The small pine bedroom was pitch black, save for the faint silver glow of twin moons slicing through the shutter slats.
Around two in the morning, Felix Vance opened his eyes and smacked his dry tongue against the roof of his mouth.
"Ugh," Felix groaned, staring at the dark ceiling. "So thirsty."
His throat felt like he had swallowed a handful of dry sand.
Ever since he had ignited that miniature main-sequence star in his lower belly, his core felt delightfully warm, but his internal thermostat was running a few degrees hot.
Naturally, Felix did not attribute this to possessing the thermonuclear fusion capacity of four hundred million tons of hydrogen.
"The server climate settings are completely out of whack," Felix muttered, swinging his legs over the side of the straw mattress. "The devs probably raised the ambient room temperature to push players toward buying stamina-refresh consumables."
He rubbed his temples, yawned until his jaw popped, and shuffled across the cool cedar floorboards in his frayed hemp pajamas.
Up on the ceiling rafter, Barnaby sat in total darkness.
The brass clockwork owl let out a muffled *"Mmmph-whirrr"* behind the wooden wine cork still lodged in its beak. Its amber mechanical eyes spun with pure, indignant hatred.
Felix patted the brass bird’s belly in passing.
"Good night, Barnaby. Keep up the quiet patrol," Felix said.
Barnaby’s cogs vibrated with rage, but Felix was already out the door and shuffling down the hallway.
***
In the kitchen, the air was cool and smelled of dried mint.
Felix walked over to the wooden water barrel in the corner. He dipped an old ceramic ladle into the cold well water, filled his chipped mug to the brim, and drank it down in three massive gulps.
"Ah," Felix exhaled, wiping his chin with his sleeve. "Much better. Cold water is truly the greatest gaming buff known to mankind."
He filled the mug a second time, intending to take it back to bed.
As he turned away from the counter, a faint, rhythmic scuffling sound caught his ear.
*Scratch. Squelch. Groan.*
It was coming from the back garden.
Felix frowned and padded quietly to the small rear window above the sink.
He leaned against the wooden sill, peering out into the moonlit yard.
Fifty feet away, right in the center of the dark loam where Lyra had planted his cabbage seed, six dark, lumpy shapes were wriggling violently in the mud.
They looked like overgrown raccoons wrapped in black rags, twisting and thrashing around like fat worms on hot pavement.
Felix squinted through the glass.
Instantly, his golden Inspector HUD flickered to life over the six writhing figures:
【Target: Midnight Garden Pests (Level 5 Scavengers)】 【Type: Nocturnal Vermin / Common Annoyance】 【Status: Heavily Pinned by Localized Atmospheric Weight】 【Inspector Note: Mangy intruders attempting to disturb your newly planted cabbage. Highly susceptible to blunt domestic trauma. Clear the area to fulfill the system bounty. Sells to the junk vendor for 0 copper coins.】
Felix stared at the text box in mild disgust.
"Are you kidding me?" Felix whispered, shaking his head. "I put that seed in the ground five hours ago. How is the wildlife AI already targeting my crops?"
He remembered the AetherDeck alert from earlier: *Emergency Quest: Clear 6x Intruding Nocturnal Scavengers.*
"One thousand gacha crystals for getting rid of six raccoons," Felix muttered. "If I don't chase them off now, they're gonna chew up the leaves by sunrise, and the quest will fail."
He really didn't want to deal with it. It was two in the morning.
He wanted to be under his thick wool blanket, floating in the warm embrace of eight more hours of passive AFK progression.
"I'm not putting on heavy work boots just to kick six raccoons," Felix grumbled.
He looked down at his feet.
He was wearing his favorite pair of worn straw slippers—the ratty, comfortable ones with the frayed heels that he used for midnight bathroom trips.
Felix slipped his right foot out of the slipper.
He picked it up by the woven heel strap, holding the floppy footwear in his right hand while balancing his mug of water in his left.
He pushed open the kitchen back door and stepped out onto the porch.
***
Out in the cabbage patch, the six elite assassins of the Ashford Clan were living through a waking nightmare.
For three continuous hours, they had been crushed face-first into the fertilizer.
Every bone in Krail's body felt like splintered glass. His lungs burned with every microscopic sip of air he managed to draw.
Beside him, Justin had completely lost his mind, quietly humming clan funeral hymns into a patch of wild onions.
Suddenly, the creak of rusty iron hinges echoed through the dead silence of the night.
*Screeech.*
Krail strained with every ounce of his remaining willpower, forcing his bloodshot left eye open against the mud.
A young man had stepped out onto the back porch.
He was dressed in wrinkled, faded gray hemp pajamas. His hair was a wild, unbrushed bird's nest. He was yawning openly, scratching his lower ribs with the casual apathy of a peasant waking for a midnight leak.
In his left hand, he held a chipped earthenware mug.
In his right hand, he carried a battered, floppy straw slipper.
To a mortal eye, it was an utterly mundane, slightly pathetic sight.
To Krail’s spiritual senses, however, the air around the young man warped into a terrifying, swirling vortex of absolute solar destruction.
The young man didn't just walk. The fabric of space bent beneath his bare left foot.
Behind his thin shoulders, Krail could see the terrifying, golden phantom of a roaring celestial star—a celestial sphere whose mass alone threatened to drag the entire Floating Spirelands out of the sky!
*The Sovereign...* Krail’s soul shrieked in silent agony. *The Ancient Slumbering Sovereign has emerged!*
*And he carries a weapon!*
Krail’s gaze dropped to the frayed straw slipper in the young man's right hand.
To Krail’s terrified mind, the woven grass of the slipper wasn't straw.
It was the braided sinew of a Primordial Void Beast, steeped in the karma of ten thousand slaughtered gods!
The frayed threads at the heel were the remnants of broken celestial chains!
"Mercy..." Krail choked out, coughing up black mud. "Immortal Lord... have mercy on our clan..."
***
Up on the porch, Felix didn't hear the muffled gurgling coming from the mud.
All he saw was six fat pests making annoying rustling sounds right next to his precious cabbage.
"Hey!" Felix shouted in a lazy, scratchy voice. "Get out of my garden, you mangy things! Shoo!"
The pests didn't move. In fact, they seemed to wriggle even more aggressively, digging their faces deeper into the soil.
Felix sighed heavily.
"Unresponsive AI," Felix muttered. "Typical indie game trash. If you don't hit them with a physical hitbox, they just stay stuck in their feeding loops."
Felix took a sip of water from his mug, swallowed it, and raised his right arm.
He gave the frayed straw slipper a casual, dismissive flick of his wrist.
He didn't aim to kill. He just wanted to toss the dirty slipper at the nearest raccoon to scare them off the patch, fully intending to pick it up in the morning.
"Scram," Felix said, tossing the slipper through the air.
It was the most casual, effortless motion in the world.
The problem, however, was that the arm executing the toss was powered by the localized kinetic potential of a 1.0-Earth-Mass stellar core.
***
The moment the slipper left Felix’s fingertips, physics completely abandoned the Seventh Spire.
*BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOM!*
The air didn't just part; it collapsed with an earth-shattering sonic crack.
The friction of the straw slipper moving through the troposphere instantly ignited a blinding cone of white-hot ionized plasma.
The slipper crossed the fifty feet to the garden patch at Mach 45.
It didn't hit the assassins directly.
It didn't need to.
The supersonic shockwave pushed ahead of the flying footwear hit the cabbage patch like the kinetic blast of an orbital kinetic bombardment rod!
*CRACK-THUUUUUUUUUM!*
The garden dirt didn't splash—it vaporized into a concussive shock ring of displaced loam, pine needles, and compressed atmospheric air.
The six elite Fifth-Tier assassins weren't just knocked back.
They were scooped out of the earth like dry leaves caught in the exhaust nozzle of a rocket thruster!
"AAAAAAAUUUUUUGGGGGGHHHHH!" Krail’s scream ripped across the night sky.
"THE SLIPPEEEEEEERRRRRR!" Justin wailed in utter despair.
The six men were launched into the upper atmosphere in a perfect parabolic arc.
They tore through the cloud sea like screaming comets, blasting over the outer perimeter of Solitude Spire, skipping past the Blade Spire, rocketing clean over the Astral Observatory, and disappearing across two entire mountain ranges into the uncharted wilderness of the Lower Strata!
Behind them, the shockwave sheared cleanly across the chasm, slicing off the top fifty feet of an ancient granite cliff three miles away with surgical precision.
And in the center of the garden?
The straw slipper, having expended its kinetic energy against the atmospheric barrier, bounced gently off a cedar fence post.
*Flop.*
It flipped once through the air and landed neatly on the gravel path right in front of the porch steps, perfectly upright, toe pointing toward the door.
***
From the deep shadows beside the rain barrel, Lyra Ashford fell to her knees.
Her hands clutched her silver rapier so tightly that her knuckles were bone-white.
Her breath came in ragged, trembling gasps.
She had watched the entire sequence from start to finish.
Six elite Fifth-Tier assassins—men who could infiltrate an imperial palace and assassinate a grand duke without tripping a single runic ward—had been eradicated from existence.
Not with a sacred sword.
Not with an ancient forbidden hex.
With an old, worn-out house slipper.
*A casual toss...* Lyra whispered inside her shattered mind, her eyes wide with reverence that bordered on religious madness.
*He didn't even spill a single drop of water from his cup!*
*He stood on the porch in his sleeping robes, held a mug of water in his left hand, and banished six masters of the shadow realm to the edge of the continent with a single flick of a shoe!*
*And look at the weapon!*
Lyra stared at the straw slipper resting peacefully on the gravel.
*The Divine Relic shattered the firmament, tore through the clouds, and returned to its master's feet through Void Spatial Recall without suffering a single frayed stitch!*
*What kind of Dao is this?!*
*Is this the legendary Dao of Absolute Domesticity? The Art of the Careless Swat?!*
Lyra’s forehead pressed down onto the cold gravel.
She wept silent tears of pure, unadulterated gratitude.
*Senior Brother Felix... you saved me again,* she sobbed silently. *You knew my clan’s killers were here. You didn't even deem them worthy of putting on your other shoe!*
***
Up on the porch, Felix blinked.
He looked at the empty cabbage patch.
The six wriggling dark lumps were gone.
In fact, the entire garden path was remarkably clean, save for a neat circular indentation in the dirt where the pests had been rooting around.
Remarkably, his tiny cabbage sprout in the center was completely untouched, swaying happily in the fresh night breeze.
Felix scratched his messy hair.
"Huh," Felix said to himself. "Must have hit them right on the collider. Physics engines in these games get so wacky with knockback multipliers."
He shuffled down the wooden steps, scooped up his straw slipper by the frayed strap, and gave it a quick shake to dislodge a couple of dry leaves.
He slid his right foot back inside. It felt warm, broken-in, and entirely comfortable.
Suddenly, a crisp digital chime chimed behind his ears.
*Ding-ding-dong!*
A bright golden box popped up before his eyes:
Felix’s eyebrows shot up.
A slow, satisfied smirk spread across his face.
"One thousand crystals," Felix chuckled softly. "Nice. That's a full ten-pull on the gacha banner."
He turned back toward the kitchen door, taking another sip of cool well water from his mug.
"I'll pull tomorrow morning after breakfast," Felix murmured, stifling another massive yawn as he pushed the screen door open. "Never do a ten-pull when you're half-asleep. Bad gacha karma."
He shuffled back down the dark hallway, climbed into his warm straw cot, and pulled the wool blanket over his head.
Within forty seconds, Felix Vance was fast asleep, snoring softly into his pillow, leaving the entire continent of Aethelgard to wonder what had just shattered the sky.