Bloodthorn studied him for a long moment. Then he nodded. "Pick your team. The Federation is hunting the leak inside their own ranks. They won't be watching the borders the way they should. Take advantage. Be careful.""I will."Bloodthorn dismissed the room. The Vajras and Arhats filed out, already planning their route.Ethan didn't know a Vajra was coming for him. He was too busy swinging a hoe.He'd been at it for weeks. A hundred mu was the milestone he'd been working toward since the first time he'd touched the dead dirt. Each mu took a full day of swinging, the energy draining out of him until his arms shook and his back burned. But each mu was one more patch of land that responded to him, one more patch where he was invincible.The valley had changed. The first day he'd arrived, the ground had been dead, gray, nothing growing. Now there were rows of vegetables stretching out in both directions. The Sprite had planted them while he slept. The land was alive. It was his.He stopp

"What the actual hell am I looking at?"Yihui Ding was a salesman. Not the kind who worked a showroom floor—his was a Class, Salesman, C-rank, and the talent that rode it was quiet and ugly useful: he could smell valuable merchandise the way other people smelled rain on a hot sidewalk. A buyer didn't see a pile of old junk and a price tag. Yihui saw what it was really worth before the auction clock finished spinning.His company kept him on a short leash and a long budget. He was allowed to watch the Exchange himself and pull the trigger on whatever caught his eye, no approvals, as long as he didn't drop more than ten million on a single impulse. Ten million of his own money to spend without asking. On this job, that was almost freedom.He opened the Exchange the way he opened it every morning, straight to the auction house, because that was where the deals hid. Somebody always listed some old thing they'd dug out of the dead zones, not knowing what it was, and if nobody else noticed,

"I'm a proper landlord now," Ethan told the valley, and the valley didn't answer. "A few more days and this is basically done."He built a fire instead of talking to himself. Sweet potatoes went into the coals. A few handfuls of whatever was ripe went in beside them.Song came out of the lake at her usual hour, walked to the fire, and sat.Ethan watched her fork turn the potato. He'd been working up to this. "I'm leaving, soon."Her fork stopped. "Where?""School. I'm still a student. Term starts, I have to report to campus." He kept his face serious. This was real.She tilted her head. Student. School. Those words were foreign to her. She sat quiet for a moment, then made a small, neutral sound. No more than that.They ate in silence.When she was done she didn't slip back under the water right away. "Leave me some of the vegetables. And the roasted thing. The—what do you call it. Sweet potato.""Sure. Before I go, I'll set aside a pile." He nodded. The produce didn't sell for much t

"Ugh. Ugh, ugh, ugh."Ethan wiped the blood off his face and spat. The tiger's blood was wrong—polluted, thick, with a rotten edge to it that stuck to his tongue. He got a sample jar and filled it anyway.Then he stood back and looked at the corpse. Hundreds of kilos of tiger, laid out across the grass.He'd heard research institutes paid for intact Aberration bodies. Fighters and monsters tore each other apart—brains out, ribs in, nothing a scientist wanted to study. This one had only one wound. A neck.He listed the whole tiger on the auction house. Reserve price: one dollar.He didn't need the body. The blood was enough. The Tiger-Strength Pill was a lifesaver—five thousand jin of burst strength when you ate it, the kind of jolt that could pull you back from the edge when everything else failed. The side effects were ugly, but a man on his deathbed didn't read the fine print. He wasn't eating it himself. He'd brew it and sell it."Shame the Exchange won't let me run two accounts,"

"These people are sick. Why does everything become a bidding war?"Yihui Ding stared at the watermelon's final price and wanted to throw his comms across the office. Two million for a wedge. He'd watched it climb. He hadn't put in a bid. He couldn't—his budget had been eaten by three straight auctions of produce he'd lost to someone with a longer wallet.He hadn't won a single thing in weeks. The company was starting to ask questions. The only reason he still had his job was the bulk vegetable supply he'd locked in—enough to keep his bosses quiet for one more month. If he came back empty-handed one more cycle, somebody upstairs would start wondering if his Salesman nose wasn't what it used to be."The tiger corpse I lost. The apples I lost. The pears I lost." He jabbed the table. "Tell me I can't win a watermelon."He sent the Global Vegetable Wholesaler another message through the Exchange's private channel. It went straight to the dead pile like all the others. He didn't even know i