The Grand Arena had never been this quiet.
Ten thousand spectators sat in the tiered stone bleachers in dead silence. Nobody coughed. Nobody shifted their feet. Even the long academy banners hanging from the gilded parapets seemed afraid to flap in the midday wind.
Down on the sand, Julian of the Second Spire remained pinned to the cracked flagstones.
His golden lamellar plates were crushed flat against his ribs like bent tin cans. His six-foot red steel broadsword was buried four feet deep into solid granite, warped into a gentle curve like a ripe banana.
Beside him, his three sworn cronies lay twitching on their bellies like overturned beetles, their fingers clawing feebly at the arena dust.
In the center of the pit, Felix Vance stood with both hands shoved into his linen pockets.
He waited five seconds.
Then he waited ten seconds.
Julian didn't get up. The cronies didn't get up.
Felix looked over at the chief arbiter standing on the stone pedestal twenty paces away.
The arbiter was frozen like a carved wax statue. The gilded wooden mallet was locked six inches above the brass combat gong. The man's eyes were bulging out of his skull, his mouth hanging wide open in silent, paralyzed shock.
Felix looked at the ring referee standing beside the western boundary. The referee didn't even blink. His eyelids seemed glued open by pure fear.
Felix looked up at the floating elders' platform. Seventy-two peak masters and grand elders were staring down at him, stiff as wooden posts, their white beards trembling in the warm mountain breeze.
Felix’s eyebrows furrowed under the frayed brim of his straw hat.
"What is going on here?" Felix muttered.
He pulled his cracked obsidian slate from his linen trousers and tapped the center screen.
In the top-right corner of his HUD, right next to the battery indicator, a tiny signal icon was blinking bright red.
Three red exclamation marks flashed next to the regional network icon:
Felix stared at the flashing red numbers and let out a deep, disgusted groan.
"I knew it," Felix grumbled, shaking his head with bitter familiarity. "Nine hundred and ninety-nine ping. The server latency is completely unplayable."
He dragged his thumb down from the top of the slate, attempting to refresh the network connection.
"Every single time," Felix complained under his breath. "You cram ten thousand players into a single arena instance, and the host machine catches fire. The tick rate drops to zero, everyone loses connection, and the character animations freeze mid-frame."
He swiped over to his background task manager to see if anything was hogging his slate's processing power.
"Did I leave the garden harvest running?" Felix wondered aloud. "No, the Sun-Lotus Cabbage is on auto-irrigation. Did Barnaby knock over the antenna on the porch? I made sure to shove that black rubber stopper into the owl's beak before I left so he wouldn't screech. And the kitchen table is stable on the Sovereign Heart Seal. There is no reason for my bandwidth to throttle like this."
He walked over to Julian and crouched down beside the flattened warrior.
Felix reached out with the tip of his frayed straw slipper and gently poked Julian's dented golden shoulder plate.
*Tap. Tap.*
Julian didn't move. He only let out a weak, pathetic wheeze from his crushed chest: "Urk... kkkk..."
Felix tapped his own slate screen again.
"Hey man," Felix said, looking down at Julian's ear. "Did your client crash? You're completely desynced. Your character model is stuck inside the floor geometry."
Julian's bloodshot eyes rolled in his head, staring at Felix's ragged straw slipper with raw, unadulterated terror.
To Julian, that slipper wasn't worn straw. It was the crushing foot of an ancient cosmic giant who walked across stars for fun. The lingering trace of that hundred-fold gravity well still echoed in his crushed bones, humming like the wrath of an angry sun.
"Spare... mercy..." Julian gurgled through cracked lips, dark blood dripping onto the granite. "Titan... Sovereign... forgive this junior's blindness..."
Felix frowned, tilting his slate to inspect Julian's condition:
【Target: Julian of the Second Spire】 【Status: Severe Packet Desync (Subjective) / Total Skeletal Shock (Objective)】 【Ping: 999 ms (Unresponsive to Basic Input)】 【Inspector Note: Player is stuck in an unskippable cutscene. Reboot recommended.】
Felix shook his head in genuine pity.
"Yep, total freeze," Felix sighed. "He's spamming chat macros, but his inputs aren't registering on the server. Poor guy. Nothing worse than lagging out during a ranked match."
He stood up and looked around the massive stone arena.
"Can someone reset the local router?" Felix called out toward the announcer's box. "The whole lobby is buffering! How am I supposed to finish this quest if the match won't register as completed?!"
Nobody answered.
To the ten thousand spectators in the stands, Felix wasn't shouting about bad internet connection.
They couldn't understand words like 'router' or 'buffering.' To their mortal ears, attuned to the ancient resonance of the Dao, Felix's bored voice sounded like the deep rumble of thunder rolling across an endless abyss.
High on the central floating platform, Grand Chancellor Alistair fell forward onto his knees.
The Grand Chancellor was a legendary Eighth-Tier Dao Lord who had lived for nine hundred years. He had seen mighty empires rise and crumble into desert dust. He had witnessed heavenly lightning trials that split entire mountain ranges in half.
Yet right now, two streams of clear tears flowed down his wrinkled face, soaking into his golden velvet robes.
"The Titan Sovereign Domain..." Chancellor Alistair wept openly, his hands clutching the marble balustrade so hard the stone turned to powder beneath his fingers. "It was the ancient Titan Sovereign Domain! By the ancestors of the Radiant Dawn, I never thought I would live to see it with my own eyes!"
Beside him, Elder Raymond's teeth were chattering like dice in a cup.
"C-Chancellor..." Raymond whispered, his throat bone-dry. "What did he just do? Julian had ten thousand solar swords! Where did they go?!"
"Where did they go?!" Chancellor Alistair turned on Raymond, his voice trembling with furious reverence. "They were crushed into nonexistence! The young Sovereign did not even summon a weapon! He did not even condense a drop of sword qi!"
Alistair pointed a shaking finger at Felix's frayed slippers down on the sand.
"Did you not see his foot?!" Alistair cried, his eyes wide with religious ecstasy. "He shifted his heel by half an inch! In that half-inch, he unlocked the primordial mass of an entire terrestrial realm! One hundred times the gravity of heaven and earth collapsed into a single point!"
The surrounding elders shuddered in unison. Several of them dropped to their knees on the floating platform, bowing toward the pit.
"He called down the weight of a wandering planet..." Elder Raymond whispered, his face turning paper-white. "A casual step... to disperse a Sixth-Tier sword formation like dust on a windowsill..."
"And look at his divine restraint!" Chancellor Alistair exclaimed, wiping tears from his beard. "He held the gravity well for less than two breaths! Had he held it for one breath longer, Julian and every disciple in the first twenty rows would have been compressed into red paste! He showed boundless mercy! Boundless!"
Down at the edge of the pit, Lyra Ashford stood quietly beside the low stone barrier.
A senior disciple from the Fifth Spire crawled over to her, his voice shaking violently. "Lady Lyra! Your Senior Brother... is he truly the legendary slumbering patriarch of the Seventh Spire?!"
Lyra looked down at the trembling disciple with cool, aristocratic grace.
"Senior Brother Vance does not concern himself with worldly titles," Lyra said smoothly, resting her hand on her rapier hilt. "To him, the Ten Thousand Golden Sun Sword Rain was nothing more than an annoying swarm of summer gnats. He simply brushed them aside so he could rest his heels."
The disciple swallowed hard, staring at Felix in absolute horror. "He... he considered Brother Julian a gnat?!"
"A gnat is being generous," Lyra replied with calm conviction. "Did you not see Senior Brother's expression? He was merely checking his divine scrying slate. The affairs of mortals do not even merit his full attention."
Two other disciples nearby fell onto their knees, pressing their foreheads to the arena flagstones.
"We have offended a living immortal!" one disciple wailed softly. "May the heavens spare our families!"
"Silence!" another whispered in terror. "Do not disturb his sacred contemplation! Look at him—he is communicating with the stars through his obsidian tablet!"
Down in the center of the ring, Felix was getting thoroughly impatient.
He checked his active quest tracker again:
Felix let out a heavy breath.
He tapped the screen of the AetherDeck repeatedly with the flat of his thumb.
*Tap. Tap. Tap.*
"Come on," Felix muttered. "Flush the DNS already. Clear the cache."
He walked over to the arbiter's podium, looking up at the frozen official.
"Hey, ref," Felix said, waving his hand in front of the man's unblinking eyes. "Hello? Is anyone in there? Are you going to ring the bell, or should I just forfeit and go home? My lunch is getting cold, and I still have three hours of offline idle rewards waiting on my porch."
The arbiter stared down at Felix from above.
Hearing the terrifying entity speaking directly to him, the arbiter's bladder nearly gave out. His knees shook so violently that his silk robes rustled like dry corn husks.
"I... I..." the arbiter squeaked, unable to form a coherent sentence.
Felix sighed and dragged a hand across his tired face.
"Unbelievable," Felix grumbled. "Even the NPC arbiters are frozen. This game was definitely coded by unpaid interns."