This time, waking up in the pod felt almost too lucid. I knew I was inside it even before I opened my eyes.

And once again — no underwear.

On the one hand, a clear sign the injury had been serious and I'd spent quite some time in recovery. On the other hand, why the hell did they strip them off me? My neck had been injured, not my arse. Was this somehow connected to the poisoning, or was it just standard protocol?

As usual, Zola was the first to greet me from the capsule. Same body old Zola, but the new host. And this time, there was no heart-to-heart talk; we parted ways fairly quickly.

After Zola came a short conversation with Lina. She told me that was it, the school was officially cleansed of demons.

The Damocles' sword that had been hanging over my head had been taken down, cleaned, and put back into its case.

It was hard to process that the threat was gone. Paranoia and the habit of glancing over my shoulder had already become part of who I was.

I tried to relax, and almost panicked, as if someone had stolen my very reason to live. Fortunately, in about forty years we still had a full-scale invasion ahead of us. That would give me something to do, and Novak wouldn't let me get bored, unless he simply waved me off.

In the end, I'd played my part to the end. From here on, I represented far less interest to him.

I spoke with Novak the following day. The Great One gave me a chance to rest and then summoned me for the traditional evening tea. Just the two of us and no one else.

His apartments greeted me with the scent of caramel, burnt wood, and roasted meat. No Pure Thoughts on the menu tonight, so I relaxed, until I noticed the extra glass on the table and a plate with sliced steak.

Vaclav drank his bourbon neat, but in one of our talks I'd once told him I didn't understand alcohol without a good bite to go with it. He remembered.

"Wow!" I said. "Didn't expect this. Thanks."

"You've earned it. And that's not all," he said, raising his glass to me.

"Really?" I asked.

"Of course! Along with Thyzreth we recovered a ring of resources left to her by her master. You've got a wide selection."

"Then I want the ring!" I declared.

Novak's eyes widened slightly at my audacity.

"I want to be able to carry my armour with me and summon it in an instant, just like Thyzreth did," I explained.

"We're not talking about that exact ring, but about any pocket that can hold armour?" Novak clarified.

Could it be… was he actually going to agree?

"Yes," I said.

Novak nodded and stepped into the treasury room.

He returned with a rectangular token on a cord and held it out to me.

"This is our own design. Point one cubic metre, a hundred litres. Enough for armour and extras, but you'll have to give up the shield," he told me. "They'll conflict."

Fuck, yes!

My hands were almost trembling as I took the token.

"But if you want to pull off that instant-equipping trick, you'll need to raise your Space root to about fifty. Thirty-five ampoules of essence inside."

"I thought this was expensive," I said.

"Extremely," Novak confirmed. "It's worth several materials for a third-stage breakthrough. But you've earned it."

Well, I suspected he wasn't planning on discarding me just yet.

I reached inward with my senses…

It was harder to manipulate than the training ring, but I felt I could manage. I reached in with my right hand and pulled out one ampoule. One landed in my palm, thirty-four scattered across the floor.

"Shit!"

"Takes practice," Novak agreed, while I crawled around, peering under the table and chairs, trying to gather them all.

Once I'd collected them, I put them back one by one, but didn't risk drawing again. I just hung the token around my neck.

Then came meat, bourbon, idle talk about the meaning of life, and pointless plans for the future.

Stolen novel; please report.

Novak seemed oddly apathetic, as though recent events had drained him even more than me. He advised me to rest and focus on grinding points.

I tried the bourbon, and the taste surprised me. Maybe it was the sensitivity of this fresh body, but beneath the aroma lurked the flavour of fine-grain sandpaper. The meat was far tastier. Still, the alcohol brought a mild buzz, very much like Evening Sun, only gentler. Not nearly strong enough to dull my situational awareness.

All in all, the evening went remarkably well.

Over the next two weeks, I pushed the invisible Space root in the interface up to fifty. Along the way, I learned how to draw ampoules one at a time instead of dumping them in a heap on the floor. After that came long training sessions of putting on and taking off a single simple item. Before moving to anything larger, I fashioned a ring from a chocolate wrapper and practised summoning it straight onto whichever finger I wanted.

Of course, I didn't forget about points. I had to clear that damned debt to the Air Garden, and the shifts were brutal, five to six hours each. Sometimes even two a day, until I was done! After that I kept going back to the farm with the guys, and visiting Rene regularly. I bought a few more Monkey one-on-ones from him, broadening my horizons, and trained alongside Novak's other disciples.

They were fairly willing to share their knowledge with me.

Artem took the beetles off my hands. They had a limited lifespan and needed special care. Still, they didn't leave me without a toy, I was given a fully composite dragonfly, electronics without organics, about half the size of a chicken. It could function both in atmosphere and in vacuum. Not that it could leave the atmosphere on its own, but once I ended up on another moon, I'd be able to use it there.

I stored it in the token and practised using it over the pastures. Now that there were no demons in the school, the only faction left with the ability to rewrite surveillance footage was the Hall of Diplomacy.

So I wasn't worried my experiments would end up on camera, though I still had to notify the Chatbot, which worked in tandem with the AI. Novak saw all commands, and, I suspected, so did Artem, so it wasn't as secret as I might have liked.

Once I resumed cultivation sessions, I immediately broke through the first bottleneck and, on an express run, blasted through the second in just two months.

The third, though, was far harder. Even with steady cultivation, it would take almost a year to fill my core to the brim. That's why no one, ever, not even the children of the wealthiest cultivators, broke through to the third stage in their first year.

By the time I'd reached late second, Denis and Bao were only at mid-second, while Nur and Marlon had just barely managed to break into the second stage at all. Marlon had burned all his points down to zero but got his perfect foundation in the end. Nur was more modest; she didn't chase after the red materials, settling for yellow and orange instead. She didn't make a secret of it.

The key thing was that Nur and Marlon weren't bothered by failing the selection.

Nur, in fact, had even received a recommendation from Bulsara to one of Earth's most prestigious medical institutes.

Denis and Bao…

That was more complicated.

Damn, even I was getting nervous as the deadline loomed!

I finally found the time to unravel the selection system. It was simple enough, if you didn't get bogged down in details. The top 500 by points passed — not by cultivation rank.

The trick was that a few days before the results were finalised, cultivation rankings were also converted into points. There was a complex formula involving the number of cadets, the total pool of points earned, and a calculated bonus. Usually, this amounted to a solid half of the final tally, if not more.

The problem was that after the school had dealt with the demons, Novak handed all the addicts over to Order. Along with the cadets who had already left the school for one reason or another, that added up to another two hundred.

Two hundred out of two and a half thousand, nearly one in ten had been using prohibited substances, and the school decided to make a spectacle of it, kicking them all out in one big sweep, just to report a massive and 'highly successful' purge.

All told, it meant about four hundred fewer cadets. On one hand, that was four hundred fewer competitors. On the other, their points vanished from the total pool. This year's pool was the smallest in decades. Accordingly, the cultivation bonus was the lowest as well.

So the cultivation ranking had been heavily devalued, while live points, on the contrary, had grown much more valuable. Still, calculating anything ahead of time was impossible, since the rankings kept shifting. Workhorses like Bao and Denis kept adding to the pool, while cadets from the top hundred got injured and shipped back to Earth, taking their points with them.

Those in the four-hundredth to five-hundredth ranks were losing their minds, burning out, and once again we had suicide attempts. Not all of the earlier cases had been demon-related, it seemed.

On top of that came setups, sabotage, and assaults. The assistant supervisor's job no longer felt like easy point-farming, it demanded the constant presence of at least two of us in the block at any given time.

Almost everyone was second stage now, and everyone had techniques.

Still, a few well-aimed Chain Punches were enough to cool the hottest heads. That technique shone brightest without armour. The key was striking faster than the opponent. Which was exactly what the technique had been created for.

Back to points: sitting at 741st in points made me nervous, but 187th in cultivation rank guaranteed I'd pass the selection. By rough estimates, I'd finish somewhere around 300th in the final ranking. Even so, the general anxiety was irrational, pressing down on me just as it did on everyone else.

Bao and Denis's situation with live points had improved significantly, but they lagged badly in cultivation rank. All signs suggested they'd scrape the edge, somewhere between 500th and 600th. Close enough to touch it, but still not make it into the second-period list.

The pressure was insane.

I had no idea how they handled it.

Still, neither of them showed any suicidal tendencies. Grind and duels, that was all they lived for in those days.

Duels had grown riskier. Stakes jumped up to a thousand points per fight. Sometimes there were even what Liang Shi called 'kamikaze duels,' where everything was put on the line. One fighter would go all-in, the other would match. Order watched such duels closely to prevent fraud. When there was too great a gap in duel rankings, they were simply banned. The winners of these matches would rocket up the standings, while the losers, nine times out of ten, became our problem. Sometimes yesterday's victor became today's loser, followed by either a suicide attempt or a bloody bid for revenge.

Liang Shi demanded we be aware of every kamikaze duel from the moment the applications came in.

So imagine my surprise when, in the very last week of school, I saw the application: Denis Rein versus Bao Feng.

The stake: 6,651 points each.

The winner of that fight would automatically take first place in points, because the current maximum, held by Gunther, was 12,225.

The application was approved by Order just minutes after being submitted.

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