The silence that followed the shockwave was thicker than lead.
No wind blew through the mountain valley. The clouds had been wiped clean from the skybox, leaving an unnatural, crystal dome of cobalt blue.
On the lawn of Solitude Spire, eighty-one men of the Sol-Aethel Imperial Inquisition remained frozen in the dirt.
Grand Inquisitor Drake stood trembling on his knees.
His Sun-Piercing Lance lay forgotten in the clover, its melted golden tip hissing softly against the damp grass. His white ermine cape had turned to black soot, and his bare scalp was dusted with fine, powdery fallout from the vaporized imperial banner.
His eyes were locked on the flagship barge behind him.
The mainmast was gone.
In its place remained a six-foot-wide circular stump of translucent, glowing ruby glass. Drops of molten crystal fell from the vitrified rim with slow, rhythmic plops, burning tiny black holes into the deckboards:
*Drip... hiss... drip... hiss...*
"Two hundredths of a second..." Drake whispered, his voice cracking like dry parchment. "It took two hundredths of a second."
Beside him, Censor-Captain Vane was crawling through the crushed buttercups on all fours.
Vane’s gilded helmet had been crushed inward, exposing wide, bloodshot eyes that stared at the porch with pure, unadulterated madness.
"My Lord..." Vane croaked, clutching Drake’s armored knee with a shaking gauntlet. "The imperial standard... the ancestral dragon silk woven by the First Empress... it didn't even burn. The atoms... the atoms were erased!"
"He didn't stand up," Drake murmured, the words tumbling from his lips in a dazed, frantic chant. "He didn't draw a blade. He didn't invoke an ancestral spirit. He didn't even look up from his black slate!"
Drake’s mind, honed by seventy years of court intrigue and military strategy, began to spin into overdrive.
Why the mast?
Why didn't the golden beam strike the flagship's hull? Why didn't it bisect Drake's skull? Why didn't it vaporize all eighty censors where they stood?
The answer hit Drake's chest like an imperial warhammer.
*A warning strike.*
*A divine, spatial warning strike!*
"He spared us..." Drake breathed, his eyes filling with hot, stinging tears of terror and realization. "He could have erased the entire flagship with a single twitch of his pinky finger! But he chose the mainmast! He chose the Imperial Sun-Dragon Standard!"
"Why the standard, my Lord?" Vane wept, trembling from head to toe.
"Because the standard represents mortal arrogance!" Drake cried, his voice breaking into a sob. "The standard represents the foolish pride of Emperor Aurelius! By severing the imperial dragon and vitrifying the mast into glass, he delivered his divine verdict: *The empire is nothing more than brittle glass before the primordial dawn!*"
Drake looked toward the porch.
There sat Felix Vance, reclined comfortably in his Zero-Gravity Recliner, his legs crossed, his thumb lazily swiping across the dark glass of the AetherDeck.
The youth hadn't even looked their way.
To this ancient solar god, seventy years of imperial glory and eighty elite inquisitors were no more significant than dust motes floating through a beam of sunlight.
Drake’s knees gave way completely.
*CLANG!*
His heavy gilded breastplate slammed flat against the damp earth.
He didn't merely bow. He threw both arms forward, burying his face into the wild clover, weeping openly like a frightened child lost in a thunderstorm.
"Mercy!" Drake choked out, his tears soaking into the dark soil. "Supreme Sovereign of the Great Sun! This blind mortal has offended your divine sanctuary! We had eyes but failed to recognize the Lord of the Firmament! Grant us your holy mercy!"
Behind him, eighty elite censors did not hesitate for a microsecond.
*CLANG-CLANG-CLANG-CLANG!*
Eighty heavily armored warriors threw their halberds into the weeds and dropped face-first into the grass.
They formed a sea of shaking gold armor, their foreheads pressed against the roots of the dandelions, sobbing prayers of repentance in jagged, breathless whispers.
"Forgive us, Great Sovereign!"
"Spare our worthless souls!"
"We shall never speak the name of the crown in your presence again!"
The front lawn of Solitude Spire sounded like a grieving cemetery.
Ten paces to the left, near the crooked pine fence, a small figure paused in his work.
The former Ghost King, Lord Nether-Bane, rested his little wooden trowel against the edge of his weed bucket.
【Target: Lord Nether-Bane (Former Ghost King of the Void)】 【Current Role: Senior Lawn Technician & Dandelion Specialist】 【Mood: Smug / Well-Fed (+20% Satiety from scallion bread)】 【Inspector Note: Highly productive yard employee. Weeding speed increased by 45%. Does not complain about overtime. Strongly advise against disturbing his shift.】
He was wearing his ragged straw sun hat tilted back on his skeletal brow, revealing two hollow eye sockets that flickered with dim, green ghostly flames. In his bony left hand, he held a half-eaten piece of cold scallion flatbread that Felix had tossed him yesterday afternoon.
Nether-Bane chewed slowly on a bite of flatbread, listening to eighty imperial grandmasters blubbering into the dirt.
He wiped a smear of green dandelion juice from his skeletal wrist, leaned against the fence post, and let out a dry, rattling chuckle:
"Heh... heh-heh... first time?"
Drake’s weeping hitched in his throat.
The Grand Inquisitor raised his tear-stained face from the clover, blinking through the morning glare.
Right in front of him sat the legendary terror of the northern provinces.
The ancient necromancer who had slaughtered three sects in the Second Era. The demon lord whose bone scythe had drank the blood of kings.
He was sitting in an old pair of hemp breeches, munching on bread, with green dandelion pulp stuck under his fingernails.
"N-Nether-Bane...?" Drake stammered, his brain struggling to reconcile the horrific myth with the gardener before him. "You... you are the Sovereign of the Nether-Abyss! Why... why are you wearing a straw hat?!"
Nether-Bane took another calm, measured bite of scallion bread.
"Ten thousand years I cultivated the Nether-Dao," the Ghost King said, his voice whistling through his hollow teeth like wind through an empty tomb. "I had eight million soul-wraiths at my command. I flew here on a flagship made of primordial bone, intending to blot out the sun."
Drake swallowed dryly, his heart in his throat. "And... and then?"
Nether-Bane pointed a dirty skeletal claw toward the porch.
"The Sovereign stepped onto the porch," Nether-Bane said softly, a look of profound, haunted nostalgia crossing his skull. "He had just woken from an eleven-hour slumber. He looked upon my eight million wraiths, sighed with mild irritation, and swatted his old straw slipper through the air."
Drake’s eyes bulged. "A... a slipper?"
"A frayed grass sandal," Nether-Bane confirmed, nodding with solemn respect. "The kinetic shockwave disintegrated my flagship, evaporated my astral body, and planted me skull-first into that turnip row. When I crawled out of the dirt, I immediately offered him my Ten-Thousand-Year Primordial Soul-Pearl."
Nether-Bane gestured toward the low pine table beside Felix’s recliner.
Drake looked.
There sat the legendary Soul-Pearl of the Void, holding down three greasy pastry receipts from the academy bakery.
"You see that?" Nether-Bane whispered, a hint of professional pride in his voice. "He uses it to stop his bun receipts from blowing away. That was my entrance exam. If you offer him something useful, he lets you pull weeds in peace."
Drake looked down at his melted lance, then back to the Ghost King.
"He... he didn't even use a slipper on us," Drake whimpered. "He just shook his black jade slate!"
"Consider yourselves blessed by the stars," Nether-Bane said, taking a sip of water from a small clay jug. "A slipper strike would have folded this entire mountain range into a pancake. Shaking the slate was merely his way of yawning."
The Ghost King leaned forward, his green eye-flames narrowing with stern warning:
"Now listen closely, imperial dog. If you value your worthless mortal hides, keep your blubbering down to a whisper."
Drake stiffened, wiping snot and tears from his upper lip with his gilded gauntlet. "W-Why?"
"Because the Sovereign values two things above all cosmic laws," Nether-Bane hissed, pointing his wooden trowel at Drake’s nose. "First: undisturbed morning digestion. Second: absolute, pin-drop silence while his idle progress accumulates."
Nether-Bane swept his hand across the yard:
"Look upon the brass owl on the railing. Even the Great Arbiter of Dawn wears the Sacred Stopper of Silence in his beak! Look upon the golden beast in the clover! Even the Divine Thunder Chimera dares not sneeze before midday!"
Drake looked at Barnaby.
The brass automaton sat motionless, the thick black rubber stopper firmly lodged in its mandibles, its amber lenses clicking softly in tiny, terrified increments. In its brass talon, the polished copper coin caught the sun like a seal of absolute authority.
Drake looked at the Thunder Gryphon.
The colossal apex beast had its head buried under its wing, pretending to be a yellow boulder.
"If your loud imperial wailing disturbs his afternoon tea," Nether-Bane warned in a bone-chilling whisper, "the Sovereign will not merely vitrify your ship. He will delete your imperial court from the root scrolls of reality. Now close your mouths, press your faces into the dirt, and do not twitch a muscle until he speaks."
Drake didn't need to be told twice.
He snapped his mouth shut with an audible click of his teeth.
He slammed his forehead back into the dirt, his heart pounding in rhythmic terror against his ribs.
Behind him, eighty censors clamped their hands over their mouths, stifling their sobs, shivering like wet mice in the morning grass.
On the porch, Felix stretched his arms over his head.
His shoulders popped with a satisfying *crack-crack*.
Inside his dantian, the miniature star purred smoothly, its dampers locked back at 100% efficiency, keeping his core temperature perfectly regulated.
Felix closed the materials tab on his AetherDeck.
He had successfully salvaged the forty rusty nails into sixty-four units of scrap star-iron, while the coarse twine had been recycled into organic fiber for the farm mod.
"Well," Felix said to himself, letting his hands drop to the armrests of the recliner. "At least the salvage ratios aren't completely awful."
He rubbed his eyes with the palms of his hands, yawning long and loud:
"Aaaaah-uuuuumph."
The sound of Felix’s yawn echoed across the silent lawn.
Down in the clover, eighty-one imperial censors flinched simultaneously, their breath catching in their throats, convinced the cosmic sovereign was inhaling the spiritual atmosphere of the planet.
Felix blinked against the bright morning glare.
For the first time since he sat down at nine in the morning, he actually looked up from his screen.
He looked across the wooden railing.
He looked out over his front lawn.
And what he saw made him stop mid-blink.
There was a massive, two-hundred-foot golden boat parked directly in the middle of his buttercup patch, with its mast completely missing and smoke rising from the deck.
And lying flat on their faces in the tall grass were eighty-one men covered head-to-toe in shiny, gilded armor, trembling like leaves in an autumn gale.
Felix stared at the golden pile of bodies.
Then he scratched his ear with a lazy pinky finger.
"What on earth," Felix muttered, his voice full of sleepy confusion. "Did the academy drama club get lost again?"