The physical laws of the universe did not apply in the Shattered Expanse.
Located deep beneath the Earth's crust, far below the deepest subway tunnels and abandoned mud-tier cities, the Expanse was a dimensional fracture—a wound in reality left over from the Spiritual Re-emergence five thousand years ago. Gravity here flowed sideways. The air was a suffocating, freezing vacuum of dark matter, and jagged continents of obsidian floated aimlessly in a sky that was the color of bruised, bleeding purple.
Dean Azure stepped out of a tearing spatial rift, landing heavily on a floating island of black glass.
He was no longer the serene, white-robed academic who sat in the pristine Solaris Chamber. He was clad in his true armor—a terrifying, unreflective abyssal-weave that clung to his muscular frame, radiating the crushing, oceanic pressure of a Martial Emperor. In his right hand, he held the Tide-Breaker, a massive halberd forged from the spine of a deep-sea leviathan.
His completely white, pupilless eyes scanned the fractured horizon.
He had promised Kai Hart a Tier 3 Spatial Beast Core. To a Martial Emperor, killing a Tier 3 anomaly—a creature with the strength of a human Martial Master—was not an impossible task. It would be a brutal, world-shaking fight, but Azure had the power to sever its head.
The problem was not killing it. The problem was finding it.
"Show yourselves," Azure's voice rumbled, heavily amplified by his Emperor Qi, sending a physical shockwave across the floating obsidian islands. "Where are the Rift-Leviathans? Where are the Void-Weavers?"
Only the howling of the spatial winds answered him.
Azure leaped. He didn't fly; his sheer physical density propelled him across a three-mile gap between the floating landmasses. He landed with a deafening crash on a massive, continent-sized shard of rock that served as the primary breeding ground for spatial anomalies.
As the dust cleared, Azure's expression hardened into a mask of cold, absolute fury.
He had found the Tier 3 beasts.
Spread across the jagged landscape were massive, mountain-sized skeletons. The bones were bleached white, covered in deep, precise, bio-mechanical scorch marks. The reality-warping Rift-Leviathans had not died of natural causes. They had been systematically slaughtered.
Azure walked up to a massive, curved rib bone that was thicker than a Vanguard dropship. He ran his gauntlet over the smooth, laser-cut edge of the bone.
"The Exarch-Kin," Azure whispered, his oceanic aura churning violently.
The Exarch Harvest Fleet wasn't just coming for humanity. Their vanguard scout ships had already been here, centuries ago. They had descended into the Shattered Expanse and harvested the highest-tier spatial beasts to fuel their own interstellar Dreadnoughts. They had scoured the ecosystem clean of anything Tier 5 and above.
There were no Tier 3 Spatial beasts left on Earth.
Azure drove the butt of his leviathan-bone halberd into the obsidian ground, a rare pulse of genuine frustration leaking from his iron-clad mind.
The Star-Forge Dilation Chamber was humanity's only hope to bridge the eighteen-month gap. Kai Hart had provided the blueprint, and Squad 7 was bleeding themselves dry to buy the Temporal Jadeite. If Azure returned empty-handed, the equation would completely collapse. The boy's genius would be wasted because the old world had already been picked clean by the aliens.
"I cannot forge a core from nothing," Azure muttered, closing his eyes to aggressively expand his Divine Sense across the fractured dimension.
He scanned the floating islands, searching for even a faint, lingering trace of high-tier spatial Qi. He searched for hours, his Emperor aura illuminating the dark expanse like a blue sun.
Nothing.
Tier 8 spatial anomalies—creatures barely stronger than standard wolves—scurried away from his light. Tier 7 Phasing-Serpents slithered deep into the bedrock. But nothing even remotely close to the Martial Master equivalent of a Tier 3.
Azure was about to recall his Divine Sense and return to the Academy in defeat when he felt a microscopic, pathetic ripple in the space behind him.
It was so weak he almost dismissed it as a trick of the dimensional wind. But Azure spun around, his hand moving faster than the speed of sound, his fingers snapping shut around empty air.
Squeak!
Azure opened his armored hand.
Dangling from his thick fingers by the scruff of its neck was a Tier 9 Void-Mink.
It was the size of a rat. It had six legs, silvery-grey fur, and oversized, terrified black eyes. It was the absolute, pathetic bottom of the Beast Threat Index. A Tier 9 anomaly possessed barely enough Qi to phase its body a few inches to the left to avoid being eaten by slightly larger predators.
It kicked its six tiny legs, letting out a frantic, high-pitched squeal as the crushing weight of the Martial Emperor's aura completely paralyzed its nervous system.
"A Tier 9," Azure said flatly, staring at the rat-sized creature. "You are not even fit to be a snack for Hart's Qilin-hound."
Azure raised his thumb, preparing to effortlessly crush the creature's skull and put it out of its misery.
But then, the Martial Emperor paused.
He looked at the Void-Mink's tiny, frantically beating chest. He couldn't feel an ocean of power, but he could feel the flavor of its Qi. It was pure, unadulterated Spatial energy. The fundamental building blocks were identical to the massive, mountain-sized skeletons littering the landscape. The only difference was volume and density.
A crazy, unprecedented, utterly arrogant thought bloomed in the Martial Emperor's mind.
Cultivators start at the bottom, Azure thought, his white eyes narrowing as he analyzed the squeaking beast. Kai Hart started as a mortal in the mud, with seventy stats to his name, and forced his way to Tier 3. Why cannot a beast do the same?
Normally, a Tier 9 beast would take ten thousand years of natural accumulation to naturally evolve into a Tier 3 calamity. They had to slowly absorb ambient Qi, survive a brutal food chain, and undergo agonizing biological shedding.
But what if a beast didn't have to survive the food chain?
What if a Martial Emperor became its personal, tyrannical cultivator?
"Listen to me, little rat," Azure whispered, bringing the terrified Void-Mink up to eye level.
The creature froze, its tiny heart hammering against Azure's gauntlet.
"There are no gods left in this dimension," Azure said, his voice echoing with cold, terrifying finality. "The aliens took them all. So, I am going to have to make a new one. And unfortunately for you... you are the foundation."
Azure didn't crush the beast. Instead, he reached into his spatial ring—a high-grade storage artifact—and pulled out a massive, heavily reinforced alchemical cauldron. He slammed the heavy bronze cauldron onto the obsidian glass.
He tossed the Void-Mink inside.
The creature immediately tried to phase through the bronze walls, but Azure casually traced a glowing blue rune in the air, sealing the cauldron with an Emperor-level spatial lock. The Mink bounced off the invisible barrier, squeaking in panic.
"Do not panic," Azure said, though his tone offered absolutely no comfort. "You are about to become the most pampered, overfed, agonizingly cultivated beast in the history of this planet."
Azure began to formulate the timeline in his head.
To forcefully push a beast from Tier 9 to Tier 3, he couldn't just pump it full of his own Qi; the sheer density of a Martial Emperor would vaporize the rat instantly. He had to feed it properly. He had to hunt Tier 8 beasts, refine their cores, and force-feed them to the Mink until it evolved to Tier 8. Then, he had to hunt Tier 7 beasts, refine them, and feed them to the Mink to push it to Tier 7.
He had to climb the ladder, step by step, forcing thousands of years of natural evolution into a matter of months.
It was an alchemical nightmare. It would require him to stay in the Shattered Expanse, hunting without rest, bleeding his own pure Qi into the cauldron to stabilize the Mink's violently expanding meridians so the creature wouldn't explode from the forced growth.
It would take him at least a hundred days of absolute, uninterrupted focus.
"Hart," Azure murmured to himself, looking up at the bruised purple sky of the dimension. "I will get you your Tier 3 Spatial Core. But it will take time. I am going to have to sculpt this monster from the mud up."
Azure drew his leviathan-bone halberd and turned his back on the cauldron. He looked out at the jagged, floating islands of the Shattered Expanse, his eyes locking onto a pack of Tier 8 Phasing-Serpents hiding in the distance.
"Time to eat," the Martial Emperor commanded, launching himself into the void to begin the longest, most humiliating, and most vital hunt of his life.
Millions of miles above the subterranean dimension, back in the pristine halls of the Supreme Martial Academy, the sun was rising.
Kai Hart stood by the reinforced window of the Vanguard Elite quarters, looking out over Sky City. The massive, lead-lined box containing ten pounds of Temporal Jadeite rested on the star-iron table behind him.
They had the blueprint. They had the materials.
Kai checked the Transmigrator System. He had expected a notification that the Tier 3 Beast had been slain. He had expected the Dean to return by dawn.
But the system was silent.
"He's not back," Prince Zhao Long said, walking into the common room, wiping sleep from his eyes. "A Martial Emperor should have been able to decapitate a beast in an hour. Where is he?"
"He ran into a complication," Kai said softly, his highly refined intuition sensing the delay. "The old world isn't as full of treasures as we hoped. We are going to have to wait."
"Wait?" Robert scoffed, his Void-snake hissing. "We have the Jadeite! We have 519 days left! We can't just sit here and wait for the Dean to play delivery boy!"
"We aren't going to sit," Kai said, turning away from the window. The molten-gold in his eyes flared with cold, unyielding purpose. "The core is only one piece of the puzzle. We still need someone who can carve a spatial array without blowing up the Faculty Spire."
"An Array Master," Princess Yan noted, walking out of her laboratory. "The Academy has dozens of them. They teach in the Upper Pavilions."
"The Academy masters are politicians in silk robes," Kai dismissed smoothly. "They ask too many questions, and they would report a Time-Dilation Chamber to the Imperial Court immediately. We need someone brilliant, desperate, and completely lacking in moral boundaries."
Kai walked past his squad, grabbing his black-and-gold Vanguard jacket.
"Where are we going?" Zhao Long asked, a predatory grin already forming on his face.
"To the Tartarus Block," Kai said. "There is a disgraced senior student in the maximum-security dungeon who got expelled three years ago for trying to splice his own soul into a weapon. They say he's completely insane."
Kai opened the heavy oak doors, stepping out into the hallway. "Sounds like exactly the kind of recruit Squad 7 needs.".