Nangong Yu stood in a barren wilderness that stretched as far as the eye could see.
The sky was blue, the clouds beautiful, and the air fresh.
There was no extreme cold, no scorching heat, no zombies, no miasma, no red sedan chairs, no claustrophobic chambers, and no streets crawling with robots…
It looked like a perfectly normal world.
Nangong Yu took out a basic defensive talisman and slapped it against her body.
She had obtained it after clearing an ancient dungeon. It was very basic and had no rank, but the boss of that dungeon had been Taotie.
A defensive talisman capable of withstanding five minutes of attacks from a divine beast like Taotie was good enough to make Nangong Yu feel a little safer. Only then did she open her system panel to take a look.
She had just cleared an infinite-flow scenario.
Her reward from the system was a golden key, with the words 【Immortality】 written beneath it.
The instant Nangong Yu gripped the key, she received no further instructions. Instead, the world spun around her, and she found herself here.
At that moment, the system panel displayed a series of messages:
【Player Name】: Nangong Yu
【Level】: ??? (Who knows? No one has ever cleared the game before.)
【Race】: Human (Probably? Have you forgotten how many things you’ve fused with?)
【Lifespan】: Unknown (What if you slit your throat the next second? The system is never wrong!)
【HP】: 1 point (Permanent) + 999,999,998 (Maximum) (Congratulations! You’ve obtained immortality!)
Ignoring the system’s snide remarks, Nangong Yu fixed her eyes on the health bar.
The total value hadn’t changed, but it had been divided into two parts. The one point had become permanent. In other words, was she effectively locked at one HP?
Nangong Yu lightly poked at her dimple, her brows drawing together.
Was that all?
Other people could hack her 999 times without killing her, but she would still die once her telomeres had divided a certain number of times!
Her race was still human!
Everyone knew that humans died of old age.
Nangong Yu laughed in exasperation. That Dog System really was useless. So-called immortality was nothing but a scam.
The customer-service icon in the lower-right corner of the panel was grayed out. Nangong Yu tapped it several times, but nothing happened. The system seemed to be offline.
“You piece of crap!”
Cursing and grumbling, Nangong Yu turned her attention to her system inventory.
When the game descended upon the world, she had been picking up garbage. Perhaps she’d been carrying too many bags? While everyone else started with a nine-slot inventory, Nangong Yu had gone straight to ninety-nine slots.
After expanding it tirelessly, she had increased it to 99,999 slots. It could not be upgraded any further.
Each slot could hold ninety-nine identical items, including but not limited to backpacks, shipping containers, and spatial buttons. If it couldn’t be upgraded, so be it.
Looking at the rows of illuminated slots, Nangong Yu’s expression softened.
Of her 99,999 inventory slots, 90,000 were completely full. That left 9,999 empty slots for her to pick up more garbage.
Nangong Yu closed the system panel and began collecting—
Air.
The air was fresh and pleasant now, but that didn’t mean it would stay that way. What if the air became polluted later, filling the world with deadly viruses, miasma, or sources of infection?
She walked on, collecting everything in her path.
Grass rose above her calves. Weasels darted through it, occasionally poking their heads out and pricking up their alert ears.
Edible wild herbs and little flowers grew everywhere.
It all looked perfectly safe.
Nangong Yu never removed the defensive talisman from her body. She kept glancing around.
“Where are the monsters?”
She had been here for more than two hours, yet she hadn’t seen a single monster.
The system claimed she had cleared the game, but Nangong Yu didn’t believe it for a second. Since when did clearing a game mean you didn’t get sent home, but were instead dumped in a strange place?
After collecting enough air to fill ninety-nine spatial buttons, taking up one inventory slot, Nangong Yu finally stopped.
She sat cross-legged and took out a self-heating hotpot.
After tearing open the packaging, a rich aroma instantly filled the air. Nangong Yu closed her eyes in bliss.
While waiting for the hotpot to heat up, Nangong Yu lightly tapped her wrist. A brain-computer interface sprang from her otherwise empty wrist, projecting a holographic screen into the air.
Her last dungeon had been the City of AI. The average person there owned 1.68 brain-computer interfaces, so she had casually picked up a few that no one wanted and had the AI download a vast collection of novels, short dramas, movies, television shows, and short videos for her.
After all, a person could live without friends, but not without a phone.
The hotpot was ready soon. Fragrant steam billowed from it, and Nangong Yu swallowed hungrily.
“Mmm~~~”
Crisp lotus root, chewy bean curd sheets, springy fish balls, and soft, creamy quail eggs.
A mouthful of spicy, salty, savory deliciousness.
Happiness!
“Rumble—”
Distant thunder rolled across the horizon, rapidly drawing near.
Was it going to rain?
Nangong Yu swiftly took out an umbrella. She had barely opened it when the thunder was already directly overhead.
“Clang—!”
The ringing of metal against metal resounded through the air. Countless rainbows transformed into streaks of light and fell from above.
The ground exploded into one crater after another, sending soil and grass clippings flying. One streak of light blasted into the hotpot, flipping it over and spilling it across the ground.
Nangong Yu had no time to save it. She hurriedly got to her feet and backed away.
“Damn it!”
There were two birdmen fighting in the sky!
She knew it! The Dog System had never been kind enough to send her somewhere scenic so she could enjoy her retirement.
The flying dirt and grass obscured her vision. Nangong Yu had to shield her eyes with one hand as she looked up.
The birdmen had no wings.
They stood in midair in defiance of the laws of physics, dressed in long robes with long hair and long swords.
The sword light grew increasingly fierce. The streaks of light crashing down sent soil and grass flying like rain, pounding against the umbrella with a steady thump-thump-thump.
Some of the dirt managed to slip beneath the umbrella and smack Nangong Yu in the face. Furious, she spat several times, then opened the system panel and equipped a title.
【Why Did You Mess with Her?: While equipped, characters within a five-hundred-meter radius have a certain chance of avoiding you and your actions.】
She had obtained this title in a Western fantasy dungeon.
That dungeon had been particularly irritating. A thief had stolen one of her items, and it had taken Nangong Yu a great deal of effort to get it back.
Fortunately, after clearing the dungeon, she had received a fairly decent title.
High in the sky, the two people who had been fighting to the death suddenly felt a chill brush the backs of their necks. They couldn’t explain why, but instinctively, they flew away into the distance.
The farther they fought, the farther away they went, until neither of them ever looked back.
Nangong Yu quickly took out a small shovel. She scooped the overturned hotpot—broth, ingredients, and dirt alike—into a woven plastic sack, then tossed it into her inventory.
Anyone who survived the infinite-flow world knew they had to be careful, especially in places without trash cans.
No one knew what kind of trap a dungeon might hide. You could lose points, anger a boss, trigger a rule… There was no shortage of unique ways to die.
After rapidly cleaning up the mess, Nangong Yu released a spaceship and activated its stealth mode before giving chase.
The spaceship was another item she had picked up in the City of AI. By the end of the great battle, abandoned spaceships had been scattered everywhere, too many to count. Nangong Yu had simply picked one up.
The birdmen flew incredibly fast. Nangong Yu chased them for fifty kilometers without catching sight of them.
But she discovered something else.
Through the spaceship’s window, she saw a winding river below, with villages scattered along both banks.
Crying filled the air like a forest, and blood flowed everywhere.
Nangong Yu immediately stopped the spaceship and landed two kilometers from the village. Then she proceeded there on foot.
There were NPCs. She could ask them about clues to the dungeon.
The branches and shrubs had torn at her braids, while sweat had washed the dirt across her face. By the time Nangong Yu reached Xiaoyan Village, she was a complete mess and looked no different from the local villagers.
Nor did she attract the attention of a single one of them.
Everyone was crying.
Some were sobbing their hearts out over the deaths of their loved ones.
Others, having lost limbs, screamed hoarsely in agony.
Some had their chests and abdomens split open, their intestines spilling out as they writhed on the ground.
“Help me…”
Nangong Yu looked away and calmly surveyed her surroundings. It was an instance, after all. They were always like this.
The main road was riddled with deep craters. Their shapes and depths looked awfully familiar—she had seen them not long ago when an explosion had overturned her hotpot, splashing mud all over her face.
More than half the houses in the village had collapsed. People were trapped beneath fallen beams, calling out weakly and intermittently:
“Help…”
“Girl, whose family are you from?” one NPC noticed Nangong Yu.
Nangong Yu immediately turned around and saw a woman wearing a hemp headscarf. She was very thin, with deep furrows etched into her face, making it impossible to tell her age.
Women from poor places often aged prematurely. A thirty-year-old woman might easily look forty or fifty.
“Auntie,” she asked blankly, “what happened?”
Nangong Yu had been dragged into the infinite-flow world at the age of sixteen, so her appearance had remained forever young and childish. Calling the woman “Auntie” was perfectly natural.
She was dressed in a scavenger’s outfit, sewn together from scraps of torn cloth. She wore no shoes, and her dirty little feet made her look like some wild child no one had bothered to care for, returned from running around in the mountains.
The NPC auntie did not suspect anything. Instead, she sighed sympathetically.
“You—you’d better go home and see how your pa and ma are doing…”
Having received directions from the NPC, Nangong Yu immediately headed into the village.
Not every courtyard had crying coming from it.
Some families had been wiped out completely, leaving behind only silence.
“Heaven damn those immortals—”
“Are you trying to get yourself killed? Shut your mouth! Immortals aren’t people you can curse!”
“The pigs I raised! They were almost ready for market, and now they’re gone!”
Some households had lost every member of the family. Others had been lucky enough to sacrifice only their livestock.
As Nangong Yu continued forward, she heard a grief-stricken roar.
“Why have the Immortals brought this calamity upon us? We are but humble commoners, honest and hardworking. The men farm, the women weave, and generation after generation, we have never shirked our duties. Why destroy our people?”
An old, white-haired man knelt on the ground, shaking his cane at the sky as he shouted.
Nangong Yu understood.
This was a cultivation world. What she had seen earlier had not been bird-men, but cultivators.
The instance’s setting had been unlocked.
Nangong Yu searched every inch of the village but found no further clues. After making a full circuit, she returned to where she had started.
The auntie who had spoken to her was still there.
“Auntie!”
Yu Xiufen was shoveling dirt. Her courtyard had been blasted into a complete mess, with hardly a patch left undisturbed.
Yet there was little sorrow on her face. Instead, she looked unexpectedly peaceful. The entire village of Xiaoyan had suffered a catastrophe, but her husband, son, daughter-in-law, and two granddaughters had all survived.
Her husband had lost one foot, and her son had a gash on his head, but they were alive.
“Girl? What is it?” Yu Xiufen raised her head and saw the little girl outside the fence.
That child was dressed far too shabbily. Even among farm families, it was rare to see someone so unkempt. Her clothes were ragged, exposing sections of her arms and legs.
And after walking all this way, her feet had grown even dirtier. Yu Xiufen couldn’t help frowning.
“Auntie, who are they?” Nangong Yu entered the courtyard and asked.
Yu Xiufen froze for a moment, then shifted her attention away from the girl’s feet and let out a long sigh.
“Girl… don’t ask.”
