Chương 3

Ming Xuan Ji flipped the skewered monster meat over the crackling bonfire, the flames casting erratic, flickering shadows against the rough stone walls of her makeshift cave. The rendered fat hissed and popped as it dripped into the fire, filling the cramped, damp space with a heavy, gamey aroma. She had chosen this cave halfway up a jagged mountain explicitly for its defensibility, noting the narrow mouth that funneled potential aggro into a perfect kill zone.

But as she stared blankly at the roasting meat, she realized the tactical positioning was entirely unnecessary. Nothing was hunting her. She took a bite of the meat. It was dense, tough, and aggressively bland without a single grain of salt or spice. Chewing mechanically, her mind wandered to the fundamental, frustrating reality of this new world's mechanics. In Unlimited Blade Art Online's New Game Plus, the enemy AI scaled brutally.

Wolf packs utilized flanking maneuvers and feints, solo beasts possessed adaptive attack patterns, and simple dungeon mobs demanded perfect parry timing or they would tear your avatar to shreds. Here? The monsters were a massive disappointment. Their Qi levels registered as high-tier threats, yet their actual combat prowess was embarrassingly mediocre. They possessed zero tactical coordination, relying entirely on brute force and predictable, primal instincts.

It was like playing a heavily downgraded alpha build of a game where the developers hadn't finished coding the enemy pathing. Thanks to her vast meta-knowledge and flawless muscle memory, she was effortlessly punching far above her supposed weight class. A single, precisely timed [Demonic Echo] to a weak spot routinely ended fights in seconds. She was getting too good at this, and the thrill was rapidly bleeding into routine. Adding to the surreal disconnect was the complete lack of physical fatigue.

In the early game of UBAO, stamina drain was a persistent, nagging mechanic that forced players to rest or burn expensive potions. But in this body, her Dantian hummed with perpetual, bottomless energy. She didn't yawn. She didn't feel the heavy, dragging pull of sleep.

'Is this a blessing from the Heavenly Demon Scripture? Or just how this reality works?' she wondered, tossing the stripped wooden skewer into the fire. Either way, it left her with far too much time to think. She extinguished the campfire with a casual wave of her hand, the devouring arts of her class passively absorbing the flames into her palm. She stepped out of the cave and into the biting chill of the mountain night.

Looking up, the three moons hung like luminous pearls in the velvet sky, weaving their disorienting, triple shadows across the jagged peaks.

"O Savior, please save this world," the voice that had summoned her echoed unhelpfully in her memory.

"Save it from what?" she muttered to the wind.

"Boredom?" She decided to climb the rest of the mountain. In any open-world RPG, scaling the highest local peak was the standard protocol for unlocking the regional map. It was a viewpoint synchronization. It would give her a sweeping vantage to finally spot a quest hub, a distant castle spire, or even a simple dirt road. Her Qinggong propelled her upward in a series of massive, gravity-defying bounds. Jagged cliffs that would have been entirely impassable for a normal human became mere stepping stones.

She leaped from frost-rimed ledge to narrow outcrop, her black hanfu billowing around her like raven wings. The higher she climbed, the thinner and colder the air grew. Frost began to coat the rocks, and a howling gale threatened to rip her off the mountain. But the [Heavenly Demon Raiment] adjusted its internal temperature seamlessly, wrapping her in a cocoon of warm, adaptive Qi.

Along the ascent, her enhanced senses picked up a flock of pterodactyl-like beasts nesting on a high outcropping, their auras pulsing with sharp, wind-aspect energy. She ignored them completely. Without reliable aerial tracking or flight capabilities, chasing flying mobs was a highly inefficient use of her time. Hours blurred into a singular, rhythmic exertion until she finally vaulted over the final ridge. She crested the summit exactly as the sky began to lighten.

The inky black horizon shifted into deep navy, then bled into a vibrant, brilliant gold as the sun breached the skyline. Rays of dawn pierced the morning mist, turning the dew far below into a sea of scattered diamonds. This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there. It was a breathtaking, cinematic vista. Ming Xuan Ji stood on the flat stone peak, the wind whipping her ponytail, and slowly scanned the horizon in a complete 360-degree arc. Trees.

To the north, a riot of green and autumnal yellow canopy. To the east, more trees. To the south and west, misty, rolling forests stretching endlessly toward distant, snow-capped mountains. There were no roads. There was no smoke rising from village chimneys. There were no grand, magical academies piercing the skyline. It was just a vast, indifferent ocean of primordial wilderness.

"Fuck my life," she whispered, her voice immediately carried away by the biting wind. A spike of genuine, bitter resentment flared in her chest toward whoever had pulled her into this reality. In the web novels she used to read between streaming queues, the summoned hero always woke up in a grand marble summoning hall. They were immediately greeted by a panicked king, a beautiful princess, and a highly detailed exposition dump.

She had been dumped in the middle of a geographical dead zone, forced to play a hardcore survival simulator with absolutely no minimap and no tutorial NPC.

"What kind of Savior treatment is this?" she yelled at the empty sky, kicking a loose stone off the cliff edge.

"If you're going to rip me out of my pod, at least drop me near a starting village! Give me a merchant! Give me a damn salt shaker!" Only the echo of her own voice answered back. With a heavy, aggravated sigh, she etched the positions of the distant mountains into her memory to act as crude navigational landmarks, ensuring she wouldn't accidentally run in circles. She turned her back on the sunrise and began her descent. —--- What followed was a mind-numbing, relentless grind.

Days bled into weeks, and weeks quietly dissolved into a full month. The vibrant, alien forest quickly devolved into a monotonous, repetitive blur of eternal green. Ming Xuan Ji's patience eroded entirely. The isolation wasn't just boring; it was psychologically corrosive. Back on Earth, thousands of voices scrolling rapidly across a chat window had been the soundtrack to her life. Now, the suffocating silence of the wilderness was driving her to the brink. She started talking to herself just to hear a human voice.

She would give the monsters harsh, verbal critiques on their terrible pathing algorithms before executing them. She started carving crude tally marks into the trunks of ancient trees, desperate to leave some proof that she actually existed in this world. Her hunting became mechanical and terrifyingly efficient.

Her [Void Storage Ring] had swelled to hold an absurd stockpile; thousands of beast carcasses and glowing herbs sat neatly categorized in her spatial inventory, representing a one-woman extinction event for the local ecosystem. But her progression had plateaued. She was pushing her Qinggong to its absolute limit, her travel speed rivaling a modern sports car as she vaulted effortlessly over streams and dense root systems. Yet, fewer and fewer monsters offered a challenge that matched her escalating stats.

The low-tier mobs died too easily, barely causing a flicker in her rapidly expanding Dantian. A dark, festering paranoia began to take root in her mind.

'Don't tell me this is one of those ridiculous xianxia worlds,' she thought bitterly as she sprinted through another identical grove of pine trees.

'The ones where a single planet is the size of an entire solar system, and walking to the next town takes three years of real-time travel.' The horrific possibility loomed over her. What if there was no civilization? What if the "Savior" prompt had been a lie, and she was simply doomed to wander an empty, procedurally generated forest forever? Was her endgame just becoming a feral demon queen ruling over a population of mindless boars and wolves?

Just as her sanity began to violently fray at the edges, a massive anomaly aggressively brushed against the periphery of her expanded senses. Ming Xuan Ji skidded to a halt, her boots tearing deep furrows into the damp earth. She instantly activated her [Divine Eye of Veritas]. Miles away, practically vibrating with raw, unadulterated hostility, was a massive flare of Qi. It was an incredibly potent, stormy signature that utterly dwarfed the pathetic beasts she had been farming for the last thirty days.

It was a beacon of pure, concentrated danger. She had actually been passively sensing it on the edge of her awareness for the past few days, her subconscious deliberately avoiding it because it registered as a highly lethal encounter. But right now? Cautious, tactical logic was entirely overridden by sheer boredom. Her unstable, profoundly bored mind latched onto the massive Qi signature like a starving wolf spotting a bleeding deer.

A crazed, manic smile slowly stretched across her flawless face, revealing a flash of sharp teeth.

"Finally," she whispered, her dark eyes flashing with a terrifying, absolute thrill.

"Something worth fighting." She didn't formulate a stealth approach. She didn't check her healing supplies. She simply unleashed her Qi, her body blurring into a streak of black and crimson silk as she veered violently off her path and sprinted directly toward the epicenter of the threat. The wind howled in her ears as the adrenaline finally, beautifully surged through her stagnant veins.

Whatever apex predator was waiting for her in the shadows ahead was going to pay the ultimate price for her month of agonizing frustration. She was done with the tutorial. She was done waiting for the world to come to her.