"Wait. Stop." Tang held up a hand. "You awakened Farmer. And Alchemist. You're sure it's Alchemist?"Tang's brain was stalling. The Alchemist Class didn't even exist on Lunguo's Class roster. It only appeared in old novels and legend. In a hundred and twenty years, no one had drawn it."Why would I fake it?" Ethan smiled, helpless.It wasn't going the way he'd feared. Tang wasn't going to lock him in the Command Center and force him to brew. For Tang, an Alchemist who could supply the country forever was less important than the boy who might one day lead Lunguo's armies and drive the invaders off Earth."This stays among us old men. You several - listen carefully. If word leaks that Su Chen is an Alchemist, I will slaughter every last member of your families. Every last one. The newborns included. Do I make myself clear?"Tang's gaze was cold enough to frost the room. He didn't raise his voice. He didn't need to.The old men laughed bitterly. They'd come to see Ethan, to ask what he'd

Ethan lit a campfire, and they roasted vegetables together. The animals in his Landlord Space weren't grown enough yet, or he'd have slaughtered a lamb for a full roast.When they'd eaten their fill, he stuffed them with more produce and watched them leave, happy.They'd throw themselves back into training now. No more visits. None of them had said it, but shipping to the front wasn't something you felt nothing about.After they were gone, Ethan settled into his own routine.He released the Planting Manager and the mid-tier assistants. The academy had empty land everywhere; he deployed the thirteen thousand mu without a second thought. Nobody noticed. The school had almost no students. Zhao Duan's team thought a forest had grown overnight and kept training.Every school had a combat space - a sealed arena where students fought monsters to gain levels. Zhao Duan's team doubled their daily training from two hours to eight. The front waited after New Year. Killing monsters was the fastes

Guoye Cai had a whole speech lined up. Ethan cut it off before he finished drawing breath. The answer was too blunt. There was nowhere to go from there.Longyun Casino, Guoye Cai: Mr. Su. Won't you reconsider? Money makes money...Ethan: How much did you lose this tournament?Guoye Cai went quiet.This year had been a bloodbath for the house. The anonymous bettor who'd put down ten billion credits at those odds alone would have broken them - if they hadn't found out the order came from Gordon Tang's people.Even with that, Ethan had cost them a fortune. People bet on long shots every year - small amounts, a thousand or two thousand credits here and there. Nobody had ever cashed one. The house didn't care.This year was different. Small bets alone ran to hundreds of millions. The whole Federation was huge; there were always people who bought every long shot on the board.The casino didn't want to pay out four hundred billion. They'd rather make Ethan a shareholder. Then, next time he c

"Space planning? And I can station a standing army and build my own guard detail now?" Ethan stared at the new functions in the Landlord Space and twitched a corner of his mouth.What had been a flat plain where every animal roamed loose was now terraformable. Mountains, plains, lakes—whatever he wanted, the space built itself, and he didn't have to lift a finger.The guard detail could grow too. It had been capped at a hundred. Now he could buy as many as he wanted, a million credits apiece—cheap. The shop had added animal feed on top, and the space itself gained a time-acceleration option.That cost money. Holding one times normal flow ran ten million credits an hour. With it running, everything inside grew faster. Not cheap, but he could afford it, because right now Ethan had nothing at all except money.He set it to five times flow. That cost a hundred million an hour, and the grass and trees inside visibly accelerated.Ethan stroked his jaw. He raised a stretch of mountain forest

"I picked it up in a Secret Realm a while back." Ethan nodded and produced a green celadon bottle.The bottle itself looked expensive. Before it was even uncorked, being near it made the soul go soft and comfortable. This was top-tier.Qingwu looked at him, curious. "Pills like that are precious. Keep it. We're ruined now; there's no sense wasting something that fine on us.""Didn't Teacher say there's a traitor high up?" Ethan held her eyes. "Until he's found, he keeps leaking our secrets. The front only gets worse, and all of us with it. If healing Teacher Yan gets that traitor exposed, why not heal him first? Pills I can go back to a Secret Realm and find again. But every day that traitor lives, how many people die?"Yan Jin's face changed. If the traitor hadn't sold their deployments, the monster horde wouldn't have known exactly where the line was thin. His colleagues hadn't been beaten—they'd been butchered. Torn apart, eaten, left in pieces. His hand clenched until the knuckles