The midnight sun that had briefly set the sky ablaze faded into an eerie, humming twilight.
High above the floating islands of Aethelgard, the cold wind returned, whistling through the crooked pine branches of Solitude Spire.
Down in the dark valley between the peaks, six silhouettes drifted through the sea of white clouds like ink bleeding into silk.
They were the Shadow Crows—the premier wet-work detachment of the great Ashford Noble Clan.
Every single one of them was an elite Fifth-Tier shadow-infiltrator. They wore cloaks spun from void-spider silk that rendered their heartbeats silent and their physical forms invisible to standard spiritual detection.
At their head moved Commander Krail, a scarred veteran with eyes as cold as chipped flint.
"Hold formation," Krail whispered through his teeth, his voice carried only by shadow-whisper mana. "The target is on the Seventh Spire ahead. Lady Lyra has disgraced the patriarch by fleeing her betrothal and hiding among common academy rabble."
Behind him, a junior assassin named Justin adjusted his blackened steel gauntlet.
"Commander, did you see the celestial flare earlier?" Justin asked, his breath hitching slightly. "The midnight sky turned golden for three minutes. Even the Grand Chancellor's solar tower shook on its foundations."
Krail scoffed under his breath, eyes fixed on the crumbling timber cottage perched atop the distant rock.
"Pay it no mind," Krail commanded coldly. "An unstable mana pocket ruptured in the lower strata. This floating rock has been abandoned for three years. It is occupied by a single mortal orphan who cleans floorboards for scraps."
"And if the hermit gets in our way?" Justin asked, touching the hilt of a curved, venom-coated stiletto.
"Cut his throat before he wakes," Krail replied without missing a beat. "We bag Lady Lyra in a suppression sack and vanish into the cloud sea before the dawn bell rings. Clean, silent, untraceable."
The six assassins smiled beneath their black cloth masks.
To killers of their caliber, raiding a rotting cottage on an abandoned peak was less than child's play. It was an insult to their professional pride.
***
They crossed the chasm with practiced, effortless grace.
Gliding over the creaking mithril suspension chains, they touched down on the damp perimeter of Solitude Spire like falling leaves.
Zero sound. Zero displaced pebbles.
The dilapidated cottage stood fifty paces ahead, surrounded by a sagging fence of split cedar rails.
To the left of the gravel path lay a freshly tilled vegetable patch. In the center of the dark loam sat a single cabbage sprout whose jade-green leaves faintly glowed with a warm, golden halo.
Lyra Ashford sat on the wooden porch steps with her back to them.
Her silver rapier lay crosswise across her lap. Her eyes were closed in deep meditation, her breathing slow and measured as she tried to comprehend the terrifying solar majesty she had witnessed an hour before.
Krail raised two fingers, signaling his squad to flank the porch in a crescent formation.
"Surround her," Krail signed with shadow-cant. "Drop the mana-nullifying cage before she can draw her blade."
Justin stepped forward, his soft leather boots silently crossing the cedar fence line into the vegetable garden.
He planted his right foot directly onto the soft soil of the cabbage patch.
And at that exact microsecond, the universe broke.
***
*THUMP.*
It wasn't a sound. It was the physical sensation of an invisible iron anvil falling from the stratosphere at ten times the speed of sound.
Justin's right foot didn't just touch the dirt.
His boot sank six inches into the ground with a sickening crunch.
The localized gravitational gradient around the vegetable patch spiked instantly from normal earth gravity to a crushing one hundred times planetary mass.
"What—" Justin gasped.
Before the word could leave his throat, his entire body was ripped out of the air.
He was slammed violently face-first into the freshly tilled dirt with such savage kinetic fury that the breath detonated out of his lungs in a single strangled wheeze.
*SPLAT.*
His nose broke instantly against a buried turnip.
His black void-cloak flattened against his spine like wet paper. His ribs creaked under an invisible hydraulic press that weighed several tons.
"Justin!" Krail hissed in shock. "What are you doing? Stand up, you fool!"
Thinking Justin had tripped over a weed like an amateur, Krail rushed forward to drag him back into the shadows.
The moment Krail’s front boot crossed the cedar boundary, the gravity well caught him by the throat.
*WHAM.*
Krail hit the mud beside Justin with the force of a falling meteor.
His forehead smashed into a mound of composted pine needles. The venom-coated stiletto in his grip snapped into three jagged pieces under his own crushed body weight.
"Hrk—gack!" Krail sputtered, spitting out mouthfuls of wet garden soil.
The air in his chest felt like solid lead. Every blood vessel in his eyeballs swelled to bursting. He couldn't lift his chin an eighth of an inch off the dirt.
Behind them, the remaining four elite shadow-infiltrators panicked.
Conditioned by years of clan discipline, they drew their void daggers and leaped forward as one unit to rescue their commander.
*THUD. SLAM. CRUNCH. SQUELCH.*
In less than two seconds, all six elite Fifth-Tier assassins of the noble Ashford Clan were pinned flat against the garden loam like squashed beetles on a windshield.
Their limbs were splayed out uselessly in every direction.
Their faces were buried deep in the damp earth, right beside the freshly sprouted cabbage leaves.
***
Inside the dark bedroom of the cottage, Felix Vance lay on his side beneath his wool blankets.
His stomach felt pleasantly full of warm jasmine tea. His new stellar core hummed away in his dantian with the steady, quiet purr of a well-oiled refrigerator.
In his sleep, Felix felt a tiny cramp in his left shoulder.
He let out a soft, grumbling groan.
"Mmph... pillows are too flat..." Felix mumbled into his mattress.
He rolled over onto his right side, pulling the blanket tighter around his shoulders.
As his physical torso rotated by forty-five degrees, the magnetic alignment of the one-Earth-mass stellar core inside his chest shifted accordingly.
The localized gravitational vector across the backyard tilted five degrees to the north.
***
Outside in the garden, the change was instantaneous and horrific.
The crushing downward weight suddenly shoved sideways like a shifting tectonic plate.
Krail’s face was dragged three inches through the manure, plowing a miniature irrigation trench with his chin.
"Gaaaaah!" Krail screamed through clenched teeth, his cheek scraping against a sharp piece of gravel. "The void array! The spatial array has tilted! It’s crushing my soul-veins!"
Justin was weeping openly, tears mixing with dirt on his bruised cheeks.
"Commander... my ribs..." Justin whimpered in agony. "What kind of forbidden seal is this?! We can’t even summon our spiritual mana! The ambient pressure is dissolving our core structures!"
Every time an assassin tried to circulate his shadow mana, the overwhelming gravitational flux sheared through their meridians like an industrial meat grinder.
Their Fifth-Tier cultivation, honed over decades of bloody assassinations, was completely worthless.
Against the raw, brutal mass of a literal planet compressed into a two-inch sphere, their delicate mortal spells were like tissue paper against a freight train.
To make matters infinitely worse, the garden dirt smelled strongly of aged chicken manure that Felix had shoveled into the patch three days ago to prepare the soil.
"Why... why does the divine killing array smell like poultry?!" an assassin named Gerald choked out, his tongue pressed firmly against a lump of fermented dung.
***
On the porch steps, Lyra Ashford slowly stood up.
She turned around and stared into the dark garden with wide, stunned amethyst eyes.
She hadn't heard a single word of warning. She hadn't seen a single flash of spiritual light.
Yet lying before her in the dirt were six men in void-silk cloaks, writhing and groaning under an invisible, suffocating pressure that made the hairs on her neck stand straight up.
Lyra cautiously drew her rapier, taking three careful steps toward the garden fence.
She recognized the silver crow crest stitched onto the shoulder of Krail's shredded cloak.
"Commander Krail?" Lyra gasped in disbelief. "The Ashford Clan's Shadow Crows?"
Krail managed to peel his bloodied left eyelid open, looking up through the dirt at the young noblewoman standing cleanly on the porch path.
"Lady... Lyra..." Krail wheezed, his throat whistling like a punctured bellows. "Run... flee this place... this Spire is not abandoned... it is the burial mound of an Ancient Void Emperor..."
Lyra froze.
Her gaze shifted from the pinned assassins to the small cabbage sprout in the center of the patch.
The two jade leaves of the cabbage were swaying gently in the night breeze. Under the ambient gravitational downpour, the plant wasn't crushed at all; instead, it seemed to be drinking in the dense atmospheric energy, glowing with an increasingly pure, golden light.
Lyra’s breath caught in her throat.
*Senior Brother did this,* she thought, her mind spiraling into dizzying realms of awe.
*He didn't set a defensive boundary of swords or wards. That would be too pedestrian, too beneath him.*
*Instead, he simply allowed his ambient cultivation field to settle over the garden like dew over the grass.*
*To a mortal plant, it is gentle nourishment.*
*To wicked interlopers harboring murderous intent, it is the weight of Mount Tai falling upon their sinful skulls!*
Lyra gripped her rapier tightly, her chest swelling with profound veneration.
*He knew they were coming!* she realized with absolute certainty.
*He knew my clan would send the Shadow Crows to drag me back to an arranged marriage! That's why he told me to plant the cabbage right here on this spot!*
*The cabbage was never a vegetable.*
*It was the focal nexus of a 9th-Tier Divine Gravity Prison!*
"Commander Krail," Lyra said coldly, looking down at the legendary assassin who was currently chewing on cow fertilizer. "You should have heeded my warnings. You stand—or rather, you lie—before the personal domain of a peerless Sovereign."
"S-Sovereign...?" Krail croaked, blood bubbling at the corner of his lips. "That boy... in the bedroom... is a Sovereign...?"
"You dare refer to Senior Brother Felix as a boy?" Lyra’s voice was like ice. "He simply sleeps, and the heavens align with his breathing. If he were to awaken and find you trespassing in his sacred sanctuary, your ashes would not even be worthy to fertilize his cabbage."
The six assassins trembled with sheer, unadulterated terror.
Justin squeezed his eyes shut, praying to whatever ancestral spirits might hear him across the cloud oceans.
"Please..." Justin begged, his forehead grinding into the loam. "Spare us... we were only following clan orders... we didn't know an ancient god resided in the junk heap..."
***
Inside the bedroom, Felix smacked his lips.
He was having a wonderful dream about a twenty-piece spicy chicken nugget meal with honey mustard dipping sauce.
Suddenly, a faint chiming sound echoed in his ears.
*Ding.*
A translucent system notification hovered before his sleeping eyes, casting a faint amber glow over his pillow:
【 Target: 6x Garden Intruders | Classification: Common Nocturnal Pests (Tier 4 Vermin) | Threat: Annoying | Note: Currently face-planted in dirt. Free loot if collected. 】
Felix stirred slightly beneath the blankets.
His brow furrowed in mild irritation.
"Ugh... pop-up ads in the middle of the night?" he grumbled into his linen sheets. "Who programmed this janky app... let a man sleep..."
He pulled the pillow over his head, determined to ignore the notification until at least noon.
Outside, the six elite assassins continued to sob quietly into the manure, completely unaware that their very lives were hanging on the sleep schedule of a mildly annoyed twenty-year-old gamer.