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Chapter 155: A Forest of Cages
Ethan didn't step out the way he'd gone in. He peered.Two old men walked out of the command center and stopped on the scorched ground where he'd been standing a heartbeat before. Both had hair gone completely white. The taller one carried himself like a man who'd stopped having to prove anything a century ago. The other was raw around the edges, trembling with something that wasn't cold.Ethan went still, then placed them.After he'd killed Zhenhai Gu, Chairman Tang had spelled it out for him. The Gu family still had two of their own on this battlefield. One was the old ancestor, who'd outlived every rule of age. The other was Zhenhai's own father — Tian Gu. Tian Gu was the deputy commander here, the one who held the center. The old man beside him was Fang Gu, the ancestor, who rarely sat in the command post at all; he roamed the lines by himself, killing Aberrations for sport.So they'd recognized him. Of course they had. They wanted him dead.Ethan smiled, thin and cold, and didn't
Chapter 154: The Shield That Should Have Fallen
Ethan Su had outfitted his two lieutenants for trouble. Not just voice-transmission talismans, either. He'd pressed teleport talismans, thousand-mile teleport talismans, anything that might buy them a breath, into Heng Zhang's and Qingwu Feng's hands before the three groups split.He couldn't draw a single talisman himself. Every one of them was loot from the battlefield pocket, and every use burned one for good. But a talisman was cheap if it kept somebody alive, and right now that was the only math that mattered.They split for the same reason Heng Zhang couldn't move three hundred thousand soldiers in one lump. A force that big moved like a rumor through dry grass — the Aberrations smelled it before it got within a hundred li. So the leaders took the fast, quiet jobs. Heng Zhang picked five hundred elites for the northwest. Ethan took five hundred Dark Guards for the southeast. Qingwu Feng took five hundred of her own guards for the northeast.The rest — the hundreds of thousands —
Chapter 153: The Second Rift. Space Crystal
They walked for two days.The flowers gave way to grass. The grass gave way to trees. The trees gave way, on the morning of the second day, to something that none of them had expected.A mountain.It was not the black, splintered, burnt-out wreck that the rest of the pocket had become. It was green. It was alive. Peach blossoms covered its lower slopes in a solid sheet of pink. Higher up, the colors shifted to white and gold and purple, layer on layer, a garden that had grown without a war for a hundred years. The grass at their feet was soft. It bent under their boots and sprang back. It had not done that anywhere else on the battlefield.Heng Zhang stopped.He took off his helmet. He looked around."Since the rifts opened," he said. "I have not seen anything that grew this normal. Not one thing."Ethan did not answer. He was looking at the mountain with a different kind of attention.It was good soil.It was the best soil he had felt in this pocket. It was the kind of soil a farmer
Chapter 152: What a Place. Fortune Everywhere
The soldiers kept coming.Ethan stood at the line and watched another wave of them drift out of the flowers, and he did some very fast arithmetic. He had fifty thousand Elite Guard in the field now. That was his ceiling. That was as many as he could afford to keep alive and fed and housed and paid for. He could not buy more. He did not have money to burn on an army he would have to maintain for the rest of his life.He was going to have to solve this without buying bodies.A small hand touched his sleeve."Dad." Qingwu's voice was soft. She had flowers in her hair. She had blood on her knees from where she had been pulling stems out of the dirt. She looked up at him with wide eyes. "Can I try?"Ethan looked down at her. "You have something?""I have Soothe." She said it the way a child says the name of a spell she knows by heart. "It calms people down when they're confused or angry. I have Purify too. It clears bad feelings. It wakes people up."Ethan stared at her.It was the exact a
Chapter 151: The Spirit-Potion Ingredient
Ethan took the flower out of Qingwu's hand.He turned it over. He looked at the stem. He looked at the petals. He breathed.He knew this one.Resource class. Second year. The instructor had held up a dried specimen in a glass case and told the lecture hall that half the things on the battlefield were useful. Not just the Aberrations. The plants. The rocks. The water. Half of them were ingredients. Half of them were currencies. You picked the right thing off the dirt and you carried it to an official exchange and you came back with credits, and credits bought you equipment, credits bought you pills, credits bought you a future.This one was Black Soul Flower.Brewed correctly by an Alchemist, it became a spirit potion. Twenty points of spirit power per dose. No upper limit. You drank as many as you wanted.Ethan looked at the meadow.He looked at the meadow again.The meadow was enormous. It stretched from one end of his vision to the other. It was wall-to-wall Black Soul Flower.He di
Chapter 150: The Mysterious Space
The walk to the Southwest took five days on foot.Ethan was not in a hurry. The Southwest had fallen. The dead were already dead. Walking faster would not bring them back. Walking slower would give him time to see what the pocket had actually become.Without the snow, he could see it.There were no plants. The soil was not black. It was the color of rust and old iron, and it smelled like turned earth and blood, and when he knelt and rubbed it between his fingers he understood. It was blood-soaked. Not a film of it. Saturation. The top layer of the ground was the color of human life. He let the dirt fall. It ran through his fingers and settled back into the field, and he did not brush his hand clean until he was sure he had gotten all of it off.Corpses lay everywhere. Soldiers. Aberrations. Somewhere in a dip off to his left, a pile of monster dead rose like a low hill, and flies were already moving on it. He recognized a uniform sleeve half-buried at the base of the hill. He did not
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