"You can supply this." Yuliu set the tomato down like it was glass. "Long term. In volume."He was looking at the answer to every problem he had. Land this account, and the Galaxy Guild stopped being one of ten. It became the first."These are our most basic plants." Ethan did not smile. "If you treat us well, the better ones are available too." He set one more thing on the table. A Soul Grass.Yuliu recognized it only when the scanner confirmed it. A spirit herb. Raised the spirit. No hard cap—buy as many as you could afford. The late gains thinned out, but it always fed the soul, always lifted what a soul could hold.To Ethan it was low-tier. To Yuliu it was a door."You have a lot of these," he said carefully.Ethan let the silence do the work. "In my star domain, only I can grow it. Not many. Around a hundred stalks a year. Price it fairly, and they're all yours."He did not say whether a hundred was a bottleneck or a choice. Let Yuliu wonder. The rarer it looked, the more a star

"Eat shit." The Fire God's voice was a ruin, but it carried. "We die before we're your dogs. Today I take a few of you bastards with me."He half-turned to look back at Tang and the men beside him, and the grin he gave them was bright, almost young."We should have died a hundred years ago. Got lucky. Cultivated up to this. I meant to see the outside world once it was safe. Heard you've mapped it. It's a good story. This old man won't get to go." His eyes were wet. "Old Tang—live. See it for all of us. Old Yu's gone, and I never lost a fight with him. I'm not starting now. If Ethan comes back, you tell him: the young are good. The old ones weren't bad either."No one answered. What was there to say. He'd already made up his mind.He drew a breath to burn his soul—to end himself and take the three of them with him.The sky went black.People looked up. Something enormous was falling, a black shape coming straight down.Tang's face shattered. "Fall back!"He couldn't tell what it was. A

Chiyou turned the small girl over in his grip like she weighed less than a sparrow. She could have been crushed between two fingers, and she knew it. He did not miss the hatred in her eyes, or the killing intent coiled behind it, but he did not care. She was far too weak to matter.What made him pause was the ground underfoot. If his memory was right, this was the very hollow where the last of the alien pack had run. A human child out here, alone, was impossible.He did not kill her. He curled his hand around the back of her dress and carried her back toward Capital City.Gordon Tang stood on the landing platform and kept waiting for the ground to open under him. The war that had hounded their kind for more than a hundred years was over. Just like that. A thing they had spent three generations preparing to lose to, solved in an afternoon.He pinched the inside of his own arm hard enough to bruise. Beside him, the Fire God reached out and slapped the aide standing nearest across the fa

Ethan reached the Capital command center to find Gordon already sitting there, face tight."Just now I felt it start to warm." Gordon met him at the door. "I didn't know what it was, so I locked it in this ring. It's empty otherwise. But there's a soul in there—something weak, stirring."Ethan took the ring and felt through it. Gordon was right. A thread of soul-power was waking in the dark, small as a spark, easy to snuff but stubborn. He emptied the ring into his palm. The lumpy red crystal had re-formed into a tiny humanoid shape, a finger tall, and inside it a faint soul-fire burned.He frowned and called up the high-level AI the system had given him."What is this?" He walked Gordon through the girl's suppression, the fire, the crystal.The AI searched for a beat. "Species detected: Hamlai. Hamlai is a life-bearing planet in a galaxy a hundred billion light-years from the Black Dragon Star Domain. Hamlai bloodline carries a natural trait. The first of them were said to be undying

It took the Shennong Cauldron three days to finish drawing the Hamlai bloodline crystal down.What it left in Ethan's palm was a scatter of pink, sugar-sized shards, crystalline and clear. Twenty-four of them. Not many.He turned them over and decided he did not know what he held. The cauldron's extraction made them safe, at least. He asked the AI."Bloodline essence," it said. "Consume it, and you gain a fragment of the bloodline's power. The exact gift differs by body. Extremely valuable. One shard sells for roughly ten billion universal credits."Ethan blinked. Twenty-four shards. That was hundreds of billions.He pocketed them, thought it over, and ate one.Nothing on the surface changed. He took out his sickle and drew it across his own forearm. The wound did not bleed. It closed before the blood had time to reach the air.He whistled under his breath. "That's a recovery. Will it work for Chen Fan?"Felix Chen had lost his legs. Ethan had spent every method he had and got nothing