A blue flash in gacha gaming is the universal color of human despair.
It is not the bright gold of an SSR legendary summon. It is not the deep royal purple of a solid four-star utility drop.
Blue is the color of cold, unwashed dishwater. Blue is the color of regret, salt, and wasted time.
On the obsidian display of the AetherDeck, the sparkling celestial animation collapsed into ten glowing crystal orbs. One by one, they floated down into the results tray, chiming with cheerful, mocking little bells.
*Ding.* Blue.
*Ding.* Blue.
*Ding.* Blue.
Felix Vance stared at the glass screen, his jaw set in a rigid, terrifying line.
Every single orb in the ten-pull was identical. A flat, lifeless sky-blue.
"No," Felix whispered, his voice trembling with the righteous fury of an online gamer who had been betrayed by math itself. "No, you didn't. You wouldn't dare."
The crystal orbs cracked open simultaneously, displaying his milestone rewards:
Felix's breath hissed through his teeth.
Forty rusty iron nails. Thirty-six yards of hairy brown rope. Two broken soup bowls. And a moldy turnip.
He had compressed a literal G-class main-sequence star into his dantian. He had slept for eight uninterrupted hours to earn a pristine milestone summon ticket from the Heavenly Vault.
And the game had handed him the contents of an abandoned woodshed.
"Four duplicates of rusty nails," Felix muttered, his voice dropping into a deadly, dangerous register. "Three bundles of coarse twine. Two chipped wooden bowls. And a vegetable that looks like it died during the previous imperial dynasty."
【Target: 3-Star Gacha Drop [Rusty Iron Nails x40]】 【Durability: 12/100 (Extremely Corroded)】 【Vendor Value: 0.04 Copper Coins】 【Inspector Note: Low-grade construction scrap retrieved from an abandoned digital barn. High risk of virtual tetanus. Recommended response: Salvage immediately into raw iron dust or send angry bug report to developer.】
He tapped the banner details icon with a vicious, stabbing finger.
The fine print expanded across the screen in tiny, microscopic runes:
Felix stared at the last sentence.
*Milestone tickets do not share pity with the standard banner.*
"A pity timer scam," Felix hissed, his blood pressure spiking into dangerous territory. "It's an isolated banner pool! The milestone ticket doesn't even carry over pity progress to the main banner! Who coded this predatory garbage?!"
The salt inside his chest was so thick you could cure ham with it.
For a gamer, there was no pain comparable to the 10x blue roll. You can endure losing a match. You can endure a three-hour server maintenance that extends into the evening.
You cannot endure an incremental idle game giving you ten pieces of literal trash after you waited sixteen hours for a loading bar to fill.
"Ten blue drops," Felix growled under his breath. "Ten. Straight. Blues. I could have traded that ticket for sixty hours of offline coal mining. I could have bought five bags of five-star fertilizer for the cabbages. Instead, I have forty tetanus spikes and a moldy root."
He jabbed his thumb at the screen to close the results window and salvage the scrap.
Nothing happened.
The AetherDeck didn't exit to the home menu.
Instead, a tiny circular icon appeared right in the middle of the ten rusty nails.
A glowing, spinning wheel of death.
*Loading...*
*Connecting to Celestial Server...*
*Data Packet Synchronization in Progress...*
The screen froze solid.
The back button was greyed out. The home button didn't respond. The skipping function was entirely disabled while the slate struggled to contact whatever divine server governed reality.
Felix’s eye gave a violent, involuntary twitch.
"Are you kidding me?" Felix said to the frozen glass. "You give me ten blues, and now you won't even let me skip the post-summon screen? You're forcing me to look at the rusty nails?!"
He tapped the screen again. *Tap. Tap. Tap-tap-tap.*
The spinning wheel remained frozen at ninety degrees, stuck in an endless handshake timeout.
Down on the grass, fifty paces away, Grand Inquisitor Drake was having his own escalating crisis.
Drake had been standing in the morning sun for nearly three full minutes. His arms were still raised, clutching the crimson imperial decree. His throat was dry from shouting his imperial title across the mountain gorge.
Yet the youth on the porch had not flinched.
The young man had merely stared at his black slate, his face shifting from lazy disinterest into an expression of cold, terrifying fury.
To Drake’s eyes, the atmosphere around the porch had suddenly turned suffocatingly heavy.
The air was warping.
The light filtering through the pine branches bent into faint, golden optical rings around the recliner. The ambient temperature, which had been a cool sixty-eight degrees, suddenly began to climb with steady, quiet pressure.
Drake’s golden armor plates began to warm against his tunic.
"Captain Vane," Drake whispered, not daring to lower his lance. "What is he doing?"
Vane swallowed hard, peering through his trembling brass looking-glass.
"My Lord... his expression," Vane breathed, terror dripping from every syllable. "He looks... insulted. Utterly, cosmically insulted!"
"Insulted?" Drake growled. "By the imperial decree?"
"He read something upon that black obsidian tablet," Vane stammered. "His face went pale with wrath! Look at his eyes, Inquisitor! That is the gaze of a primordial sovereign whose ancient sacred domain has been desecrated by lower lifeforms!"
Drake stared at Felix.
Indeed, the young man’s eyes were narrowed into razor-thin slits of pure, unadulterated contempt. His lips were moving rapidly, murmuring strange, incomprehensible incantations in a tongue that sounded like ancient abyssal curses:
*‘...zero-point-six percent... predatory gacha devs... scam pity timer... forty tetanus spikes...’*
"Ancient void tongues!" Drake gasped, his heart pounding against his breastplate. "He is invoking the names of the Pre-Creation Old Gods! He speaks of the 'Gacha-Devs'—the dark entities of the Outer Void who govern the distribution of fate and luck!"
Beside the porch steps, Lyra Ashford was shivering where she stood.
She had lived with Senior Brother for months. She had seen him annoyed when his morning tea was lukewarm. She had seen him grumble when the rain forced him to move his recliner two feet closer to the wall.
Never in all that time had she seen his gamer salt reach critical mass.
The sheer pressure radiating from Felix’s chest was causing the pine needles on the roof to vibrate in harmonic resonance. The wooden floorboards of the porch gave a faint, rhythmic groan: *creeeak... creeeak...*
Under the table, Grandmaster Vivienne’s Sovereign Heart Seal hummed with deep purple light, absorbing the microscopic gravitational ripples leaking from Felix’s sternum.
*Senior Brother is furious,* Lyra thought, her fingernails digging deep into her palms. *The imperial inquisitors have committed the ultimate sacrilege. They have interrupted his sacred contemplation during the Great Auspicious Star Alignment!*
She watched Felix’s hands begin to tense.
*He is preparing a seal!* Lyra realized with absolute dread. *He will wipe the Sol-Aethel Empire from the map!*
On the porch, Felix’s patience completely ran out.
Every smartphone user in history knows the ritual.
When your screen freezes, when the loading wheel gets stuck, when the app hangs on a terrible result and refuses to respond to basic touch inputs, there is only one universal mortal recourse:
You shake the device.
You shake it hard, hoping the accelerometer or the internal memory buffer clears the frozen process.
Felix gripped both sides of the AetherDeck with his fingers.
"Unfreeze, you piece of junk," Felix muttered through clenched teeth.
He began to shake the obsidian slate up and down in rapid, violent bursts.
*Shake. Shake. Shake-shake-shake.*
His hands moved in a frantic blur of speed, rattling the brass-and-stone casing with aggressive mechanical frequency.
To Felix, he was simply trying to force-close an unresponsive mobile game client.
To the eighty gold-armored censors standing in the grass, it looked like something out of the darkest prophecies of the First Era.
The youth’s hands vanished into an afterimage of divine golden light.
His fingers didn't just shake the tablet—they seemed to pluck at the invisible strings of the celestial firmament itself! With every violent flick of his wrists, the air around the porch shrieked with high-frequency sonic vibrations!
*WHIRRRR-THUM-THUM-THUM!*
The seventy-two suppression banners planted in the turf began to violently rattle in their sockets. The runic boundary field flickered wildly, its golden barrier cracking like cheap ice beneath a running horse!
Grand Inquisitor Drake’s blood ran cold as ice water.
"A Primordial Hand Seal!" Drake screamed, stumbling back a half-pace as the wind sheared against his gilded breastplate. "He is weaving eighty-four thousand spatial collapse mudras in the span of a single breath! He is folding the fabric of the heavens to crush our vanguard!"
"Inquisitor!" Censor-Captain Vane cried, falling to one knee as the gravitational field pressed down on his shoulders like an iron slab. "Order the retreat! The array cannot hold! His mudra is tearing the ley lines apart!"
"Silence, coward!" Drake roared, panic and pride clashing violently in his chest.
Drake could see his seventy years of military glory slipping through his fingers. If he retreated before a single youth in pajamas without striking a blow, he would be the laughingstock of the imperial court until the day he died!
Drake raised his Sun-Piercing Lance high above his head, channeling every drop of his Tier 6 Grand Inquisitor cultivation into the star-iron tip.
The lance flared with blinding, sun-white fire.
"ROGUE SOVEREIGN!" Drake bellowed, his voice straining against the rising sonic howl of the peak. "CEASE YOUR FORBIDDEN VOID MUDRAS THIS INSTANT! SURRENDER TO THE CROWN, OR THE SUN-PIERCING LANCE SHALL CONSUME YOUR FLESH!"
On the porch, Felix didn't even hear the words 'Sun-Piercing Lance.'
All Felix heard was a loud, obnoxious clanging noise from somewhere on his lawn while his screen remained stubbornly frozen on the forty rusty nails.
"Cancel!" Felix growled, giving the AetherDeck one final, exceptionally hard two-handed shake. "I said CANCEL, you stupid loading wheel!"
He snapped his wrists downward with absolute gamer frustration.
And deep inside his chest...
The 1.0-Earth-Mass main-sequence star, jostled by the violent deceleration of his hands, experienced a microscopic 0.0000001% fluctuation in its hydrostatic core equilibrium.
The star burped.