"This is really where we are." Tang's voice had gone flat.He didn't say the rest. He felt it anyway—the same tired feeling that had been with him for weeks. He had spent ten years believing that if the whole country stood shoulder to shoulder, nothing could break them. Even against something stronger, the blade would have to snap before it cut through all of them.The Hamlai had taught him otherwise. Ten years of surviving inside the walls was not winning. It was just a slower loss.He thought of the boys and girls now sleeping in their boots. The sixteen-year-olds manning the arrays. The old veterans who had been told the worst was behind them a decade ago and who were back on the wall anyway. Every single one of them had been told, ten years ago, that a single young man had carried the country to safety. The propaganda had given them hope. It had also given Ethan an office he had never asked for.And the worst of it: they were dumping the whole weight on a boy who had been nineteen

No one answered. They agreed.Then they did the math in their heads. The Fusang held more star systems than anyone present, a hundred-plus of them, all rich. Swapping Earth's people for Fusang resources wasn't a losing trade."Enough talk." The Fusang waved a hand. "Start the assault. The sooner it's done, the sooner we go home. Our Star Lord wants our report."Thousands of face-skulled aliens poured forward and spat multicolored beams of energy into the city arrays.The arrays came apart without a fight. The energy crystals at their foundations shattered, and the blast ripped through the ground. It was easier than anyone had allowed themselves to hope.The city lords marched their garrisons out to meet the attack. Every other Walled City saw the same thing. Civilians came out of their homes with their hands pressed together and prayed. They knew what losing meant. It wasn't a quick death. It was being captured, bred, sold, kept as something that had once been human. The women in part

Ethan Su walked the last empty corner of Secret Realm #12 and came back to where he started. No treasure hoard. No training ground. No spring of living water. The whole pocket had been built for one reason only: to hold the Star Lord Seal.He sent the realm folding back into its own space and went to find Gordon Tang.The room when he finished explaining was quiet the way a room goes quiet when the people in it have stopped trusting their own ears."Let me get this straight." Tang rubbed the back of his neck. "You leave, you go to this—this galaxy administration, you claim Blue Star as your own, and suddenly every alien within a hundred light-years is forbidden from attacking us. That's the plan?""That's the plan."Tang stared at him. "I understand the words. I just don't understand them in that order."They'd known for generations that stars existed beyond the sky. Lunguo, and the old Lighthouse to its east, had spent centuries launching probes and listening to the dark, and every p

"He did." Gildazi wiped his forehead again, as if the sweat might not be fully gone. "We've waited years. No one came for it. Only Blue Star blood can open it. Come with me."He led Ethan down a corridor, worked a panel in the wall, and a section of floor dropped away into a passage. Ethan hesitated exactly one breath. Too many people had seen him walk in. If this went wrong, the ancestor whose token sat against his chest would make someone explain it. And banks, whatever else they were, stayed in business by not robbing their own customers.He followed.The passage didn't look like it belonged to the bank at all. The walls were old, scored with marks that hadn't been made by any tool Ethan recognized, and the air was cooler than the floor above. Gildazi led without checking a panel or a map; he had run this route enough times to know it by heart. Ethan counted the turns and decided he would not try to find his way back on his own.Twenty minutes down, they came to a chamber. Three wa

The Galaxy Guild rose next door to the bank, a tower Ethan judged at two hundred floors, its doors open to every species that had coin in hand. Even the ugly bug-clan milled through the lobby. If you had goods or money, you were welcome. The threshold was low on purpose; the guild wanted the trade to come to it, and it had built enough floors that no kind of cargo was too strange to buy or sell.His escort was a young woman in a bunny suit, her hips moving as she walked. Every few steps she sent a little pulse of charm his way—rabbit-clan art, soft and helpless, the kind that made men want to protect something.Ethan looked straight ahead. Not once did he glance down.She was annoyed enough to sulk. Her looks were top-tier among the bank's staff. The charm worked on everyone. On Ethan it landed like rain on glass.She tried it twice more on the walk, layering the old softness into her smile, leaning in so her voice dropped to a murmur. Ethan walked on, reading his own shop listings, a