"This armor rivals a Martial Emperor… are you ready to study it?" Ethan asked, and every single one of them nodded, visibly struggling to contain themselves. They wanted to lunge at that armor, to snatch it off the table and tear it apart layer by layer just to understand how it worked.
The restraint it took to stand still was written across their faces. They wanted to know how an armor without any formation array, without any recognizable means from the cultivation world, could hold power on that level. It shouldn't have been possible.
Even at their best, with everything they knew, the strongest armor they could create on their own sat at the Martial Saint level—and that was considered impressive by any standard.
It was only when they combined their knowledge of the cultivation world's materials and formations with the electrical framework Ethan had introduced that they could push their creations into the Martial King realm. But Martial Emperor? That was an entirely different universe of power, and this armor achieved it through technology alone.
"Go ahead, have your clones deal with it," Ethan said with a smile, waving them on. They could afford to be generous with their clones—the weakest among them sat at Level 1 Martial Lord, which gave them more than enough energy reserves to create thousands of shadow clones running simultaneously without breaking a sweat.
They moved fast. Clones were created in seconds, an army of duplicates filling the lab in the blink of an eye, and a group of them carefully lifted the armor from the workstation and carried it off to a separate section of the lab where they could begin tearing into it. Their main bodies remained standing before Ethan, eyes locked onto the next item that had appeared in his hands.
"This is the Super Soldier Serum. It gives one Martial Warrior level 1 strength while still being a mortal." Ethan said with a smile, holding up the vial of liquid between two fingers. Their eyes widened at the implications of that—a serum that could grant cultivation-level physical power to someone without a single drop of Qi in their body. Another round of clones was created on the spot, and the vial was handed off to be studied and reverse-engineered.
"Next, we have a watch capable of destroying the universe," Ethan said casually, summoning the Omnitrix from the system's storage. The room went silent. The researchers stared at the device with a mixture of fascination and genuine horror, their minds already racing through the implications of what they were looking at.
But they took it without hesitation, spawning yet another batch of clones to handle it. And Ethan kept going. He pulled out item after item—lightsabers, time machines, portal guns, advanced robots, and dozens more.
They were given so much in such a short span of time that the lab began to overflow with clones, each group splitting off to tackle a different piece of technology from a different fictional universe.
Currently… well, they were geniuses now, enhanced far beyond their original capabilities by the Super Brain Cultivation Art. Given enough time, they would master everything Ethan had handed them.
But Ethan didn't like waiting. And more importantly, he didn't want the heavens to sense what was happening down here and rain down a tribulation upon them for messing with things that shouldn't exist in this world.
So the entire research team, clones and all, filed into the time chamber, where even the eyes of the heavens couldn't reach them. Inside those walls, they could work in peace, shielded from the scrutiny of a universe that would not look kindly on what they were building.
Ethan was looking forward to seeing what would come out of that chamber. What would happen once those items from fiction were deconstructed, understood, and then rebuilt from the ground up using the power, materials, and resources of the cultivation world? The thought alone was enough to make him grin.
With the research team settled, Ethan turned his attention inward. He summoned the clones... well, his other selves, that had been cultivating inside the time chamber stored within his ring, and began the process of fusing with them.
Each fusion hit like a wave, which caused his very existence to transform, evolving to greater heights. His cultivation exploded upward, climbing through level after level in rapid succession.
After all, those clones had each spent an entire day cultivating independently, and with so many of them running at the same time, the combined gains were enormous.
'Only at Level 15 Martial Disciple...' Ethan thought, looking down at his open palm as the energy settled within him. The peak of Martial Disciple for a normal cultivator was Level 12—a fact that most of the world didn't even know, since the royal family kept the existence of those extra levels a closely guarded secret.
Yet here he was, sitting at Level 15, three levels beyond what should have been the ceiling. His strength? That was harder to pin down. Seeing as the average person in this world would stop at Level 7 Martial Disciple before breaking through to Martial Warrior, Ethan estimated that with everything he had at his disposal—abilities, techniques, physique, and passive buffs—he was roughly equal to a Level 9 Martial Warrior in a straight fight, and higher than that if he incorporated his martial arts. This was a martial warrior who reached level 12, Martial disciple.
His survivability, though? That was where the gap became absurd. Even a Martial Lord would curse at how impossibly difficult it was to put Ethan down for good. Between his infinite repertoire of defensive techniques, his extra lives, his cloning ability, and his passive regeneration, killing him was less of a challenge and more of a punishment for whoever was foolish enough to attempt it.
Ethan's eyes brightened as he tested his precognition, peering into the flow of the future. The picture had sharpened considerably since his last attempt. Before, he couldn't see anyone whose combat capability exceeded his own—their bio-auras had blocked his sight like walls of frosted glass.
But now, at Level 15, those walls were thinner. He could see Martial Masters within the visions of the future now, their forms clear and their movements readable. The stronger he became, the more powerful the bio-auras he could outright ignore, and the deeper his sight could penetrate into what was coming.
***
Within the void of outer space, far from any inhabited world, there existed powerful beings who answered to no nation and followed no law but their own. Among them was a mercenary group feared across multiple star systems, led by the Martial Emperor known as the Blood Queen.
She was currently sitting in the command chair of her flagship, her blood-red hair falling across one side of her face, hiding the scarred, empty socket where her missing eye used to be. Her one remaining eye was locked onto a report displayed on the screen before her, and the anger radiating off of her was enough to make the temperature in the room drop.
She was furious. Absolutely, completely furious.
Long ago, she had managed to kidnap Ethan. At the time, it had seemed like hitting a gold mine—a prince of the United Empire, snatched right out from under their noses. The ransom alone should have set her crew up for years. And Ethan, that strange, infuriating brat, had been so cooperative—too cooperative.
He had actually worked with her to ensure his parents would pay out a massive sum, even coaching her on how to negotiate for a larger amount when she had initially asked for something modest.
He was such a weird kid. His behavior didn't match anything she expected from a hostage, and that oddness had made her curious. She had started talking to him—just idle conversation at first, to pass the time.
And before she knew what was happening, before she could even identify the moment things shifted, that brat was in her bed. He had said exactly the right words at exactly the right moments. He had made her feel special—genuinely special—in a way that no one in her entire violent, blood-soaked life had ever managed to do.
He had looked at her scars, the ones she hid from the world, the ones that made her feel like something broken and discarded, and he had made them look beautiful. He had made her feel beautiful.
Everything he did was perfect, and the worst part—the part that made her want to tear her own hair out—was that her spiritual sense had confirmed every single time that Ethan wasn't lying.
Not once.
Every word that left his mouth had been the truth. But the bastard had been using her the entire time. He got her to fall in love. He got her to lower her guard, to believe that this was one of those rare, impossible love stories where the hostage and the captor found something real in each other.
And the moment her defenses were down, the moment she let herself be vulnerable for the first time in decades… he ran. He vanished like smoke, and she hadn't been able to find him since.
She hated that bastard with every fiber of her being. But she hated herself even more, because she—a peak Martial Emperor, a woman who had carved her name into the stars through blood and fire—had foolishly fallen for a cripple's scheme. But now, with word of his marriage spreading across the domain, she finally knew where he would be. This was her chance to find Ethan and restore her honor.
"Set off, we're going to war." She roared, and the sound of her voice echoed through the ship like a cannon blast. Instantly, the Blood Queen's fleet powered up, engines igniting across dozens of vessels as they oriented toward a single destination and launched into the void, heading straight for Earth.