Stellar Slacker: I Thought This Was an Idle Game!

The afternoon sun hung high and warm over Solitude Spire.

Inside the quiet cedar cottage, the gentle breeze carried the sweet, honeyed scent of the Sun-Lotus Cabbage blooming out in the yard.

Under the front corner of the dining table, the Sovereign Heart Seal remained wedged tight, keeping the warped wood from wobbling even a millimeter.

Barnaby sat up on his cedar beam, glaring down with glowing amber eyes.

A thick black rubber stopper was still hammered firmly into the owl’s brass beak, muffling his usual pompous screams into tiny, rhythmic wheezes: ”Mmmph. Grr-mmph.”

Felix Vance sat on the edge of his cot, rubbing his eyes and yawning until his jaw clicked.

”Another peaceful afternoon,” Felix muttered, stretching his arms. ”Time for a nice post-lunch nap.”

Before he could pull the wool blanket back over his head, the front door swung open.

Lyra Ashford stood in the doorway, wearing her crisp, silver-trimmed robes. Her rapier was buckled neatly at her hip, and her expression was tense enough to crack porcelain.

”Senior Brother,” Lyra said softly, bowing with deep respect. ”Forgive my intrusion upon your profound meditation, but the hour has arrived.”

Felix squinted at her from the bed. ”What hour? Is the delivery boy here with the fried dumplings?”

”No, Senior Brother,” Lyra said, her voice dropping to an anxious whisper. ”It is the triennial Theory and Rune Examination. All registered disciples across all seven peaks must report to the Hall of Heavenly Inscriptions.”

Felix froze, a wave of pure exhaustion washing over his soul.

”An exam?” Felix asked, his voice filled with dread. ”A written test? Who invented mandatory pop quizzes in an idle game?”

”It is the sacred decree of the Grand Council,” Lyra explained, her golden eyes wide with earnest worry. ”Every three years, the academy tests the spiritual intellect and array-drafting comprehension of every student. Failure to attend results in immediate disciplinary review and endless clerical summons.”

Felix shuddered at the phrase clerical summons.

Nothing ruined AFK gains faster than annoying administrative pop-ups. If he skipped it, some elder with an ink brush would show up at his front porch every twenty minutes demanding paperwork.

”Fine,” Felix grumbled, dragging his feet into his frayed straw slippers. ”I’ll go sit in the chair. But if this takes longer than forty minutes, I’m logging off.”

Lyra’s breath caught in her throat.

Logging off! she thought, her heart racing as she analyzed his words. He speaks of severing his consciousness from the mortal coil! Senior Brother views this grand academic trial as nothing more than a trivial illusion, a lower plane he can depart from at any whim!

Felix stepped past Barnaby, reaching up to give the black rubber stopper an extra tap with his index finger.

”Stay quiet, bird,” Felix told the owl. ”Don’t touch my pillow.”

Barnaby’s internal cogs spun in pure fury, but only a tiny squeak escaped: ”Mmph!”

* * *

The Hall of Heavenly Inscriptions was a colossal pavilion built from polished white jade and ancient gray slate.

High vaulted ceilings arched overhead, carved with the constellations of the nine realms. Floating orbs of blue spirit fire illuminated rows upon rows of heavy stone desks, each separated by translucent privacy barriers.

Over four hundred disciples sat at the desks, their faces pale and slick with nervous sweat.

Up on the elevated dais at the front of the hall sat Chief Rune Master Oakhaven.

Oakhaven was a man with a beard so long and silver it reached his waist, wearing robes stitched with seven spinning golden trigrams. Beside him stood six senior proctors holding glowing censers of Dragon-Brain incense to keep the students’ minds sharp.

”Silence across the hall!” Oakhaven’s voice boomed, echoing like rolling thunder. ”You have three hours to complete the examination! You are presented with fractured Tier-Five and Tier-Six formation matrices! Your task is to analyze the heavenly flow, repair the broken spiritual conduits, and draft a self-sustaining energetic cycle!”

Disciples shuddered, and several let out quiet groans of despair.

”Begin!” Oakhaven struck a bronze gong.

BONGGGGG.

This text was taken from NovelPhoenix. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Across the hall, the frantic rustle of paper erupted. Brushes were dipped in cinnabar ink. Pupils dilated as disciples channeled their spiritual senses into the thick sheets of spirit-vellum.

In the back row, tucked into the far corner near an open window, Felix sank into a wooden chair.

He slouched low, resting his chin in his left palm. The post-lunch food coma was hitting him with the force of a freight train.

Deep inside his chest, his 1.0-Earth-Mass stellar core purred at a lazy fifteen million Kelvin. It radiated a cozy, gentle warmth through his ribs, making him feel like he was wrapped in an electric blanket on a rainy Sunday morning.

Felix stared down at the large sheet of golden spirit-vellum on his desk.

A translucent system HUD blinked into view before his eyes:

【Item: Examination Parchment (9th-Grade Academy Standard)】 【Prompt: Decipher the ancient heavenly vector logic and draft a self-sustaining cycle.】 【Inspector Note: Standard junior high school math test for cultivators. Boring busywork designed by bureaucrats with too much free time.】

”Ugh,” Felix muttered under his breath. ”Boring busywork. Just as I thought.”

He looked at the printed markings on the vellum.

To the disciples around him, those marks were complex ancient runes depicting the Flowing River Qi Array and the Mountain-Cleaving Hexagram. To Felix, they looked like messy, unoptimized spaghetti code scribbled by a sleep-deprived programmer at 3:00 AM.

Lines twisted into bizarre knots. Vectors overlapped for no reason. Half the arrows pointed straight into dead ends.

”Who designed this layout?” Felix grunted quietly. ”The user experience is absolute garbage. No clean margins, zero intuitive hotkeys, and where is the exit button?”

Two desks over, a third-year inner disciple was frantically biting his thumbnail. The boy’s face was purple with strain, veins bulging on his forehead as he tried to calculate the energetic resistance of the seventh runic junction.

Snap!

The disciple’s brush snapped in half under his trembling fingers. He clutched his head in silent agony, his spiritual energy flickering dangerously.

Felix glanced over, feeling mildly pitying.

Poor guy, Felix thought. The tutorial quest is breaking his brain. The devs really need to patch the difficulty curve in this game.

Felix picked up the heavy wolf-hair ink brush.

He didn’t know ancient xianxia geometry. He didn’t care about the difference between a yin-node and a yang-junction. But he knew how an efficient game screen should look.

If the prompt wanted a ”self-sustaining cycle,” there was only one logical answer.

An idle game dashboard.

Felix dipped the brush into the black inkstone. With brisk, lazy strokes, he ignored all the printed runes and began sketching a clean wireframe across the blank center of the vellum.

In the top-right corner, he drew a neat little horizontal rectangle with a tiny nub on the right end: a classic battery icon.

Inside the rectangle, he drew three solid vertical blocks, leaving the fourth empty to show seventy-five percent power.

”Gotta monitor the stamina bar,” Felix murmured. ”Can’t run an auto-farm script without checking resource limits.”

Next, across the upper third of the parchment, he drew a long, slender horizontal bar. Inside it, he shaded the left side and left a tiny arrow pointing at the unfinished gap near the end.

”Progress bar,” he nodded to himself. ”Ninety-nine percent complete. Because the last one percent always takes three times longer than the rest.”

Then, in the center of the page, he drew a bold, clean diagonal cursor arrow pointing downward at an empty square button.

”Auto-clicker,” Felix whispered, adding a couple of little motion lines behind the arrow. ”Set to fifty clicks per second. Saves your mouse switches from wearing out.”

Finally, down in the bottom-right corner, he sketched a simple cylindrical trash can with vertical hatching along its sides and a tilted flip lid.

”Garbage bin,” he said with satisfaction. ”For all the gray-tier vendor junk and broken gear that clutters the inventory.”

Underneath the whole wireframe, Felix scribbled a quick comment in casual cursive:

UI layout needs optimization. Energy efficiency 100%. Auto-farming enabled. Junk goes here.

As his brush lifted from the page, a crisp digital chime chimed directly behind his ears.

Ding!

A sleek blue system box materialized above the desk:

[AETHERDECK OS: MINI-QUEST DETECTED]

Quest: Complete Mandatory Bureaucratic Survey

Status: Submitted (Low Effort)

Rewards: 100x Idle Energy, 1x Minor Stamina Refresh Gum

A tiny stick of peppermint gum dropped into Felix’s lap.

He popped the gum into his mouth, chewed twice, and sighed in relief as the minty flavor woke him up just enough to stand.

”Finished,” Felix muttered.

He stood up, picked up his parchment, and walked toward the front of the hall.

The entire examination hall went dead silent.

Every scratching brush froze. Over four hundred disciples looked up in sheer, bug-eyed disbelief.

Only twelve minutes had passed since the opening gong.

Twelve minutes!

Most disciples hadn’t even finished reading the introductory theory questions on page one! Even the most brilliant geniuses of the Heavenly Sword Peak usually required at least two hours to decipher the first runic quadrant!

Lyra Ashford, sitting three rows ahead, turned her head and watched Felix walk past. Her hands trembled so hard that a drop of red ink fell onto her desk.

Senior Brother is already done? she thought, her chest tightening with awe. The Tier-Six Heavenly Array took the Grand Elder forty years of secluded meditation to compile! And Senior Brother solved it in the time it takes to brew a cup of weak tea!

Felix strolled up to the elevated dais.

A junior proctor stood there with his jaw slack, staring at Felix like he had grown a second head.

Felix dropped the parchment onto the collection tray with a limp slap.

”Here,” Felix said in a flat, tired voice. ”I filled out the survey. Can I go back to sleep now?”

The proctor blinked stupidly. ”Y-You... you are submitting your paper already? Disciple, there are still two hours and forty-eight minutes remaining!”

”I don’t need them,” Felix replied, waving a hand dismissively. ”The layout is done. Keep the change.”

Without waiting for permission, Felix turned on his heel, shoved his hands into his loose hemp sleeves, and shuffled out the grand double doors of the hall into the warm afternoon sunshine.

Oakhaven stroked his long beard, frowning down at the lone paper sitting on the collection tray.

”Arrogant youth,” Oakhaven muttered under his breath, shaking his head with mild pity. ”To give up so quickly under the weight of true heavenly mathematics. He must have scribbled nonsense just to escape the shame of a blank page.”

Oakhaven waved his sleeve. ”Resume your tests! Pay no mind to those who abandon the path of scholarship!”

The disciples swallowed hard and frantically returned to their brushes.

Outside, Felix strolled along the stone pathway toward Solitude Spire, humming a quiet tune.

”Glad that’s over,” Felix thought, spitting his gum into a leaf. ”Now for that four-hour nap.”