“They actually retreated?”
The rebel soldiers pursuing the prisoners rushed back to reinforce their position, and the scattered prisoners escaped with their lives.
This was something Shen Zhi had never expected.
For a moment, his feelings were a tangled mess.
He had never imagined that this noble really could pull it off.
She had quick wits and real ability.
How had she ever been such a good-for-nothing before?
“What are you standing there for?” Before he could think further on the matter, Zhang Yang was already urging Shen Zhi to get to work.
“We’re leaving too. Hurry up and take my head to meet up with my body.”
Since the commander had abandoned the prisoners, she knew when to quit while she was ahead.
It might look as though she’d thrown the stubborn commander into disarray with just two gold bricks, but what if he’d been a tougher sort?
What if he’d been determined to have his soldiers hunt the prisoners down and kept gritting his teeth and holding out?
Then he would have realized that the Headless Person was bluffing a little, that her words weren’t entirely true.
After all, Zhang Yang could kill one of them at most.
She couldn’t kill every last one.
Shen Zhi immediately snapped out of it and hurried to unfasten Zhang Yang’s head from the tree branch.
“Your Highness, this stratagem of besieging Wei to rescue Zhao shows astonishing nerve. Those common folk you saved don’t know who their benefactor is, but if Your Highness ever seeks to rise again, their gratitude may yet bring an unexpected reward.”
The doubts he had just suppressed surfaced once more.
Judging by his interactions with the noble these past two days, even if this woman couldn’t win universal acclaim, she shouldn’t be this awful.
And yet his elder brother serves as a Military Commandant in the noble’s household, and has had far more contact with her than Shen Zhi has, but never once mentioned that the noble could be like this.
Had his brother misjudged her?
Or was there something else going on?
Or could amnesia really transform someone completely?
Amnesia was just amnesia.
It wasn’t as if he’d been given a different brain.
He cast a complicated look at the now-disorderly rebels, tamped down his jumble of thoughts, and followed Zhang Yang’s directions to rejoin her headless body.
Zhang Yang was still urging him on: “Hurry, hurry! My warning bar can’t hold out much longer!”
Shen Zhi: “…”
He didn’t understand what a progress bar was, but Zhang Yang’s tone made it clear the situation was urgent, so he instinctively broke into a run, completely forgetting that if he’d had the heart to leave Zhang Yang’s head behind and stall for time, she might actually have been killed.
Until then, he’d genuinely wanted her dead, just for some peace and quiet.
By the time he realized that, the opportunity had passed.
Little did he know, Zhang Yang was regretting things herself.
She’d thought she could lose a hand, a leg, or even her head as often as she liked, and as long as all the parts were gathered together, they’d reassemble and she’d be as good as new.
In other words, she’d assumed she got something like Player privileges in her own Homestead.
That was why she’d been so decisive about splitting up just now.
She never would have guessed—
This crappy game had another huge pitfall hidden in it.
Just now, with her head hanging in a tree, she’d been controlling her body from an overhead view to attack the Red Names.
At first, everything had gone smoothly.
But just as she charged up to kill the enemy commander with a single swing of a gold brick, a red progress bar suddenly appeared in her field of vision.
Its right end was bright scarlet, while its left end was almost black.
The first gold brick landed, and the bar jumped left by almost half its length!
Four big characters popped up before her eyes:
HEALTH WARNING!
At the same time, the system prompt gained a new line: You are losing too much blood.
Please seek treatment at a nearby clinic as soon as possible.
Fortunately, once she stopped, the blood bar’s avalanche-like plunge came to a halt, allowing Zhang Yang to breathe a little easier.
“What kind of damn game designer puts this stuff in a Homestead Side Quest that’s supposed to be all about relaxing?”
She could only curse the fact that she was a Game NPC and not a person.
If she were human, she’d smash their heads in with a gold brick and show them just how much water was sloshing around in their brains!
“Who was that person just now?”
While her head was busy making its way back to her body, the commander she’d stunned with two swings of the gold brick had also come around.
He forced down the metallic taste of blood churning in his throat.
Grateful to have survived, he nonetheless stared menacingly in the direction the Headless Person had disappeared.
Hatred and murderous intent were intertwined in his heart.
“Does anyone recognize this person?”
The officers exchanged glances, then all shook their heads.
There were all sorts of strange and unusual people in this world, but someone with such a conspicuous feature as the “Headless Person” was still a rare sight.
Given what the other had shown today, he shouldn’t have been a nobody.
Hearing this, the commanding general felt utterly humiliated.
So he’d suffered such a crushing loss at the hands of some nobody?
The anger he’d been forcing down was now impossible to contain, and the more he thought about it, the more his insides burned like a blazing fire.
“Draw this person’s likeness and post it everywhere. Anyone who can provide a lead will be rewarded with a hundred gold pieces!”
“This subordinate obeys.”
“General, what should we do about the prisoners who escaped?”
“Should we send men to capture them again?”
Their task was to escort the prisoners back.
Now that every last one had fled, they had no way to explain themselves to their superiors.
If their colleagues found out they’d lost the prisoners because some roadblock had given them the runaround, they’d be laughed at for years to come.
It would be a lifelong disgrace!
The commanding general fixed his gaze in one direction, his jaw clenched so tightly his molars seemed ready to grind audibly.
“Prisoners are prisoners, wherever they come from.”
How much effort would it take to round up a scattered band of fleeing prisoners?
“I remember there are two towns a hundred li to the west?”
“There are.”
“Then it’s here.”
“Headless body” detected.
Synthesize?
Confirm synthesis
As soon as Zhang Yang’s head returned to its original position, she rubbed her neck and rolled it from side to side.
After checking several times that her limbs moved freely, and that the progress bar that had been like a death warrant was gradually returning to the safe zone, she finally pulled up the System Log and gave it a cursory look.
At last, she spotted what was wrong.
She counted on her fingers, adding and subtracting, and finally came up with a number.
“Why is my HP Bar so short and so thin?”
Every observation sample had several hundred thousand HP.
How come she barely had over ten thousand?
She had carefully adjusted her own stats over the years to keep pace with the Player levels, so Players couldn’t spot anything amiss just by looking at her visible HP value.
Zhang Yang figured that even if her HP Bar couldn’t match the current version’s Game Bosses, who routinely had over a billion HP, it shouldn’t be this low.
If she were a Player, she could report the bug to the developers.
But as a Game NPC, she was a bug to begin with.
Clutching her chest, she looked utterly baffled.
“Why do I feel so short of breath?”
She looked up and saw that Shen Zhi, not far away, also wore a deeply troubled expression.
It only put her in a worse mood.
“Didn’t all those prisoners escape without a hitch? Why do you still look so glum?”
She pulled Shen Zhi’s thoughts back to reality.
Already worried sick, he heard Zhang Yang’s heated question and thought, People may change their appearance, but their nature is hard to change.
Even with her memory gone, she still has traces of her old arrogance and tyranny.
“I’m not Your Highness’s scapegoat for taking out your anger on. As the saying goes, every grievance has its source and every debt its debtor. Whoever made you angry is the one you should go settle things with.”
Why was she picking a fight with him?
Zhang Yang asked, “When have I ever been angry?”
Shen Zhi: “…”
The noblewoman had anger written all over her face, and she still claimed she wasn’t angry?
He was just about to speak when he saw Zhang Yang gesture faintly toward her chest, wearing a blank expression as she suddenly seemed to realize something.
“Oh, so this is what it feels like when anger stirs inside you?”
“So this is ‘Anger’?”
Joy, anger, sorrow, happiness, love, hatred, shame, and fear: emotions that her observation samples took for granted were difficult for her to understand, and had once been an obstacle to her imitating human Players.
But then, she was an NPC who excelled at observing and learning.
Her notebook was filled with thousands upon thousands of situations calling for different emotional responses.
Whenever the right situation came along, she simply imitated the corresponding one, and she was almost never wrong.
Her observation samples even thought she was one of the top ten friends and relatives: emotionally rich, sensitive, and considerate.
Over the past sixteen years, she had gradually figured out several kinds of emotions.
Shen Zhi asked, “Your Highness, you don’t know what ‘anger’ is?”
Zhang Yang said, “It’s not that I don’t know. It’s just that most of the time, I haven’t had the chance to really experience and reflect on the feeling of ‘anger.'”
“Hadn’t had the chance?”
“The people who make me ‘angry’ generally don’t live very long.”
Most of them were human players with Red Names.
There were too many human players in the game.
According to one observation sample, the peak number of players online at the same time could exceed a hundred million.
With so many people, you got every kind of playstyle under the sun.
Some were obsessed with farming, some with crafting and other side professions, some with traveling around the game world, and some with running Instances and fighting Bosses… Naturally, there were also people obsessed with fighting other players.
If they could win, they’d stand there and taunt you.
If they couldn’t, they’d taunt you lying on the ground.
The human players who showed signs of making Zhang Yang lose her temper?
Oh, they generally lay at the Respawn Point, cursing her.
They couldn’t get back up at all.
If they dared to, she killed them.
But Shen Zhi took her words to mean something entirely different.
His expression changed dramatically.
“Have you regained your memories?”
Zhang Yang’s eyes lit up.
“Are we continuing the plot?”
“You—”
“Come on, come on, don’t dawdle.”
If an NPC got on her nerves, she’d kill them too.