Chapter 82: Gacha Mudras

A blue flash in gacha gaming is the universal color of human despair.

It is not the bright gold of an SSR legendary summon. It is not the deep royal purple of a solid four-star utility drop.

Blue is the color of cold, unwashed dishwater. Blue is the color of regret, salt, and wasted time.

On the obsidian display of the AetherDeck, the sparkling animation collapsed into ten glowing crystal orbs. One by one, they floated down into the results tray, chiming with cheerful, mocking little bells.

Ding. Blue.* Ding.* Blue.* Ding.* Blue.

Felix Vance stared at the glass screen, his jaw set in a rigid, terrifying line.

Every single orb in the ten-pull was identical. A flat, lifeless sky-blue.

"No," Felix whispered, his voice trembling with the righteous fury of an online gamer betrayed by math. "No, you didn't. You wouldn't dare."

The crystal orbs cracked open simultaneously, displaying his rewards:

Felix's breath hissed through his teeth.

Forty rusty iron nails. Thirty-six yards of hairy brown rope. Two broken wooden bowls. And a moldy turnip.

He had compressed an active, living G-class star into his chest.

And the game had handed him the contents of an abandoned woodshed.

"Four duplicates of rusty nails," Felix muttered, his voice dropping into a deadly register. "Three bundles of coarse twine. Two chipped wooden bowls. And a vegetable that died ten years ago."

【Target: 3-Star Gacha Drop [Rusty Iron Nails x40]】 【Durability: 12/100 (Extremely Corroded)】 【Vendor Value: 0.04 Copper Coins】 【Inspector Note: Low-grade construction scrap retrieved from an abandoned digital barn. High risk of virtual tetanus. Recommended response: Salvage immediately into raw iron dust or send angry bug report to developer.】

Felix tapped the screen to close the results window and salvage the scrap.

Nothing happened.

The AetherDeck didn’t exit to the home menu.

Instead, a tiny circular icon appeared right in the middle of the ten rusty nails.

A glowing, spinning wheel of death.

Loading...

Connecting to Celestial Server...

Data Packet Synchronization in Progress...

The screen froze solid.

The back button was greyed out. The home button didn’t respond. The skipping function was entirely disabled while the slate struggled to contact the server.

Felix’s eye gave a violent, involuntary twitch.

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"Are you kidding me?" Felix said to the frozen glass. "You give me ten blues, and now you won't even let me close the screen? You're forcing me to look at the rusty nails?!"

He tapped the screen again. Tap. Tap. Tap-tap-tap.

The spinning wheel remained frozen at ninety degrees, stuck in an endless handshake timeout.

Down on the grass, forty paces away, Sky-Captain Drake was watching with rising dread.

The forty-eight-year-old pirate admiral stood in his worn duster coat, holding his empty stomach.

Drake had lived through fifty sky battles. He had outrun imperial fleets and survived void storms.

Yet right now, his seasoned survival instincts screamed that reality was beginning to warp.

The air around the porch grew suffocatingly heavy.

The evening light filtering through the pines bent into faint, golden optical rings around Felix’s chair. The ambient temperature, which had been a pleasant sixty-nine degrees, began to climb with steady, quiet pressure.

Drake’s weathered skin prickled with heat.

Across the gorge, Inquisitor Valen and Vice-Chancellor Alistair hovered on their flying swords, trembling in terror.

"Look at his expression," Valen whispered, clutching his scabbard. "He looks insulted. Utterly, cosmically insulted!"

"He read something upon that black obsidian tablet," Alistair stammered. "Look at his hands! He is about to summon the wrath of the heavens!"

Drake stared at Felix.

Indeed, the young man’s hazel eyes were narrowed into razor-thin slits of pure contempt. His lips were moving rapidly, murmuring strange, incomprehensible incantations in a tongue that sounded like ancient abyssal curses:

‘...zero-point-six percent... predatory gacha devs... scam pity timer... forty tetanus spikes...’

"Ancient void tongues!" Drake gasped, his pulse pounding against his ribs. "He is invoking the names of the Pre-Creation Gods! He speaks of the Gacha-Devs—the primordial entities who govern luck and destiny!"

Over by the cabbage patch, Senior Groundskeeper Nether-Bane dropped his wooden hoe into the soft dirt.

The seven-foot Ghost King backed away three paces, pulling his floppy straw hat down until his trembling skull was hidden from view.

The Master is chanting the Forbidden Void Hexes! Nether-Bane thought, his hollow eye sockets flickering wildly. He is reciting the names of the Grand Arbiters who rule over the infinite cosmic servers! Woe unto any mortal who stands before his wrath!

Beside the porch steps, Lyra Ashford was shivering where she stood.

Her long silver hair fluttered in the rising heat, and her violet eyes were wide with dread.

She had lived with Senior Brother for months. She had seen him annoyed when his morning tea was lukewarm.

Never in all that time had she seen his gamer salt reach critical mass.

The sheer pressure radiating from Felix’s chest was causing the pine needles on the roof to vibrate.

Under the table, Grandmaster Vivienne’s Sovereign Heart Seal—with the ancient jade seal carved underneath—hummed with deep purple light, absorbing the microscopic gravitational ripples leaking from Felix’s sternum.

Perched on the cedar railing, Barnaby the clockwork owl began to whir with frantic agitation.

His brass neck gears spun in rapid clicks. His polished amber lenses dilated to maximum aperture.

The hand-carved oak bottle cork Felix had jammed into his beak held completely firm, alongside the shiny copper penny clamped in his left talon. The brass owl could only let out tiny, muffled steam hisses, as if agreeing that mobile games were the ultimate scourge of existence.

Senior Brother is furious, Lyra thought, her fingernails digging deep into her palms. He is preparing a supreme cosmic seal!

On the porch, Felix’s patience completely ran out.

Every smartphone user in history knows the ritual.

When your screen freezes, when the loading wheel gets stuck, when the app hangs on a terrible result and refuses to respond to basic touch inputs, there is only one universal mortal recourse:

You shake the device.

You shake it hard, hoping the internal accelerometer and memory buffer clears the frozen process.

Felix gripped both sides of the AetherDeck with his fingers.

"Unfreeze, you piece of junk," Felix muttered through clenched teeth.

He began to shake the obsidian slate up and down in rapid, violent bursts.

Shake. Shake. Shake-shake-shake.

His hands moved in a frantic blur of speed, rattling the brass-and-stone casing with aggressive mechanical frequency.

To Felix, he was simply trying to force-close an unresponsive mobile game client using aggressive tactile troubleshooting.

To Sky-Captain Drake and the watching cultivators, it looked like a terrifying cataclysm from the First Era!

The young man’s hands vanished into an afterimage of blinding golden light.

His fingers didn’t just shake the tablet—they seemed to pluck at the invisible strings of the celestial firmament itself! With every violent flick of his wrists, the air around the porch shrieked with high-frequency sonic vibrations!

WHIRRRR-THUM-THUM-THUM!

The wind roared across the lawn, flattening the clover. The heavy iron hull of Drake’s flagship creaked on its landing struts as the local gravity pulsed in rapid, rhythmic beats!

Sky-Captain Drake’s blood ran cold as ice water.

"A Primordial Hand Seal!" Drake screamed, stumbling back a half-pace as the wind sheared against his coat. "He is weaving eighty-four thousand spatial collapse mudras in the span of a single breath! He is folding the fabric of reality to reset the karmic balance of the world!"

"The Gacha Mudras!" Inquisitor Valen cried out across the gorge, tears of terror spilling from his eyes. "The sacred hand seals of probability manipulation! He is forcing the celestial heavens to rewrite the laws of cause and effect!"

Up in the rigging of the Iron Gale, fifty starving pirates fell flat on their faces, clutching their heads and praying to every god they knew.

"Mercy, Great Sovereign!" First Mate Bones wailed into the deck planks. "We only came for some soup! We didn't mean to offend your sacred mudras!"

Down in the four-leaf clover, the eight-ton Thunder Gryphon opened one yellow eye, gave an annoyed snort at the loud rattling, and buried its hooked beak back into its golden feathers.

On the porch, Felix didn’t hear any of them.

All Felix saw was the spinning wheel remaining stubbornly frozen over the forty rusty nails.

"Cancel!" Felix growled, giving the AetherDeck one final, exceptionally hard two-handed shake. "I said CANCEL, you stupid loading wheel!"

He snapped his wrists downward with absolute gamer frustration.

And deep inside his chest...

The 1.0-Earth-Mass main-sequence star, jostled by the violent deceleration of his hands, experienced a microscopic fluctuation in its hydrostatic core equilibrium.

The star burped. A tiny wave of pure solar heat rushed up his throat.

Felix felt a sudden, ticklish tickle in his sinuses. His eyelids fluttered as the warmth expanded through his lungs, forcing his mouth to open wide in an enormous, jaw-stretching yawn.

Down below on the clover, Drake watched the young man's jaw drop open, his heart pounding in his chest.

The evening sky held its breath.

Something ancient, golden, and impossibly hot was about to vent into the upper atmosphere.