"You don't know either?" Ethan frowned. "Then why have the Montoyas been hunting you all these years?"The old man thought it through, slow."Perhaps that's the whole of it. Kill every Su, and the treasure falls to whoever's left standing. You don't need to find it if you erase the people who know where it is."That fit. The Montoyas were ambitious and cruel enough to buy that logic."What did it do? Why did so many houses want it bad enough to exterminate a clan?""I don't know. I only ever heard it was a small cauldron." The old man's voice thinned. "When it surfaced, nine-colored light shot straight up. The whole Black Dragon Star Domain lit up like day. That flash did it. No one saw what it could do. No one had to. Enough houses looked at that light and decided it was a prize worth killing for."The old man's eyes filmed over."A man with a treasure is guilty of owning it. That's all the crime we ever committed. The strong don't wait for a reason to take what they want. They inven

A war column ten million strong didn't move without drawing eyes. The whole Black Dragon Star Domain buzzed. Only Yuliu looked at their bearing and knew. They were heading straight for a system that belonged to Ethan.He messaged Ethan the second he was sure, and offered the Guild's help — the Galaxy Guild owed Ethan three favors a year. If he wanted the column stopped, it stopped.Ethan was busy saving a life.It wasn't hard to wake Yedu's wife. He'd done this before. The hard part was remaking her soul and body while keeping the child alive inside her. He'd burned through ancient texts until he found a method that would do both. It needed two materials, both rare.One was the Ginseng Fruit.He'd imagined the fable from his childhood — the old storybook ginseng that looked like a baby and granted a hundred years. The System Shop had unlocked the real thing once he hit max level, and it wasn't that at all.It did look like a baby. It had a heartbeat. It breathed. But its one purpose w

Noikaisen Montoya sat where he had fallen and worked his jaw until the shaking stopped. The Nine-Turn Golden Soul Pill sat warm in his stomach, but no pill on any star lane could warm the cold that had started in his bones the moment that giant hand came down from the sky.He kept turning the same thought over. Chiyou. He didn't even have the man's real name, but a fighter that strong could not be anonymous. The Giant Clan had always been the hardest-hitting of the humanoid races — if their numbers hadn't been so few, if their breeding hadn't been so cursed, they would have owned the whole cosmos long ago. Even now, scarce as they were, no one argued with the claim that they were the strongest of the human races.Noikaisen had been truly broken this time. The Insect Queen had already washed her hands of him. He wasn't fool enough to go after Ethan Su or that wretched blue planet again. This was a loss he would swallow in silence.The Montoya family was gutted. Not just ten million sol

Time ticked on. The Montoya disappearance set off a brief panic, and then something else dragged every eye away. No one cared about a washed-up clan anymore.Soon enough, word came that the Mash clan had been exterminated.Nearly every last one of them. Hardly a survivor.The Mash and Montoya families had been bitter rivals on the surface, but everyone knew better. Behind the scenes they had been in bed together. A great many people knew exactly what had happened to the Su clan, too. They had simply kept their mouths shut, because the Montoyas and the Mash were too powerful to cross.Now the Montoyas were in flight and the Mash were dead. Plenty of people were reaching the same quiet conclusion: a Su survivor was still alive, and he had come home for revenge.* * *Yedu walked in from outside reeking of blood. Wumadi scowled at the sight of him. "Where have you been? How do you manage to come back looking like that?""Heard a piece of news. Went to tidy up a few pests, that's all." Ye

"Damn. Are people up there really that bad at having children?" Gordon Tang stared at the day's revenue and shook his head.He had lived nearly two centuries on Blue Star and seen millions of people. On Blue Star, plenty simply didn't want children. Raising a child meant facing danger after danger. The tall walls split the cities from the wild; unknown threats were always out there, and no one knew which day the invaders would come and the walls would fall and the city would die. A child might not live to adulthood. Even if it did, it would wake its Class, go to school, join the army, march to the front — and a parent could still bury a child.Only now were the Aberrations nearly gone, the rest penned up as training stock. With survival easier and the state generous, nobody had to worry about what a child would face. In this one year, Blue Star's birth rate had climbed sharply and the population was climbing steadily. It was one of the great weights off Tang's chest.He had never imag