Chapter 96: No Rollover
Half a month later.
Lu Yunxi and Shen San boarded their carriage. As they passed a small wooden hut near the city’s outer perimeter, the sharp sounds of a bitter argument drifted through the walls.
“What do you think you’re doing?! Do you still think you’re the young master of the Lu family?! We only have two plates left in this entire house! If you break another one, we won’t even have anything to serve food on! From now on, you get one dish a day, and that’s it!”
“Didn’t you promise to buy me some chicken to build up my strength? I’m pregnant! I’m carrying the next generation of the Lu family in my belly!”
“Master, please, find someone to save my son! I dreamed he was crying for me!”
The voices gradually faded into the distance as the carriage rolled past.
Lu Yunxi and Shen San exchanged a knowing smile. Without looking back, they left Jinzhou behind, their figures dissolving into the warm afterglow of the setting sun.
“Master, are we still heading straight to Huzhou next?” Shen San looked up from the regional map he had purchased, glancing softly at his master. She was staring out the window, completely lost in thought.
Although the Lu family had finally gotten their comeuppance, his master hadn’t seemed particularly cheerful since they hit the road. It was understandable. She still had no concrete clues as to where her aunt had been sold; she had only heard rumors pointing toward Huzhou. What if the person they found there wasn’t the one she was looking for?
Lu Yunxi rubbed her temples tiredly, completely unaware of her apprentice’s internal fretting.
In truth, she was simply exhausted. A child’s body drained of stamina far more quickly than she had anticipated. While orchestrating the Lu family’s downfall had only taken a few hours of actual execution, she had spent the rest of her time constantly awake, monitoring the fallout. Her small frame was practically begging for sleep.
Yet, she forced herself to stay awake because the landscape of the Water Continent’s interior was breathtaking. While the map seemed to be an endless network of ponds and streams, every body of water they encountered possessed its own unique aesthetic. She saw lakes as perfectly smooth as mirrors, pools of crystal-clear water, and then—
A colossal waterfall materialized ahead.
Lu Yunxi’s sleepy eyes snapped wide open. Beside her, Shen San instantly looked up, staring in awe at the magnificent cascade.
The waterfall was staggeringly high, easily matching the scale of a hundred modern buildings stacked together, and it stretched so far across the cliff face that they couldn’t see the end of it. As they drew closer, the thunderous roar of crashing water filled their ears, and a crisp, biting chill rolled over them.
Even though it was only mid-spring and the ambient air was already quite cool, the sheer majesty of the sight drew them in, and they eagerly approached the base.
“Master, look!” Shen San’s Master-tier perception nodes gave him incredibly sharp vision. Spotting something concealed behind the torrent, he pointed toward the lower section of the falls.
Lu Yunxi followed his finger, squinting through the mist for a long time before she could faintly discern a dark, ambiguous shape behind the wall of water.
“What is that? A hidden treasure chest?” She frowned, her face a mask of confusion.
“It looks like a cave entrance. Concealing a node directly behind a waterfall… the level design here is brilliant, isn’t it?” Caught up in his excitement, Shen San accidentally blurted out a phrase he shouldn’t have.
“Like the Water Curtain Cave from Flower-Fruit Mountain?” she asked subconsciously.
“What? What mountain?” Shen San didn’t catch her words over the roar of the water. Assuming she was simply confirming his discovery, he nodded rapidly. “Yes, it’s a cave, definitely!”
She didn’t bother explaining her reference. Instead, she looked up at him with eager, shining eyes. “Shall we go in and explore?”
He nodded instantly, his eyes bright with thrill. Ancient was packed with so many hidden secrets! This was a style of gameplay he had never encountered before. Although he had participated in high-stakes exploration missions on actual alien planets in the real world, those had always been rigid, military-mandated deployments. It had never been anywhere near this fun.
Familiar with the routine, Lu Yunxi nimbly vaulted into his arms.
Shen San caught her securely, stored their carriage back into his inventory, and began using the slick, protruding boulders beneath the falls as stepping stones to leap upward. Dodging through the heavy, roaring curtain of water, the two successfully cleared the threshold, landing on the stone floor completely drenched.
After ducking behind their respective privacy screens to swap into dry clothes, they began navigating the interior.
The cavern was pitch-black, but thankfully it lacked any foul or stagnant odors. Shen San retrieved the glowing night pearl from his spatial backpack and gently placed it in her tiny arms before scooping her back up, guiding them deeper into the subterranean tunnels.
Tick… tock…
The rhythmic sound of dripping water echoed continuously through the dark.
As they rounded a sharp bend, a blinding flash of white light erupted directly ahead, and the clinical, familiar chime of a system notification filled their audio feeds.
Lu Yunxi lunged backward, desperately trying to leap clear of the trigger zone to avoid entering another instance! But her miniature motor skills were a fraction of a second too slow. By the time her boots hit the stone floor, the geometry had already shifted, rendering a brand-new instance dungeon around them.
“…”
The master and disciple stood in grim silence, staring down at the compact bamboo raft beneath their feet. A winding, subterranean river stretched out before them, the raft slowly drifting forward with the gentle current. Their expressions turned profoundly dark.
Their agonizing experience in the lake dungeon still felt like a fresh trauma. The reality of falling face-first into a secondary instance immediately after clearing the last one left them thoroughly miserable.
“Another one? Let’s just hope the level cap on this boss isn’t hard-coded to Level 90.”
Shen San’s grip around Lu Yunxi tightened slightly, a subtle wave of mechanical unease settling deep into his chest.
Time flowed like water, and in the blink of an eye, five years bled away.
Fortunately, Lu Yunxi had deduced early on that the temporal flow inside instance layers operated under a severe time-dilation modifier. While five full years had ticked away within the dungeon boundaries, barely half a year had actually elapsed in the macro holographic world. Otherwise, she would have been driven mad with worry over her real-world timeline.
Shen San had naturally figured this out even sooner through his player interface, but he couldn’t share that data with his master. If he did, she would inevitably question how a native resident possessed knowledge of server architecture, and he had no logical lie to offer. Consequently, over the course of those five long years, his focus had been entirely consumed by monitoring her psychological stability. He had silently resolved that if her emotional metrics ever hit a fatal breaking point, he would confess the truth about the simulation regardless of the consequences.
Yet, to his immense anxiety, his master remained entirely calm, poised, and unbothered throughout the years.
Had she thrown hysterical tantrums, broken down sobbing, or aggressively pounded the cavern floor in frustration, he would have accepted it as a normal psychological reaction. But her absolute serenity was profoundly unnatural! To be locked within a claustrophobic, isolated instance for five continuous years without a single structural breakdown was impossible for a standard mind.
She must be internalizing an unimaginable volume of psychological trauma, he reasoned. Especially since the exact moment her mushroom debuff had expired a year ago and her physical model restored to its true height, she had thrown herself into grinding mobs alongside him with ferocious intensity, rapidly shattering her own caps to ascend to the Master tier. To his eyes, her explosive power spike was the textbook definition of a psychological breakthrough triggered by extreme emotional distress. She was a native AI, after all; such trauma must have warped her parameters!
Registering the intense, unblinking glare fixed on her profile from the side, Lu Yunxi finally let out a heavy sigh. This brat had been staring at her with that exact same look of profound, tragic pity for five straight years. Even if she were a high-tier criminal under maximum surveillance, this level of scrutiny was ridiculous.
“Shen San, why do your eyes keep tracking my form like that?” She raised an eyebrow, deliberately adopting a frivolous, teasing drawl reminiscent of a street rogue cornering a young maiden. “Well? Have you gone and fallen in love with your master?”
Shen San froze. His brain stalled as he processed her tone. Why on earth is she talking like that?!
In an instant, his head snapped down, an intense, fiery blush creeping across his face as his ears turned bright red.
Beholding her apprentice’s rare, thoroughly flustered display of pure innocence, Lu Yunxi’s eyebrows shot up in genuine surprise. She hadn’t anticipated that the towering warrior would be this easily rattled. Then again, replaying his background lore, his family was impoverished, and the poor boy likely spent his real-world cycles struggling to secure basic sustenance. How could he possibly have found the leisure to navigate romantic dynamics?
It took a long moment before Shen San could compose himself. Raising his face, he offered her a helpless, self-deprecating smile. “Master, please don’t tease me. I am simply… deeply concerned for your well-being.”
“Save your worry,” she replied serenely, effortlessly reading the underlying anxiety in his eyes. “Forget a mere five years—even if this realm keeps us locked away for a decade or two, my spirit will not waver.”
Lacking the vocabulary to explain that she was entirely aware of the server mechanics, she could only use her calm demeanor to anchor him.
“Let’s move,” she commanded, paying zero heed to his searching gaze as she hoisted her legendary gold bow. The sudden movement caught the hem of her cloak, causing the fabric to snap sharply against the wind. “Time for another attempt.”
They had finally mapped their way to the absolute final gateway of the dungeon. As long as they successfully dismantled the Level 80 boss idling ahead, the clearance protocol would trigger, and they would be free! The mere thought of finally exiting this subterranean prison sent a thrill of pure excitement through her chest.
They had spent five agonizing years navigating this instance layer. Outside of the initial year required for her debuff to clear so she could reclaim her true stature and attributes, their entire existence had been a non-stop loop of clearing trash mobs and hitting a mechanical wall at the final gate. Fortunately, the boss’s tether radius was strictly fixed to a specific zone; whenever their health pools dipped dangerously low mid-fight, they could rapidly execute a tactical retreat. The moment they cleared the aggro boundary, the boss would immediately reset and abandon the chase.
By systematically leveraging this hit-and-run strategy over the last few years, the two of them had managed to safely survive the elite map.
Shen San gripped his heavy broadsword, instantly falling into step behind her.
The duo marched into the final chamber, confronting the ultimate guardian once more. Lu Yunxi fluidly drew her bowstring and loosed a glowing arrow, the projectile slicing through the gloom to initiate the encounter.
Sensing the incoming threat, the colossal toad’s eyes flared with predatory intent, and its massive tongue whipped across the space with cracking velocity.
This time, their execution was flawless. Both of them had successfully scaled their attributes to Level 79; working in perfect, synchronized harmony, a Level 80 elite monster no longer possessed the raw defensive stats to overwhelm their rotations.
Lu Yunxi monitored the boss’s health bar as it systematically plummeted under their combined assault, offering a tight, satisfied nod. Their victory was mathematically assured.
However, the exact millisecond before the final strike landed, a bright crimson system prompt flashed directly across the center of their interfaces:
[Ding—A male and female combatant have executed a synchronized deployment within the core instance. Congratulations on triggering the hidden legacy parameters: ‘The Trial of Lovers.’ The World Boss’s attributes have scaled upward, and the clearance rewards have been doubled.]
