Felix Vance was on the verge of falling back asleep when a sharp, whining squeal pierced the orbital silence.
It sounded like a rusty engine belt slipping on an alternator, mingled with the booming bass rumble of someone running a leaf blower outside an apartment window on a Saturday morning.
Felix opened one eye, his jaw tightening with irritation.
Across the cedar deck, Barnaby's clockwork head twitched violently, his brass wings rattling against his body as his sensitive auditory gears strained under the sudden acoustic spike.
"What now?" Felix grumbled, sitting up in his hammock. "I specifically set the lobby audio limit to twenty decibels. Why do online games never enforce their own voice-chat moderation?"
He picked up his brass spyglass and peered toward the western edge of the docking platform.
Two ancient figures were currently floating three feet above the cedar planks, their robes ballooning with violent spiritual energy.
On the left stood Grand Ancestor Mo-Sha of the Dark Fiend Sect, an ancient necromancer draped in cloaks of wailing ghost-silk woven from thirty fallen sects.
On the right stood Venerable Tian-Guan of the Heavenly Sword Bastion, a stern old man with a beard like silver needles and eight ancient flying swords forged from the fossilized spines of void-dragons swirling angrily around his crown.
For four million years, their two sects had waged endless wars across seventeen star systems, soaking entire planetary clusters in rivers of blood.
"Mo-Sha! You treacherous cur!" Tian-Guan bellowed, his voice carrying the sonic weight of a collapsing mountain peak. "You stole the Nine-Yin Soul Scripture from my ancestral vault! You have the audacity to sit in the chair directly ahead of mine?"
"Silence, old fossil!" Mo-Sha snarled back, a storm of green ghost-fire swirling in his skeletal palms. "The universe is ending! Your sect has dissolved into cosmic dust! I held Ticket #023, while you crawled in with Ticket #024! By all laws of the heavens, this armrest belongs to me!"
Their competing aura fields clashed violently, generating crackling arcs of purple lightning that threatened to scorch the splinter-free cedar flooring.
Around them, forty other cosmic sovereigns scrambled out of their lawn chairs in sheer terror, pressing their backs against the green canvas sunshades.
"Madmen! Cease your bickering!" Matriarch Lin hissed from across the aisle, frantically holding a delicate finger to her lips. "Look at the sign! You are screaming in the sacred lobby!"
"Shut your mouths, both of you!" Emperor Heng-Luo warned, lunging forward with his arms outstretched. "You will awaken the Sovereign! You will bring down the wrath of the Stillness upon our entire race!"
Up on the porch, Felix rubbed his temples.
The high-pitched shouting was giving him a pounding headache, and more importantly, it had completely ruined the gentle twenty-two-hertz lullaby being sung by the star-whales in the lower orbit.
"Mute button," Felix muttered, snatching his AetherDeck off the tea table. "Where is the mute button in this awful UI?"
He swiped through the audio mixer settings.
Sure enough, the master volume slider for the [External Guest Chat] channel was sitting at a loud, obnoxious seventy-five percent.
Felix didn't just turn it down to twenty decibels.
Thoroughly annoyed, he dragged the master slider down to a strict, punishing five decibels, checking the box for `[Enforce Hardware-Level Audio Suppression]`.
【Audio Policy Enforced: Proximity voice channels clamped to 5.0 dB. Acoustic vibration damping field initialized. Excessive vocal resonance will be grounded into thermal floor heating.】
"There," Felix said, tossing the slate back onto the table. "Whisper or get kicked from the party."
Down in the western waiting lounge, Grand Ancestor Mo-Sha was inhaling deeply, preparing to unleash his signature technique: the Soul-Shattering Abyssal Howl, capable of bursting the eardrums of every living being across three planetary systems.
He opened his jaws wide, his throat swelling with pitch-black nether-energy.
He roared with all the fury of his eight-million-year existence.
What emerged from his lips was not a cataclysmic shockwave of death.
It was a tiny, pathetic puff of warm air that sounded like a sleeping mouse exhaling through a woolen sock:
*...pfft...*
Mo-Sha choked, his eyes bulging as his throat constricted automatically.
He clutched his neck with both hands, trying to force another shout through his vocal cords.
Every decibel of acoustic energy his divine soul attempted to produce was instantly absorbed by the air molecules around him, smoothly converted into gentle thermal energy that radiated into the cedar planks beneath his slippers.
Across from him, Venerable Tian-Guan was swinging his arms to command his eight flying swords to strike.
"Die, fiend!" Tian-Guan tried to scream.
What left his mouth was a delicate, airy whisper:
*...die, please...*
The eight ancient divine swords, each capable of slicing continents in half, suddenly lost all kinetic momentum.
Their razor-sharp blades slowed to an absolute halt, floating gently in the air like autumn leaves drifting down from an oak tree.
When one sword accidentally brushed against a cedar baluster, it did not splinter the wood; it made a soft, muffled *tink*, comparable to a silver teaspoon resting against a porcelain saucer.
Both ancient masters stood frozen, their faces turning from burning rage to pure, suffocating horror.
Beneath their feet, the mountain cedar deck began glowing with a gentle, soothing amber warmth.
The deafening sonic fury of their two divine shouts had been completely absorbed and redirected into the deck's underfloor heating channels, warming the timber to a delightful seventy-four degrees.
Sovereign Bai-Chen, sitting three chairs away, kicked off his embroidered silk slippers and wiggled his bare toes against the warm wood.
"My word," Bai-Chen whispered in an ecstatic murmur. "The radiant floor heating is divine! Thank you, brother Mo-Sha! Shout again, if you please, the deck was getting slightly chilly!"
Mo-Sha’s face flushed crimson with humiliation.
His supreme world-destroying vocal art had been reduced to a thermostat heater for another man's feet.
In the center of the lounge, Emperor Heng-Luo walked over to the two trembling ancestors, his boots making zero noise upon the warmed planks.
He leaned down between them, speaking in a stern, barely audible whisper:
"Do you understand now, fools? In this sanctuary, noise is the ultimate sin. The Sovereign of Solitude does not tolerate the shouting of mortals. If you wish to sit upon the Sacred Lawn Chairs, you must cultivate the Supreme Dao of Quiet Lounging."
Above the central archway, a small wooden placard spun around, displaying glowing green script:
【NOTICE: THE FIVE-DECIBEL MANDATE IS NOW IN EFFECT. PLEASE USE INDOOR VOICES. REPEATED INFRACTIONS WILL RESULT IN IMMEDIATE CANCELLATION OF TICKET NUMBER.】
Mo-Sha and Tian-Guan looked up toward the high geostationary porch.
Thirty miles above them, Felix was lying peacefully in his hammock, gently kicking one foot over the railing to keep the swing going.
He had not stood up. He had not drawn a weapon. He had not even looked in their direction.
With a single flick of his fingers, he had stripped two supreme ninth-tier ancestral gods of their voices, suppressed eight continent-cleaving swords into harmless butter knives, and recycled their cosmic rage into underfloor heating for their rivals' toes.
"The... the Five-Decibel Mandate..." Mo-Sha croaked in a panicked, trembling whisper that registered at exactly four-point-eight decibels.
"He did not kill us..." Tian-Guan whispered back, his knees buckling as he dropped to the floor, hastily recalling his floating swords. "He merely silenced our arrogance with the boundless weight of the Stillness Dao!"
Without another word of complaint, Mo-Sha meekly sat down in Chair `#023`, tucking his ghostly robes between his knees.
Tian-Guan took his place in Chair `#024`, carefully resting his forearms upon the cedar armrests and placing his hands flat against the wood in silent prayer.
The seventy other sovereigns in the lounge let out long, silent sighs of relief.
A new, sacred etiquette swept through the refugee armada:
To earn the favor of the Sovereign of Solitude, one must speak softer than a falling snowflake, move slower than drifting mist, and maintain absolute peace with all living beings.
Up on his porch, Felix checked the AetherDeck's power telemetry one last time.
Felix closed his eyes, smiling as the tranquil, rhythmic ticking of Barnaby’s clockwork mechanism filled the quiet air once more.
The brass owl ruffled his mechanical feathers, turning his head twenty degrees to scan the peaceful horizon before tucking his beak downward in a simulated sleep cycle.
"Much better," Felix sighed into his pillow. "Five decibels is the golden ratio. Free floor heating and total quiet. If every multiplayer lobby had a hardware-level noise gate like this, the world would be a far more relaxing place."
He reached out one hand, pulled his unbleached cotton blanket up over his chest, and rested his straw hat across his brow.
Down in the waiting lounge, eighty ancient sovereigns watched the rhythmic rise and fall of the Sovereign's chest with holy reverence, matching their own breath to his gentle cadence.
He let his breathing sync with the four-hundred-and-thirty-two-hertz resonance of the planetary lattice, sinking into a deep, peaceful afternoon slumber.