Lan City sat in the middle of Eastern Ridge Prefecture, nestled at the foot of cloud-wreathed peaks. The divine aura of Divine Favor Sect seeped down from the mountains all year round. Immortal masters riding spirit beasts sometimes drifted across the sky, and the townsfolk had long since gotten used to it. They might look up for a moment, sigh in envy, then go back to their stalls.
The Yun family was an old cultivator clan. Several of their ancestors had once shaken the dynasty with their strength, and their bloodline had never scattered or branched much. A single, straight lineage. Distinguished, even if the glory had dimmed with time.
Yun Liu's parents were both well-known alumni of Divine Favor Sect, respected cultivators with wide circles of friends and solid reputations on the mountain.
The Xiao clan, on the other hand, was a powerful mundane family spread across the prefecture and beyond. Their businesses reached into every corner, and their name carried weight far outside Lan City. Xiao Xinran's father, the city lord, was essentially the village chief of a rookie village that just happened to sit under a sect's mountain.
The two families had been friends for generations. Their elders had long ago settled on a marriage pact, and everyone said that the children's union would be a match blessed by heaven.
Even so, none of that could compare to Ji Shiyu's background.
She had been born into a true powerhouse family, the kind whose name made entire regions sit up straight. She stood at the peak of prestige. Her arrival in Lan City was like a beautiful foreign exchange student from a much grander world suddenly transferring into a tiny rural school, and the impact she had on the "victim" was devastating.
Star Island.
That was a place where Nascent Soul cultivators were as common as dogs and Divine Transformation seniors walked the streets. A proper mid-game map, not somewhere newbies were supposed to exist.
Anyone who had ever played a game knew that going against that kind of fate was the same as courting death. And that was before you added the Nine Heavens Phoenix Chick perched in Ji Shiyu's hair. If that fat bird ever revealed its true form, it could probably smash Yun Liu flat with one slap.
Yun Liu rubbed his nose, a little helpless. The original script had already been miserable enough for him, and he wasn't even officially recognized as a "male supporting lead."
Anyone who tried to snatch a woman from this golden-haired protagonist would almost certainly die as cannon fodder. Even if they somehow survived, the path ahead would be full of pits.
So Yun Liu had made up his mind early: he just wanted to find a nice, ordinary girl, pretty enough but not too eye-catching, someone the protagonist would never bother with. They would become Dao companions, keep their heads down, and live out their days quietly, as far from the heroines bound to the fortune of the Nine Provinces as possible.
This "walk" with Ji Shiyu dragged on all afternoon. At some point, they left the main post road behind and gradually entered the deeper forest.
As they walked, Ji Shiyu looked more and more confused. After a while, her legs actually started to ache.
"Brother Yun, where were going is a bit suspicious," she said. "Where exactly are we going?"
"Almost there," Yun Liu replied.
A man and a woman, alone, wandering farther and farther from civilization…
For a moment, her thoughts went somewhere entirely different.
She flicked her golden hair over her shoulder. Her face was not just pretty; she was easily an eight out of ten by any standard. Probably higher. She didn't know if she could charm women, but she was sure men would line up to just to take her hand.
If this bastard dares have ill intentions, I'll smash his dog head, she thought.
The trees grew denser overhead, blocking most of the light. The forest's depths turned dim and silent, and a faint, unpleasant smell rode the breeze.
"Oh… isn't this…" Ji Shiyu covered her mouth, eyes widening. Of course she remembered this place. She had not expected the victim to lead them right back to the crime scene that day.
A dozen or so broken corpses lay scattered under the trees. The bodies were torn by beasts, half-rotted in places, crawling with bugs, and the stench was thick and sour.
"There were a lot of suspicious points about the attack that day," Yun Liu said calmly. He crouched down to examine the ground. "Just in case, I wanted to come back and make sure there were no survivors."
It was a casual excuse, tossed out lightly. He had come back for a completely different reason, but the blonde heroine had insisted on tagging along to "help."
"Ugh, the smell is awful. Be careful," Ji Shiyu said, pinching her nose and squatting a little further away. "Call me if you need anything."
She secretly thought the boy was actually quite thoughtful.
This place sat right at the foot of the Cloud Sea Peak forest. Divine Favor Sect was an orthodox Daoist sect that guarded this region. How could a band of Demonic Sect disciples sneak around under their noses? If there was a conspiracy here, it might threaten the sect itself. As an inner disciple, he had a duty to investigate.
Most of the dead demonic cultivators on the ground had fallen to Ji Shiyu's sword. Only one had been killed by Yun Liu, the leader whose head he had taken in a single strike, fast and clean.
They had not had time to study the bodies that day, but later, when she and Aotian examined the lingering demonic energy, both had turned serious. The headless leader's corpse's aura had not been weak. It was no wonder Yun Liu had paid such a price.
The small fry had been poor and pathetic, but the leader, a ninth-level Qi Refining demonic cultivator, had carried a storage pouch.
With its owner dead, Yun Liu's spiritual sense slipped into it easily. He shattered the remaining consciousness imprint and took the pouch for himself.
Inside were a few dozen spirit stones, a demon sect blood-stained token, several human-skin masks, and some strange, clearly unorthodox tools.
On its own, the haul was not worth coming all this way. But in Yun Liu's memory, these demonic cultivators had not originally come for him and Xiao Xinran. The two of them had simply stumbled into an existing operation.
Scenes like this usually hid secrets in the game, waiting for the right player to trigger them.
Today, Yun Liu was here to trigger a hidden side quest. The protagonist, might not need it, but for him, this quest line was critical.
He spread his spiritual sense out in a thin net. Tiny motes of light blinked in his awareness as he brushed against scattered traces of demonic energy. Beneath those traces lay older, drier bloodstains. He followed the trail of energy and faint footprints deeper into the mountain.
Eventually, the two of them reached the mouth of a cave. The clues stopped there.
"What is this place?" Ji Shiyu asked, looking around curiously. That day, she had been focused entirely on cutting down enemies and saving people. She hadn't bothered with the surroundings.
Yun Liu shook his head with a puzzled expression.
"We just ran blindly that day and happened to stumble on this group of demonic cultivators searching for something," he said. "Maybe the answer is hidden in the cave…"
"Could there be treasure?" Ji Shiyu's eyes lit up at once. Before he could say anything more, she ran inside, unable to hold herself back for even a second.
The cave was pitch dark. After only a few steps, the impulsive girl caught a strange sweet smell on the air. Her legs went soft, and she crumpled to the ground, unable to call up even a wisp of spiritual power.
"Shiyu, you really need to be more careful," Aotian groaned.
The little phoenix chick covered his face with one wing. Having such a reckless master was embarrassing. Even if she did get injured, it was still enough to lose face.
The bodyguard who was supposed to be protecting others had collapsed first. As the numbness spread through her limbs, Ji Shiyu finally realized what was happening and gasped, "Oh no… it's a trap!"
Yun Liu rolled his eyes and waited quietly outside. Only after some time had passed, when the smoke had thinned, did he cover his nose and mouth, step in slowly, and crouch beside the fallen blonde girl. He tapped her cheek.
"I hadn't even finished talking. Why were you in such a rush?"
Ji Shiyu's cheeks flushed. "Your injuries haven't healed yet," she whispered. "Why would you come in? It's dangerous inside."
Before he could respond, a weak voice floated out from deeper in the cave, as if someone had just woken up.
"Who… who's there?"
Yun Liu raised a hand. A faint light flared in his palm, the glow of a simple Five Elements spell pushing back the darkness.
A young man in black lay slumped against the stone wall. His face was as white as paper, his body covered in wounds, his breathing so shallow it was barely there. It was obvious he would not last long.
So the demonic cultivators had not been searching for treasure after all.
They had been here for a person.
"I am a disciple of Divine Favor Sect, patrolling the mountain," Yun Liu said, lowering his voice. "Who are you?"
"A Divine Favor Sect disciple?" The young man's eyes brightened. He dragged himself forward and grabbed Yun Liu's hand, desperation shining in his gaze. Instead of answering the question, he asked, "Little brother… could you do me a favor? I'm a dying man. I have no strength left to harm anyone."
People's words tended to soften when death was close.
"…You're fatally injured," Yun Liu said. "Don't waste your strength."
"Please," the young man begged. "Please deliver this letter to Qin Yao, a disciple of Azure Cloud Peak. Tell her I'm… sorry. I have nothing of value to repay you with. If you find anything useful on me… take it…"
His head lolled to the side after that. The last thread holding him up snapped. He had forced himself to hang on this long just to put his affairs in order.
Yun Liu bowed his head for a moment in silence, then took the letter. He dug a shallow grave in the cave, laid the body inside, and buried him on the spot.
In the game, this man had been an alchemist cultivator. The soft-bone incense he'd used in the cave was a basic self-defense trick. If players were careless when they first came here, they could easily end up like Ji Shiyu, collapsing in an instant.
It was a simple errand quest. Run an item, get a decent reward. It was also the beginner's tutorial for stepping into alchemy as a secondary path.
Yun Liu checked the man's belongings: a few bottles of standard spiritual medicine, a notebook full of pill annotations, and a small pill furnace. Exactly as he remembered. He quietly put them away into his ring.
If this hidden quest was not triggered early, then once the player left the starting zone, the next time they returned to this cave, all they would find was a skeleton and some scattered relics. The main reward and the later quest chain would be gone, leaving only a half-finished story.
But if you brought the keepsake to Azure Cloud Peak, Senior Sister Qin Yao would recognize it at once and burst into tears on the spot. A small, sad Easter egg.
"What's in the letter? Hurry, open it and see!" Ji Shiyu said, blinking curiously. "It's not a love letter, is it?"
She was already picturing a tragic romance. A dying cultivator dragging himself this far to deliver his last confession, only to fall at the foot of the mountain and never see his sweetheart again… it practically wrote itself.
"If someone entrusts you with a task, you're supposed to be loyal to it," Yun Liu said. "Especially when they're already dead."
He gave the blonde girl a flat look. He didn't need to open the letter to know what was inside.
Qin Yao and that senior had a deep relationship, but it wasn't the kind she was imagining, and things between them had been complicated. That was another side story, irrelevant to the main plot.
If the letter had ended up in Ji Shiyu's hands, Senior Sister Qin Yao would probably have suffered in some way too. In a roundabout sense, making sure this quest fell to him instead could be considered saving another future victim.
Amitabha, he thought.
Rest in peace, fellow Daoist.