Grandmaster Vivienne sat rigidly on the edge of her wicker recliner, clutching her celadon teacup as if it were a talisman warding off evil spirits.
She stared across the small cedar side table at her disciple.
Felix Vance had not changed his posture by so much as an inch.
He lay nestled in the unbleached cotton hammock, lazily swinging one foot back and forth, staring at a cluster of tiny numerical readouts floating above his jade slate.
"Felix," Vivienne said, her voice dropping to a harsh, strained whisper.
"Yeah, Master?"
"Do you have any idea what you have done?"
"Fixed the porch roof," Felix replied without looking up. "Repaired the leaking gutters. Planted twenty thousand solar cabbages in the lower valley so we wouldn't have to pay market price for salad greens. Standard household chores."
Vivienne set her teacup down on the pine table with a sharp, controlled click.
"Household chores," she repeated slowly.
She pointed a trembling, frost-bitten finger toward the southwest floorboards, directly beneath the corner of the dining table.
"Felix. The rectangular block of dark pear wood resting beneath that table leg."
"The table shim?"
"It is not a table shim!" Vivienne hissed, leaning forward so violently that the frayed ermine fur around her collar bristled with static electricity. "That is the Sovereign Heart Seal of the Primordial Firmament!"
Felix blinked, lowering his AetherDeck onto his chest. He squinted toward the dark wooden block with mild, polite skepticism.
【Sovereign Heart Seal of the Primordial Firmament: Ancient World-Tree root carving. Durability: Infinite. Property: Absolute Reality Anchor. Current Assignment: Dining Table Leveling Shim (Tilt Reduction: 100%).】
"Master, I checked the item description when I found it under the junk pile in the shed," Felix said reasonably. "It’s a block of wood."
"It is the condensed heart of a fallen primordial creator deity!" Vivienne gasped, her silver eyes blazing with holy fervor. "Three million ancient star-gods waged war across six epochs to claim it! Its weight can anchor the dimensional fabric of seventeen parallel multiverses! It was entrusted to my lineage to safeguard until the end of time!"
Felix scratched the back of his neck, yawning softly.
"Well, whoever gave it to you clearly didn't own a spirit level," Felix said. "Because your kitchen table had a six-millimeter wobble on the southeast corner."
Vivienne froze mid-breath. Her mouth stayed open, hovering in stunned silence.
"A... six-millimeter wobble?" she whispered.
"A six-millimeter wobble," Felix confirmed, nodding with grave, solemn seriousness. "Every single morning, I would set my bowl of hot noodle soup down on that table. And every single time a rogue gust of wind blew across Solitude Peak, the table would rock. *Clack-clack.* The broth would splash over the rim, soaking my clean napkins."
He pointed an accusing finger at the dining table.
"Do you know how annoying it is to clean dried bone broth out of unvarnished pine grain, Master? It stains. It attracts ants. For three months, I tried folding up old paper scrolls to wedge under the leg, but the paper always compressed after two weeks."
Felix picked up his teacup, taking a refreshing sip of warm honeyed bamboo tea.
"Then I found that wooden seal in the bottom of your tackle box. It had the [Indestructible] and [Infinite Data Persistence] tags. Perfect material density. I slid it under the short leg, gave it a firm tap with my slipper, and boom—zero wobble. The table hasn't rocked once in ninety chapters."
Vivienne dropped to her knees, reaching out with one trembling hand to touch the dark wood.
She pushed with the full strength of her immortal core—a force capable of shifting small moons.
The block of pear wood did not budge by a single nanometer.
The gravitational weld between the seal, the table leg, and the cedar floorboards was so absolute that the entire geostationary porch, the mountain below, and the planetary core moved as one unified physical body.
"The Sovereign Heart Seal..." she whispered into her palms. "Forged from the primordial marrow of creation to hold the dimensional continuum against the void... used to stop noodle broth from splashing on a napkin."
"It was spicy pork broth, Master," Felix added helpfully. "The red chili oil stains are impossible to wash out."
Barnaby let out a gentle series of brass clicks from his perch, bobbing his clockwork head in complete, agreeable synchronization with Felix’s domestic logic.
Vivienne slowly stood back up, rubbing her temples.
"And my meditation cavern?" Vivienne asked suddenly, her eyes narrowing. "The ancient Grotto of the Frost Lotus where I cultivated for four thousand years? Did you preserve my holy sanctum?"
Felix hesitated for half a second, clearing his throat lightly.
"Well... preserve is a strong word, Master."
Vivienne’s gaze turned razor-sharp. "What did you do to my grotto, Felix Vance?"
"I turned it into a root cellar," Felix admitted, holding up his hands defensively. "Look, hear me out! It was completely wasted space! The ambient temperature inside that cavern was locked at fifty-five degrees Fahrenheit with forty percent humidity. That is literally the holy grail of vegetable storage conditions."
"You... stored vegetables in my sacred seat of enlightenment?"
"Twenty thousand cabbages and twelve crates of sweet winter yams," Felix said proudly. "Before I moved them in there, my harvest was spoiling in the summer heat. In your grotto, they stay crisp for six months without a single spot of mold. I even put up cedar shelving."
【Guest Status: Master Yu Jingshuang (Grandmaster Vivienne). Mental State: Severe Cognitive Dissonance. Epiphany Level: 99.9%. Root Cellar Approval: Pending.】
Vivienne slowly sat back down in the wicker recliner, staring blankly up at the cedar sunshade overhead.
Outside the screened porch, down on the two expansive waiting wings, one hundred and twenty galactic sovereigns sat watching through the mesh with breathless reverence.
Emperor Heng-Luo wiped a tear from his eye, whispering softly to Sovereign Bai-Chen:
"Listen to the divine discourse... The Ancient Master interrogates the Sovereign regarding the deep mysteries of the Cosmos! She speaks of the Sovereign Heart Seal anchoring the seventeen parallel planes, while the Sovereign speaks in profound metaphors of 'hot soup' and 'clean napkins'!"
"The soup is mortal existence!" Bai-Chen whispered back in holy epiphany. "The soup represents the fragile lives of all mortal beings! The Sovereign wedged the Sacred Seal beneath the axis of the world to prevent the soup of life from spilling into the void of entropy! What boundless, fathomless compassion!"
"And the root cellar is the great Vault of Reincarnation!" Matriarch Lin gasped in a trembling four-decibel murmur. "He preserves the harvest of mortal souls in a sanctuary of fifty-five degrees so they shall never rot under the decay of time! His wisdom is truly unfathomable!"
Inside the porch, Felix scratched his nose, completely oblivious to the theological revolution occurring thirty yards away.
He reached over to the pine plate and picked up a warm, golden pumpkin bun, extending it toward Vivienne.
【Solar Harvest Pumpkin Bun: Steamed with pure 432 Hz radiant solar steam. Restores 100% Mental Clarity and heals deep karmic exhaustion. Flavor: Cinnamon, roasted gourd, solar nectar.】
"Here, Master. Eat a bun. You've been staring into space for five minutes. Low blood sugar makes people irritable."
Vivienne looked down at the pastry in his hand.
It radiated the pure, unblemished warmth of the solar Dyson Ring, smelling of sweet squash, fresh cinnamon, and the tranquil four-hundred-and-thirty-two-hertz heartbeat of the mountain.
She took the bun with trembling fingers, bringing it to her mouth and taking a slow, quiet bite.
The warm dough melted on her tongue like sweet cloud-mist.
The lingering exhaustion in her soul—the deep, cold ache of ten thousand years of fruitless searching across dying galaxies—washed away in a wave of golden warmth.
She closed her eyes, chewing slowly as silent tears rolled down her cheeks.
All her suffering. All her bitter ascetic battles in the freezing dark.
All the ancient cosmic scriptures she had bled to decipher.
None of it had saved a single star.
Yet this ridiculous, lazy boy, who cared about nothing more than comfortable hammocks, level dining tables, and unstained napkins, had accidentally built an indestructible paradise that could shelter the entire dying universe.
"Is the bun good?" Felix asked gently.
Vivienne swallowed the pastry, wiping her eyes with the tattered ermine cuff of her robe.
"It is the best bun in creation, you infuriating brat," Vivienne whispered, her voice cracking with raw, affectionate warmth.
Felix smiled, settling back into the Brazilian cotton weave.
"Told you. Solitude Peak produce hits different."
Vivienne set her half-eaten bun down on the porcelain plate, her silver eyes narrowing slightly.
"Felix... what stage of cultivation have you reached?" she asked, reaching out one slender, pale hand toward his lower belly. "When I left, you could barely circulate a single strand of spiritual qi without complaining of muscle cramps."
Before Felix could wave her off, a delicate thread of her primordial frost consciousness tapped against his dantian.
The moment her spiritual perception breached his lower abdomen, Vivienne’s entire body went rigid.
She did not encounter a mortal golden core. She did not encounter an ordinary nascent soul or a divine avatar.
Her consciousness plummeted directly into the core of a roaring, blinding Sol-Class stellar engine.
Fifteen million Kelvin of thermonuclear proton-proton fusion blazed in a self-sustaining gravitational furnace, shielded by an exquisite miniature Dyson sphere made of pure metaphysical law.
Orbiting the stellar core at an eighteen-hour cadence was a degenerate white dwarf companion, packing the mass of an entire solar system into a sphere the size of a teacup.
The raw gravitational torque alone nearly crushed Vivienne's divine sense into subatomic particles.
She yanked her hand back, tumbling backward against the wicker recliner, her breath ragged and her face as white as mountain snow.
"You..." Vivienne gasped, clutching her chest with both hands as her heart pounded like a war drum. "Your dantian... you have a living stellar system burning inside your stomach?!"
"It's just Level 70, Master," Felix replied casually, pulling his cotton blanket higher over his shoulders. "I put all my daily idle stats into Core Density and Thermal Radiance. It acts as a personal furnace. Keeps the porch locked at seventy-two degrees year-round. Never have to chop firewood."
Vivienne stared at him, her eyes trembling as she leaned back into the chair, completely defeated by the boundless absurdity of her disciple.
"A personal furnace..." she whispered into the empty air. "The boy turned cosmic godhood into an electric blanket."