Chapter 88: Sold
Shen San retrieved a large crate of provisions from his backpack, offering it to the elderly villager with sincere gratitude. “Thank you so much for taking me in and giving me a place to stay. This is some food I gathered on my travels. It’s nothing extravagant, but please accept it.”
The old man stared at the massive crate. He reached inside, his calloused fingers brushing against several heavily packed bags of food, and tears instantly welled in his cloudy eyes. “Good, good! You stay here as long as you like, young man!”
After bidding the old man goodnight, Shen San retired to the western room. He gave the dusty space a quick sweep before collapsing onto the bed.
Lu Yunxi hopped up onto the mattress beside him. Completely bypassing any attempt to tidy up her own small spot, she curled up and fell fast asleep.
The next morning, Shen San woke up feeling thoroughly refreshed. He scooped up Lu Yunxi and went for a leisurely stroll around the perimeter of the village—though, in reality, he did the walking while she simply observed from his shoulder.
A heavy snow must have fallen during the night. The entire settlement was now draped in a thick, pristine blanket of white.
“Master, do you think we should anchor ourselves here until the spring thaw before we set out again?”
Lu Yunxi peeked out from the folds of his collar, her eyes scanning the desolate, silent surroundings as a deep frown creased her tiny brow. “This village gives me an incredibly bad feeling. We need to leave as quickly as possible.”
After a brief discussion, they compromised, deciding to stay for just two more days to prepare. Over the next forty-eight hours, they plan to harvest a massive amount of clean snow and hoard it in their spatial inventories. If they hit a water crisis out on the open sea, they could simply melt the snow down for drinkable water.
That afternoon, the elderly host caught wind of Shen San’s shoveling and trundled over to help.
“Old grandpa, please, you don’t have to do such heavy lifting!”
Though the old man appeared frail and bone-thin, he possessed a stubborn streak. Even as his limbs trembled under the weight of the iron shovel, he insisted on clearing the drifts alongside the young warrior, completely oblivious to why Shen San was hoarding so much snow in the first place.
Unable to bear watching the elderly man strain himself, Shen San rapidly sped up his pace, quickly pulling enough snow into his inventory to claim he was finished.
“Alright, that’s more than enough,” he said brightly, giving the old man a grateful smile. “Thank you so much for your help, grandpa.”
Seeing him store the tools, the old man smiled and nodded weakly. “I am just glad I could be of use. You gifted me so much food; I couldn’t simply accept your charity for nothing.”
Shen San chatted with him warmly for a short while longer, slipping him a few extra packages of dry rations before dusk fell.
As night closed in and Shen San prepared to sleep, he noticed his master wasn’t resting. She sat near the hearth, her miniature brow locked in a tight frown, deeply lost in thought.
“Master, are you still worrying over your aunt?” He thoroughly warmed his hands and feet by the fire before climbing onto the bed, gently tracing a finger down her spine to soothe her. “Don’t lose heart. We’ll locate her soon.”
Lu Yunxi wasn’t braced for his touch. The gentle nudge threw off her tiny center of gravity, and she tumbled sideways onto the mattress.
“I’m not anxious about my aunt,” she murmured, a helpless smile touching her lips as she looked down. “I simply can’t shake this profound sense of unease. It feels as though a massive storm is brewing right outside our door.”
She looked thoroughly deflated, sprawling out on the blanket. For the first time since her transformation, her puffy, bun-like little face looked entirely listless. “Then again… perhaps it is merely my imagination playing tricks on me.”
Shen San couldn’t bear to see his usually indomitable master looking so defeated. He immediately strove to comfort her. “Clear your mind, Master. I am right here beside you.”
He carefully pulled the edge of the winter quilt over her tiny shoulders. His fingers gently smoothed the fabric around her back, his eyes filled with profound tenderness beneath the flickering amber glow of the fire. “Rest easy, Master. No matter what cross-maps into our coordinates, I will absolutely protect you.”
Listening to her apprentice’s soft, resonant voice and looking up at his calm, reassuring face, Lu Yunxi felt the knot of tension in her chest gradually unspool.
Never mind, she thought. There is zero utility in obsessing over macro-level threats while my core parameters are locked at Level 10. If the sky decided to fracture and fall, she still had her towering, Master-tier disciple to hold it up.
As the midnight hours deepened, a violent blizzard began to howl against the window lattices, bringing fierce northern gales. Inside the quiet room, the translucent utility fireball flickered softly within its glass-like sphere, casting rhythmic waves of peaceful heat over the sleeping pair.
Suddenly, a faint, rhythmic crunch of footsteps cut through the white noise of the storm.
In the absolute pitch-black of the room, the figure on the mattress snapped her eyes open. The ambient firelight spell dissolved in an instant, plunging the space into absolute, dead silence.
CRASH. A heavy thud resonated from the courtyard.
“You absolute idiot, keep your voice down! You made a racket that loud just scaling a basic perimeter wall? You’re completely useless!”
“Where is the outworlder sleeping? Which quarter?”
“The old man flagged him in the western room. He’s a solo traveler and looks heavily armed. Everyone keep your blades raised when we breach; don’t let him land a counter-strike.”
“…”
Lu Yunxi rubbed her sleepy eyes, listening to the muffled conspiracy outside with profound speechlessness.
Level 10! She was currently tracking a mere Level 10 base stat array, yet these fools were clumsy enough for her to map their auditory signatures perfectly. To say nothing of Shen San, whose Master-tier perception nodes were fully operational!
The mob initializing outside was staggeringly weak.
She let out a tiny, bemused sigh.
Sensing that she had booted up, Shen San reached out a single finger, lightly tapping her back to reassure her. “Go back to sleep, Master. It’s just a handful of low-tier mobs. I’ll dismantle them in a moment.”
His voice was incredibly soft, acting like a soothing lullaby in the dead of night.
Too exhausted to waste mental data on common bandits, she gave a tiny nod and snuggled back beneath the heavy quilt. In a hazy half-dream, she registered the space beside her emptying for a brief period before Shen San slipped back into the sheets, bringing a fleeting gust of winter frost with him.
The morning sun spilled through the wooden lattice, bathing her face in a warm glow.
The light was aggressively bright. Shifting uncomfortably against the pillow, Lu Yunxi tried to bury her face away from the intrusive glare, but the rays followed her relentlessly.
She finally raised a miniature hand to block the sun, sitting up with her hair completely disheveled.
“Master, you’re awake,” Shen San said, walking into the morning light while balancing two plates that radiated a mouth-watering aroma. “Come have breakfast. This morning I prepared savory pork and cabbage pancakes, crisp fried eggs, and rich bone-broth noodles. What does your appetite prefer? How about a small sample of everything?”
For someone who routinely suffered from severe choice paralysis, there was truly nothing more exquisite than having an apprentice meticulously curate a multi-course breakfast and serve it directly to the table.
She vaulted out of bed, scooped up a thimble of steaming snow water from the basin outside the threshold, and vigorously wiped her face clean. Once washed, she bounded back to the table.
To accommodate her shrunken frame, Shen San had systematically utilized his woodcrafting skills over the course of their journey to forge miniature bowls, spoons, and chopsticks, alongside a custom-scaled table and chair set. He carefully portioned out her fractions of breakfast, neatly arranging them on her dedicated table.
The two of them sat in comfortable companionship, quietly enjoying the spectacular meal.
Once she finished eating, she immediately pivoted back to the events of the previous night. “About the ambush… who were they?”
“They were the local residents,” Shen San explained with a helpless sigh as he began rinsing the cookware. “Apparently, when they saw how freely we handed out high-tier rations, they flagged us as wealthy targets and decided to execute a midnight raid.”
“The villagers? All of them?” Lu Yunxi’s brow furrowed. The only person they had directly conversed with was their elderly host; the rest of the residents had merely offered passing nods and generic smiles. How could they have possibly deduced their wealth parameters?
He nodded, confirming her grim suspicion. “It is exactly as your station calculated. The old man we trusted actually coordinated the entire village to ambush us.”
Lu Yunxi’s eye twitched violently. “Are they completely unhinged? An entire settlement mobilizing just to rob a single traveler?!”
“I executed a thorough interrogation after securing them,” he said, shaking his head as a complex, dark expression flashed across his face. “According to their statements, this village has historically sustained its economy entirely through banditry and raiding. In the past, merchant caravans regularly mapped through these passes, but over the last decade, regional travel has completely dried up. They were desperate enough to risk everything the moment we crossed their borders.”
She was left entirely speechless by the sheer depravity of the local lore. But as she replayed her observations of the settlement, a secondary anomaly clicked in her mind. “Wait… come to think of it, I didn’t register a single female or child avatar while exploring the streets. Did your interrogation uncover the structural reason behind that?”
As the words left her mouth, a deeply unsettling hypothesis crossed her mind. Her expression darkened into an icy mask, her voice dropping to a freezing register. “Could it be… that when their resource nodes hit a fatal drought… they actively slaughtered their own wives and offspring to conserve food?”
Shen San was visibly jarred by her terrifyingly grim imagination. He froze mid-motion, looking down at her with intense hesitation. “It… it shouldn’t be structurally designed to that extreme, right?”
He recalled how he had entered the primary longhouse earlier to cross-examine the bound villagers, questioning them in isolated rooms. When he had returned to the west room, his posture had been incredibly tense.
Lu Yunxi raised a sharp eyebrow, her gaze flashing with fierce intent. “Well? Are they truly that monstrous?”
He let out a heavy, weary sigh, shaking his head. “Master, I ran the text traces. The economic reality here is simply too desolate; the standard models cannot afford the upkeep costs to raise a female population. Consequently, every few decades, the village pools its collective currency, travels to the outer city boundaries, and purchases a few women strictly to secure a new generation of offspring.”
“And where are those women now?” A dangerous, frigid light flickered in her eyes, though her vocal pitch grew unnaturally soft.
“They sold them back into the market,” he gritted his teeth, his jaw tightening as he witnessed his master’s raw look of absolute incredulity. “The moment a woman delivers a child, the village treats her as excess weight. They systematically auction them off to wealthy noble estates in the central continents to work as domestic servants or kitchen cooks.”
They auctioned them off?! They actually sold them…
She drew a long, ragged breath, fiercely suppressing the white-hot fury threatening to destabilize her master persona. “And what of the offspring? I didn’t locate a single youth inside the perimeter! Don’t tell me they processed and sold the children as well?!”
