The Walk-in Closet Safehouse CH26
Chapter 26: 0.5 of a Person
Inside the quiet safety of her [Walk-in Closet], Cui Ye was actively dry-chewing a block of instant noodles. Alternating between aggressive crunching and continuous gulps of water, she had systematically torn through three raw packages back-to-back. Despite that, she had only managed to reach a state of being semi-full, and her stomach simply didn’t have much room left for further intake.
Right as she was weighing whether to use a premium [Food Voucher] or clean out her absolute final tin of spam, her ears caught someone frantically screaming her username. The vocal frequency registered as slightly familiar, but before her brain could accurately identify the person, her system interface flashed to life.
[System: Your former teammate, He Fangzhou, has entered critical health parameters. Your former teammate, Wang Wei, has shouted your username in a state of absolute despair, triggering a Randomized Urgent Mission: "The Hero Saves the Beauty, Divine Justice Descends From Above." (Pending Acceptance)]
Hunkered down along her sofa bed, Cui Ye stared blankly: "???"
"Sitting peacefully inside her own safe house while a mission literally cascaded straight out of the heavens"—since when did the system organize such convenient rescue runs?
A single glance over the mission description confirmed that the trigger for the event was anchored directly to Wang Wei. This specific "scream" was clearly not a literal, acoustic vocalization traversing the map; the guy had obviously deployed a highly specialized utility item.
Analyzing the severely restricted mission data provided by her interface, Cui Ye habitually dissected every individual word. Imagining out He Fangzhou’s certified campus-idol facial features, alongside Wang Wei’s fair and delicate complexion, and then stacking them side-by-side with the mission title "The Hero Saves the Beauty, Divine Justice Descends From Above," she derived a highly specific narrative in her head. Had some roguish, hyper-dominant female tyrant locked eyes on their physical aesthetics and attempted to forcibly conscript them into her personal harem? Then, upon witnessing that they'd rather face demise than submit, descended into a manic, ego-shattered rage, resolving to execute a sequence of unspeakable violations? Had He Fangzhou been the first to fall, leaving a desperate Wang Wei to thrash in shattered agony until—finally consumed by raw grief and panic—he deployed an emergency item to summon external firepower?
Cui Ye clicked her tongue repeatedly: "Tsk, tsk, tsk..."
While a vivid melodrama played out inside her mind, Cui Ye’s physical limbs didn't miss a single beat. She shed her heavy lounge garments, quickly donning her white hiking jacket, specialized ski goggles, and equipping her primary stat-boosting gear set.
Because she had only just deployed her Safe House a brief window ago, it could not be recalled into her inventory so soon. Although the exterior facade of the [Walk-in Closet] looked exceptionally rustic, plain, and mundane—minimizing the risk of drawing external surveillance—she still opted to take a few extra precautions. Cui Ye dropped the [Blood Blade] and the hot pink [High Heels] into the reflection of her dual mirrors, then slipped out of her safe house, bursting into a high-velocity sprint toward the residential sector.
As for how she maintained a flawless lock on the target's exact coordinates? That was entirely thanks to her talent [Friendly Tip], which was actively projecting a golden path directly across her vision overlay. The directional navigation icon was rendered as a literal, glowing "￥" currency character. Radiant, bright-gold, and shifting dynamically against the torrential rain, the icon was profoundly eye-catching and scored massive points with her personal aesthetic preferences.
While Cui Ye was aggressively tearing through the map under the direct downpour, Wang Wei—having fully expended his [Summoning Talisman]—was staring out the reinforced viewport with an expression of pure, unadulterated panic. Behind him, He Fangzhou lay completely comatose.
Outside his safe house, a dense wave of entities was relentlessly hammering against the structure. Even though their external anatomy looked completely indistinguishable from baseline civilians, the grotesquely exaggerated grins plastered across their faces and their vacant, dead eyes left no doubt that they were no longer human.
Precisely as tracked, Wang Wei had bound a specialized [Grotto] Safe House to his character profile. Aside from his own interface, only He Fangzhou possessed clearance for these coordinates—though a third party was poised to crash the perimeter very shortly.
He was caught in a severe psychological paradox: fiercely praying that Cui Ye would materialize on the field, while simultaneously agonizing over the reality that she might lack the raw firepower to dismantle this death trap, effectively dragging her down into the exact same slaughterhouse. But above all else, he fundamentally did not want to "log out" of the server!
He was currently drowning in a wave of profound regret for failing to manually override He Fangzhou’s queue when the latter accepted that randomized mission to migrate over to Residential Building 11 to resolve a localized "complication." What part of this disaster qualified as a mere complication?! This zone was a literal temple of the King of Hell!
Worse, the pair of them had attempted to play the role of elite stealth players, bypassing the standard entry points to execute an unconventional infiltration via an "ice ladder" conjured by He Fangzhou's talent, breaching directly through the eleventh-floor balcony.
The exact millisecond their boots hit the ten-meter sensory grid of the zone, their structural signatures were exposed before they could even establish a stable footing. They sustained an immediate, catastrophic ambush. He Fangzhou, whose stat build was completely unsuited for close-quarters combat, was systematically beaten down within seconds. The instant Wang Wei watched the enemy entity extract a bizarre birdcage from his inventory, his danger parameters spiked violently. He deployed his Safe House directly onto the balcony and dragged He Fangzhou's unconscious frame into the interior cavity.
Wang Wei’s vision was locked onto his structural durability logs in a vice-like grip. He vividly recalled a central military command bulletin stating that the exact moment a Safe House hit the fifty percent damage threshold, the primary entry door would suffer a total mechanical fail-state, stripping the unit of its ability to deny entry to external threats. And once its structural durability degraded to zero percent, the entire asset would be wiped from the server grid permanently, rendering future maintenance impossible.
Right now, his structural durability log registered a grim 41% total damage—and right before his eyes, the digit clicked upward to 42%. He funneled every single remaining gold coin in his wallet to force emergency repairs, but the transaction merely bought him a couple of minutes of breathing room.
Even with the [Grotto]’s base thirty percent defense multiplier—which scaled his Level 2 Safe House up to a formidable baseline of 260 defense points—and despite him specifically selecting a defensive upgrade path that added a reinforced outer perimeter of solid rock walls, the structure was failing to withstand the sheer onslaught of entities hammering against it. These entities possessed zero pain thresholds and knew absolutely no exhaustion.
Within Wang Wei’s field of vision, the circular glass viewport was smeared a sickening crimson with raw human flesh. The primary wave of "door-knockers" had already been completely drained of blood, collapsing into limp heaps along the concrete—yet the thudding vibrations against the stone walls merely paused for a microsecond before resuming with undiminished force.
The source of the onslaught lay just a short distance away. Wen Qiu was handling his marionette arrays with casual, hyper-calculated precision. Operating with split-brain efficiency, he directed one cluster of puppets to assist his younger sister in pinning down the rifle-wielding military personnel down the hall, while simultaneously commanding another cluster to continue dismantling Wang Wei's stone safe house.
"Arrogant newbies out of their depth," he sneered internally. Dismantling these low-tier rookies required zero expenditure of his premium inventory assets; the map was loaded with free, self-replenishing "consumables". Very shortly, he would successfully harvest his third unique talent user, marking the official halfway point of the overarching directive assigned to him and his sister by their Master. The operation was unfolding infinitely more smoothly than initial simulations had mapped out. If they managed to over-deliver on their harvest quotas for this server, the baseline resource tier allocated to their build by the guild might scale up an entire grade!
Wen Qiu could practically visualize the profound approval radiating from his Master's gaze and the premium resource arrays resting right within his palm. Shifting his eyes back toward the cowardly turtle currently lingering on life support inside that stone box, his expression twisted into a feral, sadistic grimace.
The last of his patience evaporated entirely. He aggressively dialed up the burn rate of his human consumables, forcing a sudden, rhythmic acceleration of heavy impacts against the stone fortress. The [Grotto]’s structural durability took a massive hit, leaping violently to 47% damage sustained.
Watching the interface log tick down to its final three percent of safety margin, Wang Wei completely abandoned all hope. His brain locked onto a grim, clinical calculation: would executing a swift self-termination via his own blade be a cleaner checkout, or would allowing the entities outside to breach his door yield a far more agonizing demise?
The terminal despair paralyzing Wang Wei inside the bunker was mirrored by a corresponding spike of manic euphoria radiating from Wen Qiu outside. A burst of bizarre, high-pitched laughter echoed down the corridor—and then hit an instantaneous, dead stop.
Catching a severe anomaly in her peripheral vision, Wen He didn't even have the time to scream her brother's username before a terrifying, deep-purple bruise manifested violently around her throat. The constriction clamped down with crushing force, the bones in her neck emitting a low, distinct grinding sound as if they were poised to snap the very next microsecond.
A wave of suffocation paralyzed her motor control. Her hands trembling violently, Wen He whipped out a premium potion vial in a desperate bid to down the fluid, but her heart suddenly sustained a brutal, internal rupture. A massive spray of fresh blood erupted from her lips. Her balance shattered completely, sending her crashing limply onto the concrete floor as the potion slipped from her fingers and shattered against the ground.
Wen He thrashed weakly, attempting to prop herself upward. The pristine white wings anchored to her back dissolved into raw pixels, her holy radiance washing out into nothingness. She clawed desperately toward the fluid spilling across the ground, but a high-caliber rifle round cleanly punched straight through her palm. A sharp shriek of agony was instantly choked out by her hemorrhaged throat, reducing her voice to a sequence of wet wheezes. Her eyes, burning with a venomous, absolute hatred, locked directly onto the military captain charging down the line.
The human wall previously directed by the marionette strings collapsed like a deck of cards, and the sleep-inducing holy light completely evaporated from the corridor. The captain, being the first officer to fully shake off the cognitive suppression, instantly executed a tactical follow-up shot. Truthfully, his crosshairs had been locked directly onto her skull, but the target was equipped with a premium iron helmet built to absorb high-velocity impacts. Factoring in the reality that a standard round might fail to achieve a clean headshot, he dynamically adjusted his aim to cripple her remaining mobility.
The captain's battlefield deduction proved flawlessly accurate—that iron helmet was indeed a high-tier defensive item. Yet, merely denying her immediate access to her medical inventory didn't translate to a total shutdown of her extraction capabilities.
Wen He and her older brother operated under a high-tier blessing bestowed by their Master, allowing them to perfectly share a unified health pool and evenly distribute all incoming damage across both stat sheets. As long as she retained a single hit point, her brother possessed a built-in mechanism for a total combat reset. She just had to execute an immediate map extraction!
Because both siblings subscribed to highly fragile, "glass-cannon build" archetypes, they had funneled a massive volume of their career capital into hoarding premium escape mechanics. Throughout their previous runs, they had occasionally been forced into blind tactical retreats, but even inside high-difficulty, mid-tier servers, they had never been reduced to a state this profoundly pathetic!
Which exact veteran guild had deployed an elite hit squad to ambush them in a low-tier map?! Utilizing three [Teleportation Talismans] back-to-back, Wen He fled the zone without daring to look back even once, a sequence of high-tier usernames flashing across her consciousness—ranging from active rival guilds to previous targets they had backstabbed but failed to cleanly silence. Their career log spanned nearly ten completed game servers; their list of enemies was so astronomically dense that she lacked the data to isolate the architect of her ruin.
Meanwhile, back at the ambush site, Cui Ye was scanning the corpse to confirm the kill. The 60 second timer on her [Invisibility Potion] had officially expired, forcing her form to materialize back into the corridor.
Gazing down at the neutralized corpse—or rather, the hollow wooden puppet resting by her boots—she stared at her flashing system notification:
[Eliminated Player: Wen Qiu (1/2). Server Kill count updated: 1.5]
"???"
Because the entity was constructed out of raw timber, the server algorithm only counted him as half a human being? Since when did the system support decimal-based homicides? Staring intently at that bizarre "1.5" tally on her leaderboard interface, Cui Ye froze in a deep cognitive lock.
Operating under intense paranoia that these veteran players carried hidden defensive loops, she had deliberately chosen a starting position completely outside his ten-meter sensory perimeter before executing a maximum-velocity sprint. At five meters, her boots cleared the balcony threshold. At three meters, her linen necklace passive went completely live. At two meters, she unsheathed her blade, driving her full momentum into a single, fatal thrust.
She had ensured the entire sequence—decapitation and cardiac puncture—cleared within a flat, single-second window.
To ensure against any anatomical anomalies—such as the target possessing a right-sided heart—she had fully intended to drive a follow-up thrust into the opposite side of his chest out of sheer professional respect. Who could have anticipated that the dwarf’s heart would behave so traditionally, remaining perfectly seated in its standard position? Before she could even deploy her secondary stroke, the entity had already logged out of the server.
If a hyper-ventilating Wen He, fleeing blindly through the downpour, realized her brother had died so fast that it spared his corpse a secondary mutilation, it remained highly debatable whether she would feel profoundly moved or simply grind her molars to dust.
Lacking any data on the "Puppet" siblings, Cui Ye remained thoroughly perplexed by her decimal kill score until Wang Wei's voice cleanly cut through her thoughts. Surveying her surroundings, she noted the arrival of several people—the military detachment that had been lured to the area by the [Crying Cicada] a couple of nights prior.
Aside from this dozen-plus military squad, every single civilian who had collapsed onto the floorboards was dead. Not a single target survived.
The captain formulated this grim conclusion with a cold, unreadable expression. Following a manual diagnostic sweep, his data confirmed that every individual previously ensnared by Wen Qiu’s marionette strings had completely ceased all vital signs. Their bodies were already entering a state of advanced rigor mortis, precisely mirroring corpses that had been dead for hours.
He immediately patched his findings through to central command over his secure line. The radio speaker instantly crackled back with a direct, high-tier mandate: authorize total incineration of the remains immediately to prevent the biological tissue from sustaining viral mutation and converting into active water monsters.
The captain deliberately broadcasted this operational command right in front of Cui Ye and Wang Wei. Noticing the flash of visible surprise written on their faces, he provided a calm explanation:
"During a previous logistics run, a group of our fallen soldiers underwent sudden biological reanimation mid-transit. Because our perimeter teams had zero preparation for that anomaly, it triggered a massive wave of casualties. While not every corpse triggers a mutation, we must enforce a uniform destruction policy as a mandatory safety protocol."
Hearing this, Cui Ye and Wang Wei fell into a long, solemn silence. Though they had initially intended to clear their mission parameters and immediately exit the area, both individuals chose to remain on the field to assist the military squad in purging the zone.
As the operational chaos was brought under control, the echoes of raw grief began rippling through the area once more. The Wen siblings' perimeter hadn't covered the entire corridor; nearly half the civilians had successfully broken through during the initial panic, fleeing to other floors. Upon receiving confirmation that the threat had been neutralized, they began trickling back to the eleventh floor in small clusters, only to discover their family and friends stacked among the dead. The trauma of their sudden loss was impossible to suppress.
Cui Ye stepped inside the residential unit, her eyes locking onto a highly anomalous birdcage resting in the center of the floorboards. The cage was aggressively wrapped in thick, jagged thorns, and trapped inside were two severely blood-stained sparrows.
She maintained a careful distance until a vibrant green system prompt blossomed across her vision. Only then did she reach down to unlatch the mechanism. The second the door swung free, the two sparrows mutated back into human form, collapsing heavily onto the floorboards. Their garments were shredded to rags, their skin caked in dense layers of blood and grime. Fortunately, an analytical scan confirmed the injuries were strictly superficial rather than terminal. She had initially intended to flag down a nearby soldier to handle the survivors, but pivoted, using her interface to summon a military medical officer instead.
As for the birdcage itself? She quietly claimed it as her finders-fee for providing them an express medical dispatch. Under the unblinking surveillance of the two stationed soldiers in the room, she cleanly swept the asset straight into her inventory.
[Thorn Birdcage: Unlatch the primary gate, aim the array directly at your target, and execute a loud verbal shout. As long as the target entity provides an acoustic response, the mechanism will instantly vacuum them into the interior cavity, compressing their anatomy into a standard small bird.]
Cui Ye: "..."
Are you absolutely certain this isn't a blatant copyright infringement of the Purple Gold Gourd from Journey to the West? You should watch your step; the original authors might slap you with a massive lawsuit.
[Randomized Mission: "The Hero Saves the Beauty, Divine Justice Descends From Above." (Completed)]
[Mission Rewards: 50 Gold Coins.]
"Absolute mega-wealth!"
Never in her life had she encountered a baseline server mission that yielded a payout of this magnitude, and Cui Ye let out a thoroughly unrefined, uncultured gasp of pure shock. No wonder her [Friendly Tip] had shown such manic enthusiasm while guiding her here, going so far as to draw the navigation marker with a literal "￥" currency character. The financial compensation package was absolutely monstrous.
Wang Wei, who had just pulled up his own mission-completion log, was currently propping up a weak He Fangzhou. The second he cleared the threshold, he caught Cui Ye's unrefined gasp. Realizing she had also been pulled into the mission by the system, he initiated a quick data swap, only to discover that their assignment tracks were entirely distinct. However, looking at the parameters side-by-side, the mechanical difficulty seemed roughly balanced.
The baseline reward of a system mission was always hidden from players until the final resolution phase cleared. While standard daily missions offered fixed rewards, these randomized urgent missions clearly had massive variance; combining the total rewards earned by both He Fangzhou and Wang Wei yielded a meager forty gold coins.
The group deduced that the game server's financial reward system was heavily subsidized by an individual's raw combat output and their structural completion criteria. The game algorithm clearly operates a highly specialized, hidden evaluation engine—though looking back at the match that had just cleared, the system's scoring balance was remarkably fair.
Cui Ye very considerately omitted the phrase "The Hero Saves the Beauty" from her summary, strictly detailing the event as "Divine Justice Descended From Above". When she casually revealed her fifty-coin reward, she instantly drew a double-take of pure shock from her peers. This thoroughly validated that her own previous lack of composure wasn't a personal flaw; reacting like this was simply standard human nature when confronting an unbelievable jackpot.
Discovering that Cui Ye had single-handedly neutralized a high-tier veteran like Wen Qiu, Wang Wei was intensely curious as to how she had isolated their exact coordinates on the eleventh floor. The [Summoning Talisman] was strictly engineered to pull an ally across space; it packed zero data-transmission or messaging capabilities.
Cui Ye offered no explanation regarding her methods. Instead, she extended her index finger, pointing directly toward the drafty, crumbling stone chamber anchoring the far end of the corridor.
"The overall aesthetic of your Safe House is remarkably distinct."
Wang Wei, He Fangzhou: "..."
Chapter Notes:
Inside the quiet safety of her [Walk-in Closet], Cui Ye was actively dry-chewing a block of instant noodles. Alternating between aggressive crunching and continuous gulps of water, she had systematically torn through three raw packages back-to-back. Despite that, she had only managed to reach a state of being semi-full, and her stomach simply didn’t have much room left for further intake.
Right as she was weighing whether to use a premium [Food Voucher] or clean out her absolute final tin of spam, her ears caught someone frantically screaming her username. The vocal frequency registered as slightly familiar, but before her brain could accurately identify the person, her system interface flashed to life.
[System: Your former teammate, He Fangzhou, has entered critical health parameters. Your former teammate, Wang Wei, has shouted your username in a state of absolute despair, triggering a Randomized Urgent Mission: "The Hero Saves the Beauty, Divine Justice Descends From Above." (Pending Acceptance)]
Hunkered down along her sofa bed, Cui Ye stared blankly: "???"
"Sitting peacefully inside her own safe house while a mission literally cascaded straight out of the heavens"—since when did the system organize such convenient rescue runs?
A single glance over the mission description confirmed that the trigger for the event was anchored directly to Wang Wei. This specific "scream" was clearly not a literal, acoustic vocalization traversing the map; the guy had obviously deployed a highly specialized utility item.
Analyzing the severely restricted mission data provided by her interface, Cui Ye habitually dissected every individual word. Imagining out He Fangzhou’s certified campus-idol facial features, alongside Wang Wei’s fair and delicate complexion, and then stacking them side-by-side with the mission title "The Hero Saves the Beauty, Divine Justice Descends From Above," she derived a highly specific narrative in her head. Had some roguish, hyper-dominant female tyrant locked eyes on their physical aesthetics and attempted to forcibly conscript them into her personal harem? Then, upon witnessing that they'd rather face demise than submit, descended into a manic, ego-shattered rage, resolving to execute a sequence of unspeakable violations? Had He Fangzhou been the first to fall, leaving a desperate Wang Wei to thrash in shattered agony until—finally consumed by raw grief and panic—he deployed an emergency item to summon external firepower?
Cui Ye clicked her tongue repeatedly: "Tsk, tsk, tsk..."
While a vivid melodrama played out inside her mind, Cui Ye’s physical limbs didn't miss a single beat. She shed her heavy lounge garments, quickly donning her white hiking jacket, specialized ski goggles, and equipping her primary stat-boosting gear set.
Because she had only just deployed her Safe House a brief window ago, it could not be recalled into her inventory so soon. Although the exterior facade of the [Walk-in Closet] looked exceptionally rustic, plain, and mundane—minimizing the risk of drawing external surveillance—she still opted to take a few extra precautions. Cui Ye dropped the [Blood Blade] and the hot pink [High Heels] into the reflection of her dual mirrors, then slipped out of her safe house, bursting into a high-velocity sprint toward the residential sector.
As for how she maintained a flawless lock on the target's exact coordinates? That was entirely thanks to her talent [Friendly Tip], which was actively projecting a golden path directly across her vision overlay. The directional navigation icon was rendered as a literal, glowing "￥" currency character. Radiant, bright-gold, and shifting dynamically against the torrential rain, the icon was profoundly eye-catching and scored massive points with her personal aesthetic preferences.
While Cui Ye was aggressively tearing through the map under the direct downpour, Wang Wei—having fully expended his [Summoning Talisman]—was staring out the reinforced viewport with an expression of pure, unadulterated panic. Behind him, He Fangzhou lay completely comatose.
Outside his safe house, a dense wave of entities was relentlessly hammering against the structure. Even though their external anatomy looked completely indistinguishable from baseline civilians, the grotesquely exaggerated grins plastered across their faces and their vacant, dead eyes left no doubt that they were no longer human.
Precisely as tracked, Wang Wei had bound a specialized [Grotto] Safe House to his character profile. Aside from his own interface, only He Fangzhou possessed clearance for these coordinates—though a third party was poised to crash the perimeter very shortly.
He was caught in a severe psychological paradox: fiercely praying that Cui Ye would materialize on the field, while simultaneously agonizing over the reality that she might lack the raw firepower to dismantle this death trap, effectively dragging her down into the exact same slaughterhouse. But above all else, he fundamentally did not want to "log out" of the server!
He was currently drowning in a wave of profound regret for failing to manually override He Fangzhou’s queue when the latter accepted that randomized mission to migrate over to Residential Building 11 to resolve a localized "complication." What part of this disaster qualified as a mere complication?! This zone was a literal temple of the King of Hell!
Worse, the pair of them had attempted to play the role of elite stealth players, bypassing the standard entry points to execute an unconventional infiltration via an "ice ladder" conjured by He Fangzhou's talent, breaching directly through the eleventh-floor balcony.
The exact millisecond their boots hit the ten-meter sensory grid of the zone, their structural signatures were exposed before they could even establish a stable footing. They sustained an immediate, catastrophic ambush. He Fangzhou, whose stat build was completely unsuited for close-quarters combat, was systematically beaten down within seconds. The instant Wang Wei watched the enemy entity extract a bizarre birdcage from his inventory, his danger parameters spiked violently. He deployed his Safe House directly onto the balcony and dragged He Fangzhou's unconscious frame into the interior cavity.
Wang Wei’s vision was locked onto his structural durability logs in a vice-like grip. He vividly recalled a central military command bulletin stating that the exact moment a Safe House hit the fifty percent damage threshold, the primary entry door would suffer a total mechanical fail-state, stripping the unit of its ability to deny entry to external threats. And once its structural durability degraded to zero percent, the entire asset would be wiped from the server grid permanently, rendering future maintenance impossible.
Right now, his structural durability log registered a grim 41% total damage—and right before his eyes, the digit clicked upward to 42%. He funneled every single remaining gold coin in his wallet to force emergency repairs, but the transaction merely bought him a couple of minutes of breathing room.
Even with the [Grotto]’s base thirty percent defense multiplier—which scaled his Level 2 Safe House up to a formidable baseline of 260 defense points—and despite him specifically selecting a defensive upgrade path that added a reinforced outer perimeter of solid rock walls, the structure was failing to withstand the sheer onslaught of entities hammering against it. These entities possessed zero pain thresholds and knew absolutely no exhaustion.
Within Wang Wei’s field of vision, the circular glass viewport was smeared a sickening crimson with raw human flesh. The primary wave of "door-knockers" had already been completely drained of blood, collapsing into limp heaps along the concrete—yet the thudding vibrations against the stone walls merely paused for a microsecond before resuming with undiminished force.
The source of the onslaught lay just a short distance away. Wen Qiu was handling his marionette arrays with casual, hyper-calculated precision. Operating with split-brain efficiency, he directed one cluster of puppets to assist his younger sister in pinning down the rifle-wielding military personnel down the hall, while simultaneously commanding another cluster to continue dismantling Wang Wei's stone safe house.
"Arrogant newbies out of their depth," he sneered internally. Dismantling these low-tier rookies required zero expenditure of his premium inventory assets; the map was loaded with free, self-replenishing "consumables". Very shortly, he would successfully harvest his third unique talent user, marking the official halfway point of the overarching directive assigned to him and his sister by their Master. The operation was unfolding infinitely more smoothly than initial simulations had mapped out. If they managed to over-deliver on their harvest quotas for this server, the baseline resource tier allocated to their build by the guild might scale up an entire grade!
Wen Qiu could practically visualize the profound approval radiating from his Master's gaze and the premium resource arrays resting right within his palm. Shifting his eyes back toward the cowardly turtle currently lingering on life support inside that stone box, his expression twisted into a feral, sadistic grimace.
The last of his patience evaporated entirely. He aggressively dialed up the burn rate of his human consumables, forcing a sudden, rhythmic acceleration of heavy impacts against the stone fortress. The [Grotto]’s structural durability took a massive hit, leaping violently to 47% damage sustained.
Watching the interface log tick down to its final three percent of safety margin, Wang Wei completely abandoned all hope. His brain locked onto a grim, clinical calculation: would executing a swift self-termination via his own blade be a cleaner checkout, or would allowing the entities outside to breach his door yield a far more agonizing demise?
The terminal despair paralyzing Wang Wei inside the bunker was mirrored by a corresponding spike of manic euphoria radiating from Wen Qiu outside. A burst of bizarre, high-pitched laughter echoed down the corridor—and then hit an instantaneous, dead stop.
Catching a severe anomaly in her peripheral vision, Wen He didn't even have the time to scream her brother's username before a terrifying, deep-purple bruise manifested violently around her throat. The constriction clamped down with crushing force, the bones in her neck emitting a low, distinct grinding sound as if they were poised to snap the very next microsecond.
A wave of suffocation paralyzed her motor control. Her hands trembling violently, Wen He whipped out a premium potion vial in a desperate bid to down the fluid, but her heart suddenly sustained a brutal, internal rupture. A massive spray of fresh blood erupted from her lips. Her balance shattered completely, sending her crashing limply onto the concrete floor as the potion slipped from her fingers and shattered against the ground.
Wen He thrashed weakly, attempting to prop herself upward. The pristine white wings anchored to her back dissolved into raw pixels, her holy radiance washing out into nothingness. She clawed desperately toward the fluid spilling across the ground, but a high-caliber rifle round cleanly punched straight through her palm. A sharp shriek of agony was instantly choked out by her hemorrhaged throat, reducing her voice to a sequence of wet wheezes. Her eyes, burning with a venomous, absolute hatred, locked directly onto the military captain charging down the line.
The human wall previously directed by the marionette strings collapsed like a deck of cards, and the sleep-inducing holy light completely evaporated from the corridor. The captain, being the first officer to fully shake off the cognitive suppression, instantly executed a tactical follow-up shot. Truthfully, his crosshairs had been locked directly onto her skull, but the target was equipped with a premium iron helmet built to absorb high-velocity impacts. Factoring in the reality that a standard round might fail to achieve a clean headshot, he dynamically adjusted his aim to cripple her remaining mobility.
The captain's battlefield deduction proved flawlessly accurate—that iron helmet was indeed a high-tier defensive item. Yet, merely denying her immediate access to her medical inventory didn't translate to a total shutdown of her extraction capabilities.
Wen He and her older brother operated under a high-tier blessing bestowed by their Master, allowing them to perfectly share a unified health pool and evenly distribute all incoming damage across both stat sheets. As long as she retained a single hit point, her brother possessed a built-in mechanism for a total combat reset. She just had to execute an immediate map extraction!
Because both siblings subscribed to highly fragile, "glass-cannon build" archetypes, they had funneled a massive volume of their career capital into hoarding premium escape mechanics. Throughout their previous runs, they had occasionally been forced into blind tactical retreats, but even inside high-difficulty, mid-tier servers, they had never been reduced to a state this profoundly pathetic!
Which exact veteran guild had deployed an elite hit squad to ambush them in a low-tier map?! Utilizing three [Teleportation Talismans] back-to-back, Wen He fled the zone without daring to look back even once, a sequence of high-tier usernames flashing across her consciousness—ranging from active rival guilds to previous targets they had backstabbed but failed to cleanly silence. Their career log spanned nearly ten completed game servers; their list of enemies was so astronomically dense that she lacked the data to isolate the architect of her ruin.
Meanwhile, back at the ambush site, Cui Ye was scanning the corpse to confirm the kill. The 60 second timer on her [Invisibility Potion] had officially expired, forcing her form to materialize back into the corridor.
Gazing down at the neutralized corpse—or rather, the hollow wooden puppet resting by her boots—she stared at her flashing system notification:
[Eliminated Player: Wen Qiu (1/2). Server Kill count updated: 1.5]
"???"
Because the entity was constructed out of raw timber, the server algorithm only counted him as half a human being? Since when did the system support decimal-based homicides? Staring intently at that bizarre "1.5" tally on her leaderboard interface, Cui Ye froze in a deep cognitive lock.
Operating under intense paranoia that these veteran players carried hidden defensive loops, she had deliberately chosen a starting position completely outside his ten-meter sensory perimeter before executing a maximum-velocity sprint. At five meters, her boots cleared the balcony threshold. At three meters, her linen necklace passive went completely live. At two meters, she unsheathed her blade, driving her full momentum into a single, fatal thrust.
She had ensured the entire sequence—decapitation and cardiac puncture—cleared within a flat, single-second window.
To ensure against any anatomical anomalies—such as the target possessing a right-sided heart—she had fully intended to drive a follow-up thrust into the opposite side of his chest out of sheer professional respect. Who could have anticipated that the dwarf’s heart would behave so traditionally, remaining perfectly seated in its standard position? Before she could even deploy her secondary stroke, the entity had already logged out of the server.
If a hyper-ventilating Wen He, fleeing blindly through the downpour, realized her brother had died so fast that it spared his corpse a secondary mutilation, it remained highly debatable whether she would feel profoundly moved or simply grind her molars to dust.
Lacking any data on the "Puppet" siblings, Cui Ye remained thoroughly perplexed by her decimal kill score until Wang Wei's voice cleanly cut through her thoughts. Surveying her surroundings, she noted the arrival of several people—the military detachment that had been lured to the area by the [Crying Cicada] a couple of nights prior.
Aside from this dozen-plus military squad, every single civilian who had collapsed onto the floorboards was dead. Not a single target survived.
The captain formulated this grim conclusion with a cold, unreadable expression. Following a manual diagnostic sweep, his data confirmed that every individual previously ensnared by Wen Qiu’s marionette strings had completely ceased all vital signs. Their bodies were already entering a state of advanced rigor mortis, precisely mirroring corpses that had been dead for hours.
He immediately patched his findings through to central command over his secure line. The radio speaker instantly crackled back with a direct, high-tier mandate: authorize total incineration of the remains immediately to prevent the biological tissue from sustaining viral mutation and converting into active water monsters.
The captain deliberately broadcasted this operational command right in front of Cui Ye and Wang Wei. Noticing the flash of visible surprise written on their faces, he provided a calm explanation:
"During a previous logistics run, a group of our fallen soldiers underwent sudden biological reanimation mid-transit. Because our perimeter teams had zero preparation for that anomaly, it triggered a massive wave of casualties. While not every corpse triggers a mutation, we must enforce a uniform destruction policy as a mandatory safety protocol."
Hearing this, Cui Ye and Wang Wei fell into a long, solemn silence. Though they had initially intended to clear their mission parameters and immediately exit the area, both individuals chose to remain on the field to assist the military squad in purging the zone.
As the operational chaos was brought under control, the echoes of raw grief began rippling through the area once more. The Wen siblings' perimeter hadn't covered the entire corridor; nearly half the civilians had successfully broken through during the initial panic, fleeing to other floors. Upon receiving confirmation that the threat had been neutralized, they began trickling back to the eleventh floor in small clusters, only to discover their family and friends stacked among the dead. The trauma of their sudden loss was impossible to suppress.
Cui Ye stepped inside the residential unit, her eyes locking onto a highly anomalous birdcage resting in the center of the floorboards. The cage was aggressively wrapped in thick, jagged thorns, and trapped inside were two severely blood-stained sparrows.
She maintained a careful distance until a vibrant green system prompt blossomed across her vision. Only then did she reach down to unlatch the mechanism. The second the door swung free, the two sparrows mutated back into human form, collapsing heavily onto the floorboards. Their garments were shredded to rags, their skin caked in dense layers of blood and grime. Fortunately, an analytical scan confirmed the injuries were strictly superficial rather than terminal. She had initially intended to flag down a nearby soldier to handle the survivors, but pivoted, using her interface to summon a military medical officer instead.
As for the birdcage itself? She quietly claimed it as her finders-fee for providing them an express medical dispatch. Under the unblinking surveillance of the two stationed soldiers in the room, she cleanly swept the asset straight into her inventory.
[Thorn Birdcage: Unlatch the primary gate, aim the array directly at your target, and execute a loud verbal shout. As long as the target entity provides an acoustic response, the mechanism will instantly vacuum them into the interior cavity, compressing their anatomy into a standard small bird.]
Cui Ye: "..."
Are you absolutely certain this isn't a blatant copyright infringement of the Purple Gold Gourd from Journey to the West? You should watch your step; the original authors might slap you with a massive lawsuit.
[Randomized Mission: "The Hero Saves the Beauty, Divine Justice Descends From Above." (Completed)]
[Mission Rewards: 50 Gold Coins.]
"Absolute mega-wealth!"
Never in her life had she encountered a baseline server mission that yielded a payout of this magnitude, and Cui Ye let out a thoroughly unrefined, uncultured gasp of pure shock. No wonder her [Friendly Tip] had shown such manic enthusiasm while guiding her here, going so far as to draw the navigation marker with a literal "￥" currency character. The financial compensation package was absolutely monstrous.
Wang Wei, who had just pulled up his own mission-completion log, was currently propping up a weak He Fangzhou. The second he cleared the threshold, he caught Cui Ye's unrefined gasp. Realizing she had also been pulled into the mission by the system, he initiated a quick data swap, only to discover that their assignment tracks were entirely distinct. However, looking at the parameters side-by-side, the mechanical difficulty seemed roughly balanced.
The baseline reward of a system mission was always hidden from players until the final resolution phase cleared. While standard daily missions offered fixed rewards, these randomized urgent missions clearly had massive variance; combining the total rewards earned by both He Fangzhou and Wang Wei yielded a meager forty gold coins.
The group deduced that the game server's financial reward system was heavily subsidized by an individual's raw combat output and their structural completion criteria. The game algorithm clearly operates a highly specialized, hidden evaluation engine—though looking back at the match that had just cleared, the system's scoring balance was remarkably fair.
Cui Ye very considerately omitted the phrase "The Hero Saves the Beauty" from her summary, strictly detailing the event as "Divine Justice Descended From Above". When she casually revealed her fifty-coin reward, she instantly drew a double-take of pure shock from her peers. This thoroughly validated that her own previous lack of composure wasn't a personal flaw; reacting like this was simply standard human nature when confronting an unbelievable jackpot.
Discovering that Cui Ye had single-handedly neutralized a high-tier veteran like Wen Qiu, Wang Wei was intensely curious as to how she had isolated their exact coordinates on the eleventh floor. The [Summoning Talisman] was strictly engineered to pull an ally across space; it packed zero data-transmission or messaging capabilities.
Cui Ye offered no explanation regarding her methods. Instead, she extended her index finger, pointing directly toward the drafty, crumbling stone chamber anchoring the far end of the corridor.
"The overall aesthetic of your Safe House is remarkably distinct."
Wang Wei, He Fangzhou: "..."
Chapter Notes:
- "While a person is simply sitting inside their house, a mission cascades straight down from the heavens." 人在家中坐，任务从天上来: A direct, hyper-popular web-novel parody of the classic Chinese folk idiom: "While a person is simply sitting inside their house, disaster cascades straight down from the heavens" (人在家中坐，祸从天上来). It describes a scenario where an individual is minding their own business, executing zero active efforts, yet an incredibly lucrative, high-tier opportunity or event spontaneously falls directly into their lap.
- "Preferring to face demise rather than submit" 宁死不从，恼羞成怒: A classic pairing of traditional Chinese idioms frequently deployed in melodramatic historical dramas and romance web novels. It traditionally characterizes a scene where a righteous protagonist rejects the forceful advances of a corrupt, powerful entity. The spurned villain, completely unable to process the severe injury to their ego, undergoes an immediate psychological break and descends into a vindictive, violent tantrum.
- "Glass build" / "Crispy skin" 脆皮: A universal Chinese gaming slang term. It designates a character class or build that funnels the absolute entirety of its stat allocation into maximum offensive output, crowd control, or specialized utility, leaving them with an incredibly low health pool and zero physical defense metrics. If an enemy manages to bypass their utility barrier, they can be instantly deleted on contact.
- "To whip a corpse." 鞭尸: Historically derived from an ancient Chinese penal concept (most famously executed by Wu Zixu during the Spring and Autumn period) where an enemy's corpse was exhumed and desecrated to ensure absolute retribution. In modern Chinese internet and gaming culture, it means to continuously deploy maximum damage strings or execute manual confirmations against an opponent who has already died, ensuring they are absolutely neutralized and cannot trigger a hidden revival passive.
- "Lacking professional drive." 没出息: A standard, everyday Chinese phrase used to tease someone for being incredibly short-sighted, easily overwhelmed by basic material gains, or showing a complete lack of dignified composure over minor successes.
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TLCubbie: The world-building in this novel has so much potential, and I really hope I'm doing it justice. I'm doing my best to bring it to life properly, and I truly hope yall are enjoying it so far. If any parts are confusing, just let me know and I'll be happy to explain. Also, if you catch any mistranslations or grammatical errors, please feel free to point them out so I can fix them right away. Thanks so much for reading! :)
(Update Schedule: Atleast 2 chapters every Fridays.)
It's been a while. Weddings again?
ReplyDeleteHi are you still updating this novel or has it been dropped?
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