Wu Zhen first saved her game in an empty save slot.
She looked down at the immortal's face, took a knife from her inventory, and stabbed downward.
It was like striking solid metal.
Sure enough, an ordinary blade couldn't even pierce his skin, let alone kill him. The player observed him a bit more—he wore a jade ring. She tried to pry it off, but it wouldn't budge, so she regretfully gave up.
Finally, Wu Zhen took one look at his captivating character portrait and his equally flawless 3D model, and decided out of the goodness of her heart to take him home.
However, since she couldn't turn him into a corpse and stuff him into her inventory, bringing him down the mountain would be somewhat troublesome.
The player agonized over it for a while before deciding to craft a simple cart.
Fortunately, the one thing the mountain lacked least was wood, and as a hoarder player, she naturally had the necessary materials in her inventory.
She spent half a day quickly assembling a makeshift cart and placed the man onto it.
Even so, descending the mountain wasn't much easier. To prevent the vegetation from obstructing the cart's movement, Wu Zhen switched to a 2D perspective.
The path became much more spacious, but it made random encounters along the way much harder to dodge.
She slaughtered her way from the top of the mountain all the way to the bottom. By the time she walked out of the forest, the white snow behind her was covered in a winding trail of blood.
From beginning to end, she didn't utter a single word.
.
Five days later, Wu Zhen finally returned to her own courtyard.
She wasn't particularly tired, but the movement speed penalty from the increased carry weight had been absolutely agonizing. Now that the burden was finally lifted, she immediately ran two laps around the yard.
Excellent! Fully revived!
After a full year of brawling, Wu Zhen was no longer the frail orphan she was at the start of the game. She had plenty of strength and means, but due to her lacking height, it still took some effort to carry the chance at immortality she had picked up into the guest room.
She scrutinized the character portrait of the young immortal lord, and her Mood increased by 1.
Good thing he wasn't ugly, otherwise she would have reloaded her save the moment she found him. She could do without an immortal destiny like that.
Wu Zhen glanced at her list of debuffs and decisively chose to use deep sleep to refresh her status.
She wasn't worried about the safety of this immortal destiny. As long as he didn't move during this time, she wouldn't attack him while in her sleep state.
It seemed that because the bed was too narrow, and the game didn't allow clipping, selecting "Sleep" at the bed caused her little avatar to slump over the edge of the bed, looking rather pitiful.
However, there was absolutely no way she would spend money to see a doctor!
She slept like the dead. By the time she woke up, it was already the evening of the third day.
After waking up, Wu Zhen checked her hunger meter out of habit and realized something.
...If she continued to use sleep to restore her status in such a crude manner, it actually wasn't impossible for her to starve to death.
The player blinked, selectively ignored this fact, and was just about to pull out a radish for a few bites when she suddenly noticed two unfamiliar logs in the "Event" tab.
"??? status changed to Awakened"
"??? status changed to Slumbering"
...Hmm?
Wu Zhen tilted her head and looked at the person on the bed.
During these three days, he had actually woken up.
Although the interval between the two "Event" logs was only a few short seconds, for a cultivator whose stats couldn't be probed, that amount of time was enough to do quite a lot.
Wu Zhen carefully checked the "Event" tab and found no other activities recorded.
He probably woke up, but his consciousness wasn't entirely clear yet, right?
Having reached this conclusion, Wu Zhen stopped dwelling on the matter and prepared to start remodeling her ancestral home and learning new skills.
After a year, she had accumulated a decent amount of funds, so Wu Zhen directly opened the construction store.
Perhaps because she was a mortal, the items in the store were limited to things mortals could access, and the prices tended to be on the expensive side. During her first year, she had mostly just added some gardening decorations and hadn't really opened the store.
But obviously, if she wanted to expand, directly using the game's construction system would be much more convenient.
Wu Zhen planned out the layout of the ancestral home, redrew the walls, and put up a new roof. Simply moving the same materials around didn't cost any assets, but the player had to pay for any additional parts. She expanded the rooms and the courtyard, added two more guest rooms, and only then looked at the cost of this construction.
The player was stung for a moment by the price in the bottom right corner.
She silently saved the renovations as a draft, then piled all her loot from her month-long trip up the mountain onto the cart. She went around town finding people to sell it to, keeping only an assortment of herbs.
Finally, after purchasing the drafted house blueprints, Wu Zhen was left with seventeen taels of silver.
It was the dead of winter, and there was no greenery available for purchase in town. Wu Zhen opened the house construction menu again and maxed out the accompanying landscaping options. She continuously adjusted the placement and density of the flowers and plants based on the changes to her rating score. Only after confirming there was no room for improvement did she press confirm.
These mortal plants weren't expensive, but after buying them all, Wu Zhen only had three copper coins left in her hand.
Overnight, she was back to square one.
The player sighed for her lost assets, then opened the ancestral home's rating score.
After both phases of the ancestral home's construction were completed, the rating loaded for two seconds and finally gave a score of 19.99.
The evaluation comment read: "A somewhat interesting mortal dwelling."
Wu Zhen stared at the words "somewhat interesting" for a moment.
Could this be evaluating her perfect home landscaping?
The player was extremely curious. Since this game's evaluation system cared so much about landscape aesthetics rather than simple stat stacking, did it also have a mechanism similar to "a mountain is famous not for its height, but for the immortal who dwells there" to increase the rating score?
In that case, for the sake of achieving the "Humble Dwelling, Fragrant Virtue" achievement, Wu Zhen felt it was necessary to read some books after finishing her medical studies.
Yes, Wu Zhen had kept a batch of herbs specifically to practice her medical skills.
After her "Gathering" skill leveled up to Lv.9, she unlocked a new skill called "Herb Identification". It could identify the basic medicinal properties of ordinary herbs, which should be very beneficial for mastering medicine.
It just so happened that there was an unconscious person at home now, so she even had a test subject.
As long as she leveled up her medical skills, she would no longer need to rely on sleeping constantly to clear her debuffs.
In fact, the player had always highly suspected that it wasn't sleep that cured injuries and illnesses. Rather, game characters naturally recovered quickly, and this method was purely just sleeping through the recovery period.
...She really seemed to be taking terrible care of herself.
The player hesitated for a second, but quickly put it out of her mind and happily headed up the mountain again to hunt.
She had no choice; she was short on money.
Her pace was much faster this time. The round trip only took five days, and after selling her gains in other towns, she once again had over twenty taels of loose silver in hand.
However, she couldn't visit that mountain again anytime soon. Even in a game, resources needed time to respawn.
She purchased some necessary tools in the local town, thought for a moment, and then spent a fortune to buy several medical books.
She casually flipped one open.
The "Event" log immediately popped up:
"Reading" Lv.1
It was completely brand new.
Wu Zhen: "..."
...It seemed that over the past year, she really hadn't read any books at all.
She studied the [Reading] skill for a moment. This probably had nothing to do with knowledge; rather, it increased her reading and comprehension abilities.
Knowledge should have a separate skill category, which the player hadn't even triggered yet.
Wu Zhen refused to think about what this implied. Carrying a backpack full of loot, she returned to her ancestral home. Since there wasn't a structure like a study here yet, she placed the books she had bought on a small wooden table in the courtyard and began to read them by the daylight.
Among them were a few books about the basic properties of herbs. Wu Zhen spent an afternoon reading through them, gaining [Pharmacology] Lv.2, and her Reading skill also reached level three.
Perhaps with the assistance of the [Reading] skill, and the fact that the game world was far too realistic, Wu Zhen surprisingly found herself quite receptive to the act of reading within a game. Once a book's reading progress reached one hundred percent, the knowledge branded itself into her brain like a stream of data.
Now, when she looked at those herbs again, the small text appearing next to them included not only their names but also brief pharmacological explanations.
Indeed, real-time feedback was one of the greatest charms of gaming. Wu Zhen had found a new hobby for the foreseeable future.
She blinked slowly, pulling herself out of her state of flow, only to realize that the ambient light around her had already turned into a golden twilight.
As if sensing something, she turned her head and looked toward the wing room on the side of the courtyard.
The courtyard was bathed in the setting sun, but beneath the eaves, it had already grown dim. The door to the wing room had opened at some point, and in the blurry shadows at the boundary of light and dark, a corner of pale white clothing was revealed. Someone stood there quietly, as if they had been watching her for a very long time.
[??? Status changed to 'Awake'].
This [Event] log had appeared more than ten minutes ago.
The player hadn't noticed it.
Or rather, even if she had noticed, she wouldn't have cared.
She simply curved her eyes, closed the medical book, and revealed a smile.
"That's wonderful," she said briskly. "You're finally awake. Good things really are happening today."
She smiled toward the dim wing room. The air was very quiet, and about a second or two passed before a gentle, clear voice slowly drifted out.
"Thank you for saving me, miss. My injuries were quite severe, and I have truly imposed on you these past few days."
The setting sun slanted a bit more, and a portion of the warm yellow sunlight fell upon his face, allowing Wu Zhen to see the man's expression.
Unlike when she had brought him back on that snowy day, his cold, aloof face no longer carried a freezing chill; instead, it held a sense of calm gentleness. His deep black pupils were tinged with a misty gray, reducing that slight, unsettling hint of danger to almost nothing.
Wu Zhen wasn't surprised by the man's understanding of his current situation. She nodded, accepting his gratitude.
She glanced at the row of question marks in his name bar and asked directly, "What is your name?"
The young man lowered his eyes slightly, appearing somewhat regretful, though his voice remained mild. "I am truly sorry... I have lost most of my memories, and now I only remember my surname."
"Amnesia, huh." Wu Zhen didn't want to keep looking at a row of question marks, so she said casually, "Well then, since I picked you up from the snow, let's just call you Zhenxue for now."
The air seemed to grow slightly quiet.
The young man blinked.
His gaze lightly swept over Wu Zhen's matter-of-fact expression, and suddenly, a hint of a smile appeared on his face.
"Thank you, miss. My surname is Jiang."
[???] has changed to [Jiang Zhenxue].
[Jiang Zhenxue]'s affection for you has increased.
[Jiang Zhenxue] Current Affection: 1
Wu Zhen, who was just feeling quite satisfied with her naming skills: ...?
She looked at the pop-up affection notification, a rare trace of confusion appearing on her face.
1?
Even her affection level with the herb merchant in Qingni Town was at 5!
So you just look gentle and kind, huh? Is this your attitude toward your savior?
Wu Zhen smiled and retracted her gaze.
That was close. She had almost been fooled by this hypocritical man.
