Lin Yuan hovered above his Divine Domain.
His gaze passed through the ash and settled on the altar at the basin's center.
He raised his hand, aiming at the remains upon it.
Dark-gold light flared in his eyes. Chains plunged into the Rot-Armored Cockroach King's corpse.
The insect's body disintegrated. Flesh, carapace, and venom came apart beneath the chains' constriction.
A moment later, a sphere of dark-green light hovered in the air.
[Notice: Extraction successful. Black Iron-grade conceptual trait obtained: Acid Corrosion.]
[Trait Effect: Gives followers highly acidic bodily fluids. Attacks deal additional corrosive damage capable of easily melting the armor of creatures at the same grade.]
Lin Yuan tightened his fingers and crushed the sphere.
The Divine Domain panel automatically deducted sixty faith points.
The light became sixty green streaks and sank into the kneeling Petrified Goblins below.
Rrrgh.
Low growls rose from the goblins.
Drops of dark-green sweat seeped between their plates of stone armor.
They dripped onto the scorched earth and hissed, eating small pits into the ground.
A sickly green acid film also coated their bone blades.
All sixty goblins had evolved into poisonous heavy infantry.
Lin Yuan nodded in satisfaction, but didn't leave the domain at once.
Several faint glints at the battlefield's edge caught his attention.
He lowered his consciousness until it hovered ten meters above the ground.
Below lay mountains of ordinary Corrupted Cockroach remains.
On this lifeless scorched land, the wasteland environment's unusual laws worked in silence.
Three hundred thousand square kilometers of scorched earth were a natural furnace in their own right.
Fire-toxic embers falling from the sky, heat surging through the ground's energy veins, and the goblins' daily trampling and slaughter all played their part.
The neurotoxins in the dead cockroaches hadn't dissipated.
Instead, this hostile land had slowly cooked, settled, and refined them.
Lin Yuan made a grasping motion.
A dozen or so deep-green crystals, each an irregular polyhedron, broke through the thick ash and flew into his palm.
They felt cold. Green mist swirled within them.
He opened the Divine Domain panel and scanned them.
[Wasteland Toxin Crystal]
[Quality: Peak Black Iron]
[Description: Highly concentrated toxin crystals, naturally refined from Abyssal cockroach toxins over three months by the wasteland's extreme heat and poison gas. The frenzied Abyssal impurities have been removed.]
Interest flashed through Lin Yuan's eyes.
Ordinary divine textbooks considered anything poisonous a hidden threat to a Divine Domain.
A nature- or light-oriented god who found such things in their domain would have to pay a fortune for purification.
But the universe was vast. There were always unconventional people.
Independent gods who cultivated poison laws, undead laws, or even shadow laws.
What they lacked most were naturally purified, high-purity toxin crystals without the Abyss's frenzied attributes.
Lin Yuan immediately left his Divine Domain.
Opening his eyes, he accessed his Deity Terminal and logged into the Pantheon Trading Network.
He switched identities and registered an anonymous alias: Scrapyard.
Then he uploaded all dozen or so [Wasteland Toxin Crystals], together with several hundred relatively intact, high-grade mutant cockroach carapaces.
He showed no mercy when setting his prices.
A full thirty percent above ordinary poison materials on the market.
He was targeting independent cultivators desperate for supplies.
Unconventional gods spent years in the black market, unable to buy proper materials. Faced with pure toxin crystals like these, they would empty their pockets to acquire them.
He confirmed the listings.
Lin Yuan got up and went to the kitchen for a cup of water.
He had barely drunk half when his terminal began vibrating wildly.
Ding! Ding! Ding!
The clear chimes ran together.
[Your item has sold!]
[Your item has sold!]
In less than an hour, his stock was gone.
His balance jumped wildly. Even after the black market's outrageous twenty-percent fee, a fortune arrived in his account.
[Current Faith Point Balance: 28,450]
Lin Yuan's lips curved upward at the number.
Profiteering.
Cockroach egg cases purchased for a few hundred faith points had not only provided his followers with three months of free sparring partners, but also produced byproducts worth almost thirty thousand.
With Creation Extraction and this natural wasteland furnace, he could mass-produce custom poisons on an assembly line.
An Abyssal processing plant, in every sense.
With this money, a dozen army expansion plans sprang into his mind.
He was about to shop in the other trading sections when the military network device on his wrist lit up a piercing red.
[Urgent Notice: All students in senior Class Two must log into the virtual campus immediately. Late arrivals will be expelled!]
Sender: Homeroom Teacher Lei Yan.
Lin Yuan's eyes narrowed slightly.
A mandatory military order.
He immediately returned to bed and put on his holographic interface.
White light flashed.
He appeared in senior Class Two's virtual classroom.
His classmates still hadn't recovered from that morning's shock. Exhaustion and fear marked their faces.
Fatty Wang squeezed through the crowd. He saw Lin Yuan and was about to greet him when space twisted above the lectern.
Lei Yan appeared from thin air.
"Everyone's here." He scanned the room coldly.
The classroom fell silent.
"An announcement." His finger tapped the desktop with a dull knocking sound.
"Your beginner protection period ends completely at midnight tonight."
Gasps rose from the students.
In this world, beginner protection lasted only seven days.
During those seven days, Alliance laws protected Divine Domains and blocked all external invasions.
Once protection ended, their domains would be exposed to the Astral Realm.
"Next Monday, the Jiangcheng Education Bureau and the military will jointly hold this year's first major assessment for graduating seniors."
"The Divine Domain Defense Simulation."
Lei Yan turned and opened an enormous tactical star map on the holographic blackboard with one hand.
"No theory exam. No judging how well your crops are growing or how pretty your elves look."
"The military will use a large-scale array to project captured Abyssal monster phantoms directly into your Divine Domains."
His voice echoed through the spacious classroom, heavy with the promise of blood.
"The rules are simple. Last longer and kill more monsters to earn more points and rank higher."
Several commoner students went pale.
"Teacher..." A girl raised a trembling hand. "Will the monster projections... attack our followers?"
Lei Yan laughed coldly. "What else would they do? The projections don't possess the monsters' full strength, but their physical attacks and law-based damage are one hundred percent real."
"They won't just tear your followers apart. They'll destroy the buildings you've worked so hard to build. If all your followers die, your Divine Domain will collapse."
Deathly silence filled the room.
The wealthy students who had been showing off their beautiful domain scenery on the forum minutes earlier broke into cold sweats.
This wasn't an exam. It was throwing everything they had built onto a fire.
Looking over those terrified faces, Lei Yan changed his tone.
"Naturally, the military won't make you bleed for nothing."
"Place in the academy's top hundred, and you'll receive ten thousand faith points."
"Top ten, one hundred thousand faith points and a Black Iron-grade Environment Card."
Several students began breathing faster at those numbers.
A hundred thousand faith points could buy a decent set of low-grade kin bloodlines.
Lei Yan paused. A sharp gleam flashed in his one eye.
"As for first place in the academy..."
"Special military authorization: one [Bronze-Grade Barracks Blueprint]."
"Holy shit!"
The classroom erupted.
Lin Yuan, who had kept to the back row all this time, began breathing a little harder.
A building blueprint.
In this world of gods, resource cards, environment cards, and bloodline cards could all be bought online if someone had enough money.
Barracks blueprints alone were strategic supplies monopolized by the military and top financial powers.
Given enough materials, a single blueprint could raise a real building within a Divine Domain.
Followers who trained inside a barracks could gain systematic class bonuses, or even change into specialized troop types.
Permanent reinforcement. No limit on uses.
Money alone couldn't buy it.
Fatty Wang trembled with excitement and hissed at Lin Yuan, "Yuan! A barracks blueprint! If you got that, you could toss any kin inside and have regular troops come out!"
Lin Yuan said nothing, but his heart raced.
His Petrified Goblins still depended entirely on improvised brawling and insect killing to evolve.
With a barracks blueprint and his trait extraction, he could mass-produce an army of monsters that ignored pain, shrugged off blades, and came with their own strong acid.
He had to take first place.
Watching greed and excitement rekindle in the students, Lei Yan gave a cruel smile.
"Don't celebrate yet."
The words were a bucket of cold water.
"There is no upper limit on the strength of the military's monster projections. As long as your Divine Domain hasn't collapsed, they will keep coming in wave after wave."
"Get too greedy, and you'll lose every follower and shatter your Divine Spark."
Bracing one hand against the lectern, he leaned forward.
"During the simulation, you may press the surrender button on your terminal. The military will cut off the projection connection."
"Stay alive, and you have a right to become a god. Die, and you're nothing but space junk in the Astral Realm."
"Know your limits."
The words struck every heart in the room.