The escort left him in the antechamber without a word.Nine doorways stood in the dark. The first four were tame, if you kept out of their hearts; they still paid out chances, but Ethan had outgrown what they offered. His gaze went past all of them.Secret Realm Eight had given him the Primordial Ancient Tree and enough power to change his life. Nine was the one everyone named in whispers—the deadliest of the nine. Even the veterans who had survived the others came back from Nine pale and refused to talk about it.What lived inside it?He was curious. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. If he didn't risk something, he would never walk out of the war with a planet to save. He had pills, he had a domain that made him untouchable, he had the land and the sprites and the cauldron. What he didn't have was time, and time was the one thing standing still would never give him.He stepped through.* * *Lianji Zhuge felt it the instant the doorway took Ethan.He ran. He found Guosen Tang standin

Ma was sitting in the ruins, both hands pressed to his chest, when he saw the monster thrown like a toy.For a second he didn't understand. Then he did, and the tears came. That was why Tang had told him to draw the thing out of the city. Someone was waiting outside. Someone who could fight.If his memory was right, it was the old ancestor of the Tu family.The Tu name was quiet. They had held the southern border for generations, and most civilians had never heard of them. No soldier had not. Ma had been a cadet when he first heard it, told the same bedtime story every officer told: there are heroes who don't make the posters. He had never expected to meet one.Ma felt the weight come off his chest. He gave the order: no one else out of the city. Everyone back to the array. Try to repair it. Transfer out if it worked. The soldiers moved. They didn't argue.Anhe Tu looked once at the broken city, then returned to the monster. He reached down, caught its tail, and dragged it out into th

The Federation kept moving. The coast took three more battles. The death toll climbed by the tens of thousands.Qing'an Walled City fell next to a rift, not two weeks after Jiangnan. They had moved the people out fast enough. Had they moved a day slower, the city would have been a second Jiangnan, and the garrison would not have come home.The people of Qing'an, who had screamed about the evacuation order, went quiet. The garrison's new rule was simple: anyone who rioted was shot on the spot. People discovered, in a hurry, that they preferred being alive to being right.Then the pictures came. Qing'an split in two. Jiangnan split in two. The West Frontier. Rivers on the ground that were not water. A great many of the refugees looked at those pictures and were quietly grateful they had run when they were told.* * *Half a month had passed since Jiangnan.Song sat up on the bank of the valley lake and let the last of the white soul orb and the golden pill burn through her. Her strength

Tang didn't ask what for. Money was the least useful thing the Federation had left.He just waved at his staff, and every credit that wasn't nailed down moved into Ethan's account, plus a fat block of military merit on top. He'd already hauled enough out of Realm #9—pills, weapons, raw materials—to trade back for more than ten billion in merit by itself. Cash didn't even cover half of what the haul was worth.Ethan watched the balance climb and felt the knot in his chest loosen.With money, he could buy guards.The guards sold in the system shop were no joke—roughly equivalent to the Federation's best line troops. He bought a hundred thousand on instinct.He was still buying when a chime rolled through his head.System Shop consumption has exceeded 1 trillion credits. Tier-3 upgrade condition met. Shop has been upgraded to Tier 3. New items unlocked. Please review.Ethan blinked. The shop leveled up?He pulled it open.Sure enough. The seed tab now held a wall of god-tier seeds—includ

Twenty days in closed alchemy.He brewed everything he had. Strength pills. Speed pills. Recovery pills. The cauldron ran night and day, the fire never cooling, and the shelves of his dorm filled with bottles until they rattled when he breathed. He took his own share, pushed his own limits, and watched his strength climb. Nothing left to push except talent and level—and Farmer level fifty was a wall.Outside, the million Elite Guards had bought a breath of relief. Not enough to last. Rifts—large and small—kept opening across the country, and the six Walled Cities were too few to hold the line. The Battlefield Pocket had cost the Federation tens of millions of soldiers, and a nation that bled like that couldn't simply grow them back.Even with every soldier upgraded and juiced on Ethan's pills, an endless tide was an endless tide.The fighting started before he finished. Day and night, the soundscape was the same: screaming, roaring, steel. Cities that had been quiet for months woke up