Ling'er tucked her curiosity away, pressing the question down before it could slip out. It did not matter who Laia was, not really. She just wanted to learn whatever the other girl was willing to teach her—about kingdoms, about believers, about all the things her formal tutors had always been too stiff to explain properly.
Laia fought the urge to sigh. She would never understand why this bright, well-born girl kept coming to her for advice on kingdom cultivation. Ling'er had an S-rank forest realm, born with every advantage Laia could only dream of. Laia's own kingdom was held together with borrowed tricks, stubborn hope, and sheer desperation. What could she possibly teach someone with a proper, orthodox divine upbringing?
Still, she could not very well say so out loud. She picked her words carefully, sticking to broad, safe principles, careful not to let slip a single detail about her ragtag clans or her battered D-rank twin realm.
"Balanced growth is the most important thing," she said, leaning back in her seat. "And don't flood them with too many resources all at once. If a widespread disaster hits, you'll watch half your stockpiles vanish overnight. Void incursions are the worst for it—even if you don't have to worry about them now, every rank advancement triggers a major incursion on the tenth year of your kingdom's calendar. The mist eats through crops and plants alike."
She paused, thinking of the way her own woodlands swelled after every tide.
"That said, it's not all bad. If your vegetation can survive the mist, it feeds on it. Spreads like wildfire afterward. You get a huge boom in growth, but food supplies run tight right before it hits. Teach your people preservation methods—drying, curing, root cellars. It saves you more than you'd think."
Ling'er had been listening intently, nodding along, but at that she blinked and held up a hand.
"Wait—wait a second," she said, confused. "Vegetation feeds on the void mist? What do you mean?"
Now it was Laia's turn to look puzzled.
"You know… the forest plants absorb the mist from the tide," she said. "They multiply fast after that, and the fruit they bear is good for long-term storage. You really didn't know that?"
Ling'er went quiet.
Oh.
Oh no.
If she was guessing right—if Laia was describing what she thought she was describing—those were void-wood trees. The kind only God Monarchs could reliably cultivate.
Every first-year student learned the basics in theory class. The greatest danger of a void incursion was never the beasts. It was the mist. It seeped into every living thing, sapping strength, blighting fields, killing off whole forests if you let it. After a bad tide, most deities had to burn a fresh resource card just to replant what had been lost. You could not survive long replacing everything by hand, not with how expensive higher-tier resources grew.
There were only three known solutions. First, plant vegetation that actively consumed the mist, forming a living barrier around your croplands. Second, use warding cards or specialized guardian subjects to shield your fields. Third, reach God Monarch rank, wrap your whole kingdom in your own rule-force, and shut the mist out entirely.
Void-wood trees were the gold standard for the first method. Even God Monarchs treated them with care. They were a rare, high-tier divine resource, staggeringly expensive on the open market. Trying to force them to grow in a low-rank kingdom? The resource loss alone would cost a fortune. Most low-ranking deities could never even afford a single sapling.
She leaned forward, voice small and careful.
"Laia… can I see? Just a tiny peek of whatever those plants are?"
Laia shrugged. No harm in it, she figured. She held out one palm, and a tiny, shifting window of light opened above it, showing a narrow strip of her kingdom's woodland. She kept the view tight—no dragons, no volcanoes, no hint of the twin realms. Just trees.
Ling'er leaned in to look, and her breath caught.
There, standing tallest among the growth, were trees with deep, inky black bark. They were not full void-wood, not quite—weaker, rougher, wild-grown—but the resemblance was unmistakable. Around them grew hardy, drought-resistant trees with waxy, silver-green leaves, the kind that thrived on marginal land.
And scattered through the undergrowth…
Dragonblood trees, their sap thick with bloodline-enhancing properties. Prism berries, bursting with raw elemental energy. Fire nettles, glowfruit, crimson bauhinia blooms—all rare, all potent, all rated Seventh Tier or higher. A few she recognized as God-Monarch-grade alchemical ingredients.
Ling'er's family held a near-monopoly on high-tier resource card production across the empire. She had grown up surrounded by catalogs and sample groves. She knew these plants. She knew exactly how much they cost, and exactly how far above a low-rank student's reach they should have been.
She could not tell what kind of kingdom this was from such a small patch. It did not look like a pure forest realm, not with those dry-climate trees mixed in. It did not look like anything she had ever seen.
But she knew one thing for certain: whoever Laia was, she was far, far more than she let on.
She pulled back, taking a slow, steadying breath. To press further would be rude. Worse, it would skirt the academy's rules about prying into family backgrounds. Laia had already been generous, showing her even this much.
"Your kingdom is incredible," she said, quiet and sincere. "I'd be lying if I said I wasn't jealous. What rank are you at, anyway? How far along is your cultivation?"
Laia's face fell into a look of plain, weary misery.
"Early Third Rank," she said.
Ling'er blinked.
Then she blinked again.
"Wait—what?" she yelped, so loud a few nearby students turned to look. She clapped a hand over her mouth and leaned in, voice sharp with disbelief. "Laia, are you serious? It's barely been any time at all since we all awakened our kingdoms!"
It was unheard of.
Everyone knew the requirements for advancement. You needed sufficient rule-force to anchor the higher rank. You needed at least three victories over high-tier void incursions or rival godly kingdoms, to harvest enough divine resonance to break through the threshold. You needed a large enough population of high-ranked subjects to support the new rank.
Rule-force took mountains of resources, or piles of raw divinity crystals poured straight into the kingdom's core. High-ranked subjects either came from premium life-seed stock or cost a fortune to raise. And divine resonance? That was the real bottleneck. You only got it from fighting—from tearing it out of void beasts, or stealing it from another deity's kingdom. No one gave it away freely. Lose a fight, and your own kingdom shrank, your own resonance drained away. Void resonance was even more dangerous; reach too far, and the mist would poison you whole.
Most students spent years grinding their way from Second to Third Rank. Laia had done it before the first semester was even halfway over.
She stared, wide-eyed, waiting for some trick, some hidden explanation.
Laia just shrugged, like it was no big deal. Like she had not just dropped the most absurd advancement news Ling'er had ever heard.
Truth be told, Laia barely understood how ranking up worked herself. She knew fighting helped, and making her subjects stronger helped. That was about it.
She knew other students went out and dueled each other, trading chunks of their kingdom territory for resonance. She knew you poured crystals into the core to speed things up—one hundred for First Rank, one thousand for Second, on and on upward.
That was not how it worked for her.
Her clans grew stronger on their own, stubborn as weeds. Every weekly void tide left a little more resonance behind, a little more rule-force seeping into the land. She did not have to fight for it. She did not have to pour crystals into it. All she had to do was make sure no one starved, and her kingdom leveled up in her sleep.