Felix Vance rested his elbows on the padded armrests of his Zero-Gravity Recliner, squinting down at the lawn.
The morning sun was pleasantly warm.
The breeze carried the sweet, earthy scent of clover, bruised buttercups, and just a hint of ozone.
And lying completely motionless in the tall grass seventy paces away were eighty-one men covered head-to-toe in polished gold armor.
They were lined up in four neat, orderly rows. Every single one of them had their forehead pressed against the dirt, their hands outstretched in total submission. They were shivering so hard that their metal breastplates rattled against their belt buckles with a faint, continuous *chitter-chitter-chitter*.
In front of them knelt an older man with a shiny bald head, a scorched crimson cape, and a melted golden rod lying in the mud beside his knees.
Felix focused his gaze on the bald man.
A faint blue box with black brackets popped into the air beside Felix's vision:
【Target: Grand Inquisitor Drake】 【Cultivation: Tier 6 Grand Inquisitor (Mental Stability: 4%)】 【Threat Level: Completely Broken Dialogue NPC】 【Inspector Note: Suffered a catastrophic existential crisis after your slate lagged. Convinced you are the Primordial Creator of the Solar Court. Currently preparing to surrender his fleet, his imperial pension, and his family lineage to your front porch.】
Felix stared at the tooltip for three seconds.
Then he looked at the two-hundred-foot golden barge parked on his dandelion patch.
He looked at the eighty men in matching shiny gold suits.
He looked at the torn red-and-gold banners scattered in the weeds.
A deep, weary sigh escaped Felix's chest.
"I knew it," Felix muttered to himself, rubbing his temples with his index fingers. "Door-to-door religious charity canvassers."
It made complete sense.
Back in his old life, every Saturday morning at nine-thirty, aggressive volunteers in matching pressed white shirts and black ties would ring his apartment doorbell. They would stand on his welcome mat, holding glossy pamphlets about eternal salvation, trying to sign him up for monthly donations to build a new tabernacle.
In this fantasy world, people apparently took the whole missionary aesthetic to an absurd extreme.
They didn't wear shirts and ties; they wore twenty-four-karat gold plate armor. They didn't ride bicycles; they flew an oversized gilded party yacht and landed it directly on people's private lawns.
"Every single summer," Felix mumbled, slumping deeper into his recliner. "The religious fundraising guilds get more obnoxious. Last year it was the Moon Goddess monks with the copper bells. Now these guys brought a whole marching band in gold armor."
Felix cleared his throat.
"Hey!" Felix called out, his voice casual and flat, barely carrying across the clover. "You in the front! The bald guy with the burnt cape!"
Down in the dirt, Grand Inquisitor Drake felt his soul leap out of his chest.
The voice didn't boom or rumble like thunder.
It was quiet, calm, and utterly indifferent—the unmistakable voice of an immortal emperor addressing a colony of garden ants.
Drake slowly, painstakingly raised his head from the mud.
Tears and wet clover petals were plastered to his weathered cheeks. His eyes were wide with terrified reverence as he gazed up at the figure sitting beneath the cedar porch roof.
"S-Supreme Sovereign..." Drake stammered, his throat dry as bone. "This... this lowly sinner listens! Your divine words are our life!"
Felix frowned slightly.
"Look, man," Felix said, waving a dismissive hand. "I’m going to save you a lot of time. I don't buy charity calendars. I don't sign petitions to rebuild the sun temple. And whatever salvation pamphlets you’ve got in that golden boat, I’m not interested."
Drake blinked through his tears, his brain struggling to decode the divine message.
*Charity calendars? Salvation pamphlets?*
Drake’s eyes widened with sudden, terrifying epiphany.
*The Sovereign is testing our spiritual purity!* Drake’s mind screamed. *He speaks of 'charity' and 'pamphlets'—metaphors for the cheap, hollow doctrines of the mortal temples! He is saying that the Sol-Aethel Empire’s hollow religious pretenses are utterly worthless in the eyes of the True Great Sun!*
"Sovereign!" Drake cried, pressing his palms together in desperate prayer. "We bring no hollow doctrines! The Sol-Aethel Empire does not presume to teach the Heavens! We come only to offer the absolute submission of the Imperial Crown!"
"Yeah, yeah, save the sales pitch," Felix interrupted, rolling his eyes. "That's what all the brochure guys say. 'Give us ten minutes of your time, eternal blessings guaranteed.' Look around you. Does this look like an estate that buys luxury subscriptions?"
Felix gestured vaguely toward the rotting timber porch, the rusty water bucket, and the crooked pine fence.
"I’m an unemployed guy living on a junk rock," Felix said plainly. "I don't have cash. I don't have gold coins. Even if I wanted to donate to your golden temple foundation, my wallet is currently sitting at zero."
Drake’s breath caught in his throat.
*He claims to have zero wealth!* Drake thought, his chest heaving with awe. *A being who compressed a living star into his chest, who uses the Ten-Thousand-Year Primordial Soul-Pearl as a paperweight for bakery receipts, claims he is an 'unemployed squatter'!*
*The Dao of Extreme Simplicity!* Drake realized, weeping anew. *The True God owns all of existence, therefore he needs to own nothing! To hoard gold is mortal vanity; to possess the cosmos is absolute detachment!*
"We ask for no gold, Sovereign!" Drake pleaded, bowing until his nose touched the clover again. "We seek only to offer! Name any tribute across three continents! Spirit veins, ancestral floating isles, tenth-tier spirit pills—the Emperor shall empty the imperial vaults at your divine doorstep!"
Felix let out a long, irritated groan.
"Man, you canvassers really don't take no for an answer, do you?"
Felix rubbed his stomach through his rumpled grey tunic.
His stomach let out a loud, distinct, rumbling gurgle:
*GRRRRRR-URGLE.*
The sound carried clearly across the silent clearing.
Felix had been awake since nine. He had spent forty minutes watching an idle bar fill up, thirty minutes arguing with a frozen gacha screen, and another twenty minutes salvaging rusty nails.
He hadn't eaten breakfast.
Felix looked down at Drake with a deeply skeptical squint.
"Alright, look," Felix said, leaning forward in his recliner. "You made a massive racket with that flying golden tub. You blew soot all over my roof. You crushed ten feet of my wild buttercups with your metal landing skis. And you gave my owl a headache."
On the porch railing, Barnaby the clockwork owl gave a faint, muffled *click-tick*, its black rubber stopper held firmly between its brass mandibles as it clutched its polished copper coin.
"If you eighty guys are going to camp out on my lawn all morning doing your group choir practice," Felix continued, his tone dry and thoroughly transactional, "the absolute least you could have done is bring some food."
Drake froze.
His tears stopped mid-fall.
"F... food, Sovereign?" Drake whispered.
"Yeah. Food," Felix said, gesturing with his thumb toward his mouth. "Breakfast. Snacks. Did you bring any steamed dumplings? Pork and chive? Maybe some hot red bean buns? Scallion pancakes? Anything?"
Drake stared up at the porch, completely paralyzed.
Behind Felix, standing by the kitchen doorframe, Lyra Ashford felt her knees go weak with holy enlightenment.
*Senior Brother is testing the empire's ultimate sincerity!* Lyra thought, her eyes shining with manic adoration. *The Primordial Sun feeds upon the purest offerings of mortal labor! Pork and chive... the five sacred flavors of the mortal realm! If the empire cannot even provide simple nourishment to the Dao, how can they claim to govern the lands under his sky?!*
Down in the cabbage patch, the Ghost King paused his weeding, leaned his straw hat back, and whispered loudly toward Drake:
"Idiot! He asked for dumplings! Answer him!"
Drake snapped out of his trance.
Cold, electric panic seized his heart.
They had arrived with eighty censors, seventy-two suppression banners, twelve sky-dreadnoughts, and an eighth-tier Sun-Piercing Lance.
They hadn't brought any dumplings.
*WE HAVE NO DUMPLINGS!* Drake’s mind screamed in apocalyptic terror. *THE GOD OF THE SUN HAS DEMANDED THE FIVE SACRED OFFERINGS OF MORTAL FLAVOR, AND OUR GALLEY IS LOADED WITH STAR-IRON CANNONBALLS!*
Drake lunged his hand into his charred tunic, ripping out a glowing emerald jade talisman—the Direct Emergency Line to the Imperial Palace War Room.
He squeezed the jade stone with all his strength, screaming into the spiritual frequency with raw, hysterical desperation:
"CONNECT ME TO THE CAPITAL! GET ME THE GRAND MARSHAL! GET ME THE HEAD CHEF OF THE IMPERIAL PAVILION!"
A crackling, panicked voice answered from the stone:
*—Drake?! What happened?! Did the Seventh Spire retaliate?! The capital’s ley lines just recorded a twenty-mile plasma rupture! Is the armada destroyed?!—*
"SHUT UP AND LISTEN!" Drake roared into the jade, veins bulging on his bald forehead like thick cords. "DISREGARD THE ARMADA! CANCEL ALL MILITARY MOBILIZATIONS! MOBILIZE THE CHEFS! MOBILIZE EVERY PORK AND CHIVE VENDOR IN THE EMPIRE!"
*—What... what are you saying, Grand Inquisitor?!—*
"ONE HUNDRED STEAMED DUMPLINGS!" Drake shrieked, his voice echoing off the Seventh Spire’s granite cliffs. "HAND-ROLLED DOUGH! FRESH SCALLIONS! PREMIUM MINCED PORK! STEAMED IN CEDAR BASKETS! DISPATCH THE EMPEROR'S FASTEST LIGHTNING-SPEED CARRIERS! IF ONE HUNDRED HOT DUMPLINGS DO NOT LAND ON SOLITUDE SPIRE WITHIN TWENTY MINUTES, THE SUN WILL FALL AND THE EMPIRE WILL BE DELETED FROM EXISTENCE!"
Drake clicked the talisman shut, gasping for air, his chest heaving as if he had just run through three fiery hells.
He looked back up at the porch, his eyes pleading for mercy.
"S-Sovereign!" Drake wept, pressing his hands against his heart. "The imperial courier... he flies at Mach three! The dumplings... the dumplings are being steamed this very second! Have mercy upon our souls for twenty minutes!"
On the porch, Felix scratched his chin with a thumb.
He looked at the sweaty, bald old man screaming about fast-food deliveries into a green rock.
"Man," Felix murmured under his breath, shaking his head. "These modern delivery apps are getting ridiculously dramatic."
He leaned his head back against the headrest of the Zero-Gravity Recliner.
"Fine," Felix said, closing his eyes. "Twenty minutes. If they’re cold, I’m sending you guys back down the mountain. And stop screaming into that rock. Some of us have an afternoon nap scheduled."
Felix crossed his arms over his chest.
Inside his dantian, the miniature star purred with soothing, radiant warmth, wrapping his ribs in the coziest internal blanket known to physics.
Within fifteen seconds, a soft, rhythmic snore drifted from the recliner:
*Zzzzzzzzz...*
Down on the lawn, Grand Inquisitor Drake and eighty gold-armored censors remained frozen in the clover, holding their breath in terrified, tearful silence, praying to the heavens that the imperial kitchen’s dough had risen in time.