Laia pressed her forehead against the cool window of the void-coach, the low rumble of the engine thrumming through her bones. She drew a slow, steadying breath, forcing the cold knot of panic in her chest to loosen. Ten crystals a day. One hundred days of runway. It was not the end of the world. Not yet.
She closed her eyes and let her awareness sink inward, brushing against the familiar hum of her twin kingdom. It was time to take stock of exactly what her stubborn subjects had dragged her into.
Divine ranks ran from one to nine, followed by the lofty titles of God Monarch, God King, God Emperor, and at the very peak, Supreme God. Only three Supreme Gods had stood at the top for untold millennia: the Sun God, the Moon God, and the Light God. The entire Yanhuang Empire fell under the Sun God's dominion. Among the nine mortal ranks, the third, fifth, and seventh were the great thresholds. Cross into the Third Rank, and you lit your divine flame—gaining your first true, direct control over the fundamental forces of your kingdom.
And her kingdom had certainly grown.
The land had swelled with her rank advancement, stretching out to a full twenty thousand square kilometers now—vast enough to hold all six clans with room to spare. A wave of new births had swept through every settlement, too, the population climbing fast as the world stabilized at its new strength. But with more mouths to feed, resources were already growing tight.
Laia's jaw tightened. She had one resource card left, the final one from her academy starter pack. There was no saving it. Not with a population boom on her hands. She summoned it to her palm, a thin rectangle of pale ivory etched with faint green runes, and flicked it into the divine channel.
"Do what you can," she muttered.
Forests unfurled across the landscape, starting at Dragon's Rest and spreading outward in rolling green waves; lakes welled up in the valleys, clear and deep. Laia stared, her eyes widening.
These were no ordinary trees.
Spirit trees.
Their leaves glowed with a faint, soft luminescence, their trunks thick and fast-growing. Every part of them was edible—bark, wood, leaves, fruit. For a kingdom that had spent two hundred years scraping by on void beast meat and tough grain, this was a feast.
A flicker of confusion crossed her face, sharp beneath the relief.
This should not be possible. Not in a low-rank kingdom.
She knew the rules. Higher-tier divine resources suffered heavy degradation when used in weaker realms. A Ninth Rank deity could wield a Ninth Rank card at one hundred percent efficiency. A First Rank wielder would barely get twenty percent out of the same card. There was a hard floor at one percent, too—ten percent lost for every full rank of difference.
Spirit trees were Seventh Tier material. They needed high-grade mineral veins to grow, and they exhaled a constant stream of divine aura—what some worlds called mana, others called spiritual energy, but always a force close to the world's fundamental rules.
She flipped the now-dormant card over in her fingers. Second-tier, one-star. By all rights, it should have spawned maybe two hundred square kilometers of ordinary forest and a single small lake.
She gazed back into her kingdom. The forest stretched on and on. Easily a thousand square kilometers, maybe more.
She frowned, turning the card over again. No mistake. It was the standard academy-issue card. The coach had security scanners, too—high-resolution ones. They could read the card's grade plain as day. They just could not see inside her kingdom.
Well, she thought, a small, reluctant smile tugging at her lips. Who was she to look a gift forest in the leaves? If the universe wanted to hand her a win, she would take it. It would not solve everything, but it would keep the clans fed for a good long while. The rest she would figure out later.
The coach rumbled to a stop, its pneumatic doors hissing open. Laia tucked the spent card back into her pouch and stepped out onto the academy grounds.
She stood there for a long moment, gazing up at the grand marble spires and the ancient, towering silver oaks that lined the main promenade. The whole campus hummed with low, steady divine energy. Every stone, every tree, every fountain was worth more than her entire kingdom, probably.
How in the world had she ended up here? A penniless D-rank orphan, stumbling into the most prestigious academy in the empire. Every student here came from old blood, with strong kingdoms and loyal life-seed-born subjects. Any one of them could have outclassed her on their worst day.
She had made a few friends, here and there. But the gap between them felt vast, sometimes. Too vast to last.
Well, she thought, squaring her shoulders. One step at a time. Don't let yourself care too much, and you can't get hurt.
There was one thing to look forward to, at least. Today marked the start of the Godly Kingdom Cultivation core classes. Finally, she could stop fumbling around in the dark. She could see how proper gods raised and taught their subjects. Maybe she would even pick up a trick or two to whip her unruly little heathens into shape.
She walked briskly across the courtyard, slipped into the lecture hall, and slid into her usual seat near the back. She had barely set her satchel down when a blur of white and green launched itself at her, wrapping both arms tight around her waist.
"Laia! There you are!" a bright, bubbly voice chirped. "I've been trying to catch you forever! You vanish the second class ends every single day. I couldn't even find you in the dorms last night."
It was Bai Ling'er. She was small and bright-eyed, with a quick, easy smile, and she came from one of the most powerful clans in the entire empire—the Bai clan. Laia had never asked, never pried, but she had seen the Bai family's personal void-frigate docked outside the city once, and she had caught a glimpse of Ling'er's kingdom profile by accident during a first-year assessment.
It was a top-tier Forest Godly Kingdom, the kind most students could only dream of:
Barrier Strength: SS-Rank — Void can scarcely breach it, save for exceptional circumstances.
Initial Territory: A-Rank — Expansive and fertile.
Void Corruption: D-Rank — No void tides to speak of.
Resource Abundance: S-Rank — Born with ancient forests and crystal-clear lakes.
Attribute Potency: B-Rank — Strong nature-aligned affinity.
Laia's chest twinged with a sharp, quiet envy. She would never say it out loud, but it was hard not to look at a kingdom like that and feel a flicker of longing.
Then again, she thought, dry as dust, a kingdom like that would have killed me by now. A high-tier kingdom costs high-tier upkeep. I would have starved in a week.
She pushed the thought away and smiled, gently prying Ling'er's arms loose.
"I've been busy," she said. "Not much time to linger. What's wrong? Did you need something?"
Ling'er stuck her tongue out, sheepish.
"Nothing bad! I just… I wanted to ask you for advice. About believers."
Laia's smile froze on her face.
Advice. About believers.
You have got to be kidding me.
She, who ruled over a kingdom full of subjects who had tried to kill her on sight, who still treated her like a nagging groundskeeper more than a god—she was the last person anyone should come to for believer advice. Ling'er's subjects were born from genuine life-seeds. They were pre-programmed for devotion. They would never dream of throwing rocks at their creator, or arguing with her, or calling her a nuisance.
Laia stared at her, her eyes soft with a longing so plain it was almost embarrassing.
Ling'er blinked, tilting her head. She shifted awkwardly under that look.
Why was Laia looking at her like that? Like… like she was jealous?
No. That was impossible. Everyone knew Laia was the quiet rich girl of the year group. Half the academy was convinced she was the secret special recruit everyone had been whispering about—the one with the ancient bloodline and the hidden SSS-rank kingdom.