"My terms are simple." Ethan didn't look away. "No matter what, you never stand against the Chinese Federation.""You already know what's coming. Aliens are about to hit Earth. When they do, I want you and your people on our side, holding the line. I'll supply the tempering manual, the marrow-washing liquid, and a batch of high-grade healing pills—free." He kept his eyes on Guohua, reading every flicker of a reaction.He was gambling. He bet that Guohua wasn't as rotten as he pretended. If the man also wanted Earth to survive, they could work together. What did it matter what crimes he'd committed before? In a fallen world, who kept their hands clean?"Why the hell would I agree?" Guohua sneered."You'll want what I have." Ethan pulled a porcelain bottle from his personal space and tossed it across. "See for yourself."Guohua caught it. He cracked the seal. The aroma rolled out, rich and warm, and his own blood seemed to wake under his skin. He held the bottle and said nothing."Cut y

Ethan teleported straight back to the academy and into his dorm. He laid an array on the place before anything else, so the next Guohua couldn't stroll in uninvited. Only when he was sure everything was sealed did he check his own status.The battlefield trip had paid off hugely. The early bugs the chicken army had killed gave him no evolution energy, but the later kills had poured in. His evolution energy had finally broken ten million.He breathed out slow. His pulse kicked. Ten million evolution energy was exactly the price to push his talent to S-rank. A-rank to S-rank had to be a leap. He felt it coming."Evolve."He sat cross-legged on the floor, settled himself into his best state, and committed.Ten million evolution energy vanished. Something in him shifted, pulled loose. His soul drifted out of his body and rose above it. From up there he saw the whole Earth—wilderness sprawling green under his gaze, the seas gone black, the cities blocks of green dusted with tiny blue point

Ethan stepped out of the rift. His planting sprites were past a thousand now, and his guard, swelled on the battlefield, stood over a hundred thousand strong.The Landlord Space's original thousand mu was nowhere near enough. The guard couldn't live mixed in with his livestock. He set aside a section of his own territory inside the academy as a temporary camp.Anhou Wu and Yan Jin said nothing when they heard. They'd seen what Ethan had done on the battlefield. The kid was practically the shadow ruler of the Federation now, and the guards he kept fought and died for the country. They'd seen it. Nothing about it was wrong.Since the talent had awakened—one look and the land was his—Ethan spent his free time roaming the wilds. His acreage only grew. More land meant he needed more help. One planting steward couldn't manage it all, so he kept buying new ones.These months were also a boom time for the Federation. The nation-under-arms program became real. With the tempering manual and the

Half a month later, Ethan dragged himself back to his dormitory caked in mud and worse, filled a tub with hot water, and slept straight through three days and three nights before he felt like himself again.He'd been everywhere. Two-thirds of the Chinese Federation had turned to wilderness, every patch crawling with monsters. For where he stood now, the danger was tolerable.Even so, he'd almost died.The reason was simple: he'd run into one of Song's guards. Strong. The kind of strong that only made sense as her guard captain. There had been no introduction, no taunt—just the clear, hard-learned wisdom that villains talk too much, and this one had skipped straight to trying to take Ethan's head off. If his spirit sense hadn't been what it was, that head would be in a ditch by now.He got away by the skin of his teeth. He still woke up twice that first night and reached for the hoe, his heart hammering, because he could still feel the edge of that blade passing the place his throat ha

Anhou Wu made the decision in the space of one breath.He sealed the whole block. They had array bases—array bases Ethan had given them—and he laid them out now, layer over layer, until the area around Ethan's dorm was shut off from the world. It wasn't distrust. It was that a thing this big could not afford to go wrong.This year the academy had freshmen. The newcomer tournament had gone off in September, as always, and as always the Special Occupation Academy had taken first. The new students were settled in their dorms, far from this side of campus, and weak enough that they probably hadn't noticed anything yet. Wu wasn't going to bet on it.The pill scent kept drifting. The whole campus smelled like a holiday.Wu and Yan Jin started sweeping up the pills that had rolled outside the seal. They stopped after the first pass. The loose, stray pills—ones that had landed past the protective ring—already added up to a hundred thousand.And the quality was absurd. Just breathing the aroma