A week passed on Ardania while the friendship rekindled and became stronger.

Gaia's kids were slowly gaining more ranks, using the milder blood wine. Then Pef hugged his friends one last time, and left them a small vial of beast blood, enough to push them into divine tiers.

Then he Blinked away, heading towards another galaxy.

Wong and his wife were fighting side by side, beams of sword qi and shards of ice impaling a dozen spiders at once.

His troops fought alongside, shields and elemental shields united into a barrier formation, while fire and wind cultivators were firing jets and projectiles from behind.

In an hour, the spider horde was stalled and had begun to waver.

Wong felt hope for once. "I think we're almost done. We can have a feast after..." he told his wife in a confident voice.

Always sound confident, even if you had to fake it.

The ground shook ominously and a qi powered scream emerged, followed by a humongous beast with too many eyes.

Wong grit his teeth as he observed the Spider King or whatever the thing was. His qi was nearly depleted and the beast was at least a Tier 3. His regiment wasn't doing much better, and their morale was plummeting rapidly.

"Rally! On me Soldiers! By platoons target the eyes!" Wong yelled as he focused his qi beam to target a larger eye.

His last drop of qi went into the beam.

He closed his eyes after, slumping in defeat. Sometimes, even his best efforts were for nothing.

Then, a blast of qi leveled the battlefield, a stream of fire bathing the spiders from above.

Wong opened a tired eye and searched for the source. "Reinforcements?" he asked blurily.

"It's Lady Yuan. Must have been returning from her expedition..." Chen Wong explained while hugging him with one arm for support.

Wong circulated his qi a few times, gathering enough for a wide qi scan.

But Lady Yuan was already gone, a firestorm moving away the only sign of her real presence.

He fell to his knees and weeping in relief. Saved at the last moment...

"Still crying like a baby, eh?" a familiar voice spoke from somewhere near.

"Master?" Wong muttered in disbelief.

A friendly hand patted his head then he was drawn inside Pef's inner world.

Wong looked around in awe. The beach was mostly the same, but the universe was larger. There was a whole galaxy in here. A dozen galaxies in fact.

"You still like wine, Wong? Lady Wong too, I expect." Pef asked with a smug face, handing them two large cups of fragrant wine.

"You know me the best, Master." the disciple muttered in thanks, eager to parch his dry throat.

The wine was laced with something, but he trusted Pef with his life anyway. And indeed, he wasn't disappointed. Just a small sip fully recharged his reserves, while the next gulp actually increased his cultivation!

He sat down at the simple wooden table, as his regiment was also being moved inside and offered drinks and maize porridge as a reward for their hard effort.

"Still too weak, Wong. Not even One with the Heaven?" Pef asked with a smile.

"I am trying. But between leading the regiment and cultivating, training with the sword always falls last." Wong replied with dignity.

"The old Sea Guards, eh?" Pef mused while examining the soldiers in Wong's regiment.

A single one of them had Earth affinity, and was employed as smith and fortification builder. The descendants of the Stoneport firecone monks were now used as massed artillery, lobbing fireballs over towards the enemy.

The Wind cultivators used bows and aerial combat, though without needing airships like their Air Guard ancestors.

Not a bad setup, in Pef's view.

In a minute, the butchered remains of the spider colony were also brought in, to be prepared as a feast. The shells and claws would be soulsmithed into weapons and armor, especially those from the large spider with a Tier 3.

A hundred avatar clones began cooking the white spider meat, while setting aside the shells.

Soon enough, the regiment was fed the delicious flesh of their enemies, and they sat down to chat and exchange soldier feats.

"Here, you two. Ingest the blood and grow. Tier 2 will not cut it anymore, not for regiment leaders." Pef offered some time later, holding up a few drops of Godbeast blood.

Wong and his wife exploded and died, then revived and died again. But in a few hours, they both emerged as Tier 3 gods, standing proud while looking at Pef in awe.

"Master, you're a Tier 4 already?" Wong asked with a curious voice.

"What? Is that so hard? Just find a strong enemy and kill him. That spider could have been your ticket to Tier 3. Well, maybe a few more like it. Beasts don't have enough insights to digest. Not like Godbeasts do." Pef answered smugly.

Wong nodded sagely. "It was hidden somehow. If I had sensed the big spider from the start, the battle wouldn't have gone like this. I have ships in orbit after all."

Yuan appeared beside them and sat at the table with a flushed face. "There was a masking formation underground. Took nearly all my qi to break through. A trillion eggs inside, all at Earth rank." she explained after sipping some wine to recharge.

Pef sighed inward and tapped the table in thought. "Someone is messing things up. Just like the Purple Veil. But the ants were sapient and could be reasoned with. These spiders..."

"It's the hundred spider colony we had destroyed so far. And I bet there's more." Wong muttered as he sipped more of the fragrant blood wine.

Pef took out two more Godbeast ribs and flashed forged them into polearms. It was still hard, and they didn't have and edge yet, but soulsmithing did seem to have become easier since reaching Tier 4.

He handed them over and waited.

"Amazing toughness. Good balance. But no edge?" Wong mused out loud, twirling his new weapon around.

Pef sighed and expelled the idiot from his world, followed by his regiment. He then handed a storage ring with more bloodwine to his wife. "Tier 4 Godbeasts are very rare. Use it only at need." Pef advised the woman and sent her out.

Then, Pef Blinked away, leaving behind a Legion regiment ten times stronger. He kinda overspent the meager resources this time, but the Sea Guards were of his past. Call it attachment or whatever. Plus, it was Wong.

He couldn't have a disciple that was too weak, right?

On the way back, Reason sat beside the avatar and took a small bite from the cooked spider meat.

"You have gained the Dao of Cooking." she mused with a sad tone. "Quite irresponsible to waste your cultivation on something this...mundane." the weapon added as warning.

Pef smiled and hugged Yuan to his side. "My wives love it, right?"

Yuan leaned into him and nodded. "There are millions of soldiers, but only my husband can cook like this. Makes him special." his wife admitted with a small blush.

Reason waved a hand in disgust and vanished.

The next day, Pef arrived back in Lacrima's orbit and went to see Lin and the dragon smith, in her lunar lab.

Quite expected, they were working hard to reproduce the devil inscriptions and testing their efficiency on various types of armor and weapons.

Around them, a large factory was hard at work, thousands of smiths and engineers producing equipment of all kinds.

In fact, nearly a quarter of the moon was covered in shipyards and factories, and Pef could sense almost a billion people working and living here.

Every minute or so, another spaceship took off and left for combat or patrols. In a way it did make sense, as the low gravity and lack of atmosphere made space engineering much easier.

"I say a combination of iridium and adamantite would work better. It would be twice as strong, at least!" Drake argued as Pef arrived beside them.

"We have a small supply of adamantite, silly dragon. Enough for a thousand armors, not for a trillion." Lin answered with a single glance at the intruder.

Pef waited for a minute, till the two smiths came to an agreement. They would craft two types of armor, the elite kind and the regular.

"Hey boss. Brought me anything nice?" Drake asked shamelessly. The boy had a galaxy worth of materials and still asked for more!

"No. I was visiting friends not buying out another auction house." Pef muttered as complaint, while skipping over to hug and kiss his main wife.

After a minute, Lin drew back and measured Pef from head to toe. "The boy is right though. Go bring some more adamantite. At least a million tons. That will save lives. Legion soldier lives."

"Oh! A million tons, divided by a kilogram per armor...a billion sets of Tier 2 armor! That will take some time to craft..." Drake mused out loud, lost inside his head.

Pef sighed inward. 'Can we even find a billion tons of adamantite, my glove?'

Pef actually like the idea of armoring all his troops with Tier 2 armor. Why only a mere billion soldiers?

'Not in the demon galaxy. They kinda mined out most of it, and they didn't have much anyway. But we can explore in that direction. Adamantite is similar to boron, not naturally occurring inside stars, like iron or gold. But the source should be nearby the demons' galaxy.' the glove answered after a few seconds.

'Not another beast, right?' Pef asked to make sure.

'Adamantite is not animal droppings, idiot. Some type of exploded stars, maybe a quasar. We'll see when we get there.' the glove said in a more angry voice.

Pef kissed Lin again and Blinked away.

He arrived at his apartment in the Monarchy palace and ejected Yuan. No more wives risked while exploring.

This time he would go alone.