Chapter 5: No Quest?

"Hold on," he muttered, a sudden, cold bead of sweat rolling down the back of his neck. "Why does a generic status window have an ’Undead’ tracker? Where is the swordsmanship gauge? Where is the elemental affinity chart? Why are you immediately preparing inventory space for corpses?!"The System offered no clarification. It simply sat there, glowing with serene, algorithmic malice.

He stared at it for another full minute, waiting for a dramatic quest notification to pop up.

No [Quest: Kill the Demon King in 30 Days or Suffer Heart Rupture].

No [Emergency Warning: A Level 90 Assassin is Outside Your Window].

No [Tutorial: Run 10 Kilometers and Do 100 Push-ups or Enter the Punishment Zone].

Just a quiet, passive status window, hovering patiently until dismissed.

Lucien let out a slow breath, his shoulders relaxing.

"Okay. Fine," he said, waving his hand through the translucent box. The interface smoothly dissolved into specks of pale light, vanishing from his vision. "You’re a passive system. You have no personality, no obnoxious mascot, and no ticking death clock. We can coexist peacefully."

He swung his legs back into the bed, sinking deeply into the feather mattress and pulling the heavy midnight-blue duvet right up to his chin.

"I don’t care if my Spirit is twenty-seven. I don’t care if my class potential says ’Calculating’. The Imperial Awakening Ceremony is in two weeks, which means I have fourteen glorious days of medical exemption."

His stomach let out an enormous, ferocious rumble that sounded like an angry badger trapped inside a hollow log.

"First, I am going to ring that servant bell and request four bowls of beef stew, a platter of warm bread, and whatever absurd fruit costs twenty gold coins a basket in this kingdom. Then, I am going to sleep until Thursday."

He reached over to the nightstand, grabbed the ornate silver bell, and gave it an enthusiastic, vigorous shake.

In the quiet, sun-dappled master suite of the Everhart estate, the bell chimed with cheerful clarity. The great gears of fate had undeniably begun to turn, cosmic horrors were stirring in the depths of ancient ruins, and the Hero of the world was currently doing one thousand practice swings in a courtyard three hundred miles away.

Lucien Alaric Everhart, however, simply leaned his head back against the silk pillow, closed his eyes, and waited for his soup.

The soup had been magnificent.

That was the primary, uncontested victory of Lucien’s first full day of fraudulent existence.

It was a rich, velvety concoction of slow-braised oxtail, crushed winter truffles, caramelized mountain alliums, and miniature root vegetables that looked as though they had been individually buffed by artisanal gnomes before being simmered in rich marrow broth for sixteen hours.

It came accompanied by a basket of pull-apart sourdough rolls so crisp on the crust and so impossibly pillowy on the inside that Lucien had nearly wept directly into his silver spoon.

For the first forty-eight hours, he had pursued the art of total, shameless invalidism with the kind of ruthless efficiency usually reserved for Olympic athletes.

He did not leave the bed.

He barely sat up straight.

Whenever a maid entered the room carrying a fresh tray of smoked venison cutlets or warm plum tarts, Lucien would deliberately let his eyelids droop to half-mast, emit a delicate, tremulous sigh, and gaze mournfully out the sprawling bay window as if contemplating the ephemeral fragility of the mortal condition.

It worked like a charm.

"Oh, the poor young master," Rosalind, the robust head maid whose starched white apron crackled like fresh parchment, would whisper to the junior maids in the corridor.

"Look at him. The light of life has returned to his cheeks, but the wounds still linger. To think he threw himself in front of an abyssal fiend for a friend! An angel in silk, that’s what he is. Bring another crock of buttered custard! And fetch the heavy wool blankets from the south linen closet, the master’s toes looked faintly chilly!"

By the third day, however, Lucien realized two deeply unsettling things.

First, human muscles, even those belonging to a dashing twenty-year-old aristocrat who had miraculously avoided atrophy through noble vitality, do not enjoy being horizontal for seventy-two consecutive hours.

His spine was beginning to feel like a stack of loose ceramic tiles.

Second, and far more terrifying, was the quiet, predatory presence lurking just behind his left retina.

Whenever he stared at a blank patch of wall for more than four seconds, the light in the room would faintly shudder.

The air would produce that phantom, high-frequency click of static electricity, and a thin, spectral line of silver text would hover timidly at the periphery of his vision:

[SOUL SYSTEM: IDLE MODE]

[Host Inactivity Duration: 68 Hours, 42 Minutes...]

[Class Evaluation: Pending]

[Imperial Ceremony: 11 Days Remaining.]

"Shoo," Lucien had whispered into his teacup, waving a buttered scone at the optical hallucination. "Away with you, you parasitic pile of gamified microtransactions. I am on medical leave. I have a doctor’s note signed by an elderly man with mutton chops who smells of sulfur and eucalyptus. Go bother someone with an inferiority complex."

The text had flickered, unimpressed, and vanished.

Lucien had scowled, chewing his scone with aggressive melancholy.

"Unbelievable. Even in an alternate reality governed by magical feudalism, management still finds a way to monitor my downtime."

By day four, the boredom had begun to erode his commitment to being a sloth.

A man can only stare at cherubs bludgeoning demons with gold thunderbolts for so long before he begins mentally redesigning the fresco’s load-bearing architecture.

Wrapping himself in a quilted velvet dressing gown the color of crushed blackberries, lined with ermine fur so ridiculously soft it felt like being hugged by an apologetic cloud, Lucien had embarked on his first reconnaissance mission across the Everhart ancestral estate.

The estate, as it turned out, was not merely a house; rather, it was a small, aggressively fortified city-state masquerading as a private country residence.