"Sure. Let's find somewhere to sit." Ethan could see it was real. He'd just done the Giants a favor. They weren't going to betray him now, of all times.Chiyou gave him one look, shrugged, and headed back to Mars with Gou Dan.Ethan didn't take Bi Han to Earth. The man was too large; stepping onto the surface would start a panic before he said two words. Instead he picked an empty planet, nowhere near anyone, and stood facing the giant.Bi Han looked down at him for a long moment, then began to shrink. He settled at five meters tall, still a mountain, but manageable. He scratched his head and looked embarrassed."This is as small as I get. Our bloodline works the other way from yours. The stronger we grow, the bigger we get. Late in life, shrinking back gets hard." He gestured at himself. "We're also bigger than the Bimeng. Truth is, the Bimeng are our own descendants — us, married into other clans. They split off and became their own people. But we're close. Still."He sobered."I ca

"Wait." Ethan caught Suotu before the man could charge off.If Suotu went, he'd walk straight into the trap. The Giants and the Insects would be at war years early. Suotu alone couldn't win. And humans stood together. Once the fighting started, it wouldn't be Giants versus Insects. It would be every human against every insect. The other allied races would join. It would become a race war, and the ones who profited would be the ones sitting back and watching."Don't be stupid. It may not be the Insects at all. Hold on."Ethan pulled out the vial he'd saved.There was still one worm left in the last mouthful of blood. Thumb-sized, pure black, ugly. On Earth that would be the mother gu. The ones he'd already burned had been the children.He sprinkled cinnabar and sulfur into the vial, dropped in a few spirit herbs, and waited. Then he reached in and drew the worm out.It had grown. It was fist-sized now. Its shell had a strange, metallic sheen. Its two pincers were sharp and hungry. If s

Ethan grunted and slid a prepared list across the desk.It was mostly instruments. Alchemical glassware, climate boxes, refined reagents—the sort of unglamorous stock his farms burned through by the crate every month. Yuliu Tuluo took it, skimmed it, and didn't bother hiding his relief. He already knew what Ethan usually bought, so nothing on the list surprised him."All of this together... two Nine-Turn Golden Soul Pills, more or less." He passed the list to a clerk and started rubbing his hands together. "Mr. Su, it's just—you haven't consigned anything to us in a while, and I was hoping maybe we could—""Price it out," Ethan cut in. "I'll settle with Soul-Nourishing Pills."Yuliu's mouth stayed open. He shut it without another word. He remembered. Whatever he'd done last time to sour the relationship, he'd remembered it, and there was nothing he could say now. He had a voice in the Guild—more than he'd ever had, thanks to Ethan's business—but at the end of the day he was still a br

Blue Star had not been sitting still while Ethan was away.After the bloodline tests, everyone who'd drawn a strong line received fresh cultivation resources. Everyone weaker got one chance to force that line forward instead—an idea the biologists had worked out on their own. They used the blood of captured alien beasts to temper a person's inherited blood, a painful process, but one that reliably made the bloodline stronger when it held. The beast blood itself they bought in from the Galaxy Guild and the other houses, in trade for the produce Blue Star now grew in abundance.Running the strategic supply side was Lianji Zhuge. He wasn't a fighter, but he had the one thing that mattered here: foresight. Early on he'd decided the Galaxy Guild couldn't be trusted to stay friendly forever, and he'd refused to put all his eggs in one basket. He kept warm relations with every other major house in Black Dragon City.It paid off. Blue Star's fruits and vegetables were rarities across the cosm

"Little brother Long Chen—why are you sending me this?" Yedu's face filled the screen, creased with confusion. "Shouldn't you be on your way to the Central Domain?""A few of my friends went into the area." Ethan kept his voice even, but the wrongness was already sitting on him. "We traded for a Cosmic Secret Realm token a while back, and one of them covers that coordinate. Is something wrong there?"Yedu's expression changed. He was quiet a long moment, then blew out a breath. "If they really went to that place... it's bad. It's very bad.""Listen closely. A Cosmic Tide hit the Black Dragon Domain recently. Whole regions have been erupting with wild energy. The coordinate you sent me is right inside one of them.""That used to be a small realm—Black Dragon Star Academy ran it as a student training ground. They gave it up when the realm started shifting, but family teams still slip in to strip resources. This tide, though... that small realm may have woken up as something mid-sized, o