Torchlight flickered wildly across the river, throwing jagged orange-red reflections across a water surface as dark as ink. Foreign voices rang out in a chorus, cutting through the roar of the waterfall.
"Check Sector 3!"
"Where's the Elite Boss? Don't let it despawn!"
"Check the cave behind the waterfall! Hidden Chests usually spawn there!"
Li Wei pressed his back hard against the ice-cold stone wall, clamping his hand over his mother's mouth to muffle her delirious moaning.
[MOTHER'S HP: 3% (CRITICAL)]
The digital number blinked a fierce red, pulsing in perfect rhythm with Li Wei's heart slamming wild inside his ribcage.
"Cold... Wei... it's so cold..." Madam Mei whimpered, her eyelids squeezed shut against the pain.
Ten minutes. Maybe less, before this narrow cave flooded with dozens of bloodthirsty Players hunting a "Boss."
Li Wei's gaze dropped — staring straight down to the base of the cliff, which was entirely swallowed by a sea of thick purple fog.
The Skull Valley.
A hellish restricted zone. Rumor had it that breathing its air alone could blister organs from within, and its dew could dissolve skin from bone. But somewhere in his memory, his late grandfather's stories surfaced — the old man who had walked these rims: The poison here is a true guardian, not a killer. As long as you know how to filter your breath.
Li Wei tore the sleeve-end of his gray robe off with both hands. He spat on it repeatedly — not from disgust, but because saliva mixed with mud was the most logical natural filter he could think of right now. He tied the wet cloth tight over his mother's nose and mouth, then did the same to his own face.
"Forgive me, Mother," he rasped. "We have to spend a little while in hell."
He readjusted his hold and jumped, picking his way down the slick vertical trail toward the heart of the deadly purple fog.
The moment his soles sank into the soft swamp floor at the valley's base, a stinging sensation bit immediately into every patch of exposed skin.
The air here was enormously heavy. It smelled sharp — like a sickening blend of sulfur and sweet rotting flesh. Li Wei's eyes watered and burned. His lungs felt packed with sand fresh from a furnace.
But he didn't die.
No Health Bar ticking steadily down to zero. The pain he felt was very real, but it was purely biological pain — the kind of physical suffering that could still be beaten down by sheer will and discipline.
Li Wei staggered forward through the dense poisonous fog. Around him, dead trees stood rigid like enormous black skeletons carved from solid charcoal.
CREAK.
The sound came from directly above his head.
Li Wei went completely still.
From the branches of the massive tree right in front of him, something descended slowly along a pale silk thread as thick as a grown man's arm.
A Bone Spider.
The size of a full-grown bull. Its legs stretched out long and tapered to spear-point tips. Eight blood-red eyes glowed through the fog with a cold, predatory light. From its mandibles dripped thick neon-green fluid that hissed and scorched the moment it touched the wet ground below.
[MONSTER: BONE SPIDER]
[LEVEL: 35 (AGGRESSIVE)]
Li Wei's knees nearly gave out beneath him. Level 35. For the pack of Level 20-something Players hunting him up on the ridge, this thing was a merciless death sentence. One bite and their screens would go dark.
Li Wei pulled his mother's legs tight and shut his eyes. His scavenged dagger couldn't scratch a shell that hard.
The giant spider landed without a sound directly in front of him. The stench of its breath hit Li Wei's covered face like a physical blow.
The creature lowered its grotesque head. And sniffed.
Li Wei held his breath until his chest felt ready to split.
Scrape... scrape...
The spider dragged its two front legs across the ground, looking confused. The sensor antennae on its head flickered blind, sweeping the empty space — searching for Mana fluctuations, searching for Qi signatures, searching for the System radiation any foreign entity would leave behind.
But Li Wei was empty. He had no Mana Bar. He radiated no Player Aura.
To this predator's every sensor, Li Wei smelled exactly like a pile of swamp mud. As static and ignorable as the dead tree trunks surrounding them.
The spider let out a slow, dissatisfied hiss. It turned around and crawled back up into the tree — dismissing Li Wei's existence entirely, the same way it would dismiss a river stone.
Li Wei opened his eyes slowly. His legs were still shaking badly, but a wild smile had begun forming behind the dirty cloth covering his face.
"So it's true..."
The monsters of this world weren't just bloodthirsty beasts. They were antibodies. Giant white blood cells, programmed by raw nature to hunt down the foreign virus called Player.
As long as Li Wei stood as a native cell of this world, nature would never touch him — unless he was the one to start trouble.
"This place..." Li Wei let out a small laugh, his voice hoarse and raw against the silence. "This place is the safest fortress in the entire world."
---
Li Wei found shelter inside the ruins of an old stone temple, its lower half already swallowed by the swamp. Its curved roof was still intact, ringed by thick curtains of spiderweb that functioned as a natural defensive perimeter.
Near the entrance archway, a human skeleton slumped helplessly against the wall, still wearing the remains of heavily rusted mid-grade iron armor.
[PLAYER CORPSE (LEVEL 24)]
[CAUSE OF DEATH: POISON DAMAGE (STACK x10)]
The bones were polished white and gleaming. Every scrap of flesh and muscle had been dissolved away by the air's toxin. This unfortunate Player hadn't fallen in combat — the environment had simply gnawed their Health Bar down to absolute zero.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
Li Wei stepped over the skeleton without interest and carefully laid his mother down on the stone floor tiles.
[MOTHER'S HP: 2%]
Madam Mei had lost consciousness completely. Her pale lips had darkened to black. The poison from the Quest Item at her throat was reacting more violently now, accelerated by the trace amounts of swamp air that had seeped through the wet cloth.
Medicine. I need a stabilizer. Now.
Li Wei swept the interior of the temple with a predator's starving gaze. In the dampest, darkest corner of the wall, a cluster of mushrooms grew together in a dense patch — deep purple as midnight, their caps rimmed with blood-red spots.
[ITEM: DEATH MUSHROOM]
[EFFECT: LETHAL POISON (INSTANT DEATH)]
For Players, this was nothing but a crafting material for pure killing poison.
But for Li Wei, a memory ignited — the village Elder Healer's teachings, the fragile old man whose skull had been crushed underfoot by a monster two years ago before he could pass on his full library of knowledge.
"The strongest poison of the swamp, burned completely to ash, becomes the most absolute life-anchor there is."
Li Wei didn't hesitate for a single second. He harvested the poisonous mushrooms with bare hands. Borrowing a flint stone and a bundle of dry cloth from the physical remains of the Player corpse at the entrance, he struck a small fire alive in the temple's corner.
The mushrooms were burned until perfectly charred. Ground by force with the back of his dagger into dense black powder. Mixed with a few drops of remaining water from his bamboo tube until it became a thick paste.
The smell was absolutely rancid. Like a corpse being boiled.
"Drink this, Mother. Please..."
Li Wei let the black liquid drip between his mother's lips.
Madam Mei's body convulsed sharply for a moment — then the ragged, broken gasps of her breathing slowly began to even out. Steady. The blackness at her lips faded slightly, returning to a pale blue.
[STATUS: POISON STASIS (FROZEN)]
[HP: LOCKED AT 2%]
Not healed. But not dying either. The mushroom ash had forced her body's circulation into an immediate freeze, preventing the cursed Quest Item from draining her life any further. A borrowed pause. A rented window of time.
Li Wei slid down and collapsed backward, his spine settling heavy against a stone pillar. Every trace of energy in his body had been spent.
"Safe..." he muttered, eyes half-lidded. "No sane Player is reckless enough to push through this fog without preparation..."
Splash. Splash.
The sound of footsteps walking calmly across swamp puddles.
Li Wei's eyes flew open. He stamped out the last embers of his fire instantly, then peered slowly around the edge of the thick stone pillar.
Through the sea of purple fog — the same fog guaranteed to kill anyone within minutes — someone was walking inside.
A woman.
No filter mask. No poison-resistant armor. She wore only a clean white silk gown that somehow remained untouched by a single speck of swamp mud. Around her small frame, a dome of soft green light pulsed gently, as though it had a breath of its own.
A Bone Spider dropped from a branch above, lunging straight at her with fangs wide open.
The instant the tip of the monster's leg touched the surface of the green dome, it dissolved into gray ash. The Level 35 creature shrieked in pain and fled scrambling back into the darkness.
The woman in white didn't even bother to turn her head.
Li Wei forced his eyes to scan this impossible figure.
Her level wouldn't resolve. The number was too high for his sight's system to reach.
[NAME: ARIA]
[JOB: SAINTESS (HEALER)]
[LEVEL: ???]
[OBJECTIVE: SEARCHING FOR RARE HERB (DEATH MUSHROOM)]
Li Wei swallowed. It felt like broken glass going down.
He had fought his way into the depths of pure hell to put himself beyond the reach of human hands.
But tonight, an "angel" had come and knocked directly on the door of his new home.
And the only thing this lethal angel was here searching for... was a cluster of mushrooms Li Wei had just burned completely to ash.
Izinnnn suhu mau lewatTorchlight flickered wildly across the river, throwing jagged orange-red reflections across a water surface as dark as ink. Foreign voices rang out in a chorus, cutting through the roar of the waterfall.
"Check Sector 3!"
"Where's the Elite Boss? Don't let it despawn!"
"Check the cave behind the waterfall! Hidden Chests usually spawn there!"
Li Wei pressed his back hard against the ice-cold stone wall, clamping his hand over his mother's mouth to muffle her delirious moaning.
[MOTHER'S HP: 3% (CRITICAL)]
The digital number blinked a fierce red, pulsing in perfect rhythm with Li Wei's heart slamming wild inside his ribcage.
"Cold... Wei... it's so cold..." Madam Mei whimpered, her eyelids squeezed shut against the pain.
Ten minutes. Maybe less, before this narrow cave flooded with dozens of bloodthirsty Players hunting a "Boss."
Li Wei's gaze dropped — staring straight down to the base of the cliff, which was entirely swallowed by a sea of thick purple fog.
The Skull Valley.
A hellish restricted zone. Rumor had it that breathing its air alone could blister organs from within, and its dew could dissolve skin from bone. But somewhere in his memory, his late grandfather's stories surfaced — the old man who had walked these rims: The poison here is a true guardian, not a killer. As long as you know how to filter your breath.
Li Wei tore the sleeve-end of his gray robe off with both hands. He spat on it repeatedly — not from disgust, but because saliva mixed with mud was the most logical natural filter he could think of right now. He tied the wet cloth tight over his mother's nose and mouth, then did the same to his own face.
"Forgive me, Mother," he rasped. "We have to spend a little while in hell."
He readjusted his hold and jumped, picking his way down the slick vertical trail toward the heart of the deadly purple fog.
The moment his soles sank into the soft swamp floor at the valley's base, a stinging sensation bit immediately into every patch of exposed skin.
The air here was enormously heavy. It smelled sharp — like a sickening blend of sulfur and sweet rotting flesh. Li Wei's eyes watered and burned. His lungs felt packed with sand fresh from a furnace.
But he didn't die.
No Health Bar ticking steadily down to zero. The pain he felt was very real, but it was purely biological pain — the kind of physical suffering that could still be beaten down by sheer will and discipline.
Li Wei staggered forward through the dense poisonous fog. Around him, dead trees stood rigid like enormous black skeletons carved from solid charcoal.
CREAK.
The sound came from directly above his head.
Li Wei went completely still.
From the branches of the massive tree right in front of him, something descended slowly along a pale silk thread as thick as a grown man's arm.
A Bone Spider.
The size of a full-grown bull. Its legs stretched out long and tapered to spear-point tips. Eight blood-red eyes glowed through the fog with a cold, predatory light. From its mandibles dripped thick neon-green fluid that hissed and scorched the moment it touched the wet ground below.
[MONSTER: BONE SPIDER]
[LEVEL: 35 (AGGRESSIVE)]
Li Wei's knees nearly gave out beneath him. Level 35. For the pack of Level 20-something Players hunting him up on the ridge, this thing was a merciless death sentence. One bite and their screens would go dark.
Li Wei pulled his mother's legs tight and shut his eyes. His scavenged dagger couldn't scratch a shell that hard.
The giant spider landed without a sound directly in front of him. The stench of its breath hit Li Wei's covered face like a physical blow.
The creature lowered its grotesque head. And sniffed.
Li Wei held his breath until his chest felt ready to split.
Scrape... scrape...
The spider dragged its two front legs across the ground, looking confused. The sensor antennae on its head flickered blind, sweeping the empty space — searching for Mana fluctuations, searching for Qi signatures, searching for the System radiation any foreign entity would leave behind.
But Li Wei was empty. He had no Mana Bar. He radiated no Player Aura.
To this predator's every sensor, Li Wei smelled exactly like a pile of swamp mud. As static and ignorable as the dead tree trunks surrounding them.
The spider let out a slow, dissatisfied hiss. It turned around and crawled back up into the tree — dismissing Li Wei's existence entirely, the same way it would dismiss a river stone.
Li Wei opened his eyes slowly. His legs were still shaking badly, but a wild smile had begun forming behind the dirty cloth covering his face.
"So it's true..."
The monsters of this world weren't just bloodthirsty beasts. They were antibodies. Giant white blood cells, programmed by raw nature to hunt down the foreign virus called Player.
As long as Li Wei stood as a native cell of this world, nature would never touch him — unless he was the one to start trouble.
"This place..." Li Wei let out a small laugh, his voice hoarse and raw against the silence. "This place is the safest fortress in the entire world."
---
Li Wei found shelter inside the ruins of an old stone temple, its lower half already swallowed by the swamp. Its curved roof was still intact, ringed by thick curtains of spiderweb that functioned as a natural defensive perimeter.
Near the entrance archway, a human skeleton slumped helplessly against the wall, still wearing the remains of heavily rusted mid-grade iron armor.
[PLAYER CORPSE (LEVEL 24)]
[CAUSE OF DEATH: POISON DAMAGE (STACK x10)]
The bones were polished white and gleaming. Every scrap of flesh and muscle had been dissolved away by the air's toxin. This unfortunate Player hadn't fallen in combat — the environment had simply gnawed their Health Bar down to absolute zero.
Li Wei stepped over the skeleton without interest and carefully laid his mother down on the stone floor tiles.
[MOTHER'S HP: 2%]
Madam Mei had lost consciousness completely. Her pale lips had darkened to black. The poison from the Quest Item at her throat was reacting more violently now, accelerated by the trace amounts of swamp air that had seeped through the wet cloth.
Medicine. I need a stabilizer. Now.
Li Wei swept the interior of the temple with a predator's starving gaze. In the dampest, darkest corner of the wall, a cluster of mushrooms grew together in a dense patch — deep purple as midnight, their caps rimmed with blood-red spots.
[ITEM: DEATH MUSHROOM]
[EFFECT: LETHAL POISON (INSTANT DEATH)]
For Players, this was nothing but a crafting material for pure killing poison.
But for Li Wei, a memory ignited — the village Elder Healer's teachings, the fragile old man whose skull had been crushed underfoot by a monster two years ago before he could pass on his full library of knowledge.
"The strongest poison of the swamp, burned completely to ash, becomes the most absolute life-anchor there is."
Li Wei didn't hesitate for a single second. He harvested the poisonous mushrooms with bare hands. Borrowing a flint stone and a bundle of dry cloth from the physical remains of the Player corpse at the entrance, he struck a small fire alive in the temple's corner.
The mushrooms were burned until perfectly charred. Ground by force with the back of his dagger into dense black powder. Mixed with a few drops of remaining water from his bamboo tube until it became a thick paste.
The smell was absolutely rancid. Like a corpse being boiled.
"Drink this, Mother. Please..."
Li Wei let the black liquid drip between his mother's lips.
Madam Mei's body convulsed sharply for a moment — then the ragged, broken gasps of her breathing slowly began to even out. Steady. The blackness at her lips faded slightly, returning to a pale blue.
[STATUS: POISON STASIS (FROZEN)]
[HP: LOCKED AT 2%]
Not healed. But not dying either. The mushroom ash had forced her body's circulation into an immediate freeze, preventing the cursed Quest Item from draining her life any further. A borrowed pause. A rented window of time.
Li Wei slid down and collapsed backward, his spine settling heavy against a stone pillar. Every trace of energy in his body had been spent.
"Safe..." he muttered, eyes half-lidded. "No sane Player is reckless enough to push through this fog without preparation..."
Splash. Splash.
The sound of footsteps walking calmly across swamp puddles.
Li Wei's eyes flew open. He stamped out the last embers of his fire instantly, then peered slowly around the edge of the thick stone pillar.
Through the sea of purple fog — the same fog guaranteed to kill anyone within minutes — someone was walking inside.
A woman.
No filter mask. No poison-resistant armor. She wore only a clean white silk gown that somehow remained untouched by a single speck of swamp mud. Around her small frame, a dome of soft green light pulsed gently, as though it had a breath of its own.
A Bone Spider dropped from a branch above, lunging straight at her with fangs wide open.
The instant the tip of the monster's leg touched the surface of the green dome, it dissolved into gray ash. The Level 35 creature shrieked in pain and fled scrambling back into the darkness.
The woman in white didn't even bother to turn her head.
Li Wei forced his eyes to scan this impossible figure.
Her level wouldn't resolve. The number was too high for his sight's system to reach.
[NAME: ARIA]
[JOB: SAINTESS (HEALER)]
[LEVEL: ???]
[OBJECTIVE: SEARCHING FOR RARE HERB (DEATH MUSHROOM)]
Li Wei swallowed. It felt like broken glass going down.
He had fought his way into the depths of pure hell to put himself beyond the reach of human hands.
But tonight, an "angel" had come and knocked directly on the door of his new home.
And the only thing this lethal angel was here searching for... was a cluster of mushrooms Li Wei had just burned completely to ash.
