monster was Level 60?” His gaze turned piercing, his tone sharp with absolute disbelief as he scrutinized her tiny form.
Lu Yunxi’s gentle smile nearly shattered on the spot. Fortunately, her psychological fortitude was steel-clad, allowing her to lock her facial muscles into a seamless, unbothered mask. Had her heart not been hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird, it would have been mathematically impossible to detect her internal panic.
Moreover, she was currently sustained by a ten-centimeter infant model. Even with her pulse racing violently, Shen San’s character attributes hadn’t reached the Master tier yet, meaning his sensory perception lacked the sensitivity to register her physiological spike.
She tilted her head to the side, her wide eyes radiating absolute, innocent confusion, as if she genuinely couldn’t comprehend his suspicion. “What do you mean? The moment we entered this secret realm, a prominent Level 60 numeric matrix initialized directly above the creature’s crown… Can your vision parameters not perceive it, apprentice?” At the final syllable, her vocal inflections shifted into a wave of intense, frantic worry, as if she were deeply terrified that his character model had sustained permanent cognitive damage from the fight.
Staring down at his master’s perfectly executed display of maternal panic, the sharp suspicion in Shen San’s eyes slowly receded. He turned his gaze inward, a wave of self-doubt hitting his logical processes. Could my translation matrix truly have misread the data?
For a split second just now, he had genuinely suspected that his master wasn’t an artificial NPC model at all, but a high-tier outworld player operating a custom avatar. He had seen tech threads mentioning that the corporate developers occasionally deployed live employees to pilot elite legacy characters for world-building events. Was his master one of those hidden administrators?
He lowered his head, a calculating glint flashing through his eyes. I’ll run a few more diagnostic tests later.
When he raised his face again, he forced his signature, easygoing laugh. “Ah, my mistake! I simply assumed the system UI hidden those tags from native residents, Master.”
“What a ridiculous thought!” She let out a soft laugh, waving her tiny hand dismissively. “My physical model may have contracted, but my vision parameters are perfectly calibrated!”
Shen San grinned, throwing his weight back into the oar. Within minutes, the boat intercepted a secondary aquatic guardian.
The established combat loop initialized once more: he dove into the depths to manage the threat, while she anchored the deck to sustain his bars.
The subsequent fish monsters systematically scaled up, advancing precisely one level per engagement—Level 61, Level 62, and onward. Because the consistent kill data was continuously funneling raw experience points into Shen San’s profile, his own level was steadily scaling alongside the mobs, ensuring his offensive output never fell behind the curve.
But these tactical victories were entirely secondary to Yunxi’s internal crisis. The real danger was that Shen San’s logical suspicions had been triggered, and the brat was now systematically running covert linguistic traces to test her programming.
Shen San: “Master, what are the entry requirements to log into an instance dungeon like this?”
Lu Yunxi: “What is an ‘instance’? Oh, do your outworld clans refer to localized secret realms by that name? Any entity can clear the threshold, but the historical major sects typically monopolize the core gateways.”
Shen San: “Master, what flavor profile of systemic nutrient paste do you prefer to consume? Personally, I find the synthetic sweet-and-sour matrix completely unpalatable.”
Lu Yunxi: “What is a ‘nutrient’?”
Shen San: “Master, let me share a popular interstellar joke! A merchant vessel was charting a deep-space quadrant when the captain discovered…”
Lu Yunxi: …I have absolutely no structural framework to parse these words.
Observing that her facial parameters returned nothing but pure, unadulterated, and organic confusion that felt entirely unscripted, Shen San’s suspicions finally dissolved. He systematically cleared the flag on her profile.
I guess the artificial intelligence engine running ‘Ancient Times’ is simply designed with this level of cognitive adaptability, he concluded.
It was an incredible, narrow escape. Her apprentice had blasted her with an advanced, high-tech joke from the interstellar empire, and because she was entirely detached from that civilization’s history, her natural, blank incomprehension had served as the perfect structural defense to shatter his theory!
Lu Yunxi covertly let out a massive sigh of relief. If that brat had continued to run covert diagnostics on her character profile every single day, she would have been forced to sever their master-disciple contract, abandon his party, and striking out into the world layer as a solo entity.
At the very least, having him drop the interrogation protocol was a massive win for her mental health.
The dungeon run pushed steadily into the deeper tiers. However, the exact second their vessel crossed into the final clearing, the ambient light faded, and their collective expressions turned profoundly dark.
An absolute behemoth of an aquatic predator was idling in the deep trenches ahead. Floating directly above its jagged, obsidian crown were the glowing, unmistakable words: [Level 70]. Its massive fangs flashed with a cold, metallic sheen as it cut effortlessly through the dark water.
