Pov: Vik
Pushpa finished the last flake of her steamed river-perch with a delicate, satisfied lick of her whiskers. Sitting on the counter stool, she let out a tiny, polite burp that smelled faintly of ginger and fish, then immediately hopped onto my left shoulder and curled around my collar like a warm black scarf.
"Good girl," I murmured, scratching behind her ears before picking up the six high-density plasma capacitors and the spool of superconducting wire from the counter. "Come on. Let's go rescue the western branch before our resident mad scientist turns it into a crater."
I left Roman, Sherry, and Lu Xiaoran's family to their quiet dinner and walked down the long, floating corridor of the western pillar toward the Artifact Lab.
Even before I reached the heavy alloy blast doors, I could feel a faint, rhythmic humming vibrating through the floorboards. The overhead runic lights flickered purple once, then stabilized.
I pushed the door open without knocking.
Inside the vast, dome-shaped laboratory, the scene looked like a scrapyard had collided with a high-energy physics institute. Half-assembled humanoid robot frames hung from ceiling gantries, blueprints floated across a dozen holographic monitors, and in the center of the room stood Lina.
Her silver-tipped black hair was tied up in a messy bun held together by a soldering iron. Her brass mechanical monocle whirred furiously over one eye as she hovered a seven-foot-long metallic spear three feet above her workbench. Strange, jagged arcs of purple light crackled along the shaft, bending the air around the spearhead.
"Hehehe... yes, yes!" Lina cackled, rubbing her grease-stained hands together with the exact manic energy of an old-school movie villain. "Once I stabilize the spatial-inversion coil, not even a 6th-circle defensive matrix will stop the penetration vector! I'll call it the God-Piercer Mark I—no, the Protagonist-Shredder 3000!"
"I see your three hours of peaceful meditation really calmed your spirit," I said dryly, leaning against the doorframe.
"Eep!"
Lina jumped three feet in the air. Her concentration broke, the purple light on the spear sputtered out, and the heavy weapon dropped straight onto the workbench with a loud metallic CLANG.
She spun around, hiding a wrench behind her back while her face turned bright red. "M-Master! I was just—I finished my Qi circulation! All three hours, down to the second! You can ask Roman!"
"I did ask Roman," I replied, walking over to her workbench and setting the six West Oak City plasma capacitors and the superconducting wire down beside her blueprints. "Which is why I brought you these instead of confiscating your tools."
Lina's eyes instantly locked onto the high-grade components. Her nervousness vanished in a split second, replaced by pure, unbridled greed. "High-density sub-atomic plasma capacitors?! Master, these are restricted military-grade parts from the Old Quarter! With six of these in series, I won't even need a manual charge cycle on the spear!"
"You won't be touching a single one of them until you finish a hundred squats, a hundred push-ups, and ten laps around the outer pond with Chintu," I said calmly, tapping her forehead with a single finger. "You just broke through to the Foundation Establishment realm, Lina. If your physical body remains as fragile as wet paper, the recoil from this spear will dislocate your shoulder before the beam even hits the target."
Lina's shoulders slumped, her lower lip jutting out in a tragic pout. "Master, physical labor is what robots are for..."
"Out to the yard," I pointed toward the door. "Noah is still splitting iron-bark logs outside. Join him for an hour. While you sweat out that mad-scientist energy, I need to borrow your holographic projector."
Grumbling under her breath about the tyranny of fitness-obsessed teachers, Lina reluctantly took off her brass monocle, set it on the table, and trudged out of the lab toward the training plaza.
Once the doors slid shut behind her, the laboratory grew quiet, save for the soft hum of the cooling fans.
I pulled up a rolling metal stool, sat down in front of Lina's main holographic terminal, and reached into my sleeve. I pulled out the three physical micro-film drives I had bought from the unindexed antiquarian bookstore in West Oak City's underground market.
[System: Host, I thought we already had a plan for West Oak City. Noah trains until he reaches the Golden Core realm, Chintu eats whatever monsters Ruby makes, and we slowly bleed her dry. Why are you digging through old historical drives now?]
"Because you only see one board at a time, chatbot," I said, slotting the first micro-film drive into the optical reader. "Think about what we've learned so far. Ruby is a transmigrator with a Devouring ring and a Flesh-Forge system. If we keep chipping away at her labs, what happens when her back is truly pushed against the wall?"
[System: Her system will trigger a desperate crisis protocol, or she will call in the Heavenly Sword Pavilion's ancestors to nuke the city.]
"Exactly," I said, adjusting my gold-rimmed spectacles as thousands of pages of old news archives, geographical surveys, and faction registries projected into the air above the desk. "And what happens if I step in personally to crush her? Even with my Void Traveling realm restored and my Prana masking my aura, killing a Chosen One directly is a messy business that attracts Heaven's spotlight—or worse, alerts that fake copy of me sitting in the Infinite Heaven Sect."
Pushpa shifted on my shoulder, resting her chin on my collarbone as her golden-green eyes lazily watched the scrolling blue text in the hologram.
"Remember the four steps of victory I taught Lu Xiaoran and Roman back when we were farming?" I murmured, tapping the console to filter the historical data by regional anomalies. "Saam, Daam, Dand, Bhed. Negotiation, bribery, force, and division. Force is the last resort. When dealing with cockroaches who have heaven-defying luck and system plot armor, the smartest move isn't to stomp on them yourself."
[System: Wait... Host, don't tell me you are planning to—]
"If Chosen Ones cannot be easily killed by normal people because fate bends to protect them," I smiled, a cold, scholarly glint flashing behind my lenses, "then the most efficient weapon to ruin a Chosen One... is another Chosen One."
[System: Host, you are truly sinister! You want to start a dogfight between protagonists!]
"I prefer to call it peer-reviewed academic competition," I corrected mildly. "When two Chosen Ones with conflicting destinies collide, their luck halos grind against each other, their systems burn through their emergency trump cards, and their plot armor cancels out. We already know from our earlier encounters that Blue Star is currently crawling with Chosen Ones. Let's see who else is operating on the Western Continent right now."
I tapped the terminal, instructing Lina's local search algorithm to scan the three micro-film drives for three specific patterns over the last five years:
Unexplained dungeon evolutions or insect swarms.Sudden, overnight massacres of ancient families involving bizarre monsters.Obscure waste-branch youths who miraculously skyrocketed in cultivation after finding an "ancient inheritance".
For two minutes, the cooling fans on Lina's terminal whined at maximum speed as the optical reader tore through decades of offline Western Continent records.
PING!
Three separate holographic windows snapped open in front of me, highlighted in bright crimson.
I leaned forward, resting my elbows on the workbench as I read the first file.
[File 01: The Southern Marsh Quarantine — Six Months Ago]Location: Blackwater Province (800 miles south of West Oak City).Report: Three mid-sized sects and twelve beast-taming clans were wiped out overnight by a tide of mutated, blood-drinking insects. Survivors reported seeing a young man in tattered robes standing atop a flying centipede, claiming that "all living beings are merely fodder to refine my Spring-Autumn Gu."
"There's our Gu Master from the B-rank dungeon," I noted, tapping the window. "Eight hundred miles south. And look at his behavioral profile—he harvests entire beast-taming sects to feed his insects. What do you think a psychotic Gu Master would do if he heard that a 'Prismatic Fairy' in West Oak City possesses a ring that condenses pure, high-grade biological essence and forty-eight mutated chimera cores?"
[System: He would drool and march his entire insect swarm straight into West Oak City to turn her into bug food!]
"Precisely. Now let's look at the second one."
I swiped my hand, bringing the middle hologram to the front. My playful expression faded slightly, my yellow eyes narrowing into cold, vertical slits.
[File 02: The Kingdom of Mercury Incident — One Month Ago] Location: Capital Region, Magic Kingdom of Mercury (Western Continent Core). Report: Complete eradication of the Rosewell Family estate. Official Empire of Solaris records blame the surviving heiress, Lina Rosewell, for colluding with abyssal entities. Unverified eyewitness accounts from border hunters, however, describe a massive, four-legged mountain behemoth carrying a black castle moving through the outer wilderness, accompanied by a black-haired, red-eyed youth commanding colossal giants.
"Lina's enemy," I said softly, my fingers drumming once against the steel table. "The boy who planted that Mind Flayer in her head and murdered her father. He's wandering the wilderness between the Kingdom of Mercury and the Central Plains. A summoner who hoards giant monsters and thinks himself a demon king."
[System: Host, that guy has a Monster-Creation System! And Ruby is currently running the 'Apex Flesh-Forge Protocol' to build her own monster army! Their system domains practically overlap!]
"Two monster-summoners on the same continent," I chuckled dryly. "To a guy who rides around on a mountain behemoth, Ruby's illegal chimera lab isn't just an insult—it's a loot box waiting to be cracked open."
Finally, I looked at the third window.
[File 03: The Heavenly Sword Pavilion's 'Rising Dragon' — Current]Location: Central Plains, Heavenly Sword Pavilion Main Peak (300 miles west of West Oak City).Report: A formerly crippled outer-sect sword slave named Ye Xiao miraculously regrew his meridians three months ago after falling off Sword-Burial Cliff. Since then, he has defeated seven inner-sect elders, awakened an 'Ancient Chaos Sword Spirit,' and publicly vowed to cleanse the Heavenly Sword Pavilion of all corrupt elders and 'false fairies' who rely on demonic crooked paths.
I stared at the third file for a full five seconds. Then, a slow, genuine grin spread across my face.
"Fell off a cliff, found an ancient sword spirit, and hates 'false fairies' who use crooked paths," I read aloud, shaking my head in sheer amazement. "And he's right inside Ruby's own sect—the Heavenly Sword Pavilion."
[System: Host... this Ye Xiao is a textbook righteous-path Sword Protagonist! The kind whose entire character arc revolves around exposing hidden demonic cultivators inside his sect and slaying them to prove his Dao heart!]
"And meanwhile," I said, leaning back on the stool and stroking Pushpa's soft black fur, "Ruby is an arrogant transmigrator sitting in West Oak City under the banner of the Heavenly Sword Pavilion, secretly cutting open mortals in her basement and acting like everyone in this world is a disposable NPC."
Pushpa let out a low, purring rumble against my neck, her tail flicking once as if applauding the upcoming theater.
"Look at the board, System," I said, my voice calm and conversational. "We don't need to risk Noah exposing himself before he reaches the Golden Core realm. And we don't need to waste our own energy fighting the Heavenly Sword Pavilion's elders. We still have our dear prisoner Luther sedated in my spatial ring, and we have the six alchemists Roman tied up in Ruby's sewer lab."
[System: Wait... what are you going to do with Luther and those lab technicians?!]
"Simple," I said, standing up from the stool and powering down the holographic projector. "Tonight, we are going to package up the evidence of Ruby's subterranean flesh-lab, attach a few 'leaked' rumors about her priceless devouring ring, and deliver a custom invitation to the righteous sword boy Ye Xiao, the bug-loving Gu Master in the south, and the castle-riding monster boy from Mercury."
I adjusted my spectacles, watching through the lab window as Noah split his fiftieth iron-bark log in the twilight while Lina miserably jogged around the pond with a three-foot-tall Chintu waddling enthusiastically at her heels.
"Ruby thinks she's the only player in a single-player game," I murmured, a gentle scholar's smile resting on my lips. "Let's turn on multiplayer mode and see how her system handles three other protagonists knocking on her front door at the exact same time."