"What are you." Duan's voice was thin. "Strength. Spirit power. Either one alone I could call a fluke. Both? On an E-rank? You know what the testing machine doesn't do? It doesn't make mistakes. So you're the mistake."Ethan said the most reasonable thing he could think of. "I'm a farmer. Every day is not knowing where the next meal comes from. A guy under that much stress—naturally his spirit power develops. Makes sense, right?"He meant it, sort of. He'd figured his mind would be decent—his Alchemist talent had pushed it up, probably. Three ninety-nine was higher than he'd guessed, but the principle held. What he did not say was the other Class. A second Class was the kind of secret that got you locked in a room in this country. He planned to die with it.Duan's eye twitched. He had a prepared speech about why that was garbage—every poor bastard in the Outer District was stressed out of his mind and none of them tested at four hundred—and he threw it away. Arguing with this kid was

"Now." The old man held up a hand. "You don't need to carry that. I told you because you asked. Forget I said it. Tell me your Class and your abilities. I'll write you a training plan."Ethan told him. Class Farmer, E-rank Verdant Touch, and he walked through the four abilities, keeping the details broad.The old man wrote them down. He read them back. He read them back a second time."Your talent is E-rank?" He looked up. "These abilities don't read like E-rank. Infinite stamina. Invulnerability in a domain. A tenfold harvest—" He shook his head. "Nobody hands out that on an E-rank."He went quiet. Something clicked."You've been selling produce on the trading site the last month or so. The vegetables. The fruit. All over the news feeds."Ethan nodded. "Am I not allowed to sell on the trading site, sir?""Of course you are." The old man waved it off. "I just don't know what to do with you. Your strength is high. Your spirit is high. I'll slot you into strength courses and spirit-cond

Two days. Ten thousand batches. The cauldron ran hot and cool and hot again, and Ethan fed it herbs until his hands smelled of bitter root and his storage bin of raw materials looked like it had gone through a shrink ray. The brews came out uniform, one after another, twenty times the potency of anything a normal Alchemist could bottle. He didn't even have to think about the steps anymore. The Class did them for him.Alchemist Level up: Level 4.Five thousand experience to Level 5. He inventoried what was left. Enough ingredients for a hundred batches, maybe. He did the subtraction once and didn't like it: a hundred batches wasn't five thousand experience points. Not even close.He finished the last batch, stretched until his shoulders cracked, and checked the time. Four in the afternoon.He hadn't tilled in days. He could feel it in his joints, the way a farmer can feel rain coming in his knees.The signature weapon didn't just sit there while he held it. Every swing put a little str

Hongyuan held the cabbage at arm's length and made himself close the lid.A hundred million dollars. If he ate it and gained three points of something useless, the clan would have his skin on the wall. He was not the talent in this family. He was the buyer. The buyer didn't test the merchandise. The buyer wrapped it carefully, locked the desk drawer, and walked it down the hall to the one person who could.The An family had been a name in the Capital for four generations. Not old money—not Liu-family old—and not flashy new. Manager was their Class line, generation after generation, and a Manager ran people the way a conductor runs an orchestra. It was how the clan had survived without a single war-god among them: by buying the right thing, at the right moment, before anyone else understood it was worth buying. Hongyuan's job was to find those things. His brother's job was to spend the clan's fortune on them.The hall to the patriarch's office was quiet. The doors were closed. Nobody g

"Find him," Tang said. "Right now."It wasn't hard. Ethan Su was enrolled at the Special Occupation Academy. The school kept its roster on a central registry. Tang's people had a location inside of ten minutes.A teleport array was already warming up. Tang sent word ahead.The school's only on-site teacher—a man missing more than half his sight and most of one arm—read the notice and thought his comms had glitched. The first person in the country wanted to see a freshman who'd arrived three weeks ago.He sat with it for a minute. Then he thought about the rumors. The boy who'd punched a test plate hard enough to ring it. The boy a dead senior teacher had taken a shine to. The boy the headhunters couldn't find. Maybe it wasn't crazy.The Special Occupation Academy kept its roster on a central registry, and the boy's file was locked tighter than most. The old teacher had spent three decades in this building, and he'd learned to stop asking about the things that didn't explain themselves