Chapter 94: Medicinal Powder
Lu Yunxi looked at the faces of the newlyweds and the overwhelming red decorations filling the bridal chamber. She didn’t feel a single bit of wedding joy—only a deep sense of irony.
What a joke! Talk about an unforeseen disaster!
Although she had sensed earlier that the groom harbored ill intentions toward her apprentice, she hadn’t expected him to be so impatient that he couldn’t even wait a single day to send men to harm him.
Thinking of Shen San, who was currently sneaking around and exploring the other side of the courtyard, Lu Yunxi locked her gaze on the man inside the room. A cold, dangerous light flashed in her eyes.
The corners of her lips slowly curled into a faint, mischievous smile.
He’s certainly brave! Trying to ambush my apprentice right under my nose… I might as well leave this gentleman a spectacular wedding gift!
She opened her spatial inventory and began rummaging through her supplies. Suddenly, her eyes lit up. Found it!
Peering down into the room through a gap in the roof tiles, she carefully tilted a micro-vial. Amidst the dark night, a few wisps of fine powder drifted down, landing squarely on the groom’s skin without a single speck going to waste.
Lu Yunxi tucked the medicine bottle back into her inventory, quietly slid the roof tiles back into place, and giggled softly to herself for a long moment before vaulting over the wall and out of the Lu estate.
Meanwhile, Shen San finished copying the ledger data he had uncovered in the study, swept the documents into his backpack, and mentally logged the suspicious conversation he had just overheard between Madam Lu and her personal maid.
The master and disciple’s eyes met across the open courtyard. Under the cover of night, they slipped out of the estate and returned to the inn together.
However, before they could even sit down to compare notes on tonight’s harvest, they froze.
Inside the inn, the waiter, the shopkeeper, and the other patrons were all strewn across the lobby, completely unconscious. Some had collapsed flat on the floor, others were sprawled over the dining tables, and one unfortunate soul had even tumbled into a horse trough. Fortunately, the trough was currently dry, so nobody had drowned.
Amidst the eerie, silent darkness, the only signs of life were coming directly from their rented quarters upstairs. The sharp ring of drawing swords, heavy, frantic footsteps, and muffled curses echoed clearly down the stairwell and into Shen San’s ears.
Although Lu Yunxi’s character parameters were locked at Level 15, her vast combat history granted her exceptional sensory perception. She snapped her head up, locking her gaze on the door of their room.
She paused for a brief moment, then knelt beside a few of the unconscious bodies on the floor to examine them.
“Fortunately, they’re still breathing. They’ve just been heavily drugged,” she murmured, letting out a quiet sigh of relief after feeling a weak, steady pulse. She had no desire to see innocent bystanders lose their character nodes because of a dispute targeting her party.
Shen San nodded grimly. Drawing his heavy broadsword, he carefully crept up the stairs, blending into the shadows.
Lu Yunxi slipped out to circle the perimeter of the inn. Once she verified that all the threats were contained upstairs and the rest of the patrons were safely unconscious in their rooms, she firmly bolted the main entrance from the inside.
Her apprentice was incredibly efficient. Almost the exact millisecond she slammed the security bolt into place, the chaotic clattering and shattering of furniture upstairs abruptly died out.
When she walked up into the room, she found several masked men clad in black silk bound tightly together, squatting on the floor and glaring at Shen San with fierce, venomous eyes.
But the moment their gaze drifted down to Lu Yunxi walking step by step over the threshold, their eyes widened with sheer terror.
“Y-You… you monster!” one of the assassins choked out, his entire frame shuddering violently. He scrambled desperately to slide away from her, but the heavy ropes severely restricted his movement.
Lu Yunxi: …
She was well aware that running, jumping, and speaking classical prose with flawless fluency was a bit unusual for a child barely a year old. But wasn’t there a common saying about natural-born geniuses? Why did this fool instantly label her a monster instead of a prodigy? The man clearly lacked vision!
She let out a cold snort. “Well? Did you extract any useful data?”
“They were dispatched by the young master of the Lu family,” Shen San explained, a dark smirk playing on his lips as he relayed the interrogation results. “Their explicit parameters were to disfigure my face, execute my character node, and dump my body in a mass grave.”
He shook his head, thoroughly amused by the sheer absurdity of the situation. What on earth had he done to offend the young master of the Lu family to this extent? If he didn’t know any better, he would think he had targeted the man’s bloodline across ten lifetimes!
Lu Yunxi furrowed her brow, crossing her tiny arms over her chest as she silently evaluated the group of bound mercenaries.
“Shen San, my stamina bar is dropping. I’m heading to bed first,” she suddenly announced, turning her small frame toward the inner room. “I’ll leave the disposition of these guests to you.”
A dangerous, icy glint flickered in Shen San’s eyes, and he broke into a meaningful, sharp grin. “Leave them to me.”
She patted his arm encouragingly. Reaching into her spatial pouch, she retrieved a handful of experimental alchemy jars and lined them up on the table. “These are a few volatile medicinal powders I synthesized by mistake. If you dust a target with this formulation, their entire skin matrix will trigger an unyielding, intense itch. Furthermore, the chemical compounds aggressively attract mosquitoes and biting flies. I guarantee they will go absolute mad from the stings…”
Shen San stared down at the strange vials in his palm, the corners of his lips curling into a wide, genuine smile. The frigid, murderous aura clouding his expression instantly melted away, replaced by a wave of warmth.
“Thank you, Master.”
Beholding her apprentice’s bright, watery eyes, Lu Yunxi’s heart softened. Thinking back, she had only given the young master of the Lu family a very small, diluted dose of medicine on her way out of his room. He had honestly gotten off incredibly cheap!
“Ah—!”
Early the next morning, a blood-curdling shriek from the bride shattered the peace of the Lu estate, piercing straight through the sky.
The residents who were still asleep were violently startled out of their slumbers, bolting upright in their beds.
“What happened?”
“That racket came from the young master’s courtyard. Was that the new young mistress screaming?”
“Could something catastrophic have happened to our young master?”
Over in the primary estate building, Master Lu and his wife scrambled out of bed in a panic, frantically shouting for their maids to hurry and help them dress.
The personal maids and attendants assigned to the newlyweds’ courtyard were already swarming the threshold, whispering nervously among themselves.
By the time Master and Madam Lu arrived at their son’s quarters, they found the entire domestic staff huddled outside the perimeter wall, driven out by the furious, echoing roars of their son bouncing through the paper windows.
“Get out! Every single one of you, get out of my sight!” Along with his savage roars, the constant, violent shattering of porcelain cups and heavy ceramic plates rattled the walls.
“What is the meaning of this?!” Master Lu stormed forward, his brow locked in a tight, furious frown as he barked at the head servant.
The attendant trembled, tears streaming down her face. “M-Master, please have mercy! We are entirely locked out of the data! The moment the young mistress screamed, something valuable was smashed inside the chamber. Ever since, the young master has been in a towering rage and flatly refuses to let anyone breach the door!”
Madam Lu’s temper flared instantly. “I knew that girl was bad luck from the moment she entered our registry! But you and our son insisted on pushing the match through. Look at this mess! She must have committed some unspeakable offense to provoke my precious boy. When has our son ever lost his composure to this extent?!”
Master Lu fell silent, a rare, heavy wave of regret washing over him.
The elderly couple waited outside for a long time before finally forcing their way into the chamber. However, the absolute second they stepped over the threshold, both of them froze as if struck by a paralysis spell.
“Son… my precious boy!” Tears erupted from Madam Lu’s eyes. She lunged forward, throwing her arms around her child and weeping hysterically. “My poor, unfortunate son! How on earth did your model warp into this?!”
Master Lu’s face rapidly cycled through brilliant shades of blue and purple.
At this moment, the young master’s facial features had undergone a drastic, bizarre shift—it looked as though his masculine parameters had been entirely rewritten into a woman’s. His originally thick, sharp eyebrows had thinned into elegant, delicate willow-leaf arches, his rugged, square jawline had softened into a perfect oval, and even his nose and lips had turned strikingly petite and feminine. Yet, if one scrutinized the foundation closely, the underlying bone structure still carried an undeniable resemblance to Master and Madam Lu.
The young bride sat huddled in a corner nearby, her eyes glassy and unfocused, clearly still processing the absolute shock of the morning.
The longer Madam Lu stared at her son’s altered face, the hotter her fury burned. Spinning on her heel, she lunged at her new daughter-in-law and delivered a savage, echoing slap across her cheek. To her mind, this girl’s family background was vastly inferior to the Lus anyway; the match had been driven entirely by her husband and son’s stubbornness. She had never liked the girl’s face, so she felt zero hesitation in using her as a punching bag!
The young mistress of the Lu family hadn’t anticipated that her new mother-in-law would be such a vicious, unhinged tyrant. Being struck without a single shred of justification caused her face to flush a violent, furious red.
She was the true victim here! She had no idea what kind of cursed, demonic lineage the Lu family possessed to make a grown man suddenly transform into a woman overnight! She had already signed the marriage registry, meaning she was legally locked into the bloodline and couldn’t trigger a divorce. And now she was being beaten for it!
The more she weighed her grievances, the more her compliance shattered. Abandoning every filial boundary and rule of domestic tolerance, she lunged forward and slapped the old woman right back.
“You miserable wretch! You dare strike me?!” Madam Lu shrieked in absolute disbelief.
“Strike you?! Why should I be afraid of a household of frauds? I was just calculating how to settle the score with your lying family, and you actually have the nerve to lay hands on me?!” The young bride roared, delivering two more heavy slaps to the old woman’s face.
Although Madam Lu had successfully climbed the social ladder from a common housemaid to a wealthy matriarch, she had lived a pampered, sedentary life of luxury for too many years. In a physical struggle against a young bride who regularly performed domestic chores, she was utterly outmatched.
Being pinned against the floor and aggressively pummeled, she shrieked frantically at the two men standing by. “Are you two blind?! Are you just going to stand there and watch me get murdered?!”
However, when they had first entered the room, the young master had explicitly commanded the guards to keep the perimeter clear, meaning there were only the four of them inside the chamber. The two men were so utterly consumed by the catastrophic ruin of their son’s masculine features that even though her screams bounced off their eardrums, neither possessed the mental capacity to intervene.
Perched in the shadows of the roof beams, Shen San watched the Lu family descends into absolute, chaotic civil war, his chest bursting with profound satisfaction.
Last night, he had witnessed his master dropping custom medicinal powders through the roof tiles. At the time, he had been slightly puzzled, assuming she had discovered some dark secret regarding the Lu family’s business practices. Now that the data had finalized, the reality was clear: his master must have caught wind of the young master’s plot to ambush him yesterday! She had gone out into the night explicitly to avenge the offense on his behalf!
In truth, the custom alchemy hadn’t actually rewritten the young master’s gender variables; it had merely drastically softened his facial vectors, shifting his visual model to resemble a delicate girl. It was a hilarious testament to their stupidity that they were tearing their own family apart over a cosmetic modifier.
