Rather than the harsh siren of the pre-patch countdown or the polite bell of the deli counter queue, a cheerful three-tone ascending chime echoed across the porch.
It presented itself as the clean, unmistakable notification of a local Wi-Fi adapter successfully discovering a new wireless access point.
Felix Vance was halfway through his afternoon stretch when the sound pulled his attention away from his ceiling rafters.
He reached lazily toward the cedar tea table, picking up the glowing jade slate.
In the network connections menu, directly beneath his personal twelve-millisecond VIP broadband channel, an encrypted network had appeared, pulsing with eighty percent signal strength:
Felix blinked at the prompt, a nostalgic smirk tugging at the corners of his mouth.
"Frost Weaver Five-Gee Guest," Felix murmured, shaking his head. "Old Master Yu's personal mobile hotspot. I haven't seen that SSID since she vanished into the mountains ten thousand chapters ago."
Beside him, Barnaby's clockwork head snapped toward the northern quadrant.
The brass owl gave a sharp, muffled click against his rubber stopper, his mechanical wings trembling with sudden recognition.
The copper feathers along Barnaby’s neck stood on end as his internal chronometer registered the exact resonant frequency of the woman who had originally assembled his gears from junk parts.
"Yeah, I know, Barnaby," Felix said, patting the owl's brass shoulder. "She always set the security questions to something completely obvious so she wouldn't forget her own password. If she made it complicated, she’d lock herself out of her own account for three weeks."
He brought up the virtual keyboard on the jade slate and tapped in the answer with a practiced rhythm:
`[Bitter_Bamboo_Leaf_Extra_Honey]`
He pressed Enter.
The screen flared with soft, icy-blue radiance. A gentle chime confirmed the connection:
【Authentication Successful. Device [AetherDeck-Sol-01] paired with [Frost_Weaver_5G_Guest]. High-speed quantum data bridge established. Bandwidth: Unlimited.】
【Host Telemetry: Master Node approaching planetary orbital plane at Mach 140,000. Estimated Arrival at Porch: 22 Minutes.】
"Twenty-two minutes," Felix said, checking the countdown clock. "She's really stepping on the gas. Usually she walks like she's got all the time in the universe."
He looked around the porch with a critical eye.
The cedar floorboards were swept clean, the melon rinds had been composted into the wicker bin, and the Sovereign Heart Seal was firmly propping up the short leg of the dining table.
"Gotta set out another cup," Felix decided, rolling out of his hammock and slipping his feet into his straw sandals. "If she arrives and there's no tea ready, she'll lecture me for three hours about basic disciple etiquette."
He walked over to the pine cupboard, taking down a second ceramic teacup glazed with celadon pine needles.
He filled the small cast-iron kettle with fresh spring water from the pneumatic dispenser, placing it over the radiant heat vent connected to his white dwarf core.
He reached into the vintage tea tin on the top shelf, carefully measuring out three pinches of dried bitter bamboo leaves.
From a small ceramic crock, he scooped two generous spoonfuls of golden solar honey, stirring it gently into the bottom of the pot.
Within thirty seconds, the kettle began to sing with a cheerful, gentle whistle, filling the cedar porch with the brisk, soothing aroma of mountain forest and sweet comb.
Down on the surface of Aethelgard, inside the ancient Ancestral Pavilion of Solitude Peak, Lyra Ashford suddenly gasped.
Above the central altar, the ten-thousand-year-old silk portrait of Master Yu Jingshuang—which had remained dormant and faded since the founding of the sect—burst into brilliant, pearlescent silver flames.
The eyes of the painted founder seemed to glow with living, breathing awareness.
"The Founder..." Lyra whispered, dropping her cleaning rag onto the stone floor as tears welled in her eyes. "The Founder's karmic thread has reconnected with Solitude Peak! She has returned from the outer void!"
Thirty miles above the atmosphere, at the icy edge of the Kuiper belt, an impossible vessel was slicing through the collapsing fabric of reality.
Rather than a titanic dreadnought or a sixty-mile crystalline ark, the vessel gliding through the vacuum was a humble twelve-foot wooden rowboat, carved from the ancient timber of the Primordial Frost Tree.
Standing in the stern of the boat was a slender woman draped in ragged, snow-white daoist robes lined with frayed ermine fur.
Her long, midnight-black hair whipped in the cosmic void, frosted with the glittering dust of dead galaxies.
Her eyes were twin stars of piercing silver, ancient beyond reckoning, carrying the sorrow of an immortal who had searched the outer perimeter of reality for ten thousand years.
Grandmaster Vivienne—known across the ancient texts as Master Yu Jingshuang—held a single wooden oar in her calloused hands.
Behind her, the outer rim of the cosmos was unspooling into screaming mathematical noise.
She had spent three hundred centuries searching the boundary walls of creation for the legendary "Source Code of Reality"—the primordial root that could save the universe from the Kalpa of Erasure.
She had fought cosmic void-beasts the size of planetary systems. She had deciphered forbidden glyphs etched into the event horizons of supermassive black holes.
Yet as the end of days approached, every clue had led her back to where her journey had begun: the humble, forgotten star system of Aethelgard.
"It is falling..." Vivienne whispered, her breath freezing into silver crystals against the vacuum. "The Great Kalpa has arrived. My mortal disciple... my peaceful Solitude Peak... surely it has already been reduced to ash."
A pang of profound grief twisted in her immortal chest.
Ten thousand years ago, she had left behind a lazy, good-for-nothing young disciple named Felix.
The boy refused to practice sword katas, skipped morning meditation to nap in the garden, and spent his days staring at an old rectangular jade slab she had found in a junk pile.
She had left him a basic breathing manual, a crude wooden seal to keep his papers from blowing away, and told him she was going out to buy tea.
"Felix..." Vivienne murmured, a solitary frozen tear rolling down her cheek. "I failed to return in time. Forgive your master."
Suddenly, the small bronze talisman pinned to her lapel began vibrating with intense, golden light.
A tiny chime sounded in her mind:
【Device Paired: Connection established to [Solitude_Spire_Local_LAN].】 【Password Accepted: [Bitter_Bamboo_Leaf_Extra_Honey].】 【Welcome Home, Master. Tea is currently boiling. Ping: 1.2ms.】
Vivienne’s silver pupils contracted to pinpricks.
"The... the soul-signal of the mountain?" she gasped, her hands gripping the wooden oar so hard the ancient timber creaked. "The connection has been accepted? By whom?"
She pushed the oar through the frozen spacetime, sending the wooden rowboat hurtling into the inner solar system at blinding speeds.
As she cleared the orbit of the fourth planet, the inner system came into full, panoramic view.
Vivienne froze. Her jaw dropped open.
The oar slipped from her fingers, clattering against the bottom of the boat.
"What... what in the name of the Primordial Dao is that?" Vivienne choked out, rubbing her eyes with the sleeve of her robe.
Before her, the primary star was not burning with chaotic, dying flares.
It was encased in a flawless, magnificent Kardashev-II Dyson Ring of spun gold and polished brass, its 360 collector nodes humming in sublime thermodynamic balance.
Along the orbital plane of Aethelgard, one hundred and eight imperial dreadnoughts hung in a decorative arc, strung with colorful lanterns like a festival street in a mortal city.
Surrounding the dreadnoughts, three gargantuan Abyssal Star-Whales were swimming peaceful figure-eights, dusting the solar dishes with their tails.
And gathered upon two vast floating cedar wings extending from a mountaintop platform in geostationary orbit, thousands of ancient cosmic sovereigns and galactic emperors were sitting politely in folding wooden lawn chairs, sipping tea and eating honeydew melon.
As Vivienne's small rowboat drifted past the waiting refugee armada, Emperor Heng-Luo caught sight of the ragged wooden skiff.
The emperor stood up from Chair `#001`, bowing deeply toward the frost-covered boat with hands clasped in awe.
"Greetings to the Ancient One!" Heng-Luo whispered in reverent, four-decibel tones. "Have you also come to seek the salvation of the Sovereign of Solitude?"
Vivienne stared at the emperor, her silver eyes twitching.
She recognized the Nine-Star imperial crest on his robes—a dynasty that had ruled forty galaxies before she had even embarked on her journey.
"Sovereign of Solitude?" Vivienne whispered hoarsely, pointing a trembling finger toward the high porch. "You mean the lazy boy sleeping in that hammock?"
Heng-Luo gasped in horror, hastily raising a finger to his lips.
"Hush, elder! Do not speak so flippantly of the Supreme Creator! He has just enforced the Five-Decibel Mandate! And more importantly... he has boiled fresh tea!"
Vivienne looked toward the porch.
There, thirty miles above the clouds, Felix was casually pouring amber tea from a black iron kettle into two celadon cups.
Beside him sat Barnaby, wearing the exact rubber stopper she had jammed into his beak ten thousand years ago.
And propping up the short leg of a cheap pine dining table was the Sovereign Heart Seal—the primordial root key of the entire cosmic universe—faithfully keeping the honey pot from sliding off the edge.
Vivienne stood in her wooden rowboat, her silver eyes wide with utter, absolute incomprehension.
"Ten thousand years..." Vivienne whispered, her voice trembling between laughter and tears. "I spent ten thousand years fighting gods in the outer void... and this boy turned my mountain into a luxury resort."
She picked up her oar, steering her little boat directly toward the cedar docking ramp of the geostationary porch.