Back in his underground base, Ethan smirked as he watched everything happening with his other self. Honestly, this situation with his mother was years in the making.
From the very moment he was born and opened his eyes for the first time, he had seen through his mother's act and began working on making her love him—genuinely, not out of obligation or guilt, but real, unconditional love.
Originally, his plan had been to use that love as leverage. He had intended to get both her and his sister invested enough in him to dedicate their resources toward finding him a way to cultivate.
He had been planning to become a body cultivator specifically—body cultivation was exceedingly rare, and seemingly no one in the entire Milky Way galaxy possessed such arts, which meant there was no established path for him to follow. He would have had to look beyond this galaxy.
But that plan was useless now. He had the system. He had cultivation. He had everything he once needed them for, and then some. As for his sister, he had the chance—through his captured clone—to get Ellen to reveal what she was planning. But he didn't need her to spell it out.
He already had a solid guess. Someone was giving her orders, pulling strings from behind the scenes, and given that her goal was to land a massive, crippling blow against the human domain, Ethan was fairly confident it was the demon race. The pieces fit too neatly for it to be anything else.
Ethan shifted his attention to the door leading to the time chamber, and as if on cue, it swung open. Out came his shinobi—but they looked nothing like they had when they entered. They were no longer dressed in their standard ninja outfits, their faces no longer hidden behind masks. For the first time, they stood before him with their appearances fully revealed.
Leading them was a black-haired woman with a hollow, empty gaze that could make even a seasoned killer uncomfortable. This was Alpha. She had thrown away her birth name long ago and went solely by her code name now—Alpha was who she was, and whoever she had been before no longer existed.
Behind Alpha stood Beta—a blue-haired young man whose gaze was similarly hollow, though not quite as deep or as vacant as hers. There was still something behind his eyes, faint but present, like a candle flame that refused to go out no matter how many times the wind tried to snuff it.
Behind Beta was Gamma, another man, who wore a smile. But there was no life behind that smile—no warmth, no humor, nothing real. It was an empty expression, a mask molded into the shape of friendliness.
He was a snake.
The kind of person who would laugh with you, pat you on the back, and compliment your cooking while mentally mapping every weakness you had and planning exactly how he would kill you if the order ever came.
Delta, Epsilon, and Zeta filled out the rest of the front line. These were Ethan's six strongest shinobi—or more accurately, his six most talented.
Every single person standing in this room carried their own trauma. Some had been slaves. Some had been sex slaves, passed around and broken until there was almost nothing left of who they used to be.
Some had been thrown out by their own parents and clans, discarded like trash the moment they were deemed useless or inconvenient. And every last one of them had a single thing in common—at their lowest point, at the moment they had been ready to give up on everything, a hand had reached out to them. Ethan's hand.
Ethan had become their light. He had promised them everything—power, purpose, a future worth living for—and all they had to do in return was make an oath to never betray him. That was the deal. One oath, and Ethan would give them the chance to rewrite their own stories from scratch.
But these six weren't the full extent of Ethan's network. Not even close. He had operatives embedded as spies inside clans, sects, noble houses, and powerful organizations across the empire and beyond. Others were out on active missions at this very moment, carrying out tasks that no one would ever trace back to him.
Ethan had thousands of people working under him, spread across the human domain like an invisible web, and he had more than enough resources flowing in from his various businesses and operations to feed, equip, and pay every single one of them.
On top of the shinobi, there was also Ethan's research team. As they stepped through the door behind the combat group, the difference in them was immediately noticeable.
They were far different from the last time Ethan had seen them—their eyes scanned the room and everything in it with a sharpness and clarity that hadn't been there before, as though the world itself looked different to them now through the lens of the Super Brain Cultivation Art.
"We have regained our strength and gone beyond it," Alpha said, dropping to one knee before Ethan's throne. She was now a Martial Lord, and although she sat at only Level 1 of that realm, the jutsu and techniques she had gained during her time in the chamber made her a powerhouse far beyond what her cultivation level suggested.
She was stronger now than her former self had been at half-step Martial King, despite being a full ten levels below where she used to stand.
Their cultivation speed had been remarkable. The fact that they had reached this level in just one year of internal time was staggering by any standard. But it was partly thanks to the time chamber itself being a fusion of multiple treasures, each one enhancing the environment inside it.
Cultivating within that space was equivalent to cultivating in the immortal realm for the same duration—the density of energy, the compression of time, the clarity of mind it provided were all on a level that the outside world simply couldn't match.
"That's nice. What's your combat power? How many levels can you all skip?" Ethan asked with a smile. He could have given them the Omnipotent Cultivation Art—it would have made them exponentially stronger—but he had deemed them unworthy of it.
Ethan wasn't even sure these people could ever reach the immortal realm on their own. Maybe after a few thousand years of rest, recovery, and improving their mental health, maybe then they could take that final step. But that was a question for a future so distant it barely mattered right now.
"We can fight one full realm above our level," Alpha said softly. This was a massive improvement. Before entering the time chamber, without her armor equipped, her combat power had actually fallen below her own cultivation realm—she was weaker in a fight than her level suggested.
But now, sitting ten full levels below where her former self had been, she was far stronger than that former self had ever been. Her current combat capability placed her at Level 1 Martial King, an entire realm above her actual cultivation.
"But to do this, we need to go all out, and we can only tap into that level of power for a limited amount of time before we burn through our energy reserves completely. But we are assassins, so that's not a problem." She said softly. They didn't need to sustain a fight for hours—they needed one opening, one moment, and the target was dead. Ethan nodded at that, satisfied with the assessment.
And although they were classified as assassins, their skillset covered far more than just killing. They were tanks when they needed to be, capable of deploying sand armor jutsu and lightning chakra armor that turned their bodies into walking fortresses.
Their offensive power was devastating—they had dust release, a technique capable of breaking matter down at a molecular level. If a drawn-out battle demanded it, they had wood release to control the battlefield itself, reshaping the terrain to their advantage.
Their speed was terrifying thanks to the body flicker jutsu stacked on top of the natural buff that the lightning chakra armor provided, compounded further by techniques that allowed them to lighten their own body weight to move even faster. They were, in every sense, complete combatants.
And that was all without the armor. What would happen when they put on the suits Ethan had built for them—those Iron Man-inspired armors that amplified every aspect of their physical and combat capabilities?
Naturally, Alpha, with her armor equipped, would be well above a Level 1 Martial King. The gap between her armored and unarmored states was the difference between dangerous and catastrophic.
"Go ahead and rest for now. I need to work with the research group." Ethan said with a smile, waving the combat team off. The research group stepped forward as the shinobi filed out, and Ethan led them down the corridor toward the lab.
"I will give you all something I want you to research… but I'm sure you all want to work on everything at the same time, so how about I give you a cloning technique first?" Ethan asked with a smile, and every single one of them nodded almost instantly, their eyes lighting up at the prospect.
Ethan snapped his fingers, and the technique flooded into their minds—the Shadow Clone Jutsu. They stood there, stunned, as the full scope of what they had just received became clear. This jutsu allowed them to create perfect clones of themselves, each one capable of independent thought and action.
The cost was energy—each clone required a portion of their reserves to sustain—but when a clone was dispersed, that energy returned to the original, along with every scrap of experience, knowledge, and skill the clone had accumulated during its existence.
For a group of researchers, it was the single most powerful tool imaginable. One person could become ten, each one running a different experiment, and when they merged back together, they would have the combined results of all ten without having spent more than a fraction of the time.
"The first thing I want you all to study is nanotech… how about I give you an armor to work with as a starting point," Ethan said, and with a wave of his hand, he summoned a suit of armor from the system's storage.
It materialized on the workstation before them—sleek, compact, and shimmering with a metallic sheen. It was the suit of armor Iron Man had used during Endgame, built entirely from nanobots that could reshape, reform, and adapt to any situation in real time. Let's not forget this armor could create energy constructs and such things.