Vân stayed with Team Nemean for the next few days.
What started as a short lesson in prana coat turned into full training, then into something harsher and more useful. He trained them in the mornings, corrected them in the afternoons, and mocked them all day in between. Even Dominic, who got along with him best out of the team, admitted after the second day that Phong's cousin had the soul of a drill sergeant wrapped in the body of a monk-shaped hooligan.
Alex struggled the most with prana coating.
That annoyed her deeply.
It was not because she lacked control. If anything, her control was better than most of them. The issue was the psychic nature of her mana. It did not settle around her skin the same way Vân's did. It wanted to move sharper, cleaner, more like force given shape than like a living sheath wrapping around flesh. Several times she got the layer almost right, only for it to flicker or distort near her hands and shoulders where her constructs usually formed first.
Vân clicked his tongue every time it happened.
"Your mana has bad manners."
Alex glared at him. "You're one to talk."
Dominic learned the fastest.
That did not surprise Vân much.
He watched Dominic get the feel of mana wrapping close to the body by the second day, then nodded to himself and said it was probably the boxing background. Dominic already understood how to distribute force, how to brace without stiffening, how to control his body precisely how he wanted. Prana coat only added a new layer to an old habit.
Dominic accepted the praise with the quiet ease he always had. Jake, meanwhile, complained that it was favoritism.
Joanne said Dominic being built like a wall probably helped too.
Then Vân took them to level somewhere new: a swamp.
The place smelled wrong before they even reached the deeper water. Rot, heat, lots of mud and even more bugs. And something else under it all, something like infection left out too long. The trees there were lower and broader than the Croak Wood giants, their roots sinking into black water and thick slime.
The dinosaurs came next.
Badly mutated things, like the swamp had claimed them and kept sculpting afterward. Pockets of pus bulged over their skin and along their necks, yellow-white and swollen, some so large they had burst and crusted over. On more than one beast, the growths had spread over the eyes until the sockets themselves looked infected and blind.
Jake looked at the nearest one and made a face. "Absolutely not."
Vân sounded far too cheerful.
"I found this place while hunting Josh."
Emma looked over. "That is not comforting."
Vân shrugged. "It gets better."
"It doesn't," Joanne said.
But Vân explained anyway. The dinosaurs here were not truly normal living creatures anymore. They were more like an extension of the swamp. Growths of the biome. Meat and mud and disease moving around in the rough shape of predators, with barely enough mind left to point themselves at prey.
Which, as Dominic pointed out, made them perfect for grinding. So Team Nemean stayed there and leveled.
The swamp was miserable. The fights were worse. The gains were real.
Prana coat improved under pressure. Mana control sharpened. People started feeling the travel paths in their bodies more clearly after enough combat forced them to use the idea instead of merely understanding it.
Alex was the fastest with custom skill work. That did not mean she was best at prana coat. Dominic still had that title for now. But Alex already had a half-built skill waiting for completion.
Her drill attack had existed before Vân. She had forged it in battle and desperation, but it had never quite crossed the line into something stable enough for the system to register. Now, with better control over her mana movement and with Vân's lessons in mind, she finally finished it.
The first time it happened, everyone knew the moment was different.
Alex activated Bai Hu's storm.
The typhoon gathered around her body with that familiar violent spin. Then, from the moving lines of the storm, a psychic tiger took shape. It was not fully solid, not like an animal of flesh. It looked made from force and cutting intent, a white tiger of mind and storm that ran along the edge of her skill radius and slashed at anything that came close.
Even Vân stopped talking for one second.
Then he recovered and said, "I want naming rights."
Alex did not even look at him.
"No."
"That's rude. It should have a proper title."
"It does."
"What is it."
Alex answered with complete seriousness.
"Psychic tiger."
Vân groaned like he had been personally insulted by creativity itself. He tried to negotiate. Failed. Then complained about it for the next two hours until even Jake told him to shut up.
Phong's grandpa called from time to time too.
That became its own strange routine.
At first, Team Nemean did not question it too much. Then Alex finally did the math in her head and realized something was off.
Signal amplifiers on Floor 3 were still too sparse. A few other footholds maybe had similar equipment. But where Team Nemean had been training and ranging, it should not have been enough for clean regular calls.
When she pointed that out, Vân admitted the truth without much fuss.
"It's grandpa's skill."
That shut them up immediately.
He explained while cleaning mud off one hand after a swamp fight. Their grandpa had never chosen a diver's life after the dungeon came. The old man's missing arm and leg made that road pointless. But the class he got still gave him a communication skill tied to Vân. As long as Vân paid the mana cost, the old man could reach him.
Emma muttered that this family was ridiculous. Nobody disagreed.
Grandpa, for his part, was very fond of Alex.
Once he got over calling her future granddaughter-in-law every other conversation, he started telling her things with total sincerity that left Alex unsure whether to laugh or hide.
Most memorably, he told her she and Phong should visit Vietnam for their honeymoon.
Alex turned red enough that even Joanne stopped teasing for a whole five seconds.
Vân, naturally, laughed until Dominic slapped the back of his head.
A month passed like that.
Training, swamp leveling, prana coat practice.
Custom skill experiments.
And occasionally, calls from an old man who somehow felt scarier and warmer at the same time.
By the end of it, the team had grown stronger in the hard way. Not just in levels too. In their battle rhythm and understanding of mana. In the kind of pressure only came from living beside stronger people and trying not to be left behind by them.
Dominic and Alexei crossed into level 40 territory, everyone else except Alex got to 39. Alex sat at 38 and for the first time since joining Dominic's team, she was the one with the lowest level in the team.
She cursed the buff Bai Hu gave her for that with as much love-hate she could muster.
Eventually Dominic made the call.
They needed to surface.
The national league was coming, and for once, the danger waiting ahead was not only monsters and floor bosses, but cameras, crowds, and a system of power they meant to challenge in the open.
Vân accepted that easily enough. He said he would be participating in the Asian league on his side of the world, and he hoped to see them again in the international tournament next year.
That gave the goodbye a strange shape.
A see you on another battlefield kind of shape.
On the way back, Team Nemean returned to the Tortura camp.
Séline took time to pay her respects to the statue that housed the copy of dǒu. She did not kneel for long, but she stood before it with her head lowered, quiet and serious in a way none of the others interrupted.
Then they took the Tortura who were close to their fall and led them back down. Through the gate, the pixie ruin. And toward Camp Orthrus.
The trip was slower with elders and near-fallen warriors in tow, but no one complained. By now, the promise made to the Tortura chieftain had become real. Camp Orthrus was no longer only a human outpost with monster allies. It had started becoming a place people drifted toward when their old world no longer had room for them. The pixies seemed to remember them and decided team Nemean meat did not worth the price in drones to mobilize the nest.
When they finally reached Wraith Fortress, the sight waiting for them made several of them stop short. There were giant crickets there now, citizens from the United Tribes. And mice from the Great Burrow.
Enough of both that, for one ugly second, Team Nemean thought their fort had been taken over while they were gone.
Then one of the mice rushed forward, paws raised in peace.
"Do not worry," she said quickly. "There will be time for explanation later."
That did not fully calm anyone, but it was enough not to start swinging. The mice had already prepared rooms and beds inside the fortress. The crickets, with their strange clipped calm, advised the team to stay the night in Wraith Fort rather than try to push onward.
"To avoid the Painted Skins," one of them said.
That got everyone's full attention.
So they stayed.
That night, the crickets cooked. Which, to Team Nemean's mild shock, they did quite well. And to make it even more of a surprise, the taste was quite similar to a certain farmer cooking. While the food was passed around, the mice told them what had happened.
After the Painted Skins appeared, nearly every faction around Lake Baratok had reached the same conclusion: Phong's camp was the safest place. Not because Phong was the strongest fighter. Far from it. The farmer was barely a sneeze away from becoming dinner of lizardmen or Kamohai. The real reason was because of the little tyrants who had decided on a whim that fruit was the ideal body type: the Timatoes.
Those little monstrous fruits had become such a violent deterrent that people finally understood something simple. If a horror came for your skin, the safest place to stand was near the farmer whose army of lava burping tomatoes were vicious and abundant enough to end most civilization near the lake if they crossed him the wrong way. So one by one, the nearby peoples had moved.
The Great Burrow, the United Tribes of Giant Crickets, the Inkborn, and the Buforians. All vassals under the Scaled Throne control had asked to become Phong's vassals as well, in exchange for protection.
Even the Kamohai and the lizardmen had come forward, not asking for vassalage, but for a joined defense system around the lake perimeter.
When the explanation ended, Team Nemean sat in silence for a moment.
Then Jake let out a breath.
"So while we were gone," he said, "Phong accidentally built another kingdom?"
Nobody at the table could honestly say that was wrong.