After freshening up in the opulent chambers provided by the Southern Sea Sun Palace, we changed into formal attire appropriate for the evening's banquet. The quarters were undeniably luxurious—all dark polished wood, hand-painted silks, and gleaming precious metals—but they lacked one crucial modern convenience: reliable network connectivity. The palace's antiquated systems were incompatible with our advanced devices, making even basic communication frustratingly archaic.
I adjusted my formal jacket, resigned to relying on physical messengers and pre-arranged meeting points like we were living in the previous century. In a world of instant communication and real-time data, being disconnected felt like losing a limb.
