Chapter 95: Lost
Seeing the Lu family in such a state of utter disarray, Shen San felt a wave of profound satisfaction.
After a brief moment of deliberation, he retrieved the other medicinal vial his master had gifted him and shook a little more powder through the gap in the roof tiles. It was only when he saw the groom break out in a furious rash, frantically clawing at his own skin, that Shen San grinned and slipped away into the night.
A few days later.
As Lu Yunxi and Shen San sat enjoying a quiet meal at the inn, they noticed the atmosphere had shifted. The waiter’s face was bright with a cheerful smile, the dining room was buzzing with a sudden influx of customers, and the local gossip was running rampant.
“Have you heard? The Lu family is in absolute chaos! They just got married, and already the bride is demanding a divorce!”
“Oh, that’s just the half of it. I heard the young master has contracted some terrifying illness, which is why the young mistress refuses to stay!”
“I know the truth! Someone told me his entire body is covered in a horrific rash. The poor man can’t stop scratching!”
“Wait, I thought it was a severe heart condition? Either way, the young lady wants nothing to do with the Lu mansion anymore.”
“They say Master Lu is offering a reward of a thousand taels of silver to anyone who can cure his son’s affliction…”
Lu Yunxi and Shen San exchanged a look across the table, both wearing amused smiles.
“Master,” Shen San whispered, sliding a neatly transcribed bundle of papers across the timber. “Here is all the data I managed to extract from the Lu family’s domestic servants. Take a look.”
Lu Yunxi accepted the documents and scanned them in silence. As her eyes tracked the text, her initial indifference slowly hardened into an icy stare.
“The Lu family is indeed related to my mother,” she murmured. Her tone was unnaturally gentle, as if she were merely making casual conversation about the pleasant afternoon weather.
Watching his master adopt such a serene demeanor, Shen San couldn’t help but shiver.
The Lu family is completely doomed, he thought. They’ve crossed the ultimate line.
He knew better than to be fooled by her nonchalant expression. The more relaxed her posture appeared, the more catastrophic the consequences would be for the targets of her wrath. Then again, reviewing the historical files, he couldn’t blame her for being furious. If he were in her position, he wouldn’t show the Lu family a shred of mercy either.
Her mother was Lu Yuniang, the daughter of Master Lu’s original, lawful wife. She had a twin sister. When the first Madam Lu delivered the twin girls, Master Lu—despite his promises—insisted on taking a concubine into the household.
The betrayal had broken Madam Lu’s spirit. Furthermore, delivering twins had taken a severe toll on her physical parameters. Following the childbirth, her vitality began to steadily drain. For the sake of her two defenseless daughters, the first Madam Lu fought desperately to survive, consulting elite physicians, consuming bitter medicines, and forcing herself to eat and exercise. Yet her efforts yielded little result, primarily because Master Lu continuously ushered fresh concubines through the front gates.
His targets included women redeemed from high-end brothels, desperate girls selling themselves on the streets to fund their fathers’ burials, and even common laborers purchased directly from human traffickers. In short, the peaceful household that had once belonged solely to Master Lu and his first wife was suddenly overflowing with concubines of every imaginable shape and background.
Master Lu had originally built his entire commercial fortune by leveraging the wealth and political influence of his first wife’s clan. To guarantee his absolute devotion to her estate, he had even legally adopted her family’s surname. Though his birth family had fiercely protested the arrangement, his greed overrode his pride, and he insisted on the change.
Backed by the substantial resources of the Lu clan, his official rank rose step by step. By the time he successfully climbed to the third rank, an environmental disaster suddenly struck Jinzhou, far to the south.
At that time, the imperial court was short on administrative personnel, and the Lu clan happened to be navigating a period of political vulnerability. Seizing the opening, Master Lu’s political rivals framed his record, engineering his demotion and dispatching him to Jinzhou under the title of an imperial envoy.
However, this deployment was no comfortable, decorative assignment; he was sent into the vanguard to resolve a collapsing crisis. Having been carried up the bureaucratic ladder entirely by his first wife’s family, Master Lu had only ever occupied minor, insignificant posts. He possessed zero actual leadership capabilities. The moment he encountered a real macro-level crisis, his mind blanked.
Predictably, under his disastrous management, Jinzhou’s parameters deteriorated rapidly. The civil unrest escalated, and numerous rebel factions initialized across the map. The imperial court was completely enraged, instantly stripping Master Lu of his official titles and banishing him to the civilian registries.
Having lost his prestigious position, the man’s psyche fractured. He completely abandoned the ailing Madam Lu, throwing himself into a manic spiral of taking concubines and indulging in fleeting pleasures to numb his failure.
With her family far away and facing their own political tribulations, the first Madam Lu was left entirely isolated. Before long, her remaining health points depleted, and she passed away.
Almost the exact second her body was buried, the current Madam Lu—who had successfully secured her position by becoming pregnant—took over the primary estate registry. One of her very first administrative actions was to systematically sell Lu Yuniang and her twin sister into the domestic slave markets.
The two sisters were violently separated, setting off the chain of events that would eventually lead to Lu Yuniang presenting her legacy quest to Lu Yunxi.
Meanwhile, back at the Lu estate, inside the young master’s courtyard.
“Ah—!”
A familiar, ear-splitting shriek pierced the morning sky.
Master and Madam Lu bolted upright in their bed, their expressions twisting with instant irritation. The personal maids stationed outside immediately rushed into the chamber with steaming basins of water, scrambling to wash and dress the elderly couple.
However, Madam Lu shoved the head servant away with impatient fury. “Get out of my sight! Did I give your station permission to alter my garments?!”
The maids paled with terror, dropping to their knees to beg for mercy.
Master Lu waved his hand dismissively. “Everyone clear the room! Now!”
Once the door clicked shut, he turned a dark look on his wife. “Why are you taking your frustrations out on the staff? When all is said and done, the blame for this entire fiasco rests squarely on that unhinged girl we brought into our house!”
Madam Lu’s face flushed a violent red with anger. She kicked the winter quilt aside, turning to glare at her husband. “Master, you need to intervene immediately! This has been going on for days! Every single morning she wakes up shrieking like a banshee, deliberately draining our sanity. Is she truly so aggrieved that she was matched with our precious boy?!”
Master Lu was equally disgusted by the dynamic.
They had intentionally selected a bride from a lower socioeconomic tier, operating under the assumption that her family’s lack of leverage would force her to remain docile and serve them obediently in their old age. Who could have predicted that while his son’s condition was still unverified, this girl would trigger endless, exhausting civil war inside his walls?
He narrowed his eyes, his voice flat. “Have the servants finish our grooming. I intend to pay a visit to our in-laws later this afternoon. It is time we have a stern conversation regarding the structural rules of domestic conduct.”
Before the words could fully clear his lips, a loud, frantic clattering echoed from the outer corridor.
“What is the meaning of this insolence?!” Master Lu roared, his temper snapping.
The chamber door flew open, and a maid threw herself onto the floor, her knees hitting the timber with a heavy thud. “Master! Madam! A catastrophic anomaly has occurred! The young master… he… he has vanished!”
Madam Lu lunged forward, her fingers clamping onto the maid’s wrist with bruising force, her eyes bulging with sheer panic. “What did you just utter?! Who is missing?!”
“When the young mistress booted up this morning, the young master was still resting securely on the mattress,” the maid squeaked, her face completely drained of color as she trembled. “But when she returned from her dressing screen after swapping her robes, she realized the master had entirely disappeared from the room!”
Within the Lu estate’s hierarchy, the young master was the absolute core asset. If any critical failure code wiped his character node, even if every servant in the mansion forfeited their lives, it wouldn’t be enough to atone for the operational disaster.
“Where is that miserable girl?!” Madam Lu shrieked, her breath catching in her throat. She pointed a shaking finger toward the door, aggressively slamming her fist against the bed frame. “She’s utterly useless! A living, breathing human is abducted right out of her own quarters, and her parameters fail to even register the breach?! Hunt her down! Mobilize every unit and find my boy!”
The domestic staff scrambled into action, though internally, they were weeping with dismay. The young master had vanished into thin air; how were common low-tier servants supposed to track his coordinates?
Deep within the remote wilderness bordering the outer limits of Jinzhou City, along a desolate mountain pass leading toward a neighboring territory.
Young Master Lu lay bound hand and foot in the back of a rugged wooden wagon, heavy structural tape sealing his mouth as he emitted a series of frantic, muffled grunts. If looks alone possessed the mechanical capacity to delete data nodes, the group of mercenaries surrounding his frame would have been vaporized instantly.
“Boss,” one of the newly recruited bandits murmured, casting a hesitant, wary glance down at the captive. The young master’s expensive silk robes practically radiated high-tier wealth, and the sheer fury vibrating from his model was reaching a boiling point. “This target is outfitted in incredibly premium gear. Are we absolutely certain he isn’t the heir of some high-level merchant clan?”
The mercenary leader lounging in the center of the bench let out a dark snort. “You lot are far too green. This item was explicitly handed over by his own kin, with strict instructions to dump him as far from the local map as humanly possible. This is classic internal housekeeping for a wealthy house. Keep your nose out of the faction lore! Secure the gold coins, drive the carriage, and deposit him deep into the uncharted mountain sectors where his pathing can never retrace its way back. If he ever manages to navigate back to Jinzhou, our entire guild will take the heat!”
The underlings nodded slowly, a wave of realization hitting their minds. So their captive truly belonged to an elite lineage.
Realizing the potential danger of a high-tier retaliation tracking their location, the mercenaries panicked. They aggressively lashed the horses, forcing the wagon to maximum velocity to escape the regional boundaries before any guard units could intercept them.
Just as the mercenary wagon cleared the outer checkpoints of Jinzhou, the personal guards Master Lu had deployed to locate his son were suddenly hit with an emergency recall order.
“Abort the search!” Master Lu roared, commanding the entire household guard to abandon the wilderness grid. “A massive security breach has occurred within our primary vaults! Initiate an immediate internal audit. I want to know exactly which invisible thief possessed the audacity to infiltrate my estate and plunder my private hoard!”
To his mind, the mountains of gold bullion, silver chests, and legendary jewelry he had painstakingly squeezed from the local populace over decades were his absolute life bar. A son? If his parameters remained intact, he could always spawn another heir with a concubine later. But if these core treasures were deleted, his entire faction would face an instant, permanent system wipe!
Madam Lu collapsed against his robes, tears streaming down her face as she wailed, “Master, I beg of you, redeploy the guards to find my boy! My precious son! My life bar will hit zero without him…”
She had originally been a low-tier servant girl whose only programmed skill was to brew tea for the estate. Before she could even maximize her proficiency in that craft, she had won the master’s favor and successfully conceived an heir, a mechanical stroke of luck that had allowed her to usurp the primary marriage slot.
The logic was simple: if her son’s data node was permanently lost, Master Lu would inevitably strip her of her titles and evict her from the estate.
Witnessing her husband flatly refuse to assign a single unit to track her child, her legs gave out entirely. She slid onto the dirt floor, her features frozen in a mask of total confusion and terror.
Without her anchor, what would become of her station?
Around them, the Lu family servants stared at their frantic master and hysterical mistress, their own internal logic loops spiraling into absolute chaos.
