The seclusion lasted a full month.With three teachers back, the academy felt alive again. Once Anhou Wu's body finished knitting, he started dragging Duan Zhao and the others out every day to beat on them. They were no match for him. One punch each, and they scattered howling. The campus echoed with their screams from dawn to dusk, and it was, in its way, a cheerful sound.It looked like abuse. It was anything but. Anhou Wu didn't hold back, but every hit was a lesson—when a student flinched wrong, the next blow showed them why. Duan Zhao would be bruised black and blue by lunch, back on his feet by dinner, moving a little faster, a little less open. A month of it, and the raw edges of all five had hardened into something a front line might forgive.Qingwu spent the month training Qiqi's spirit power—how to channel it, how to make it hit harder. She had no body left to spar with, so she used her own spirit as the opponent, letting Qiqi probe and test and get her mind bent back when s

"Whatever." Qingwu waved it off. "As long as I get stronger and can kill things, what do I care what I look like? Add it. I don't care."Ethan's mouth twitched hard. He nodded at last.The Primordial Embryo was private, so he brought Qingwu back to his dorm and set arrays around it—the arrays he'd looted from the dog-cat caves in the battlefield pocket, unused until now.When the lines were set he breathed out."Why so tense?" Qingwu misread him. "It's fine. If the body can't be rebuilt, I won't blame you. Worst case, I run to the front and blow up those bastards. I stopped fearing death a long time ago. Don't force it."Ethan smiled and didn't explain. His worry wasn't failure, or her coming out ugly. The flood of heavenly treasures would draw the monsters. The academy sealed several dimensional rifts on its grounds. If those broke loose now, with almost no one left to hold the campus, what happened then? He wasn't about to let those beasts

"Ten thousand isn't enough." Mingzhen Xu's voice snapped at his aides. "Message Chief Tang. Tell him exactly what we're walking into. We need reinforcements—at least another hundred thousand, or this school doesn't hold."He'd come expecting an easy job, cocky, raring to cut loose. Now he wished his parents had given him two more arms. It was impossible to kill them all.There were hundreds of thousands on the campus alone. Clearly the school's sealed rifts had burst open. The things they held were the strong ones—the weak had been culled by students for years. What came out were smart, durable, and mean.He knew the academy's thirty teachers had nearly been wiped out on the front, only three broken ones sent home. A month, maybe. And now the school itself? This was a nightmare.Gordon Tang stood up so fast the chair went back. He took a hundred thousand troops himself and moved on the academy at once.Ethan could not be hurt.Mi

A dozen or so oversized flying Aberrations crossed the forest in high spirits, climbed toward the villa, and before they'd decided what to do next they simply ceased to exist. The defense array absorbed the energy of what it killed and came back stronger for it.The burrowers fared no better. Ethan had built that array to cover the ground as well as the sky—three hundred and sixty degrees, no blind angle.Anhou Wu came charging over, worried, and found a hundred solid guards already posted, the array live, the place a vaulted tomb. Everyone here would be long dead before so much as a hair on Ethan's head got touched.He twitched. Then he gave up, found a patch of ground, and sat down. There was no job for him here. Better to rest.Seven days in, cracks had started to run across Qingwu's cocoon, and a terrifying pressure was building inside it. Whatever came out, it would come out far stronger than she'd been—how much stronger, Ethan didn't eve

"Whew." Ruirui Qi rubbed the chest that had nearly caved in, walking over on Duan Zhao's arm, and threw a wary look at Qingwu. "Teacher Feng is stronger than she used to be."Duan Zhao gave a half-laugh. "She rebuilt that body on heaven knows how many treasures. Ethan already told us the new body would hit like a truck. Her raw strength has to be off the charts now." He glanced at Qingwu himself, and was glad he hadn't thrown a punch at her. That tree had proved who it would have been. Even as a toddler, Qingwu was not a thing to poke."Can we test her force and spirit?" Anhou Wu looked at her, half thrilled, half worried. Without all her memories, he had no idea whether her combat instincts had survived. She hadn't only been an outstanding Mind Resonance user; she'd been a fine teacher. If she'd lost everything and couldn't even lecture, that was a real waste. When it came to controlling spirit power, he and Yan Jin didn't measure up to her. Without her guiding them, Duan Zhao's crew