Chapter Summaries

Lu PingAn returned to Earth as the war entered its strategic counteroffensive phase, donating hundreds of War Machines at a charity banquet and meeting with Xia Qin, his lover of nearly two years. After discussing the war and giving Xia Qin a magical flower crown, he went to negotiate with two elders about the Sail Engine technology.

• Lu PingAn attended a charity banquet hosted by an Ancient City development company and anonymously donated more than four hundred War Machines.
• Lu PingAn and Xia Qin toasted each other and revealed their affection as lovers, while Catherine interrupted them to summon him to meet two elders.
• Xia Qin remembered how she and Lu PingAn had started their relationship two years earlier, and then turned her attention back to work.
• Lu PingAn gave Xia Qin a headband made from the bones of a Rule-level being, then transformed it into a colorful flower crown with an enchantment.
• Xia Qin questioned Lu PingAn about his practiced flower magic and kicked him before he limped away to discuss the Sail Engine with the elders.

Lu PingAn traveled north on an assignment as the Eastern Kingdom prepared a Great Counterattack against the deep-sea invaders. He reached New Tokyo, a city built by the Sakurajima People in Siberia, while worrying about the counterattack and the volatile soldiers he might have to command.

• Lu PingAn reflected on the Eastern Kingdom’s preparations for a Great Counterattack expected to begin within six months, three years after the Sakurajima Battle.
• He discussed how UT’s reorganization had made it the nominal leader of the counterattack, though its authority and ability to secure international cooperation remained limited.
• Lu PingAn and his friend talked about the Sakurajima People’s divisions between anti-war assimilationists and radical supporters of reclaiming their homeland.
• Lu PingAn traveled to Siberia on an assignment and considered the difficulties of commanding Sakurajima soldiers traumatized by the loss of their homeland.
• Lu PingAn arrived at New Tokyo and worried that a monster might destroy the city someday.

Lu PingAn arrived in New Tokyo, where Sakurajima refugees and expatriates maintained a fragile community under Eastern Kingdom and Red Star control. At a gathering of Sakurajima leaders demanding a campaign to reclaim their homeland, Lu PingAn announced that he had brought news from Wanjing.

• Lu PingAn arrived in New Tokyo and accepted a formal welcome from the city’s representatives.
• He learned that the remote settlement was a joint development zone and mining center where Sakurajima people worked while many others chose to integrate into Eastern Kingdom cities.
• Lu PingAn greeted Sakurajima combatants and observed how the Eastern Kingdom drew ordinary refugees toward integration while tying elite fighters to its cause.
• Sakurajima leaders pressed Lu PingAn to name the date of a counterattack and offered to serve as its vanguard.
• Lu PingAn announced that he had brought news from Wanjing.

Lu PingAn secured cooperation and supplies from New Tokyo and Red Star as the Eastern Kingdom prepared a multinational counteroffensive. He then inspected Sakurajima’s hidden weapons, including an army of Living Corpses.

• Lu PingAn told New Tokyo’s demigods that the Eastern Kingdom would protect their people and culture, then left to handle wartime preparations.
• Lu PingAn welcomed Red Star’s reinforcements and arranged to escort their combatants, weapons, and valuable artifacts back to Wanjing in exchange for food and supplies.
• Lu PingAn learned that many of his disciples had joined the navy and that his wartime influence had grown.
• Lu PingAn declined the Sakurajima girls’ invitation because his room was already full.
• Lu PingAn met Sakurajima’s underground forces and discovered one hundred thousand Living Corpses prepared as weapons for the coming war.

Lu PingAn and Cat Cat explored Sakurajima, where wartime propaganda had replaced most anime and games. Cat Cat revealed that she had already found her brother and was preparing to chase him again, while Lu PingAn urged her not to kill him.

• Lu PingAn saw Sakurajima's young students training in old armor and watched propaganda promoting enlistment and reclaiming the homeland.
• Cat Cat complained that New Akihabara had little enjoyable entertainment, since most new anime and games were wartime propaganda.
• Lu PingAn recalled that Tom and Jerry had comforted Cat Cat during her imprisonment and recognized why she collected old cartoons and animal-themed merchandise.
• Lu PingAn asked whether Cat Cat had found her brother, and she said he kept fleeing whenever he sensed her.
• Cat Cat admitted she was waiting for her brother to stock up so she could chase him farther, and Lu PingAn warned her to show restraint.
• Lu PingAn reflected that the siblings could not reconcile while the wanted order against her brother remained, leaving them to continue their game of cat and mouse.

Lu PingAn reflected on his unusually close, affectionate bond with Cat Cat, then spent a date with Big Cat, who revealed that she wanted him to help acquire rare creatures and Mythical Species brought by Sakurajima’s demigods. The chapter ended with Lu PingAn agreeing to help and receiving Big Cat’s prioritized list of targets.

• Lu PingAn thought about how much he and Cat Cat trusted and depended on each other, while insisting their relationship was not romantic.
• Big Cat reassured Lu PingAn that Cat Cat would return after playing and took him out for a date.
• Lu PingAn noticed Big Cat’s beauty and independence, and recalled how she devoted most of her time to research and educating Eve and Phil.
• After they watched a movie, ate steak, and visited tourist spots, Big Cat explained that the Sakurajima demigods had brought extraordinary creatures and Mythical Species.
• Lu PingAn agreed to help Big Cat obtain the creatures, and she gave him a list of high-priority targets and suggested people he could pressure into handing them over.

Lu PingAn and Chris toured the Black Market, using their reputations and grievances against its factions to demand goods and licensing fees without paying. They reached the Forest Goddess Church, where Chris wanted to continue shopping despite Lu PingAn recognizing its symbol.

• Chris accused a shop of infringing on their patents and demanded compensation until Lu PingAn intervened and ordered the goods delivered to them.
• Lu PingAn learned Chris had a long-standing grudge against Boiling Blood, which had stolen several shiploads of her goods.
• Lu PingAn agreed to let Chris pick faults with the factions while he smoothed things over and accepted gifts from them.
• Lu PingAn and Chris pressured gray and black factions across the Black Market, leaving with porters carrying goods they had not paid for.
• Lu PingAn tried to skip the Forest Goddess Church, but Chris insisted on entering because it was the fattest target.

Lu PingAn and Chris inspected New Tokyo’s black-market networks, warning their operators and finding dangerous weapons stockpiled throughout the region. Lu PingAn then used promises of land in a recovered Sakurajima to stir nationalist fervor and push Sakurajima People toward military service.

• Lu PingAn let Chris take goods from a Top Seed Vault while warning the store manager to keep his faction in line during the war.
• Lu PingAn and Chris visited secret realms, the Black Market, and other channels, finding widespread weapons of mass destruction and illegal technology.
• Lu PingAn considered how to draw the region’s unstable factions into battle and concluded that mobilizing Sakurajima People might bring them along.
• A Wanjing contact announced that land in a recovered Sakurajima would be granted according to military merit, sparking fierce public debate in New Tokyo.
• Lu PingAn saw young supernaturals enlist in large numbers and told his people to promote claims that Sakurajima was already too full to share.

Lu PingAn used the Eastern Kingdom’s plan to trade military merit for land to channel Sakurajima’s refugees toward reclaiming their homeland and away from domestic unrest. He also offered a path into the Eastern Kingdom’s elite, leaving Sakurajima’s future and identity uncertain.

• Lu PingAn explained that the land-allocation policy was meant to keep refugees focused overseas and prevent them from destabilizing the Eastern Kingdom.
• The Eastern Kingdom’s policy drew Sakurajima’s superhumans into combat training, while local leaders sought confirmation from Lu PingAn that reclaiming their homeland was possible.
• Lu PingAn revealed that military merit could benefit a dead warrior’s relatives, encouraging people to fight despite the heavy cost.
• Lu PingAn announced plans to take students, giving local elites a possible route for their children to join the Eastern Kingdom.
• Local leaders eagerly offered their relatives as students, and Lu PingAn considered how Sakurajima’s people and resources might be absorbed over generations.

Lu PingAn and the Eastern Kingdom used goodwill and the promise of cooperation to draw Sakurajima’s leaders into talks, while weighing the costs of preserving New Tokyo and preventing its people and gods from leaving. The chapter ended with Sakurajima’s Twenty-Six Gods Alliance and Eleven Outer Gods expressing their desire to reclaim their homeland, potentially bringing them into the coming war.

• Lu PingAn watched public opinion in Sakurajima swing toward welcoming the Eastern Kingdom, and Wanjing proposed sending a coordination team and arranging local disciples for Eastern strong figures.
• Wanjing warned Lu PingAn that mass migration would cost Earth locally raised Order Gods, while Lu PingAn considered the overseas wealth sustaining New Tokyo.
• Chris and another speaker discussed the high cost of maintaining New Tokyo’s standard of living and the resources consumed by the Great Furnace of Spring.
• Lu PingAn listened as Sakurajima’s gods explained their defeat three years earlier, citing the flood, isolation, and their inability to use their powers effectively.
• Sakurajima’s Twenty-Six Gods Alliance and Eleven Outer Gods declared that they yearned to reclaim their homeland.

Lu PingAn discussed Eastern Kingdom’s interests with the Sakurajima refugees and sought capable prospective disciples among them. New Tokyo presented a seventeen-year-old Scholar whose apparent madness left him intrigued as the chapter ended.

• Lu PingAn gave the refugees vague assurances about relations between nations while privately recognizing Eastern Kingdom’s plans to absorb their assets and influence.
• Lu PingAn accepted several nominal students but said he wanted genuinely talented disciples, especially those with Quasi-Rules Seeds.
• New Tokyo quickly produced three candidates for Lu PingAn, including a seventeen-year-old sixth-tier pure Scholar who had been born transcendent.
• Lu PingAn learned that the candidate had become abnormal at twelve and found her restrained in a New Tokyo mental hospital, murmuring that the world was broken.

Lu PingAn confronted Baishi Wuling, a young Scholar whose ability to read people and the world made her seem dangerous and unstable. After trapping her in a false perception of reality, he learned her innate ability was called “Weakening Intelligence Art” and suspected the explanation was incomplete.

• Baishi Wuling recalled using her unusual understanding as an infant to expose abuse at her orphanage, which drew special attention to her.
• Lu PingAn approached the blindfolded, restrained Baishi Wuling, who read his emotions and tried to unsettle him with insults and threats.
• Lu PingAn deliberately fed Baishi Wuling false information and revealed that she had been trapped inside a world he created with his Tier 8 domain.
• Lu PingAn learned from the staff that Baishi Wuling’s innate ability was “Weakening Intelligence Art.”
• Lu PingAn reasoned that her power might slow others’ thinking and suspected the stated ability was false or incomplete.

Lu PingAn repeatedly examined Baishi Wuling’s extraordinary mutations until she revealed that her ability, Soul Hacker, let her assimilate parts of other people’s selves and use them as processing power. Intrigued by its potential and its cost, he offered himself as her next target.

• Lu PingAn repeatedly rewound Baishi Wuling’s transformations as he investigated her unpredictable mutations.
• Baishi Wuling revealed that her ability was called Soul Hacker.
• Lu PingAn deduced that Soul Hacker let her erode others and use their cognitive capacity as a network, but Baishi Wuling warned that too many merged perceptions could make her lose herself.
• Lu PingAn asked Baishi Wuling to use Soul Hacker on him so he could explore its possibilities.

Lu PingAn recruited Wu Ling as a prospective disciple and gave her a forbidden notebook to study, hoping its knowledge would help resolve the instability that had nearly driven her insane. The chapter ended with him warning her not to read it alone and directing her to gather ten Scholars to share its burden.

• Lu PingAn decided Wu Ling was a promising recruit after learning she had restrained herself despite her powerful ability and had no complicated ties.
• Wu Ling asked Lu PingAn to provide a laboratory and help recover her research, then asked whether he would accept her as a disciple.
• Lu PingAn explained that Wu Ling’s research had exposed her to knowledge beyond her ability to understand, and gave her a notebook containing his forbidden knowledge.
• Lu PingAn warned Wu Ling that everyone who had read the notebook had gone insane, while she became eager to examine its dangerous contents.
• Lu PingAn told Wu Ling not to read the notebook yet and instructed her to find ten Scholars who could share the burden through her ability.

After completing his inspection of New Tokyo and reuniting with Cat Cat, Lu PingAn reviewed the looming war and Eastern Kingdom’s preparations for a decisive counteroffensive. He learned the Outland Visitors were adapting faster and treating his Awakening Disease, leaving his side little time before the balance shifted.

• Lu PingAn finished a week of work with New Tokyo’s Security Department, confirmed the city was prepared, and reunited with Cat Cat after she chased Lei Huo Ren toward the Arctic.
• Lu PingAn and Big Cat discussed how Eastern Kingdom’s strategic depth, industrial mobilization, and fleet gave it a chance to launch a decisive counteroffensive, while a defeat could doom humanity to slow decline.
• Lu PingAn learned that the Outland Visitors had found an inhumane treatment for his Awakening Disease, though its severe side effects reportedly required patients to die once.
• Lu PingAn heard that ocean-affiliated Outland gods had arrived and begun purifying the sea, while Eastern Kingdom was deliberately polluting it to hinder them.

On the train south, Lu PingAn discussed Red Star’s ability to support the coming war with Olga V. Hillrona, a powerful diplomat and former spy. Red Star was too occupied by a catastrophic otherworldization crisis to provide much help, but the Eastern Kingdom had recruited some of its independent powerhouses.

• Lu PingAn asked Olga V. Hillrona whether Red Star would send troops, and she explained that the country had the will but lacked the capacity.
• Olga described how Red Star’s vast territory and a Central Asian crisis had left its forces stretched thin, while Lu PingAn recognized that even limited mobilization could free Eastern Kingdom troops for other duties.
• Olga reported that an evil god faction called Eternal Water had caused lakes to appear and submerged a small nation, with several evil gods personally involved.
• Lu PingAn and Olga discussed how the worlds’ growing closeness was allowing evil gods to interfere more easily, and Olga said Red Star could not spare attention for foreign affairs.
• Olga said Red Star might send a fleet at most, but the Eastern Kingdom had hired civilian armed forces and powerful independent Transcendents for the coming war.

Lu PingAn and Miss Li Na traveled by train while the Countess taught him to read intelligence from railway traffic and shared stories from her past. She recognized that Lu PingAn cared about ordinary people, and the chapter left them continuing their conversation about how the new generation differed from the old.

• Lu PingAn and Miss Li Na rode a freight train fitted with a passenger carriage as he reflected on how railways served this world's needs.
• The Countess showed Lu PingAn how to infer resource flows and regional conditions from train cargo, railway tracks, and towns along the route.
• The Countess shared her hostility toward the Sakura Kingdom and recounted tales of the old Tsarist court, its failed mystical projects, and her search for the twelve Animal Heads and Tsar's artworks.
• The Countess told Lu PingAn she had noticed his concern for ordinary people's lives, and he suggested that the new generation was more humane than the old.

Lu PingAn returned to Ancient City, where he and Xia Qin dealt with Rule-level visitors who had humiliated the local police. He learned that Ancient City had attracted powerful combatants and major industrial and military investment as war approached.

• Lu PingAn returned to Ancient City by train and met Xia Qin, who drove him away from the station in a new locally produced vehicle.
• Xia Qin told Lu PingAn that Rule-level visitors had stripped a young police officer and hung him from a hotel wall, so they headed to confront them.
• Lu PingAn helped Xia Qin defeat the visitors, and the men were hung from a tower at the city Garbage Disposal Plant while reporters took photographs.
• Lu PingAn used the Eye of Truth and discovered that Ancient City already had seven or eight combatants at Rule-level or above.
• Xia Qin explained that Ancient City’s growth and industrial workforce had attracted powerful people and led the higher-ups to plan more investment, shipyards, and military orders.

Lu PingAn sent foreign trainees and local youths to work in Ancient City so they could prove their abilities before receiving further training. He then gathered five candidates he had already judged valuable, while warning Xiao Wu Ling to pay attention.

• Lu PingAn assigned his disciples daytime jobs and extra lessons, using their work and conduct to assess their reliability.
• The trainees named fields they wanted to enter, including medicine, engineering, biology, entertainment, office work, and small business.
• Lu PingAn told the foreign candidates that they would need to achieve more than local youths to earn equal training and support.
• The Municipal Office and Rebirth Company helped most trainees begin their new jobs, while five candidates remained with Lu PingAn.
• Lu PingAn took the five remaining candidates to a lesson and threatened to hang Xiao Wu Ling from the Garbage Dump Platform if she kept pretending to sleep.

Lu PingAn reflected on how the Ancient City’s industrial growth, fueled by its earlier acceptance of the Phosphorus People and his own assistance, had made it a major center for wartime production. The Eastern Kingdom’s war machine was now fully operating, leaving the city’s shipyards and factories ready to supply the coming conflict.

• Lu PingAn’s contacts among the newly arrived refugees sent family letters and reports describing their lives and work in the Eastern Kingdom.
• Lu PingAn considered how the Ancient City’s automobile industry had built a large workforce and supply network that could support shipbuilding and other industries.
• The Ancient City’s shipyards and factories expanded as war orders brought investment, jobs, and rising wages.
• Lu PingAn credited the city’s willingness to take risks and develop the Phosphorus People, rather than his own assistance alone, for its growth.
• The Eastern Kingdom began producing ships, drones, mechanical soldiers, war puppets, and war vehicles to prepare for the coming decisive battle.