Forty-eight hours of peaceful, uninterrupted idle farming had passed over Solitude Spire.
Deep inside Felix Vance’s chest, his one-Earth-mass Sol-Class stellar core continued its slow, eternal hydrostatic rhythm.
The core burned at a tranquil fifteen million Kelvin, fusing hydrogen into helium with effortless mathematical perfection.
Day and night, that gentle, invisible nuclear furnace radiated a mild, nourishing warmth into the surrounding atmosphere.
To Felix, it was just like having a personal sunlamp that kept his joints loose and his tea perpetually steaming.
To the soil of Solitude Spire, however, it was the equivalent of bathing three square miles of virgin black earth in continuous, concentrated cosmic sunlight.
On the morning of the second day, Felix woke up because the air felt unusually luminous.
Even with his faded straw hat pulled down over his nose, the light filtering through the woven reeds was as bright as high noon in midsummer.
Felix pushed his hat back and blinked at the yard.
Beside his woven recliner, his white porcelain Infinite Cozy Teacup sat on the cedar side table, sending up a gentle wisp of fragrant steam at exactly 68.5 degrees.
Under the short left table leg, the purple Sovereign Heart Seal held the wood motionless against the deck.
On top of the table, the glowing fist-sized Soul-Pearl held down his crumpled drop-rate sheets without moving an inch.
On the brass perch near the railing, Barnaby the clockwork owl had tucked his head beneath his metallic wing.
The thick black rubber stopper was still clamped firmly in his beak, keeping his copper tip secure.
Inside the bird’s brass chest, his internal gears produced their faithful, rhythmic cadence: *tick... tick... tick...*
Down in the clover meadow, the Thunder Gryphon lay stretched out on its belly.
The massive golden beast was wearing a pair of thick leather eye goggles that the spectral corsairs had custom-stitched from spare sailcloth.
The gryphon let out a muffled snore, twitching its golden tail to swat away a passing firefly.
To the left, the five-star Sun-Lotus Cabbage was glowing happily, its twelve emerald leaves bobbing in the warm breeze.
Felix stood up, stretched his arms toward the sky, and walked to the porch railing.
He looked out across the newly expanded three-square-mile field.
The five hundred pumpkin seeds he had casually tossed two days ago had sprouted into neat, tidy rows of healthy golden vines.
Dozens of plump, fist-sized orange gourds dotted the dark loam, looking like cheerful little lanterns nestled among broad green leaves.
"The pumpkins look pretty good," Felix murmured, nodding in mild approval. "Nice texture, no bug spawns."
Then, his gaze drifted toward the exact center of the field.
Felix froze, one hand resting on the cedar post.
His eyes widened slightly.
"Wait a second," Felix whispered, rubbing his eyes. "What on earth is that hitbox?"
In the middle of the dark plateau sat a golden colossus.
This was no pumpkin.
It was an enormous, gleaming white-and-gold root vegetable the exact size and shape of an imperial four-horse carriage.
The colossal vegetable bulged out of the black earth like the dome of a sunken temple.
Its thick, fibrous skin was translucent ivory wrapped in glowing veins of molten gold, pulsing with a slow, radiant rhythm that lit up the entire upper skybox.
From the top of the root, a crown of emerald foliage exploded thirty feet into the morning air.
Each serrated leaf was the size of a schooner’s mainsail, drinking in the morning sunlight and exhaling a shimmering mist of white-gold solar vapor.
A localized ring of warm, radiant auroras hovered directly above the leafy crown, humming with the deep resonance of a singing bronze bowl.
Down at the lower tiers of the Radiant Dawn Academy, sixty miles of cloud ocean separated the outer peaks from the Seventh Spire.
Yet the sheer, incandescent brilliance radiating from the central field of Solitude Spire was visible to every disciple who stepped outside.
In the High Observatory, Chancellor Valen stood frozen before the Grand Astral Looking-Glass.
Beside him, Elder Helius and half a dozen senior masters crowded the brass platform, their eyes glued to the scrying mirrors.
Valen leaned forward, peering through the enchanted crystal lenses.
His hands began to shake.
His breath caught in his throat with a wet, ragged gasp.
The brass looking-glass slipped from his fingers, clattering loudly against the stone tiles.
Valen stumbled backward two full steps, his face pale and his knees trembling so hard that Elder Helius had to grab him by the elbow.
"Chancellor!" Helius cried out, alarmed. "What is it?! Have the spatial wards collapsed?! Is a void rift opening above the peak?!"
"The... the ancient texts..." Valen choked out, clutching his chest with both hands. "The stone murals of the First Sovereign... the records of the Primordial Garden..."
Helius quickly shoved past the Chancellor and peered through the looking-glass.
The elder's white beard practically stood on end.
"Great ancestors above..." Helius whimpered, his voice shrinking to a frightened squeak. "That golden light... those dragon-scale striations along the root... that pulsing crown of solar leaves..."
"The Ten-Thousand-Year Sun Ginseng of Creation!" an elder behind them screamed, dropping to his knees and clutching his head in utter shock. "The mythological ancestor-herb said to sprout only in the divine palaces of the Higher Heavens!"
"Look at the celestial mist surrounding its crown!" Valen wept openly, tears streaming down his wrinkled cheeks. "A single inhalation of that divine vapor could purge forty years of marrow poison! A single strand of its root hair could shatter a bottleneck and grant three thousand years of lifespan!"
"And it has grown to the size of an imperial carriage!" Helius gasped, his soul reeling in cosmic dread. "How many countless millions of years of celestial solar qi did the Supreme Patriarch pour into that sacred soil to manifest such an impossible miracle in merely two days?!"
Valen slowly straightened his robes, looking toward the Seventh Spire with boundless, terrified reverence.
"The Patriarch does not plant mere crops," Valen whispered, his voice trembling. "He is cultivating the foundation of a new heavenly dynasty. Solitude Spire is no longer a mortal peak. It has become the garden of an immortal creator."
Up on Solitude Spire, the garden of the immortal creator was experiencing a very different atmosphere.
Out in the middle of the field, Lord Nether-Bane and his eighty spectral corsairs were flat on their skeletal bellies in the dirt.
Their bleached hemp aprons were smeared with black loam.
The Ghost King lay prostrate directly before the giant vegetable, his bony forehead pressed into the crumbly earth.
He was weeping tears of pure, luminous ectoplasm, soaking the warm soil beneath his jaw.
"The Divine Ancestor Root..." the Ghost King sobbed, his hollow voice vibrating with religious hysteria. "The Patriarch saw our hollow, cursed bones and took pity on our eternal damnation! He grew the Golden Ginseng of Nine Heavens to bathe our sins in sacred solar light!"
"Praise the Supreme Sovereign!" eighty spectral corsairs chorused from the dirt, their ghostly ribs rattling in rhythm. "Praise the Lord of the Golden Sun!"
Felix Vance casually strolled across the black field in his loose hemp tunic and straw slippers.
He walked past the groveling corsairs, stepping right up to the massive white-and-gold root.
The thing was truly absurd.
Felix reached out and knocked on the thick golden skin with his knuckles.
*Thump. Thump.*
The sound was deep, dense, and solid, ringing like a hollowed-out oak trunk.
Felix pulled his foot back and gave the side of the vegetable a light kick with his straw slipper.
*Bonk.*
The giant vegetable did not move a millimeter.
Instead, a tiny shower of warm golden sparks puffed from the rind, smelling faintly of clean radish and peppery mustard greens.
Felix tapped the side notch on his obsidian AetherDeck, bringing up the Inspector HUD.
He aimed the camera module directly at the glowing monolith:
【Target: Overgrown Sun-Radish】 【Grade: Common Root (Mutation Tier: Gigantic)】 【Inspector Note: An ordinary tutorial white radish that spent 48 hours soaking in the ambient fusion radiation of a 15-million-degree Sol-Class core. It has mutated into a crunchy 3.4-ton mountain of salad material. Tough skin, incredibly sweet interior.】
Felix stared at the report on his screen, his eye twitching slightly.
"A winter radish," Felix said flatly.
He looked down at the tiny tutorial seed packet icon in his virtual inventory trash bin.
"It was that tiny leftover seed stuck in the seam of the burlap bag," Felix muttered, rubbing his forehead with a deep, weary sigh. "I must have dropped it right here when I was kicking open the furrows."
He looked back up at the 3.4-ton golden monolith towering above him.
"This is ridiculous," Felix grumbled under his breath. "This is why you never leave an idle farm sim running in the background with high-tier environmental multipliers turned on. The code always glitches out. The local growth buffs overflow the integer cap, and suddenly your level-one starter radish becomes the size of a city bus."
He rested his hands on his hips, staring at the sheer scale of the vegetable.
"Where am I even supposed to put three tons of radish?" Felix complained. "My pantry only has six shelves. The crisper drawer in my wooden icebox can barely fit two cabbages and a carton of milk. If I leave this out in the sun, it's going to attract giant fruit flies."
At his feet, the Ghost King slowly lifted his bleached skull from the loam.
The ancient skeleton had caught Felix's muttered words: *growth buffs overflow the integer cap... level-one starter radish... size of a city bus.*
The Ghost King’s soulfire flared in stunned, dizzying enlightenment.
*Integer cap... Level-one starter...* the Ghost King repeated internally, his ethereal mind scrambling to decipher the cosmic riddle.
*The Patriarch speaks the primordial language of the First Creators!*
*He calls this world-shattering divine treasure a 'starter root'! To his supreme, infinite consciousness, a Ten-Thousand-Year Sun Ginseng capable of ascending an entire mortal sect to immortality is merely a trivial pebble from his tutorial steps!*
*And he complains of its size! He laments that the mortal vessel of his pantry cannot contain the boundless bounty of Heaven!*
*Such terrifying, peerless arrogance! Such sublime, godlike nonchalance!*
The Ghost King wiped an ectoplasmic tear from his cheekbone, bowing his head in total submission.
"Supreme Patriarch!" the Ghost King called out with trembling reverence. "If this sacred mountain of divine life displeases your eyes, allow your humble servants to guard it with our very souls! We shall build a shrine of pure silver around its roots!"
Felix looked down at the skeleton in the hemp apron.
"What shrine? It's a vegetable, dude," Felix said, waving a dismissive hand. "We aren't building a shrine in the middle of my pumpkin patch. We're eating it."
The Ghost King's jaw literally dropped, falling two inches open.
"E-eating it?!" the Ghost King stammered, his eye sockets flashing violently. "You... you intend to consume the primordial avatar of the Golden Sun?!"
"Yeah, obviously," Felix said, tapping his chin thoughtfully. "Radishes are great for morning congee. Slice them up thin, soak them in rice vinegar, toss in some salt and chili oil, and let them ferment in a stone jar for a couple of days. Super crunchy, nice and tangy."
Felix turned on his heel, his straw slippers dragging lightly through the dark loam as he headed back toward the porch.
"I need to grab my kitchen cleaver," Felix called over his shoulder. "Keep the bird away from the leaves while I'm inside. If the gryphon eats thirty square yards of radish greens, it's going to have stomach gas, and I'm not dealing with ozone burps all afternoon."
The Ghost King remained frozen on his knees, staring after Felix's retreating back with wide, unblinking eye sockets.
*Pickling the Primordial Sun Ginseng in vinegar and chili oil...* the Ghost King thought, his skeletal hands shaking so hard his trowel rattled against his ribs. *He treats the greatest celestial artifact of the epoch like a side dish for porridge.*
*There is no being in the nine heavens more terrifying than this lazy, barefoot mortal.*