Chapter 729: Internet‑Addicted Girl Xi Lian

Heimu then sensed Xi Lian's exact location.

The signal source was on the first floor, in a corner room slightly to the right at the end of the hallway.

She crossed the courtyard, walked along the corridor inward; on the walls on both sides hung several hand‑drawn landscape sketches, with delicate strokes, the corners bore dates, probably drawn by Xi Lian herself.

The corridor was quiet, with only a faint creak from the floorboards.

That door was at the end of the corridor.

The door was not fully closed, leaving a gap about two fingers wide.

The light seeping through the gap was neither candlelight nor daylight, but a somewhat cold white glow.

At the same time came a series of thump‑thump muffled sounds, mixed with a rapid, almost frantic key‑press combo, and a voice she recognized intimately yet found utterly unfamiliar.

Heimu tilted her head, "What's going on?"

She reached out, hesitated briefly, pressed her fingertips against the door panel, and gently pushed it inward.

The hinge was well‑maintained; the turning produced not a single sound.

She slipped sideways through the opened gap and stepped into the room, her boot soles landing silently on the floor.

Then she saw the room's scene clearly, her violet‑black pupils dilating slightly.

?!

The state of this room could only be described in four characters: utterly dreadful.

Various items lay scattered haphazardly on the floor: opened snack wrappers piled into a small mound, empty soda bottles tipped and rolling in the corner, several jackets and skirts tangled in a heap at the foot of the bed, the quilt rolled into a loose clump, a pillow jutting half‑off the edge of the mattress.

The air was filled with a complex scent mixing snack crumbs, beverage residue, and some fragrance, contrasting starkly with the warm, poetic scene outside in the courtyard.

And the source of all this lay perched on a purple cushion at the center of the room.

The pink‑haired girl faced away from the doorway, her hair a tangled mess, completely unstyled; the shoulder‑length pink hair at the back of her head sprouted several stray tufts.

She wore a wrinkled off‑shoulder purple jacket, the large pink ribbon on its back crushed and misshapen, hanging crookedly on her left shoulder.

The white strap short‑skirt's hem was flipped up, revealing a white, tender thigh and half a strip of the same white fabric—underwear!

Two bare little feet were tucked behind, ankles crossed, the pale toes bobbing up and down to some rhythm.

She wore a pair of oversized headphones, clearly a product of external technology, with clean lines; the casing bore a ring of breathing lights slowly alternating blue and purple.

Both hands gripped a controller, she lay prone on the cushion, her face pressed against a huge glowing screen ahead, so focused that everything around vanished from her perception.

That glowing screen clashed entirely with the antiquated room, like a portal from a modern tech society thrust into a pastoral medieval setting, floating in the air and emitting cold white light.

The screen displayed a shooter game scene, the crosshair shaking wildly, bullet count dwindling rapidly, the edges flashing red warnings indicating damage, and a huge gray dialog box popping up in the center.

Heimu recognized the interface; the external network permission she had personally granted Xi Lian was originally intended to let this Golden Descendant girl, trapped in System Space, glimpse the outside world for entertainment, learn about the diversity of civilizations across universes, perhaps write poetry, perhaps collect fragments she found interesting.

But now...

Xi Lian was completely unaware that someone stood behind her.

Her attention was wholly on the screen, both thumbs firing rapidly on the controller, her mouth speaking nonstop, tone high and urgent, nothing like the soft, whispered voice Heimu remembered.

That voice belonged to an artistic girl who habitually prefixed "I" to her sentences, each ending with a light musical note.

And now every word that sprang from this pink‑haired girl's mouth sounded as if lifted straight from a high‑rank voice channel of a shooter game.

"Left side, left side! Someone on the left! Corner, corner! Switch weapons! Are you using that busted Handgun to snipe just to laugh at the enemy and inherit their bullets?!"

The headphones emitted an unknown reply.

Xi Lian's feet stopped their wobble.

"What do you mean 'cover me'! You don't even know which dimension you're crouching in! I haven't seen your marker on the map since earlier—why is there gunfire on your side again? Are you solo—ugh!"

A rapid‑fire barrage of output.

Intermixed with several syllables that Heimu couldn't immediately tell whether to classify as interjections.

Heimu stood at the doorway, her mouth twitching, a thousand words stuck in her throat, not a single syllable escaping.

She stared at the pink‑haired girl frantically spouting trash talk at the screen, and the entire set of modules in her brain that handled the "Xi Lian" character portrait crashed simultaneously.

After she crossed into this Honkai Star Rail world, the person she spent the most time with was Xi Lian.

Feng Jin and A Ge Lai Ya met for the first time today.

Ke Lv De La and HaiSeYin also made formal contact today.

Ti Bao was indeed enthusiastic, so much that she called her "mom" and then bombarded her all the way.

But Xi Lian was different.

Xi Lian was the first Golden Descendant she encountered in System Space, the one she handed the replicated Weng Fa Luo Si governance permission to, and the one who gently said "Just leave it to me" in remote communication.

Heimu's familiarity with Xi Lian was far deeper than with any other Golden Descendant.

Hence the impact she felt was more intense than any previous one.

When Feng Jin turned into Socrates, she was only bewildered for a moment before pulling up a panel and beginning to delete entries.

While Ke Lv De La and HaiSeYin were getting cozy in the bath, she leaned against the door, eavesdropped, and silently critiqued HaiSeYin's seductive technique.

Ti Bao's barrage left her a mess, yet she maintained a resigned composure.

But now!

Standing in the doorway of this chaotic room, watching this internet‑addicted girl version of Xi Lian, Heimu was utterly stunned.

Her expression froze, her lips moved as if to speak, but no sound emerged from her throat.

At that moment, a blood‑red defeat dialog box popped up on the screen.

Gunfire halted abruptly, the screen dimmed, leaving only the central bold text flickering coldly.

The air in the room solidified for an instant.

Xi Lian sprang up from the cushion, sitting upright with legs crossed, both hands gripping the controller raised to her chest, her blue rhombus‑shaped pupils burning with pure fury.

She stared at the failure message on the screen, inhaled deeply, then blasted out through the headphones.

"Solo upgrade! Ugh! You really are solo, huh!"

Her calf kicked the mat, her bare heel struck the soft pad with a muffled thump, "I've told you a hundred times—cover, cover, cover—do you not understand human speech, or is that button missing on your controller! I was covering three heads up front, you went off alone around the back and ended up in the opposite respawn point—what the hell are you looking at on the map, damn it!"

A vague defensive voice came through the headset.