Crown Prince Raymond’s roar shook the foundations of the Second Spire.
He channeled the entirety of his Astral Knight cultivation into the Nine-Sun Imperial Dragon Saber, his spirit meridians blazing with blinding gold. The curved blade shrieked like a dying star as nine distinct rings of solar fire erupted along the metal, expanding outward in violent, concentric shockwaves.
Above the arena floor, the air tore apart.
A swirling sphere of superheated crimson plasma coalesced fifty feet in the air, growing at terrifying speed. Within seconds, it expanded to over a hundred meters wide, hovering over the arena like a second, furious sun brought down from the heavens.
The heat was apocalyptic.
Flagstones around Raymond turned into glowing orange mush, sinking into bubbling pools of liquid basalt. The ancient runic containment pillars ringing the arena groaned in mechanical agony, spiderweb fractures racing across their carved surfaces as alarm bells clanged across all seven academy spires.
Fifty thousand spectators scrambled backward up the stone tiers in blind panic.
"Flee! The barrier won't hold!" someone screamed.
"The Nine-Sun Divine Cataclysm! He's summoning the wrath of the ancestral dragon!" an elder shrieked, shielding his blistering face with his silk sleeves.
In the center of the molten sand, Raymond stood inside a cage of swirling fire, his eyes burning like white embers.
"Tremble before the true power of the High Sun Empire!" Raymond bellowed, pointing his flaming blade down at Felix. "Melt into the ash of history, charlatan! Nothing in this realm can withstand the concentrated fury of a falling star!"
Felix stood ten paces away, squinting up at the glowing hundred-meter ball of fire.
The sheer thermal radiance was reflecting off the glossy screen of his AetherDeck, creating a blinding glare. He tilted the brass slate to the left, then to the right, but the intense light washed out every single pixel of his *Pocket Star Sandbox* layout.
"Seriously?" Felix muttered, his voice full of mild irritation. "The auto-brightness on this slate is completely broken."
He let out a tired sigh. Standing directly beneath a hundred-meter ball of celestial fire felt like standing in front of an open blast furnace with a broken oven door. His tunic collar felt damp, and the glare was giving him a pounding migraine behind his temples.
Suddenly, the obsidian surface of the AetherDeck buzzed against his fingers.
A bright amber notification box popped up over the screen, accompanied by a clean, retro chime:
【 Target: 100m Artificial Plasma Sphere | Thermal Scale: 0.0004% Solar Baseline | Hazard: Annoying screen glare | Action: Vacuum clean before eyes start watering. 】
Felix stared at the screen, blinking at the options.
"Fast clear?" Felix mumbled. "Yeah, definitely. Anything to turn down this obnoxious screen glare."
He extended his right thumb and tapped the virtual `[YES]` button.
Deep inside Felix’s chest, the 1.0-Earth-Mass terrestrial core stirred.
It didn't roar. It didn't flash with dramatic lights. It simply performed its fundamental cosmic duty under the laws of astrophysics.
To an internal stellar mass equal to 5.97 sextillion metric tons of compressed matter, a hundred-meter bubble of hot gas felt utterly harmless. The flaming sphere barely registered as a snack, amounting to nothing more than a speck of floating lint drifting past a black hole's outer orbit.
The localized gravitational field around Felix warped violently.
The air around his shoulders twisted, light bending into a shimmering optical halo as spacetime groaned beneath sheer, concentrated density. The ground beneath his straw slippers didn't crack; it simply locked into place, anchored by an immovable center of universal mass.
Crown Prince Raymond smirked, his saber slashing downward with imperial arrogance.
"Burn to cinders!" Raymond yelled.
The hundred-meter artificial sun plummeted toward the arena floor, trailing roaring ribbons of crimson destruction.
Then, five feet above Felix’s head, the miniature star stopped dead in midair.
Raymond’s triumphant smile froze.
The fifty thousand screaming spectators fell dead silent.
The colossal sphere of fire didn't explode. It didn't smash into the flagstones. Instead, its outer edges began to stretch, warping into an elongated, swirling funnel that twisted straight toward Felix’s chest.
*VWWWOOOOOM.*
A low-frequency hum resonated through the very marrow of everyone in the stadium. It wasn't the sound of an explosion; it was the sound of a cosmic drain opening in the fabric of space.
The hundred-meter sun was being sucked inward at blinding speed.
Vast rivers of roaring crimson plasma poured into Felix’s chest, spiraling into a pinprick vortex right between his collarbones. The blinding flames compressed, turned deep blue, then vanished completely beneath the fabric of his faded gray tunic like bathwater rushing down a drainpipe.
In less than three seconds, the hundred-meter artificial sun was completely gone.
*Fwump.*
The sky above the Grand Arena plunged into sudden, shocking darkness as the artificial daylight was snuffed out like a birthday candle.
The suffocating, blistering heat vanished instantly. The ambient temperature of the arena dropped from three thousand degrees to a crisp, autumn chill of sixty-five degrees in the blink of an eye. A cool, crisp breeze swept across the molten sand, causing the red-hot glass pools to solidify with sharp, cracking whispers.
Crown Prince Raymond stood frozen in place, his jaw hanging slack.
His golden armor was scorched, not from his own fire, but from the sudden, violent vacuum that had stripped the air clean from his lungs. He looked up at the empty sky, then looked down at Felix Vance.
Felix was still standing in the exact same spot, casually rubbing his stomach.
"Ah, that's much better," Felix said with a satisfied nod. "The glare is finally gone."
Raymond’s trembling eyes dropped down to his right hand.
The *Nine-Sun Imperial Dragon Saber*—the ancestral relic passed down through forty generations of High Sun emperors—was vibrating violently. The nine golden dragon carvings along the spine were weeping flakes of blackened ash.
The weapon had not been struck by a blade. It had not clashed against a shield.
It had simply passed through the fringe tidal shear of Felix’s passive gravitational pull. To an object made of ordinary astral iron, the sheer gravitational gradient between its tip and its pommel was an impossible physical strain.
*CRACK.*
A hairline fracture appeared at the base of the blade.
Raymond gasped, his voice catching in his dry throat. "No... no, impossible... the ancestral dragon flame..."
*Shatter.*
With a sound like brittle glass tumbling onto flagstones, the Nine-Sun Imperial Dragon Saber disintegrated.
The divine blade did not break into large shards. It collapsed into a cloud of ultra-fine gray dust, dissolving completely before it even touched the sand. A stray gust of wind caught the powder, scattering centuries of imperial glory into the cooling breeze.
Raymond was left holding nothing but a bare, blackened brass hilt.
His knees turned to water.
The First Scion of the High Sun Empire, the undefeated prodigy who had conquered seventeen barbarian kingdoms, collapsed onto his knees in the scorched sand.
His polished golden armor slammed against the flagstones with a dull, hollow clang. His hands shook uncontrollably as he stared at the empty patch of dirt where his ancestral treasure had just vanished.
"You... what are you?" Raymond whispered, his voice cracking into a pathetic, high-pitched squeak.
Tears of pure, existential terror spilled down the prince's cheeks, washing pale tracks through the soot on his face. His spiritual veins felt completely hollowed out, his dantian shivering like a frozen mouse trapped in a cellar.
"You swallowed the sun..." Raymond babbled, his eyes wide and unblinking as he stared at Felix's chest. "You consumed the primordial flame with your mortal flesh... you didn't even draw a blade... you are the Void... the living Abyss that drinks the heavens..."
Ten paces away, Lyra Ashford stepped forward onto the rim of the chalk circle.
Her silver breastplate gleamed in the returning daylight. Her golden eyes looked down at the weeping prince with the cold, detached pity of someone watching an ant attempt to wrestle a mountain.
"Did I not warn you, Raymond?" Lyra said, her voice ringing clear and serene across the silent arena. "You brought a spark of mortal ember before the Primeval Slumbering Sovereign. You dared to boast of your nine suns, yet in the presence of Senior Brother, entire solar systems are but fleeting motes of dust."
She bowed deeply toward Felix, her hands folded with absolute, fanatical devotion.
"Senior Brother’s benevolence is boundless," Lyra proclaimed, her words echoing into the frozen silence of fifty thousand onlookers. "He spared your worthless life, choosing only to cleanse the arrogance from your soul and relieve you of a weapon you were never worthy to carry."
Up in the VIP pavilion, Grand Chancellor Zhao dropped his silk handkerchief.
His knees gave way, and he slumped backward into his velvet armchair, clutching his chest as if his heart might burst from his ribs.
Beside him, Arch-Inquisitor Valen was leaning against the marble pillar for support, his silver goatee dripping with cold sweat.
"He swallowed it..." Valen croaked, his voice barely audible. "A Tier-Four Astral Cataclysm... devoured in three seconds... like a child drinking milk..."
"Dispatch the Imperial Herald," Zhao wheezed, his eyes staring blankly at the ceiling. "Draft the treaties.
Draft whatever he wants. If that man decides to exhale, the entire eastern archipelago will be erased from the firmament."
Down on the arena sand, Felix tapped his obsidian slate.
A new line of text popped up at the bottom of his screen:
Felix stared at the zero-gold drop summary, his face falling into an expression of profound, cynical disappointment.
He looked down at the weeping Crown Prince kneeling in the dirt, then glanced at the bare brass hilt in Raymond's trembling hand. A small cloud of gray metal dust settled on Felix’s straw slipper, and he kicked his foot to shake it loose.
"Zero gold," Felix grumbled under his breath, shaking his head in disgust. "Zero crafting shards. Just a tiny static shock that gave me two hundredths of a battery percent."
He let out a long, heavy sigh that ruffled his loose tunic.
"Terrible drop rates," Felix muttered, turning his back on the broken prince and shuffling toward the arena exit. "The developers of this game really need to buff the boss loot tables."