The crack in the floor was not a crack.
It was a wrinkle.
A very old, very large, and very grumpy wrinkle on the skin of a very, very big turtle.
The floor of Hell, the foundation of the entire afterlife, was the shell of a sleeping god.
And he was waking up.
A voice, deeper than the concept of deep, rumbled from below, shaking the very foundations of damnation.
It was a slow, groggy, and infinitely annoyed voice.
The voice of someone who has been woken up from a nap that has lasted for the last five million years.
"Could you keep it down?" the voice grumbled. "Some of us are trying to sleep."
**
A head, the size of a small continent, slowly emerged from the abyss where the dance floor used to be.
Its eyes, each one a swirling galaxy of ancient starlight, blinked slowly.
It was Xuanwu. The Black Tortoise.
The Dean of the university.
And he looked pissed.
"Do you have any idea," the cosmic turtle god rumbled, his voice causing tectonic shifts across all three realms, "how hard it is to get a good night's sleep when someone builds a bureaucratic hellscape on your back?"
He fixed his ancient, sleepy gaze on the Ten Kings of Hell, who were currently trying to hide behind their broken judge's table.
"I've been having nightmares," Xuanwu complained. "For centuries. About paperwork. About inefficient filing systems. Do you know what it's like to dream in triplicate?"
"My entire subconscious is a cubicle farm because of you people!"
**
The Underworld was having a structural crisis.
As Xuanwu shifted his weight, entire departments of damnation began to slide off his shell and into the void.
The Lake of Fire was now perilously close to the Department of Icy Torments, creating a very confusing, very steamy existential problem for the souls trapped there.
Li Wei, Feng Yue, and the newly-reformed-but-still-glitchy Zhurong stood on a tilting piece of obsidian, trying not to fall off the edge of the afterlife.
"We have to calm him down!" Feng Yue yelled over the sound of collapsing demonic real estate.
"How do you calm down a god the size of a moon?!" Yin Mode shrieked, clinging to a stray piece of rebar.
His energy signature indicates extreme sleep deprivation and caffeine deficiency, Yang Mode calculated, his golden eyes scanning the massive, grumpy turtle. The logical solution is to provide a stimulant.
Zhurong, whose mind was still a chaotic soup of divine fire and TikTok trends, suddenly had an idea.
"I got this," he declared, his voice glitching slightly.
He summoned a small, elegant espresso cup.
He looked at Feng Yue, who was still crying from the emotional rollercoaster of the dance battle.
"Hey, bird girl," he said. "Cry me a river. Or, like, a shot of espresso."
Feng Yue stared at him. "What?"
"Phoenix tears," Zhurong explained, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world. "They're pure, concentrated emotional energy. The perfect base for a cosmic latte."
**
Feng Yue, too tired and confused to argue, actually did it.
She cried a single, perfect, fiery tear into the espresso cup.
Zhurong took the cup, added a pinch of stardust for flavor, and flew toward Xuanwu's massive, continent-sized head.
"Yo, turtle dude!" he yelled. "Wakey wakey! Got you a little pick-me-up!"
He presented the espresso cup to the ancient, sleep-deprived god.
Xuanwu blinked one of his galactic eyes.
He looked at the tiny cup.
He looked at the flaming god offering it to him.
"I don't drink espresso," he rumbled. "It makes me jittery."
He yawned, a great, galaxy-sized intake of breath that nearly sucked them all into his mouth.
"I'm a drip coffee man."
**
Zhurong flew back, looking dejected.
"He says he wants drip coffee," he reported.
Feng Yue stared at him, then at her own hands, which were still glowing with a faint, phoenix fire.
Her fire was pure Yang energy.
The perfect heat source.
She looked at Long Bo, the river dragon, who had just managed to climb up from a lower, less stable level of Hell.
His power was pure Yin. The perfect water.
An idea, born of desperation and a sudden craving for caffeine, sparked in her mind.
"Li Wei," she commanded. "I need your shoe."
Li Wei, who had long since given up on understanding anything, just took off his sneaker and handed it to her.
She took the shoe.
She filled it with water from a stream Long Bo summoned.
She used her own phoenix fire to heat it to the perfect, optimal brewing temperature.
She had just invented the world's first divine, shoe-based, single-origin coffee brewing method.
**
She flew the shoe-coffee over to Xuanwu.
The ancient turtle god sniffed the air.
A flicker of interest appeared in his sleepy, cosmic eyes.
He took a delicate, continent-sized sip.
A deep, satisfied rumble echoed through the void.
"Ah," he sighed. "That's the good stuff."
The tremors across his shell began to subside.
The tectonic shifts across the realms stabilized.
The universe was saved.
By a shoe.
**
As he drank his coffee, a strange, profound sadness seemed to wash over the ancient guardian.
"It's lonely," he said, his voice a low, melancholic rumble. "Being a guardian."
He looked at Li Wei, at the three distinct, yet unified, forms that now flickered around him.
"You spend so much time being what everyone needs you to be," Xuanwu said, his galactic eyes filled with a surprising empathy. "The shell. The foundation. The unshakeable rock."
"You forget who you are underneath it all."
"I see you, kid," the turtle god whispered, his voice resonating with the very core of Li Wei's fractured soul. "I see your pieces. And I know what it's like to feel like you're just a collection of parts, and not a whole."
"It's the curse of the responsible."
The moment of shared, cosmic loneliness was beautiful.
Profound.
Heartbreaking.
And it was, of course, the moment that Yang Mode chose to finish his calculations.
**
Optimal caffeine dosage for a being of Xuanwu's mass and metabolic rate has been calculated, his voice announced in Li Wei's head. The current dosage is insufficient for full alertness.
Before anyone could stop him, Yang Mode took control.
He snatched the shoe-turned-coffee-pot from Feng Yue.
He flew up to Xuanwu's head.
"Your caffeine intake is suboptimal," he stated, his voice a flat, emotionless critique. "Allow me to administer the correct dosage for maximum efficiency."
He was going to pour the coffee directly onto the god's head.
"Wait, no!" Yin Mode screamed, wrestling for control.
The two halves of his soul went to war, right at the crucial moment.
Their internal struggle translated into a physical one.
The shoe tilted.
And the entire pot of divine, phoenix-fire-brewed coffee spilled.
Directly onto the top of Xuanwu's ancient, continent-sized head.
**
Silence.
A horrified, "we just accidentally waterboarded a cosmic deity" silence.
Xuanwu froze.
The hot, magical coffee trickled down his ancient, wrinkled face.
He blinked.
Once.
Twice.
A slow, beatific smile spread across his face.
"Wow," he rumbled, his voice filled with a newfound, blissful energy.
"That is the best shower I have had in five million years."
He looked at the terrified, coffee-soaked Li Wei.
"Can you do that again?"
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