"So, what's your name?"
Seeing the hostility fade from the little girl, Li Muyang couldn't help but laugh and also heaved a sigh of relief.
Now that the little girl harbored no malice toward him, that was good news.
It seemed he was one step closer to completing the game.
Li Muyang immediately seized the moment to chitchat with the little girl and hear her story, trying to find out where she had come from.
But the little girl shook her head and said, "My parents said that when I stepped out of that house's door, I no longer had a name."
The response of the little girl made Li Muyang raise his eyebrows.
"Oh? No longer having a name after stepping out the door?"
This little girl didn't seem like an ordinary orphan...
The little girl nodded obediently, "Yes, I am a soul-lost."
"My parents said that people like me are naturally born disasters, monsters, and cannot live with them, so they sold me to the traffickers."
"The traffickers all call me Little Grass."
The little girl spoke obediently, but her logic was coherent as she roughly explained her experiences.
Li Muyang suddenly nodded, understanding, "So you're a soul-lost..."
This strange ailment also existed in his world; it was a congenital weird disease.
People afflicted with this disease were said to hear voices from another world, gradually lose their sanity and consciousness at night, and periodically become bloodthirsty and brutal.
In the end, they would even completely go mad, turning into beast-like monsters and roaming the wilderness, attacking any living beings they encountered.
For mortals, this disease was a catastrophe.
But for a Demon Cultivator, these afflicted were excellent material.
When soul-lost went mad and turned demonic, their blood would secrete a special substance. Once this substance accumulated sufficiently, drawing out the demonic blood of the soul-lost for Artifact Refining or cultivation had great benefits.
At that moment, Li Muyang immediately understood the reason why the village had bought three stray children.
These three stray children were likely soul-losts, collected and sold to the village by the traffickers.
And Li Muyang was the Nurturer chosen by Manager Wu.
Aside from eating three meals a day like normal people, soul-lost needed a Nurturer with abundant vitality to stay by their side, continuously drawing yang energy from them.
No wonder Leng Aqi would rather work in the mountains than nurture Little Wild Grass. For ordinary people, such a role was purely a pitfall!
Li Muyang sighed lightly, his eyes alight with excitement.
Good, now he understood the basic settings of the game.
The next task was to build a relationship with this abandoned little girl and cultivate affection.
The moment the nurturing ended would also be the moment Li Muyang successfully completed the game and received his reward.
Li Muyang smiled and said, "From now on, we'll live together. Tonight you sleep on the bamboo bed, and I'll sleep on the floor. Tomorrow I'll get us a new bed."
"What would you like to eat tonight? I'll go get it for you."
Li Muyang quickly adapted to his role and directly expressed his goodwill.
But upon hearing his words, the little girl was slightly surprised.
"Big brother, you..."
She looked down at the bamboo bed she was sitting on and then glanced around the empty room, quickly getting up in a fluster, "How can I let big brother sleep on the floor? I can sleep on the floor."
Li Muyang laughed heartily, "It's okay, I don't mind. You're young, so you sleep on the bamboo bed."
After all, it wasn't he who would be sleeping, but the character in the game.
Once this scene's dialogue ended, he would quickly jump to the next. Li Muyang didn't care at all; naturally, he grasped every opportunity to boost the girl's favorability towards him.
It was just unfortunate that after his resolute decision to sleep on the floor, he looked at the favorability bar in the upper right corner… it hadn't moved at all.
This stubborn girl seemed touched and uneasy on the surface, but in reality, her favorability hadn't increased at all.
It seemed all her emotions were just an act... tsk...
But Li Muyang wasn't particularly surprised either.
Given this little girl's crafty character, it would have been strange if Li Muyang had easily increased her favorability.
As Li Muyang finished the conversation, the flow of time within the game instance suddenly accelerated.
In non-critical scenes and narratives of the game, the speed of time was very fast, with the speech and actions of those around him fast forwarding like a pressed fast-forward button.
For instance, previously when Li Muyang collected a task from Manager Wu and went to guard outside the stockade, it seemed like only seconds had passed, but in reality, the sun had moved from noon to dusk.
Now, after the dialogue between Li Muyang and Little Wild Grass ended, the sunset outside the window quickly descended.
And the two in the room quickly finished their dinner and went to bed.
During the dinner scene, three choice prompts popped up, and Li Muyang chose the friendly options that increased likability all three times.
However, Little Wild Grass's likability still did not increase.
It seemed that dealing with this mature-minded, precocious little kid required patience; the little girl was not easy to fool.
After finishing dinner, following the rules, Li Muyang locked the chain that Manager Wu gave him around Little Wild Grass's neck.
This iron lock, forged from refined iron, had a ring just right to fit around the neck of a little girl.
By locking up the little girl like this, there was no need to worry about her going crazy and attacking Li Muyang during the night.
After completing all this, Li Muyang finally lay down with peace of mind.
[So tired... should sleep...]
[I don't want to be a Nurturer... I can't sleep]
Faced with the two options that appeared before him, Li Muyang thought for a moment and chose the first.
Then his vision rapidly darkened.
Shortly thereafter...
[You died, game over]
The sudden popup of the blood-red dialogue box left Li Muyang stunned.
What's going on? Dead again?
Didn't I lock the person up properly?
Li Muyang was somewhat speechless, closed his eyes, and re-entered the game.
This time, he first saved the game, and before going to sleep, he thoroughly checked the chain as well as the well-behaved little girl.
Indeed, there was nothing amiss, and he was far enough away that she couldn't possibly break free from the chain and attack him.
Only then did Li Muyang choose to sleep, his field of view going pitch black.
And then...
[You died, game over]
Once again, the blood-red dialogue box popped up in his field of view, forcefully returning Li Muyang to the main screen.
Looking at the painting of a mysterious small mountain village on the game system's main interface, Li Muyang felt somewhat speechless.
"The game officially started, so they've upped the difficulty, huh?"
The key thing is, I'm dying inexplicably. It's just outrageous.
Entering the game again by loading the saved data, this time Li Muyang did not choose to sleep, but instead picked the second option.
[I don't want to be a Nurturer... I can't sleep]
So, after the candle was extinguished, Li Muyang lay wide awake in the little hut, and just like that, he became insomniac.
The pitch-black room was dead silent.
The little girl with an iron chain around her neck helplessly curled up on the bamboo bed; it seemed she was having a nightmare, and she looked pitiful.
In the middle of the night, she suddenly began to struggle, emitting a deep, terrifying growl like a beast.
But it was only a few deep growls, like talking in her sleep, without any other movement, and certainly no breaking free from the chain to kill.
And this time, Li Muyang did not die.
The first rays of sunlight in the morning streamed through the window and fell on him, and Li Muyang, having safely made it through the night, was somewhat surprised.
If it's not the little girl going crazy in the middle of the night... then who killed me those previous times?
Is there some other danger hidden in this village?