Worldwide Class Change: Minimal Effort, Maximum Reward!

Lin Yi let his thoughts drift, turning over the idea more carefully. It wasn’t just about movement, not really. If something had been watching him, truly watching, then it would have seen everything.

Not just how he moved from one point to another, but how he fought, how he reacted, how he chose in the middle of pressure. Every skill he activated, every exchange he entered, every decision he made while clearing those islands.

Among his Various skills.

Predatory Instinct was a passive abilityz that shaped how he saw a fight, how his attention naturally drifted toward weak points without him forcing it. Resonant Strike was precision, a deliberate choice to target structure instead of surface, to break things from the inside rather than clash head-on.

Void Severance followed the same logic, cutting past defenses entirely as if they were never there, ignoring what most people relied on to survive. And then there was Blade Domain, a space where his presence pressed down on everything around him while lifting himself higher at the same time.

Taken separately, they were just abilities. But together, they formed something more coherent, something that revealed how he approached combat at its core. Not brute force, not recklessness, but a quiet efficiency that removed what didn’t matter and went straight for what did. If something had truly been observing him, it wouldn’t just see what he could do. It would see how he thought.

Every pattern. Every application. Every variation and adaptation.

If it had learned Heaven Step to the point of optimizing it in days of observation, what would it have learned from four weeks?

He didn’t have an answer for that yet. But the question changed how he thought about the next several weeks of the event.

Lin Yi looked at the qilin for a long moment. It looked back at him with those evolved eyes that carried awareness where there had once been only calm.

"You’re going to be a problem," he said.

The qilin did not respond to that in any observable way. But its posture carried something that might, in a person, have been described as unbothered.

Lin Yi looked at the distance between their current position and the dense island formation he had identified as the next target. He thought about the optimized version of Heaven Step the qilin had demonstrated.

"Can you carry me?" he said.

The qilin looked at him. Then it lowered itself slightly. Just enough.

Lin Yi stepped onto its back.

The contact point was different from what he expected. The qilin’s body, post-evolution, had a different quality at close range. The scales that shimmered with multicolored light were warm, the ambient dao absorption it performed continuously radiating outward in a way that was noticeable at this distance.

It stood to its full height with him on its back. Then it activated its version of Heaven Step.

The spatial bend was larger than anything he produced individually. The distance covered in a single activation was longer by a significant margin. The arrival was precise and completely vibration-free, the landing point exact to the degree that he felt no adjustment of balance needed on arrival.

Then it activated again without waiting.

And again.

Chain traversal. Not limited to the five-second window his skill imposed. The qilin’s version of the chain appeared to operate without a fixed window, the consecutive activations continuing as long as its energy reserve supported them. The energy cost per activation, based on the aura fluctuation visible around its body, was lower than his own.

The transit island, the open expanse, the mid-distance formation, the outer edge of the dense cluster zone, all of it flowed past in a sequence of spatial transitions that took seconds where the route had previously projected as minutes.

They arrived at the outer edge of the dense island cluster and the qilin settled to a landing with a smoothness that registered as zero impact.

Lin Yi stepped off and looked back at the traversal route they had covered.

He looked at the qilin.

The qilin looked at him with the same steady awareness it had been directing at him since the evolution.

"Good," he said.

They were standing at the edge of something larger than the cluster zones he had been working through. The island formation ahead was denser and more vertical than the flat distributed clusters of the previous days, the terrain stacking upward in layers rather than spreading outward, stone and crystal formations rising from a base island that was wide enough to qualify as a small continent by the expanse’s scale.

And at the center of that vertical formation, rising above everything around it, was a peak.

Not a natural peak, or not only a natural peak. The shape was too deliberate, the angle of rise too consistent, the summit too flat to be entirely geological. Whatever this structure was, it had been shaped by something at some point, though what and when were questions the expanse was not offering answers to.

From the summit, visible even at this distance, a continuous column of spiritual energy was rising upward into the upper atmospheric layers of the expanse. Not a thin stream. A column. Wide and dense and completely stable, moving at a pace that indicated it had been moving for a very long time without interruption.

The density of that energy output was different from the ambient saturation of the general expanse. The general expanse was rich. This was concentrated. The Celestial Absorption passive, which converted ambient energy to recovery and regeneration, was already registering the difference from two kilometers out, the passive feed rate stepping up in response to the stronger concentration.

Lin Yi looked at the peak. He looked at the column of spiritual energy rising from it.

"That’s the next location," he said. 𝒻𝑟ℯℯ𝑤𝑒𝑏𝑛𝘰𝓋𝑒𝓁.𝒸𝑜𝘮

The qilin was already oriented toward it.

He activated Heaven Step, chaining three transitions toward the base of the vertical formation, and the qilin moved alongside him using its version of the same technique, arriving at each waypoint simultaneously despite the difference in their methods.

The synchronization of movement was not something he had established deliberately. It had developed the same way everything the qilin did had developed. Through observation and adaptation and the application of something that exceeded standard spirit beast cognition by a margin.

They reached the base of the volcanic formation and Lin Yi looked upward at the path to the summit. The spiritual energy column was brighter from here, the warmth of it registering against his skin.

The Greater Qilin lowered itself again. And Lin Yi stepped onto its back. And they rose.