The lizardmen officially accepted first. That did not surprise Phong.
The queen had always been practical beneath the layers of dignity, ritual, and cold reptilian caution. She understood what Baratok Town had become. She understood what Fort Erymanthian meant. More importantly, she understood what the Sky Emperor's appearance had changed. The old game of surviving floor by floor was over. Now every kingdom, tribe, and species had to decide whether to drift alone through the new age or bind itself to something sturdier.
They had already agreed to the ideas of an alliance with Phong's influence as its heart. Whether the food supplier was a camp, or a kingdom meant little to them, as long as the lv1 farmer they knew was the head of thing. They knew Phong had no interest in hegemonism.
So did their vassals.
The mice of the Great Burrow bowed their heads and agreed with visible relief. The Buforians croaked their support in a chorus that sounded almost ceremonial. The Inkborn representatives said little, but their soft clicking assent carried no uncertainty. Even the giant crickets, whose manner always made everything sound like the reading of an agricultural law, accepted the terms of alliance without any fuss.
The Kamohai came next. That, in its own way, was even more meaningful.
The shark-folk mercenaries did not give loyalty lightly. They gave labor, appetite, and violence where profit made sense. Yet they had fought beside Phong long enough, eaten enough of his food, and seen enough of his towns endure that the calculation had shifted. Joining his alliance no longer looked like sentiment. It looked like the smartest way to survive the second age of the dungeon.
So they acknowledge Yuè too.
The Tortura elders, already settled under Phong's protection and waiting out the slow cruelty of their leveling curse, needed even less convincing. Their chieftain, after being informed, saw no harm in forming an alliance with Phong. A group of Tortura archers would be sent to Baratok town, and monthly payment of food, material like vines, barks would be sent to the village.
The only delays came from the Greencap Bunnies and the Wolven. Phong expected that.
They did not reject him. But acknowledging a new body of power as a kingdom in the dungeon and establish official terms on alliances was something only their leaders had the right to do. And so, time was needed. However, both sides also made one thing clear: they wanted stronger trade ties and stronger diplomatic ties now, even before any final military compact was signed.
That was enough for Phong.
He accepted the delay with no offense and no pressure. He even said openly that he wished, one day soon, to speak face to face with the Greencap king and the Wolven chieftain. That earned him two very different reactions. The Greencap envoy stiffened with courtly caution. The Wolven representative looked almost amused, like the idea of the farmer calmly requesting audience with power appealed to some old part of him.
When the formalities finally eased, Phong did something that made Alex and Dominic exchange the same look. He handed the organization of the allied army over to the lizardmen queen.
Not because he did not care, but because he knew exactly where his own strengths ended.
He was not a general. He was not a king in the old sense, no matter what the new shape of Yuè might become. He could feed people, connect places, build hidden safeholds, and change the land itself. But armies needed discipline, hierarchy, and someone who understood long command under pressure.
The lizardmen queen did.
So she took that responsibility with the grave acceptance of someone being handed a second crown.
Afterward, while the new alliances settled into practical discussion, Phong moved on to the next piece of his work.
Rice. Water spinach, and coffee.
The words alone would have made Rico ascend when he heard the plan for self-grown caffeine was already in motion.
Near Baratok Town, Phong walked the wet ground and chose the spots himself. Water spinach near the shallower moisture-rich edges. Rice in the flatter irrigable fields where the lake's influence could be controlled. Coffee farther in, where the soil held the right balance and the growing conditions might, if the dungeon gods were merciful, translate well enough from dream to reality.
Alex followed him while he worked, sometimes saying nothing, sometimes asking the practical questions no one else thought to ask.
"How much water?"
"How long until first harvest? Same ten day cycle?"
"Can the mice protect the early lines?"
Phong answered as he planted.
Dominic mostly watched and muttered now and then about how absurd it was that three days ago he had been in a stadium, and now he was watching a level-one farmer start a coffee industry in a monster frontier.
Once the work was done, they returned to the surface through the Lime-Oak network.
The clubhouse felt almost ordinary when they stepped back into it.
Emma and the rest of Team Nemean were waiting there, spread across the room in the comfortable disarray that had become natural to them. The first leg had ended with DC Otters coming to New York. The second leg meant Team Nemean now had to go to DC and be the guests there. Which meant timing mattered, flights mattered, public image mattered. The fact that Phong, Alex, and Dominic had returned on schedule mattered too.
Emma looked up first from her phone.
"You're alive."
"Barely," Dominic said, dropping into a chair.
Phong ignored that and sat down.
Then Alex, because she enjoyed stealing his thunder almost as much as Phong hated narrating his own madness, told the others what he had done.
She did not dramatize it, because that was how Alex's German side function, straight to the point. Yet somehow made it sound worse.
The new fort in the Obsidian Canyon, then the Lime-Oak clone planted there. The defensive lines, the alliances accepted and those delayed. The naming of Yuè, and finally the boar skull over the gate.
The look on the others' faces became increasingly priceless. Jake stared like his eyes were about to fall out. Joanne looked at Phong as if she wanted to accuse him of smuggling a whole separate campaign setting into the main plot. Séline and Camille both looked proud. Alexei shrugged, asking if he could expand the chicken coop to floor 2 as well.
Phong shrugged at all of them.
"What?"
Joanne pointed at him. "You disappeared for one day and came back with a kingdom."
"It's a small kingdom."
"That is not helping."
Emma, who had already guessed much of it from pieces, leaned back and said, "You did it before the format changes."
Phong nodded.
"That was the point."
Now everyone listened properly.
"If the league moves forward with this new format," he said, "a joined dungeon dive for Celestial Skeletal, then the mice of the Great Burrow become one of our biggest advantages." He folded his hands. "Intel. Routes. Enemy activity. Safe paths. Boss sightings. It all matters more in a long dive."
Emma's eyes sharpened with approval.
Phong continued.
"So I wanted Yuè in place beforehand."
That was the kind of decision only Phong made: a pre-positioning move. Quiet infrastructure built before the public even fully understood what kind of game they were about to be forced into.
Then he added the part that made half the room grin and the other half go still.
"I also told the mice to look for bosses and ruins from alien civilizations in our controlled territories across all three floors."
Silence.
Then Jake laughed first.
"Of course you did."
"You mean," Emma said, "you're planning to arm us to the teeth?"
"With Celestial Skeletal and relics," Joanne finished, now fully pleased.
Phong did not bother denying it. That was exactly what he meant.
And because the room had just started settling into that warm dangerous feeling Team Nemean always got when Phong's plans became visible in stages, there came a knock at the door.
Mr. Zero stepped in like he owned thresholds. Which, given who he really was, Phong supposed he often did.
He wore the same businessman disguise he favored on the surface. Sharp suit. Perfectly unbothered smile. Thick sideburns and all the strange charm of a man who looked like he had invented both venture capital and practical jokes in the same afternoon.
"Evening," he said.
No one in the room reacted like this was normal anymore, but no one panicked either. That in itself said too much about the kind of lives they now led.
Phong raised a brow. "What brings you here."
Mr. Zero spread his hands.
"My dear sister has a gift for you."
Phong's shoulders tightened slightly at the mention of Bai Hu.
Mr. Zero noticed and looked delighted by it.
"She wished to thank you for enabling the birth of a Mushroomkhan," he said. "But she is, alas, much too prideful to hand it to you directly."
Joanne covered her mouth, already bracing for something ridiculous.
"And so," Mr. Zero continued, "I have come to deliver it on her behalf."
Phong did not know whether to feel suspicious, offended, or tired.
He chose all three.
Still, when Mr. Zero produced the object, he took it.
It was a pair of boots.
Neither beautiful in the ornate relic sense nor the kind of thing a king or hero would pose with in a painting. They looked sturdy, travel-worn, practical, and strangely old-fashioned, with a plain number 7 written on top in a way that made them feel more like an artifact from a fairy tale than from the dungeon.
Phong stared at them.
Mr. Zero, with obvious pleasure, explained.
"Seven-league boots."
Rico gasped dramatically from the couch.
But Mr. Zero lifted one finger.
"Modified, of course. They are connected to the Lime-Oak network."
That got everyone's attention.
He went on.
"If you need to use the Lime-Oak in haste, simply click your heels together, and you will appear at any Lime-Oak within the network."
Phong's hands tightened on the boots.
That alone would have been absurdly useful.
Then came the cost.
"Once used," Mr. Zero said, "they enter a cooldown of seven days. So I advise care. Even fairy tales dislike being cheapened by overuse."
Phong looked down at the boots again.
He had expected Bai Hu's "gift," if it existed at all, to be insulting, explosive, or somehow both. Instead she had handed him something so uniquely, terrifyingly useful to him and him alone that for a second he did not know how to react.
Because of course that was the thing. A combat relic would help Alex more. Or Dominic. Or almost anyone else on the team.
This? This was his.
A panic escape button made for his network, his movement, his ridiculous life split between camps and surfaces and secret roots.
Team Nemean reacted before he did.
They laughed.
Not meanly. Just with that warm exhausted joy that came whenever the dungeon handed Phong yet another item that seemed custom-designed to reward his weirdest possible lifestyle.
Jake was first.
"Of course the farmer gets teleport boots."
Joanne wiped at her eyes. "That is the most Phong relic I've ever seen."
Dominic shook his head. "You're becoming impossible."
Alex, sitting closest, leaned over and touched the top of one boot with the same expression she wore when amused affection and tactical envy met in the middle.
"That really is perfect for you."
Phong looked at Mr. Zero once more. The businessman-floor-boss only smiled wider.
"Tell your sister…" Phong began, then stopped, realizing he did not actually have a sentence he wanted carried to Bai Hu.
Mr. Zero laughed softly.
"I shall tell her you looked deeply inconvenienced by gratitude."
Then he left, as suddenly and cleanly as he had arrived.
The room stayed warm after he was gone, leaving Team Nemean with the absurdity of teleport boots, Moon kingdoms, three hidden territories, and the fact that their level-one farmer now had more methods of disappearing than most assassins.
Emma let them enjoy it for exactly long enough.
Then she clapped once and stood.
"Sleep."
The room groaned. Emma did not care.
"We go to the airport on time tomorrow. Which means no one stays up trying to test fairy tale footwear, no one starts a theoretical debate about monarchic branding, and no one," she looked directly at Rico, "tries to steal the boots."
Rico looked wounded. "Raccoon is trustworthy."
"Do you?" everyone said at once.
And with that, the night finally settled into something gentler. After fungal megastructures, Sky Emperors, kingdoms, relics, and the constant threat of escalation, Team Nemean let themselves laugh, stretch, yawn, and drift toward sleep like people who still deserved ordinary tiredness.