A proper hammock required two sturdy pillars and zero ambition.
Kaelen Vance adjusted his quilted pillow and stared at the ceiling of the Vermilion Imperial Palace. Thirty feet below his dangling heels, the central spirit vein hummed like a fat bumblebee. Pure golden mist drifted up through the floor grates, warming his ribs.
In his sea of consciousness, the translucent gray tablet flickered into view.
[The Fallow Slate] [Stage 5: Hibernation Compression Active] [Spirit Vein Detected: Central Vermilion Earth-Root] [Real Time Slept: 60 Hours] [Track 1 (Cultivation Vessel): 120 Hours (121x)] [Track 2 (Martial Combat): 120 Hours (121x)] [Track 3 (Alchemy): 120 Hours (121x)] [Track 4 (Comprehension): 120 Hours (121x)] [Current Cap: 4,320 Hours (43,210x)]
Kaelen smiled and pulled his silk blanket higher.
Two hours of credit for every single hour of horizontal rest. Whoever designed Stage 5 truly understood the burden of high-level statecraft.
Most cultivators spent sixty hours coughing up lung-blood in closed-door grottos to polish a single drop of spiritual liquid. Kaelen had spent those same sixty hours drooling into a goose-down bolster. Now his Fallow Slate credited him with a five-day retreat across all four tracks.
He reached down to a low wooden table beside the hammock and picked up his teacup. The jasmine tea was cold, but lifting a finger to reheat it felt dangerously close to manual labor.
