Chapter 98: Massage
After struggling for most of the day, Lu Yunxi and her team finally defeated the toad and cleared the dungeon.
The moment they stepped out of the instance layer, she completely ignored the man and the dragon panting in sheer exhaustion beside her. She immediately initialized her internal interface to check the global timer.
Ten full years had bled away inside the dungeon, but barely a single year had elapsed in the macro holographic world!
Yes!
Over the course of that year, her parameters had scaled from Level 71 to Level 87. She no longer had to constantly fret over her survival metrics! With her current attribute allocation, she possessed the raw power to easily dominate any continent on the map.
Scanning the regional leaderboard, she noted that aside from her own apprentice, not a single outworld player had mathematically broken past the Master-tier threshold yet. She couldn’t help but burst into a triumphant, ringing laugh.
Beside her, the young warrior and the infant frost dragon exchanged a look, a flicker of genuine worry crossing their eyes.
“Master, what has triggered such amusement?” Shen San asked hesitantly. Could it be that Master was gridlocked inside that instance for too long and her mind has finally snapped?
“Haha… hic!“
She opened her mouth to fabricate a seamless excuse, but the syllable caught in her throat, followed by a sharp, involuntary convulsion. She couldn’t stop hiccuping!
Lu Yunxi hiccuped with such violent intensity that Shen San’s chest tightened with distress. He frantically retrieved a flask of premium mountain spring water he had boiled earlier, carefully holding the rim to her lips to guide a few sips down her throat.
Unfortunately, the ancient folk remedy of chugging water to shock the diaphragm yielded zero results against her current condition. She managed to down half the flask, filling her stomach until she felt uncomfortably bloated, yet the rhythmic spasms continued to rattle her frame.
Curse it all! Is this the literal definition of being driven to sorrow by overjoy? If I had known the system would punish my hubris, I never would have laughed so arrogantly!
She tightly pressed her hands against her chest, attempting to manually soothe the localized pain.
“Master,” Shen San murmured, his anxiety mounting the longer he observed her distress. He anchored her shoulder with one hand while using his free palm to gently pat her back. “Perhaps we should navigate toward a local medical clinic and have a physician run a diagnostic scan?”
Lu Yunxi attempted to cycle her recovery arts on her own sheet, but high-tier healing mechanics were mathematically designed to restore missing vitality points; the system code simply didn’t recognize minor, non-lethal ailments like hiccups.
Beholding her pale, strained features, Shen San felt a wave of profound discomfort wash over his own system. Reaching into his spatial backpack, he materialized a compact travel cot, scooped her up in a flawless bridal carry, and settled her frame onto the mattress.
This narrow single cot had been thrown into his inventory purely for mechanical convenience during his solo travels. The frame was rigid and the cushioning was thin, making it an incredibly unforgiving surface to rest on. He hadn’t thought twice about the quality when he purchased the blueprint, but seeing his master draped across such a spartan setup filled him with intense remorse. She was a grandmaster entity; her model deserved to be anchored to the most luxurious, opulent, and comfortable bedding the server could render, not this miserable wooden plank.
“Xiaolong, maintain a strict guard perimeter around Master,” Shen San commanded, directing his focus to the infant leviathan. The little blue dragon offered a firm nod, curling its tail tightly around the foot of the cot.
“Master, rest your mind here for a moment.” He carefully tucked the heavy winter quilt around her shoulders, offering a few more soothing pats to her back, his voice incredibly soft.
Lu Yunxi watched him execute a high-speed movement skill, his silhouette blurring as he vanished into the tree line. Too exhausted to question his destination, she simply closed her eyes, fighting the grunting sounds forcing their way past her lips. Surely the spasms will deactivate once my consciousness drops offline into sleep, she reasoned.
Watching his mistress rest, Xiaolong tucked its snout beneath its wings and drifted off to sleep on the edge of the blanket.
“Master?”
Hearing Shen San’s voice echo through the chamber, Lu Yunxi clamped a hand over her chest and forced her eyes open. The continuous contractions had been far too violent, rendering sleep an absolute impossibility.
“I’ve sourced several varieties of refined sugar from the local market. Please, sample a portion,” Shen San urged, meticulously arranging an array of paper parcels on the bedside crate so she could test each remedy sequentially.
The regional database held an absolute mess of conflicting folk remedies for metabolic spasms. Drinking fresh spring water was merely the baseline option; other data tracks suggested raw sugar, concentrated vinegar, or strong herbal teas. The sheer volume of methods was overwhelming.
By the time Lu Yunxi had forced herself to sample the chaotic assortment of items, her spasms hadn’t shifted a single millimeter, and her mental state had thoroughly plummeted. The raw flavors were utterly vile. Most of the remedies were nothing more than common kitchen seasonings; consuming raw vinegar and dry sugar format was a sensory nightmare.
Dejected by her miserable expression, Shen San began frantically dumping his entire inventory onto the floor, searching for any high-tier potions he might have stockpiled. But the absolute elite of his alchemy stash had been personally synthesized by her own hands, meaning those formulas offered zero utility against this specific debuff.
Watching her suffer, Shen San felt a heavy weight settle onto his chest, desperately wishing his own character sheet could absorb the penalty on her behalf. He gently wrapped an arm around her shoulders, drawing her upper body against his tunic as he continued to pat her back.
Lu Yunxi leaned heavily against his chest, her breathing turning shallow from the sheer discomfort as the color drained from her face.
Realizing her vital parameters were flagging, Shen San abandoned the campsite. Lifting her onto his back, he navigated the mountain trail with absolute, rock-solid stability, sprinting toward the coordinates of the nearest commercial town.
Inside the local medical clinic, the elderly physician’s expression cycled from intense gravity to absolute relaxation. Shen San’s internal anxiety mirrored the shifts, rising and falling with every change in the doctor’s eyes.
“Doctor, what is the diagnosis?” he demanded frantically the exact second the old man withdrew his fingers from her wrist.
“Young traveler, clear your panic,” the physician chuckled, a teasing gleam dancing in his cloudy eyes. “Your wife’s baseline parameters are perfectly secure. The continuous spasms are merely the byproduct of a sudden, intense emotional spike altering her internal energy loops. There is no need to waste resources on heavy medicinal brews. Simply administer a targeted meridian massage later this evening, and the condition will resolve itself.”
The statement contained a massive amount of uncalibrated data, causing Shen San to visibly choke. “My… my wife? No, your tracking is mistaken, she isn’t my—wait, what exactly does a meridian massage entail?”
“A massage is simply…” The old physician paused, scratching his head as he struggled to translate the medical jargon for an outworlder. “Hold a moment. I will demonstrate the kinetic vectors on the bronze acupuncture model, and your mind will comprehend the pathing.”
After tracking the doctor’s precise manual demonstrations with a look of pure astonishment, Shen San’s posture turned deeply awkward. “Is there truly no secondary mechanical alternative? This specific routing seems… incredibly intimate.”
He felt a massive headache coming on. Given the strict boundaries governing physical contact between men and women within this classical world lore, executing such a technique felt highly inappropriate.
“The massage protocol is entirely optional,” the physician replied easily, shuffling his tools. “We could attempt an intense course of acupuncture needles instead, though the success rate for shifting energy blocks is significantly lower.”
The comatose Lu Yunxi snapped upright at the mention of the needles. “Absolutely not! I refuse the needles! We are choosing the massage!”
“Master… is the pressure calibrated correctly? Does this angle ease the tension?”
Shen San kept his left hand flat, carefully massaging the lower quadrants of Lu Yunxi’s abdomen. Mechanically speaking, the physician’s data trace required him to manipulate the meridian points situated directly beneath her chest panel, but that location was far too awkward for him to navigate. Deflecting the pathing, he chose to focus his movements strictly across her lower stomach.
Lu Yunxi lay flat on the mattress, tracing the intense, radiating warmth seeping from his palm deep into her core. The violent urge to hiccup steadily weakened with every rotation. Her eyelids fluttered for a few minutes before her features relaxed, and she slowly drifted into a deep sleep.
Watching her parameters finally stabilize, Shen San let out a long, sweeping breath of relief. The suffocating awkwardness gridlocking his movements instantly unraveled. He shook out his aching arms, which had grown rigid from pure, unadulterated nervousness. Once his muscles loosened, he returned his palm to her stomach, maintaining the steady, rhythmic strokes.
As his hand moved, the final traces of strain vanished from her face, replaced by a soft, serene smile.
He covertly exhaled. He hadn’t anticipated that a folk remedy that appeared so primitive on the bronze model would yield such flawless empirical results.
But as the midnight hours deepened, his internal thoughts began to warp. Looking down at how seamlessly his master had succumbed to sleep, a strange trace of depression touched his mind.
Inside the isolated inn chamber, a lone man and a beautiful woman were entirely sequestered, the ambient candlelight casting long, intimate shadows across the walls. Amidst such an ambiguous atmosphere, his master possessed zero awareness of his masculine presence, slumping into a state of total, defenseless relaxation. Did her programming simply hold an absolute, infinite store of trust toward his account… or did her AI genuinely fail to categorize him as a man?
Letting out a heavy, slightly frustrated sigh, he forced every distracting thought out of his consciousness, focusing his entire mechanical output back onto the massage.
The following morning.
Lu Yunxi stared at her apprentice, whose eyes were heavily bloodshot and rimmed with dark shadows, and a rare wave of profound guilt washed over her. She hadn’t anticipated that the brat would take his filial duties to such an extreme, staying awake through the entire night cycle just to maintain her meridian therapy.
She aggressively pushed him toward the mattress. “Shen San, drop your rotation and sleep immediately. Our party will anchor at this inn for the next seven days. We are not moving a single step until our stamina bars are fully restored.”
A seven-day block in the simulation granted him ample time to sever his feed, return to the physical plane, and catch up on his real-world sleep schedule.
Shen San hesitated for a fraction of a second, but before he could voice a single objection, she forcefully shoved his massive frame onto the bed, bringing his arguments to an absolute halt.
Interstellar Empire, Capital Planet, The Fu Estate.
The youngest scion of the Fu family sat lounged across the designer sofa, lazily consuming a plate of premium fruit, when his eyes widened. His third brother was actively unlatching the canopy of his military-grade immersion capsule and stepping out into the room!
Had this been an isolated incident, he wouldn’t have flagged the data. But over the course of this academic furlough, his third brother had systematically logged offline every single day, maintaining a bizarrely disciplined, civilian routine: executing physical morning drills, reading in the study by afternoon, and logging off to sleep precisely on schedule every evening.
Staring at his elder brother, who had settled onto the adjacent cushion with a book and a distinctly soft smile on his lips, the youth leaned forward to audit the stack of reading materials resting on the marble table.
The Imperial Fashion Almanac, Six Elegant Spring Braid Matrices, The Aesthetics of Textile Harmony…
Scanning the bizarre titles, the younger brother felt his sanity slipping.
What under the sun is happening to his brain? This was Fu Jinheng! The notorious martial fanatic who treated personal attire as entirely irrelevant, wearing the exact same standard-issue tactical suits every day of his life! Why on earth was a decorated officer analyzing hairdo layouts and textile combinations? Worse, why was he smiling so fields of flowers were blooming in his background?
“Third brother?” he asked tentatively, reaching out to pat his shoulder.
In the next micro-second, his vision blurred. A cold, lethal glare locked onto his coordinates, and his arm was violently pinned behind his back in a high-precision submission hold.
“Argh—! Sweet mother of stars! Let go!” the youth howled in agony, desperately massaging his shoulder the instant the grip uncoiled. Historically, his third brother’s close-quarters combat metrics were legendary, but the man had spent the last year entirely sequestered inside a video game capsule; how on earth were his physical reflexes still outscaling a heavily trained military cadet?
“Third brother, it’s just me!” he whined.
Fu Jinheng blinked, the icy focus fading from his dark eyes as he recognized his foolish sibling. For a split second, his battle instincts had classified the touch as an enemy ambush. “What is the purpose of your stealth approach?”
“Hehe… Third brother, your search history has been entirely occupied by high-end tailoring, cosmetic palettes, and luxury accessories lately,” the youth grinned, entirely forgetting his physical trauma as he nudged Jinheng’s ribs. “Spill the data. Has your account finally locked down a girlfriend?”
Fu Jinheng’s eye twitched violently as he dismissed his brother’s prying. “Cease your ridiculous theories. My station is currently executing standard research… regarding how to construct high-tier garments for my martial master.”
“Your master? Absolute garbage! Why would a research project for a martial mentor make your face wear a smile that disgustingly sweet?!”
The younger Fu didn’t buy the narrative for a single second.
Although Jinheng continuously praised the flawless beauty and omnipotent attributes of his master during family dinners, no one had ever verified her visual data. Within his mind, his brother’s master was likely an elite, terrifyingly powerful old matriarch, or perhaps a hidden, middle-aged system administrator.
It was mathematically impossible for a warrior to wear a grin that deeply infatuated while designing robes for an elderly legacy NPC!
“Third brother, save your fabrications. That smile just now… tsk, tsk, tsk. Your data is completely compromised.”
