The wooden hut should have been lit by nothing more than a cheap oil lamp running on its last thread of wick — a dying flicker that mirrored what remained of its inhabitant's life.
But tonight, Madam Mei's hut blazed.
Not from any lantern. From a golden Exclamation Mark (!) — a massive Quest icon — hovering straight through the thatched roof, rotating slowly, radiating its arrogant glow into the night air.
Li Wei crouched behind the wet undergrowth, holding his breath hard. The marker's light felt blinding against his UI-sight, as if the world's system was openly mocking his family's suffering to his face.
"Marker's active," Li Wei rasped. "There's a Player inside."
His eyes scanned the bamboo-weave walls riddled with gaps. A figure's shadow was printed clearly within — moving restlessly, pacing back and forth at the rapid rhythm of someone starving in a queue for food.
Li Wei narrowed his eyes, focusing his vision through the gaps in the bamboo.
[NAME: XING (PLAYER)]
[LEVEL: 22 (AGILITY TYPE)]
[STATUS: AWAITING EVENT TRIGGER]
A lean young man with a sharp, hollow face. Two curved twin daggers hung at his hips. His foot tapped continuously against the floorboards with impatience. His fingers jabbed repeatedly at the empty air in front of him.
Li Wei crept one step closer. The sounds from inside the hut came through clearly now.
"Cough... Wei... my son..."
His mother's voice. Weak, hoarse, and laced with cuts of pain. Li Wei's heart dropped straight to the bottom of his stomach.
"Please... get me water... my chest is so tight..." Madam Mei whimpered.
Beside the decrepit bed, Xing stood tall with an expression of profound boredom. He didn't move a single inch toward the water jug. Instead, he stared fixedly at the empty space in front of Madam Mei's wrinkled face, pressing the air in front of him with one finger at an aggressive rhythm.
Tap. Tap. Tap.
A transparent square button hovered and blinked in front of Xing's face — a UI element only visible to fellow Players and anomalies like Li Wei.
[SKIP DIALOGUE >>]
"God, the animation on this is so slow," Xing muttered in disgust. "Skip. Skip. Is the skip button broken or something? Why is she taking so long to die?"
Li Wei's blood went to a boil instantly.
His mother was in her final struggle. His mother was begging for water for her drying throat. His mother might have been trying to say her last words — and this piece of garbage was treating all of it as nothing but a cutscene timer he needed to fast-forward through.
Xing exhaled sharply. "Ugh. Should've just gone grinding mobs in the Dungeon. Drop rate on this quest item is probably garbage anyway."
Li Wei's right hand clamped around the hilt of his scavenged dagger — then he forced every muscle in his arm to freeze.
He's Agility Type. Level 22. Frontal attack and my head comes off first.
Li Wei had to test his Walking Rock theory. Right now.
He drew a long, slow breath, scooped up a handful of wet mud from the ground, and pressed it across his face, burying every trace of the pure hatred underneath. He released the dagger, letting both hands hang open — dirty, empty, shaking visibly with fear.
He wasn't a hunter hiding in the dark. He was just a panicked village NPC running home.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Li Wei broke out of the undergrowth. He stumbled forward in a lurching, uneven run toward the hut's front door, his hands grabbing the bamboo tube of water from the clay pot sitting on the front porch.
"Mother! Mother!" Li Wei cried out. His voice cracked with a panic he didn't need to manufacture at all.
He kicked the rotting wooden door open.
Xing spun around. The reflexes of an Agility-Type Player were something horrifying — in the blink of an eye, both twin daggers were drawn and crossed in his hands. Xing's eyes lit up with a blue glow.
[SKILL: ANALYZE]
Li Wei's heart stopped beating inside his chest.
He didn't take a combat stance. Instead of defending himself, Li Wei threw himself to his knees hard beside his mother's bed. He turned his back fully to Xing — a deliberate, life-staking gamble.
"Mother... I'm sorry I'm late..." Li Wei choked out, lifting his mother's head with trembling hands.
Xing lowered his daggers slowly. The blue scanning light in his eyes went dark.
"Tch. Thought it was an Elite Mob spawn," Xing scoffed in disappointment. "Just the NPC's son. No wonder the old lady's dialogue wouldn't end — it was waiting for the kid's arrival to trigger."
Li Wei exhaled slowly through his teeth.
It worked.
In the sweep of Xing's system scan, Li Wei's name bar glowed a calm, untroubled YELLOW. Neutral. Non-threatening. Just another background prop walking past.
"Wei... you're home..." Madam Mei smiled, so faintly it barely reached her lips. Her thin, dried-out hand reached up, brushing Li Wei's mud-streaked cheek with a rough tenderness. "I thought... I wouldn't see you again..."
"Shh. Drink first, Mother," Li Wei whispered, tilting the bamboo tube to her cracked lips.
Behind Li Wei's back, Xing began tapping the tip of his boot again. His patience had run dry.
"Hey. NPC. Move it. Your little family drama is taking way too long. I've got a Raid at nine."
Li Wei didn't turn around. His eyes stayed locked on his mother's HP bar floating dim at the edge of his vision.
[HP: 5% (CRITICAL)]
"I'll just kill the mother myself," Xing muttered coldly. The sickening sound of metal grinding against metal as he dragged his twin daggers across each other. "Usually when a Quest Giver dies mid-dialogue, the item auto-drops to the corpse."
[KILLING INTENT DETECTED]
The red warning flashed in Li Wei's eyes. He knew the clock had just hit zero. Save his mother's life, or kill Xing here — he couldn't do both at once.
He chose to run.
"Forgive me, Mother," Li Wei breathed, barely audible.
"What?" Xing responded from behind.
Li Wei pivoted sharply. His right arm swung hard, hurling the water and the bamboo tube directly at Xing's face.
"Hah?" Xing deflected it easily with the back of his hand. "The NPC's fighting back? Is this a bug?"
But the throw was never meant to connect.
In the split second Xing was distracted by the splash, Li Wei dropped low and lunged forward, ripping his scavenged dagger from inside his robe and driving it viciously toward Xing's exposed thigh.
CLANG!
Not the sound of flesh tearing — the sharp ring of metal on metal. A transparent hexagonal barrier materialized for an instant, catching Li Wei's blade cold.
[PASSIVE: EVASION (DODGE SUCCESSFUL)]
"What the—!" Xing snarled, jerking backward. "You're not a regular NPC! You're a disguised Elite Mob, aren't you?!"
In an instant, Li Wei's name above his head shifted — from calm YELLOW to a blazing, bloody RED.
Xing moved. His speed was obscene. The twin blades carved through the air, slashing straight toward Li Wei's throat.
Li Wei didn't try to block. His hand plunged into his inner pocket, ripped out one of his small black spheres, and smashed it into the floorboards with everything he had.
POOF!
Dense black smoke detonated instantly, swallowing the entire cramped room in artificial darkness. The sharp bite of sulfur hit the nose like a slap.
"Ugh! What is this?!" Xing slashed his daggers blindly into the wall of smoke.
[STATUS: BLINDED]
[ACCURACY -90%]
Li Wei didn't waste a breath on a counterattack. He spun back to the bed, scooped up his mother's body — she felt as light as a bundle of dirty rags — and held her tight against his back.
He didn't run for the front door. Li Wei lifted his foot and drove it into the rear wall of the hut, the one made from rotting woven bamboo.
CRACK!
The brittle wall caved apart. Li Wei vaulted through the gap, hit the wet ground hard, and ran.
"DON'T YOU RUN FROM ME, TRASH!"
Xing's scream muffled from inside the hut, chased by a fit of hard coughing.
Li Wei didn't look back. He tore through wild brush. Sharp thorns ripped his robe and drew lines across his mother's dangling legs, but his feet never stopped.
"Wei... where are we going..." his mother whispered helplessly in his ear.
"Somewhere safe, Mother. Please... hold on just a little longer."
In the middle of his desperate run, Li Wei felt something strange. At his mother's throat — cold as ice — an ancient jade necklace pulsed with a faint, slow glow that matched her heartbeat exactly.
[QUEST ITEM: JADE OF THE LOST DYNASTY]
[STATUS: SOUL BOUND]
[WARNING: Separating this item will cause the host's instant death.]
Li Wei's foot nearly caught on a tree root.
All this time, he and his Uncle had assumed the Players were hunting his mother because she was hiding something valuable.
The truth was far more brutal. His mother was the valuable thing.
The system had deliberately made Madam Mei's life into a living vessel for the item. To claim the necklace, every Player first had to slaughter the host.
"Bastards..." Li Wei spat between ragged breaths. "All of you, every last one — bastards!"
---
Li Wei slumped against the narrow cave wall hidden behind a waterfall — his most secret childhood hiding spot. The thundering curtain of water swallowed the sound of his wrecked, uneven breathing.
Beside him, Madam Mei had lost consciousness on a bed of dry leaves. Fever burned off her skin. Her HP bar was barely a sliver, blinking its critical red at 4%.
Li Wei ran his thumb along the flat of his dagger — the blade that never got to drink Xing's blood. His hands shook hard from physical exhaustion and the crash of adrenaline.
Then the corner of his vision flared bright. The Chat Box window he always kept minimized in the bottom left corner of his sight began scrolling fast.
---
[GLOBAL CHAT — SERVER: MURIM-01]
[Xing]: "Heads up, everyone. Serious bug at the Starter Village Quest in Sector 4, Northern Hut."
[Player77]: "What kind of bug? Item not dropping?"
[Xing]: "Worse. The target NPC got kidnapped by another NPC — male, carrying a dagger, had smoke bombs. Might be an Elite Boss or a glitched Hidden Event."
[GuildMaster_Dragon]: "Elite Boss spawning in a starter village? Drop has to be Legendary guaranteed. Share the coordinates, Xing."
[Xing]: "Last seen heading toward the Black Bamboo Forest. He's carrying the Quest Item [Jade of the Lost Dynasty]. Whoever finds him first, take him down. Fifty-fifty split."
---
Li Wei stared at the stream of glowing blue messages with bloodshot eyes. He punched the empty air, forcing the chat window shut. His gaze dropped to his mother, shivering violently through what might be her final hours.
"Elite Boss, huh?"
Li Wei let out a short laugh. Empty. Broken. It bounced quietly off the wet cave walls and died there. He brushed his hand gently over his mother's cold-sweat-damp hair, then slowly raised his face, eyes cutting hard toward the darkness of the forest beyond the curtain of falling water.
There was no trace of a cornered rat left in them. Only a resolve that had been frozen solid by absolute, unforgiving hatred.
"Fine. If all of you want a Boss so badly..." Li Wei's grip tightened around his dagger hilt until his knuckles went white. "...then I'll become the one Boss none of you can kill."
