Worldwide Class Change: Minimal Effort, Maximum Reward!

Fifteen figures emerged from the cave entrance in tight formation.

The one at the center moved differently from the others. Not faster, not more deliberately, but with the specific carefulness of someone carrying something they did not want to drop and could not afford to lose.

The storage token in his palm was the kind of object that warranted that carefulness in the Allheaven Expanse, a container whose value was entirely dependent on what was inside it and what was inside it was currently worth more than anything else the group owned combined.

The fourteen surrounding him moved with the coordinated awareness of people who had been operating as a unit long enough that the formation was automatic. Two at the front, two at the rear, five on each lateral side, the circle maintained at a consistent radius regardless of the terrain’s demands, adjusting around the caves and bridges and island edges without discussion because the adjustment had been drilled enough times that it required none.

They were airborne before they cleared the cave mouth, the flying techniques that carried them distributing weight and momentum across the formation.

They flew in silence.

The Allheaven Expanse around them was its usual vast and ambient self, the astral rivers moving through their slow cycles overhead, the floating islands drifting on their fixed currents, the distant sound of the layered melody present under everything as it always was. The fifteen hunters did not interact with any of it. They were moving from where they had been to where they needed to be, and everything in between was territory to be cleared as efficiently as possible.

They landed at a wide island formation that had been modified since the event began. But the approaches to the central island had been adjusted, the natural bridges altered, the sight lines from adjacent islands disrupted in ways that were subtle enough to miss if you were moving through without looking for them. Someone had spent time making this formation harder to observe and harder to approach without being detected.

The serious-looking hunter waiting on the central island’s surface did not move toward them when they landed. He waited. His posture was the posture of a man who had learned through decades of experience that moving toward a situation before you understood it fully was how situations became problems.

Before he did anything else, he released his spiritual sense.

It extended outward in a sphere, the output of a level 166 S-Rank Demon Necromancer’s perception capability pressing through the surrounding terrain, reading the energy signatures of everything within its range. It moved across adjacent islands, through the bridge approaches, into the cave systems visible in the nearby formations, through the atmospheric layers above. It catalogued and assessed and found nothing that did not belong.

He waited another three seconds.

Still nothing.

He nodded once, to himself, and then he smiled and walked toward the returning group.

"Another successful collection," he said. "Sun Yong, let me see it."

The hunter holding the storage token stepped forward from the center of the formation and held it out. Sun Tian took it without immediately opening it, turning it in his hand with the practiced touch of someone reading a container’s contents through physical assessment before visual confirmation.

He was Sun Tian. Guildmaster of the Nine Yin Demon Guild. Thirty-eight years as a registered hunter, thirty-two of them at S-Rank or above, twenty of them as a guild leader who had built the Nine Yin Demon Guild from a regional operation into something that warranted a directional mention in Bureau threat assessment reports.

The Demon Necromancer class was not common and not popular. It produced a specific kind of capability that the general hunter community found uncomfortable, and operating with it at the highest tiers had required him to develop the particular thick skin of someone who had been evaluated negatively on optics for most of his career and had long since stopped caring.

He opened the token.

The jade count registered on the token’s surface display.

He looked at it for a moment. Then his smile deepened.

"Good," he said.

The word carried more weight than its syllable count suggested. "At this rate, by the end of the three months, we will have one of the highest individual jade counts of any guild operating in this instance." He looked at the fifteen hunters who had returned. "Rest. Eat. We go out again at first light."

The formation broke up. People moved toward the supplies arranged along the central island’s interior edge, the easy movement of a group that had been together long enough that shared space was comfortable rather than managed.

Sun Tian walked to the island’s edge and looked out at the expanse. He did this at the end of each collection run, the habit of a man who processed the day’s work through observation rather than conversation. Thirty-eight years had produced a lot of habits. This was one of the better ones.

His spiritual sense was still extended passively, the background awareness that a hunter of his experience maintained without consciously activating it, the constant low-level read of the surrounding environment that became reflex at a certain point in development. 𝗳𝚛𝗲𝕖𝕨𝕖𝗯𝚗𝚘𝕧𝕖𝗹.𝗰𝗼𝕞

He read nothing unusual.

---

Far beyond the range of Sun Tian’s spiritual sense, at a distance that made the Nine Yin Demon Guild’s hideout a small collection of shapes against the expanse’s ambient haze, Lin Yi stood on the Greater Qilin’s back and watched.

He had been watching for approximately four minutes. Long enough to count the formation members, read the approach patterns, identify the guildmaster, note the spiritual sense extension and its range limit, and assess the token’s contents through the ambient energy signature it produced at this distance.

The jade count in that token was substantial. More than anything a single hunter or small group could accumulate. The Nine Yin Demon Guild had been organized and efficient in their approach, which was consistent with a guild that had a guildmaster with thirty-eight years of operational experience.

Lin Yi looked at the formation, the hideout, and then at Sun Tian’s figure standing at the island edge, and then, he took a step forward.