Chief Grade Greatsword, Entry Fee

**Boom!**

The plaza shook with the impact.

The Mechanical Chief's crystal shield was formidable — under Lu Yuan's relentless assault, it had weathered nearly a hundred blows before finally giving way. With the shield shattered, his greatsword found its mark on every swing, crashing down on the massive mechanical head again and again. Ten more strikes. Fifteen. Then the head burst apart, and the red glow in the mechanical eyes dimmed and went dark forever.

Mechanical Chief: dead.

Lu Yuan and Amy looked at each other and smiled.

From the wreckage, over a dozen light orbs rose into the air. Seven glowed a deep green. Three shimmered in pale cyan. And one pulsed with a beautiful, luminous blue that seemed to breathe with its own inner light.

Up on the surrounding rooftops, every remaining Gene Warrior went completely still.

Then someone said it.

"**Chief Grade item!**"

That was all it took. Every eye snapped to the blue orb. Reason began to dissolve.

*If I could grab that Chief Grade item... I'd soar to the top. Become a true powerhouse.* The thought moved through the crowd like a current. Most of the Gene Warriors watching were already beyond thinking clearly.

A Kaman with bloodshot eyes erupted from one of the rooftops: "They must have burned through their Spirit Power killing it! **Move! Go grab the loot!**"

He vaulted over the edge first.

Half the warriors on the surrounding buildings poured down after him. By the time the wave reached the plaza floor, over two hundred people were charging — including Gene Warriors who had shown no greed until this moment, now staring at the blue orb with labored breathing, bodies moving before their minds could catch up. Even those who had never once shown covetous eyes now found their breath coming short and heavy.

Lu Yuan simply bent down and swept every orb into his grasp before anyone could close the distance.

Amy's hands came up an instant later. Dozens of Tianrao Purple Vine tendrils shot from her palms, weaving into a sweeping purple net that blanketed the entire charging mob.

Lu Yuan moved through them. His greatsword swept in broad, efficient arcs, blade light trailing through the air as Gene Warriors fell one after another, blood spreading across the stone beneath his feet.

It was over in moments.

On the surrounding rooftops, every spectator had fallen completely silent.

Elf youth Beiman stood watching the carnage below with a faint, contemptuous smile. "How naive."

Beside him, Meli nodded, still smiling. "They never even thought about it. Those warriors couldn't bring themselves to *face* the Mechanical Chief. What made them think they could stand against the two humans who *killed* it?"

"Those two together are just insane," someone muttered from a neighboring rooftop. "The human boy tanks the Chief's attacks, the human girl binds it — and then it's just chopping a wooden post."

Another voice: "Right — and if he can tank a *Lord Grade's* attacks, and she can bind a Lord Grade..." A pause. "Wouldn't that mean even a Lord Grade couldn't escape them?"

Eyes met across every rooftop. A chill worked its way through the crowd without exception.

Amy watched the last attacker fall, then let out a cold sniff and retracted the Tianrao Purple Vine.

The surviving Gene Warriors looked at the bodies carpeting the plaza below and felt the last embers of recklessness go cold inside them, as though a bucket of ice water had been upended over their heads.

Only a vanishingly rare few could stare down Chief Grade treasure and stay calm.

Lu Yuan raised an eyebrow, a glimmer of amusement in his eyes, and drew out the blue orb.

Inside it floated a massive black metal greatsword. The shape was unmistakable — the same weapon the Mechanical Chief had wielded.

**Chief Grade Gene Armament Greatsword.**

Amy stared at it for a moment. Her expression immediately collapsed. She thrust out her lower lip. "Hmph. Why couldn't it be a Staff?"

"Sorry to disappoint you," Lu Yuan said pleasantly.

He closed his fist around the orb and crushed it. The Mechanical Sentinel dissolved into a stream of light and flowed into his body.

The ghost image of the Dark Red Blade that had orbited his Gene Chain was displaced — pushed aside as the Mechanical Sentinel settled in its place.

A surge of raw power immediately flooded his flesh and bones, dense and overwhelming, reshaping him from the inside out in the span of a single breath.

*Strength: up close to fifty percent. Defense: up close to fifty percent. Agility — never his strong suit — also up by nearly fifty percent. Spirit Power and Perception, already his strongest attributes, gained less than ten percent.*

Primary enhancements: Strength and Defense. Secondary: Agility. Marginal: Spirit and Perception.

*Pure brute-force armament*, he thought. *Through and through.*

But the special ability was what made it truly exceptional: channel Spirit Power in, and it entered Overload Mode — three minutes of operation, with every strike amplified by approximately fifty percent.

He already knew his raw attack power at Chief Grade was substantial, comparable to an Assault Type warrior even without armament support. Adding fifty percent on top of that?

*Dangerous*, he decided, with quiet satisfaction.

Part of the gain felt so dramatic because the Dark Red Blade had been a relatively weak armament to begin with. The floor had been low; the jump was correspondingly large. With his current strength combined with Black Steel Force, his attack output was already formidable among Chief Grade combatants. The Overload Mode would make it something else entirely.

He stowed the Dark Red Blade carefully. It was the first armament he'd ever used, and he wasn't ready to discard it.

He then examined the remaining orbs.

The Boss Grade drops included one armor armament — but his current armor was already Boss Grade. No point in upgrading. The other Boss Grade items were things he couldn't use at all.

The Elite Grade orbs were straightforward: all Enhanced Spirit Power Gene Fluid, every last one.

"I'll take the Chief Grade greatsword," he told Amy. "Everything else is yours."

He passed over the remaining items. Amy accepted them without much complaint — she was a wealthy young woman by anyone's standard; none of these things were genuinely scarce to her. The only thing she truly wanted was a Chief Grade armament suited for herself, and today hadn't delivered one.

Their arrangement was simple: each kept what they needed, and the rest compensated the other party.

*The Mechanical Sentinel alone*, Lu Yuan reflected, *was worth several times more than everything else in that pile combined.*

The value of a Chief Grade Gene Armament was almost impossible to overstate. Even for the Algaibi family — powerful and well-resourced — assembling a complete set of First-rank Chief Grade armaments was no easy undertaking. The principle held across every tier: lower rank, higher quality, rarer drop. First-rank Chief Grade Feral Beasts were vanishingly scarce, and their loot was scarcer still.

The practical implications were staggering. A Boss Grade warrior equipped with a Chief Grade armament could hold their own against Chief Grade opponents for several exchanges. Even an Elite Grade warrior would be elevated to Boss Grade standards with it equipped. Sell it if you couldn't use it — you'd still clear several million First-rank Spirit Crystals. The total resources in play here were enough to take an ordinary Gene Warrior from First Rank all the way to Battle General, or even Battle Venerable, without a single resource concern.

And if the blue orb had contained a Chief Grade Transcendent Gene rather than an armament? Worth even more. A Chief Grade Transcendent Gene, given to someone with the right aptitude to engrave it, could forge a true Chief Grade warrior from nothing.

Rare things are precious. The principle never changed.

Amy's little face still wore a guarded look as she finished storing her portion of the loot — half afraid someone would reach out and snatch it back.

The group gathered themselves and pushed through the gate into the building.

The lobby inside was unlike any standard hundred-meter structure. Instead of a simple open hall, this space had two doors flanking the left and right walls, and a third set into the far interior end.

Lu Yuan studied the layout for a moment. "The side doors probably connect to the neighboring hundred-meter buildings. The inner door should lead up to the five-hundred-meter tower."

Amy nodded, eyes drifting toward the inner door with a gleam of anticipation. "There has to be good stuff in there."

"We'll find out when we go in," Lu Yuan started to say—

Voices drifted in from outside before he could finish. "Friends! Could you wait just a moment?"

Lu Yuan raised an eyebrow and turned toward the entrance.

Outside stood dozens of Gene Warriors representing every race present in the ruins. At the front: a broad-shouldered young human man with an easy, personable smile. Beside him stood a slender, sharp-featured elf youth.

*Tianfu Consortium?* The thought moved through more than one watcher's mind when the man stepped forward.

"Hello, both of you." The muscular man's tone was warm. "I'm Xu Qi, from the Tianfu Consortium. We were wondering — once you've finished here, are you planning to head to the Floating City?"

Amy and Lin Xixi turned to look.

"What's on your mind?" Lu Yuan said.

Xu Qi cleared his throat. "We were hoping we might be able to join you when you go up. The Floating City is enormous — your group probably doesn't have the numbers to fully cover it. We'd only need the outer edge areas. We wouldn't get in your way."

"We'd be fine with that too," a Baro behind him called out.

Amy turned to Lu Yuan, blinking. "Lei Feng, what do you think?"

An image surfaced in Lu Yuan's mind — Liu Xi, back in Sandy Rock City. He nodded. "Right."

He swept his gaze over the assembled Gene Warriors outside, took a moment to consider, and smiled.

"You're welcome to come up with us. Entry fee is one thousand Spirit Power Gene Fluids per person."

Silence.

The crowd hesitated.

Xu Qi's smile turned rueful. "Friend... a thousand is a little steep, isn't it?"

Amy's expression sharpened immediately. "Steep? Our team cleared every single Mechanical Guardian outside this building. Without us, you wouldn't have gotten through the front door. On top of that — to reach the Floating City, you need the aerial elevator, and the only control panel is in the thousand-meter tower. That'll be in our hands. You want to go up, we charge an entry fee. Is that really unreasonable?"

A beat of silence. Then a quiet mutter from somewhere in the crowd: "A *thousand* Spirit Power Gene Fluids per person?"

Someone quickly did the arithmetic. A thousand Spirit Power Gene Fluids was the equivalent of a hundred thousand First-rank Spirit Crystals. That was a number that stung.

Xu Qi took a breath, pressed down his reluctance, and shook his head with a wry smile. "All right, human powerhouses — five hundred per person?"

"Deal." Amy accepted without hesitation.

"One thousand per person — deal!" From behind Xu Qi, a Baro warrior called out with decisive enthusiasm. "Take us up when the time comes!"

Beiman, after a moment's quiet consideration, smiled. "We're in as well."

Xu Qi, seeing Beiman commit, gave a nod of his own.

Once both Xu Qi and Beiman had agreed, the rest of the Gene Warriors fell into line. They understood the situation well enough: the Floating City was a massive prize, and the only reason Lu Yuan's group was opening the door at all was their shortage of people. For a team with proper numbers, this opportunity would never have come to them. The entry fee would be recovered easily — they'd been in the ruins four days already, and every team present had built up a solid haul.

Lu Yuan said what he was thinking aloud: "The Floating City has far more resources than anything on the ground. A thousand Spirit Power Gene Fluids — you should be able to earn that back without breaking a sweat. If we weren't short on people, I wouldn't be letting you in at all."

*Better to collect a fee and let others do some of the legwork*, he'd reasoned, *than try to cover everything alone.*

"We understand." Xu Qi smiled pleasantly and nodded. Outside, he and Beiman and their respective groups glanced at the Tianrao Purple Vine still woven across the gate — and their eyelids twitched, but none of them said a word about it.

"You'll need to wait a bit longer," Lu Yuan told them. "We're going to sweep through this high-rise section first."

Then he turned to Lin Xixi. "Xixi — take the others and hold this position. Amy and I will go up."

Lin Xixi blinked and glanced at Amy. Amy gave a single nod. "Follow Lei Feng's lead."

Amy immediately turned back to the inner door, eyes bright. She ran to Lu Yuan's side. "There *has* to be good stuff in there!"

Lu Yuan looked at the three doors in front of them and felt the same pull of anticipation.

"We'll find out."

*His plan was straightforward: hit the Floating City, hunt its Chief Grade enemies, strip the core zone clean, then move on to the core zones of other Floating Cities. The central area would come last.*

One Floating City was simply too vast. Spending all eight remaining days in a single location wasn't worth it — true efficiency meant keeping the pace.

*Keep moving*, he thought. *No waste.*