Grandmaster Vivienne did not sit down immediately.
Instead, holding her celadon teacup in both hands, she began an obsessive, inspection tour of the geostationary porch.
Her frayed straw slippers made soft scuffing sounds against the polished mountain cedar.
Every three steps, she paused, reached down, and ran her calloused fingers over the grain of the wood.
"Five-hundred-year mountain cedar," Vivienne muttered under her breath, her eyes darting like an investigator at a crime scene. "Harvested from the western ridge of Solitude Peak. But the molecular density... it's locked at ten times the tensile strength of adamantine."
She stood before the eastern balustrade, peering closely at the joints connecting the balusters to the top rail.
There were zero iron nails. There were zero enchanted spirit-screws.
Every single joint was a clean, traditional mortise-and-tenon connection, fitted so tightly that not even a single photon of starlight could leak through the seam.
"Felix," Vivienne said, her voice dropping to a tense, vibrating whisper that hovered right at the edge of the five-decibel limit.
"Yeah, Master?" Felix answered from his hammock without opening his eyes.
"Where did you get the timber for two hundred yards of deck expansion?"
"Chopped down four dead pines by the outhouse," Felix replied casually. "Then I put points into the Woodworking and Base Expansion tree. The crafting menu has an auto-duplicate feature if you feed it enough raw mana."
Vivienne stared at the back of his straw hat. Her jaw tightened so hard her molars clicked.
"You 'put points into Woodworking'?" she repeated, enunciating every syllable as if speaking to a lunatic. "You used the Heavenly Dao’s fundamental creation laws to run a mass-production lumber duplicator?"
"Well, yeah," Felix said, adjusting his pillow. "Who wants to hand-plane a hundred and twenty balusters with a drawknife? It would take all afternoon. The macro script knocked it out in four seconds."
Vivienne closed her eyes, taking three deep, measured breaths of the warm cedar air to prevent her dantian from overheating.
She walked over to the western corner of the porch.
There, mounted upon a sturdy brass swivel base, sat a six-foot parabolic dish woven from thick copper mesh.
A heavy, shielded grounding cable ran from the receiver horn at the center of the dish directly into the charging port of the AetherDeck on the tea table.
Vivienne placed her palm against the copper mesh.
In the next instant, her immortal soul shuddered violently.
Her divine consciousness was sucked into the dish, shooting out across forty million miles of open vacuum.
The dish was not receiving ordinary radio waves or radio chatter.
It was precisely locked onto the Cosmic Microwave Background—the primordial, lingering echo of the First Word spoken at the birth of the universe.
It was siphoning the fundamental vibrational frequency of existence itself, filtering out cosmic static, and converting the raw energy into a pure, lag-free data stream.
Vivienne yanked her hand back from the dish as if she had touched white-hot iron.
"This dish..." Vivienne breathed, her chest heaving beneath her tattered robes. "It is an Origin Frequency Array. It is tuned directly to the heartbeat of the Primordial Creator!"
"It's just a directional antenna, Master," Felix said, letting out a soft sigh. "The ping on the local mountain node was hovering around three hundred milliseconds. You can't play an idle game with three hundred milliseconds of latency. Every time you try to claim your daily rewards, the loading spinner just sits there buffering."
"The... loading spinner?"
"The loading spinner," Felix confirmed. "So I pointed the dish at the quietest spot in the sky. Clean line of sight, zero interference. Ping dropped straight to eleven milliseconds. Night and day difference."
Vivienne looked from the six-foot copper dish to the boy in the hammock, her mind staggering under the sheer absurdity of the comparison.
She had spent six thousand years meditating inside the icy crater of an extinct neutron star, starving her mortal body and burning her life-force just to catch a fleeting, three-second glimpse of that primordial frequency.
Her disciple had built a copper chicken-wire strainer on his porch so his daily login rewards wouldn't lag.
【AetherDeck Diagnostic: External User [Master Yu Jingshuang] inspected [Parabolic Microwave Dish]. Shock Index: 98.7%. Mental Fragility: Approaching Critical Threshold. Recommendation: Offer more tea.】
Vivienne slowly walked back to the center of the porch, stopping before Barnaby’s brass perch.
The clockwork owl tilted his head ninety degrees, his ruby glass eyes clicking as they focused on her face.
Vivienne reached out a trembling finger, gently touching the carved black rubber stopper wedged firmly into the owl’s beak.
"Barnaby..." Vivienne whispered softly. "I built you from clock parts I scavenged from an imperial junkyard. You used to screech like a dying banshee whenever the clock struck noon."
"He did," Felix agreed, nodding from the hammock. "He screeched at eighty-five decibels every single day right in the middle of my morning nap. I couldn't find the volume dial on his chassis, so I whittled a rubber stopper out of an old carriage tire and shoved it in his mouth. Now he just purrs like a kitten."
Barnaby let out a series of quiet, rhythmic brass clicks, nuzzling his metallic head against Vivienne’s fingertips.
Vivienne looked closer at the owl's brass chest.
Behind the slatted filigree of his breastplate, his original brass escapement had been completely replaced.
Inside the automaton's heart now rested a tiny, hovering sphere of pure degenerate white dwarf matter, spinning at exactly eighteen hours per revolution.
Its atomic decay rate was linked directly to the fundamental gravitational constant of the cosmos.
The junk clockwork owl she had left behind was now an atomic chronometer of absolute perfection, tracking the passage of time with zero drift over ten billion years.
"You put a degenerate star-core inside my mechanical toy..." Vivienne murmured, her voice hollow with shock.
"He needed a battery that wouldn't die every two weeks," Felix replied. "Winding him with a brass key every Sunday was becoming a chore. Automation is the future, Master."
Vivienne turned her gaze toward the floor beneath the dining table.
There sat the Sovereign Heart Seal.
The rectangular block of dark mountain pear wood rested quietly under the southeast leg of the table.
Vivienne dropped to her knees, peering beneath the table skirt with eyes full of holy dread.
The archaic runes carved into the wood were glowing with soft, rhythmic violet pulses.
Through the copper wire Felix had wrapped around its base, the seal was actively tethered to the bedrock of Aethelgard and the 360 nodes of the solar Dyson Ring.
"The Sovereign Heart Seal..." Vivienne whispered, her fingers hovering an inch from the wood, not daring to touch it. "The ancient master who gave me this artifact told me it was the Master Anchor of Spacetime. He said that if it were ever moved, the dimensional fabric of our reality would tear in two."
"Well, he wasn't wrong," Felix said, lifting his straw hat to look at her. "When I pulled it out to back up my save file this morning, the whole table tilted south. My marble rolled right off the edge into my soup bowl. It was a complete disaster."
Vivienne slowly looked up from the floor, her silver eyes locking onto Felix's face.
"Your... marble rolled into your soup?"
"Right into the broth," Felix said, nodding solemnly. "Splashed broth all over my clean napkins. That's why I put the seal right back under the leg as soon as the file finished copying. You can't eat soup on an unlevel surface, Master. It's unhygienic."
Vivienne stayed on her knees for ten full seconds, staring at the block of wood that anchored the existence of three billion mortal souls and seventy thousand celestial realms.
A low, trembling sound escaped her throat.
It started as a choked sob, rose into a ragged gasp, and finally blossomed into a quiet, hysterical chuckle that she hastily suppressed behind her sleeve to avoid breaking the Five-Decibel Mandate.
"A table shim..." Vivienne whispered into her sleeve, her shoulders shaking with silent laughter. "The Pillar of the Universe... is a table shim."
She slowly stood up, brushing the cedar dust from her frayed ermine hem.
She picked up her celadon cup, took another long, slow sip of the sweet bamboo tea, and walked over to the wicker recliner beside the hammock.
She sat down, leaning back into the woven willow frame.
The chair gave a soft, comfortable creak, conforming to her tired back with immediate, soothing support.
"Felix," she said softly, gazing out through the screen at the golden Dyson Ring circling the primary sun.
"Yeah, Master?"
"Tell me about this 'server maintenance' you mentioned."
Felix picked up his AetherDeck, scrolling to the flashing red countdown window:
"Basically, Master," Felix explained, showing her the screen, "the lazy indie developers are pushing a mandatory engine update that’s going to wipe everyone’s account data and reset the universe to factory settings. They claim it’s because of an 'unresolvable thermodynamic anomaly,' which is obviously just bad coding."
Vivienne looked at the red text on the slate.
Her silver eyes, which had spent ten thousand years reading the ancient primordial glyphs of creation, recognized the language immediately.
Rather than meaningless developer jargon, the text revealed the Primordial Language of the Heavenly Dao—the absolute mathematical code that governed the birth, expansion, and eventual destruction of all existence.
The "Arbiter Engine" was the Great Will of the Cosmos.
And it was descending to erase their reality in less than twenty-two hours.
Vivienne set her teacup down on the table, her knuckles whitening as her immortal aura flared with icy resolve.
"Felix," she said, her voice dropping to a deadly, serious whisper. "This is not an engine update. The Primordial Arbiter is the supreme executioner of the cosmos. When it arrives, it does not wipe save files. It unmakes reality itself. Nothing survives."
Felix waved a dismissive hand, pulling his straw hat back over his eyes.
"That's what all the early access patch notes say, Master. 'Major balance pass, older builds no longer supported.' Don't fall for the hype. As long as we keep the router firewalled and don't click 'Accept Update,' they can't force the patch on an offline client."
Vivienne stared at him, caught between sheer terror and complete, bewildered awe.
"You intend to refuse an update from the Heavenly Dao?" she whispered.
"Of course," Felix muttered, settling deep into his cotton hammock. "I just built this porch. I'm not letting some outsourced moderator delete my patio furniture."