Breakfast was a non-negotiable pillar of civilization.
A working man didn't run on mountain air and spiritual vibes. You needed grease, protein, and black coffee strong enough to strip paint off a tailboard. Even in a broken alpha build with broken collision vectors, missing keybinds, and zero settings sliders, an avatar needed an egg.
Austin stood on the porch of his listing shack, shoulder braced against a charred cedar post, squinting across the yard. The morning air was crisp, but looking up at the eaves made his jaw ache. The rafters lacked collar ties, the purlins were sagging under rotten thatch, and condensation was pooling on the raw timber. Without proper ridge vents, the whole roof structure would turn to punky sponge within two seasons.
Just beyond the square edge of his obsidian plaza, three mangy mountain pheasants pecked at the dry dirt.
Pitiful birds. Grey-brown, moth-eaten feathers. Raw pink skin showing around scrawny necks. Spindly yellow shanks that looked like dry willow twigs. The previous tenant had tossed wild grass chaff at them now and then—some half-starved effort at domestication before the frost finished him off.
`[Entity: Wild Mountain Pheasant (Level 1)]` `[Status: Malnourished / Hostile to Earthworms]` `[AI Routine: Basic Forager]` `[Taming Progress: 0%]`
"Level one critters," Austin muttered, tapping a knuckle against his chin. "Standard ambient fauna. But basic survival mechanics never change: feed passive mobs their preferred grain bait, trigger the love-heart particle effect, and unlock passive daily resource drops. If I don't get sixty grams of protein into this avatar, my mining efficiency is gonna crater by noon."
Chickens were chickens. Back home, Austin's uncle had kept four dozen Rhode Island Reds behind the machine shed. Feathered garbage disposals, every last one. They'd peck at scrap tin, dried paint flakes, and each other's tails if you forgot the mash. You had to bury your perimeter wire twelve inches into the dirt. You had to flare it out at a ninety-degree angle. If you didn't, every wandering fox in the county would tunnel right under the coop wall.
He walked around to the compost heap behind the lean-to. Yesterday's furious weeding and grading had stacked up a neat mound of shredded Iron-Thorn roots, thistle husks, and seed pods. Because Austin's superheated hoe had pulverized the pile with 10,000-degree plasma, every root chunk and seed had caught a massive dose of beta decay and thermonuclear radiation.
They looked like dried grain kernels, except they pulsed with a steady crimson-gold glow, humming at thirty megahertz and smelling faintly of toasted oats and electrical fire.
Austin scooped up a generous double handful in a cracked wooden bowl.
"Here, chook-chook-chook," Austin called in a flat, monotone voice, ambling to the plaza's edge. He scattered the glowing seeds across coordinate `[X: 02, Y: 18]`. "Breakfast time. Eat your grain, register player ownership, and unlock the daily egg cycle."
The three pheasants froze. Beady black eyes locked onto the glowing kernels.
To their starving avian senses, the seeds didn't smell like dry weeds. They radiated the intoxicating, condensed essence of pure first-dawn solar dew. Driven by starved desperation, the birds hopped forward, claws clicking sharply against the vitreous obsidian, and pecked at the glowing grains.
*CRACKLE.*
The second the lead hen swallowed a kernel, the mountain air hitched.
The bird's pupils blew wide, turning into swirling pools of molten gold.
*SCREEEEEECH—!*
The hen threw its head back. The cry that ripped from its throat didn't sound like poultry; it tore through the morning silence like an industrial cutting torch biting through sheet steel.
A sheet of blinding golden fire burst through its ragged feathers. The dull grey plumage didn't singe; it dissolved, replaced by crystalline feathers the color of fresh liquid sunlight that split the dawn into razor-sharp rainbows. Its wings snapped out, expanding to a five-foot spread, each primary quill crowned with a licking tongue of white-hot solar plasma. Its spindly yellow legs thickened into scaled gold talons capable of gouging armor plate like soft butter.
Within three breaths, the mangy birds had ceased to exist.
In their place stood three razor-taloned **Golden Sun-Crows**—first-epoch divine raptors, spoken of in forbidden mountain scrolls as the celestial steeds of the ancient Solar Sovereign.
The lead Sun-Crow flapped once, kicking up an ozone-rich thermal draft that ruffled Austin's hemp hem, and settled onto the glass deck. It tilted its flame-crowned head, fixing Austin with a look of absolute submission, and let out an affectionate *coo* that rattled like an oxyacetylene torch.
Austin blinked down at the trio of miniature sun-dragons standing politely in a row.
He checked their tooltips:
"Not bad," Austin grunted, nodding in mild approval. "The devs actually put shiny cosmetic skins into the game. That golden shader looks a hell of a lot cleaner than the default mangy plumage. High-temp egg production? Good. Saves on firewood."
He dumped the remaining seeds into an old wooden crate by the corner. "Stay in the yard. Don't peck at the perimeter grounding wire, or you'll trip the breaker. And don't leave any droppings on the obsidian pad. I just spent four hours grading this slab to zero tolerance. One white spot on coordinate fourteen-eight and somebody's ending up in the soup pot."
The three divine Sun-Crows bowed their flame-crowned heads in solemn, sacred reverence, spreading out along the perimeter posts like fiery gargoyles guarding an imperial vault.
***
Meanwhile, down in the grand council courtyard of the Iron Sword Hall, five miles below, peace had been entirely shattered.
"WHAT KIND OF DOGSHIT JOKE IS THIS?!"
Young Master Bai Chen kicked a carved rosewood tea table across the stone tiles. Porcelain shattered; fragrant Longjing tea splattered over the flagstones. His handsome, aristocratic face twisted in livid disbelief as he glared down at the stretcher on the ground.
On the stretcher lay Wang Hu.
What was left of him, anyway.
The burly enforcer was caked from scalp to boot heels in semi-solid pig manure. His heavy indigo linen robes were burned down to blackened, greasy threads, revealing skin covered in violet, fractal lightning burns that still crackled with static. His beard and eyebrows had been scorched off to the roots. His glazed pupils stared up at the rafter timbers, his jaw slack as his lips twitched:
*"...The sky box... vectors... launched me... three hundred meters... straight into the sky box..."*
Beside the litter, the hall's chief apothecary sat on his haunches, his fingers trembling as he pulled his hand back from Wang Hu's wrist.
"Young Master Bai," the apothecary stammered, his lips pale. "His meridians... they are not merely damaged. They have been fused together like molten copper pipe! There is a lingering solar resonance in his marrow that our spiritual cooling salves cannot suppress!"
Beside the litter, the two surviving lackeys had their foreheads glued to the stone, weeping so hard they could barely draw breath.
"Young Master! It wasn't a fight! It was demonic sorcery!" one blubbered, snot dripping onto the tiles. "Brother Hu barely stepped toward the fence! He didn't even pull his saber! The second his boot hit the wire, the sky ripped open! A column of purple tribulation lightning dropped from nowhere, boiled his saber into slag, and blew him three thousand paces across the valley into the muck!"
"Idiots! Incompetent dogs!" Bai Chen bellowed, his hand gripping the shark-skin hilt of his spirit sword until his knuckles blanched. "Chu Yuan is a worthless cripple! His spirit roots are dead! Three years ago, Elder Shen tested him personally on the Spirit-Testing Stele and declared his veins as cold and useless as pig iron! He couldn't muster a thimble of spiritual qi to save his neck! How could he summon heavenly tribulation lightning?!"
"Young Master, we swear on our Dao hearts!" the second lackey wailed. "And Sunset Peak... it's all changed! The courtyard is paved in black void-stone that swallows the sun! And Li Xiaoyao... that spineless dog is crawling on his knees, sweeping the deck with a sacred bamboo relic, chanting forbidden scriptures to appease the altar!"
Bai Chen's pupils narrowed to cold, needle-fine points.
A dark, greedy spark ignited behind his eyes.
*An ancient immortal cave,* the thought raced through his skull, making his pulse hammer against his ribs. *That dying dog must have stumbled into a buried grotto beneath the peak! An ancient legacy from the Clear Sky Sect's Founding Ancestor ten millennia ago!*
Greed, hot and blinding, burned away every shred of caution. An inheritance that could command purple lightning and vitrify mountain rock... if he seized it, he wouldn't just crush the other outer sect masters. He could skip straight to Core Disciple!
"Summon Senior Brother Shen," Bai Chen snapped to his bodyguards. "Shen is at the fourth level of Foundation Establishment. Tell him to bring the Heaven-Suppressing Spirit Net and twenty elite archers with spirit-piercing crossbows. If Chu Yuan dug up an ancient sect treasure, it belongs by right of strength to the Iron Sword Hall!"
***
Up on Sunset Peak, Austin had no clue an armed assault was mobilizing down the ridge.
He was currently crouched behind the shack, peering into a straw-lined nest crate.
The lead golden hen had delivered.
The egg was massive—the size of an ostrich egg—and crafted from what looked like translucent, fire-red ruby. Inside the vitrified shell, a swirling whorl of golden plasma spun in a slow, hypnotic circle, throwing off a gentle, dry heat of about three hundred degrees Celsius.
"Well, that's not going into a teflon skillet," Austin muttered, admiring the mineral finish. "Thermal output would burn the non-stick coating off in three seconds flat. And a clay pot would suffer thermal shock and crack down the belly before the water even got warm."
He grabbed a pair of long, heavy iron blacksmith tongs from the scrap heap, gripped the glowing ruby egg firmly, and hauled it over to a thick cast-iron kettle sitting on an improvised stone hearth. The kettle was brim-full of icy spring water drawn from the rock seep.
He lowered the ruby egg into the kettle.
*SSSSSSSSSSSSSHHHHH—!*
The spring water didn't boil up gradually. It flash-vaporized into a roaring plume of pressurized steam with the fury of a cracked locomotive boiler.
Austin jumped back, waving a pine paddle through the cloud and coughing against the humid blast. He peered into the bubbling cauldron and checked the interface:
"Ten percent fire resist for thirty minutes," Austin smirked, prodding the glowing red shell with a dried cedar chopstick. "Solid early-game consumable stats. Perfect for mining runs or boss fights. Now if I can just dig up some coarse pickling salt and a pepper grinder, this sandbox might actually be worth the grief."